Alexandra Kleeman, _Something New Under the Sun_

AN EXCERPT FROM this appeared in The Baffler and caught my interest, so I picked it up. It's very good, but not quite what I expected.

The initial premise, very much to the foreground in the excerpt: our main point-of-view character, Patrick Hamlin, is a NYC-based literary novelist who has not quite broken through. A couple of film producers have, however, bought the film rights to his Hamlet-inspired novel, Elsinore Lane, and he has come out to Hollywood to serve as a production assistant and, he expects, to offer invaluable advice to the production, being the author of the source material.  And to maybe give his career a boost, too.

However, it turns out that being a "production assistant" mainly amounts to transporting objects and people, and the producers are less interested in Patrick's novel than in whipping up a CGI-enhanced ghost story to reboot the career of former child star Cassidy Carter, who has had a difficult, paparazzo-ridden transition to adulthood, including a few public scenes, á la Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. 

Meanwhile, Patrick's wife Alison, anxious and conscience-stricken by the approaching climate catastrophe, has taken herself and their daughter to an all-but-inaccessible experimental community in far upstate New York.

Interesting set-up. Can Patrick save his novel from Hollywood exploitation and save his family in the bargain?

If Something New Under the Sun were a film, both questions would be answered in the affirmative, but it is actually an ingenious satirical novel. 

Patrick's production assistant duties mainly involve transporting of Cassidy Carter, who turns out (a) to be a lot more interesting, in Kleeman's hands, than Patrick is and (b) to actually possess in real life the sleuthing skills of the character she played for several seasons on television, teenage detective Kassi Keene. Cassidy comes across a California scam of Pynchonian dimensions in the mass marketing of WAT-R, a manufactured water-substitute that is making billions for somebody but unfortunately inducing dementia in its consumers.

Something New Under the Sun, however, does not turn into a Pynchonian noir. The enigmatic closing chapter takes our two main characters out to the desert, where they encounter a grey-suited figure and...meet their ends? I don't know. Patrick and Alison's daughter Nora is going to be all right, I imagine, as she possesses visionary powers, but everyone else seems to be sliding into the chasm.

So, not a book for folks who like loose ends tied up, but Kleeman's satirical insight is sharp and the novel has at least one unforgettable character in Cassidy Carter. Kleeman also has a gift for description--a gift not in high demand these days, perhaps. As Maureen McLane put it in a poem in the most recent LRB, 

description is decadent and passé

some say         some say

 And yes, description can get tedious, but try this: "As Cassidy follows the curve of the road out to the desert, the valley fades into the long, brown flats of Riverside, adorned by a sarcastic smattering of palm trees. Out past the highway, terra-cotta-shingled houses huddle around twisting inner streets and culs-de-sac. [...] In the backyard of a sand-colored ranch, pale concrete surrounds an empty swimming pool, punctured by short, tough plants with tiny blue flowers growing through cracks in the surface."

Katherine Rundell, _Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne_

 I APPRECIATE DONNE, but I picked this up mainly because I enjoyed Rundell's reviews and essays in the LRB, the NYRB, etc.  She carries her learning lightly, and her prose is lucid and witty. Not unlike Donne, she snaps a neat metaphor. On the deanship of St. Paul's: "it was also a fantastic piñata of a job: hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out." On the facial hair of Edward Alleyn: "a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice-skate." Topping it all, on p. 254, an abecedarian prose poem indicating the range of erudition evident in his Donne's sermons.

Donne was not only one of the great poets in a golden age of English poetry, but also "star preacher of the age," not to mention courtier, diplomat, military man, lawyer...he even did a prison stint. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery producing his body of work while also being celebrated for his sermons and accompanying American troops into Baghdad, but that's the kind of career Donne had. Those were different times, as Lou Reed once sang.

To be clear: Rundell's is neither a definitive nor a critical biography; it does not aim at comprehensive detail and touches only on some highlights of the poetry.  Worthwhile? Yes. Clocking in at just under 300 pages, authoritative and crisply written, it would make a perfect starter book for anyone curious about Donne.

Hua Hsu, _Stay True_

HUA HSU IS a staff writer at the New Yorker, and this book, his second, is a memoir focusing on a college friend, Ken Ishida, who was robbed, kidnapped, and murdered in the summer after their junior year. 

Hsu and Ken did not, judging by the surface of things, have enough in common to serve as the basis of friendship; Hsu was an indie kid, a 'zine writer who got his clothes at thrift stores, Ken a business major and frat brother who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch. They were both "Asian-American," but the Hsus were Taiwanese-Chinese and the Ishidas Japanese, so their family cultures were distinct, too. Still, they became close friends, sharing smoke breaks on the balcony of their dormitory.

College-age folks typically embrace their chosen cultural affiliations with a certain ferocity, especially if they are indie kids, but the book goes to show one can still have a kind of flexibility and openness at that age. Or maybe the secondary-family aspect of dorm life explains the friendship, the live-and-let-live tolerance we (sometimes) extend to those with whom we share living quarters. A lot of the book is a convincing portrait of a not-that-likely friendship.

The main turn in the book, of course, is Ken's terrible death. Stay True is set mainly in the late 1990s, and I was reminded over and over of something that happened about the same time on the campus at which I was teaching: the death of one of our English majors in a house fire. Carlos's death had a galvanizing effect on his friends, I recall. The English majors at our small college tended to know each other well and socialize together, and mortality's abrupt interruption of the relatively idyllic routine of campus life was for them a psychic revolution. Real Life, when one is that age, is supposed to be some number of months or years away, yet here it was, grim and implacable and iron-visaged. Reading about what Ken's loss meant to his friends, and to Hsu in particular, was so minutely evocative of what Carlos's death meant to his friends that I am prepared to say that Hsu got this traumatic event exactly right.

Richard Siken, _Crush_

 A FRIEND'S GIVING me Siken's recent book, I Do Know Some Things, inspired me to re-read this one, his debut from 2005, a Yale Younger Poets selection. I think I read it in 2007, probably because of the selections from it in the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I remember thinking it was good, but I didn't pick up on his next collection, perhaps because it didn't arrive until 2015. 

Re-reading Crush now, I think it is not just good, but excellent, one of the outstanding debut collections of the 21st century's first decade (alongside, say, Ariana Reines's The Cow and G. C. Waldrep's Goldbeater's Skin). It seems a key precursor for collections like Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Sam Sax's Bury It. 

In Louise Glück's introduction (she was the Yale Younger Poets judge that tapped Siken), she writes, "For a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing). Books of this kind dream big; they trust not only what drives  them but the importance of what drives them. When they work, as Plath's Ariel works, they are unforgettable; they restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form." 

That's exactly right, I think. Obsessives can be precise and passionate at one and the same time, exact and extravagant at one and the same time, because only too much comes close to being enough.

I should quote a least a bit, don't you think? Let's go with this, from "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves":

      The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

            and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

                  and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

      because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

                        your life is over anyway.

Joshua Hammer, _The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts)_

 BY THE WAY, the author is the Joshua Hammer whose journalism on events in Africa appears in The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, not the Josh Hammer associated with the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. As a case of noted authors working at the same time and sharing an unusual name, this coincidence is up there with P. Wyndham Lewis (avant-garde writer and painter) and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (popular biographer).

For quite a while, western scholars assumed that there was not much of a documentary tradition in Africa before European colonization, but they were mistaken, for Mali had extensively developed such a tradition in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Collecting, preserving, and cataloguing as many of these manuscripts as he could was the work of Abdel Kader Haidara, the bad-ass librarian whose activities we follow for much of the book.

The collection is in jeopardy after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which enables al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, in cooperation with Tuareg separatists, to sweep into Mali from the North. The manuscripts are the fruit of an Islamic culture, yes, but one the jihadists regard as heretical, so Haidara has to find a way to get the immense collection away safely before it is captured and destroyed.

He succeeds--as the books subtitle lets us know, so that's hardly a spoiler. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a brisk read, an inspiring story, and an illuminating look at both the history and the current circumstances of Mali.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 5, Last Campaigns (1974-2008)

 1) Finishing this biography, I had the odd thought that it is a kind of inverse of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. When Boswell met Johnson in 1763, Johnson was already 53 and had already accomplished most of what he is famous for: the dictionary, above all, but also the Life of Savage, Rasselas, the Rambler essays, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Yet most, maybe three-quarters, of Boswell’s biography is about the last twenty years of Johnson’s life--not Johnson's most productive years, but the years when Boswell often had him under close observation, writing everything down. 

Tanenhaus spent quite a bit time with his subject as well, something at least close to the twenty years Boswell knew Johnson. As far as I know, they did not travel together, as Johnson and Boswell did to the Hebrides, or belong to same famous club. Still, Tanenhaus spent a lot of time with Buckley, and he could have brought in a lot of anecdotes based on direct observation, á la Boswell, yet he seems to be deliberately refraining from doing so.

Part 5, the book’s concluding section, contains the whole of the time Tanenhaus was in contact with Buckley, yet it is the shortest, even though it covers the widest range of years.

Tanenhaus’s having long known his subject does nonetheless leave a kind of dusting on things, transmitting a familiarity with his subject that is felt by the reader in lots of hard-to-pin-down ways. Take his account in Chapter 49 of the celebration of the entrance into the priesthood of Brent Bozell, Buckley’s longtime friend, co-worker, and brother-in-law. Tanenhaus may not have been an eyewitness at this event, but his account of it all but puts Buckley right before us.

2) I don’t know that Tanenhaus explicitly says anywhere that the election of Ronald Reagan, possibly the culmination of the movement Buckley had been helming for three decades, actually represented an anti-climax for Buckley. He sure leaves this reader with that impression, though. 

Tanenhaus skillfully conveyed the excitement of Buckley and the National Review-ers in getting Goldwater nominated in 1964. In 1980, their man Reagan--a friend of Buckley and a subscriber to National Review--not only gets nominated, but wins. Victory! However, Buckley and Reagan disagree about the Panama Canal...Reagan declines to attend the NR 25th anniversary bash in December 1980...Buckley is not offered a Cabinet position...it's just not the way anyone might have imagined it.

Buckley pulls back a bit from the magazine, Firing Line starts winding down, Buckley seems more involved in his a-week-in-my-life memoirs, in his series of spy novels, in being host-with-the-most than he does in the revolution.

3) Tanenhaus does not explicitly address the question of whether Buckley bears some responsibility for the election of Trump eight years after Buckley died. Anyone attempting to answer that question would need to read Tanenhaus's book, certainly, but he leaves it alone (Trump references in the index = zero). 

Having read the book, I'm not sure how I would answer the question. It's hard to imagine Trump being elected without the modern conservative movement behind him, and without Buckley there might not even have been a modern conservative moment. On the other hand, Buckley was principled, Trump is not, and it's not clear that Trump is even "conservative" in any of the senses that Buckley was. It's hard to imagine Trump on Firing Line. I'm going to say Buckley has some responsibility for the election of Trump, but I don't think he would be much pleased about that.

Kathryn Neurnberger, _Rue_

 I POSTED ABOUT Nuernberger’s previous collection, The End of Pink, and that post is the second-most-visited post of my blog, a bit north of 1,200. Surprising, no? I mean, Nuernberger is accomplished and respected, but still. 

Given the date of the post—October 17, 2016—perhaps Russian bots were looking to latch onto anything that might help elect Trump, and perhaps the phrase “the end of pink” had promising overtones of anti-feminism and anti-socialism, just the thing for stopping Hilary. 

Eh, who knows. If the post got one person to read the book, mission accomplished. It’s a fine book, as is this one.

Rue is both a plant and an emotion, making it an apt choice of title for this collection, which pays a lot of attention to the landscape, especially its plants, and which does betray regret. In various poems, Nuernberger seems to regret or half-regret her job, her decision to live in the country, and her marriage (see the title poem). What I can find on the internet suggests that at some time after 2020, when this book was published, she found a new job and moved to Minneapolis. The internet does not seem to know how things went with the marriage.

Rue (the book) tends toward the conversational—that is, the poems often begin with observations about the speaker’s immediate surroundings, the sentence structure and diction are plain, the language mainly matter-of-fact—but never stays there. Just when the reader is lulled into a kind of passivity, out jumps a surprisingly candid revelation, or an unexpected new topic, or an audacious image. Rue makes a lot of bold moves.

The collection is worth reading just for those jumps, but we also get portraits of other women artists whose work is highly involved with plants, such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Anna Atkins, and if you, like Neurnberger, are interested in plants, you will also pick up some lore.