Anthony Trollope, _The Way We Live Now_

 TROLLOPE'S CHARACTERS USUALLY, with some exceptions, behave decorously. They have a sense of what their obligations are and attempt to live up them. They can of course be selfish and/or obtuse, but these seem like aberrant moments that the characters recover from, finding their moral feet again. 

The Way We Live Now (1875) is a  remarkable exception in which hardly anyone behaves decorously. 

The cast of characters is largely drawn from the upper class, as is again usual for Trollope, but the bourgeoisie (in this novel, represented by the ridiculously wealthy financier Melmotte) is throwing its weight around via sheer purchasing power. Titled young gentlemen are lining up to marry Melmotte's daughter or get in on his railway shares or latch on to his coattails somehow. 

Melmotte's empire turns out to less solid than supposed. Both it and Melmotte come to a sudden, dismal end, and Trollope whips up some relatively happy endings for everyone else, but all the characters look a little the shabbier for having tried to get on the gravy train--a bit like Twain's "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg."

The Way We Live Now is a good deal more disillusioned and satirical than the usual Trollope novel and was not much loved when it was first published, but it now ranks very high among his admirers. 

I was particularly impressed by a couple of chapters in which Trollope does some free indirect discourse from Melmotte's point of view, inhabiting the beast (as it were) and making him not likable, exactly, but human when he makes his disastrous first appearance in Parliament (to which his money has gotten him elected) and even sympathetic when he realizes the jig is up.

Trollope had another great f.i.d. chapter with Mr. Harding in London in The Warden, but pulling it off with Melmotte would have been much more demanding, I think, and Trollope pulls it off with élan.

Pierre Senges, _The Major Refutation_, trans. Jacon Siefring

 AMAZING BOOK, BUT not easy to describe. It purports to be a scholarly polemic by Don Antonio de Guevara (1480-1545), a bishop attached to the court of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.  Don Antonio really did exist and wrote a few books, including a very well-known one on Marcus Aurelius, but so far as I can find out he never wrote a work explaining that the whole so-called “New World” was simply a self-interested fiction imposed by an unscrupulous few upon a gullible public—and that is what Senges’s book is. Its argument is addressed to Charles, hoping to persuade him not to fall for this scam.

The whole presentation is deadpan—there is even a scholarly endnote explaining some of the arguments for attributing the text to other authors, one scholar’s theory being that it was written by Juana la Loca, “Joanna the Mad,” one time queen of Castile and Aragon and Charles's mother, whom he had tucked away in a nunnery.

The whole thing is Senges’s invention, though. Within my own reading, its only rival as a faux-scholarly presentation of a fictitious artifact is Pierre Michon’s Les Onze, about a fictional portrait of the Committee of Public Safety (see LLL post for May 30, 2022).

Senges does an astonishingly persuasive job of capturing the tone of 16th century argumentation. If you have ever sampled the feistier pieces of Erasmus, Melancthon, Calvin, or Luther, or the pamphlet wars from the period right before the Civil War, you will recognize it immediately: learned, contemptuous of its opponents, flattering towards its main intended audience, and, once you start accepting its premises, surprisingly convincing…

…the surprisingly convincing part being the cream of the joke here, since we know Don Antonio is as wrong as wrong can be. Oddly enough, though, his scholarship is so impeccable, his insight into the ways of scoundrels so piercing, his style so elegant, that I started pitying the poor fools who had bought into the whole “New World” bubble. What idiots!

George Saunders, _Liberation Day_

 THIS WAS THE first collection of Sunders stories that I was not sure I liked.

Saunders has had from the beginning of his career a strong vein of stories exploring worker alienation by presenting the routines, often irksome and humiliating, of people doing the less glamorous jobs of the "entertainment" industry. The job of providing "fun" is not much fun, Saunders has repeatedly pointed out; ironically, the very activities of generating entertainment for others underlines what an inequitable system capitalism is. Early masterpieces like "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Pastoralia" are perfect examples.

This strand in Saunders's fiction took a dark, dystopian turn in "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" (in his previous collection, The Tenth of December), in which young women from poorer countries were strung up as decorations on suburban lawns. 

Even darker and more dystopian is this collection's title story, the volume's first and longest and one of the four not previously published in the New Yorker. In "Liberation Day," some people have actually sold off their neural autonomy in order to perform scripts by their...owners, I guess we would have to say?...who thus can design their own private entertainments.

Saunders's story is from the point of view of one of the performers, and gets into some expected sexual harassment territory and a not at all expected militant intervention led by the owners' son. 

I found the whole scenario difficult to buy into and wide of its satiric targets.

The volume's other stories were more engaging--"Mom of Bold Action" was especially good at how we navigate  the contradictions of family life, as "A Thing at Work"was about how we navigate those of the workplace--but "Liberation Day" put a hitch in stride, so to speak, for the whole volume. I will still read the next one, but I found this collection mildly disappointing, given Saunders's usual level of excellence.

Madeline Gins, _The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader_, ed. Lucy Ives, Part 2

 I SHOULD HAVE gone on to mention the other main sections of the book,  I now realize.

Much of the excerpt from What the President Will Say and Do!! is all-caps declarations such as "FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!" and "USE FIRE AS A PULLEY." The nifty thing about the declarations is that one can (1) read them as being in the imperative mode, in that the President will order his administration to fill the ocean with cotton or urge the citizenry to use fire as a pulley, or (2) read them as being in the indicative mode, preceded by an implied "The President will," as in "[The President will] fill the ocean with cotton" or "[The President will] use fire as a pulley." Thus, any of the declarations could be about something the President will say OR something the President will do. 

Either way, saying or doing, supposedly matters immensely, the President being our chief executive, but at the same time all the statements occur within the structures of English, and thus (as in Word Rain) can be clear and meaningful yet have no reliable or guaranteed relationship to actuality, to the world of observable phenomena. Language's structure permits one to state plainly and unambiguously that one wishes the ocean filled with cotton, or that one intends to fill the ocean with cotton, without any regard at all for the sheer impossibility of the thing. That language lets us conceptualize the impossible may be important.

In the May 2024 edition of Poetry, Lisa Jarnot wrote of one day writing some lines in which she felt she lifted clear of the goals she had originally set for her own poetry, i.e., "to SAY SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, and GO SOMEWHERE! to get at the empathy I had for the world and to pour out my own feeling states." The lines she had just written (which wound up in "Triptych") did not seem to issue from her design or intentions or any kind of purposefulness, but to be a kind of "revelation": "It was not about what I was  trying to make the poem say but about what the poem was trying to make me say." 

I think What the President Will Say and Do!! similarly juggles with the idea that our saying and doing, our going somewhere, may benefit from lifting clear of the our own intentions and designs, our own sense of the possible, and language's infinite versatility can help lift us...if we let it.

Ives also includes three chapters from Gins's Helen Keller or Arakawa, in which Gins sets some of her husband's artworks in relation to Keller's own discussions of her perceptual apparatus, which gets into  the bigger question of what the imagination owes the senses. I can't tell for ceratan whether Gins had read Helen Keller's The World I Live In, but I bet she had. Probably Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles too.

Madeline Gins, _The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader_, ed. Lucy Ives

 MADELINE GINS (1941-2014) was an artist, architect, and writer. I had not heard of heard before coming across her name and a citation of this book in the endnote to Kate Briggs's The Long Form; just being cited by Briggs made Gins a person of interest for me, but it also made a difference that Lucy Ives, a writer I have long followed, had put the collection together. So, what have we here?

Gins published several books in collaboration with her husband and partner, Shusaku Arakawa, and another four on her own. The Saddest Thing reprints the entirety of her first book, Word Rain (in facsimile, no less), and substantial excerpts from What the President Will Say and Do!! and Helen Keller, or Arakawa, together with some early poems and essays.

Although I am among the world’s leading skippers of introductions, I read Lucy Ives’s introduction to the volume because….well, Lucy Ives. Her account of finding Word Rain in the University of Iowa Library inspired flashbacks of some of my own favorite finds in the less frequented shelves in the “P” stacks (or 800s in the Dewey decimal system). She also makes the useful suggestion that what Gins is up to make overlap with what the Language poets were doing.

That suggestion led to my own guess at what the title Word Rain means. Language is like weather in that it is the ground of almost everything we do, a universal condition in which in which our lives inevitably take place, the always-already-there thing so omnipresent that we may not always notice it. Language creates the context in which our lives occur, as weather does (as, for example, rain or its absence does).

The structure of our language tells us things about the world even prior to anything semantic—prior, that is, to our knowing what a word means. If someone says, “I snarfled today, and I plan to snarfle tomorrow,” we know that “snarfle” is an action one can perform, even if we do not what it is. We could even pose questions like, “Is it okay to snarfle on an empty stomach?” without even knowing what “snarfling” is.

The structure of our language allows us to make perfectly grammatical, coherent statements contrary to fact, such as the Kafka’s famous one about Gregor Samsa waking up and finding himself a bug, and even statements that are literally impossible, like Chomsky’s famous “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Using the possibilities of syntax to generate statements without regard to what is actually existing, to what is even possible, could get us into the realm of the surrealists, such as “Hairy buildings ponder equanimity annually.” 

Even though such statements do not correspond to any actuality, even any possible actuality, they might have a certain meaningfulness, as though they might be true in some sense, or might have some kind of utopian projection in them. We naturally look for meaning in statements, and so we might speculate about the spiritual lives of hairy buildings. And if a writer places such statements in a sequence, we start to assume they are or could be a meaningful sequence, a narrative.

That language cannot actually reliably deliver to us the truth about the world may induce anxiety, even a sense of tragedy, but we have little in the way of alternatives. It’s sad that we have to rely on something so unreliable as words, as Gins notes in the sentence Ives repurposed as the book’s title. It’s certainly healthy to be made to understand this particular deficit in our shared situation, however.

Word Rain gets us thinking about how syntax generates meaning by leaving blank spaces in the middle of sentences, gets us thinking about how two sentences are points that we assume will define a line, gets us thinking about how the relation between language and the real is always up for grabs. It participates in many of the same tricks that a lot of 20th century avant-garde writing was trafficking in, but it’s a great deal more fun that most of the other examples. It takes its games seriously, but doesn’t get too painfully earnest and beetle-browed or götterdammerung about it. The book is a delight, mainly, with some unnerving moments and some startling insights, like a good psychedelic. Props to Lucy Ives for getting it back in circulation.

Victoria Chang, _With My Back to the World_

 THE MOTIVATION FOR my deep dive into Victoria Chang this spring was that I was writing a review of this, her most recent book. That review will, I hope, be appearing before too long in a blog much more prestigious than this one, and I do not wish to scoop myself, so I won't be saying much here except, damn, another fine collection. 

The volume consists mainly of ekphrastic poems on paintings by Agnes Martin, but these are ekphrastic poems in the sense that the obituaries of Obit are obituaries...that is, only up to a point, after which point they become springboards to various locations in the interior landscape of the poet.

And we have the book's "departure" section as well, here a poetic diary on the final days of Chang's father, who has figured in her work so often.

Chang finds a lot of identify with in Martin, but is her back really to the world? I'm not sure. We can certainly still hear its clamor, that I know.

Victoria Chang, _The Trees Witness Everything_

 ANOTHER INSTALLMENT IN this spring's deep dive into the work of Victoria Chang. This 2022 collection is mainly devoted to waka, that is, "various Japanese syllabic forms" that were part of "the court poetry of the sixth to fourteenth centuries" in Japan (as Chang's endnote explains), such as the tanka, the katauta, the sedoka. To mix things up a bit, Chang chose her titles from the poetry of W. S. Merwin (sometimes reading the poem of that title. sometimes not), chose a traditional Japanese syllabic form, and then composed her own poem.

As procedures go, this one sounds a bit eccentric and not all that promising, but the resulting poems mainly work, I would say. They often feel traditional both in their concision and their imagery (rain, trees, birds); they are also traditional in their preoccupation with loss and isolation. Those themes have been so thoroughly explored in Chang's earlier work, however, (e.g., Dream Memory, Obit, Barbie Chang) that the collection readily takes its place in the constellation of her body of work.

Chang's collections often have a dominating form, like the detourné obituaries of Obit or the couplets of Barbie Chang, but also a section in a different form, serving as a sort of counterpoint, like the waka of Obit or the sonnets to of Barbie Chang. Here, we have "Marfa, Texas," a longer poem in stanzas of five short lines, both left- and right-justified to create a column centered in the page, somewhat reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese manuscript writing. 

"Marfa, Texas" seems to be written during and about some kind of artist's residency there, which doesn't sound promising, but then, how different is that from the circumstances that produced Rilke's Duino Elegies? Anyway, it seems to me one of the best things she has done. Very much of a piece with her other work in that it seems disengaged and highly engaged at the same time, very much about what is present before but also about what is absent. 

Victoria Chang reminds me a bit of Louise Glück--not that she sounds like Glück, or shares Glück's preoccupations, but in her poems she becomes very present even in the act of seeming to disappear. I couldn't say whether Chang is headed for a Nobel Prize, but she is certainly effective at what she does. Every book is very different, but also fits in as part of a whole.

Lexi Freiman, _The Book of Ayn_

 THIS APPEARED ON a "new fiction"shelf at my local public library, and I picked it up wondering whether it had anything to do with Ayn Rand. It did, of course. Anna, the novel's narrator, has just published her second novel, but the reviewers have given it bad marks for classism and like shortcomings. Feeling herself a victim of cancel culture, she takes solace in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, with its contempt of the herd and its celebration of pursuing one's self-interest.

(Pretty clever premise...but I probably would have put the book back on the shelf had it nor borne a blurb from Joshua Cohen, one of my favorite novelists and not a promiscuous blurber. So to the self-checkout station I went.)

Weary of New York City, where everyone she knows has seen the humiliating reviews and no one wants to hear about Ayn Rand, Anna takes off for LA, where she hopes to sell a series based on Rand's life and thought. Hollywood offers as splendid array of targets for satire as New York City's publishing scene, so Freiman has as much fun in the middle third of the book as she did in the first third.

In the final third, Anna becomes disenchanted with Rand and decides to take up a friend's offer to accompany her to a meditation retreat on a Greek island, where Freiman takes aim at a whole new set of satiric targets clustering around the Eat Pray Love scenario.

Anna is a bit of a Candide figure (with Rand as Pangloss) in that she seems misled by others and by herself and often obtuse, but retains readerly sympathy and finally achieves some sort of clarity, perhaps. I was undecided whether the clarity was true clarity or merely part of the parody of the Eat Pray Love trope, but Anna does seem ready to cultivate her garden and let her wilder ambitions go, so we can hope for the best.

Jane Bowles, _Two Serious Ladies_

 MOVING ALONG WITH the outlaw lit series, I picked up this 1943 novel. We do not learn until almost the end of the novel that the first serious lady, Christina Goering, is acquainted with the second, Mrs. Copperfield, but they have a good deal in common. Both like a drink; both attract hangers-on; both prefer the company of women to that of men.

The word "lesbian"never occurs, and nothing explicitly sexual surfaces in the text, but slowly one gets the impression that Christina Goering and Mrs. Copperfield have that in common, too. Just as Henry Blake Fuller's Bertram Cope's Year (1919) seems like the kind of novel one could write about gay men in a time when no fiction about gay men could be openly published, Two Serious Ladies seems its lesbian counterpart.

The main attraction here, though, might be Bowles's style: deadpan but hilarious, dry and exact and corrosively witty, swift on its feet, confident, distinctive. Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield, who in the novel's middle episode are traveling together-but-apart in Central America, reminded me much of the Moresbys in The Sheltering Sky, the 1949 novel buy Jane Bowles's husband Paul, but Jane's tone of dark farce differs greatly from Paul's post-war blend of dread and ennui. At this point, hard not to prefer Jane.

Percival Everett, _James_

 QUITE A FEW Black American novelist have set novels during the slavery era, but they typically do not write them in the straight literary realism mode typical of most historical fiction. That is, there is usually some kind of curveball, some kind of changeup, something utterly un-Michener-esque. 

Consider a few examples. Toni Morrison's Beloved: ghosts and the supernatural. Octavia Butler's Kindred: time travel. Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad: alternative-universe history. Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale: the plot takes its template from a Buddhist fable. Edward Jones's The Known World is stylistically mainstream, but the twist there is that it is about a Black owner of Black slaves. 

Percival Everett has now turned his hand to the novel of American enslavement, and he too has a trick pitch for us. Deft post-modernist that he is, he retells Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave with whom Huck takes a raft down the Mississippi River.

Everett is not the first writer to do this, actually; "Rivers," a short story in John Keene's collection Counternarratives, also took up Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, with a surprising conclusion in which Jim, who had joined the Union Army, ended up on a battlefield facing Huck, who had joined the Confederate Army. (There's also a Robert Coover take, which I haven't read, so I don't know whether or how he deals with Jim.)

That Jim becomes James in Everett's novel is part of one of the novel's more effective conceits. The way Jim and the other Blacks speak in Huckleberry Finn (or in Uncle Tom's Cabin or any other white writer's attempt at southern Black vernacular) turns out to be a ruse, a manner of speech they adopt whenever white people are around so as to keep white anxiety tamped down. Among themselves, they speak in standard American English. 

Everett's James is a much more complex proposition than Twain's Jim, it's almost needless to say, much more mindful of how to manage both his escape and Huck and desperate to get his wife and daughter free. He is a reader, a thinker, and a writer, the novel written with a pencil he obtained at a terrible cost to the  fellow slave who found it for him, in a notebook he lifted from Dan Emmett, the blackface vaudevillian who wrote "Dixie."

Everett dispenses utterly with Twain's ending, in which Jim winds up at the mercy of Tom Sawyer's pulp-fed imagination--an ending whose aesthetic and moral flaws Toni Morrison took a sledgehammer to in Playing in the Dark. Instead, James winds up in a face-to-face with the man who enslaved him, with a highly satisfactory outcome.

James was published by Doubleday, which I guess means the critical praise given to The Trees and to the film based on Erasure (Oscar nominee American Fiction) has made Everett welcome in the big-time publishing world. Good for him, I thought, but I was deeply gladdened  to see that in his acknowledgements he gives an eloquent shout-out to his longtime publisher Graywolf.  Long may you run, Graywolf. You may have lost one great writer to the bigtime world, but I bet you know where to find some more.