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.

Lauren Groff, _Matrix_

 I LIKELY WOULD not have read this had our book club not chosen it for our September meeting, but I was game, given Groff's generally solid critical reputation. I was a little worried, though, when the prose in the opening pages offered several examples of the kind of overcooked writing typical of the cheesier end of historical fiction--pointless adjectives, crude psychologizing, over-explanation. To wit:

"delicate mushrooms poking from the rich soil" (p. 3)

"felt her greatness hot in her blood" (p. 5)

"Eleanor extended her hand, encrusted with rings" (p. 7)

"she felt ebbing out of her the dazzling love that had filled those years" (p. 9)

"the abbess Emme, to whom an internal music had been given as solace for her blindness" (p. 11)

I stuck with it, though, and while the prose did not get a lot better as things went along, Groff did conjure up an interesting character. 

The novel takes the point of view of Marie de France, author of the Lais, a 12th century collection of narrative poems in Old French. Little is known of the author save that she was French and named Marie--not even that much is solidly established, actually--but one intriguing speculation is that she was Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the out-of-wedlock daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and hence half-sister to England's Henry II. Groff takes this idea and runs with it.

Her Marie is somewhat in love with Henry's wife, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, but also in her later years both a visionary and an extremely skillful administrator, somewhat along the lines of Hildegard of Bingen or Gertrude the Great. She turns the abbey into a thriving feminist utopia, materially prosperous, well-protected, and a center of learning. (The Lais get short shrift here, just a few pages early in the novel).

I wondered if the novel was a kind of argument that menopause unleashes women's power. Part I of the novel, about fifty pages, is about Marie's early, unhappy days at the abbey, when she writes the Lais; Part II is mainly about her erotic intrigues in the abbey. Marie hits menopause at the beginning of Part III, which is about 150 pages, and that is when she really comes into her own, transforming the abbey into a powerful community. 

Is menopause a kind of rebirth for women? All that distraction vanished, a clearing of the mind, a claiming of one's power? It seemed that way in Matrix.

Steve Silberman, _NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity_

 AN OUTSTANDING BOOK and an important one, I'd say. Silberman provides not exactly a history of autism, but an history of how it has been known, named, and treated by western medicine from the early twentieth century to the present. It's a history full of bad guesses and unintended harm, but still gradually making progress.

Silberman's first chapter is about Henry Cavendish, an 18th century Englishman and scientist of very eccentric habits; his second is about Leo Rosa, a boy in the contemporary USA, also of very eccentric habits. Leo has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, while Henry lived and died before "autism" was known and named, but both thrived because they were given the space and accommodation they needed. 

The knowing and naming went on between Henry and Leo, and it's a story of both progress and regress, of illumination  in  unlikely partnership with darkness. Hans Asperger and his associates in a Vienna do crucial pioneering in identifying autism, but their work is fatally compromised by association with Nazism and eugenics. Leo Kanner makes comparable progress in the United States, but gets balled up in assumptions about causes and cures (and his own infallibility) to damaging effect.

Causes and cures are the recurring bugbears of the middle of the book. Whose fault autism is and how to fix it becomes the sole topics of interest among professionals. Eventually, gradually, the parents of autistic children and the autistic themselves start getting their say, and some light breaks through. Rain Man comes out, and a little more light comes through. Adjustments get made, handbooks get rewritten, and children like Leo Rosa are no longer doomed to a lifetime of misunderstanding.

Not that everything is all better for everyone on the spectrum. Progress remains to be made. It's a hopeful story, though, of people eventually being heard and getting something like what they need.

Maia Kobabe, _Gender Queer_

 THIS IS THE graphic memoir that is being banned and attacked all over the country. Briefly, it is about Kobabe's personal journey of discovery that ey (Kobabe's preferred pronoun) are nonbinary and asexual.

The boiling outrage over it had led me to expect that it was quite a bit edgier, or more militant, or more confrontational, or more shocking, or more something than it is. There is a little bit of nudity, but not much--some sexuality, but not much. Kobabe's drawing style is clean, in a kind of juste milieu between realistic and cartoon-y. The story line is clear and easy to follow as Kobabe moves, sometimes painfully but nonetheless steadily, from one breakthrough realization to another. The book is eminently accessible.

So--is that the problem? Kobabe presents eir circumstances lucidly and unaffectedly, in a way that any middle school student could read this and understand. Is that why Moms for Liberty et al. are all frantic about it? If it were weirder, more avant-garde, more experimental, more out-there, more obviously intended for a niche readership, would the guardians of morality have left it alone?

Kobabe also makes the point that she has family and community support. Her parents are unreconstructed hippies who are somewhat bewildered by their offspring's development but want Kobabe to be happy and do their best to support em. Her school is a private, non-traditional one with a flourishing pride group. Ey have a lot to deal with, but eir parents are not bloody-minded Southern Baptists who rush em in to conversion therapy, and eir schoolmates are not out to bully em into suicide. 

Is that too a problem? That Gender Queer not only presents clearly and understandably that gender and sexuality are complex, but also makes clear that sympathetic and supportive communities exist, that not all one's fellow Americans are red-hot to judge and persecute?

I would not say that Gender Queer is one of the great graphic memoirs, but I am convinced it ought to be in every library for middle and high schoolers. It is a valuable and timely book.

Fredrick Exley, _A Fan's Notes_

 THINKING BACK TO the question that came up with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Loads of Learned Lumber, August 18), would this make anyone's list for a great American autobiography?

I recall it getting a lot of praise and attention when it appeared back in 1968, including a National Book Award nomination. My copy is a "Vintage Contemporaries" edition, which in the 1980s was a serious endorsement all by itself, putting Exley in such company as Denis Johnson, Harold Brodkey, Paule Marshall, Barry Hannah, and Cormac McCarthy. Just carrying a Vintage Contemporaries in those days was a sign that you knew who the cool-but-not-yet-famous writers were.

Then again, perhaps A Fan's Notes does not count as autobiography. Exley subtitled it "A Fictional Memoir." The National Book Award nomination was for fiction. Autofiction avant la lettre, we could say.

Exley could write, and the book remains interesting to read. It might be interesting to pair with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, because Exley's book is all about not overcoming adversity, about not achieving success, about fucking up every opportunity and not being able to do yourself a lick of good. Alcoholism, depression, going home to live with mom, institutionalization, getting fired, wrecking one's marriage and family, humiliating bouts of impotence...yet all with the strong, all but unkillable conviction that one is more capable than most people, more intelligent than most people, certainly a better writer than most writers, and that somehow, someday one will become the center of attention and adulation that one seemed destined to be, like a star halfback...until one realizes, no, one is just another spectator, just another face in the bleachers...just a fan. Hence the title.

I would certainly hesitate to assign the book to undergraduates of 2023, though. Exley's presentations of women, blacks, and LGBTQ+ folks are none too aware even by the standards of 1968, and today they are just...urk. Exley could catch on with fans of Charles Bukowski, perhaps, but Exley feels a lot sorrier for himself than Bukowski ever does, and few Bukowskians would find that appealing. 

Odds of a revival are slim, I suspect.

Maybe Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh? I should look at that again.