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.