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.