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.