Lan Samantha Chang, _All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost_

 About thirty years ago, there was a nasty splash in poetry world when Jorie Graham, one of the judges of the National Poetry Series, selected for the honor a volume by one of her own students, Mark Levine. Rumor had it Graham and Levine had had an affair as well. On the Richter scale of scandal, it came in well under Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding or the O. J. trial, but given that American poetry is a pretty calm pond most of the time, it felt like a big deal.

Levine was Graham's student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so when I learned that Lan Samantha Chang, currently director at the Workshop, had written a novel seemingly inspired by l'affaire Graham, I wanted to read it.

No copies of the novel are available in my town, but interlibrary loan came through, and a copy arrived from ... Coralville Public Library (rim shot). Ha! Coralville is a small town adjacent to Iowa City, home of the Workshop.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost  does not really feel like a roman á clef, though. It's more as though Chang took the crucial event--teacher has affair with student, then as judge in a contest gives him a big prize--and then imagined her own set of circumstances and consequences around it. Miranda Sturgis--famous, charismatic, demanding, dead earnest--could be a portrait of Graham, but she could pass for Lucie Brock-Broido as well, or the Annie Dillard we meet in Alexander Chee's essays. Roman Morris could be Mark Levine, but he comes across as a fairly typical cocky young male aspiring poet. 

Most of the novel is about how Roman takes advantage of his early career break to get a great job, more prizes, and a secure reputation while tromping on the feelings of those who love him: Miranda, his wife Lucy, his son Aidan, his friend and former fellow student Bernard.

Bernard is as monkishly, single-mindedly devoted to the ideal of poetry as Roman is to his careerist ambitions, and the contrast in their fortunes (Bernard dies in poverty before the masterpiece to which he has devoted his life is published) seems to be the point of the novel. 

In a lot of ways, it seems to be a novel about being a poet that only a novelist would write. Compared to Sam  Riviere's Dead Souls, it feels like a Lifetime movie.

William Allen White, _A Most Lamentable Comedy_

 A SHORT NOVEL, just under a hundred pages, included in a volume titled Stratagems and Spoils, published by Scribner's in 1901. I obtained a copy to read through the good offices of interlibrary loan (thank you, Sioux Falls College Library).

I know about this thanks to Thomas Frank's The People, No, which I hope to be blogging about before too long. Frank's book argues that the the term "populism" is routinely misused and that the American political movement known as Populism has been routinely misunderstood. Case in point: this work of fiction by legendary Kansas journalist William Allen White. It was news to me that White wrote fiction, so Frank inspired me to check it out.

The main character in "A Most Lamentable Comedy" is Dan Gregg, a village atheist type who discovers an ability to articulate popular resentment of bankers and financiers, despite a very slender understanding of how banking and finance actually work. Gregg's Will-Rogers-as-Marxist schtick gets him elected governor, at which point he soon finds himself involved with a crowd of corrupt fixers who take advantage of his naïveté. He is turned out at the next election, which he is convinced was fraudulent, and returns to his village and his wife.

Frank cites the novel as an example of how the Populists were caricatured as ignorant and demagogic even though they were nothing of the kind. It's an excellent example.

As a journalist's fiction, "A Most Lamentable Comedy" put me in mind of the fiction of the late Tom Wolfe: full of sharply-drawn representative types, satire of fashionable ideas, and an interest in the turning of the wheels of power, without much nuance as to character or setting or narrative modalities.  The book's preface, in which White sees his fiction, in its attention to the actual, as a departure from prevailing models of romance and domestic realism, likewise reminded me of the essays Wolfe occasionally published about why the contemporary novel should devote itself more to the mechanics of power, social and political, and less to the sort of thing they were encouraging in MFA writing programs. 

I wouldn't call Wolfe's fiction insightful about its times, though, entertaining though it often was, and I think Frank is right that White's fiction is not that insightful either. 

Still, White was famous for  his opposition to the KKK--I wonder whether he wrote any fiction about that?

Chuck Palahniuk, _Fight Club_

 HOW CAN THIS NOVEL be 27 years old this year? That means I must be...never mind.

So...one of our senior majors is writing her thesis on this novel. I suppose you already know that the novel's darkly charismatic anarcho-pugilist, Tyler Durden, turns out to an alternate identity of the put-upon, pushed-around, and nameless narrator, who may be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. At times, he "becomes" Tyler, without realizing it, and as Tyler he has an affair with a woman named Marla Singer, starts Fight Clubs, makes soap from the discarded fat of liposuctions, attracts disciples, and creates Project Mayhem, a small group devoted to random acts of disruption.

Our senior English major thinks Marla, too, is imaginary--an illusion conjured up by the narrator out of the same tangle of frustration, self-loathing, and helplessness that generated Tyler.

I had never heard of this reading before, but it's in circulation, according to our senior English major. Is this some kind of new orthodoxy about the novel?

In fact, our major even goes beyond the imaginary-Marla hypothesis and is convinced that the whole plot around Tyler--the Fight Clubs, Project Mayhem, and so on--is entirely in the narrator's head, has no substantial existence.

This seemed outlandish to me, so I re-read the novel...and some scenes do have a sort of implausibly surreal or dreamlike quality. Chapter 26, for instance, in which a bus-full of shaven-headed Tyler acolytes jump the narrator on a bus, or Chapter 29, when the narrator is having a final showdown with Tyler/himself atop a tall building, and Marla arrives along with "all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people" whose support groups the narrator and Marla have been crashing for months. Really? All of them?

So now I don't know. The whole plot has a somewhat fantastical, improbable air. Everyone in the novel seems more a type than a character. Maybe the whole thing actually is the narrator's pitiful power fantasy.

 What really worries me, though, is how this sustained-delusion interpretation could catch on a universal hermeneutic. Potentially, could we see any novel at all with with far-fetched and unlikely events enacted by characters who seems like types as the narrator's hallucination? I mean...that's almost all of them, isn't?