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." 

Lucy Ellmann, _Ducks, Newburyport_ (2)

THE GENUINELY REMARKABLE thing about Ducks, Newburyport is not its narrator's amazingly extended sentence but that it is an epic-scale novel about mothers and daughters, the way Ulysses and Infinite Jest are epic-scale novels about fathers and sons (as indicated, I would note, by their shared interest in Hamlet, among other things).

Our narrator is a mother, of course, but she also frequently remembers her own mother (who has a lot in common with Mary Ellmann, the author's mother) and still mourns for her, often mentioning that she has been "broken" since her mother's death. The title of the novel alludes to an early memory of the narrator's mother.

The narrator is mindful and attentive about all four of her children, but is particularly focused on the oldest, Stacy, over the span of the novel.

Stacy, in her mid-teens, is unhappy, angry, and resentful in a number of classic mid-teen ways, even to the extent of running away--one of the narrative's main events. She is only out of the house overnight before she decides to return, and we do not get as much information about her as we do about Stephen Dedalus, Hal Incandenza, or Hamlet, but even so, the question of what is to become of Stacy looms tall.

So when a dramatic life-or-death dramatic confrontation does at last occur...one that, given the sorts of things that happen nowadays, does not even feel particularly contrived...and Stacy rises to the occasion and emphatically demonstrates that she is prepared for adulthood...well...it did my heart good.

Is there another epic of motherhood out there? I'm having a hard time thinking of one.

Lucy Ellmann, _Ducks, Newburyport_ (1)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to read this--not as long a while as Les Bienveillantes is taking me (eight years and counting) but over a year--and I would not recommend it to everyone, but it is outstanding, an unforgettable novel.

It is quite long, over a thousand pages if you count the index of abbreviations (which you should not skip, as it has a few good jokes), and formally experimental, being for the most part one long unscrolling sentence of what is passing through the consciousness of a middle-aged Ohio woman, mother of four with a home-based baking business. Interspersed among the woman's thoughts is a narrative tracking a mother mountain lion who has been separated from her cubs and is prowling around northern Ohio looking for them. In other words, not for everyone.

Even so--a landmark fiction, an immersion in the life of a character to rival Joyce or Woolf.

Unless I missed it, we never do learn the narrator's name, but we do get to know a great deal else about her. She grew up as the child of two academics in Evanston, Illinois, and New Haven, Connecticut, with a year in England as well. Two siblings, a brother and a sister, for whom she has warm feelings, but who live far away. Her oldest child, teenaged daughter Stacy, is from her first marriage, while the other three, Gillian, Ben, and Jake, are from her much happier second, to Leo, who teaches civil engineering (bridges, mainly) in Philadelphia, which seems like one crazee commute (The narrator always writes "crazee" for "crazy"). She has a graduate degree in history and taught Ohio history at a local community college for a while, but did not like it all that much. She has an intimate familiarity with Jane Austen's novels and Douglas Sirk's films. She has a habit of correcting ambiguous antecedents. She really dislikes Trump (the novel seems to be set in the summer of 2017, just before the total eclipse) and does her best not to say anything about this to Ronny, the MAGA-fan who delivered the feed for her chickens and is just a bit creepy.

And she is just wonderful. She often complains of a leaky memory, but she remembers a great deal, and the richness of the novel lies as much in the detail and presence of what she recalls as it does in her impressions of the passing moments while she bakes, makes deliveries, tends to the kids, deals with a flat tire, reflects on the news.

Steven Hyden, _Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal about the Meaning of Life_

 HYDEN’S FIRST BOOK...the only one of his I have read so far, but on the strength of this one I would definitely try the Radiohead book.

Great premise, looking at the feuds and rivalries that arise between performers (and those performers’ fan bases) and what they reveal about our libidinal investment in the music we love—which does in fact amount to “the meaning of life” for a lot of us. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I thought of the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Kenny Loggins, Toto, and the Doobie Brothers as The Enemy, the Forces of Blandness who had to be overcome so that Music that Mattered might prevail. I was a zealot, in short. I have calmed down and now enjoy Rumours once in a while (still, give me Sonic Youth or the Replacements any day).

Hyden looks at some of the more public band-vs.-band feuds, from those that were mainly P.R. (Oasis and Blur) to those that actually became deadly (Tupac and Biggie). Kanye and Taylor Swift, Pavement and Smashing Pumpkins, White Stripes and Black Keys, and several more are analyzed both for what they were actually about (often not much) and what they meant to partisans of the performers involved (often a great deal).

The Stones and the Beatles get a chapter, too, even though the bands themselves got along fine most of the time, because the who-is-better debate was such a staple among music obsessives.

Why no Smiths-vs.-the Cure, though? Insufficient USA appeal?

Hyden strikes a nice reconciliatory note in his final chapter. Do we really have to hate Toby Keith? No. Music is love. Mainly.

Yiyun Li, _Where Reasons End_

NOT A MEMOIR, but not exactly autofiction either. Where Reasons End is a book-length dialogue between Li and her 16-year-old son, who died of suicide. The dialogue is not recalled conversations from when her son was alive, however, but conversations that took place after his suicide..."took place" may be inaccurate, since they occurred only in Li's imagination. The book looks to the past in the ways a grief memoir does, but is set entirely after his death.

Gah. Hard book to describe. But the concept is readily grasped as one reads.

Not that one would call it an easy read--it's painful. I can't imagine what it took for Li to conjure up the voice--the mood, the memories, the sensibility--of the son she had lost this way. But she has done an absolutely convincing job. Nikolai is as real a 16-year-old as one will find in any novel: prickly, given to absolute statements, willing to debate finer-than-fine points, not much inclined to explain things, let alone apologize. He seems a lot like 16-year-olds I have known, including me circa 1970.

He's there, in the book, magically recreated in the very act of understanding that he is irretrievably gone.