Brandon Taylor, _The Late Americans_

ADAM MARS-JONES's fiction reviews in the LRB so often sound like hatchet jobs that his praise of this novel caught my attention, and it turns out it is really good...so thank you, Mr. Mars-Jones.

The Late Americans is one of those pass-the-baton novels in which the narrative point of view is handed off to a new character every chapter. Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth could serve as examples, but the first novel I encountered that took the principle to its logical conclusion--i.e., the narrative baton never returns to any character who has already had it once--was Wilton Barnhardt's Lookaway, Lookaway. I think the technique must be enjoying some kind of vogue, as it turns up in Yaa Gyaasi's Homecoming and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other as well. (Also, I think, in David Szalay's All That Man Is, which I have not read but would like to.)

Taylor's is not a simon-pure example of the technique, as Seamus the poet provides our POV in the fifth chapter as well as the first, but generally the baton in The Last Americans keeps moving to a new bearer. Most of its characters are in graduate programs at the University of Iowa, generally in the arts (writing, music, dance) but one is getting an MBA, and a few are simply folks who live and work in Iowa City and have been drawn into the orbits of the students. Those orbits intersect and overlap all over the place, because most of the characters are young gay men who tend wind up in the same bars, the same parties, and, yep, the same beds. Two of the POV characters are women, but the novel feel largely like a portrait of the gay male scene in a small-to-mid-sized university town. 

But it also feels like more than that, somehow. The title suggest ambitions towards a the-way-we-live-now kind of novel, like Updike's Rabbit series. Such ambitions could be awkward in a novel set in so specific a milieu as a collection of U. of Iowa grad students, but surprisingly enough Taylor makes it work. The way we live now, the way we meet people now, the way we make art now, the way we plan for the future now, the way we try to start careers now, the way we have parties, break up, get in our own way now...so much of that is here, in just 300 pages. 

I did not spot much in the way of actual dates in the novel, but it seems to be set just shortly before Trump and the pandemic sent the-way-we-live-now over Niagara Falls in a barrel. And it feels very faithful to that time.

Really impressive. I plan to track down Taylor's other work.

Stephanie Burt, _We Are Mermaids_

 DO POETS WHO write well and publish widely on the topic of poetry ever worry that their criticism will overshadow their poetry? Arguably, this happened to Randall Jarrell, one of the best American poetry reviewers of the 1950s but also a poet--but, as it happens, one now remembered for only one poem, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," even though he wrote quite a few other good ones (e.g., "90 North"). 

Ange Mlinko, say. At this point, do more people read her reviews than read her poems? Is that unfortunate?

Stephanie Burt is perhaps an even more striking example, as she is not only a widely-published reviewer of poetry but also the author of several books of criticism (including one on Randall Jarrell). Given that she publishes in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and the London Review of Books, are her poems ever going to have as large a readership as her reviews? 

Probably neither Mlinko nor Burt worries much about this discrepancy. Still, I wonder, if they could magically flip the size of their audiences so that their poems were more widely read than their reviews, would they hesitate to do so? 

Graywolf Press is doing their part, having given the cover of We Are Mermaids an eye-catching trio of comic-book-style mermaids, so that the bookstore browser might think the book a short graphic novel and give it a quick perusal. 

The thing is...I don't think a quick perusal would do the volume justice. Burt is a subtle, understated kind of poet, her syntax sophisticated, her forms ingenious, her best trick a reverse-angle perspective, as when she lets punctuation marks speak for themselves, or the poem titled "Whale Watch" that turns out to be from the point of view of the whales. 

Well, maybe I'm being pessimistic. I hope the folks who pick up the book will sit with it a while. It has some fine poems about being trans--and for that matter, some fine poems about comics, so that cover is accurate as well as enticing.

Zadie Smith, _The Fraud_

A FREQUENTLY OCCURRING short descriptor of this novel in the week of its publication was "Zadie Smith's Victorian Novel." One definitely ought to parse that phrase as "a Zadie Smith novel set in Victorian England" and not as "Zadie Smith writing in the mode of the Victorian novelists." 

The novel's technique is not at all that of the usual Victorian novelist, that of, for instance, William Harrison Ainsworth, who figures as one of Smith's major characters in The Fraud: wooly, overstuffed, sentimental, packed with the burrs of the period's prejudices. Nor is it much like that of the great Victorian novelists like Dickens and Thackeray, who make cameo appearances. 

It is, happily, a 21st century Zadie Smith novel, mobile in time and space, mercurial in its points of view, composed of swift but revealing glimpses, alert to the nuances of difference in class and gender identities, funny, written with energy, and in love with northwest London.

There is a point to the Victorian setting, though. Suppose we say that 19th century English novels tended to be vague on the role of colonialism and slave-holding in creating the wealth and power of the society those novels depicted, and not always wholly articulate about how that wealth and power was monopolized by the male portion of the upper and middle classes. One can think of exceptions, but Victorian fiction generally turns a blind eye to those topics. Not Smith, of course.

The principal point-of-view character in The Fraud is Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage to the novelist Ainsworth and the person who takes over the management of the Ainsworth household when his first wife dies. Eliza has sexual relationships with both Ainsworth and Mrs. Ainsworth--so there's that. She is also a convinced abolitionist--so there's that. 

And in the novel's fundamental "now" (with frequent flashbacks) of about 1870, she becomes a spectator of the unfolding (and historical) case of the Tichborne Claimant, in which an unlikely man claims to be the long-lost heir to a title and fortune. (The second Mrs. Ainsworth is a vocal partisan of the Claimant.) What really fascinates Mrs. Touchet, though, is the role in the case of the formerly enslaved Andrew Bogle, who provides the Claimant with what slender evidence he has of being the real thing.

It's in the ups-and-downs of the case of the Claimant and the characters' involvement in it that the reader sense the novel's closest kinship to our own awkward moment. Not that racism and patriarchy are not a part of our moment--Lord knows they are--but the crossfire of competing sets of information, the passionate attachment to dubious causes, and the long-simmering resentments over feeling excluded from power are as pointedly present in The Fraud as they are in the Anglo-American world of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson (not to mention Modi, Orban, Le Pen, Erdogan...). 

The conversation between Eliza Touchet and Henry (son of Andrew) Bogle in the 40th chapter of Volume 8, pp. 440-45, I would say, presents in essence the big question of the 2020s.

Kate Briggs, _The Long Form_ (2)

AS NOTED YESTERDAY, The Long Form takes place over the course of a single day, a day that Helen, the principal character, spends looking after her six-week-old daughter, Rose.

This, it seems to me, is relatively unexplored ground in the novel; that is, I can't immediately think of another novel so focused on a mother and a baby. For that matter, mothers and daughters do not have the lengthy history of literary representation that fathers and sons do. The Odyssey, Hamlet, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest are just the tip of the iceberg, and understandably so, since father-and-son-hood is a universal phenomenon that pre-dates literature itself. 

Mother-and-daughter-hood is just as universal and just as ancient, however, yet examples are harder to recall. Sense and Sensibility, perhaps, or Little Women, both excellent books--principally from the daughters' point of view, though. Perhaps it matters that the great women novelists in the English tradition tended not to be mothers: Austen, Eliot, Emily Brontë, Woolf. And the tragic instance of Charlotte Brontë, who did have a child, but did not survive childbirth.

Doris Lessing did have a child, and Anna in The Golden Notebook has a child, but Anna's main attention usually seems directed elsewhere.

A lot of the eerie power of Beloved may come from its breaking new ground on this topic. Circumstances make Sethe's relationships with Beloved and Denver uniquely tormented, but then there's that ice-skating scene.

And then Ducks, Newburyport--unlikely ever to be as widely read as Beloved, but another landmark, perhaps, in its detailed representation of motherhood. 

Recent years have seen a lot of excellent memoirs on giving birth (Elizabeth McCracken, Rivka Galchen, Rachel Zucker, Arielle Greenberg, just off the top of my head), but these tend not to have the granular detail a novel does. 

The Long Form may be the Jeanne Dielmann of taking care of a six-week old. It has the exquisite slowness of David Foster Wallace or the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses, applied to a hitherto little-written about but utterly ordinary human experience, the clock-defying work of caring for a baby.

Blaise Cendrars, _Selected Writings_, ed. & introd. Walter Albert, various translators

SO, IN PARIS, in those heady days of cubism and the Ballets Russes, there was a poet hanging out with painters, exploding traditional French prosody, and bringing the bustling new cityscape of the new century into verse...and that was Guillaume Apollinaire, of course, but Blaise Cendrars was doing roughly the same thing at the same time.

I had seen Cendrars's name often, but it was Lucy Sante's article in the November 2 NYRB that inspired me to take up this volume that first appeared in the 1960s. A lengthy introduction (which I only skimmed), about 170 pages of poetry (with original French versions facing English translations, so call it about 85 pages, really), and about 50 pages of excerpts from Cendrars's prose. 

Lucy Sante will  never steer a reader wrong, so yes, definitely excellent stuff, especially the three long poems with which the selections open, Les Pâques à New-York, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, and Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles. All have a certain erratic narrative movement, being about journeys one is not fully confident ever actually took place, but the main thing is the energy, the invention, the freshness of things that are  showing up in poetry for perhaps the very first time, like the Eiffel Tower or the skyscraper (gratte-ciel).

European modernism has a reputation for bleakness and dread, utterly deserved given the prominence of The Waste Land, the Cantos, the Duino Elegies, Robert Musil, Egon Schiele, Céline, and so many others, but before the First World War disembowelled western civilization and left it a quivering husk there was a modernism of joy, discovery, exuberance--Matisse's Dance, for instance, or The Firebird, or even Blast. Cendrars's long poems come out of that moment, and their vitality is still bracing.

Kate Briggs, _The Long Form_ (1)

I'M READY TO declare this Most Remarkable Novel of 2023. Or Most Interesting, Most Important, Most Worthwhile...take your pick. 

"The long form" referred to in the title is the novel itself (as Briggs mentions in a note at the back), a literary form to some extent defined by its page count, so this is a novel that is in part about novels. Not that The Long Form goes in for a lot of metafictional mind-fuckery of a John Barth or David Foster Wallace sort--instead, the narration simply and frequently takes up the topic of the history of the novel and how novels work, with a lot of familiar critical sources cited (e.g., Forster, Bakhtin, Watt). Since the main character is some species of academic, these turns toward the theoretical never seem particularly unrealistic or imposed. Some readers not conversant with Forster, Bakhtin, Watt, et al. may find these excursions tiresome, but the explanations Briggs provides are usually clear, unpretentious, and helpful, not so much lecture-fodder as they are earnest and valuable work on the questions of how novels work and what they do for us.

Briggs's ingenious device for bringing up these questions is to have Helen, the main character of The Long Form, accepting the delivery of and beginning to read a copy of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones--another novel that devotes considerable space to the question of what a novel does. That Briggs does this without getting lost in the funhouse is a feat.

Perhaps even more telling, Briggs sets the novel during the course of a single day, thus joining a tradition of other novels that used that device to dramatically reconfigure the form of novel: Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway being the leading instances. Even more relevant, perhaps, is Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport (2019), but that gets us to topics that will need their own post.

Tracy K. Smith, _Wade in the Water_

 FROM 2018, PUBLISHED during Smith's tenure as Poet Laureate. Deft, accomplished, and sometimes more than that. An erasure poem based on the Declaration of Independence, a long piece constructed from the testimonies of the Black Civil War soldiers, some spiritual engagement (the title poem in particular, I would say), some deeply felt poems about members of her family (especially in Part IV). 

Smith has never been one of my very favorite poets, but I always find her worth reading. That I thought well enough of her work to buy this book, then took five years to get around to reading it because  there were always several poetry collections I was more interested in looking at, then eventually did read it and appreciated it...that about sums up my readerly relation to Tracy K. Smith.  I don't expect to pick up the memoir or the "new and selected," but she's been a true toiler in the vineyard, so kudos to her.

By the way, the "new and selected" format just annoys me. If you are reprinting old work for readers unfamiliar with your poetry, can you leave it at that, and not throw in a dozen new poems so the people who have been reading you all along have to re-purchase work they have already paid for once in order to get the new work? A slap in the face to loyal readers, it seems to me. We deserve better.

Gary Indiana, _Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt_

ANOTHER DIP INTO Indiana's non-fiction--this one really made me miss Gore Vidal. One could always count on Vidal for a stream of well-aimed, elegantly-phrased contempt for whatever the most despicable recent abuse of power was, and Indiana's preface and first chapter rise to Vidal-like heights of scorn in analyzing the Bush II's 2004 presidential campaign. Indiana's scorn runs hotter and ruder than Vidal's patrician frost, but it is just as satisfying.

The larger part of the book, about Arnold Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California, is not quite as successful. The architecture of the book feels careless at times, and Indiana does not explain complex phenomena like California's recall procedures and its catastrophic deregulation of the energy industry quite as deftly as Vidal probably would have.  When Indiana is in his wheelhouse, though, as when he takes apart the Schwarzenegger character as created by his film roles, he is his usual brilliant self. 

The conclusion is a little disappointing, a pileup of long quotations...interesting quotations, but still.

Can't really complain about Indiana's prose, though--glistening and sharp as a scimitar all the way through. 

Helen DeWitt, _The English Understand Wool_

 I HAVE NEVER done four posts on the same day before--trying to catch up, obviously. 

Anyway, here is the  real prize of the day, a brilliant long tale by DeWitt, published as a stand-alone volume of 69 pages in the New Directions Storybook series.

The narrator was orphaned by the death of her staggeringly wealthy parents when still a toddler, then raised by an opportunistic couple who posed as her parents and then, when the narrator turned seventeen, abandoned her, making off with all of the staggering wealth. 

Left with little in the way of financial resources, the narrator does however land a big book deal, her publishers being confident a tale of great trauma and great wealth will be a sure-fire bestseller.

The tale is, to begin with, the opening pages of the narrator's memoir, which is soon interrupted by frantic and imperfectly literate correspondence from her editor, who anxiously notes that there not yet much in the story about trauma and emotions and such. Judging from what the narrator tells us, the opportunistic couple, in their own way, prepared the narrator for adulthood unusually well, and she is cognizant, even grateful, for how they raised her. 

The editor gets angry about the missing trauma and emotions and threatens to terminate the contract, at which point she and we learn just how very, very well prepared for adulthood the narrator is. 

A quick and delightful read. I hear it's selling well, too, and deservedly so.

Anne Carson, _Norma Jeane Baker of Troy_

IF ANYONE BUT Anne Carson had rewritten Euripides' Helen as a play about Marilyn Monroe, I would probably not have picked it up, but Anne Carson being an estimable classicist as well as an excellent poet...well, why not?

It's a short one-character play (Norma Jeane was played by Ben Whishaw in the spring 2019 premier, which must have been interesting). Marilyn Monroe makes an apt analogue for Helen of Troy. Carson brings out a storyline of the war in Troy that runs a little like this--"You are so luscious that we will kill each other over the question of who gets to fuck you, so this whole war is your fault"--and Monroe's being eventually overwhelmed by the male fantasies and projections she inspired tellingly rhymes her situation with Helen's.

With the final scene especially, Carson steps up with Simone Weil and Alice Oswald as another woman writer giving us news we can use on the matter of Troy. (Maybe Emily Wilson too--I have not yet read her new translation of the Iliad).

Brilliant little mini-essays on several relevant Greek words (e.g., eidolon, trauma) between scenes--were these part of the stage production, too? Hope I get to find out someday.

Gary Indiana, _Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom_

 GARY INDIANA'S MEMOIR I Can't Give You Anything But Love left me with a keen wish to read more of his work, but his fiction (it looks like) leans toward noir mysteries, which I don't much care for. Turns out, though, that he has published a fair amount of non-fiction, including this, a short study of Pasolini's final film from the "BFI Modern Classics" series.

Salò, as its subtitle indicates, is an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's novel about a small set of aristos doing whatever they feel like doing with a group of captives; as its title indicates, it is set in the last few month of the Fascist regime in Italy (the city of Salò was the regime's capital once it was forced out of Rome). 

Indiana looks not only at the film's exploration of fascism's affinity with sadism, but also at how Pasolini detects the same affinity in the post-war neo-liberal order and consumer capitalism. Among the useful points: although what is going on in the palace the fascists have commandeered could be broadly described as an orgy, it has nothing to do with pleasure. Power is exercised entirely as a means of producing pain and humiliation.

Indiana's book brings to bear a deep familiarity with the film (as he also mentioned in I Can't Give You Anything But Love, owing to the particular circumstances of his life circa 1975, he saw the film almost every night for a month or so). He also brings to the party a variety of insights into Pasolini's life and career and an unfailingly engaging prose style. Salò is a hard film to watch out and not even all that easy to read about, but if you're looking for a strong short book about it, this is the one.

Kathy Acker, _Blood and Guts in High School_

 GARY INDIANA DEVOTED several pages of I Can't Give You Anything But Love to Acker, which felt like reason enough for me to give her another try. I had read In Memoriam to Identity years and years ago (early 1990s, I think--it was before she passed) and not liked it much. It seemed to me a case of assuming that trafficking in transgression would suffice to make writing interesting in the absence of imagination, insight, and style. But no, it does not suffice. The literature of transgression can be powerful when imagination, insight, and style are present (e.g. Rimbaud), but without them, all you get is...well, In Memoriam to Identity.

Blood and Guts in High School is a much better known book, so I thought it was a good bet for my second Acker. It concerns Janey, who at the beginning of the novel is ten years old and living with her father in Yucatan. The first event in the story is that her father breaks up with her...so, yes, we have some transgression going up. Janey moves on to a variety of different locales, New York City, France, Morocco, getting involved with a few other men, such as Jean Genet and a Persian slave trader.

Much of the book is devoted to texts and drawings by Janey. Some of these were interesting: an analysis of The Scarlet Letter and some gonzo translations off Sextus Propertius. 

I finished the book, however, with no desire at all to read any more Acker. She seems convinced that being bad makes you interesting. It does not.

Sam Sax, _Pig_

SAX"S NEW COLLECTION does sometimes talk about actual pigs, but it talks rather more about the pig as a cultural presence, its representations, mythology, figurations. 

I  had not thought of it before, but there may not be another domesticated animal with a worse cultural profile than the pig. One would not like being called a dog, a sheep, a cow, or a chicken--one would certainly not like being called an ass--but being called a pig, a hog, a swine, or a sow evokes a different and harsher level of abuse. Some peoples--including, Sax emphasizes, his own people, the Jews--regard the pig as unfit for consumption. There is nothing fair in this particular cultural construction, but even so, dismantling it would require sustained and mindful effort.

The speakers in Sax's poems often seem to inhabit a comparable state of abjection, and their embrace of the Pig-Idea may be a step in that dismantling: an owning, a willingness to don the mask, to accept the name, and reconfigure the Pig-Idea from inside. Can the other's hatred be transmuted into a blessing by this owning, the other's venom turn into chrism?

In this respect, Pig ups the ante of Bury It.

Pig also testifies to the range of the pig's presence in our culture, which turns out to be wider and more various than I would have guessed before reading the book. We  have the Three Little Pigs in the book's  three section titles, "Straw," "Sticks," and "Bricks." We have the shepherd-pig of the film Babe. We have the Gadarene swine, swine flu, Pooh's Piglet, and--paid resplendent tribute in the poem that bears her name--Miss Piggy. The book's final page signs off as Porky Pig alway did in Warner Brothers cartoons: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" 

The poem titled "Three Stories" gives three examples of pig-as-cultural-locus, and perhaps flips the script, arguing for the centrality of that which has been exiled to the periphery. Here is the poem in its entirety:

in the end, the children come to learn, the beast lives in  them.

in the end, it is the animal's proximity to language that saves him.

in the end, despite their best intentions, the animals become men.

My fourth or fifth time through this, I discerned Lord of the Flies and its human sacrifice, Piggy; Wilbur of Charlotte's Web, saved by Charlotte's ability to write words in her web; and Animal Farm, with its Bolshevik pigs who undermine their own revolution. Hardly a person makes it through the U. S. educational experience without reading at least one of those--all three, in my own case. The three stories, slightly rotated by Sax to reflect a different light, revise the Pig-Idea, if we will let them; they re-negotiate the boundaries between species.

Maggie Millner, _Couplets_

MAGGIE MILLNER MUST be on some kind of fast track for poets. Not only did her first book get published by Farrar Straus Giroux...not only did it feature blurbs from the likes of Leslie Jamison, Elif Batuman, and Garth Greenwell....but it got reviewed (favorably) in the NYRB, of all places, a publication that notices maybe six books of poetry a year. 

The book is organized into four sections of twelve poems each, with a "Proem" at the beginning and a "coda" at the end, for a nice round total of fifty. Most of the poems are in couplets, the rhymes ranging from straightforward (bed/head) to whimsical (Gornick/romantic) to hold-on-does-that-count? (today/persuaded)--these all occur in the opening lines of 4.11. My favorite was bagels/Kegels, from "Coda."

Each section has a few prose poems written in the second person, with the "you" seeming to be the same person as the "I" in the couplet poems. There's a lovely one about making a Cather pilgrimage to Red Cloud.

Couplets' fast start may have to do with its being a relatively undemanding read (relative to, say, Alice Notley or Rosmarie Waldrop) or with its having the narrative arc of a memoir/novel/autofiction, tracking the end of the speaker's long-term relationship with a man she has known since college out west and the growth of a relationship with a woman she has met in New York City. That relationship has ended, too, by the the end of Couplets, but the book's conclusion strikes a note of affirmation and gratitude for both relationships. 

I can see this being a hit with more ambitious book clubs. 

I wonder whether Millner will stick with poetry, though. I see her making a kind of Patricia Lockwood/Anne Boyer/Maggie Nelson move to prose. 

Brenda Shaughnessy, _Tanya_

 I HAVE WRITTEN a review of that, I hope, will appear in a more reputable blog, so rather than scoop myself here I will simply say, another good one by Brenda Shaughnessy--six in a row. Thank you, Brenda.

Geraldine Brooks, _Horse_

 IN AN APPENDIX to Paisley Rekdal's Appropriate, she provides a ten-point self-assessment for writers thinking of representing the perspective of a character whose identity the writer does not share. It is more elaborate than but essentially similar to Alexander Chee's three questions from "How to Unlearn Everything":

1. Why do you want to write from this character's point of view? 

2. Do you read writers from this community currently? 

3. Why do you want to tell this story? 

I imagine Geraldine Brooks's agent, editors, and publishers went over some of this ground with her as she was working on Horse, which relies heavily on the narrative perspective of two Black men. One, Jarret, is an enslaved teenager who is entrusted with the care of the legendary (and historical) 19th century racehorse Lexington; the other is Theo, a doctoral student in art history in our own time, who is studying surviving paintings of 19th century American racehorses, with particular attention to the Black grooms and trainers often painted alongside them. Theo's study of one particular painting leads him to the Smithsonian, where he meets Jess, an Australian zoologist-archaeologist and finds Lexington's preserved skeleton.

The novel has a five-page afterword that answers a lot of questions about Brooks's research into 19th century American horse-racing (her late husband, Tony Horwitz, was a specialist in the period), but does not discuss whatever self-examination she may have done about writing from the point of view of 19th or 21st century Black men.

Given the contemporary climate, though, she must have done some thinking about it, though, wouldn't you think? Especially given the circumstance that Theo is particularly interested in white artists' representations of Black personhood. Is that Brooks trying to disarm criticism? Or some kind of ironic joke?

I have no answers to these questions. They did make it hard to relax and enjoy the book, though. Still, Brooks's representation of Jarret's bond with Lexington has to be counted a success.

Paisley Rekdal, _Appropriate: A Provocation_

 APPROPRIATE PRESENTS ITSELF as a series of letters to a student in one of Rekdal's writing workshops. The student (who, we learn in the book's postscript, is a fictional composite, not an actual student) has submitted a piece in which she writes both from the perspective of her grandmother and from that off her  grandmother's Black caretaker. The other students in the workshop had some hard things to say about the writer's presuming to write from the perspective of the Black character. The student turns to Rekdal for some answers as to what is okay and what is not okay in writing from or about identities the writer does not belong to. Rekdal's letters are a careful, detailed, and expansive (194 pages) answer to this question. 

Rekdal revisits many of the more familiar examples of appropriation of an identity not the artists's own: William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt, Dana Schulz's painting Open Casket, Anders Carlson-Wee's "How-To." These analyses go along familiar lines; Rekdal does have some fresh and interesting things to say, though, about the poems of "Araki Yasusada," the Hiroshima survivor whose poems were likely in fact the work of American poet Kent Johnson (1955-2022). 

She never says so in so many words, but the book seems mainly about staying out of trouble. The book's format immediately called to my mind Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, evoking a comparison that could hardly go in Rekdal's favor. Rilke's short book is a classic discussion of the rewards and hazards of a life devoted to artistic creativity. A quick taste:

You must think that something is happening with you, that life hs not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

Rekdal, by contrast, tends to fall into the soporific cadences of an MLA resolution:

If we've become attuned to how politicians and writers use metaphor as ways to promote policies that have substantial negative effects, we've also used metaphor to contradict them. Our rejections of their appropriations have compelled us, generation by generation, to reimagine more nuanced and realistic language around bodily difference.

I daresay this book will inspire many fewer people to commit themselves to making art than Rilke's did. Even though the book is subtitled "A Provocation," it;'s hard to imagine anyone really being provoked by it.

Carolyn Gage, _The Second Coming of Joan of Arc_

 A FRIEND TIPPED me to this after learning of my abiding fascination with Joan. It's a one-performer play, a monologue by Joan in two acts (maybe an hour playing time?) in which she recounts her career from the beyond the grave.

Gage gives us a deliberately anachronistic Joan who makes her points with references to baseball and the Wizard of Oz and who from the outset relates the events of her life with a squarely feminist stance. By the end, she even sounds a bit like a lesbian separatist: "I realized that the closest I had ever come to any real sense of spirituality was alone with my voices, in nature, or in the company of other women." Sacrificing herself to save a tottering male monarch and strengthen belief in a patriarchal God was a mistake, she now thinks--she would have done better to stay at home in Domrémy with her best friend and occasional bed-partner, Hauviette.

The play is from 1988, and in relation to more contemporary thinking it might seem to be relying too much on essentialist conceptions of gender and reinforcing the gender binary. Joan's cross-dressing, in this play, is purely a practical matter of ease of movement and discouraging rape, not a matter of chosen identity. Joan as TERF? Gage dials down the visionary aspect as well.

Debatable interpretative points aside, though, Gage knows her history and has conjured up yet one more dramatically convincing Joan. 

Gary Indiana, _I Can Give You Anything But Love_

 READING COOKIE MUELLER inspired me to finally read this, which has been siting on the shelf since 2015--Mueller and Indiana ran in the same circles in New York City for a while.

I Can Give You Anything But Love is a memoir in sixteen chapters. The opening pages of each chapter describe Indiana's situation as he is drafting the book: on an extended visit to Havana, where he devotes a lot of the time when he is not working to Havana's pingueros. Although these passages were not the main draw of the book, they were brisk, vivid, and clear-eyed, not at all steeped in romanticism about the revolution or about Havana's pre-revolutionary bacchanal days. 

Indiana generally keeps romanticization at arm's length, whatever the topic, as you might guess from his title. Chapter 5 provides a good overview of why Indiana never went in for partnering-up, monogamy, fidelity, or any of our culture's most heavily-promoted versions of love. 

He devotes a chapter to his teenage years in New Hampshire and a chapter to his escape to San Francisco (he drops out of Berkeley just in time for the Summer of Love), but he writes mainly of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in Los Angeles and New York City. The book is reminiscent of Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: motley crews with big plans in theater, music, literature, or radical politics who are scraping by on various ill-paid work while devoting themselves to sex, drugs, and talk. 

Accordingly, the book might remind you of Rent (or La Bohème) save that it ends somewhat before AIDS began its ravages and, as mentioned already, Indiana is allergic to sentimentality. 

It ends, too, before Indiana has become a well known writer, as he subsequently did. This is a common pattern. Goethe, Yeats, André Gide, and Philip Roth all wrote autobiographies that wrap up right at the point where they are about to hit it big and become famous. Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth is the clearest example--it ends just when his writing career hits an absolute nadir.

Indiana is a much better writer than Murger, though--definitely more in the Gide or Auster class. Take this account of driving up to look at the famous Hollywood sign from behind:

   I often found myself driving on an unpaved access road that slithered along ridges hemmed with pines and juniper bushes to a flat, dusty plateau right below the observatory on Mount Lee. There was an outcrop  of jagged travertine with caves woven through it. Sometimes I walked around in the caves, through puddles of bat guano, wary of rattlesnakes. Around a bend in the road, the reverse of the Hollywood sign came into view, the letters, held up on charred diagonal pylons, a bricolage of white-painted metal sheets pocked with bullet holes. The ledge the sign perched on revealed a startling panorama, the city spread out like an endless construction site sprinkled with talcum power.

Damn. That is good writing, and also indicative of Indiana's skepticism about façades, whether of structures or of institutions or of people. Some unnamed-but-recognizable folks get some venomous dismissals--William Vollman ("Nothing he wrote could possibly interest an adult for longer than ten minutes") or Joyce Carol Oates ("a twaddle factory"), and some named ones (Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, David Lynch) fare only a little better. Hemingway comes in for some cudgeling, and The Great Gatsby "is often mistaken for a great novel because it can be read in a few hours and its characters are rich people who come to a bad end." (I might point out that the novel's richest people, the Buchanans, seem to get off lightly.)

I am so impressed by Indiana's writing that I want to read more, but most of his fiction seems to be of the noir variety, whose charms elude me. (Indiana prefers Simenon to Camus.) Well, we'll see. 

Gene Luen Yang, _Boxers_ and _Saints_

 SAD TO SAY, all I knew of the Boxer Rebellion before  reading these graphic novels was what I had gathered as an 11-year-old from a comic book based on Thirty Days in Peking, a schlocky Hollywood historical epic starring Charlton Heston--which was probably worse than knowing nothing at all.

So, I picked this up not only because I was impressed by Yang's previous book, the graphic memoir American Born Chinese, but also just to make up for some gaps in my own historical knowledge. Turned out, there was also a Joan of Arc bonus.

The Boxer Rebellion was not only an uprising against the European colonizing presence, the "foreign devils," but also a sort of civil war, since the Boxers also declared war on the Chinese who made alliance with the foreign devils by, e.g., converting to Christianity. Yang cannily gives us two stories. Little Bao is a young villager who, inspired by stories of the gods and demi-gods of Chinese mythology, learns martial arts and joins the uprising. Four-Girl, who takes the baptismal name Vibiana, finds in Christianity a kind of sanctuary from her brutal upbringing, and is inspired to protect her new community by the example of...Joan of Arc.

Little Bao's and Vibiana's stories intersect in a couple of spots, accidentally when they are children and then dramatically when Little Bao's campaign takes him to the mission compound where Vibiana lives and works.

Yang's spare, unfussy style works as well here as it did in American Born Chinese. Historical graphic fiction creates an impulse, I suspect, to go into maniacal detail about buildings, armor, dress, and such, but Yang did well to keep things clean.

The greatest success of the two stories, though, is Yang's ability to convey the spiritual reality of the two characters, different as those spiritual realities are. He makes the divinities of the two characters as real for the reader as they are for his characters.

Marie-Claire Bancquart, _Anatole France: Polémiste_

 I WAS CURIOUS to see what people made of Anatole France's biography of Joan of Arc and came across this substantial volume (680 pages) from 1962. 

Bancquart's book is a thorough examination of how France's essays and fictions worked as interventions in the cultural politics of the Third Republic, basically on the socialist-republican-secularist side of things. 

The Joan of Arc biography gets a whole chapter, forty pages. I learned that France had written several essays and articles on Joan and her historical context in the thirty years or so before the volume was published, many of which were incorporated into the book, but which France did not always revise as carefully as he should have to achieve consistency in the portrait of Joan. Bancquart does a nice job of exposing the archaeological strata of the book, so to speak, showing how it reflects the evolution of France's idea of Joan over the years. 

By the time the book was published, the climate created by the Dreyfus Affair (what Bancquart calls "la Revolution Dreyfusienne") made it seem urgent to debunk Joan's claims to being a visionary and a nationalist icon--hence France's Joan leaning a bit more towards that of Voltaire than that of Michelet.. France's tendency to see Joan as  delusional and as manipulated by powerful courtiers derived mainly, Bancquart argues, from his campaign to help reason prevail over religion, science over superstition, republicanism over monarchy. Bancquart suggests that the needs of France's polemic lead him to do less than full justice to Joan, however comprehensible his motivations were. 

I also had a look at her  discussion of my favorite France novel, Les Dieux Ont Soif, and I thought it made a lot of sense. Politically progressive though France was, he had some misgivings about the way political enthusiasm can fall into the same pitfalls as religious fanaticism, and Bancquart does a neat job of showing how Evariste Gamelin exemplifies exactly that problem.

Rick Perlstein,, _The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan_

THIS IS THE third in Perlstein's quartet of detailed histories (this one is 800 pages) attempting to answer the question, "Given Goldwater's crushing defeat in 1964 and Nixon's humiliating disgrace in Watergate, how did Reagan and the Republicans nonetheless prevail in 1980 and reorient American politics?"

The broad answers are not too surprising: on the one hand, ressentiment, especially in but not confined to the South, over the progress made by the civil rights movement; on the other, anxiety throughout the middle classes over cultural change (women in the workplace, legal abortion, shifting attitudes about sexuality and religion). Right-wing hawks' dismay over Henry Kissinger's attempts to relax Cold War tensions with the USSR and China also played a part, but otherwise it's the same basic formula for right wing political success that we see now.

The delight of Perlstein's books is in the grain of the detail. I was alive and paying (I thought) relatively close attention to events during the years covered here, 1972-76, but Perlstein has an uncanny ability to recreate the mood of any moment: the return of the prisoners of war from Vietnam, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and her brief career as a revolutionary, Squeaky Fromme, Fanne Foxe, Jaws, the dawn of the textbook wars, the impossible-to-foresee emergence of Jimmy Carter...it's all vividly, palpably here. 

And I had no idea the 1976 Republican convention was as dramatic as Perlstein shows it to have been, nor how obvious it was, even in defeat, that Reagan was the coming man.

The fourth volume--Reaganland--was published in 2020, and I will pick it up as soon as I feel brave enough to re-live the Carter years. 

Nick Drnaso, _Acting Class_

 HAPPY HALLOWE’EN! IF you are seeking something disturbing, you might try this.

Ten people—some of whom are related to or acquainted with each other, but who are for the most part strangers—all sign up for a free acting class at a local community center. All ten are at or nearing an impasse of some sort: an overwhelmed single mother, a grandmother looking after a granddaughter whose mental health is precarious, a couple whose marriage is failing, people in dead-end jobs. Everyone is a bit needy, a bit vulnerable, and each is looking for something different, some sort of jump start into a better or more fulfilling or at least more interesting life.

The class’s teacher, John, leads them into ever more elaborate improv scenarios, some of which involve new locations and turn out to last longer than expected, some of which take on an eerie feel, as though they were a group hallucination, or drug trip, or even as though they were being led to the threshold of some portal to a different reality. The neediest and most vulnerable, as it happens, are given the most powerful; fantasies (if that is what they are) and buy in the most deeply.

Four of the ten opt out, leave the class, but six opt in and board a van for…what? A new life in a new town? A cult? John tells one of the opters-out that he is “just a recruiter.” But for what? Something he calls “the real work.” Are the four missing out of some unutterable transformation? Or have they narrowly escaped some terrible exploitation? We don’t know.

Disturbing. But memorable.

Drnaso’s style in this book aligns closely with that of his last, Sabrina. A color palette that leans heavily on brown, gray, and beige; rectilinear, almost featureless interiors; characters whose eyes, noses, and mouths look a lot like each other’s, leaving the shape and color of their hair as the main clue to their identity. The style is spookily fitting for the story, actuality mapping without much difference onto dream, and good dreams not quickly distinguishable from nightmares.

Matthew Zapruder (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _The Best American Poetry 2022_

 I FAILED AGAIN in my annual quest to read one year's BAmPo before the next year's was published; the 2023 volume appeared in September, and I was only a few pages into this one.

What is up with that, by the way? How can this be the best American poetry of 2022 if it appeared when there were still four months left of 2022? Strictly speaking, this should be called 75 Excellent American Poems from the Last Half of 2021 and the First Half of 2022. Awkward, I know, but more accurate.

The poetry is this volume is right down the middle of the plate, we might say, not unlike Mr. Zapruder's own work: leaning heavily towards personal anecdote, language generally plain with lyrical flashes, occasional shadows cast by events in the wider world (the lockdown, the wildfires in California, Black Lives Matter).

I noted with interest that the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day site is well-represented--eight poems, more I think than any other single source.

The individual poems I think I will remember longest are Diane Seuss's "Modern Poetry" (about college classes she took on that subject--judging from the reading list, Seuss and I must be near exact contemporaries) and Michael Robins's "The Remaining Facts," about his wife's sudden death while she was on an out-of-town trip, an event the poem never directly mentions.

Cookie Mueller, _Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories_

 I LEARNED OF this through a very positive review in the LRB a while back. Cookie Mueller was, among other things, an actress; she appeared in several John Waters films. She also wrote strikingly non-judgmental advice column in the East Village Eye and a column for Details magazine.

This volume collects some of the columns and a few short stories, but for the most part it is autobiographical essays about Mueller's life and adventures growing up in Baltimore, making the scene in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, working with John Waters, and making the scene in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She died in 1989 at age 40, of "AIDS-related complications," according to the "about the author" note.

Mueller seems to have lived fairly impulsively, in regards to travel, work, sex, pharmaceuticals, and so on--the sort of person who "always took candy from strangers," as Keith Richards put it in "Happy." The stories consequently reflect some very dicey situations ("Narcotics," "Abduction and Rape--Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland, 1969"), but even though the whole book is a walk on the wild side, Mueller maintains a witty, matter-of-fact tone and wry humor, as when her efforts to revive a friend who has overdosed in a bathroom are constantly interrupted by a partygoer outside the door who keeps demanding he be allowed in to urinate ("Sam's Party--Lower East Side, 1979"). The revived person then complains that his friends did not remove his sharkskin suit before they dunked him in a tub of cold water. 

The literature of transgression is vast, but we might draw a line between that written by people who write about it freshly, memorably, and vividly (Genet, say) and those whose experiences are outrageous but whose sentences are pedestrian. Mueller could really write.

"I lived there with my pet monkey who liked cockroaches. He used to scan the fabric walls for them. When he saw one from all the way across the room with his primate super X-ray vision, he'd swing the distance on the ceiling pipes and deftly scoop up the bug with one hand, pop it in his mouth, and swing back to the curtain rod window perch where he lived. He was a good pet."

Robert Southey, _Joan of Arc_

 A GREAT FRIEND of Wordsworth and Coleridge, among other literary figures, and Poet Laureate of Great Britain in the latter part of his career, Southey wrote this epic poem in six weeks when he was twenty. It was published a couple of years later, in 1796. De Quincey recommended regarding Joan of Arc as juvenilia, a remark which seemed to me a rude dismissal, but now that I have read part of the poem (the beginning and the end, basically), I would call it charitable, in that it suggests Southey went on to do much better things.

 Joan of Arc is cringe-inducing. Right out of the gate, Southey takes considerable liberties with Joan's history. He begins with Joan encountering Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, on her way to Charles VII's court at Chinon (didn't happen). They exchange stories; Joan tells Dunois that though she was born in Domrémy, she was raised in Harfleur (not true) and that her father was fatally injured in Henry V of England's taking of that city (nope). Joan was subsequently raised by hermit in the woods, who happens to be a herbalist healer (WTF?). 

I looked ahead to learn that the poem ends with the Battle of Patay (at which Joan was actually not present) and the coronation of Charles. That is, Joan's capture, trial, and martyrdom--for me, the most heroic part of her story--are left out of Southey's poem.

On top of that, the writing is clunky and wheezing, sub-sub-Milton.

At length I heard of Orleans, by the foe
Wall'd in from human succour; to the event
All look'd with fear, for there the fate of France
Hung in the balance.

However...the first half of Book II was written mostly by Coleridge, and it is fascinating. Coleridge is (I think) trying to answer the question of where Joan's voices came from, and he works around, in his Unitarian/pantheist/metaphysics-drenched Coleridgean way,  to the idea that they came from Being itself, which he does not shy away from explaining :

          Others boldlier think
That as one body is the aggregate 
Of atoms numberless, each organiz'd
So by a strange and dim similitude, 
Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds
Form one all-conscious spirit, who directs
With absolute ubiquity of thought
All  his competent monads, that yet seem
with various province and apt agency
Each to pursue its self-centering end.       

Thus my man Sam.  This was the spirit Joan heard. Coleridge wraps up his contribution with a stirring and utterly idiosyncratic hymn of praise:

 "Glory to thee, FATHER of Earth and Heaven!
All conscious PRESENCE of the Universe!
Nature's vast ever-acting ENERGY!
In will, in deed, IMPULSE of All to all,
Whether thy LAW with unrefracted Ray
Beam on the PROPHET'S purged Eye, or if
Distressing Realms the ENTHUSIAST wild of thought
Scatter new frenzies of the infected Throng,
THOU Both inspiring, and predooming Both,
Fit INSTRUMENTS and best of perfect END.
Glory to thee, Father of Earth and Heaven!"

Whew! Unfortunately, Southey decided to remove all of Coleridge's contribution to Book II when Joan of Arc was republished in 1798. I don't know why--perhaps he decided it did not match the rest of the poem (it doesn't, being much more interesting) or perhaps the friendship was on the rocks. Coleridge had ill-advisedly married the sister of Southey's wife, and the marriage did not go well. Hats off to editor Lynda Pratt for including both the 1796 and the 1798 texts in this handy first volume of Southey's Poetical Works, published by Pickering and Chatto in 2004.

                                                                                    

Romain Rolland, _Péguy_

 HAVING NOW READ Charles Péguy's fascinating but highly idiosyncratic play Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc, I have been looking for help in understanding what Péguy may have been up to, and found this two-volume study by another important French writer not much talked about in the USA, Romain Rolland. 

I've just been looking at Rolland's Wikipedia entry. I knew he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1915) and that his chief work was a roman-fleuve in ten books titled Jean-Christophe (about a Beethoven-inspired German composer, but set in the early 20th century), but I had not read a word of him, nor did I know that he was a highly active in politics as he was--a defender of Stalin right through the 1930s, for instance, and a very vocal anti-fascist. But he also corresponded with Freud and with Richard Strauss, and had a part in expanding the renown of Swami Vivekananda. Interesting person. 

Péguy was published in 1944, thirty years after its subject's death, and in the year of Rolland's own death. (I haven't found out where Rolland was during the war...Switzerland, perhaps? Hard to imagine him being welcome in Vichy France.) It's a biography, in a way, but also in a way a memoir, since Rolland was a long time friend and associate of Péguy, and also to some extent a critical analysis of Péguy's chief works, and also a bit of a contextualizing of that work within the intellectual climate of France in the early 20th century.

I have not read (and probably will not read) the whole thing, but the discussion of Mystère de la Charité was substantial, about twenty pages, and worthwhile. I don't know how orthodox Rolland's reading his, but he sees Jeanne as an embodiment of authentic Christianity debating and winning a debate with the Church, as embodied by Mme. Gervaise. Christianity is true, is real, but its chief steward, the Roman Catholic Church, has been remiss, half-hearted, compromised...and has been so from the very beginning, as one of Jeanne's chief points is that Peter and the other disciples' abandonment of Jesus during his trial was cowardly and inexcusable.

Jeanne is sure that she would not have abandoned Jesus--"Moi, je suis sûre que je ne l'aurais abandonné"--and Rolland emphasizes that Péguy writes that Jeanne says this humbly, "humblement." 

"Humility in pride--or all armors, the most unbreakable [I am translating Rolland here]. Whatever Mme Gervaise may say, she is vanquished, and she knows it. Joan has stripped her implacably of all her veils, one after the other, of her eyes-shut optimism: she is forced to see in its bare reality the wretchedness of the world, the suffering of the world, the christianity that has sunk into perdition...her resistance is futile, her denials also. [..] Joan, weary, dismisses her with a brusque 'Adieu.' This young girl has sent packing that imperious woman. And that woman lets herself be dismissed, without protest."

And it's at this moment that Péguy gives Joan a vision of Orléans. 

Rachel Cusk, _Second Place_

ODD TO SAY, but this novel seemed to me like a long-delayed sequel to Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God (1930). 

As Lewis saw the history of western art, for long centuries artists—painters, composers, sculptors, poets—had been seen as skilled craftsmen whose main work was to celebrate whatever those rich enough to hire them—the church and the nobility—wished to have celebrated (mainly themselves, their learning, their piety, etc.). This may not have been exactly the work the artists would have chosen to do, but they at least made a living.

Along came the French Revolution, the Romantic cult of the genius, etc. Now the bourgeois have all the money; they are the ones who can afford to award commissions to produce artistic celebrations of whatever they want celebrated. In the meantime, though, the cultural prestige of art has risen considerably.   Being Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Beethoven is a much bigger deal than being a pope, or the earl of something, or even a king, and certainly a bigger deal than being a railroad magnate. 

So, according to Lewis, by the 1920s the bourgeoisie don’t want to commission art. They want to be artists. They want to hang out with artists, be recognized by artists as artists, have their work exhibited or published or performed alongside those of real artists. In the 600-something pages of The Apes of God, he dissects how dire a situation this bourgeois envy of creativity produces for actual art and actual artists.

Cusk’s novel is a good deal more focused, at 180 pages, and a good deal more sympathetic to the bourgeois desire to connect to art, but it describes the same situation. In a brief note at the end, Cusk explains that the novel was inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, about a short but dreadful period of providing D. H. Lawrence with a place to live and work.

Luhan may have been hoping for some kind of recognition of her intellectual acumen from Lawrence, or gratitude, or just a feeling of being taken seriously. She gets nothing of the kind—nor does the narrator of Second Place get anything of the kind from L, the painter whom she allows to take up residence in a small extra house on her property. L. seems to resent the narrator’s wealth, or his dependence upon it, or perhaps is frustrated by the ebbing of his own career, but however we account for the tension, it goes from bad to worse to horrible.

As in a Wyndham Lewis novel, no one comes off well. The narrator does at least get to something that sounds like self-understanding near the end:

I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

Even those “momentary flashes of insight” may be just wishful thinking, though. And L—though we may well be a brilliant painter—just seems like a grouchy, entitled pain in the ass.

Wondering whether to resume reading Jonathan Franzen’s _Crossroads_

 I WAS READING this in the summer of 2022; I got to p. 242 and just ran out of gas.

The novel is set in a Midwestern suburb at the early end of the 1970s, and “Crossroads” is the name of a church youth group that looms large in the lives of the novel’s main characters. Russ Hildebrandt is a senior pastor at the church (unspecified mainline Protestant) where the Crossroads group meets, but he has been excluded from its activities for being too perceptibly covetous of an assistant pastor’s standing as guru of the group. One of his sons, Clem, belonged to the group but is now in college; sister Becky and brother Perry are current members. Then there is Mom, Marion, and another son, still in grade school.

I stopped reading because each of the Hildebrandts is profoundly unappealing. I know that is wrong of me, having spent much of my career trying to cajole students out of “hating” a book because they find its characters unsympathetic. The Hildebrandts are not anguished like Raskolnikov, though, or perverse but articulate like Valmont or Humbert Humbert, or scrappy and unscrupulous like Becky Sharp. They are just selfish and obtuse in humdrum ways.

Reverend Russ is trying to start an affair with a divorced congregant. Chip off the old block Becky is trying to undermine Crossroads’ most charismatic male’s relationship with his girlfriend. Perry sells pot to middle schoolers. Meanwhile, other Hildebrandts have consciences that are, if anything, overactive. Marion is tying herself in knots over an episode of promiscuity that happened before her marriage to Russ. Clem has decided his student exemption from the draft is unwarranted class privilege, so he has dropped out and promptly informed his draft board.

So, once again, Franzen is interested in knotty ethics questions (see Purity and Freedom) and middle class American families that are a good deal more messed-up than appearances suggest (see all his other novels).

But, thanks to Kevin Kruse, I now wonder whether Franzen is exploring one of the more interesting cultural questions of US history in the second half of the 20th century: that is, how did mainline Protestantism collapse? For most of American history, it defined the mainstream of American spiritual life, and in the mid-1950s seemed more dominant than ever. Now, it seems defined by big empty downtown churches with aging congregations while the evangelicals are power brokers in the Republican party. 

The early 1970s might just be a crucial breaking point, and the Hildebrandts might be an insight into why things broke the way they did. I’m just about persuadedI should pick it up again.

Sam Riviere, _Dead Souls_

SO MANY NOVELS of late have no table of contents. This bothers me.  The new Zadie Smith novel, for instance (which I am enjoying very much so far), has chapters that are both numbered and titled and moreover divided into eight "volumes" (not literally--it's all one book). all these carefully designated parts, but no table of contents. Frustrating.

Poet Sam Riviere's first novel has a table of contents, I am pleased to report, one I found myself consulting frequently, and moreover has one in spite of the fact that it has no chapters, not even divisions indicated by blank pages or extra spacing. In fact, his novel is all one paragraph from beginning to end. By having recourse to the table of contents, however, a reader can quickly locate the pages on which one or another character had been mentioned earlier--an indispensable aid, given the monolithic presentation of the text.

Riviere thus had me as an ally before his novel even commenced, and everything after that confirmed me a stalwart in his camp. For one thing, the novel is very reminiscent of the work of Thomas Bernhard. This could have gone very wrong, of course, but here it is skillfully sustained. 

For another, the writing is consistently surprising, keen-eyed, and even graceful (even when it goes in for some of the intentionally graceless Bernhardian effects, á la Correction). 

Best of all, the novel, even given its swirly four-in-the-morning surrealist streaks, persuasively presents the world of contemporary poetry. The (unnamed) narrator is a poet, or former poet, who edits a literary quarterly and whose duties have  taken him to the Literature Zone of the Festival of Culture taking place at the Royal Festival Hall. All of which suggests that poetry is a matter of crucial, even central cultural significance and is lavishly supported...which it is, in a way. At the Festival, everyone is gossiping about the disgrace of poet Solomon Wiese, who has been caught plagiarizing and has also been bad boyfriend. All of which suggests that poetry is just a tiny, spiteful coterie of people relentlessly undermining each other while pursuing an activity no one else in the world cares about...which is also true, in a way. Riviere convincingly portrays poetry's' paradoxical situation of somehow being quite important and not at all important at the very same time.

Soon the narrator finds Solomon Wiese himself, and we get his story--as well as some stories within his story, and stories within those stories, in a delightfully Bernhardian matryoshka doll of a novel.If I were a graduate student still, I would diagram them all out for you...but I'm not, so I won't.

Dead Souls reminded me of Douglas Kearney's Optic Subwoof, very different book though that is (not a novel, for one thing), in that it gives a sense of the contemporary Anglophone poetry world that is wickedly funny and irreverent while also being lucid and earnest. 

Kevin Kruse, _One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America_

 I AM OLD enough to have been in school when the Supreme Court decided prayer in public school was unconstitutional. In first grade, we had a prayer at the start of the day, right alongside the Pledge of Allegiance, and the occasional Bible story along with our mid-morning milk and graham crackers. In second grade...no prayer, no Bible stories. I didn't miss either, and my parents did not seem at all bothered by the change, but the outcry in other households was loud enough to get a movement for a constitutional amendment started.

Kevin Kruse explains that the loudness of the outcry had a lot to do with the wall of separation between church and state having been shaved down to wafer thinness during the Eisenhower years, the years when "In God We Trust" officially became the U.S. motto and the phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance. Attending "the church of your choice," as the slogan of the time put it, became almost a civic duty. The Supreme Court decision on school prayer was the first check the 1960s delivered to this steady incursion of religiosity into public life...but not the last. 

Behind this incursion, Kruse argues (and his subtitle indicates), was "corporate America," or more precisely what he calls "Christian libertarianism," i.e., the idea that capitalism and Christianity were perfectly congruent with each other, even uniquely well-suited for each other. This idea, he explains, arose in the 1930s as a way to muster public opinion against the New Deal, but only really took off in the Cold War. Since communism was atheistic, capitalism must be Christian. Americans and their allies must be the new Chosen People; God must be in favor of free markets and opposed to unions and minimum wage laws.

Kruse does not look closely into what these arguments looked like, but one has to wonder. Both the Old and the New Testaments urge relieving the poor and scorn the accumulation of riches as a vanity. How do you get an ally of capitalism out of that? Ayn Rand's ruthless atheistic materialism seems a better match, really. It must have required fancy footwork.

In an interesting irony, as Kruse makes clear, the crucial opposition that arrested the progress of the school prayer amendment was not the ACLU or secularists, but the churches themselves--not just the non-Christian faiths, but the National Council of Churches, the  Roman Catholic church, and even the Southern Baptist Convention. Why? Because they saw, as Tocqueville saw back in 1830s, that the separation of church and state was the best ally American religion ever had.

School prayer has never come back, but Kruse traces the many ways the idea that the USA ought to be officially Christian continued to influence our politics fro the 1970s forward--the prayer breakfasts, the photographs with Billy Graham, the inescapable "God bless America" at the end of presidential speeches. 

Anatole France, _Vie de Jeanne d'Arc_

 I SUSPECT THERE is an interesting short book to be written on Joan of Arc and the communal imagination of the Third Republic. Péguy on the one hand, the Action Française on another, and then this extraordinary production. 

When I first saw references to a book by France on Joan, I assumed it was some brief but pointed skewering of medieval superstition and the nationalist right. No...not at all. It's a full-dress biography, two volumes, close to a thousand pages all told. Its general tendency is to debunk, and France gets off several poison-tipped ironies against the church and the monarchists, but it is not dismissive. In places, he even does his best to imagine his way into the mind of a person of the 15th century. 

He must have been working on this book about the same time as Mark Twain was working on his, and as in Twain's case, it's fun to see the hard-headed, satirical de-bunker unable to stop himself from falling in love with Joan.

I am going to attempt a translation of a passage from France's generous (80-page) preface (this is on page LXV):

While under influences it is impossible for us now to identify precisely, the thought came to her to re-establish the dauphin in his rightful inheritance, and that thought seemed to her so great, so beautiful, that, in the simplicity of her naive and candid pride, she believed it had been the angels and saints of Heaven who had brought it to her. For that thought, she gave her life. And that is how she survived her own cause. The highest enterprises perish in their defeat, and perish even more thoroughly in their victory. The devotion that inspired them remains behind, an immortal example. And, if it was an illusion that surrounded her senses and sustained her, helped her to offer herself entirely, was that illusion not, without her knowing it, the creation of her own heart? Her folly was wiser than wisdom [Sa folie fut plus sage que la sagesse], for it was the folly of martyrdom, without which men have founded nothing  great and useful in this world. Cities, empires, republics, lie atop sacrifice. It is not, accordingly, without reason and justice that, transformed by imaginations of enthusiasts, she has become the symbol of the fatherland [patrie] in arms.

Whenever I read Anatole France, I am again surprised that he is not better known nowadays in the USA.What a writer. And he was Bergotte, after all. 

Susan Jacoby, _Why Baseball Matters_

 FROM 2018, A volume in the Yale University Press's "Why X Matters" series. Judging from the other chosen topics in the series--poetry, the museum, dance (the high art kind), Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, the New Deal, the Dreyfus Affair--the secret name of the series must be "Why X Still Matters Even Though It Gets a Lot Less Attention Than It Used to." I have read only this volume in the series, but I would venture that the slightly defensive, somewhat curmudgeonly note audible in Jacoby's book recurs in other contributions to the series. (In the case of Adam Kirsch's book on Lionel Trilling, that note is probably a low hum from beginning to end.)

Jacoby concedes that some of the complaints about baseball have merit--that it is has lost the interest of Blacks in the USA, that it is not doing enough to interest the young, that it continues to exclude women from visible roles. She is decidedly testy, though, about the complaint that it is too slow and that games take too long. 

All the suggestions for speeding things up, like the pitch clock or starting extra innings with a free runner on second base, she dismisses with what Albert O. Hirschman, in The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the "Futility Thesis" and the "Jeopardy Thesis"--that is, arguments that the proposed change (1) would not achieve its end and (2) would damage baseball. 

Five years on from the year she published her book, with both of those rule changes now in effect, I wonder...does she still think they are wrong? Most fans seem to have accepted them, and most of those I talk to are a bit grateful that games are running closer to two-and-a-half hours than three.

There is plenty to like in the book, though. Jacoby explains the genesis of her love of baseball well and does a fine job of explaining the uniqueness of the sport (leaning a bit on Roger Angell). I loved her account of the climactic game of the 1986 National League Championship Series. She wasn't there--she was watching it on TV, as I was--but the peculiar rhythms of remote spectatorship are certainly a part of baseball, and she renders them beautifully.

Robyn Schiff, _Information Desk_

 I WAS READING, or perhaps listening to, something by Rebecca Solnit recently--can't quite recall exactly what--in which she mentioned in passing that there were more museum workers in the USA than there were coal miners. Her point was that while coal miners are often taken to represent the core of the United States working class (as in that "Rich Men North of Richmond" song, for example), there are actually not all that many of them. And she is right, according to what I turned up on Google: there are currently about 38,000 coal miners and about 93,000 museum workers. Our whole picture of who the American working class is may be long out of date.

Coal mining is more difficult and dangerous than working in a museum, I imagine--better paid, too, no doubt, since coal miners have a well-established union. It's harder work than an 8-hour shift of telling people, "step back from the paintings, please." There's something to be said, though, for Solnit's suggestion that we update and revise our notion of who the working class is. The young person at the Information Desk with the bright smile and professional manner and (perhaps) an MFA does not seem to have stepped out of of a Dorothea Lange photo, but he or she too is a member of the working class.

Hence I see it as a helpful thing that the museum is getting more attention as a setting for fiction. There have long been examples in youth literature--Milan Trenc's The Night at the Museum and E. L. Konigsburg's classic From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler--but now we also have Cate Dicharry's The Fine Art of Fucking Up and Lucy Ives's Impossible Views of the World.

And now there is even an epic poem: Robyn Schiff's Information Desk. Schiff really was a museum worker for much of her twenties, staffing the Information Desk at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Not a curator, or a fundraiser, or a restorer, or a cataloguer...she's just one of the many ordinary workers interacting with the public as the public digests the accumulated treasures of several thousand years' worth of human achievement. 

No one is going to ask her opinions of those accumulated treasures, but she has some, to be sure, and also some opinions on how he treasures were accumulated, be it by imperial sway, robber baron largesse, or just plain old plunder. Information Desk conveys all that in supple, musical, but well-pointed verse.

Anyone really interested in trying to figure out the role of wealth and power in what we see, read, think, and are expected to value would be much better off skipping "Rich Men North of Richmond" and instead reading Information Desk.

It's a masterpiece.

Yaa Gyasi, _Homegoing_

This novel reminded me of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, in which one sister decides to pass as white while the other lives as Black. Bennett may have been in part inspired by Gyasi’s novel, which came out five years ahead of hers—but who knows. Great idea, in any case.

Bennett’s novel stays focused on the two sisters for the whole novel, though, while Gyasi’s covers an immense range of time. The novel begins in the 18th century in the territory that is now Ghana. In the first two chapters, we meet Effia and Esi, who are half-sisters but do not know each other. Effia marries a British officer involved in the slave trade; Esi is captured, enslaved, and shipped to North America.

Rather than staying with the two half-sisters, though, the next pair of chapters are about their adult offspring. Then the next pair are about their grandchildren. And so on, each pair of chapters moving on to the next generation, until we arrive roughly at nowadays, and one of Effia’s descendants meets one of Esi’s descendants, and they fall in love.

A lovely ending, but most of the novel is about trauma, with the trauma of the enslaved worse than that of the colonized, but not by all that much. 

Gyasi's conception of contrasting the stories of one branch of a family that ended up enslaved with the stories of another branch that did not is bold and original. Likewise bold and original was the attempt to cover so many generations in a novel of moderate length.

What I missed, though, was that sense of investment in a character (or a few characters) that is one of the usual rewards of novel-reading. Several of the characters were particularly intriguing (e.g., Quey, Kojo, Akua, H), but once their 20-page chapter was concluded, they were whisked offstage and scarcely even referred to again. This created a kind of rhythm of delight then disappointment in my reading of the novel.

Gyasi could not have satisfied my interest in these characters without making her novel two or three tines longer than it was, and I can see how that might have been impracticable. Still, I did miss that sense of investment in a character, and that wound up being the dominant note in the impression the book made on me.

Jules Michelet, _Joan of Arc_, trans. Albert Guérard

EVEN WITHOUT THE benefit of modern scholarship, this is one of the best books on Joan,  I'd say. Michelet did not actually publish it as a book; it's an excerpt from his multi-volume history of France, deftly translated and presented by Albert Guérard.

As a historian, Michelet was of the republican tradition and as such no ally of the church, but he had a soft spot for Joan. His narration of her career begins: 

Joan’s eminent originality was her common sense.  This set her apart from the multitude of enthusiasts who, in ages of ignorance, have swayed the masses. In most cases, they derived their power from some dark contagious force of unreason. Her influence, on the contrary, was due to the clear light she was able to throw upon an obscure situation, through the unique virtue of her good sense and of her loving heart.

Michelet sought to reclaim Joan from the obscurantist pope-and-king element that were then re-fashioning her for propaganda purposes--a trend that continued right through the Dreyfus Affair, the collaborationist Vichy government (ironically enough), and Marine Le Pen in our own time. I guess we have to say he did not entirely succeed, given the depth to which right wing claws are still sunk in the image of the Maid of Orléans, but one is grateful the attempt was made.