Tommi Parrish, _Men I Trust_

 PARRISH'S GRAPHIC NOVEL deftly reconciles seemingly divergent modes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Brainard, _The Nancy Book_

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

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

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

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

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

Patricia Lockwood, _Will There Ever Be Another You_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonora Carrington, _The Stone Door_

 I HAVE READ Carrington’s short fiction (thanks to The Dorothy Project) but not her other and more widely read novel, The Hearing Trumpet. I am certainly eager to read The Hearing Trumpet, though, after reading this.

Anna Watz’s helpful afterword tells us that Carrington wrote The Stone Door “ostensibly to celebrate her recent marriage to her second husband, Emérico “Chiki” Weisz, in Mexico City in 1946.” It has a loosely articulated plot about the opening of the titular door to allow freer circulation between and among the sexes, but the plot is really the least interesting thing about the novel—it’s not what pulled me in, at least. What I most relished was the atmosphere of the fictional world and the texture of the prose, an adventure and a delight from sentence to sentence. 

So yes, there were characters, and yes, they were in pursuit of something and encountering obstacles, but what kept me reading was something else. Imagine a collection of tales by the Brothers Grimm interleaved with a Victorian translation of The 1001 Nights, and further imagine that this volume has ingested a non-trivial amount of LSD. That’s what this book is like.

For instance:

“On a sunless Wednesday morning Zacharias began to work in O Ucca. Furnished with a small black book and a pencil he set about sorting the varied, dust-ridden possessions of Ming Lo.While groveling in an ornate tin trunk, he came upon a triangular box covered in black feathers fixed one upon the other as cunningly as if they grew on a bird. With some difficulty he opened the box and saw that it contained a stone key of Mexican workmanship.”

It’s the key to the titular door, as you may have guessed, but what I loved was the feathered triangular box. And in what world but this so cunningly imagined one does a Ming Lo, living in a city named O Ucca, hire a Zacharias, who comes across a Mexican-made key? And I love “sunless,” which takes us right back to Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.”

Huzzahs to New York Review Books for bringing this back into print.

Mosab Abu Toha, _Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear_

 I PICKED THIS up in the Barbara’s Bookstore outpost at O’Hare Airport. My flight had been cancelled the night before, my rebooked flight was going to be delayed four hours, and I had finished reading everything I had brought along, so I was feeling sorry for myself as I browsed for more reading material. 

I might have passed this book up had I not recently read a poem by Toha in the most recent (and final, apparently) Best American Poetry, but since I was impressed by that poem (“Two Watches”), I thought, well, this is probably a good bet. As it happened, I finished it before my flight took off.

It’s not only a fine collection, but also a quick cure for any self-pity, or at least the self-pity of someone whose worst problem is a cancelled flight. Most of Toha’s poems are about living in Gaza, as his family has since 1948, and the problems of living in Gaza after having been dispossessed of one’s home and forced into exile make even the worst of my problems seem hardly even to deserve the designation “problem.”

And the book was published in 2022–that is, well before the horrors of the last two years.

The book includes an interview with Toha. The interviewer does not ask him why he writes poetry in English rather than Arabic, but we do learn he began studying English at an early age and was much influenced by such classics as Marlowe, Shelley, “Kublai Khan,” and The Waste Land. I wonder if he writes poetry in Arabic as well; bi-lingual poets are rare but not unheard of (e.g., Amelia Rosselli).

The book obviously qualifies as “poetry of witness,” but is also better-than-usual poetry. Toha uses anaphora effectively (see “Home,” “To Ibrahim Kilani,” and “To My Visa Interviewer”), and the longer poems—“Palestine A-Z” and “The Wounds”—are extraordinarily well sustained. 

Richard Ayoade, _The Unfinished Harauld Hughes_

 I AM GOBSMACKED, to use a British phrase, that the typically staid New York Review of Books let Richard Ayoade write a first-person appreciation (as the fictional "Chloë Clifton-Wright") of the  British playwright and screenwriter Harauld Hughes (also fictional). I imagine this is the NYRB's indirect way of endorsing Ayoade's The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a novel that masquerades as a journal about the making of a documentary film about Hughes. "Clifton-Wright" dismisses The Unfinished Harauld Hughes in a curt footnote.

Not only has the august NYRB been persuaded to participate in Ayoade's guerrilla campaign of creating an aura of reality around his fictional playwright and screenwriter, but the just as august Faber and Faber publishing house has been so persuaded as well, for they agreed to place ads for Harauld Hughes's (fictional) books on the back cover and back pages of Ayoade's novel.

The novel does not quite match the ingenuity of the guerrilla campaign, in my opinion, but is nonetheless hilarious and entertaining in a Waugh-ian vein. Ayoade, as the planned documentary's presenter, drags the filmmaking crew from one interviewee to another, each more prickly and uncooperative than the last. The El Dorado of the documentary is to figure out what Hughes's final, unfilmed screenplay, O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, was about, but just as Ayoade is winning near the goal...well, no spoilers.

Ayoade seems to be a well-known and popular television presence in the UK, which means we might start seeing more of him here. I hope it works out better than it did with Russell Brand. Judging from novel, it is bound to do so.