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.
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