Bennett Sims, _Other Minds and Other Stories_

I’M A RETIRED professor of English, so I am sometimes asked whether there I have recommendations of young/new/emerging fiction writers. I always mention Bennett Sims (as I always mentioned Ben Marcus thirty years ago and Joshua Cohen fifteen years ago). Not that many people have taken up my recommendation, but one day, they will wish they had.

Other Minds and Other Stories is Sims’s second collection and is just as strong as his first, White Dialogues. The title story is explicitly about the famous philosophical question of how we know what other people are thinking (and whether we can tell that they are indeed thinking—that too is part of the question). The story follows the thoughts of someone in the tricky situation of composing an email to someone she is in the earliest stages of a relationship with as she guesses and re-guesses how her correspondent would feel about this word or that word, this tone or that tone. 

The book’s other stories also engage the question in some way. For instance, the POV character in “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel” is trying to anticipate the thoughts of the reviewers who will be evaluating the fellowship application he has but a few hours in which to complete. “A Postcard” is a detective story in a Paul Austen vein, in which the detective has to puzzle out the minds both of his client and of the man he is being paid to watch, who may turn out to be the same person.

I revere Jane Austen is part because of how well she represents the experiencing of the problem of other minds. Anne Elliot trying to read Capt. Wentworth’s mind in his words and actions, Elizabeth trying to read Darcy’s…it’s her trademark, almost. Sims is a different cup of coffee than Jane Austen, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see they share this particular skill.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (1)

JORIE  GRAHAM TURNS seventy-six this year. For all anyone knows, she could still be publishing poetry five, ten, or even fifteen years from now, but if Killing Spree turns out to be the final collection in the career that began with Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts in 1980, it will stand as a compelling and honorable conclusion. Not that it lands on a resounding major chord or feels like a victory lap—if anything, it feels more like a defeat lap, painfully mindful of failures and fallings short. Our failure to take care of our one and only planet has mattered in Graham’s poetry for a long while now and matters again in Killing Spree, but alongside climate concerns she also insists we face our failure to protect each other from violence and war (words like “massacre” and “slaughter” turn up frequently). The failures of the baby boom generation to live up to its best hopes get some attention, as do the failures of poetry itself. From its title on, the collection could hardly be more sobering. Even so, hope curls around its edges. It’s among her strongest books.

     Like its predecessor, To 2040 (2023), carries the atmosphere of dystopian science fiction, often seeming to be set in a near-future in which some catastrophe has overturned most institutions and social practices as well as natural processes. The book’s opening poem, “The World,” begins, “didn’t change much / at first” (3). Changes occurred, however, then accelerated, “And that was when / the end began” (4). The book’s title phrase occurs several times, including as the title of a poem, but its most arresting instance is in “The Eloquence”: “The killing spree began one day in the suburbs” (68). Littleton? Sandy Hook? A few lines on, “bullets whirred like hummingbirds when there were hummingbirds” (68), and since hummingbirds are still with us, the killing spree must occur in an imagined future, but the book unsettles by continually suggesting that our catastrophic future has already arrived. For instance, the statement “I remember the rule of law” (11) teeters between Orwellian pre-imagining and last week’s op-ed. “The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about / in the dust-filled amnesia” (26) could be dystopian fiction or just news from Ukraine, as could “They burned / the silver icons down / to tiny pools” (33). “Once I watch them drag / the whole cuffed family / out” (33), depending on where one lives, could be local news.

     Killing Spree is also like To 2040 in alternating between two forms. The eleven left-justified poems use short lines (very short, compared to Graham’s practice for most of her career) of only a few words, quatrains dropping vertically down the page like a plumb line. Combined with Graham’s penchant for longer, unscrolling sentences, the main effect of the very short lines is of speed and headlong movement, of arriving sooner than you expected—underlining the book’s dystopian message that the future we have been anticipating in dread may already be here. Text-message abbreviations (u, yr, bc, and ampersands) lend these poems an intimacy and vulnerability less evident in the right-justified poems. The eleven right-justified poems have longer lines, feel relatively more discursive than lyrical, and sound more like what longtime Graham readers are used to, but the shunted-to-the-right visual orientation creates the feeling that we are looking at things from a new angle, a previously ignored vantage point. This form is superficially closer to that of Graham’s symphonic poems with their page-wide lines and distinct movements—“The Dream of the Unified Field,” “From the New World,” “Emergency”—but are rougher and faster, as though neither she nor we have time for the slow and stately.

Lucy Sante, _I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition_

I HAVE BEEN reading Sante for years, but always in pieces in periodicals, mainly book reviews in NYRB, so this is the first of her books proper I have read. I should try some of the others, though, for this one is excellent. Sante’s prose is light-footed but sinewy, her curiosity omnivorous, and the subject matter here of unusual interest.

After living sixty plus years as an assigned male, Sante realized she was actually female and set out upon the transition mentioned in the book’s subtitle. The book begins with the email she sent to her friends announcing this new departure (which began, remarkably, with a photo app that can switch the photographed person’s gender). Roughly half the book tracks how Sante managed that transition, and roughly half recounts his first sixty years as an assigned male, with particular attention to a chronic anomie that she now sees as a sign that she needed to transition.

I Heard Her Call My Name does not go into what surgical or other medical treatments Sante pursued, apart from taking hormones, nor into how the transition played out in her sexuality; that is, it skips the whole tabloid side of the story. What it does do is make vivid and palpable the unnameable tension Sante was living with as a man and the immense relief it was to live as a woman. What possible compelling state interest could there be in denying people like Sante the opportunity to live as themselves? The book deserves its wide audience not only for its writing, which is brilliant, but also for raising that question.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 3: Buckley’s Revolution (1961-1965)

 1. Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the story of how Buckley and his movement helped gain him the 1964 Republican presidential nomination makes for swift and exciting reading (as Rick Perlstein also demonstrated in Before the Storm). The relative youth of many of the most active participants, the sense of overcoming entrenched powers in the Republican party (pragmatic moderation had prevailed for decades), and the delirium of victory at the 1964 convention all make for a thrill-ride narrative that the Reagan campaign of 1980 cannot match, even though it was much more successful. 

2. An irony of Buckley’s career is that he was a writer as much as anything else, a graceful and lucid and prolific one, yet he never wrote the conservative classic that everyone assumed he must have in him: no Road to Serfdom or Witness or Ideas Have Consequences. He did publish a lot of books, including fourteen novels. His books sold well, and one of them, his first, God and Man at Yale, was a center of national attention for a while. Tanenhaus describes Buckley’s attempt to write his definitive statement of principles, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, but Buckley eventually abandoned the project despite fervent encouragement from Hugh Kenner (no less). Since it’s the books of public intellectuals like Mencken, Niebuhr, Hofstadter, and (gag) Ayn Rand that keep them part of the conversation, I wonder whether Buckley’s not having a "you-really-should-read-this” book will lead to his fading from the conversation as the people who remember him from television succumb to mortality.  You can still watch Firing Line on YouTube, though.

3. Tanenhaus argues that Buckley’s quixotic but stylish campaign for major of New York City in 1965 was an early and influential example of the “white grievance” approach later successfully deployed by Nixon, Reagan, Trump, and a few thousand others. This is ironic, too, given Buckley’s patrician background and his tendency to speak de haut en bas, but I think Tanenhaus has a point.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, _Dream Count_

DREAM COUNT KEPT reminding me of Sex and the City, in that we have four women characters experiencing the vicissitudes of family, career, sex, and life in general in the contemporary city (Washington, D. C., for the greater part). All four are originally from Africa (three from Nigeria, one from Ghana), three now live in the USA. Or maybe Dream Count is more like Designing Women, if you remember that one, in that one of the women is working class.

Chiamaka is the hub character; the other three have closer relations to her than they do to each other. An aspiring travel writer from a wealthy family, she has “always longed to be known, truly known by another human being,” as she tells us in the novel’s first sentence. Her family badly wants her to marry and have children, but each of the men with whom she gets involved turns out to be not quite what she is looking for.

Zikora is Chiamaka’s best friend, a successful professional but under the same family pressure to marry and have children. She gets pregnant and believes her seemingly deeply committed boyfriend will be ready for the next level, but whoops, no, he isn’t, and he vanishes like a puff of smoke.

Kadiatou, who grew up in a village and does not have the formal education  the other three have, is Chiamaka’s sometime housekeeper who also works as a hotel maid. In the course of her work she endures an assault like that of which Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused, turning her and her daughter’s life upside down as she finds herself under punishing media scrutiny. Chiamaka helps organize support for her.

Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin, a successful professional in Nigeria, whose main work seems to involve laundering money for heavyweight Nigerian politicians. She has also gotten a doctorate in cultural studies in the USA  and has a popular blog called “For Men Only.”

Dream Count does not have a strong central plot, but it does have a strong central theme: epistemology. What do we know, how do we know it, how do we know we know? Chiamaka wants to be known, but no man so far really knows her. Zikora thought she knew her boyfriend, but was way wrong. Kadiatou has to fight her way through assumptions about who she is and who the man who attacked her is—much or most of the world thinks it knows her, assumes she is lying, or a prostitute, and so on, and are dead wrong. Omelogor’s blog is all about what men ought to know but don’t, and her dissertation is about the problem that much of men’s “knowledge” of female sexuality comes from pornography, which is based more on male fantasy than on anything else.

I would have to say of the four Adichie novels I have read (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah), this is the one I enjoyed least…I did enjoy it, though. All four women are vividly presented, the sentences brisk, Adichie’s eye for revealing detail sharp. But a bit like Sex and the City, it’s entertaining without being thought-provoking.

Michael M. Weinstein, _Saint Consequence_

 I DECIDED TO take a chance on this after reading a couple of Weinstein’s poems in Conjunctions. He is “a trans/crip poet, essayist, and photographer,” according to the note on the back cover of Saint Consequence, and the poem “Cut” (which appeared in Conjunctions and also appears here) is the most arresting poem I have ever read about a gender transition.

Quite a few of the other poems likewise take on trans identity and experience, but the collection also has poems based on Weinstein’s year in Tomsk, a city in Siberia, and “Brother,” a very affecting sequence about his brother, who apparently lives with a cognitive disability. Weinstein’s own disability (that is, his own self-claimed status as “crip”) may be reflected in another sequence, “Crip Album,” although the sequence is mainly quick, imagistic poems about others. 

Weinstein’s handling of the sequence form is a strength. Besides “Brother” and “Crip Album,” the collection includes a sequence about Weinstein’s time in Russia, “Street of the Friendship of Nations.” He has a talent for using the sequence providing multiple perspectives on a phenomenon, shifting temporally and tonally while still creating a unified effect.

I was also struck by two longer poems, “The Center” and “Anniversary,” because they suggested the influence of Jorie Graham. This likeness may have occurred to me only because I have been immersed in Graham lately, but in making a case I would note these two poems' longer lines (Alice James Books printed these poems on the vertical axis, so you have to rotate the book ninety degrees to read them), their presenting of personal experience while simultaneously mindful of one’s historical situation, and their ambition—that is, a willingness to swing for the fences. A big swing can mean a big whiff, but Weinstein connects.

Ben Lerner, _Transcription_

AUTOFICTION? WHO KNOWS? I appreciated Tara K. Menon's review of Ben Lerner's new novel for the Nation for pointing out that the episode where the (unnamed) narrator visits the famous glass flower museum at Harvard goes to show how convincing a simulacrum can be, even while you remain aware of its artificiality. The characters and events of Transcription seem utterly plausible, and the narrator is again a near-ringer for Lerner himself, but could this very short novel be 100% fiction? Of course it could. Do we really need ti know whether it is?

In the first chapter, "Hotel Providence," the narrator returns to the Providence, RI, where he attended college, to interview his famous mentor Thomas for a magazine. In his hotel, before heading over to his mentor's house, he gets water in his phone, which means he will be unable to record the interview. Embarrassed but unwilling to own up to his klutziness, he goes ahead with the interview. His mentor, while obviously brilliant, is showing signs of dementia and goes off on some startling and unfiltered digressions about his wife (who died by suicide) and detailed memories of a trip to Switzerland with the narrator...a trip the narrator has absolutely no memory of. 

In the second chapter, "[Hotel Villa Real]." (why the brackets? I don't know), the narrator gives a talk at a conference about Thomas, who has died since the first chapter (by assisted suicide, in Switzerland, it seems). The talk is about the circumstances of the interview the narrator did publish after all, which turned out to be Thomas's final public utterance. Accordingly, the interview has gotten a lot of reverential attention from Thomas-philes. In the narrator's talk, however, he spills some beans about the circumstances of the interview (that is, that he had to rely on memory? That Thomas betrayed signs of dementia?), and now everyone is angry at him. Thomas's son, Max--a college friend of the narrator--is, we hear, especially furious.

A lot of the talking in the second chapter is from Rosa, one of those wondering what the hell the narrator thought he was up to in his talk on Thomas, and almost all of the talking in the third chapter, "Hotel Arbez," is done by Max. Is this before or after the narrator's talk at the conference? After, one would assume, given that novels typically move forward in time, but Max does not seem angry and makes no reference to the talk...another little puzzle. Max, like the narrator, has a tween daughter with baffling issues that her parents have no idea how to handle, and Max, it turns out, not the narrator, was the young man accompanying Thomas on that trip to Switzerland.

The Thomas-Max-narrator triangle is at the heart of things, somehow. Max and the narrator are vaguely doppelgänger-like; besides their being the same age and having daughters with unfathomable issues, a mentor-mentee relationship between men has plenty of father-son overtones, making Max and the narrator sibling rivals, of a sort. Neither can quite relax and take Thomas's approval for granted; both constantly look for signs of how they stand. 

Max and the narrator do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their parent; they do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their daughters. To me, this is an utterly recognizable situation, autofiction or not.

So much for summary--I've failed, though, to get at how captivating the novel is. I could hardly put it down.