Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_

 I WAS ABOUT a hundred pages in when I decided this was now my favorite Kingsolver novel, dislodging The Poisonwood Bible, which had reigned serenely for a good twenty-five years.

I could go on an on about the merits of this book, but I will confine myself to three.

1) it's an honest but compassionate description of a problem that has been devastating the USA for years, focused on a region that has been hit particularly hard. Refreshingly (and in contrast, I would say, to J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy), there is no victim-blaming, and we see the problem more from on the ground than from up above (as in Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain). As an example of how fiction can illuminate a social reality, it can stand alongside Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

2) Quite unlike The Jungle, though, Demon Copperhead is a literary tour de force. The strategy of constructing the novel on the scaffolding of Dickens's David Copperfield could have been strained and distracting, or simply a way of showing off, but it ends up being one of the most brilliant successes in intertextuality that I have ever read. My only quibble is that Mr. McCubb, while certainly as feckless and irresponsible as Mr. Micawber, lacks his model's warmth and humanity.

3) The voice of Demon is convincing throughout, which must have taken some doing, not only because Kingsolver has never been an adolescent boy, but also because Demon has to sound intelligent, observant, and articulate without ever sounding bookish. His vocabulary, allusions, and syntax have to be those of an irregularly-educated young American male who almost never picked up a book, yet also have to make the settings vivid, convey nuances of character, and reflect Demon's ever-evolving consciousness. An impossible task, it would seem, but Kingsolver does it. As a breathtakingly-written book in the voice of someone who has to sound un-bookish, it rivals and maybe surpasses Peter Carey's True Adventures of the Kelly Gang. 

And so many vivid episodes--Demon getting robbed in a convenience store restroom, the 4th of July party, the pain clinic.... This is a masterpiece.

Daniel Defoe (probably), "Of Captain Misson" and "Of Captain Tew and His Crew"

I'VE BEEN READING reviews of the late David Graeber's posthumously-published final book, Pirate Enlightenment, and it sounds fascinating. Somehow, though, I feel I should read his Debt first, and I promised myself I would finish Piketty's Capital before I started Debt....so I may never get around to it. But I can at least read the chapters in the 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates (often assumed to be by Daniel Defoe) that touch on the founding of Libertalia.

Captain Misson was a French naval officer in the late 17th century who (if the story is true) had his assumptions about God, society, and the world rocked by a disillusioned Italian priest and decided to devote his ship and crew to piracy...but of a new kind. Misson abolished class distinctions, insisted that all important matters be decided democratically by the crew, divided whatever wealth they captured equally, and set a policy of giving sailors taken prisoner, who were typically executed, the option of joining the crew or being set down safely at the nearest port.

Eventually Misson and his crew set up a colony in Madagascar, established on the same democratic and egalitarian principles, after coming to an agreement with the neighboring indigenous peoples. An Englishman, Captain Tew, and his crew eventually join them.

Is any of this true? There is not much in the way of corroborating evidence, unfortunately, although apparently there actually were a few such experimental communities, as described and analyzed in Graeber's book.

True or not, the accounts of Captains Misson and Tew speak to the circulation of democratic and egalitarian ideas several generations before the American or French Revolutions, even if only in fantasy.

Roger Reeves, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind"

 THIS ESSAY WAS published in Granta 162, which came out about a year ago, but I only read it this week, and let me tell you...it is among the most moving, most thought-provoking, most powerful essays I have ever read. Up there with Baldwin, Orwell, Didion, I think--an extraordinary convergence of a particular event at a particular setting, personal history, and American history rendered in extraordinarily vivid and cliché-free language...beautiful, lyrical language, I want to say, but given that the subject is the trauma of enslavement I am going to say sublime language. 

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_ (3) and Saint-John Perse, _Anabase_

AS I READ To 2040, I kept thinking of Saint-John Persse's Anabase, a book-length poem published in France in 1924 and in an English translation by T. S. Eliot (no less) in 1930.

I had not read Anabase since the 1980s and so was surprised to be reminded of it. I don't think the likenesses, such as they are, were intentional on Graham's part. Perhaps she has not even read it; Perse is not often cited these days, although he was well regarded in his own time (Nobel Prize, 1960). Still, it seemed worth thinking a bit on why the one book called up for me memories of the other.

Anabase has orientalist fantasy aspects that render it problematic for a contemporary reader, but its leading quality is that it seems set in an indefinite antiquity somewhere near Asia Minor while at the same time being shot though with the sensibility of the present (i.e., early 20th century). 

It has a little of the effect of Dune or Star Wars in that some of the customs and institutions in those fantasy worlds seem drawn from historical antiquity while others involve highly futuristic technologies. The difference being, though, that the world-building in Anabase is intentionally fragmentary and incomplete, more suggestion than assertion. 

Here is a short bit from the Eliot translation:

   To the place called the Place of the Dry Tree:

   and the starved levin allots me these provinces in the West.

   But beyond are the greater leisures, and in a great

   land of grass without memory, the unconfined unreckoned year, seasoned with dawns and heavenly fires. (Matutinal sacrifice of the heart of a black sheep.)

So it sounds like a modern translation of an ancient text for which the explanatory context has entirely vanished. 

To 2040 sometimes has a similar atmosphere in that it is set in the future, but a denuded future, from which a lot of familiar landmarks have been effaced. An eerie, alien bareness surrounds us in To 2040 as it does in in Anabase. We are conscious of something gone: in Anabase, it is the clutter of modernity, while in To 2040, it is non-human nature.

To 2040 is something akin to The Waste Land, too, especially "What the Thunder Said" with its juxtaposition of the desert of the Gospels with the moral collapse of the First World War. In fact, the last poem in Graham's book, "Then the Rain," certainly made me think of the "Then a damp gust / bringing rain" passage in "What the Thunder Said." The unspeakable relief, the hope of that...but in Graham the coming of rain seems to be about earth gathering strength to renew itself once the last human beings have finally disappeared.

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_,, 2

 IN A RECENT review of new books by Annelyse Gelman and Elisa Gonzalez in NYRB (1/18/2024), Anahid Nersessian quoted a remark by Eileen Myles: "It's really hard to figure out what's poetry and what's a tweet at this time." The observation took me aback at first, but on reflection, I saw what she meant. It is not just the poetry shelves at my local Barnes and Noble sag under the weight of multiple volumes of Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav and other practitioners of Instagram-ready poetry, but people like Chelsey Minnis, working from the other side, so to speak, can leave you wondering whether we have any business making distinctions. 

And then I thought, "well, there's Jorie Graham." There is no mistaking a Jorie Graham poem for a tweet. Right?

But now and again in To 2040 one reads something like this:

stay in touch it  is
saying, stay in touch 

babe. I'm here 
for u. I'm always
going to be
here for you.

A good many poems in To 2040 are in short-lined quatrains, justified all the way left, and use text message shorthand: u, yr, cd, bc, that sort of thing. They do not all use phrases like "I'm here for u," but they are a few steps down Graham's typical diction. 

I discovered, on checking, that there are quite a few poems in this form (short-lined quatrains, text message shorthand) in the final section of Runaway (2021).

What's going on?

Damned if I know. The only thing that occurred to me was that Graham found it freeing or refreshing to work a more popular vein, like Yeats writing "Words for Music Perhaps" after the highly wrought ottava rima poems of The Tower and The Winding Stair. Just letting that (famous) hair down. Or perhaps they are tongue in cheek? But the quatrain poems do not do a lot to lighten the mood, I'd say.

More on the mood tomorrow, maybe.

Jorie Graham, _To 2040_, 1

THIS IS GRAHAM's first new collection with Copper Canyon (who in 2022 re-published her last four books with Ecco as a single volume). I wonder why she changed publishers? I'll probably never know.

The title may mean that the book is set, so to speak, in the future, its landscapes those of a world in which present rates of climate change go unaddressed and we end up in a world of no birds but AI ones (which I think is what "Dusk in Drought" is about). Graham has been writing about this at least since Sea Change (2009), but the flash-forward effect adds an unnerving dimension. Also noticeable is the probing of the relationship between poets and nature, raising questions of what becomes of that relationship as "nature" vanishes. 

The date in the title may also carry an implication about Graham's age, as she would be 90 in 2040, and in some poems of Part II the speaker seems to be in a care facility of some kind. Graham has been in this neighborhood before, too, in the cancer patient poems of Fast (2018), a particular favorite of mine among her books. Here, too, the flash-forward lends the familiar a strangeness--we get a Graham we know, but within and around it another Graham.

Imagining herself into a not-too-distant future is a surprising move for Graham, as she has always been a student of the now--the phenomenological now, I mean, the always-opening present moment. There were always memories of the past and anticipations of the future as well, I know, but her characteristic move seemed to be to stay with the present so intensely that it almost broke off  from the continuum of time and hovered there, a Grecian urn made to stand still for contemplation by her language. And she is still doing that in this volume--only it's a "now" from some 16 years hence, conjured by her imagination. 

I don't want to call it "science fiction poetry," as that sounds just a tad silly, but you could certainly read To 2040 alongside Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future without any sense of incongruence.

Chris Bachelder, _The Throwback Special_

 GLAD TO SEE this got some respectful attention (a National Book Award nomination); Bachelder has been one of the overlooked gems of American fiction for quite a while.

The novel has a very peculiar premise: 20-some American men get together once a year to re-enact the failed flea-flicker play (i.e., the titular "throwback special") in the course of which legendary Washington Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann suffered a career-ending leg injury after a tackle by legendary New York Giant linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

The re-created event occurred in 1985, about 30 years before the time the novel is set. We never find out when or how the men hit upon the idea of doing the re-enactment, or why they have been so faithful to it over so many years, or what they find meaningful about it. The tacit nature of the enterprise, the absence of speeches or explanations, struck me as a key element of the novel's portrait of American (white, middle-class) male-dom, with its fervency and commitments about things it will not and probably cannot explain. 

The re-enactments probably began when the men were young, maybe college-age, but in its current state the group gives Bachelder plenty of room to represent the contours of American middle-aged masculinity, about which he is so spot-on all I can say is "yikes."

Religions often include annual recallings, even symbolic re-enactments of significant, sometimes terrible events--Passover, Purim, Christmas, Easter, Muharram--so Bachelder also gives us (subtly, without anything overstated or even explicit) an insight into the origins of religions. The "why" of the re-enactment somehow involves Theismann's trauma, Taylor's remorse, something about our emotional investment in the spectacle of sports, something about the human ability to create symbol and allegory. In that respect, it put me a little in mind of Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Bachelder's touch is a bit lighter and maybe a bit surer than Coover's (though I admire  both books).

An example of Bachelder's deftness: when the novel actually arrives at the climactic event of the re-enactment itself, Bachelder does not write from the point of view of any of the participants, but rather from that of some conference attendees (for "Prestige Vista Solutions") who just happen to be at the same hotel as the re-enactors that weekend. They are observing from a distance without knowing exactly what is going on. A surprising but perfect choice, making the re-enactment we have been waiting for for 200 pages seem mysterious, strange, comical but oddly fascinating. Who knows, one of these spectators to the bizarre ritual of these middle-aged men made be the next to take up the baton--may become, who knows, the Throwback Special's Paul.

Luke Mogelson, _The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible_

LUKE MOGELSON HAS logged quite a few years as war correspondent for the New Yorker but happened to be back in the USA for our own local wars in 2020: the no-vaccines-no-masks protests, the George Floyd protests and counter-protests, and the Trump-was-robbed  protests, culminating in the attack on  the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

The centerpiece of the book is Chapter 17, a fifty-page, first-hand account of what went down at the Capitol, a version of which ran in the New Yorker. (Mogelson, I believe, took that amazing video of buffalo-horned Q shaman Jason Chansley ensconced in Mike Pence's chair in the Senate chamber.) Mogelson's account has the benefit not only of his actually having been there, but also of his having spent months beforehand reporting on the very people swarming up the steps, zip-ties at the ready. It could well become the definitive written account.

Made me wonder--what would Tom Wolfe have done with this material? 

Mogelson does so good a job reporting the martial fervency of the pro-Trumpers that I was somewhat relieved that he doesn't think we have a real civil war on our hands. He has reported on several real civil wars, and he emphasizes that they involve real grievances, real injuries--the death of one's family members, the destruction of one's hometown. Those storming the Capitol were motivated more by what they thought they might be losing than by anything they had actually lost. As Mogelson puts  it, "Were large-scale violence to erupt in the US, it would be something different: a war fueled not by injury but by delusion." (316) 

Then again, back in 1861, the South seceded more for what they thought they might lose than for anything they had actually lost. So who knows.

Ben Lerner, _The Lights_

SO MANY EXCELLENT poets hit a vein of prosperity with books of prose and the next thing we know, they are no longer publishing much poetry: Patricia Lockwood, Eula Biss, Lucy Ives, Anne Boyer. I am glad to see this is not the case (yet) for Ben Lerner. He has published three novels to considerable acclaim, and his essays and stories show up in the New Yorker and Harpers, yet here he gives us a generous (100+ pages) volume of new poems. You go, Mr. Lerner.

Really good new poems, too. Lerner likes to stretch out, and the longer poems tend to be the stronger ones--"The Lights," "The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also," "Rotation," and my particular  favorite, "Untitled (Triptych)," in which we wander through the Met with Lerner as he awaits test results (as to whether is wife is pregnant, I think), making one dazzling unexpected connection after another.

That Lerner's success in prose has potentially enlarged the audience for his poetry may have prompted the thoughts about connection and accessibility that occur in the volume's closing poems ("The Rose, "The Son," "No Art") and may even account for the recurring invocations of Whitman, who certainly sought connection and at least occasionally tried to be accessible. The volume's real secret sharer is a different New York poet, though--Ashbery.

The whoops-what-happened jumps in syntax, the juxtaposition of precise technical vocabulary with the throwaway phrase of the week, the oblique strategies of the prose poems--none of this comes from Whitman, no, nor from Brooklyn's other laureate Hart Crane, but from good old J.A. And I for one am thankful. You go, Mr. Lerner--you go.

Eve Babitz, _Eve's Hollywood_

HER FIRST BOOK, I believe...published when she was 30 or so. I read this as the next installment in a run of outlaw lit after Cookie Mueller, Gary Indiana, and Kathy Acker, but while Babitz has a bohemian edge--lots of drugs, lots of boyfriends--she is too full of good cheer to come across as much of an outlaw. You need a little Des Esseintes jadedness to strike the outlaw lit pose, but it's hard to sound that world-weary, dying-from-ennui note when you are in ecstasy over finding the perfect taquito.

The good cheer is also a departure from classic literary accounts of Los Angeles--Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One--which tend to play up the spiritual sterility and desperation under the glamorous surface. Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and James Ellroy are a little more forgiving, but still attracted to the city's more dire side. Not Babitz. The chapters on the Hollywood Branch Library and Watts Towers are downright celebratory. 

The prose is always light on its feet, inviting, a bit relaxed about the rules...quite a bit like California, come to think of it.

Is the "James Byrns" described in the chapter "Rosewood Casket" a portrait of Gram Parsons? Sure seems like it.

Lydia Millet, _A Children's Bible_

 A CHILDREN'S BIBLE reminded me of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm (1994). In Moody's novel, set in the 1970s, some suburban parents get together in someone's house for drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. The natural disaster named in the title arrives in the night, downing power lines and  the parents' derelictions of duty especially salient.

In Millet's novel, some well-off parents rent a palatial home in the countryside for a long vacation of drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. A hurricane arrives, disrupting power supplies and communication systems, creating circumstances (including a fatality) that make the parents' dereliction of duties especially salient.

I thought Millet's novel was actually more interesting, though, for a few reasons. One, we get the edgily witty and consistently on-point voice of first person narrator Eve.  Two, the kids actually get organized and improvise a functioning collective, leaving the parents to their own hedonist devices. Three, there are some well-paced, thriller-adjacent episodes (e.g., the arrival of a trio of armed marauders) that left me with the impression that a film adaptation of the novel could be brilliant.

And--crucially--four, the whole novel could stand as a parable for the older generation's obtuseness and sloth in responding to the climate crisis, a lapse for which the younger generation will end up paying the highest costs.

I've wanted to read Millet since I saw her in a pandemic-era zoom-cast with Tom McCarthy and Joshua Cohen, talking about William Gaddis. McCarthy and Cohen, both erudite and articulate, got into trying to out-articulate and out-erudite each other, and Millet just seemed to be thinking, hoo, boy, what have I gotten myself into? Just her facial expression as McCarthy and Cohen did their grad-seminar thing gave me the idea that she would have a knack for satire--and so she does.

Robert Plunket, _My Search for Warren Harding_

FIRST PUBLISHED FORTY years ago, this novel's republication could launch it as a belatedly-discovered classic, à la John Williams's Stoner. 

To describe it briefly, it is Henry James's The Aspern Papers set in late 1970s Los Angeles, with the dark farce dialed up to 11.

Narrator Elliot Weiner (not Jewish, he wants you to know) is a historian and would-be-biographer of twenty-ninth President Warren G. Harding. He is hot on the trail of an amazing trove of documents belonging to Rebekah Kinney, a mistress of Harding who bore him a child and is now living in the Hollywood Hills. (Rebekah's circumstances blend those of Nan Britton, Harding's actual mistress, with those of the all-but-forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard.) 

If Weiner can get those documents, his career is assured, so he is willing to tell any lie, betray any trust, and manipulate any friendship to get his hands on them. Ethically, he is even worse than the unnamed narrator of The Aspern Papers, although also more self-aware.

Weiner is also racist and homophobic, even though his own queerness is often discernible to the reader; he is the most despicable narrator, in fact, that I have come across in a good long while. Tarquin Winot in John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure could match him, perhaps. Weiner's tart observations on California, his associates, and his own projects are constantly amusing, however, and the consistent backfiring of his best-laid plans shows Plunket to be a master architect of farce. My Search for Warren Harding is a comic masterpiece.

I wonder if the novel will end up on syllabusses? It would be tough to teach, since Weiner is so awful in so many ways. Perhaps in fiction-writing programs, though? Given Plunket's stylistic energy and whiplash wit, the novel's influence could only be salutary.