Yongsoo Park, _Boygenius_

 I HAVE NOT been able to find out whether the title of this novel inspired the name of the group formed by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. No such rumors are afloat on the internet, I can attest. Even so, it seems at least possible that at least one of them might have picked up on this novel, a cult favorite in some quarters. 

Boygenius was published in 2002 by Akashic Press, and it is still in print, which is no small accomplishment. It struck me as a revision and updating of Candide. 

Narrator and main character Boy Genius was born in South Korea in the middle 1960s (I would guess) and became a national hero with his own TV show after getting the nation's highest score on an intelligence test.  His fame and privileges (which include occasional meetings with President Park Chung Hee) are abruptly yanked from him, without explanation, after an attempted assassination of President Park. 

Shunned and disgraced, he and his parents choose to emigrate, arriving in a city that is like New York City in every respect save that it is named Bogota. After a rebellious period, some of which he spends with a gang of talking dogs, he decides to go straight, finish school, and make it big. This leads to extended time in (southern) California and a total makeover in which he becomes a handsome Euro-American. He marries another Korean emigré who has similarly become a beautiful Euro-American.

Memory of the wrongs done to him and his parents will not leave him alone, though, and he embarks on a mission of vengeance, ending in...well, I'm not sure. I think he ends up in heaven, though.

Like Candide, Boy Genius in his youth is loaded up with a wobbly bundle of assumptions and expectations that go disastrously wrong for him, after which he acquires a new set of assumptions and expectations which also eventually backfire, and so on. People take advantage of his naïvete or do their best to help him out, and neither he nor the reader quite know whom to trust. As in Voltaire's tale, the structure is picaresque, a series of episodes taking Boygenius all over the world, the mode satiric, in that what Boygenius learns is that no institution or authority should be trusted. We arrive at an expectedly happy ending though, Candide in his garden, Boy Genius in paradise. If that's where he is.

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume II_, trans. Barbara Haveland

 IN VOLUME ONE, Tara Selter was preoccupied with how to break the spell and get out of November 18 and into November 19. When Volume Two opens, she has been in November 18 for over a year--that is, she has had more than 365 November Eighteenths--and she seems to have decided that for the time being she will just have to reconcile herself to being in November 18 indefinitely. If she is well and truly stuck on this day, how can she make the best of it?

She makes a kind of farewell visit to her family, explaining to them daily, as she did to her husband Thomas in Volume One, why she is popping in so suddenly on November 18. Then she simply starts moving around Europe. It occurs to her that she can create a kind of "year" of her own by traveling to a place with a wintry November 18, then a while later to a place with a springlike November 18, and so on. This creates a focus for her for a while, but eventually the tactic ceases to satisfy her, and she hits a Slough of Despond.

In her lower moments, Tara reminded me of a Clarice Lispector narrator: minutely attentive, self-aware, articulate, but at a profound loss for how to account for her own circumstances.

Tara settles into Düsseldorf. November 18 was a pleasant day there, she won't be bumping into anyone she knows, she finds comfortable accommodations, and there is lots to do: attending university lectures, for example, and studying up on the history of Rome. And then, after more than another couple of years have passed, she meets someone else who is stuck in November 18. I expect an interesting development is in store in Volume Three.

It's not suspense that keeps one reading On the Calculation of Volume, though, but the voice Balle has conjured for Tara and the resourcefulness and resilience Tara has to keep finding in herself.

Alan Hollinghurst, "It's queer how I'm lonely"; Edmund Wilson, "A Revival of Ronald Firbank"; Evelyn Waugh, "Ronald Firbank"

EMILY WILSON'S SMACKDOWN of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey no doubt got more attention than anything else in the August 13 issue of the London Review of Books, but the real keeper in that issue,  the real gem, the real prize, was almost 8,653 words from Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. 

Hollinghurst is one of the great British novelists of his generation, I am convinced. His recurring theme is English queer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, could serve as a history of that culture from Wilde to the advent of AIDS, as The Stranger's Child could for the period from World War I to Tony Blair. The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair cover shorter time frames but are likewise vivid historical portraits.

I should emphasize that I do no mean that Hollinghurst is a chronicler, or produces elephantine historical novels like those of Edward Rutherford or James Michener. He is, I suppose, a historical novelist, but one more like Anthony Powell or Proust--sharp, observant, writers of graceful and assured prose.

Novelist Ronald Firbank is a kind of icon in English queer culture because his novels (which appeared in the teens and twenties of the 20th century), while far from realistic, capture something of the queer sensibility of their time. It's hard to say what that something is. The novels are campy, but not simply that; they have a gravitas even while seeming to float free of reality. The effect is hard to describe, but Hollinghurst comes closer to explaining it than anyone else I know of has.

That "anyone else" includes such distinguished writers as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh. Wilson and Waugh, as it happens, are the ones who got me reading Firbank forty-five years ago or so. They too tried to get at what makes Firbank's novels much more than period pieces, and I appreciated Hollinghurst giving both of them a shout-out. I would say, even so, that his is now the go-to short piece on Firbank. As Wilson and Waugh got me once to read Firbank, I suspect Hollinghurst will get me to re-read him.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?

Richard Siken, _I Do Know Some Things_

 I HAD READ and heard that this book is good, but I was still taken by surprise. It is...jaw-dropping good. 

I thought very well of Siken's first book, Crush, which twenty years on from its publication stands as a contemporary classic, if we are ready to concede there is such a thing.  I don't know why I never picked up his second collection, War of the Foxes, published ten years after Crush. Checking my records, in 2015 I seem to have been reading Lisa Robertson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Susan Howe, Mary Hickman, and Patricia Lockwood, so I was not wasting my time...still, looking back, I feel like scolding myself. I hope to rectify the omission soon.

As you probably know, Siken suffered a debilitating stroke in 2019. Somehow, besides re-learning how to talk and walk, he re-learned how to write poems. 

In many respects, these poems feel different from the poems of Crush. Siken's earlier poems performed a variety of feats of legerdemain with lineation and sentence construction while orbiting various men over whom Siken was obsessing. The poems of I Do Know Some Things are printed as prose, with no special lineation at all, and the sentences tend to be short. Most of the poems are about his own situation or those of family members, especially his father, who died in the period when Siken was writing these poems.

Unchanged, though, are Siken's audacity, powers of invention, and ability to land some startling leaps.

"I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a  long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

Some leaps launch him into the surreal, as in "Fear":

"I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves."

But I was most amazed by "Sentence" in the book's seventh and final section, where Siken reflects on his own practices, explaining how lines differ from sentences and then dropping a sentence whose length and elaboration David Foster Wallace might envy.

The backstory of this collection, compelling as it is, is overshadowed by the poems themselves.

_The Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956_, Rupert Hart-Davis

MAX DOES NOT give away a lot about himself here. Although editor Hart-Davis believes one of the letters to Florence Kahn, whom Max later married, suggests that Max was asexual (and perhaps it does),  Max is not one for confessions and revelations, generally. Charm, perfect manners, inimitable style, piercing eye--the reader does get all that, and a generous helping of reproduced drawings as well. 

I can hardly explain to myself why Max always dazzles me. He's one of the great caricaturists, I'd say, and this collection of letters makes clear that a lot of his caricatures were of friends...and that they stayed friends. Perhaps because however unflattering the caricatures are, one never senses malice.

And then there are those Max sentences. Perfectly clear, perfectly turned, yet still able to come around from behind and startle you. 

And different as I am from Max, unlike him in so many ways, I enjoyed finding out that we both admire the prose of Lytton Strachey.

Sybille Bedford, _The Trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover_

 THE 1960s REALLY were the golden age of long-form journalism. Rachel Carson. Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote. Norman Mailer. Gay Talese. And Sybille Bedford, who is perhaps not as famous as the others but whose account of The Crown v. Penguin Books, the trial over the legality of publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, was published by Esquire magazine in 1961 and is available as an 80-page book from Daunt Books.

On the cover of the Daunt version, the words "Would YOU let your WIFE read this BOOK?" are much larger and more prominent than the book's actual title--a canny design call, since Bedford spends less time on what is or isn't obscene about Lawrence's novel than on the prosecutor's assumption that upper- and upper-middle-class men need to be in charge of what women and the laboring classes read. 

Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones clearly does not think reading the book would do him or men like him any harm, but he keeps asking the large cast of writers and academics Penguin call to testify to the book's artistic value whether they would let their wives and servants read it. 

We remember this trial mainly for legalizing the literary depiction of human sexuality--fair enough--but what Bedford also brings out is the overturning of the idea that the upper classes knew what was best for everybody. And that was a big part of the 1960s, too.