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. 

Edmund De Waal, _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_

 COULD THIS BOOK, I wondered, actually be as great as so many people say it is? Turns out, yes.

De Waal’s book begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings in wood and ivory) assembled by Charles Ephrussi in the 1880s and 1890s. The Ephrussis were a prominent European banking family with origins in Odessa; Charles was a connoisseur of the arts in Belle Époque Paris (being the third son, he had not that much to do for the family business). He is the figure in the top hat towards the back in Renoir’s famous painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers and may have been part of the inspiration for Proust’s Swann. De Waal does an extraordinary job of evoking the art world of that time and place and how it crashed into the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. (Charles’s grandfather is De Waal’s great-great-great-grandfather).

Charles gave the collection as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor, who belonged to the part of the family running the Vienna branch of the bank. De Waal turns out to be as sure-handed and evocative in conjuring up Secession Vienna as he was with Belle Époque Paris. Here too, however, anti-semitism exerts pressure, thanks to the anti-semiotic mayor Karl Lueger.

The real, fatal pressure comes in 1938 with the Anschluss, when Austria is incorporated into Nazi Germany. The Ephrussis lose their business, their house, and their art collection to Nazi appropriation. The netsuke, however, being so tiny, are smuggled out by a house servant, and find their way to Viktor’s son, Ignace, who got out early to the USA and joined the army when America entered World War II.

After the war, Ignace moves to Tokyo—and once again De Waal skillfully represents a legendary milieu. De Waal, great-nephew of the gay and childless Ignace, becomes the next inheritor of the collection.

Besides being compulsively readable, De Waal strikes an extraordinary balance in presenting, on the one hand, the beauty of artistic objects and the sensibility of those who love and preserve them, and on the other, the cruelty and brutality of history (including not only the Holocaust but the bombing of Tokyo). The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that will continue to attract readers for generations, I will venture to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 4: Controlling the Message (1966-1974)

 THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.

Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China. 

Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else. 

The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001).