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.

Ocean Vuong, _Time Is a Mother_

I THINK THIS is actually a bit stronger than Vuong's first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The longer poems, in particular, struck me as sturdier, more surprising, and more ambitious than those in  the debut collection.

A good deal of this collection reflects the passing of Vuong's mother, who was vividly represented in Vuong's novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. My having read that novel likely added to the impact these poems had with me.

The title (I think) refers to the idea that time gives birth to us, but no doubt it also means that time can give us a very, very hard time.

Johnny Marr, _Set the Boy Free_

AS YOU MIGHT expect, Marr’s memoir is clear, unfussy, down to earth, and a reminder of how different he is from his onetime songwriting partner in the Smiths.

He is especially good at conveying his excitement about music, which goes back to some of his earliest memories, and at capturing the euphoria of the extraordinary takeoff of the Smiths.

As to the breaking up of the Smiths, in Marr’s telling it seems somewhat comparable to that of the Beatles. Like McCartney, Marr wanted to entrust management to a certain party, and the other three wanted a different party, and they could not settle the question. So no more Smiths.

Marr is full of praise for his many later collaborators (e.g., Bernard Sumner, The The, Modest Mouse, and the Cribs), but this part of the book is anticlimactic, I have to say.

Set the Boy Free came out in 2016, by which time Marr had started making solo records, beginning with The Messenger in 2013. I saw him live in I think 2014, in Omaha. It was a not-very-large club, and the crowd was not that large either, but Marr gave us a fiery, no-holds-barred set that even included great Smiths songs such as “How Soon Is Now” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” It was a glimpse into the molten core of rock and roll for the two hundred or so people who were there--one of the best shows I have ever seen. The encore included “I Fought the Law,” in the Clash arrangement. Stunning.

I saw Morrissey about a year later, and he fully lived up to his reputation for petulance. His Smiths cover was “Meat Is Murder,” which might be the consensus pick for the Smiths song one is least interested in hearing played live. No encore. Yes, Morrissey and Marr are different indeed.

Henry James, _The Outcry_

 YOU DON'T HEAR about this one much—it’s the last novel James completed, published in 1911. Don’t go in hoping for anything like The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, or The Ambassadors, though, for you will be (as I was) disappointed.

For one thing, it comes from an idea James had for a play. As such, the novel is mainly scenes of dialogue, and particularly ponderous dialogue at that, as it carries much of the novel’s exposition and tends toward people staking out debate positions rather than having conversations. The sympathetic characters line up tidily opposite the not-so-sympathetic, and there is a not-very-interesting romance that tips towards matrimony by the novel’s end. The Outcry seems more the work of James the would-be playwright than James the novelist…and that’s not good.

For another, the novel is (by James’s standards) topical, and the topic is probably of slender interest for a contemporary reader. James was inspired by a 1909 newspaper-led campaign to dissuade the Duke of Norfolk from selling an Old Master painting his family owned (Holbein’s The Duchess of Milan) to the American millionaire Henry Frick. (The campaign succeeded, and the portrait is now in the National Gallery in London, not in the Frick Collection in New York City.)

In The Outcry, Lord Theign is in embarrassed enough circumstances (thanks to daughter Kitty’s gambling debts) that he is tempted by American millionaire Breckinridge Bender’s interest in a Joshua Reynolds portrait of one of Theign’s ancestors. Stakes are raised when a bright young English connoisseur, Hugh Crimble, spots another of Theign’s families Old Master paintings as the work of an Old Master other than the one to whom it has been long attributed, making it much rarer and more valuable.

Theign is meanwhile hoping that his younger daughter, Grace, will agree to marry Lord John. Lord John is serving as middleman for Bender, probably in hopes that the painting’s sale will pump up Grace's marriage settlement. But Grace has eyes for…Hugh Crimble.

It all seems a bit on the rattletrap side, doesn’t it?  I have read about two dozen novels or short novels by James, and The Outcry, I’m sorry to say, is the first one that seemed to me not really worth the reading.

Catherine Lacey, _The Möbius Book_

 VERY UNUSUAL TRICK here. One side presents title, author, and a white outline of a Möbius strip on a blue background. Open it up, and you get jacket copy, title page, copyright page, a dedication, and a memoir of what sounds like a terrible break up. Flip the book over, and you have the very same cover, the very same jacket copy, title page, and copyright page, but a different dedication, and (it turns out) a different text: a fiction (88 pages, a short novel or long short story) in which the character whose point of view gets the most attention is worrying about the (apparent) bloodstain seeping from the door of the neighboring apartment while she is being visited by a friend who has been through a terrible breakup.

The neat thing about a Möbius strip, as you may recall from math class, is that one starts with an ordinary two-sided strip of paper, but a half-twist and a piece of tape will you give you a strip of paper with only one side--as you can confirm by yourself by trying coloring it with a crayon.

So the memoir and the fiction seem like two texts, but are in some sense one text.

But in what sense? 

The memoir part, which by sheer chance is what I read first, tells a grim story. The man who in the text is only known as The Reason (as in "A man downstairs was The Reason I'd turned from inhabitant to visitor") breaks up with Lacey via an email, even though they are in different rooms of their shared apartment at the time he sends it. Most of The Reason's reported behavior is similarly odd and cruel. (Googling suggests that writer Jesse Ball is The Reason.)

The memoir might remind you of other getting-myself-back-together narratives, like those of Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed. Lacey explores quite a few different avenues--spiritual, sexual, pharmaceutical--and makes what seems like progress in purging her life of The Reason and his inexplicable behavior. The most interesting parts for me, I'd say, are Lacey's memories of an intensely Christian adolescence in Mississippi. It was easy to connect these memories with the setting of Pew or X's Southern Territories years in Biography of X.

The fiction is interesting in that even though it does have a character who has been broken up with, it gets (for the most part) well away from the experience of the broken-up-with person. The fictional situation includes but also gives the slip to Lacey's own breakup, and that bloodstain under the door becomes the focus of our attention.

I'm not sure The Möbius Book will catch on with the book clubs, but it certainly shows Lacey's resourcefulness and powers of writerly invention.