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.