Seamus Heaney, _The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes_

 WONDERING WHAT DREW Heaney to this play, I figured it must have had something to do with Ireland. The translation of Dante and the Dantean influence in Station Island have something to do with Ireland, I feel sure--the Ugolino episode evokes civil conflict, betrayal, and the thirst for revenge: the main ingredients of most literature about the Troubles, from Juno and the Paycock and The Informer and The Hostage up to The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Cal and Milkman.

So is there something Irish about Philoctetes? Betrayal? The nursing of grievance? The passing along of grievance, the legacy of injury, to the next generation?

I'm guessing it's the hope for reconciliation that drew Heaney to the play. The story, briefly: Ten years ago, on the way to Troy to reclaim Helen, the Greeks marooned one of their warriors, Philoctetes, because he had an incurable wound in his foot so putrid-smelling that his presence was intolerable. Now, however, they learn from an oracle that they will never take Troy unless they have Philoctetes' bow. Odysseus recruits the now-dead Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, to gain Philoctetes' trust, obtain the bow, and skedaddle back to Troy.

Philoctetes, who is still on that island with his suppurating foot, is still angry at the Greeks and will do nothing to help them voluntarily. Neoptolemus does win his trust...but then feels bad about misleading him. He wants to bring to Troy not just the bow, but Philoctetes himself. He wants a reconciliation. 

And the point of The Cure at Troy is that such a reconciliation can happen; the seemingly impossible yet deeply hoped-for thing can occur. This leads to the lines of the play, spoken by the chorus, that Joe Biden often quotes:

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Is this about Ireland? The Cure at Troy was published in 1991, quite a while before the Good Friday Accords. Is it about 1989, about what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia? Heaney was acquainted with Milosz, I believe, possibly with Havel. 

The "hope and history rhyme" line is a striking one, which made me wonder how others had translated it.  Turns out it is not a translation at all, but all Heaney. At least, the choral song in which it occurs near the end of the play did not show up in the first three English translations I found. Heaney wanted it there, which, I suspect, tells us a lot about what he found in the play. Or maybe wanted, or hoped, or needed to find in the play, even if he had to write the passage that embodied it himself.

Alison Bechdel, _The Secret to Superhuman Strength_

 ALISON BECHDEL IS one of those people—Bob Dylan, John Ashbery, Todd Haynes, Johnny Marr come to mind, for me—who seem constitutionally unable to produce anything uninteresting. 

All of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections are worthwhile, by my lights. This is the third of the “book” books, and like its two predecessors it is funny, poignant, insightful, and a visual delight.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in some ways more ambitious than Fun Home and Are You My Mother? It’s physically larger, in full color, and, though still mainly autobiographical, it contextualizes Bechdel’s story in a wide historical perspective. 

The main current in the book is Bechdel’s conscious efforts, from childhood on, to become stronger. Each of the six decades of her life so far gets a chapter, and in each one she is pursuing one or more activity with the intention of becoming stronger and fitter: skiing, martial arts, bicycling, and running, for example. With each activity, she also gives us a sense of the culture around it, how at one time or another it was having its moment, with its particular buzz and patois, its particular equipment fetishisms. Even though this is mainly her story, we get a sense of how broad a movement physical fitness has become in the USA.

But bodies come attached to minds, perhaps to spirits, and Bechdel’s pursuit of bodily fitness intersects often with her pursuit of mental and spiritual fitness. Accordingly, we learn also of her involvement with yoga, meditation, Buddhism, and the Anglo-American culture of seeking, particularly as represented by the English Romantics (focusing on Coleridge and the Wordsworths) and the American Transcendentalists (focusing on Emerson and Fuller). 

Bechdel achieves the near impossible by taking herself seriously without…taking herself seriously. That is, she makes no apologies for devoting herself to physical and spiritual self-development. Her pursuits can seem like solipsistic self-absorption—do indeed seem so to some of her friends and partners, it looks like—but the reader never doubts that they are for her not just worthwhile, but indispensable, the activity that enables her to live a meaningful life. Yet she is so funny about it all—so self-deprecating, so clear-eyed about its absurdities, that the book never has the irritating smugness so many, many tales of self-improvement have. 

And her drawing—is it better than ever? I’m ready to say yes. The same painstaking detail, but also occasional pages in a loose gray wash…a greater tonal variety than ever. As I was saying, is any Bechdel going to be one you should skip? Nope.

Nathalie Léger, _Exposition_, trans. Amanda DeMarco

 THE BACK JACKET copy calls Exposition the first in a triptych--a painting in three panels--would we call Exposition a portrait, then? It's not historical fiction, but not a biography either. It lies within hailing distance of art criticism or art history, but what kind of art history devotes any space to the author's father's marital infidelities? So let's just say portrait. A portrait with a lot of other things in the background.

Exposition is a portrait of Virginia Oldoini (1837-1899), the Countess of Castiglione, a celebrated beauty and Parisian social figure of the Second Empire (1850-1870), for a time the mistress of Napoleon III. The Countess is famous for being photographed--"the most photographed woman on the 19th century," reputedly. A lot of painstaking preparation went into the photographs, attention to clothes, hair, setting; some are in costume or are representations of a historical character. Robert de Montesquiou--the main model for Proust's Charlus--was among those fascinated by her and by the photographs. The most famous of them, "Scherzo di Follio," you have probably seen; it often figures in accounts of the early history of the medium.

The France of the 1850s and 1860s was politically gruesome (see Robert Browning's "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society") but it was a flourishing era for French art--there were the Impressionists, of course, not to mention Baudelaire and Flaubert. So, is the Countess an artist? Is she a precursor of Cindy Sherman? Is she the ancestress of all the artistically-inflected self-representation that now occurs globally on the internet?

Maybe. Léger raises such possibilities, but she does not spend a lot of time or energy on them. Rather than turn the Countess into that familiar figure, the woman ahead of her time, or attribute to her motivations we can readily recognize, Léger ponders her in all her bewildering idiosyncrasy. What did she think she was doing? Why is it still interesting?

It has something to do with the male gaze, Léger seems willing to venture. If to be a woman has a lot to do with being looked at, all the more so if one is beautiful, even famous for being beautiful. Is that something one can work with, do something with, heighten, appropriate, turn inside out? Or is it just a cage, however you decorate it?

I'm hoping to have time this January to look at the next two panels of the triptych.

Kent Russell, _I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son_

 KING KONG THEORY could be crudely described as a book about the perils of being born female, and I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son serves to show that being born male is no stroll in the park, either--or at least not for American-born millennials.

Born forty years earlier than he was, Russell might have been a journalist in the Hunter S. Thompson vein, but the demand for that sort of thing has largely evaporated--not that you know that from the Knopf jacket copy that proclaims "a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld." Russell does no trade in fear and loathing, nor does he devote a lot of space to his drug intake. Instead he turns his reportorial attention to the bizarre sorts of things American men elect to do, such as: 

--acquire immunity from snakebites by letting themselves be bitten regularly by poisonous snakes ("Mithridates of Fond du Lac")

--design gory special effects for horror movies ("Say Good Morning to the Adversary")

--become one of professional hockey's "enforcers"--that is, the players who get rough with opposing player attempting to get rough with the team's best scorer ("Showing Up").

The jewel in the crown (and the reason I bought the book) is "American Juggalo," in which Russell attends a Gathering, the annual summer festival for fans of the Insane Clown Posse. As drop-in literary journalism goes, this essay can sustain comparison to Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, or David Foster Wallace's "Ticket to the Fair," about the Illinois State Fair. Russell is not of the scene, and he has a sense of its absurdities, but he does not want to merely mock it, and he almost kinda sorta gets it. I hope this piece becomes a classic.

(For contrast, like a sweet breeze wafted in from some pastoral Eden, we have "Artisanal Ball," about baseball as played by the Amish.)

What is going on with American men doing such stupid things? Is it because American men have always done stupid things--is this is our legacy from our fathers? The book's title, it turns out, is not something Russell's father said to him, but something Daniel Boone once said to a son who showed no interest in military service. Trying to be what our fathers were, or wanted to be, or  thought they had to be...is that what it is?

Interspersed throughout I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are essays with dates rather than titles, almost all from September 2013, in which Russell describes a lengthy visit with his own father in Florida. Russell is trying to obtain his father's co-operation for a piece in which Russell will travel to the ancestral home of the Russells, Ohio, to write about the family's history. Dad, fearing his son will annihilate the family in a snark-blast for some snooty national magazine, won't go along. But even though Russell fails in his quest to get Dad up to Ohio, we get a convincing portrait of the man, and incidentally a glimpse into what fathers mean to sons, what sons means to fathers... not to mention a glimpse into a masculinity that is not exactly toxic but nonetheless hard on the liver.

Virginie Despentes, _King Kong Theory_, trans. Frank Wynne

I READ THIS last month, and am reading Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism this month, so I am thinking, my god, critical theoretical discourse has gotten a lot more entertaining to read these days--personal, slanging, taking no prisoners, marching through Georgia and scorching the landscape without explanation or apology.

King Kong Theory has actually been around for quite a while; it came out in French in 2006 and was first published in English in 2010. This English translation appeared relatively recently, in 2020. The book is not readily comparable to anything I can think of in American letters. It could imaginably occupy a space on a shelf within heckling distance of books by Camille Paglia, Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, and Maggie Nelson given its promiscuous blending of memoir, fiction, critical theory, and polemic. Despentes seems to give even less of a rat's ass what the tenure and promotion committee thinks than those writers do, however, and is even happier to give enlightened feminist consensus the middle finger than Paglia is. 

Opening sentence: "I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh." And we accelerate from there.

Chapters are devoted to rape, sex work, pornography, with punk rock and authorship as unifying motifs. What does King Kong have to do with it? 

As women go, I'm more King Kong than Kate Moss [who had the Fay Wray/Jessica Lange role in the most recent film about the giant gorilla]. I'm the sort of woman you don't marry, you don't have kids with; I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me.

But she is both the exception and the rule--for is any woman actually like the woman Kate/Faye/Jessica represent, "sexy but not slutty, married but not meek, with a good job but not so successful she upstages her husband, slim but not hung up about food," and so on? "I suspect she doesn't exist," writes Despentes. King Kong Theory takes a gleeful stick to this particular piñata for 139 pages, and it is one adrenalized read.

Bernardine Evaristo, _Girl, Woman, Other_

 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER for 2019, and a better than average Booker winner, I'd say. 

At the novel's hub is radical lesbian experimental playwright Amma, whose new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey,  is having its premier at the National Theater--she is hitting the big time, in other words. The first section is from her point of view, filling us in on her story and sensibility.

The next eleven sections are the spokes, we might say. Many are from the point of view of other people present at the premier--Amma's daughter, an old lover, an old playmate. But we also get a few sections from people connected to the people connected to Amma...maybe more a network than a wheel, then.

What the characters all have in common is not only that they have a (sometimes mediated) tie to Amma, though.  They are also all women (though one is moving towards non-binary) of African heritage (some having come from Africa itself, some the children of immigrants, some the descendants of people abducted from Africa many generations ago). Even more intriguingly, they all also have in common a kind of free-verse style of presentation that Evaristo came up with for the novel. A random sample:

     by the time Carole began her banking career in the City, Bummi had a staff of ten

     one of them, Sister Omofe from church, was the most pleasant and diligent worker of them all

     her husband, Jimoh, had taken a second wife back in Port Harcourt where he ran his mobile phone business and left her to raise their two sons, Tayo and Wole, alone

Have to admit, I was skeptical at first--is this actually going to work over the course of a 450-page novel? But the free-verse method actually gave the book a headlong momentum. I found it very hard to stop in the middle of any character's section, absorbed not just by the conjuring up of the section's character (all in free  indirect discourse) but by the style's pace, the march of the statements, continuously unscrolling without affording any natural place to pause.

Since the characters shared this discourse as well as their connections to femaleness and Africa, they always seemed to belong in the same book together, even though they are also widely different--of different generations, different politics, different levels of education, different classes, different sensibilities. Together they constitute a cosmos, and by the the time we get to the  final chapter, "The After-party," we have traveled far together. 

And then, a neat little curveball in the epilogue. Or perhaps we should call it a googly.

Bob Mehr, _Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements_

WHO WOULD HAVE thought, back around 1986, that thirty years on a ramshackle, off-the-radar band like the Replacements would have a 435-page history, with a further 16 pages of notes?

Yet it makes a kind of sense, too. Bon Jovi (to name only one monster ‘80s band) sold records and played for audiences in numbers whole levels of magnitude beyond anything the Replacements ever achieved. For sheer unquantifiable devotion among their fans, though, the ‘Mats were unmatchable. (Mehr, by the way, explains the band’s odd nickname.) To the band’s faithful, frontman Paul Westerberg’s songs were scripture, their verge-of-chaos live shows a sacrament, their penchant for self-sabotage the only true holiness.

The book breaks neatly into two halves, the Replacements with Bob and without Bob—Bob Stinson, that is, founder of the band and human train wreck, kicked out of the band as an unredeemable liability just when it looked like they might conceivably break huge. They were arguably a better band without him and his car crash guitar solos—except, of course, that they now sounded more like every other band and were Never the Same. 

The dropping of Bob and its complicated effects—not least on his half-brother, Tommy, the band’s bassist, who stayed on without him—is among the many topics on which Mehr proves illuminating. Mehr is a great journalist; he did the legwork to find the right sources, won their trust, got the story. He writes as a fan, but not a besotted one. He can capture the incandescent, unpredictable brilliance of the band without sparing the details of how they could be their own worst enemy. (Their two network TV appearances led to lifetime bans from both networks.) His writing is always sturdy, often eloquent.

Are there still high school dropouts with day jobs as janitors flailing away in midwestern basements, blasting through cheap amps, coming up with such howls of angsty joy as “Kids Don’t Follow” and “I Will Dare”? I don’t know. I hope so.

A. D. Jameson, _I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture_

TO TELL THE truth, I read a short story by Jameson in Conjunctions that I admired and bought this thinking it was a collection of short stories. It is not even close to being a collection of short stories. Careless of me! Always read the subtitle. 

To tell a further truth, I am not much of a fan of the films whose popularity Jameson explores here—superhero movies, Star Wars, Star Trek. I’ve watched a few examples of each category and liked them well enough, but never got the bug, really. But Jameson writes well, and I am at least curious about how the Avengers etc. came to dominate the cinematic landscape, so I gave it a go.

Jameson comes up with an intriguing paradox: what geeks love about fantasy is realism. For example, that Han Solo’s space ship is a little battered and occasionally breaks down, just like a real life vehicle, adds a certain frisson because the “secondary world,” the world of the fantasy, thereby imitates the actual world, and the secondary world accordingly seems that much more credible. 

Jameson is particularly lucid on what he calls the “Holodeck” effect, after a recurring feature of the Star Trek franchise: “In order to please geeks, artworks must function like Holodecks, creating the impression of a secondary world without any boundaries” (134). In the famous cantina scene in the original Star Wars, for example, geeks are hooked by the idea that every customer has a name, a home planet, a story that the film could pursue if it wished, just like Richard Linklater’s Slacker…or, for that matter, like any actual bar in your neighborhood. The elaboration and exploration of these latent potentialities behind any detail in any fantasy world is the heart of the geekiness.

A lot of the book seems a riposte to Peter Biskind or anyone else who has lamented that the gritty, experimental New Hollywood of the 1970s was hip-checked into limbo by Star Wars and its innumerable progeny. I understand Biskind’s frustration, especially in the summer, when all we get at the local multiplex is the latest installment of this or that or the other franchise. But Jameson’s argument that geek films have an aesthetic of their own, and by no means an inferior one, makes sense.

Joshua Cohen, _The Netanyahus_, 2

 COHEN, NOW THAT I think of it, had earlier shown some affinities with Roth. Roth sometimes turned his attention to Israel (The Counterlife, Operation Shylock), and Cohen has done so even more steadily (A Heaven of Others, Moving Kings, parts of Witz, and the novel under discussion). Roth wrote fiction about a doppelgänger with his very own name in Operation Shylock, and Cohen did so in Book of Numbers. 

But the other affinity (besides the gift for painful family comedy, as noted in first installment) that particularly struck me here is that Cohen shows the same startling ability to make an argument that (I imagine) he does not agree with that Roth does with the Meir Kahane character in Counterlife. Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s lecture in Chapter 12, an unforgettable evocation of whatever the Jewish version of Afro-pessimism is, sounds undiluted and faithful to its models. And it plays for real stakes.

I can hardly think that Cohen really does, on some level, believe assimilation is tantamount to extinction. Come to think of it, though, who knows? It occurs to me that we could read the disappearance of Jewry in Witz as a dark fantasy about assimilation. I need to read the essay collection, I think.

However much of a Zionist Cohen is, though, I can hardly imagine him as cantankerously adamant as Ben-Zion Netanyahu is here…and yet while Cohen depicts the Netanyahus, father, mother, and sons, to be as unlikable a clan as you are going to meet this side of the Snopes, he gives its patriarch the dignity of a full-fledged, forceful argument in Chapter 12. Like Dostoevsky—and Roth—he believes in the art of fiction enough to let the other really speak. 

Joshua Cohen, _The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family_, I

 I'M A FAITHFUL reader of Joshua Cohen going all the way back to Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. Last April, I was checking around, thinking he was about due for a new book, and saw a new one called The Best Assassination in the Nation. Delighted, I ordered it. When it arrived, I opened it up only to find myself launched on a pedestrian political thriller. Joshua, Joshua, I inwardly lamented, how could you? More careful inspection of the book's back cover, however, revealed that this book was in fact written by a different Joshua Cohen, not the author of Book of Numbers and Witz. Whew. I did not finish the book, but I have been keeping it around just as a reminder to myself not to be such an idiot.

My gratitude was enhanced, therefore, when this summer there appeared a new novel by the echt Joshua Cohen. And it is excellent.

Set mainly over a few days in a small northeastern college town in the early 1960s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a new member of the college's WASP-ily patrician history department. He has been assigned the task of squiring Israeli scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu during his campus visit. Netanyahu (an historical figure, father to "Bibi," longtime prime minister of Israel) is on campus to give a lecture and to interview for a teaching position.

In an afterword, Cohen explains the genesis of the novel lay in the late Harold Bloom's story of having been handed that very assignment back in that day, when Netanyahu père was on the job market in the USA. (Ruben Blum is not based on Harold Bloom, however.)

Cohen had never put me much in mind of Philip Roth before this novel, but this one did on nearly every page. This may have been due to my plowing through the big Roth biography at the same time I was reading The Netanyahus, but I don't think that's all it was. The family comedy of this novel--its scenes of Ruben with his wife, his teenage daughter, his parents, and his in-laws--is explosively funny even when it is painful, as it frequently is. The episode of daughter Judy's finding a way to obtain the nose job that she badly wants but that her parents refuse to allow, for instance, could almost be a lost story from the Goodbye, Columbus era. When the nor'easter of the Netanyahu family lands, with its three sons who seem to have stepped out of Lord of the Flies, we are in the over-the-top farce mode of Portnoy's Complaint, The Great American Novel, and Operation Shylock.

And that wasn't all...but I'll stop here for now.

Anthony Veasna So, _Afterparties_

 I HAD BEEN looking forward to this coming out since I read "Superking Son Scores Again" back in 2018, and now it's here, and it's great, and it's his last book as well as his first. Well. 

There may be another book--I imagine there are fugitive pieces here and there that could be collected. "Baby Yeah" certainly deserves to be in a book. But this will be the only book of So's fiction that So himself had a hand in preparing.

Quite a few of the stories here are narrated from the point of view of a character resembling So himself, gay son of a Cambodian immigrant family that escaped the genocide, growing up in Stockton, California. But quite a few could be from the point of view of cousins, friends, neighbors. As a fictional portrait of a certain place at a certain time, it bears comparison to Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man or Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees, although he's funnier and grittier than either, and his prose pings and flashes like a pinball machine.

I hope it becomes a classic.

Tom Barbash, _The Dakota Winters_

 IT'S 1980, AND young Anton Winters, after an early exit from the Peace Corps due to a bout with malaria, is back in New York City...in the Dakota, in fact. 

His father, Buddy, was the host of a much-admired talk show (there were such things in the 1970s, e.g., Dick Cavett's), but inexplicably walked off the show one day and traveled about for a year or so to find himself. 

Now Buddy is hoping for a comeback, but the television industry is skeptical, reluctant to give him another chance. Who's to say he won't crack up again? He asks for Anton's help in putting a new show together.

It may be only because I teach it so often, but this seemed like Hamlet to me. The father returns from the dead (literally in Hamlet's case, figuratively in Anton's) with a request. The request is no small one; it will require the son to put his own life on hold and devote himself to furthering his father's interests. How can the son say no? At the same time, how can this go other than badly?

Since it is 1980, another resident of the Dakota is planning his own resurrection from the dead. Anton thus also plays a small role in John Lennon's re-emergence, as a crew member on John's sailing voyage to the Bermudas, during which he wrote much of his comeback Double Fantasy album, released shortly before he was murdered. Barbash presents a credible portrait of Lennon, but I did not feel that it added a lot to the novel. Ditto the accumulation of period detail--Barbash can't compete with City on Fire or Fortress of Solitude on this front. 

But the the story of the Winters, father and son, I think will be sticking with me.

Sarah Moss, _Summerwater_

 I HAD NEVER heard of Sarah Moss until I saw a good review of this in...I think it was LRB. Probably. In any case, my city library had a copy, so I gave it a shot, and it's good. 

Quite short, under 200 pages, but feels well-rounded. The book is set during the course of a single day at a lake in Scotland surrounded by vacation rentals. Each chapter gives the point of view of one or another person who happens to be staying in one of the cabins (cottages?) this particular week, with short inter-chapters devoted to the description of the lake.

The close-third-person/free indirect style of the chapters present a range of characters who vary in age and circumstances, so on one level we have a Winesburg, Ohio sort of novel. At the same time, almost everyone is feeling provoked by the eastern European vacationers in one of the cabins, who are playing loud music late into the night, so on another level we seem to have a Brexit allegory.

You don't need to be too canny to divine that the last chapter will turn on a confrontation between the British vacationers and the people variously imagined by the other characters as Polish, Romanian, or Ukrainian...and sure enough, that's what happens. It does not go down at all the way I was expecting.

Renee Gladman, _Houses of Ravicka_

 I MISUNDERSTOOD THE sequence of the Ravicka books and so read this one, the fourth, right after reading the first (Event Factory), skipping the second and third, but I ended by enjoying it even more than I did the first, so I suppose no harm was done. I certainly intend to get to the second and third when I can.

Houses in Ravicka have...hmm, what to call them, spiritual partner houses? That is, for every house there is another house to which it corresponds, in some mysterious, never made explicit way. The Comptroller, our narrator for most of Houses of Ravicka, is embarrassed to mortification by his, or her (the Comptroller's gender sometimes switches) inability to locate Number 32, the partner of Number 96. The Comptroller is an i-dotting, t-crossing sort of person, a minder of p's and q's, the author of Regulating the Book of Regulations, and her/his bureaucratic discomfiture was both easy to sympathize with and entertaining.

The beauty of these books, for me, is their ability to hybridize the sci-fi-as-anthropology world-building of Delany or LeGuin with the intoxicating indeterminacy of Beckett or Lispector. Even though the last part of the novel is narrated by the person in 32, we never learn why or how the house became imperceptible to the Comptroller, just as we never quite settle on the Comptroller's gender identity. That seems exactly as it should be--the reward of the novel is not in the resolving of mysteries but in sentences like this one: 

Seeing my coordinate for the first time and knowing it was my coordinate was like being in two separate novels--at the beginning of one, the end of the other--and having those two novels write toward one another but as if with an obstacle between them, such as a massive eruption in the landscape that you must walk around in order to progress, and it'll take decades to do this.

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (4)

 THE MAIN REASON I picked this up was to see how Jameson worked with more historical, more canonical writers—I think of him as a critic focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, and I don’t think I had til now read him on anybody who dated earlier than Balzac. So chapters 6, 7, and 8 on Spenser, Dante, and Goethe I read with particular interest.

    As with the chapter on Hamlet, I was impressed and a little in awe of how well Jameson knows this terrain. Taste this from the first paragraph of the Spenser chapter:

The two great traditions of medieval literature had both emerged in the twelfth century; on the one hand, in a mystico-erotic lyric that culminates in Dante’s unique epic; the second, in the more properly narrative “romans” of the epoch’s greatest “novelist,” Chrétien de Troyes. Intricate legends are spun from this last, which are dutifully developed for centuries (and fine true literary achievement in Italian “epic”) until they sink under their own weight in Spenser’s megallegory, thereafter only fitly remembered by the Romantics in Novalis […] and Wagner’s Parsifal (to which I suppose we need to add Tolkien and the effervescence of contemporary commercial fantasy literature).

God help me, does that not sound like Harold Bloom? The bravura sweep over centuries of Western Lit, the confidence about what counts as “true literary achievement,” the authoritative summing up? This sentence started me wondering: could Jameson do a Bloom, or something like Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve or Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, get a contract with Penguin and write one of those books that gets embraced by the Intelligent General Reader? I mean…why not? He has the prestige, he’s read everything, he can, as this passage shows, go big.

      Then again—near the beginning of the next chapter, on Dante, Jameson decides he has to clear some ground to talk about Dante and allegory by addressing Erich Auerbach’s famous argument that Dante found a way forward from the stiff symbolism of medieval literature, breaking out of allegory into a precursor of realism. Jameson writes:

At any rate, what I want to argue in the following pages is that Auerbach’s figura is a mediatory concept rather than a structural one, and this authority is not to be invoked against the revivals of allegory such as this one unless it is restaged in a contemporary semiotic arena in which questions of meaning and reference are measured against the philosophical problems of immanence and of representation in general.

Whew. Jameson’s gotta be Jameson, I guess. Penguin will have to keep looking for the next crossover literary critic. In that contemporary semiotic arena, the Intelligent General Reader would just be a Christian to Jameson’s lion.

Nonetheless, all three chapters are loaded with startlingly fresh ideas about these canonical figures. When Jameson talks about “Goethe’s Nietzschean side, the discovery of the life-giving powers of strong forgetting as a way of consigning guilt, the past, one’s own crimes and failures, to oblivion” and then a page later connects this capacity “to capitalism itself,” I thought, damn, he’s right.

Looking for Funny 3: Nell Zink, _Nicotine_

 LIKE THE WALLCREEPER and Mislaid, Nicotine is not sweetness and light, but it is funny. Our main character, Penny Baker, is the daughter of a celebrated anthropologist who adopted, in a way, then eventually married a young orphaned girl from a South American tribe he was studying. When her father dies, this dodgy situation reveals whole new and possibly even dodgier angles, so Penny decides she needs to get away for a while.

One of the questions that has come up after her father dies intestate is what to do with his childhood home, which the family still owns. Checking out the house, Penny discovers it is inhabited by a colorful group of squatters, who have named their community “Nicotine,” since they are all tobacco users.

Penny’s relationships with the community and certain of its members deepen intricately over the course of the novel, especially once her unscrupulous shark of an older half-brother conceives of a grand gentrification project around the house and becomes erotically obsessed with one of the members of Nicotine.

Does it all work out? I would say so. But the novel’s main treat is Nicotine. The only other novel I have read set among squatters is Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, and this one had a livelier representation of the world and culture—funnier, too, but also a shade more vraisemblable, perhaps.

Leslie Jamison, _Make It Scream, Make It Burn_

 THE EMPATHY EXAMS is a hard to act to follow, but I liked this one just as much. 

As with the earlier collection's essay on people who suffer (or believe they do) from Morgellons Disease, the first part of Make It Scream, Make It Burn gives us some intimate, empathetic glimpses at communities that share an unusual but powerful bond: "52 Blue" (about people fascinated by a particular whale), "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again" (about parents convinced their son is the reincarnation of a WW II fighter pilot), "Sim Life" (about the online activity Second Life). 

As with the earlier collection's deeply affecting personal pieces ("The Empathy Exams," "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain"), the newer book's concluding section has deeply poignant essays on Jamison's relationships with her husband and daughter (although she and her husband divorced last year, I learn from Wikipedia).

Make It Scream, Make It Burn sagged a bit in the middle for me, though, in the extended pieces on James Agee and Annie Appel. The question of how a writer or photographer or any other artist might document the lives of people in much more straitened circumstances than they are in themselves is an interesting one--how does one manage a humane impulse, maybe even a moral imperative, that is so streaked with potential for callousness and exploitation? I'm not sure Jamison had anything particularly illuminating to offer on this question, though.

On the whole, though, there's enough here to keep Jamison in the front rank of American essayists under 40, I would say. 

Ange Mlinko and Adrienne Rich

 QUITE A WHILE BACK--February 2013, going by the print edition date--Ange Mlinko published in The Nation a review of Adrienne Rich's final collection (Rich had died the previous March) and suggested that Rich's standing among younger poets had fallen and was likely to fall further.

JANUARY 30, 2013

Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich

A new collection of Adrienne Rich’s poems does not show her at her best.

ANGE MLINKO

It seemed to me that Mlinko was right (see Loads of Learned Lumber for 3/16/2013), so I was struck by Mlinko beginning a recent review in London Review of Books of a new biography of Rich and a new edition of Of Woman Born by saying "Adrienne Rich's poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist [...] that's is astounding to realize they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago [...]".  The discourses of the Occupy, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements are all close to Rich's wavelength, Mlinko notes. "Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from," she writes.

This got my attention. Has Mlinko changed her mind about Adrienne Rich?

The word "argot" made me suspect that Mlinko had not really changed her mind. Rich may have been right on any number of issues, but she was better at being right than she was at making poems--at least I think that is where Mlinko is coming down. "But one doesn't doesn't read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort--unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal," Mlinko writes.

It has long seemed to me that Rich is a good poet for people who do not otherwise like poetry much. If you do like poetry, her poems do not provide the kind of pleasures you have come to expect. They do take up important topics, though, and take a forward-leaning progressive stance. It did not seem to me or (I guess) Ange Mlinko in 2013 that those choices boded well for Rich's future reputation, but at this point, her reputation may be doing fine.

Alice Quinn, ed., _Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic_

THIS MAKES SEVEN posts on seven poetry collections in seven days, and yes, I am feeling a little pleased with myself.

Here we have 100+ poems, seemingly mainly from spring 2020, doing basically what the volume's subtitle indicates. 

A lot of really good poems from some really good poets here, but the book has mainly served to remind me of the relief I felt when Alice Quinn stepped down as New Yorker poetry editor.

Given the stylistic spectrum of American poetry, the anthology occupies a rather narrow range, one familiar to anyone who read the poetry in the New Yorker during the Quinn era. These are well-educated, well-behaved poems, mainly in conversational syntax, bundles of ingenuity in the figurative language but rhythmically subdued, quite a few loosely-handled closed forms, lots of poems ending with a little fwip like a Tupperware container for which the right lid has been found.

It's not that I cannot or do not enjoy that sort of thing--but when ninety out of a hundred poems in an anthology are all executing the same set of compulsory exercises (so to speak), they start to blur into each other. I was grateful for the occasional Eileen Myles, Shane McCrae, or Claudia Rankine poem that changed things up a bit.

Not that some of the milder-mannered poems were not excellent. I really enjoyed Susan Kinsolving's "My Heart Cannot Accept It All," for instance. Hats off also to Joshua Bennet, Traci Brimhall, Erin Belieu, Aleksander Hemon, Ada Limón, Matthew Zapruder. 

But I found myself wishing Quinn had worked with a co-editor, Cole Swenson perhaps, Jericho Brown, someone who might have wandered farther off the path once in a while.

Bei Dao, _The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems_, ed. Eliot Weinberger

 SINCE I OFTEN mention how much I admire James Joyce, I am occasionally asked whether I have read Finnegans Wake. I don’t know whether I have, actually. I looked at every word on every page in serial left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which means I “read” the book in some narrow sense…but did I take it in, grasp it, comprehend it, have some flickering glimmer of what was being narrated? Well, no, not so much. So I have both read and not read Finnegans Wake.

I feel that I have also both read and not read The Rose of Time. Most of the time, I would read the poem’s three or four stanzas, read it again, and read it again, and still draw a blank.

this sky unexceptional at chess

watches the sea change color

a ladder goes deep into the mirror

fingers in a school for the blind

touch the extinction of birds

     (“Another”)

Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was one of a group of poets attacked by the state as “menglong,” sometimes translated “misty,” essentially meaning “obscure,” with dismissive connotation. Nonetheless, he was embraced by a broad readership in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of generational spokesman figure. He was abroad  when Tiananmen Square happened and decided to stay abroad, but he remains widely read and revered in China.

All of which makes sense for me, I have to say, because Bob Dylan means a lot to me, and the Dylan songs that most affected me, that shaped my sensibility I would even say, are almost perfectly opaque. “Visions of Johanna” may be my favorite song; it seems to put its finger precisely on the spot. And yet do I have any idea why lines like “the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes” or “harmonicas play skeleton keys in the rain” seem so meaningful? I do not.

“Bei Dao” and “Bob Dylan” even have the same initials, in our writing system.

So I loved the book even though I did not understand much of it, since I could read “keyword my shadow /  hammers dreamworld iron / stepping to that rhythm / a lone wolf walks into” and imagine thousands in China thinking, “Damn, he nailed it again.”

 

Jane Wong, _Overpour_

 I COULD SAY this is a debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family…and that would be accurate…but it would fail to convey how remarkable this book is. 

When I say, “ debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family,” do you think of a gothic hallucinatory trip streaked with black humor and populated with raccoons? Probably not. The book’s Amy Tan dimension is overshadowed by its Shirley-Jackson-on-mushrooms dimension.

It may just be due to the Action Books connection, but I sometimes thought of Lara Glenum, or early Ariana Reines.

The book’s most audacious gesture, I’d say, are the five poems, interspersed throughout the volume, in the voice of the poet’s mother at different ages (24, 30, 29, 43, 25). Amy Tan channeling Plath? 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, _Lies_

 TWENTY-NINE OF Ní Ghríofa’s Irish poems, translated by herself. The poems have been selected from three different collections of her Irish poetry, and I wish someone had thought to add a note on which poems came from which collections, but oh, well.

Almost all of the poetry translated from Irish I have read was written centuries ago, so it is a bit of a kick just to see Irish language poems that mention selfies (féin-phic) or dishwashers (miasniteoir). But even the poems furnished with contemporary details tend to have lines with  a whiff of the traditional about them, like “My shoulders were those of a stranger” (“Dos Conejos”) or this from “Cusp of Autumn”:

The beech tree watching from above

forgets herself and drops a handful 

of leaves—golden, green—

sending them scattering into the stream.

Or “When I open / my mouth, my tongue flies away” from the opening poem, “First Date on Azul Street”.

 How did the rest of that first date go, I wonder? That is actually the reason I wish I knew which poem came from which collection. Some hearken back to flaming youth (“rave,” “Tattoo Removal”), others speak of pregnancy and motherhood. I imagine Ní Ghríofa had these phases in the usual sequence, but who knows?

I recently picked up her prose book, A Ghost in the Throat, but I’m glad I read this first. Curious about her English language poetry, too—how different is it from her Irish-into-English poetry?

John Murillo, _Up Jump the Boogie_

 I WAS SO taken with Murillo’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire,” a sonnet sequence that appeared in Best American Poetry 2020, that I went online to look for his books. All I could find at the moment was this—since it was published in 2020, I figured it had to include the sequence. Turns out, though, this is a 2020 reprint of his first book, published in 2009. No harm done, though—this book turned out to be brilliant. 

As in the sonnet sequence that pulled me in, Up Jump the Boogie combines deft handling of traditional forms—this book has three sestinas, and a refashioning of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”—with you-can-almost-taste-it evocations of the streets where and the culture in which Murillo grew up: Eazy E, George Clinton, the Leonard-Durán fight, kung fu movies, basketball on cement courts with chain-link nets. The perfect example of the book’s unique blend: a ghazal titled “Hustle.”

Up Jump the Boogie has a sequence of its own, “Flowers for Etheridge,” a tribute to a poetic father, Etheridge Knight, that includes parallel tributes to Murillo’s mentor, Larry Levis, to Levis’s tutelary figure John Keats, and to Murillo’s literal father. The whole sequence demonstrates what you sense throughout the book, that Murillo has mastered the tradition without being assimilated by it.

By the way, “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” is in Murillo’s actual most recent book, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, which I ordered before I even finished this one.

Bernadette Mayer, _Midwinter Day_

CAN SHE REALLY, as is said, have written this in a day? I can just barely imagine writing a 120-page poem on a day on which one had absolutely nothing else to do, but on a day on which one was minding two children, one in diapers, running to the post office, making the coffee, getting food on the table, and so on?

I have no idea how she did it, but somehow she did, creating a high-water mark for the art of making literature out of the dailiness of the day, 56 years after the grandparent of them all, Ulysses, and 41 years before a subsequent high-water mark, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport. (Let's throw in Knausgaard for good measure).

As with Joyce, Ellmann, and Knausgaard, memory provides an important dimension. Whatever is occurring in the moment occurs in the context of remembering, the here and now resonating with the there and then--a there and then that in Mayer's case intersects with a notable place and time in American poetry once you realize that the Ted, Alice, Clark, and Joe whose names keep popping up are surnamed Berrigan, Notley, Coolidge, and Brainard. The dimension of time turns routine into a universe.

I can't imagine anyone getting as far as Part Two and not falling in love with this book. 

Jana Prikryl, _No Matter_

 THIS IS SO unlike The After Party that I would not have guessed it was by the same writer. It’s not better, not worse, but definitely different.

The After Party was cosmopolitan, with poems set in many different places; apart from a couple or so poems set in Dublin, No Matter sticks closely to New York City. The After Party ranged widely through history, but the poems in No Matter more often describe someone or something the poet seemed to have seen that day. 

The After Party foregrounded erudition and technique, poems about reading Barthes, ekphrastic poems, an ambitious long closing poem. There is a lot of craft in No Matter What, if you look closely, but on first impression the poems often have the quick-take immediacy of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. 

Nor is there anything in The After Party quite like the tart elegy for Robert Silvers, “Bob”:

Listen, he would start

when driven once again

to issue a rebuke,

listen, I’d stiffen,

listen—

First book though it was, The After Party seemed so much the end of a long line of development, so matured a voice, that I was thinking of it as one of those debut volumes in which a poet seems to have already achieved their distinctive style, like Stevens’s Harmonium or Moore’s Observations. But she had another voice up her sleeve the whole time. What next? 

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (3)

 CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 were a long haul--98 pages--and wandered off into the weeds a bit, I thought.

Chapter 4 switches things up, as it is devoted Mahler's 6th Symphony. But since allegories (as we usually think of them) are pictorial or narrative, can music, neither pictorial nor narrative, be allegorical? Jameson spends a fair amount of space on this before actually getting to Mahler. The answer--if I followed the argument correctly--is that narratives occur in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, and that music also occurs in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, so there is "narrative" in music even when it is not strictly speaking programmatic. Fair enough. 

So the allegories within the narrative of Mahler's Sixth have to do with its looking back to the European art music tradition but also looking ahead to modernism ("the end of sonata form and of tonality"), with the story of the Mahlers' marriage, and with the coming of the crisis of the First World War. All of which sounds persuasive to me. All art aspires to the condition of allegory, I suppose.

Chapter 5 reprints an article Jameson published in 1986 and adds a detailed commentary. The article, which appeared in Social Text, argues that in many Third World texts the main character allegorically represents the situation of the nation, as a kind of Everyman; key examples are Lu Xun's Tale of Ah Q and Ousmane Sembène's Xala. 

We don't say "Third World" these days--it was a way of referring to those places on the earth that were neither the USA and its close allies (First World) nor the Soviet Union and its close allies (Second World), i.e., most of the globe.

The commentary responds to a variety of the critiques the article received over the next several years (there were quite a few), but for me the most interesting development was Jameson using the figure of "multidimensional chess" to describe how levels of allegory co-exist. In multi-dimensional chess, "a number of distinct chessboards coexist simultaneously with distinct configurations of forces on each, so that a move on any one of these boards has distinct but unforeseeable consequences for the configuration and relative power-relations on the others" (191). So, we might say, the Lacanian reading is its own game, and the Marxist reading is also its own game, but they also affect each other with "distinct but unforeseeable consequences."

That's what I thought the point was, at least. He goes on to talk quite a bit about professional soccer, the outbreak of World War I, and contemporary China's foreign relations. 

Looking for Funny 2: Patricia Lockwood, _No One Is Talking about This_

 GIVEN THAT I laughed at some point in almost every page of Priestdaddy, Lockwood's new novel (her first) seemed a likely candidate to be funny, but the second half took a very serious (and moving) turn. 

Could we call this autofiction? Lockwood has become a go-to panelist and lecturer on the topic of social media and internet culture, and the first person narrator of No One Is Talking about This likewise gets invited all over the world to talk about social media, thanks to her question "Can a dog be twins?" going viral. The first half of the book is in the whipcrack, quick-take style of Lockwood's essay on social media, "The Communal Mind" (London Review of Books, 21 Feb. 2019), and is often hilarious. The narrator's husband and parents feel very continuous with the husband and parents of Priestdaddy. In short, even though Priestdaddy is a memoir and this new one a novel, the novel feels like a sequel.

The autofiction question emerges more sharply in the second half, as the narrator's niece is born with Proteus Syndrome (which may be what Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man," had) and dies having lived just a bit longer than six months. Not many laughs here. Delight, joy, wonder, and gratitude all surface, as well as grief and sorrow, but you wouldn't call it funny...you might well call it extraordinarily moving and heartbreakingly real, though. 

And it turns out that Lockwood's own sister did have a daughter with Proteus Syndrome, so the portrait of a family in these circumstances is intimate, close to the bone. In that respect, it put me in mind of Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, another fiction based on a closely-observed. family tragedy.

No One Is Talking about This was not quite what I was expecting, then, but wound up exceeding my expectations. Another brilliant prose turn by Lockwood. I hope she hasn't abandoned poetry, though.

Christian Wiman, _Once in the West_

 HAVING ENJOYED WIMAN'S anthology Joy, I felt inspired to catch up on his own poetry. This is not his most recent collection, as he published one last year, but rather the successor to Every Riven Thing (see my post from August 12, 2014).

Once again we get dollops of Hopkins in the sound of the poems ("big-boned Joe Sloane shrivelcrippled / tight as tumbleweed") and in their sense (wonder streaked with anguish), but I suspect the crucial influence here is Dante. Once in the West strikes me as a miniature Divina Commedia.

Part One, "Sungone Noon," mainly recalls Wiman's childhood and youth in west Texas, but feels more infernal than Wordsworthian, heat-blasted, desperate, scoured of anything that feels like meaning or hope.

Part Two, "My Stop is Grand," is a little like Purgatory--mainly work and moving in seemingly endless circles, but with little explosions of grace punctuating the grayness, like the "grace of sparks" seen on the Chicago El train in the poem that lends its title to the section, mentioned again in the section's concluding "Poem for Edward Thomas."

So Part Three, "More Like the Stars," should be paradise, but paradisos are not easy to pull off my friends...not easy at all. The title certainly points towards Paradiso--"stelle," "stars," is the final word of all three parts of The Divine Comedy. But what we get as the conclusion to Wiman's small-scale Divine Comedy is an even smaller scale Divine Comedy, a three-part poem. It begins in a hospital (a good stand-in for hell, I think), proceeds through the faith-under-strain section that opens with the lines "What rest in faith / wrested / from grief," then concludes with Wiman at Shedd Aquarium with his family, which actually makes a convincing heaven.

I ordered the new collection, Survival Is a Style, and hope to get to it sooner than six years from now.

Julian Barnes, _The Only Story_

 STRUCTURALLY, A DEAD ringer for Barnes’s previous novel, The Sense of an Ending. The narrator in old age recalls decisions and actions of his youth that seemed sufficiently justified at the time, even righteous, but that look shockingly and shamefully different in the light of later experience and information.

Paul, 19, enters a mixed doubles tournament at the tennis club his parents belong to. He is randomly paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod, 29 years his senior. They fall in love. Paul’s parents are horrified, as are Susan’s three adult daughters and of course Mr. Macleod, who it turns out is alcoholic and abusive. With the world against them, they bet their lives on love and run off to London to live together.

And live happily ever after.

Ha!

No, in fact, they enter a doom spiral not long after moving to London. Things end badly. Very badly.

Barnes pulls off a remarkable trick with pronouns. In Part One, the falling-in-love part, Paul naturally refers to himself in the first person, “I” and “me.” In Part Two, set in London, he drifts into referring to himself in the second person,, “you,” as one does when trying to present one’s own perhaps questionable behavior as what any normal person might do, e.g., “It’s like when you lose that month’s rent money at poker,” or, to quote from the novel, “You don’t, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren’t really convinced.”

And then, in Part Three, the grim aftermath, Paul becomes “he”: “But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.” 

Yet this catastrophe remains the one time in Paul’s life that he was unmistakably in love. Does that redeem  his story? Is it better to have loved and gone down in a flaming doom spiral than never to have loved at all? The novel doesn’t answer that question, but it’s a good question. And this is another final novel from the best English novelist of his generation.

John Ferling, _Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800_

THIS HAD BEEN sitting on my shelf for few years (published 2004) before I decided to read it, along about May, mainly wondering whether the 2020 presidential election was truly the bitterest, most contested, most vicious in U. S. history, or just seemed that way. Having read this book, I'm thinking, yes, it may have been. But at least we were spared having the election thrown into the House of Representatives.

1800 was the fourth presidential election under the new (as of 1787) Constitution, and the first seriously contested one. Incumbent John Adams, of the Federalist Party, had had a bumpy first term, thanks to conflict with France (having its own bumpy days under the Directoire, then Napoleon after the 18th Brumaire). Thomas Jefferson, of the Republican Party (or Democrat-Republicans), wanted peace with France, an expanded electorate, protection of the Bill of Rights (the Adams administration had brought in the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts), and dismantling of the national financing created by Alexander Hamilton.

Both parties saw themselves as inheritors and defenders of the sacred principles of the Revolution, and thought the republic would be doomed if the other party won. So feelings were high, occasionally violent. Very like 2020.

On the other hand, both Adams and Jefferson were actual statesmen who had contributed significantly to the creation of the state, and both were capable of governing. No Trump-esque charlatans in this election.

Jefferson won, as you know, which could be seen as a victory for the progress of democracy, except that his edge in electoral votes was due to three-fifths of the enslaved populations in the southern states counting towards the size of their Congressional delegation. Adams was anti-slavery, at least.

As in 2020, there were stirrings among the defeated, looking for ways to flip the results--nothing came of them. There was nonetheless another dramatic episode. Due to the peculiarities of how the Electoral College worked in those days, Jefferson's main rival in the House election was his own running mate, Aaron Burr. Burr was more appealing than Jefferson to a lot of Federalist Congressmen, and he was advancing himself as a compromise candidate. Hamilton (who had a lot of clout with the Federalists) hated Burr even worse than he hated Jefferson, though, and used his influence against him. Burr wound up as vice-president, but one even more sidelined than usual.

Adams skipped Jefferson's inauguration, becoming the first of the three (so far) presidents who have chosen not to be present for their successor's inaugural. Adams's son John Quincy Adams, who absented himself from Andrew Jackson's inaugural, was the second, and DJT the third.

So...tumultuous, yes--bitter, violent, ugly--but 2020 may be the champ. Unless 1860 was...2020 has not led to a civil war. Yet.

Eliot Weinberger, _Angels and Saints_

 EXTRAORDINARILY FITTING THAT this strange and beautiful book has such strange and beautiful illustrations--the "grid poems" of Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780-856 CE). And thank you, New Directions, for including Mary Wellesley's note.

The angels and saints of Weinberger's new book seem worlds away from the dispatches from Trump-land he has been publishing in the London Review of Books in recent years, but they share a kind of deliberate dryness, a willingness to let things speak for themselves. 

For instance, this from the LRB of June 4, 2020:

On his first trip in many weeks, the president flies to Arizona to inspect a Honeywell plant manufacturing masks, which he tours not wearing a mask while loudspeakers on the factory floor blare "Live and Let Die" by Guns N' Roses.

And this from the new book:

Eskil

(Sweden, d. c. 1038)

East of the village of Tuna, he disrupted a blood sacrifice, urging them to repent, and they stoned him to death.

That's the Weinbergian note--perfect abstention from commentary, while the right words are dropped in so well-suited an arrangement that commentary would be superfluous. 

Now and then a high-frequency irony is just about audible (in the lives of Magdalena of the Cross, Philomena, and Thérèse of Lisieux, for instance), but by and large we are at some degree zero exactly equidistant from both G. K. Chesterton and Voltaire.

How does he do it? 

Cathleen Schine, _The Grammarians_

 IF YOU ARE looking for a brisk, deftly-executed contemporary novel of manners, serious and intelligent but not heavy, this is a good bet for you. Our book club liked it.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are identical twins, baby boomers, New Yorkers, Jewish (but not especially observant), and from the dawn of their interwoven consciousnesses devotees of language. As toddlers, they devise their own; as children, they spend hours with their father’s Unabridged Webster’s (second edition, N.B.). They both marry, they both have one daughter, and they both pursue careers centered on language. 

Daphne goes from being a copy editor at a Village Voice-like publication to writing a William Safire-like column pouncing on people for deviations from standard formal English. Laurel, at first an elementary school teacher, establishes a literary career with poems and stories based on found material, namely the correspondence of the unlettered, drawing on the power of demotic speech, the eloquence of the uneducated.

In short, Daphne is a prescriptivist, Laurel a descriptivist. For Daphne, the right use of language involves maintaining rules and standards. For Laurel, whatever we say or write is “right,” so long as it communicates, and all the old schoolroom rules about agreement, not splitting infinitives, and not ending a sentence with a preposition are just so much pointless policing. Estrangement ensues.

According to one review I saw, Schine’s inspiration was Esther Lederer (aka Ann Landers) and Pauline Phillips (aka “Dear Abby”), identical twins who wound up in the same line of work and famously did not get along.

As a novelist, Schine knows her craft. The point of view is more often Daphne’s in the first half of the novel, more often Laurel’s in the second half, but Schine keeps it mobile and interesting. She has a neat trick of fast-forwarding between chapters, so to speak, skipping over events an ordinary novel might narrate, e.g., if Daphne becomes pregnant in one chapter, in the next she will have a toddler. This creates a few “wait, what?” moments, but aids immensely in keeping the book moving.

And the last chapter, brilliantly, is from the point of view of the twins’ mother and is in the future tense. Can’t say more without giving too much away, but what a great choice on Schine’s part.

Christian Wiman, ed., _Joy: 100 Poems_

 DOES ANYONE OUT there remember Sister Corita Kent (1918-86)? Her posters, brightly-colored with handmade-looking shapes and inspirational quotations, were part of the landscape in the late 60s and early 70s if you were in any of the various milieus where religion cohabited with ideals of social justice. The underlying message was typically thoughtful and serious, but the design was usually bold and cheerful. If you do not remember Corita, you could search for her work right now, and as soon as you saw it you would say, “oh…that sort of thing.” 

Yes. Well, the cover of Christian Wiman’s anthology looks like a Corita poster (though actually the work of an artist named Mary Valencia). And it radiates the same vibe, we might say: cheerful and bold, but also serious and thoughtful, suitable for every enlightened home.

The anthology walks a fine line. Its orientation is religious, I would say, and vaguely Christian, but there are no “thank you Jesus” poems here (although gratitude appears frequently) and there is none of the spirit that animates the folks who stand by government buildings with posters of bloodied embryos. As you might expect if you have read Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, the joy in the anthology is religiously grounded but curiously astringent, streaked with pain and loss. 

But how many copies can you hope to sell of a poetry anthology titled Curiously Astringent Joy Streaked with Pain and Loss: 100 Poems? Not many, obviously. Better just call it Joy and commission a Corita-esque cover.

The poetry maintains high standards, as you might guess from knowing Wiman helmed Poetry magazine during one of its better periods. Mainly American, mainly from the last 40-50 years, not much that you would call experimental or avant-garde (does have a Gertrude Stein poem, though),  mainly well-known poets, but reasonably diverse within those parameters. Highly readable, deftly arranged, salted with well-chosen prose excerpts…an arrow headed for the bull’s-eye in the heart of any progressive, literate person of faith…are there such people still around? If you build it, will they come?

It’s actually a little difficult to imagine that the audience the anthology imagines is still around in the Year or Our Lord 2021. But maybe. 

Lindy West, _The Witches Are Coming_

 I THINK BACK to 1981, picking up Fran Lebowitz's Social Studies with acute anticipation, and liking it a lot but, truth too tell, not quite as much as I did Metropolitan Life. Yet was it a falling-off, really? It was just as incisive, just as whip-smart, just as funny, really every bit as good...but the thrill of one's discovery of that voice, that angle of vision, that particular flavor of neuro-tonic that is Fran Lebowitz...that was missing. 

Had I been able to wipe any memory of Metropolitan Life from my mind, Social Studies would have delivered the same kick, I suspect. But a book you pick up haphazardly and then find delightful is a different experience from picking up a book because you found its predecessor delightful. The successor has a tougher job in front of it.

This, I suspect, is what happened to me with The Witches Are Coming. I read Shrill without particular expectations, just because it sounded interesting. And it turned out to be incisive, whip-smart, funny, brilliant. And it's not that The Witches Are Coming falls short on any one of those points. But I came to it with such different (and high) expectations that it was likely not going to speak to me in the same way. So, like Social Studies, I enjoyed it, but it didn't carry that same jolt of discovery.

I would certainly read the next one, though. As I would read the next one by Fran Lebowitz. And I hope West does not take as long for her third book as Lebowitz is taking. 

Renée Gladman, _Event Factory_

THANK YOU, WILLIAM Harris, for it was your short piece on Gladman in n+1 that inspired me to give this a shot.

Event Factory is the first in a series of fictions about a world or society or place called Ravicka, and I would certainly read the next one. Gladman does not try to conjure up character or plot the way a conventional novelist does—that the epigraph is from Samuel Beckett should be sufficient notice—so the novel’s narrator does not come furnished with the usual demographic tags (e.g., name, gender, ethnicity), nor do they get drawn into a romance or a murder or a revolution. It is not even all that clear whether Ravicka is located on our planet or a different one. 

We do gather, though, that the narrator is a kind of linguist-anthropologist, whose main goal is to see and understand as much of Ravicka and its codes as they can within an allotted amount of time.  It thus has some of the feel of an overtly analytical and intelligent travel book—Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or Chatwin’s Songlines—but also provides the feeling that the character of the narrator is being revealed to us as we see what they notice, how they analyze, what strikes them as important.

Event Factory belongs to a genre that needs a name, in which the main action is the character figuring out what sort of place they are in, how it works, and how they can manage what they need to manage. Gladman gives a shout-out to Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren in the acknowledgements, and that could certainly serve in many respects as a classic example. David Ohle’s Motorman also comes to mind… some of Ursula LeGuin…. But the genre might also include novels in which some mysterious neurological roadblock is getting in the way of the narrator’s re-connecting to a once-familiar setting, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder or Edmund White’s Forgetting Elena. The figuring-out-what-kind-of-a-world-you have-been-dropped-into novel. If only I spoke German….

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, _The Mother House_

 I WAS VERY excited to see that Ní Chuilleanáin's collected poems were coming out this year, news that spurred me to get to this, her most recent collection, which came out in the USA last year.

Ní Chuilleanáin has never been the kind of poet given to including notes on her poems, so I resorted to Wikipedia to learn that Nano Nagle, the dedicatee of the volume's first poem, "was a pioneer of Catholic education in Ireland despite legal prohibitions. She founded the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as the Presentation Sisters, now a worldwide teaching order." The order was founded in Cork, where Ní Chuilleanáin grew up, so the "mother house" of the order is probably in Cork..but the "mother house" in the book's title poem seems to be in France, and the Presentation Sisters seem not to be active in France. Hmm.

So let's say Ní Chuilleanáin's long-standing interest in nuns continues and leave it at that for now.

As has also long been the case, she is sparing in her use of the first person singular, even when writing (apparently) of her grandchildren ("On the Move"). Her republican roots can sometimes be glimpsed ("Kilmainham," "For James Connolly"), and I am happy to report that she is still likely to round a poem off with an alarming but unexplained detail, as in "A Journey":

           I looked

again at the deep wound in my arm;

it was all cleaned and covered up,

so as not to frighten the children.

Well, someone is looking out for the sensibilities of the children, at least, though I as reader was badly rattled. Deep wound? Shouldn't we get a story about that hitherto-unmentioned wound? Does it have anything to do with roadblock noted a few lines earlier? Where did this journey start, and where does it end? 

The beauty of this and so many other Ní Chuilleanáin poems is that she isn't going to tell you, She is one of the great poets of the unsaid.

Looking for Funny 1: Kevin Wilson, _The Family Fang_

A LOT OF the fiction I have been reading lately tilts grim--Yuyin Li, Hari Kunzru, Bolaño's 2666 (which I am in the middle of)--so I decided I needed to explore the comical as well. Kevin Wilson's novel was a good place to start.

Caleb and Camille Fang are conceptual artists who make a point of including their children, Annie and Buster ("Child A" and "Child B," as they are identified in the documentation) in their events/performances, which are typically disruptive and designed to elicit strong reactions. Roughly every other chapter is a vignette of one or another of these events, which seem rich in possibility for lingering trauma (e.g., Buster, cross-dressed, is entered in a girls' beauty pageant).

In the alternating chapters, set in the novel's present, we see Annie and Buster as adults. They have had some conspicuous success (Buster's first book of stories was a critical success, Annie got noticed for a lead part in an indie film) that has gone sour (Buster's second book gets terrible reviews, Annie gets consumed by Hollywood machinery). As the novel opens, both Fang offspring are at a nadir. On a freelance journalism assignment in Nebraska (!), Buster gets horribly injured by a potato gun (!); Annie has a Britney/Miley/Lindsay style celebrity meltdown and becomes tabloid/internet gossip fodder. With the greatest reluctance, they decide it is time to go back home for a while.

Caleb and Camille seem delighted to have them back. Then they disappear.

Victims of foul play? Of an accident? Or is it another art event?

Answering those questions (which do get answered) not only involves Annie and Buster in a series of travels and encounters, but also requires them to reckon with what it meant and means to be a Fang. Caleb and Camille imposed the weirdest, most unsettling of childhoods on Annie and Buster, but also perhaps empowered them in a unique way. 

The Family Fang is brilliantly funny, but also edgy, and ultimately and somewhat surprisingly poignant without getting sentimental. 

Rumaan Alam, _Leave the World Behind_

REMINDED ME OF Don DeLillo’s The Silence, which also involves an unspecified catastrophe that knocks out the internet, a circumstance that complicates the catastrophe in that the characters have no idea about the catastrophe's nature or extent because they (like you and I) get all their information from the internet.

The Silence came out first, but DeLillo and Alam must have been writing about the same time. Interesting that they hit on so similar a situation.

From the first  half or so off Alam's novel, though, we have something quite different from DeLillo's story, more of a satire on American race relations. We have a white New York couple, one an academic and the other in some kind of high-stress business, and their two teenaged kids on the way to a vacation rental well out of the city. They get comfortable in the very comfortable  house, then the owners show up, their plans having been obstructed by whatever weirdness the onset of the catastrophe has set in motion. The owners are Black.

This struck me as a brilliant situation. There's the comic potential of who gets to make decisions about what, given that the owners of the house are, after all, its owners, but the renters, after all, have rented it for the week. There's the abrasion of class difference, since the owners are in a much higher tax bracket than  the renters. Then there's the racial difference--Katie, bar the door!

Alam displays keen satirical insight in getting all these plates spinning, and he keeps them spinning by keeping the point of view moving rapidly; whereas a lot of of novelists might have given us a chapter from this character's perspective, then a chapter from that of another, and so on, Alam often changes point-of-view a few times even on a single page. The rapid, caroming collisions of the renters' assumptions about the owners with the owners' assumptions about the renters makes for some great moments and some rising tension.

Around mid-point, though, the novel's catastrophe plot overtakes its social satire, and the tension (I felt) actually dissipates as the characters find themselves similarly non-plussed in their incomprehension of the catastrophe. Is the point that crises unite us? Maybe. We never really find out what the crisis is (though there are many ominous prolepses, such as that the neighbors will never return), so we hardly know whether we are justified in drawing a lesson from it or not. 

Alam is smart, has a sharp eye for contemporary detail, and possesses a true satirist's scalpel. It did seem, though, that the novel changed its trajectory about halfway through, in a way I found disappointing.

Karel Capek, _War with the Newts_, tr. Ewald Osers

WHAT WOULD HUMANS do if they encountered somewhere on earth a new species, comparable to themselves in cognitive ability and physical capabilities? Would we reach out, achieve common understanding, work towards our mutual benefit? Probably not, according to this 1936 satire by Czech writer Karel Capek (whose name is pronounced CHOP-ek, by the way, and I apologize for my inability to produce the diacritic required for spelling his last name). No, sadly, we would instead exploit them for spectacle and then enslave them.

A dark take on human capacity for evil? Perhaps just an indictment of European/American imperial projects? Grim as its premise is, Capek's novel nonetheless made me laugh on almost every page with its  takedowns of Hollywood, its satirical insights into the toxic politics of most European nations and the USA in the 1930s, and its still-resonant parodies of academic discourse, public relations puffery, and bureaucratic hypocrisy.

Unlike Gulliver's Travels, with its similarly sobering examination of human depravity, War with the Newts has what could almost count as a happy ending. But I won't spoil it for you.

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (2)

 CHAPTER 3: "PSYCHOLOGY: Emotional Infrastructures." To be honest, I am not sure I successfully followed the argument here, but I think here Jameson takes his best shot at explaining why you can toggle back and forth between Freudian reading and Marxist reading without necessarily becoming incoherent. (Incoherence remains a risk, though--do not attempt on heavy meds.) 

Near the end of the chapter, Jameson observes: "And this is also the moment to affirm the fundamental argument in play here, which has hitherto only sporadically surfaced: the identification between the system of emotions in question and the structure and dimensions of the collectivity in which individuals feel and identify them" (77).  That is (I think he is saying) the history of human emotions tracks with the history of class conflicts. He goes on to mention the differences between "the psychology of country people" and "those of the big city with its anonymity and labyrinthine space" and (in more detail) the transition from the emotions of the Greek city-state to those of Christianity ("the elaboration of a new kind of universal religion"), a transition which he later says resembles that of "the contemporary supersession of the national by globalization" (79). When the organization of our collectivities changes, our emotions change.

Hmm. Really? Maybe. I don't know.

Chapter 4, "Psychoanalytic: Hamlet with Lacan," is the reason I plunked down my one-nickel-shy-of-thirty-dollars for this book. Jameson on Hamlet--who could resist? I was not disappointed. If there is a secular equivalent of the sacred texts upon which patristic exegesis ruled that four distinct interpretations could be stacked, it is Hamlet.  "[W]e pause only to wonder what it is about this peculiar object that arouses so many different readings in the first place," as Jameson notes in his opening paragraph. He awards Lacan "a certain priority" in his journey through the landscape of Hamlet criticism (83), but folds in a lot else (e.g., Shmitt, Benjamin, Empson, Hazlitt, de Grazia) on his way to concluding that the crowning (anagogical) reading of the play aligns with Marxist understanding ("transition to modernity [capitalism]"), but also grants authority to the play's metatheatrical dimension, its figurings of desire, and its relations to Tudor-Stuart politics. 

Whether this will catch on among Shakespeare people, I can't say, but it was a fascinating read.

Natasha Trethewey, _Memorial Drive_

 THIS IS TRETHEWEY'S second book of prose, I think. I have not read the first, Beyond Katrina, but I did read one of the Virginia Quarterly Review essays that became part of it, and the tone I remember from that essay--clarity, precision, emotional restraint that had the effect of heightening the piece's emotion--carries over into this book, about another disaster,  a more personal one.

Trethewey's parents had an interracial marriage, undertaken in the heady days of the civil rights movement, but they divorced when she was just six. Gwen, Trethewey's mother, remarried, but her new husband had some serious issues--controlling, jealous, violent. In Trethewey's first year of college, Gwen initiated a separation; shortly afterward,  her estranged husband murdered her.

These same events constitute the background of much of Native Guard, Trethewey's Pulitzer-winning poetry collection from 2006. As a teacher, I found it hard not to think of how interesting it would be to teach them together, as a vivid instance of how the same experiences land differently when written as poetry and written as prose.

The book can certainly stand alone, though. As I mentioned earlier, my main impression is of restraint. The horror and pain of these events obviously need no heightening, and Trethewey's dry, bare bones account paradoxically makes that pain and horror all the starker.

Kazuo Ishiguro, _Klara and the Sun_

 REMINISCENT OF Never Let Me Go, one could say, since it addresses how our technological capabilities continue to leapfrog ahead of our ability to behave ethically. In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro imagines (1) how we might treat AI companions, once we have them, and (2) how the capability to genetically modify our children to give them some kind of advantage, once it is possible, would play out in our class structure. As in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro doesn't expect us to handle either innovation with much moral insight.

But the novel is perhaps even more reminiscent of Remains of the Day, with Klara rivaling Stevens in her devotion, patience, and unselfishness. Josie is several degrees more appreciative than Lord Darlington, though, which was a relief.

Does it make sense that an AI being would develop religious ideas? The solar-powered Klara does not call the sun her god, but she does petition it in prayer and assume it has intentions as well as powers. Even more strikingly, Klara proves capable of Christlike sacrifice, jeopardizing her own well-being in an effort to please the sun, so that it would use its power on Josie's behalf. And, in a somewhat fantastic twist, Klara's prayer seems answered.

It's a moving, poignant tale--did make me wonder whether Ishiguro knew the late Ray Bradbury's 1960s short story "I Sing the Body Electric," about a kind of Mary Poppins robot that likewise turned out to be capable of self-sacrifice.

Blake Bailey, _Philip Roth: The Life_ (1)

WHAT A MESS, eh? "I don't want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting," Roth apparently told Bailey; Bailey uses it as his epigraph. Even so, the reader gets a very palpable feeling that Roth saw this biography as a keystone in his posthumous reputation, not only giving Bailey full access to his papers and Boswellian amounts of conversation time, but also telling him whom to  interview and even what questions to ask. Roth knew Bailey had serious biographical chops (very evident in the Cheever bio). Roth also knew, perhaps, that Bailey would take a worldly, men-will-be-men position on Roth's treatment of his two wives and many, many mistresses, a point on which Roth likely knew he needed some rehabilitation, especially after Claire Bloom's memoir.

Except now it turns out that Blake Bailey, accused of rape and grooming his middle school students for later seduction, now has no credibility whatsoever as a witness for the defense, so far as predatory behavior or misogyny goes.

What's going to happen to this book? I imagine most research libraries have already bought it. Another publisher picked it up after Norton dropped it, but all those Pulitzer and National Book Award visions are flaming like the Hindenburg. Some folks will still read it, I expect. I'm reading it.

I haven't finished it--I'm about 250 pages in--but I would have to say it's quite good. I've already gotten the impression, though, that Bailey decided to just give Roth a pass on the question of marital fidelity, for instance. Roth could be generous, thoughtful, stimulating company, and emotionally supportive to his women friends, but he was not going to be faithful, and he was not going to give anything in his life higher priority than his work. As a husband, he barely gets a passing grade.

To my mind, though, that takes nothing away from the fiction. He did not do right by many of the women in his life, but he does tend to do right by his women characters--does right by them as fictional characters, that is, in that they're always interesting. 

Consider Maggie Martinson, his first wife, traces of whom turn up in Marge of Letting Go, Lucy in When She Was Good, the Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint, and Maureen in My Life as a Man, and who appears as herself in The Facts. He ended up loathing her, but her fictional avatars are always fascinating, surprising, resourceful, and quick off the mark, always as least as interesting as their Roth-resembling male counterparts. 

I think of Nathan Zuckerman's postscript to The Facts, pointing out that he, the character, is much more  interesting than Roth, the writer, is, and that Roth should stick to writing about Zuckerman. When Roth was writing of Roth, he succumbed to the temptation to present himself as a nice guy, according to Zuckerman--and Zuckerman (fictional though he is!) had a point. Roth's characters are always more interesting than the people they are based on, even the ones based on Roth himself. Roth gave Bailey an impossible assignment--Roth as presented by Roth, which is what the book turned into, was never going to be as interesting as a Roth character.

Paisley Rekdal (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _The Best American Poetry 2020_

 THIS YEAR'S SEVENTY-FIVE poems are diverse, woke, and resourceful while tending to stay close to home. In these respects, they are a lot like 2020.

"Home" in this case would be the sort of well-made, reasonably intricate, relatively accessible poem one often encounters in New Yorker or Parnassus or the Georgia-Kenyon-New England-Massachusetts-Sewanee Reviews. We do get a handful of more out-there things, Heather Christle, Ariana Reines, but we're mainly staying indoors with our memories of our parents and subtle observations on what is seen through our windows or glimpsed in our news feeds, rendered in Jamesian syntax.

Paisley Rekdal includes some great sequences this year: Rick Barot, John Murillo, Arthur Sze.

As so often, the arbitrariness of alphabetical order yields some arresting juxtapositions. Steven Leyva's "When I Feel a Whoop Comin' On" includes the lines, "There / at least a hip moment of locomotion  / where no one could charge / you with a lack of blackness." And then the very next poem is Cate Lycurgus's "Locomotion." Nice!

By my count, Matthew Zapruder has now had the final poem in Best American Poetry four times, which I think ties Kevin Young. Keep your eye on Rachel Zucker and Monica Youn, though, because things could shift.

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (1)

 THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS was a must-read when I was in graduate school, up there with Discipline and Punish, and I gather Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was a must-read about ten years later, when I was the home stretch of getting tenure. Now I am on the brink of retirement, without much idea of what grad students are finding exciting. Are they now making their way through this, highlighter in hand? Or has everyone given up and gone for an MBA?

Jameson reminds me of Augustine, partly because he is very smart, partly because he has read everything, but mainly because he won't cave. Back in 410 CE, when the Visigoths took Rome, the capital of Christendom, any number of doomsayers could have said and did say, "Well, I guess that's it. for Christianity." Not Augustine, who wrote City of God to prove that Christianity did not depend on anything so subject to destruction and decay as a man-built metropolis. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed and China turned into whatever it now is, any number of cynics could have said and did say that Marxism was exhausted as an intellectual force. Jameson didn't even blink. 

And in this book Jameson re-animates the four-fold method of interpretation that Augustine discussed in On Christian Doctrine and that became a staple in the Middle Ages: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical. (James credits Origen rather than Augustine, but in my medieval lit seminar back in the early eighties, Augustine was the man). 

The four methodologies produce four different readings (the Exodus story is a literal historical record, but also provides a lesson in the conduct of one's life, and furthermore foreshadows the ministry of the Christ as well as indicating God's great plan of salvation), but the beauty of the thing is that the four stack up without any sense of contradiction or conflict. They are non-identical, but all count as true.

In much the same way, Jameson is proposing (I think), that we can have our cultural artifact, its New Critical formal unpacking, its psychoanalytical reading, and its Marxist reading all stacking together and available for discussion, without feeling any particular anxiousness about the rightness of one approach implying the wrongness of another.

Rather than another attempt at squaring the circle by rigging up a Freud-Marx synthesis, Jameson's proposal invites us to let them amicably co-exist. Jameson cites Badiou on this point, saying "each one becomes its own Absolute, allowing us to affirm alternatively that everything is political or that everything is psychoanalytic."