Douglas Kearney, _Sho_

 I READ THIS just prior to reading Optic Subwoof, thinking it would help me to read Kearney's recent poetry before reading (and reviewing) his lectures on poetics. Help me it certainly did--in fact, I think I ended up reading Optic Subwoof through the lens of Sho.

The poem "Sho" acts as a kind of intersection for several of the collection's energies. It is a torchon--a form I had not previously heard of, but which seems to involve a cycling-through of end words, like a sestina, but in a more particular pattern, derived from lacemaking (Kearney credits Indigo Weller with creating the form). Kearney is ingenious with form--that's one energy. At the same time, "sho" is how the BAVE pronunciation of "sure" is often orthographically rendered; the poem quotes an example, "'Sho / gwine fix dis mess.'" "Sho" also homonymically summons "show," as in the business of performance, with its high forms like tragedy and its popular forms like the old chitlin circuit.

            Rig
full o' Deus. "Sho
gwine fix dis mess." Spit

In tragedy's good
eye! "This one's called...."Jig
ger gogglers then bow

housefully. They clap.
"...be misundeeeerstoooood!"
Hang notes high or deep,

make my tongue a bow--
what's the gift?! My good
song vox?

We are at the intersection of Blackness and performance,  but also at the intersection of American Blackness and violence: "Bloody / inkpot of Body, // I stay nib dipped, show / never run dry!" Reading the poem and then hearing/seeing him read it on YouTube is a good preparation for diving into Optic Subwoof.

Not every poem in Sho is the rapid fire tour de force that "Sho" is, but the whole volume continually surprises. It's often funny ("Eulogy for a Pair of Kicks"), but the humor can sit right next to anger ("Promissory Note"), or right next to family feeling ("Close"), or right next to spirituality ("Fire"). Kearney moves fast. It takes some readerly quickness to keep up with him, but he's worth it.

 

Douglas Kearney, _Optic Subwoof_

I REVIEWED THIS for a more legit blog a while ago, but I have a few further notes.

1. The Bagley Wright Lecture series seems to get some real heavy hitters. Ange Mlinko. Fred Moten. Srikanth Reddy. Timothy Donnelly. Rachel Zucker. Tyehimba Jess. Don Mee Choi. Do you have to be a Wave Books author to get an invitation? Maybe. But Wave Books has a great list.

2. The editors of the blog for which I reviewed the book did not want me to go into the topic of minstrelsy, and I see their point, but it's at least interesting that the topic comes up not only here but in the work of Tyehimba Jess and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. A lot of Kearney's book is about the aesthetics and protocols of the contemporary American poetry reading--a richly idiosyncratic species of performance. Since Kearney is Black, and since a great many poetry readings in the U.S. have close-to-all-white audiences, the topic of performing Blackness, of Blackness as spectacle, hence minstrelsy, is bound to come up, and Kearney has some chillingly insightful things to say about it. My editors were right that I am not well-positioned to address Kearney's analysis of the the topic, but I hope someone who is well-positioned does so.

3. I think it would be a great thing for Wave to publish everybody who participates in the series. A few have been published, but I would certainly like to get a look at the Mlinko, Reddy, and Donnelly lectures, and I would rather have the books than video clips. 

Stephen Marche, _The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future_

 STEPHEN MARCHE WROTE one of the most ingenious novels I have read in recent years, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (see post of July 2, 2008), a novel in the form of an anthology of the literature of an imaginary country. It was a normal-length book, but provided some of the satisfactions of an old-school multi-generation historical novel, without the months of immersion (the months of immersion can be pleasurable in their own way, I realize).

The Next Civil War is also a knuckleball, not-exactly-a-novel kind of novel. It has settings, episodes, and characters from what could have been a set-in-the-near-future fiction about the red state vs. blue state divide turning into armed conflict and secession. Integrated with the novelistic elements, though, are more journalistic sections summarizing the research Marche (a Canadian) did into the United States' growing self-division.

Given the preponderance of what-might-soon-happen novels to be about climate change or (in my youth) nuclear destruction, it was refreshing to read a book based on an entirely different variety of anxiety. The journalistic sections were skillfully presented: informative and well-focused.

How one finally feels about a what-might-soon-happen novel, though, depends not on its execution but on how credible one feels the prediction is. This prediction...I think not. The United States will certainly not break up into the four countries Marche presents in a map on p. 219, at least. The terrible events he imagines--the standoffs, assassinations, breakdowns of order--well, maybe. But our polity has great reserves of resilience, too. 

Things feel slightly more stable after the 2022 elections. The fever has not passed, I know, and it could be goaded back into a rage again. And I know there is always going to be a part of the population ready to kill to achieve a White Christian U.S.A. But I think the greater part of the country is more sane than that.

Jamil Jan Kochai, _The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories_

 I KEPT THINKING of Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties as I read this, for all sorts of admittedly superficial reasons. As in So's book, the narrative voice of most of these stories is echt Young American Male in vocabulary, sensibility, and preoccupations, but, again as with So's book, these young American males have parents whose lives were burned and bent by historical traumas that turned them into refugees in a country they do not much understand and never much wanted to be. The circumstances of So's Cambodian refugees in California do differ from those of Kochai's Afghani in California, certainly--they differ religiously, for one thing, and in the amount contact they have with family back in the old country, and in the role U.S. policy played in what happened back home. Nonetheless, it's easy to imagine any algorithm leading you to the one book soon leading you to the other.

One difference: Kochai sometimes veers towards magical realism. The basic frame for each story is realistic, but events occur that border on the supernatural from a post-Enlightenment perspective, although within the realm of the possible from a more traditional perspective. These events usually have to do with the dead. There's a bit of a spiritual tingle.

Another: Kochai likes to play with form a bit more than So did. For instance, we have a story here that adopts the format of video game instructions, another that is a take on the form of the job résumé. Surprisingly enough, even though the form of both stories is somewhat experimental, they were the most revealing and the most moving of the book. 

Kochai did not get the National Book Award, I see, but I hope just being nominated wins the book some of the attention it deserves. 

Fred D'Aguiar, _Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020_

FIVE YEARS AGO, just about to the day, I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. I had surgery the following April, and it was successful--no sign of recurrence so far, knock wood. 

In 2017-18 there was plenty to read about prostate cancer, but it was of the practical variety, How to Survive Prostate Cancer, and so on. Useful, obviously, but as a reading kind of person I was hoping for something like Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals or Anne Boyer's The Undying--i.e., something about the experience of having it written by a person who could really write.

I wanted this book, basically, and now here it is. 

D'Aguiar is a novelist and poet, "born in London to Guyanese parents," as it says in the jacket copy. He grew mainly with his grandparents in Guyana, came back to England a a young man, and has been resident in the USA for quite a while; he teaches creative writing at UCLA. I haven't read any of his books before this one, although I have seen occasional pieces by him in Conjunctions. 

It's not a practical guide sort of book--it does not explain what your Gleason score means, for instance, or how laparoscopic surgery is performed, or how to obtain an erection with a vacuum pump, or anything of that sort. 

It's excellent, though, on all the topics that the practical guides ignore. What is it like to have a potentially mortal illness that has no symptoms--to have a hostile familiar dwelling inside you that you know about only because a doctor has told you that you have it? What is it like having the operation that will deal this hostile familiar, an operation that will utterly change the circumstances of your life, but during which you will  be perfectly unconscious, after which you will  have no memories? How do you manage the three months before they check your PSA again, the three months during which you will not know whether the operation made a difference for not? 

D'Aguiar had the added fillip of going through all this during the COVID lockdown months. I did not have  to deal with that, praise the Lord. But reading this book was like reliving one of my life's strangest episodes. I never thought of myself as a "cancer survivor," but I did have cancer, and I am still here, so I guess I am one, and this book was what I needed to get me to shake hands with that identity.

Sasha Steensen, _Gatherest_

 FROM 2017--NOT her most recent (that would be Everything Awake, 2020), but the first of her books I have read, and I was impressed. Three long poems or sequences, with two based on elements ("Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made") on either end of "I Couldn't Stop Watching," a montage of short essays and heterogeneous documents.

"Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made" are about water and fire, respectively, but also seem to be about faith and spirituality, and about writing, and about family--Steensen's daughters are a presence in "Waters," her parents in "Aflame" (the fire that destroyed their home is the poem's occasion). 

"Waters" is subtitled "A Lenten Sequence." It was composed, one poem a day, during Lent of 2012. The subject matter is sometimes religious--

taking up

what no one

else wants

to carry

this is its own 

kind of worship

faith 

is the substance

of faith

the difference

between air

& water

--but by no means exclusively, as the poem also takes up events of the moment like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Adrienne Rich. The quoted poem (# 11 of the sequence) is reasonably typical of "Waters": pared down, well-balanced between the concrete and the abstract, seemingly surrounded by a deep quiet.

"Aflame, It Itself Made" was my favorite--an odd thing to say, it occurs to me, since a lot of the poem is terrifying. It carries an epigraph from Eliot's "Little Gidding"--"redeemed from fire by fire"--but it reminded me more of another poem written during the London Blitz, H.D.'s Trilogy. And sure enough, what should Steensen mention on p. 110 but "H.D.'s burnt tree," with its prophecy that fire not only destroys, but renews.

"I Couldn't Stop Watching" works as a link by not trying to be a link. Is it somehow Earth and Air, with its ruminations on syntax and prosody and its tributes to predecessors both famous (Catullus and Dante) and all but forgotten (Jones Very)? Or the workshop out of which the other two poems came? Not sure I could quite make the case for any such argument, but the piece does seem to belong where it is, a bricolage tugboat bobbing along between the two visionary flights, somehow responsible for getting them out in the wider spaces that is their proper haunt, well out, beyond.

Kevin Wilson, _Nothing to See Here_

 AFTER THIS AND The Family Fang, I'm ready to admit Kevin Wilson to the club of Novelists-Whose-Next-Novel-I-Will-Always-Plan-to-Read. 

Now, it's true that a novelist's being in that club does not mean I will get around to it right away. I still haven't read that Jennifer Egan novel about the scuba diver although...you know...I plan to. But Wilson now has a track record with me, having written two novels that were smart, funny, moving, and deft at such novelistic tricks as establishing point of view, switching among time frames, and nailing the narrator's voice.

Narrator Lilian's life is at loose ends when she is contacted by old friend Madison, who makes an attractive offer to look after her step kids. Then Wilson fills in some background. Lilian's family was hard up, Madison's wealthy. They were friends in college, both stars on the women's basketball team, but when Madison's illegal drug stash was discovered in their dorm room, Madison's rich dad paid off Lilian's hard-up mom so that Lilian would take the fall. (The payoff is to enable Lilian to continue her education elsewhere, but Lilian's mom ends up spending most of it on herself.) Madison has stayed in touch, sort of, but she is now married to an intensely ambitious politician, so there has been drift. Until now.

Oh, and the step kids? They spontaneously catch fire. Hence the offer.

Amazing premise, no? The development does not disappoint, with witty and insightful dramatization of the challenges of raising children, of navigating class differences, and of the hypocrisy acrobatics of politicians, who have to appear to be normal-family-types while pursuing a career that requires their utter absorption 25 hours a day. (Wilson renders Jasper, Madison's husband, as a character one loves to loathe.) The denouement is utterly satisfying in a Horton Hatches the Egg sort of way. 

And a new Wilson is just out, it appears. I'm on it.

Maggie Nelson, _On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint_

WE HAVE THE ingredients for a cautionary tale here. No sooner does Maggie Nelson have a breakout, crossover hit with The Argonauts than she gets wrong-footed by the zeitgeist. 

Seeing as she wrote an eloquent apologia for transgressive art that abrades our sensibilities (The Art of Cruelty), it seems ironic the her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with the "stay in your lane" moment, with artists like Sam Durant and Dana Schutz getting stiff blowback for abrading sensibilities, and without the consolation of culture-hero standing that Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe got. 

Seeing as she has also written frankly about owning and pursuing our erotic desires (in The Argonauts, for example), it again seems ironic that her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with #MeToo and a kind of renaissance for Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

At moments in On Freedom, she does not seem best pleased with these developments. In the first of the four essays, on art, one hears subtextual tongue-clucking when she writes, "Suggesting that certain pieces of art should be treated as acts of violence, or on par with the violent power of sovereignty, plays into the same arguments that have long been used to undermine art's legal protections." 

She brings in a similar guilt-by-resemblance charge in the second essay, on sex: "Even--or especially--when we are in pain, it's worth taking the time to make sure our pain is not partnering with our puritanism or punitiveness, as such partnering reinforces the flawed dichotomies of innocent/guilty, dangerous/non-dangerous, disposable/worthy, upon which the carceral state depends."

I don't know how many would find this persuasive. Probably a lot of people are quite reconciled to the carceral state's getting a hold of Harvey Weinstein.

The third essay, on drugs, has some interesting things to say about a good many literary expressions of drug experience. The fourth, on climate change...I don't know. Not her wheelhouse. 

I wonder if she will ever get back to doing things like Bluets and Jane? I hope so.

Emily Berry, _Stranger, Baby_

THE TITLE COULD be read as a response to the statement from Freud that stands as the book's epigraph--"The loss of a mother must be something very strange..."--but it is also a phrase in the poem "Everything Bad Is Permanent," where the phrase seems to be shorthand for a period when an infant is taken from its mother to be placed ion the care of another, before being left on its own:

Blank tearful retreat from mother
Mother, Baby. Stranger, Baby. Baby Alone.

A good deal of the book seems to be about losing a mother. It's not perfectly clear how recent or. how remote the loss was, whether it happened when the speaker was a child or an adult; the distinctive thing about the book is that the loss seems to be both recent and to have occurred in childhood. It's as though the adult can immediately gain access, in the here and now, to the feelings of the child, however many years have passed.

Stranger, Baby has a lot in common with Berry's first book, Dear Boy (see Loads of Learned Lumber for July 1, 2020): deadpan wit, formal versatility, a wide range of registers. The underground river of disquiet in it,  though, is wider and deeper.

Dash Shaw, _Discipline_

 A GRAPHIC NOVEL with virtually no dialogue--there are occasional excerpts from letters written out in longhand, but for the most part Discipline is unfussy line drawings arranged on the page without panels. Opening to a random page, you have the impression of opening someone's sketch book. 

Although the approach is spare, the story is nuanced.  Charles Cox is a young Quaker man in Indiana. When the American Civil War breaks out, he has to make the impossible choice between his faith's commitment to pacifism and its commitment to the abolition of slavery. Much to his family's dismay, he joins the  army and goes to war.

He doesn't have an easy war. His unit does set some slaves free, but he also sees friends die, gets wounded, and is taken prisoner. 

Back home, there are other kinds of problems. Charles's sister, Fanny, gets involved with a local man and becomes pregnant, but he will not marry her. The disgrace and humiliation she goes through are a painful domestic counterpoint to what Charles endures.

I'm not sure why this book is as moving as it is, but I think it has to do with the absence of dialogue. Take a general midwestern taciturnity and combine it with a faith that requires one speak only when the Lord moves one to speak, and a great deal is going to go unsaid. The pressure of the unsaid--even though the drawing too is understated, without expressionist exaggeration or unusual detail--is continually felt. Is the maintaining of such quiet in the face of such pain what the title refers to?

Dave Hickey, _Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy_

 I HAD HAD this on the shelf for years and had read in it desultorily, but it took the news of his death to get me to actually go through it from beginning to end...and he really is as good as people always said. 

And as distinctive. Hickey gets cited by fully-credentialed art historical sorts of people (e.g. Alexander Nehamas), even though he writes about subjects beyond the pale of traditional art history (customizing cars, Hank Williams, Perry Mason, Siegfried and Roy) in an aggressively personalized style much more reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson than of (say) Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, or Michael Fried, to say nothing of Roger Fry. Or Walter Pater. (Although it's fun to imagine Pater and Hickey having a dinner in Art Critic Heaven.)

He takes mass culture as seriously as high culture--maybe more seriously, as he sometimes plainly states (e.g., in noting "my own predisposition to regard popular recorded music as the dominant art form of this American century"). He does not seem to take writing art criticism seriously at all, hence the book's title: "It [criticism] is the written equivalent of air guitar--flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music."

Notwithstanding his penchant for popular culture and his unabashedly shoot-from-the-hip prose, Hickey was about as well-regarded a writer on art as anyone else in the U.S.A. So, I am wondering--why does literature not have anyone like this? Someone who, with literature as home base, could go this far afield, could leave so definitive a fingerprint on their prose, could as persuasively analyze the smudged groove of Watts, Wyman, & Richards, and then turn around and tell exactly what was going on in Pynchon, DeLillo, Ashbery, Notley, Robinson, etc.? The long-gone John Leonard had a bit of this quality, maybe...but it's hard to think of anyone extant who is even close.

Brit Bennett, _The Vanishing Half_

 I AM CATCHING up here--when school started, I fell woefully behind in my blogging. Fiona Hill (see post of a minute past) was our book club selection of August, and this novel that of September. I read Richard Thompson back in July. I have about five more to catch up on. But I will.

Anyway.

The main plot of The Vanished Half is about light-complexioned identical twin sisters, one of whom decides to pass and cuts ties with her family. Much later sisters' daughters, cousins who have never met, do meet; one of them figures out what is going on, leading to one final meeting of the original twins. A little soap-opera-ish, but plausible enough if the reader decides to just roll with it.

Bennett's novel reminded me much of Toni Morrison, thematically. Relationships between women, within and across generations, get more attention than relationships between women and men. We get to watch the dynamics of almost entirely Black communities; we get a sense of what differences darker or lighter shades of skin color can make. 

What the novel does not have, though, is that special Morrison density. Morrison would give you a paragraph from this or that character's perspective and the paragraph would be veined with that character's history, memory, regrets, and hopes, saturated with that character's discourse. Bennett just isn't there yet, maybe. 

Chapter 8 was the best episode, I thought. The twin who is passing (Stella) hazards all by striking up a friendship with the wife of the Black family that is integrating Stella's (supposedly) all-white neighborhood. Bennett gives us a convincing account of Stella's trying to manage her yearning to re-connect to her culture and her attraction to the new neighbor while also trying to stay friends with the neighborhood wives who want to freeze out the interloper. 

Fiona Hill, _There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century_

 IF YOU REMEMBER Fiona Hill, I expect it is because of her brave and revealing testimony in the first Trump impeachment trial. I imagine that testimony had a lot to do with why she got a book deal. 

Such being the case, I was expecting that testimony to be the book's big set piece: what led to her being called to testify, how it felt to be in the national headlines for a number of days, what it felt like to be in that room, and so on.

But...no. A few pages early in the book on picking out her outfit. That's about it.

What Hill really wants to write about, it turns out, is what she had to cope with as the daughter of a working class family in northern England: the petty snobbery of classmates, teachers who dismissed her abilities, the class warfare of the Thatcher era. The title is her father' advice to her, telling her to forget about trying to get ahead in County Durham. 

Hill pivots from the story of her own against the-odds rise to the top of her profession to the story of how the ever-shrinking opportunities for working class people in the USA made possible the election of Trump. The problem of self-perpetuating elites and the resentment they generate among the excluded and marginalized is the book's main (and continually underlined) point.

And it's a fair point. I would have liked maybe a chapter or two on that, though, and a lot more about testifying in an historic impeachment trial.

Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), _Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975_

THOMPSON HAD AN eventful youth and early manhood. He was a founding member of Fairport Convention, the seminal English folk-rock band, and he survived the terrible road accident in which the band's drummer and Thompson's girlfriend of the time died. After that disaster, the band, having accidentally arrived at their greatest lineup, went on to record their masterpiece, Liege and Lief, but nonetheless Thompson left the band to form another seminal folk-rock ensemble with his new wife, Linda. They both converted to Sufism. Then, when things went south, they collaborated on one of the greatest break-up albums of all time (rivaling Blood on the Tracks and Blue), great both by reason of its musicianship and its giving both sides.

In short, Thompson has the material for a page-turning musician's memoir. However, he elects to be not at all that forthcoming about any of it and tends to play down even the inherently dramatic moments. Maybe it's the Sufism? Or maybe just English reticence? Considering what Thompson had to work with, the book is a bit on the tea-with-the-vicar side.

Oh, well. Enjoyable nonetheless. I enjoyed reading Thompson on the recording of Fairport classic "A Sailor's Life," and there's a great Buck Owens anecdote.

Hilton Als, _Alice Neel, Uptown_

 AN ART BOOK, basically, with fifty-some full-page color reproductions of paintings by Alice Neel, who lived in Harlem in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s and mainly painted her neighbors there, a few of whom were famous (Harold Cruse, Alice Childress, Faith Ringgold) but were mostly not.

The paintings are remarkable, walking a line between European expressionism and social documentation, but I likely would not have tracked this down were it not for Als's contributions, a short introduction and texts for a dozen of the paintings. It was worth the tracking down. Als's criticism is at its most interesting when it is most autobiographical (see White Girls) and Als's introduction to this book suggests why:

I believe that one reason I began writing essays--a form without a form until you make it--was this: you didn't have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other stories. In short, the essay is not about the empirical "I" but about the collective--all the voices that made your "I." When I first saw Alice Neel's pictures, I. think I recognized a similar ethos of inclusion in her work.

Als's most fascinating criticism (I think) fascinates because he tells us his story in telling us about the art that engages him. That he himself grew up in Harlem and as a child might have walked by adults who had been the children in these paintings gives the book its spine.

Jack Underwood, _Happiness_

 FROM 2015--THIS is his first collection, I believe, with a second arriving last year. It feels like an old-school kind of poetry collection to me, in that it does not seem to be a "project," exactly, with a defined mission and some set of formal constraints. Instead, the book seems to say, "these are my best poems from the last n years, and I think they hang together, more or less."

I can see why project collections seem like a good idea; it's a way to catch the attention of a publisher, or a prize committee, or a hiring committee, I imagine. But nowadays there seem to be more project collections than non-project collections, so Underwood's book was a welcome change of pace, less "this book has a mission," more, "here are some interesting poems."

The book does have a kind of unity in Underwood's voice, though, with its dry-as-the-Gobi humor, its juggling of high culture and popular culture, its wit, its obliqueness, its quirky Syd Barrett style melodicism. I think I must have picked it up because I came across a poem of his I liked--in Granta, perhaps?--and taking that risk paid off, for I enjoyed the book greatly. (I went ahead and ordered the next collection).

I wonder what is going on in British poetry, which I admit to not having followed much for quite a while. Various poets I heard about (Robin Robertson, Carol Duffy, Christopher Reid, Mark Ford) I sampled and respected without feeling much enthusiasm. But I get the feeling some new current has entered the scene. Underwood's acknowledgement page tips the hat to Emily Berry, whom I also read this summer, and to Sam Riviere, whose novel Dead Souls and I have read about two-thirds of. Berry and Riviere's books  were both excellent as well. Something's happening.

Pat Rogers, _The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street_ (1 of 2)

IS ALEXANDER POPE one of the great English poets? Eighteenth century readers were willing to see him as such, by and large, and. it's hard to think of anyone else between Milton and Blake who might qualify, apart from Dryden. But I rarely come across readers who like Pope's work as much as I do. People nowadays rarely agree with Matthew Arnold about anything, but he sums up a widely-shared view on Pope: "Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose."

I can see what's not to like about him. The philosophizing of Essay on Man wobbles between the inane and the vicious, and he devoted astonishing amounts of of his gifts to attacking his enemies; it's hard to read either version of The Dunciad without being on the one hand amazed by his wit, erudition, and verbal command, and on the other dumbfounded by his willingness to expend his powers on such unworthy targets.

It's his elegance that wins me over, I guess. He's a tightrope walker, doing something that does not seem to have much intrinsic importance, that does not produce much or take us anywhere,  but doing it so gracefully, so seemingly effortlessly, so dazzlingly that I can only gawp at the display of skill.

I not only like to read Pope, I like to read about Pope, but I must confess I never made it through Maynard Mack's magisterial but airless biography. Rogers's book, though, I gulped down. Rogers is looking at one very specific dimension of Pope's biography, a long-running feud with the opportunistic, somewhat shady publisher Edmund Curll. At 450 pages including notes, The Poet and the Publisher may seem unduly exhaustive, but it's crisply written, entertaining, and illuminating.

A "bookseller" in 18th century terms normally had a shop where books were sold, as we might guess, but was also what we would call a "publisher," producing their own line of books. This was in some ways a more wide-open business than it is now. Bookseller-publishers had to deal with state censorship (vigilant about religion, politics, and sexual morality), but copyright was a good deal looser then (the first Act of Parliament trying to define copyright was passed in 1710). When Pope was just beginning to make his name, Curll obtained, somehow, some manuscript poems by Pope and printed them without permission or payment--and the feud was off and running. Pope retaliated by having an emetic slipped into Curll's cup of sack and writing an account of the explosive results. Curll then got a hold of some of Pope's private correspondence and published it. Pope fired back in The Dunciad. Curll fired back in attacks of his own of Pope's various vulnerabilities (Pope was short, hunchbacked, Catholic, and had friends who were suspected of wanting to put the Stuarts back on the throne). 

The masterstroke was that Pope and some confederates set Curll up to publish a large batch of Pope's correspondence. Getting these letters sounds like a windfall and a major coup for Curll, but his jumping at the opportunity to publish them enabled Pope to publish the correspondence himself, in a corrected version. Publishing your own letters would have been considered bad form at the time--but in the circumstances Pope could present himself as simply putting things right after Curll's unseemly appropriation. 

(to be continued)

Christian Wiman, _Survival Is a Style_

WITH WIMAN KNOWN as a poet who is also a person of faith, this new collection's opening with the lines--

Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form.

--seems like an announcement of sorts. The book's longest poem, "The Parable of Perfect Silence," doubles down with the opening line, "Today I woke and believed in nothing." Wiman's faith was never of the blessed assurance kind--the manifestations of faith in his writing tended to the edgy, astringent, and Kierkegaardian. But this seems like a new note, and I did wonder what was up.

As an accomplished poet whose work is often shaped by his Christianity, Wiman gets shelved next to T. S. Eliot in my mental library, so I pulled up a bit at "To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe" precisely because it seemed like a critique of Eliot:

To eat the awful while you starve your awe,
to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience's prick and leak,
a character pinched. to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom,
all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay.

Not an entirely fair critique, I would say, if it is about Eliot. Yes, there is a miserabilist streak in Eliot, likewise a deflationary one. He can seem joyless, and he does sometimes relish the idea of hell and find his own wounds fascinating. Okay. But this salvo seems reductive. Would a poem like Wiman's "Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party" even exist without the women who came and went talking of Michelangelo, or Hakagawa bowing among the Titians, or the pizzicato of tensed nerves in "A Game of Chess"?

Maybe Wiman is just tired of being shelved next to Eliot in readers' mental libraries and wants to move out from the shadow of a poetic father. "Something of the Sky" may be about saying goodbye to a kind of romanticized father figure, and "The Parable of Perfect Silence," the book's anchor, is a meditation-elegy on Wiman's own father. Wiman is no longer young (see "Fifty") and has had to think hard about death--that he is still alive probably surprised some of his doctors--but however old a man is, he is still a son. 

I should have said more about the poems, I think, looking back over this. If you like Wiman's poetry, you'll like the book. A little more acerbic, a little funnier at times, but he still sounds like himself. 

Samuel Daniel, _The Civil Wars_, ed. Michel

An epic poem about what we got used to calling the Wars of the Roses, composed mainly in the 1590s--about 900 ottava rima stanzas in eight (of a projected twelve) books. It wouldn't make most people's summer reading list, but I have had a vague hankering to read this for years. Reading Caleb Crain's Overthrow, in which one of the characters is working on a dissertation on the poem, did the trick for me. This is the summer I read The Civil Wars. 

And it is great. I am baffled why it is not better known, more widely read; not only is it not in print (aside from "on demand" services), but it does not even have a Wikipedia entry. I mean...even City of Dreadful Night has a Wikipedia entry.

It covers many of the same figures and events as Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies, from the deposition of Richard II to Edward the IV's surprise marriage to Elizabeth Woodville (since Daniel's poem is unfinished, we don't get the battle of Tewksbury, the death of Henry VI, or anything at all about the Duke of Gloucester/Richard III). A great deal of the scholarship on Daniel addresses Shakespeare's debt to the early books of Daniel's poem, especially in Richard II and both parts of Henry IV; some of the scholarship argues that the later books of Daniel's poem were influenced by Shakespeare's early plays about Henry VI.

You know what, though? It's a great poem even if you don't get into the weeds of who influenced whom. For one thing, the narrative line could be the archetype for Game of Thrones--a few closely-related families scheming and lying and maneuvering, betraying and making war on each other to seize power.

But beyond that, Daniel has a number of (it seems to me) astute observations on the politics of monarchy. Is having a legitimate but incapable king better or worse than having an illegitimate but capable one? Might one be a good, even saintly man but a terrible king precisely by virtue of one's goodness and saintliness?

Or try this, stanza 31 of the eighth book, the last Daniel completed (the subject of the verb "beholds" is the beleaguered Henry VI):

   Beholds there, what a poore distresséd thing
A King without a people was: and whence
The glory of that Mightinesse doth spring,
That over-spreds (with such a reverence)
This under-world: whence comes this furnishing
And all this splendor of Magnificence:
He sees, what chayre so-ever Monarch sate
Upon, on Earth, the People was the state.

Interesting, no? Not exactly a full-blown statement that the government's power derives from the consent of the governed, but a step in that direction. I need to look around in the more recent Daniel scholarship a bit, because I think Crain's fictional grad student was on to something.

Jennifer Moxley, _The Open Secret_

 READING MOXLEY'S NEW book of essays brought to mind that I was a couple of collections behind on her--a mistake, given that she is one of my favorite poets, but easily fixed, no?

Handsomely designed (by Quemadura, which I think is Jeff Clark), The Open Secret (2014) works mainly with the somewhat relaxed but basically iambic pentameter blank verse line that Moxley has been using for quite a while now. The rhythm of her line and her willingness to use sophisticated syntax (she puts me in mind of James Merrill in that regard) combine to give her work a traditional cast--without, however, it ever sounding like a fetishistic or finicky re-production. It stays firmly contemporary in its concerns.

Highlights for me in The Open Secret were two longer poems, "Coastal" and "Evacuations." 

"Coastal" is a letter to a friend, painter Monique Van Genderen, that rolls out with the same sense of intimate-communication-meets-major-artistic-statement that we hear in the poems Wordsworth and Coleridge addressed to each other or in Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Moxley touches on 9/11 in one passage, in another on how hard it is to find a patty melt in Maine. She can be hilariously dead serious:

How would you like the politics in your poetry?
How about in your painting? Romantic and sad
or smart and structural? Whatever your answer
you will leave here thinking you've done
a little something for the good of mankind.
BUT IN THIS CASE YOU'D BE WRONG!

"Evacuations" somehow reminded me of Coleridge, too, the Coleridge of "Frost at Midnight" or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," where he seems to be just following a thought wherever it goes, but in more of a butterfly line than a beeline. The butterfly in this case hovers around a lot of serious questions for contemporary writing--the nature of the present, of resistance, of naming--but here again irony, a sense of the ridiculous, and matter-of-fact lucidity leaven the poem and keep it from sinking into ponderousness.

Moxley is one of America's best living poets, for my money.

 

Jennifer Moxley, _For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds_

 I HAVE NOT read There Are Things We Live Among, but I have a feeling that book is the closest analogue to this one in Moxley's corpus.  Each chapter in For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds looks closely at a (usually famous) poem (or other literary text) about a bird, stirring in some of Moxley's own experiences with or observations of birds and a few reflections on her own poetry. Hardy's thrush, Tennyson's swan, Whitman's mocking-bird...but with some surprises, like Félicité's parrot in Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, Creeley's nightingale rather than Keats's, a bird-man out of one of Max Ernst's collages, and an opera or two.

The book may be too literary for people who like to read about birds and too avian-centric to make much dent as literary criticism, but I read it just because I like Jennifer Moxley's writing, so I was quite happy with it.

As apparent also in her memoir The Middle Room, poet Moxley writes great prose. The sensibility and landscape are contemporary, roughly, but the grace and poise in the prose hearken back to a pre-Didion, pre-Hemingway pace and amplitude--like Pater (but not as perfumed) or Ruskin (but lighter on its feet) or Newman. Moxley has, like the rest of us, read her Adorno et al., but she steers well away from anything that sounds like jargon. Her prose breathes a more oxygenated atmosphere than we usually get in lit crit, and I am grateful.

Roberto Bolaño, _2666_, trans. Natasha Wimmer

 THIS IS THE fifth Bolaño novel I have read, and the first I would hesitate to recommend. I started it two years ago and just finished it, mainly because Part 4 was a labor for me. 

Four of the five parts of 2666 are swift reads embodying Bolaño's characteristic virtues. 

In "The Part about the Critics," we meet three scholar-devotees (one French, one Italian, one Spanish) of the legendary and reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. The three of them perform a tangled but comical erotic minuet around a fourth scholar-devotee, an American woman, before showing up at a conference in Santa Teresa, Mexico, where, it is rumored, Archimboldi himself may appear.

In "The Part about Amalfitano," we meet one of the organizers of the conference, an Italian academic who has landed in Santa Teresa. His chief concern at the moment, though, is his teenaged daughter Rosa, who is hanging out with dubious new acquaintances.

The the third section, "The Part about Fate," is not about fate in the abstract sense, but about Oscar Fate, an American journalist. He has been sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, in the course of which assignment he accidentally stumbles across some of the town's organized crime underworld and helps get Rosa Amalfitano disentangled from it.

In the fifth section, "The Part about Archimboldi," we get the story of the legendary and reclusive German novelist to whom the critics of the first section have devoted their careers, a veteran of the Eastern Front who has detached himself from his past and from society in general to devote himself to his writing. Near the end of the section--that is, near the end of the book--we learn why he has agreed to travel to Santa Teresa.

Throughout these sections, we get the usual pleasures of the Bolañesque: deft portraiture of specialized sub-cultures (the depiction of the academics in Part 1 rivals those of the young poets' coterie in Savage Detectives and the Catholic reactionaries in By Night in Chile); skillful, knowing deployment of noir conventions (esp. in Part 3); wizardry in folding backstories into the main story (esp. in Part 5).

My problem is basically with Part 4, "The Part about the Crimes." Santa Teresa is largely based on Juarez during the years when scores of young women were being murdered. Part 4--all 280 pages of it--is about those murders. Roughly every other page, the novel describes the  finding of another dead young woman, usually with explicit detail. I don't want to try counting them, but there must be at least a hundred such passages. The efforts of journalists, politicians, police, and outside "experts" to solve the murders get some attention, Part 4 is mainly a catalog of violation, mutilation, and murder. It's a gallery of horrors. 

How does all this fit together, if it does? I wonder how finished it really is--it was published posthumously, written while Bolaño knew he was dying. Perhaps something about a core of misogyny in authoritarianism was supposed to hold the book together? But Part 4 was a long trek through the desert that I'm not sure was worth the effort.

Justin Phillip Reed, _The Malevolent Volume_

 THIS IS REED'S second collection. His first, Indecency, which won the 2018 National Book Award  for poetry, but I have not read it... to tell the truth, I'm not completely sure how I acquired this one. My copy came with a shipping slip bearing the handwritten message "Thank you for your support!" Is this just an acknowledgement from a small independent press (Coffee House) that appreciates any sale or did I make a donation to something for which this was a thank-you gift? I'm at a loss.

I do plan to look around for Indecency, though, since The Malevolent Volume is a good book. Reed is queer and Black, and the poems engage those dimensions of his identity with a white-hot intensity. A few pages are printed with white letters on black ground, and I was wondering whether those poems are more particularly connected to the theme of blackness. I don't know, though--some of the black-letters-on-white-ground poems definitely connect to the theme of blackness as well. Queerness themes show up often--"What's Left Behind after a Hawk Has Seized a Smaller Bird Midair," "The Lorelei," "The Queen"-- and in some cases the Blackness and Queerness themes memorably braid: "The Whiteness of Achilles," "Minotaur," "In a Daydream of Being the Big House Missus."

What really makes me want to find Indecency, though, is not Reed's engagement with dimensions of identity, fierce though that is, but that he is language-drunk, like Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane. Samples chosen nearly at random from several poems:

Morning dusted blush across the yawn of a visible mile

through which a prison break of ravens cropped

   ("When What They Called Us Was Our Name")

 

I toed over a storm-blown bit of limb or a jay's broken corpse

the bluebottles had yet to bejewel and swamp with gentles.

   ("Ruthless")

                              Pinky finger

and a clutch, a fist of gloves, shoulder-waist

isosceles like a Dutch chocolate slice [...]

   ("The Hang-Up")

There's something wonderful about young poet taking this much delight in juggling phonemes. Reminds me of Paul Muldoon in his twenties.

Forough Farrokhzad, _Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season_, trans. Elizabeth T. Gray, jr.

 FOROUGH FARROKHZAD (1934-1967) is roughly contemporary with Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974), and like Plath and Sexton she is famous for pushing the envelope of the poetic tradition she inherited to make it better accommodate a candor about female experience that had not previously been visible in the tradition. As with Plath and Sexton, that gunpowder smell of transgression creates much of a reader's first impression, but if you stick around and keep reading you will start to hear the grain of a unique voice.

As I read, I found myself thinking most of all of Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva, Plath, Sexton, and Farrokhzad have a kind of situation in common, composed of their candor, their boldness in giving the tradition something new to talk about, their flipping of the tables to turn abjection into exaltation, and the absence of anything that sounds like acquiescence. It's Tsvetaeva who seems like Farrokhzad's real kindred spirit, though, the one having least truck with how her culture wanted women to present themselves.

This volume's translator, Elizabeth Gray, mentions being less interested in the earlier work than in the later, and on the evidence here included, it's hard to disagree.  The poems from the first three books have a lot of attitude but mainly recycled imagery; those from Another Birth, the last volume to appear in Farrokhzad's lifetime, and especially those from the posthumous collection also titled Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season are fresher, stranger, more audacious, closer to the bone.

I need to reread Solmaz Sharif's poem on not translating Farrokhzad. It's the right call, I'd say, in that Sharif is not daemonic in quite the way Farrokhzad is, but I'm not sure that's why Sharif declined the gambit. Maybe she declined it precisely because it seemed like a gambit?

Solmaz Sharif, _Customs_

SHARIF'S SECOND COLLECTION is tougher, sharper, and generally more impressive than her already impressive first collection, Look. She stands in serious jeopardy of winning a big prize, I suspect, a prospect that might not even please her that much, given the disillusioned view of the poetry world on offer in "Patronage":

Poets convinced they are ringmaster

when it is with big brooms and bins, in fact,

they enter to clear the elephant scat.

The gap between the prestige attached to poetry and its lack of power to accomplish anything in particular--the irony that one can win lucrative prizes for doing it well even though it "makes nothing happen"--is just one of the abysses the book stares into it. There is also the gap between Sharif's having grown up in the United States and gone on to live and work here while being routinely perceived as a foreign presence. But when she visits her mother's hometown in Iran, she is not "of" that place either: "A without which / I have learned to be." "Without Which" is the name of one of the two long poems that anchor the book, and it formally enacts the sense of incompleteness through spatial gaps where sections of the poem seem to have gone missing. 

Sharif can be satirically funny about this sense of incompleteness, as in "Self Care," a list of all the commodities one can buy to remedy that feeling of lack: 

Have you tried

rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz

in a steel bottle

of glacial water? Tincture

drawn from the stamens

of daylilies grown

on the western sides

of two-story homes?

Pancreas of toad?

Deodorant paste?

Have you removed

your metal fillings?

The lack may be the work of patriarchy, as suggested by "The Master's House," or estrangement from might have been one's sources, as suggested in Sharif's poem on not translating Forough Farrokhzad ("Into English"), or the general public's obtuseness about poetry ("He, Too"). It resists naming. It isn't going anywhere.

Yet the cloud lifts towards the end of the book's second long poem, "An Otherwise." In defiance of Lear's declaration that "nothing will come of nothing," does Sharif find that absence can be constructive? Or maybe it was as simple as deciding to keep her fillings:

I knew not the poem, only the weather.

I knew not the listening, only this landscape, its one clear channel.

The metal in my teeth caught its frequency.

The iron shavings of my blood pulled towards this otherwise.

Rebecca Giggs, _Fathoms: The World in the Whale_

I'M STILL DRAWING on the momentum I picked up from Sheldrake's amazing Entangled Life and so picked up this prize-winning debut from Australian writer Rebecca Giggs. Fathoms abounds in astonishing information about what whales, not least dead ones, contribute to the eco-system of the oceans (especially the deepest parts of it), about their vocalizations, about how humans have hunted and consumed them (as fuel, as food), about how humans have become fascinated by them and decided to try to protect them, about how the trash we dump in the ocean may be doing whales even more harm than our hunting of them did.

Giggs's style is energetic. "A whale warrants pause--be it for amazement or for mourning" is a sentence that arrested me in the early going (p. 17), and then there was the carnival of imagery Giggs gives us in describing marine life in the deepest of depths : "It [a dead whale sinking to ocean's bottom] drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out" (19). By the middle of the book, I found myself wishing she would occasionally dial the lyricism back a notch; I like rich prose, but the cholesterol count was getting high at times. I'd certainly be interested in what she does next, nonetheless.

Speaking of recent lyrical expositions on whales, I wonder if Giggs knows Bathsheba Demuth? Demuth's "On Mistaking Whales" in Granta 157 seems to be coming from a perspective not unlike that of Giggs.

Renee Gladman, _The Ravickians_

 THE NARRATOR OF the previous novel in Gladman's series, Event Factory, is a student of Ravickian language and culture making her/their first visit to Ravicka, anxious to impress, to avoid any faux pas, to convey somehow her/their genuine love and engagement with Ravicka. The visit does not go altogether well, though. She/they never finds exactly the right note, although many try to be helpful, like the poet Zàoter Limici. Just as the narrator is about to leave, she finds a copy of the most Ravickian of Ravickian novels, Luswage Amini's Matlatli Doc, and even accidentally passes by Amini in the street, but doesn't say a word. The connection does not  happen, and the narrator goes home.

"The Great Ravickian Novelist," the first section of the series' second volume, The Ravickians, is narrated by Amini herself. We immediately notice a bristling isolation, a denial that the essentially Ravickian is knowable in any but its own terms. "If, for example, you are reading these lines in French or German, Basharac or English, these are not the lines you are reading. Rather, these are not the lines I wrote." Only in Ravickian can one know the Ravickian.

At the same time, something is amiss in Ravicka. The narrator of Event Factory had a vague sense of this throughout that novel, and she/they seems to have been right in her intuitions, for Amini and her friends are anxious about the future. Amini is looking forward to a lecture later in the evening by Zàoter Limici, who may have some insights into the problem. His lecture is the novel's second part ("Please Welcome Zàoter Limici"), and it seems to be an esoteric performance, proceeding mainly by quotation and allusion, but it also may be about opening up, letting things in, as if Ravicka has been too isolated. "I have gone on too long, my brothers," he apologizes. "And have brought the outside in with me. Your faces confirm it."

The third and final section, "Grand Horizontals," is a freewheeling, somewhat tipsy post-lecture conversation among who knows  how many people, likely including not only Amini and Limici but also Ana Patova, Amini's long-lost love. There is a lot of talk of bridges--might there be some possibility of exchange or communication between the Ravickian and non-Ravickian after all? Would an influx of otherness be exactly what will restore Ravicka to health?

The next installment is titled Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, so I feel there is reason for hope.

Kim Hyesoon, _Autobiography of Death_, trans. Don Mee Choi

THE COVER OF DMZ Colony mentions that Choi is the translator of Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, which reminded me that I had acquired this at some point and not gotten around to reading it...so it seemed like an opportune moment.

The English translation (from New Directions) includes an interview of Kim by Choi, in which we learn of a traditional Korean belief that after death, the soul circulates for 49 days before it is reincarnated. The 49 poems of the main part of the book correspond to these 49 days, so we might read them as the soul's circulation in this liminal zone among perceptions, memories, and anticipations. So we have something a bit like the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which provides the epigraph of one of the poems) or the second chapter of Han Kang's novel Human Acts, in which we get the narration of Jeong-Dae, a young man shot by the government's troops at the Gwangju Uprising (which is part of the background of "Autopsy (Day 24)").

That may make the book sound a bit more domesticated than it is, though. The explanation about the 49 days draws a kind of faint outline around the book's turbulence, we might say, but does not resolve or quell that turbulence. Autobiography of Death is a wild ride through a phantasmagoria with continually  metamorphosing characters. Is the "you" frequently addressed in the book the soul, or death, or something else, something restlessly mobile? I was never entirely sure.

"Name (Day 42)" put me in mind of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, to give you an idea how trippy the book gets. I would cite "Mommy of Death (Day 26)," "Hiccups (Day 31)," "Lord No (Day 36)," and "Don't (Day 49)" as providing similarly harrowing pleasures.

The book includes a long (16 pages) poem not part of the main sequence proper--"Face of Rhythm"--that seems to track a long, difficult, elusive illness. Placed in the same book as "Autobiography of Death," it's as if the anxiety of being alive is looking through a window at the anxiety of being dead.

Oh, and speaking of Han's Human Acts: Choi mentions in a note at the end of the book that Kim Hyesoon worked as an editor during the dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, in which post she dealt with a play that was entirely redacted by the censor and with being slapped in the face seven times by a government official for withholding information about an author. Exactly these affronts happen to Kim Eun-sook in the third chapter of Han's novel. Kim Hyesoon must be a model for Kim Eun-sook, to some extent, which makes me wonder, was Kim Hyesoon actually present at Gwangju, as Han's Kim Eun-sook was? Probably not, as Choi likely would have mentioned that, but I did wonder.

Sianne Ngai, _Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting_

 AT SOME POINT last summer, I had seen Ngai's work cited so often that I decided I had better read some of it, and the cover image of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo) awkwardly straddling a barre in a dance studio was enough to persuade me this was the one to read.

Aesthetics has been a bit neglected as a philosophical domain in recent decades, I would say. Aesthetics as a discipline developed by focusing on the beautiful, the sublime, the great, the important, on good vs. bad taste, etc., and so was terribly exposed to arguments (by Pierre Bourdieu, for example) that it was just a cover for class privilege, a camouflage for power, a ducking of responsibilities. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just might serve as an example of aesthetics, as a discipline, being a bit on the defensive.

But Ngai gives aesthetics a whole new energy by taking up more familiar, lower stakes categories--the cute, the interesting, the zany--and using them to build a convincing argument about where art is and where we are in our late capitalist moment.

For example, Ngai connects the "cute" to avant-garde poetry and the paradoxical power that may emerge from powerlessness, the "interesting" to that which opens up to the not-yet-noticed and not-yet-articulated, and the "zany" to the increasing tendency of work to involve more and more kinds of performance (even to the need of performing "humanness" if one os a flight attendant or answers phones). She not only illuminates the language game one plays with these tokens, so to speak, but also can make rethink Hello Kitty. 

Like Fredric Jameson she has a gift for turning from high culture to popular culture to high theory and back again without missing a beat or batting an eye, and however far she goes, the means of production and its relationships are never far away. The chapter on "zany" gathers in Lucille Ball, Richard Pryor,  and Jim Carrey, reasonably enough, but also the zanni of the commedia dell'arte, Diderot's dialogue with Rameau's nephew, Nietzsche and Arlie Hochschild, Hardt and Negri and Kathy Weeks...and it all adds up to an insightful discussion of the unexpected kinds of labor late capitalism ropes us into doing. 

Sianne Ngai and Wyndham Lewis

 LAST SUMMER, AS I was reading Jameson's Allegory and Ideology, I was also working my way through Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. An excellent book, and I will be getting to it in a day or two, but I thought I would devote a separate post to the notice she gives to that fascinating figure Wyndham Lewis.

Fascinating to me, anyway, but also problematic, as can be seen from the promptness with which most discussions of Lewis that are not by Lewis specialists gravitate towards the ways he can be seen as anti-semitic, or racist, or misogynistic, or fascist, or homophobic...as I said, he's problematic.

Ngai simply draws on Lewis's fascinating (but, yes, problematic) The Art of Being Ruled in talking about the relationship of avant-garde writing to her category "cute" (via Lewis's "savage indictment of cuteness" in his discussion of Gertrude Stein and the "child-cult") and in talking about Nietzsche's relationship to her category "zany."

That Ngai brought in Lewis simply to provide an interesting sidelight on her topics, not in order to show his wrong-headedness, was refreshing.

By the way, the book's indexer left out one of Ngai's more detailed discussions of Lewis, which can be found on pp. 302-04, note 61.

Diane Seuss, _Frank: Sonnets_

 I WAS IN Seattle last October, and whenever I am in Seattle, I get on over to its excellent poetry bookstore, Open Books. This book was prominently displayed, and I had seen it praised in a few places, so I went ahead and bought it. A few months pass, and it wins a couple of major prizes (the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle), so it lands right at the top of my summer reading list. 

All this while, though, being unfamiliar with Seuss's work, I had been assuming she was on the younger side--say, under 40. Then, on p. 26, I read: "My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok, not the actual guy but the guy who played him on TV, Guy Madison, who died of emphysema [...]". What?! I too was a fan of the TV Wild Bill, and imitated his unusual practice of wearing his holstered sidearms backwards, handles pointing forward, with my toy six-shooters. But that show was on TV in the 1950s...how old is Diane Seuss?

Born in 1956, she is just two years younger than I am, in turns out. She went to an excellent midwestern liberal arts college, just as I did. In her early twenties, she had an up-close brush with the eruption of punk rock, and in her later twenties with the eruption of AIDS, right when all of us born in the mid-1950s did. My oldest daughter was born in 1985; her son was born in 1986. She is now a college teacher and so, it happens, am I. 

This all became clear over the course of Frank, a sonnet sequence with significant autobiographical content. Not that Seuss and I resemble each other all that much--she has lived a lot closer to the edge than I have, and sometimes gone clean over the edge, it sounds like, and more power to her. But I was haunted by the idea that we could easily have been at the same Ramones concert, or the same panel presentation at MLA, or had kids in the same playgroup...that sort of thing.  I couldn't put the book down.

Is being unable to put it down a virtue in a book of poetry? It seems more like the kind of thing you would say about a thriller or Harry Potter. After sixty or ninety minutes with a poet, you should probably just step away for a while lest they completely rewire your circuitry. But it's hard to step away from Frank. It's one of those conversations where you think, well, it's late, but let's just open another bottle and/or another pack of cigarettes and see where this goes.

Frank put me a bit in mind of Alice Notley's Alma in its combination of intimacy and headlong rush, which naturally put me in mind of Ted Berrigan (sonnets, etc.), but I found the form was reminding me less of him than of Berryman and the Dream Songs. Why? Something in the utterly personal associative logic of the movement of the poems? I'm just guessing. I don't know. I found myself reminded of Berryman repeatedly, though.

Is the book's title a tribute to Frank O'Hara (mentioned in the final poem) or Amy Winehouse (who furnishes one of the epigraphs)? 

Keith Gessen, _A Terrible Country_

 A GIANT STEP beyond the likable but thin All the Sad Young Literary Men, I'd say. A friend said A Terrible Country is "a good novel, not a great novel." Not great, maybe, but I'd go stronger than "good"--an excellent novel, I'd say, and one bears comparison to at least one indisputably great novel, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.

In Flaubert's novel, Frédéric Moreau is a young man of civilized tastes and progressive opinions living in Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. He is in love with Mme. Arnoux, the wife of an older friend, and convinced both that he can win her and become a leading figure in the new society being born in the revolutionary tumult. By the novel's end, he has learned the hard lesson that he never had a real shot either with Mme. Arnoux or as a leader of men. He's actually a fairly typical product of his class and his time.

Gessen's Andrei Kaplan was born in Moscow and emigrated to the USA with his family when he was a child. Now in  his mid-to-late 20s, he has pursued an academic career in Slavic Studies but seems stalled-out at the crucial post-dissertation stage. His girlfriend drops him. With not much going on, he has no reason not to accept a proposal from his brother (who has returned to Moscow and is making money) that he live in Moscow for a while and look after their grandmother.

Andrei takes a while to get used to Moscow, but his Russian becomes fluent, he makes some friends he can play hockey with, he meets a group of very stimulating young intellectuals who are interested in reviving socialist ideals in post-Soviet Russia, and he even gets a girlfriend. (The middle of the novel offers a fascinating, cliché-free portrait of post-Soviet Russia, with which Gessen is well acquainted.)

Like Frédéric Moreau, Andrei has plenty of raw material for elaborate fantasies about what sort of person he is on the cusp of becoming. 

Like Frédéric, he is embarrassingly wrong. (I'll spare you the details.)

I don't know whether A Terrible Country will become a classic, but in its handling of theme of the young man  hitting the wall of his own delusions, it has a shot at enduring. 

Jericho Brown, _The Tradition_

 ONE WOULD EXPECT a poetry collection titled The Tradition to demonstrate familiarity and deftness with a variety of closed and/or regular forms, and Brown certainly checks that box; you would likewise expect it to allude cannily to canonical poems, and Brown does that as well, as when his "Of the Swan" glances back at Yeats's "Leda and the Swan."

It does not surprise that the collection's title poem turns out to be a sonnet. 

It does surprise that the "tradition" invoked is that of American police killing black men. 

And there you have the particular power of the book. A collection that is "woke," shall we say, reflecting on questions of race, sexuality, and justice, is not such an unusual thing these days. Likewise,  a collection with some neo-formalist tightrope-walking is not such an unusual thing. That Brown can do either, switching from one to the other and even doing both at once, makes this one of those prize-winning books (a Pulitzer in the case) whose prizes feel deserved.

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (5, and final)

I WAS WITHIN about twenty pages of finishing this last August...then the semester began and I forgot all about it. I finished it yesterday.

The last chapter had detailed discussions of two contemporary novels I particularly like, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Jameson here brings the book's argument around to postmodernity (his wheelhouse, famously), noting that postmodernity will be found in its cultural productions not in a mimetic or representational way but "in the forms themselves and their slow mutation, emergence, or decay, a process in which their approach to the Real or retreat from it requires us to come to terms with representation as reality and to adjust such unwieldy apparatuses as the one proposed here here to detect the significance of its inevitable failures." 

When Jameson writes of "its inevitable failures," is the antecedent of "it" the work of art's "approach to the Real" or "the one [i.e., the 'unwieldy apparatus"] proposed here"? Is it the approach or the apparatus that is bound to fail?

Does anyone at Verso actually edit this? Or do they just assume anyone willing to work through to the last chapter of a book by Jameson will manage somehow?

I guess the main point is that Mitchell's and McCarthy's novels do not reflect our postmodern circumstances like Stendhal's mirror ambling down the road but instead embody them structurally, reproduce them in their form. Okay, fair enough. Sounds right.

I am ten months from retirement, so I ask myself. am I still going to want to read this sort of thing once I retire? I've been trying to keep up with Jameson's arguments since I was a graduate student, and I have to admit I have learned a great deal from him, but how much am I going to want to wrestle with this sort of writing when I don't...you know...have to?

Have to say, though, it was gratifying to see Jameson found Remainder and Cloud Atlas worth writing about. 

Dan O'Brien, _Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch_

 THIS WAS A selection for our book club. I had not heard anything of it, and was not looking forward to reading it, actually, but it turned out to be excellent.

Basic storyline: it's the late 90s, and rancher/novelist Dan O'Brien is dealing with the failure of his marriage and the never-ending challenges of raising cattle on the Great Plains: keeping them fed, making sure they survive the winter, managing the damage they do to the natural environment, the recurring cycles of debt. After an eerie encounter with a buffalo, described in the opening pages, he decides to switch to raising buffalo. The book follows the story of his converting his operation from cattle ranch to buffalo ranch over the course of year and a half, roughly.

O'Brien is good at presenting the advantages of buffalo-raising. Since bison are native to the prairie, they thrive on it mjuch better than cattle do: they need no supplements to native grasses, they know how to find their own water, they handle the winter well, and need little veterinary intervention. Their meat is actually better for us than beef (less fat, less cholesterol). Their presences actually restores the land rather than compromising it. 

What makes the book excellent, though, is not its argument for raising bison, but its novel-like aspects. O'Brien is excellent in narrating an episode (his first buffalo auction, his driving a trailer full of buffalo during a snowstorm), in conjuring character (his hired hand Erney, real estate maven Dick, neighbor Stan), in relating the history of those who farmed (and failed) on his land before he acquired it. He is  good at evoking the landscape and its seasons, even better at evoking the people who live on it.

A fine book. I'm going to try grilling ground buffalo tonight.

 

Nick Hasted, _The Story of the Kinks: You Really Got Me_

THE TITLE AND subtitle ought to be flipped, it seems to me, but it's good to have a book this readable on one of my favorite groups, the Kinks, and one of my favorite songwriters, Ray Davies. Hasted's book is not a masterpiece of rock biography (a category in which I would include Bob Mehr's book on the Replacements and Paul Trynka's book on Iggy Pop), but it's workmanlike and solid.

Hasted is good on the Davies brothers' neighborhood and family background and good on the group's various crises (being banned from touring in the USA thanks to a dustup with the musicians' union, the collapse of Ray's marriage in the early 1970s, Ray's lengthy fascination with writing concept albums). He is especially good on Dave Davies, whose guitar, voice, and songwriting were rarely in the spotlight but nonetheless a crucial presence for the whole of the band's existence. I had no idea of the ups and downs of Dave's story, but they turn out to be vertiginous. I did know there was a good deal of sibling tension, which Hasted does a fine job of reporting on without taking a side.

Hasted got interviews with Ray, Dave, drummer Mick Avory, and the brother of the late Pete Quaife, the group's original bass player, so the book has a strong primary-source core. Extra points for talking to Bob Henrit.

Although Hasted does justly by the band's career high points--the volcanic eruption of "You Really Got Me," the London anthem "Waterloo Sunset," the run as an arena-filling live act in the US--I wouldn't say he's as eloquent and insightful about the peculiar, unique beauty of the group's work as a few other writers have been (John Mendelsohn, Greil Marcus, Erik Campbell). So there's still room for that. Whoever does eventually write the definitive assessment of the Kinks, though, will benefit from Hasted's book.

Don Mee Choi, _DMZ Colony_

 A CASE IN point regarding the point that came up in the Baudelaire post of a few days ago, viz., poetry not being the same as verse. DMZ Colony won the National Book Award for poetry, which makes for a convincing institutional affirmation that yes, this is poetry. But there is no regular verse here, and only some free verse; most of the book, typographically, is in prose. 

Nor is the prose particularly lyrical or imagistic or cadenced or any of the qualities that lead to prose being called "poetic." A good many pages simply presents phrases from an interview with Ahn Hak-sop, a political prisoner and victim of torture in South Korea. One section is the invented testimony of some of the children killed in Sancheong-Hamyang massacres of 1951. There are prose passages about journalists like Choi's father, who tried to report on and document the brutal methods of some of South Korea's series of dictatorial regimes. Complementing the text are a variety of photographs and drawings.

We are very far from anything a reader who pre-dated Baudelaire would call poetry, then (to say nothing of a good many who post-date him). But there is no other obvious thing to call it. It has elements of memoir, of documentary, of fiction, as well as some pages of familiar (i.e., lineated) poetry. The pictorial elements are integral rather than illustrative--they need to be there. So what is that? As with Cha's Dictée, one might hesitate to call it poetry, but one is stuck for what else to call it. 

So is "poetry" now not only what looks and sounds like poetry, but also large tracts of the unclassifiable and unnameable?

It's an unforgettable book. Set this alongside Han Kang's novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution and you get a quite different idea of South Korea than you are going to get from images of Gangnam or from BTS. 

Zadie Smith, _The Wife of Willesden_

 IT'S HARD FOR me to write about Zadie Smith without immediately deliquescing into fanboy gush, so I'm not even going to try to maintain some sort of judicious objectivity here. This is brilliant. Writing a play around a 21st century version of the Wife of Bath, in which the Wife is a Londoner of Caribbean origin, is already a great idea. That the play goes so far as to be faithful line by line to Chaucer's original makes it all the more amazing. Then add in that Smith wrote the update in (loosely) rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, just like Chaucer's original, which takes us to even higher levels of astonishment. Then, at the end, when Smith throws in a Chaucerian "Retraction" taking her own (first four only) novels to task, what alternative do we have to sheer awe?

Plenty of folks will be happy to take cheap shots at this. Ignore them. To repeat: this is brilliant.

Charles Baudelaire, _Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose_

 I HAD READ a large handful of these in anthologies, but had never read the whole book through--the flight to Paris seemed a good opportunity.

Are they great? Well, yes. You knew that. "Any where out of the world" remains a particular favorite.

They seem important, too, in their implicit cancellation of the idea that poetry is purely and simply verse. If poetry is not purely and simply verse, what is it? Baudelaire's preface/dedication emphasizes aspects of the language: "musicale sans rythme et sans rhyme, assez souple and assez heurtée pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, de la conscience." [my translation: "musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt itself to the movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, of consciousness."] Is it a discourse's ability to respond to or model the lability of our interiority that makes it poetry? 

Perhaps also its ability to respond to or model the lability of urban life, as Baudelaire goes on to say: "C'est surtout de la fréquentation des villes enormes, c'est du croisements de leur innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant." ["It is above all living in large cities, it is the intersections of their countless communications, that gave birth to this artistic obsession."] I'm guessing Baudelaire's example was crucial as Eliot made his way towards an English poetic of the city.

Some of the pieces herein, appearing today, might be called "flash fiction" or "lyrical essays," which goes to show how what an immense legacy Baudelaire has. We continue to ask what poetry is if it is not verse, and the attempts at answers continue to be generative.

George Packer, _The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America_

 I READ ABOUT 100 pages of this the year it was published (2013), but, not finding it all that engaging, I dropped it at that point. In 2017 it was often cited as helpful in explaining the forces that had elected Trump (cf. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land); that made sense, insofar as the book looks at how working-class white Americans came to feel betrayed and forgotten, but did not inspire me to pick up the book again. Then I read that the book contained, in its later pages, an excellent profile of Peter Thiel. Okay, I thought--I will read that, at least.

Peter Thiel is an important backer of Vance's campaign for the Senate in Ohio, and my recurring nightmare is that Thiel's deeper-than-deep pockets and Vance's remarkable story and canny rhetoric will combine to create a politics that unites Trump's base with no-kidding, naked-fist authoritarian politics. Without a loose cannon like Trump at the head of the movement, what might happen? I fear some "it can happen here" nightmare.

So, I needed to know more about Thiel. Packer's profile (contained in the three chapters titled "Silicon Valley") is indeed excellent. It gives us a relatively familiar figure: brilliant nerdy kid (Dungeons and Dragons) gets elite education (Stanford), discovers conservative politics (Ayn Rand), makes an unfathomable amount of money as founder/early investor in what  grow to be internet colossi (PayPal, Facebook), and decides to remold American society.

The surprises: Thiel is gay (which might have made him more sympathetic to the situation of the marginalized and excluded, but no, seems not to have) and highly interested in achieving immortality (which might line him up as a potential Great American Eccentric, à la Howard Hughes).

But are my anxieties quelled? Not so much. Coming to this right after Vuillard's l'ordre du jour, I was wondering if Thiel could do for Vance what Krupp did for Hitler. Was January 6 just our Kapp Putsch? Just a prologue to the real tragedy? 

Éric Vuillard, _L'ordre du jour_

THIS WON THE Prix Goncourt in 2017. It is not a novel, precisely, but a récit, a narrative form familiar in the French literary tradition but elusive of definition, like novelle in the German literary tradition, I suppose.

It's a narrative, but not exactly fiction, and not exactly not fiction. It has no invented characters, so far as I can tell. All the characters actually existed, and what they say and do seems largely based on documents, to a large extent their own memoirs or testimony (at Nuremberg, say). Vuillard very occasionally slips into the sensoria of the historical actors in the way historical fiction usually does, as when Austrian Prime Minister Schuschnigg is awakened by his valet on the morning of March 11, 1938--

Il pose ses pieds par terre. Le parquet est froid. Il enfile ses mules. On lui annonce de vastes mouvements des troupes allemands.

[He puts his feet on the ground. The parquet floor is cold. He puts on his slippers. He is told of vast movements of German troops.]

--but typically he eschews such devices. The narration does not aim at being historically objective--it has an attitude, sometimes a bristling one--but Vuillard generally confines himself to documented facts. 

The first and last chapters have to do with how the major German industrial concerns decided to go along with the Nazis (who promised stability, big spending on armaments,  and the suppression of labor unions). The second chapter is about Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, the British government's pre-eminent advocate of appeasing Hitler, and his meeting Göring and Hitler himself before the war. The main part of the book, though, is about the Anschluss, the political union with Nazi Germany that Austria was bullied into, or succumbed to under the threat of military force, or rushed to embrace--Vuillard gives us evidence for all three of those possibilities. 

I've wondered whether novelists use World War II settings for their fiction so frequently not only because WW II novels are popular, but also because the setting is a quick way of lending gravitas to a plot. Having World War II in the background instantly creates moral weight, significance. Civilization in the balance, fatal decisions, lives of millions at stake--World War II is one of those unusual actual historical events that rises to the plot stakes of a Marvel superhero movie, and those stakes give the fiction's characters' actions and decisions an epic scale.

Vuillard seems intentionally to go against the grain of all that, though. Everyone, even the political leaders--especially the political leaders, come to think of it--seems egotistical, shortsighted, petty, gaffe-prone. British response to the German troop movements is delayed because the German Ambassador won't leave a state dinner, instead keeping everyone listening to his tennis stories. The fearsome mechanized German military machine breaks down in the mountain passes, creating a  bottleneck. There is lots of film footage of the Austrian crowds cheering Hitler, but it was all edited by Goebbels's team, so we have no idea  how faithfully it records anything. 

Someone occasionally makes a stand--Wilhelm Miklas, president of Austria, stalls a bit before consenting that several crucial state posts be filled by Nazi sympathizers--but just about everyone comes off as a bit shabby: weak, hypocritical, dishonest. No great heroes, no great villains. Even Hitler gets mistaken for a valet.

Vuillard so consistently undermines the usual epic tonality that I wondered, is that why he got the prize? Is he trying to break the paradigm, and succeeding? Not quite as interesting as Les Onze, but L'ordre du jour does show there is life in the old dog of historical fiction yet.

Solmaz Sharif, _Look_

 WHEN I BUY books, I always intend to read them, but rarely do I read them right away. They typically land on some shelf or in some stack as I promise myself I will soon find the opportunity...you can imagine how it goes. It usually takes some kind of occasion or spur to get the book off the shelf and into my hands. In this case, it was the publication of Sharif's second book and its attendant buzz. I thought, geez, I guess  it's time I read the first book.

It's a strong one. Sharif is Iranian-American, and the book reflects both her own family's experience of the lengthy and terrible Iraq-Iran war and the U.S.'s military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her language tends to be spare, pared down, exact, with a scattering of lyrical bright spots.

The surprising element is that throughout the book Sharif stirs in terms and phrases from U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Their presence in the text is signaled by block capitals: 

His father grew very quiet

His father would

HEAVY DROP sob

behind a closed door

His father was a

PERSON ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE EFFECTS

A PILLBOX of opium

in his sock drawer.

The incongruity of the military terms would, you might think, sink the enterprise, given their clunkiness and their Orwellian tendency to hide or blur a grim actuality--their being the exact opposite of what poetry is supposed to be, we might say--but Sharif makes them work in a kind of counterpoint to the grace and clarity of her own voice. Perhaps the military terms' indigestible rigidity makes clearer that the family's suffering and the suffering of whole peoples occur within constraints they did not choose, in terms they do not get to set. 

A really convincing first volume. Yes, I have already bought Customs. I hope to read it before the third appears.

Pierre Michon, _Les Onze_

 A UNIQUE AND for me powerful novel, although it took me a good while to catch on to what was happening. It's a historical novel, I suppose we would say, but on new and surprising lines, like Alvaro Enrique's Sudden Death or Laurent Binet's HHhH, both of which it predates.

It reads like an unusually literary work of art history. Les Onze ("The Eleven") is, we learn, a painting of the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) during their brief but historically crucial tenure as chief authority of the revolutionary French Republic, a period often known as the Reign of Terror. The painting is the work of François-Élie Corentin, the "Tiepolo of the Terror," and now hangs in a room all by itself in the Louvre. The first part of the book is devoted in large part to Corentin's biography and to accounts of the painting's current placement, surrounded by plaques of background information, as well as some details about the members of the Committee, the best-remembered being Maximilien Robespierre.

As I read, I would occasionally Google Corentin, hoping to get an image of Les Onze or of his other paintings or just some supplementary information about him, and kept getting no results other than the novel Les Onze itself. My frustration had no source but my own dim-wittedness, for it turned out, as I should have seen, that Corentin and his painting are entirely Michon's invention. Michon's imagined biographical details about Corentin, his description of the painting, even his description of the painting's museum setting, were so persuasive that I took them as real.

So, we have a historical novel about the French Revolution, but not at all engineered in the way historical fiction typically is. Nonetheless, short (132 pages) and peculiar though it is, it gives us a more sharply focused idea of what the revolution was about than the much longer, much more populated novels about it do (e.g., those of Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Trollope, and their many 20th century successors). For Michon, the revolution is about a migration of authority and power from the sacred to the secular. He captures this in describing the scene of the painting's commission, for instance, but also in describing the (mainly frustrated) literary careers of the members of the committee and the way arts and letters, in some respects, moved into the place in the culture that religion had occupied.

Robespierre, I gather, came up in the recent French presidential election, since the leading left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sometimes cited Robespierre with approval, especially for his redistributivist principles, which brought outcries from those who associate him mainly with the guillotine. But Michon's novel seems less about political particulars than about a watershed moment, a tectonic shift in our basic social assumptions. 

Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif has long been my very favorite novel about the French Revolution, but now I would say it's Les Onze.

Jonathan Balcombe, _Super Fly_

 I WAS SUFFICIENTLY enchanted by Sheldrake's Entangled Life to attempt a deeper dive into pop biology books. This one arrived as a Christmas present, a happy instance of a holiday present rhyming with one's current interests.

Super Fly is devoted to flying insects, a class of being much larger and more varied than I had any idea. It is witty, informative, and well-written...it does suffer in comparison to Enchanted Life, though, I would say, but that's a high bar. 

Still, pretty darned informative. Chapter 3, about flying insect intelligence (capable of quite a bit more than I expected, so far as memory and problem-solving go) and Chapter 8, about flying insect reproduction (a good deal weirder than I expected) were especially illuminating.

Edna O'Brien, _The Little Red Chairs_

 SPOILER ALERT, LET me note, since I can't think of a way to write about this novel without noting the curveball that occurs at its midpoint.

The first half is set in a small, somewhat isolated town in Ireland. A stranger arrives, apparently eastern European in origin, and sets up shop as a sex-therapist or life coach or new age guru or masseur--anyway, he's a hit, even with the nuns and priests. He is a special hit with Fidelma McBride, not exactly middle-aged but no longer young, leader of the local book club, a woman of sensibilité.

There are signs that the new arrival, Dr. Vlad, has a complicated past and may not be what he claims to be. Fidelma is married, making her interest in him, which soon becomes sexual, adulterous. Still, I thought we were headed towards an Irish Music Man with Vlad as Harold Hill and Fidelma as Marian the Librarian--the simple virtues of the small town will redeem him, he will redeem the small town from its hidebound narrowness, life will proceed happily....

No such luck. Vlad is a war criminal, a kind of  Radovan Karadzic figure. He is spotted, arrested, hauled off to the Hague for his trial. Fidelma is pregnant, but she is found by Vlad's former body guards, who (in revenge for what they see as his betrayal and abandonment of them) abort the fetus and nearly kill her. Shattered, she ends up in London, where she slowly and painfully reassembles what she can of her selfhood.

This is the only O'Brien novel I have read. Philip Roth, a longtime fan, called it her masterpiece. Maybe it is. She certainly throws a mean curveball.

Percival Everett, _The Trees_

 I THINK THE Trees is still Percival Everett's most recent novel, but odds are it won't be much longer--he's that prolific. He is also unpredictable, inventive, canny, inspired, prophetic--not to mention deft in any genre he feels like picking up, from metafiction to fantasy to Western. 

The Trees traffics in noir and in the ghost story simultaneously. A well-known local white man turns up dead in Money, Mississippi, alongside a longer-dead corpse of a black man no one recognizes. While the police investigate, the black man's corpse disappears--only to turn up alongside the recently-killed corpse of another local white man. In both cases, the dead white man's testicles have been forcibly removed from his body and are to be found in the tight grip of the dead black man.  Next thing you know, the black corpse disappears again, only to turn up next to....

You get the idea. Since Money, Mississippi, is the town where Emmett Till was murdered, we begin to wonder: is the ghost of Till walking, taking a long-deferred revenge? For the dead white men are the descendants of the men who killed Emmett Till.

Turns out, eventually, that there is a more down-to-earth, wholly natural explanation for the deaths in Money, Mississippi, but soon there is a national outbreak of sudden, violent death among the descendants of lynchers, all found alongside another corpse, sometimes Black, sometimes Chinese. 

The Trees is a kind of fable, then, wrapped in a couple of layers of genre fiction. 

Sometimes it is farcical, as in the names that seem inspired by Dickens (the Rev. Cad Fondle, Prof. Damon Thruff) or Bennie Hill (FBI agent Herberta "Herbie" Hind). Even though Everett is capable of shrewd social and psychological depiction, he mainly goes for the archetypal here: the redneck sheriffs, the white trash Klansmen, the diner called "Dinah," the wisecracking out-of-town detectives, and the omniscient matriarchal crone who lies behind it all. There is a spot-on parody of Trump's speaking style in Chapter 103. You could almost decide not to take it at all seriously.

But then there is Chapter 64, at ten pages the book's longest, which is basically just a list--a list of people lynched in the United States since 1913. The names here are all too real. And they include the names of victims of recent police violence, as if to emphasize that extra-judicial murder is still extra-judicial murder even when it has a uniform on.

The Trees is a swift read, briskly paced, often funny, but not at all funny by the end. 

Does anyone know why Chapters 74 and 104 are not here?