Diana Evans, _A House for Alice_

THE NOVEL BEGINS with a bang, a tour de force chapter of free indirect discourse from the point of view of Cornelius Pitt, a crotchety, irritable old Englishman living among piles of papers in the vicinity of which, despite multiple warnings from his caretakers, he continues to smoke tobacco...well, the long and short of it is that the reader realizes before Cornelius does that his place is on fire, and Cornelius does not survive the novel's first chapter.

Things settle down in the next few chapters, as Evans gives us a chapter-apiece survey of Cornelius's estranged wife and three daughters. We seem to be in familiar contemporary British novel territory. Then, right at the end of Part One, we get another chapter from Cornelius's point of view...as a ghost.

Whoa!

By and large, A House for Alice is domestic realism with a salting of State-of-England (the Grenfell fire, Brexit), within hailing distance of Zadie Smith novels like NW or Swing Time in its portrait of contemporary London. Alice is the estranged wife of the dead but uncannily active Cornelius; the house is one she wants to have built in Nigeria so she can return to spend her twilight years there. Her daughters disagree on how good an idea this is, but the novel ends with Alice about to fly out of Gatwick, her house built and her dream on the cusp of realization. Her daughters and grandchildren have made various kinds of progress in resolving their own issues.

All enjoyable enough, but I wondered about the novel's brush with the supernatural, which seems to involve a grievous sin on Cornelius's part, for which some kind of reckoning is due. I wasn't quite sure how this fit in with a story that otherwise had its feet on the ground, so to speak. 

Alejandro Zambra, _Multiple Choice_, trans. Megan McDowell

 NOW, HERE IS a brilliant conceit: a parody of a standardized, high stakes multiple choice test (like our SAT or GRE or LSAT or the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, Zambra's actual model) that deftly illustrates how remote from any actually-occurring problems or experiences or life in general the questions in a standardized multiple choice test are.

My favorite section was "Reading Comprehension," in which the supplied narratives were a great deal more true to life (and hence more ambiguous) than those encountered in actual tests, and the questions probing your comprehension of the narrative neatly demonstrated the procrustean absurdities of the choices the test-taker confronts. For example--

71. One can infer from the text that the teachers at the school:

(A) Were mediocre and cruel, because they adhered unquestioningly to a rotten educational model.

(B) Were cruel and severe: they liked to torture the students by overloading them with homework.

(C) Were deadened by sadness, because they got paid shit.

(D) Were cruel and severe, because they were sad. Everyone was sad back  then.

(E) The kid next to me marked C, so I'm going to mark C as well.

An endnote mentions that the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test was no longer administered after 2003; our own elite post-secondary institutions are vacillating on whether they will continue to use standardized admissions tests or not. I hope they eventually decide to drop them once and for all. I happened to be good at taking them, myself, so they helped me personally, but after a career in academe I am convinced they mainly indicate one's talent for taking multiple choice tests, a skill that is no use at all once one leaves school. If Zambra's satire persuades any college administrators that it is time to junk standardized testing, it will have performed a valuable service.

John Keene, _Punks: New and Selected Poems_

 "NEW AND SELECTED" ordinarily signals that the poet has already published four or five collections and is a well-established, mid-career poet who has attracted enough interest to warrant a publisher's venturing on an "introduction to" volume. So far as I can tell, however, this is Keene's first collection. He has published a book of (brilliant) short fiction, Counternarratives, and a book of (likewise brilliant) essays (or perhaps "experimental novel"), Annotations, and a chapbook or two, but no collections from which poems could be selected in the ordinary way. 

Perhaps, though, the subtitle is a way to indicate that this a debut collection that is not exactly a debut, i.e., not a book by someone newly and dewily emerged from an MFA program. Keene is no fledgling. Punks is more like Wallace Stevens's Harmonium or Robert Duncan's Opening of the Field; it's the first collection of someone who has been publishing for quite a while and whose first collection readers have for years and years been jonesing for. In effect, he indeed is a well-established, mid-career poet.

And a strong one, so no wonder  that the book won the National Book Award in 2022 (and a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award). 

The book has wide stylistic variety--not the variety of "I'm going to try to write a sestina now," but the variety of an evolving, exploratory, deeply-considered relationship to form. We get not only some high-polish New Yorker-ish things, some dramatic monologues somewhat reminiscent of that modern master of the form, Richard Howard, but also some poems that seem to have the spoken-word urgency slam and some experimental page-as-field poems. 

We can also tell that the the poems were not all written recently. The book's opening sections, "Playland" and "The Lost World" evoke the LGBTQ social and cultural milieu of the 1980s and 1990s as it was lived in different American cities, the feeling of emerging affirmation and pride strong and salient even while the shadow of AIDS flickers. The same sense of a long-maturing, generations-deep awareness informs the poems that deal with Black history (unsurprising coming from the author off Counternarratives). 

I couldn't say whether Punks is going to have the long tail of Harmonium or Opening of the Field, but I think it very well could. It's really good.

Daniel Clowes, _Monica_

 CLOWES'S GHOST WORLD is one of the great graphic novels, I would say, and this new one is impressive. Monica is born to and for a few years raised by Penny, a young woman caught up in the dodgier, more sordid turbulences of the 1960s. It's not certain who her father is. Monica is only four or five when Penny, on the threshold of marrying her high-school sweetheart, a returned Vietnam vet and not Monica's father, takes off and joins a cult. Monica is left to be raised by Penny's parents.

Much of the book is about Monica's adult life and the long shadows of Penny's disappearance. Monica decides to give up everything else in her life to find her mother, which leads to an extended stay in what is left of the cult as well as tracking down any paternity clues she can.

It's an often grim and dispiriting tale, but Monica does seem to have achieved some understanding and equilibrium once she hits her sixties. And then...

...I wasn't sure what to make of the ending, which abruptly flips a switch to turn on some supernatural, otherworldly horror. I didn't feel quite prepared for it, although an early chapter that seemed a digression from the main plot may have been a clue to dark secret powers percolating through the story.

Ghost World also had a subtle hint of the supernatural and otherworldly at the end...that was fine, I thought. This time, I'm not so sure.

Clowes does seem to be true to the weltanschauung of the old EC Tales from the Crypt-style horror comics, though. The visual style of the book is very EC--heavy black outlines, lurid colors, chiaroscuro effects--so maybe the oozing Lovecraftian terrors under the bland everyday surfaces make narrative sense. It bothered me, though, that Monica's hard-won serenity was so catastrophically overturned in the final page.

Friedrich Schiller, _Mary Stuart_, trans. Charles E. Passage

 I WAS TIPPED to this by David Runciman's podcast, Past Present Future, where it was featured in a series on "great political fictions."

It's set in the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots, who is also a former Queen of France and, according to some at the time, the legitimate Queen of England. English Catholics in the 1580s had to keep their affiliation secret, but there were apparently a good many of them, and they saw Elizabeth as a usurper since (a) she was illegitimate, the daughter of an adulterous union and (b) she was a Protestant. As a precaution, therefore, Elizabeth had Mary confined in the Tower of London.

So Mary is royal, but also a prisoner, subject to constraints of many kinds. The clever thing in Schiller's play is that Elizabeth is also subject to many constraints, even though she is the most powerful person in the country. She can't just fall in love and marry, for instance, or commit herself to a lover, as Mary famously did. And all of Elizabeth's closest advisors always argue the absolute necessity of whatever policy they are pushing, that Elizabeth must do this or must do that. In one decision after another, her hands are tied.

In short, they are both queens and they are both prisoners.

That even the world's most powerful people may see their hands as tied is a striking political insight, Runciman argues, and he's got a great point. The only work by Schiller I had read before this was The  Robbers, which I did not like all that much, but Mary Stuart made me curious to try more.

Sarah Churchwell, _Behold America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "The American Dream"_

 I PICKED THIS up because I was impressed by a Churchwell piece included in the recent collection Did It Happen Here? Born in the USA, she now teaches at the University of London and has also published on The Great Gatsby and Marilyn Monroe. On the strength of this book, I would guess her others are worth tracking down.

This book is about the braided history of the two phrases in the subtitle from the early 20th century, when they seem to have emerged, to the USA’s entry into World War II. 

The “American dream,” as one might guess, has been a mobile and mutable concept. Churchwell argues that in its earlier days it most often referred to the democratic and egalitarian dimensions of the American republic—“conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Lincoln put it. In the Progressive era, commentators feared the American Dream was threatened by the concentration of wealth, but by the Roaring Twenties it was more often invoked as the idea that anyone could become wealthy. There was a complementary migration in the term’s meaning from the idea that we would achieve the dream collectively, as a society, to the idea that it was achieved by individuals, especially entrepreneurs. Either way, the American Dream was what attracted talented and hard-working immigrants to the United States.

I always associated the phrase “America First” with the isolationists who argued against the USA entering World War II, as it was the name of the group led by Charles Lindbergh, but Churchwell explains that it goes back quite a bit further. It was a leading campaign slogan for Warren Harding in 1920, for instance, aimed mainly at keeping the USA out of the League of Nations. The slogan was also picked up a rallying cry by a variety of anti-immigrant groups, most notably the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s Klan was as fierce about excluding Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants as it was about keeping down Blacks; it was gaining influence at the same time Fascism was taking power in Italy, and Churchwell notes that the similarity was pointed out even at the time.

Turns out—as any reader of Philip Roth’s Plot Against America will recall—that the Lindbergh-led America First movement was likewise inspired by white supremacist notions. Lindbergh was not a pacifist, but thought we should stay out of any fight between “white” peoples and instead prepare for war against the duskier races. Shades of Tom Buchanan!

In an epilogue and coda, Churchwell catches us up with the latest iteration of “America First” rhetoric in the campaign speeches of the Trumpster. 

I liked the way Churchwell marshals her evidence. She draws a lot on influential journalists of the time, especially Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson, and deftly handles such literary landmarks as Babbitt, The Great Gatsby, and The Grapes of Wrath. I was most struck, through, by her command of a massive array of anonymous editorials from a range of newspapers—big town, medium town, small town, from all across the nation. Even with digital search capabilities, her many quotations from the daily press suggest a heroic level of time in the archives. Scholarship lives!

Paul Auster, _4 3 2 1_ (1)

 THE FIRST PAUL Auster novel I ever read was Moon Palace, back around 1990. I almost immediately went back to read its predecessors, New York Trilogy and In the Country of Last Things, and the two autobiographical essays published as The Invention of Solitude, and subsequently read every other Auster novel as they were published. I mean...I loved Paul Auster. 

Almost very other Auster novel, I should say, because I had been avoiding 4 3 2 1. For its length, mainly...866 pages. I associate Auster with a certain Gallic focus and concision, along the lines of Blanchot or Michon, say, and a door-stopper Auster novel didn't seem like it could be an Auster novel, if you see what I mean. Then too, the reviews I read ran lukewarm. So, while I had not at all decided that I was going to skip 4 3 2 1, I did put it off.

And then, when Auster died a few months ago, I felt this pang of guilt, as though I had betrayed a writer I loved. So off the shelves it came, the dust was blown off the  top, and I started reading it.

I haven't finished...I am on p. 452...but I am certainly enjoying and admiring it. I was right that for a novel by Auster, it was not very Austerian. The prose, I would say, does not sound like his usual prose at all, with long, detail-accumulating sentences that even slip into garrulity at times. The sheer piling up of detail has to do, I suspect, with another way in which this novel is a departure for Auster: it seems to draw deeply on memories of his childhood, boyhood, and youth.

Once I noticed how much of the novel feels like remembered detail, it struck me as remarkable and surprising that a novelist as prolific as Auster (4 3 2 1 was his 17th published novel, if you count New York Trilogy as three) had never before written fiction about growing up as a baby boomer in suburban New Jersey. Even his memoir, Hand to Mouth, opens with his finishing college and trying to make a career as a writer. But 4 3 2 1 is all about Archie Ferguson, who is born in 1947 to a middle-class Jewish couple that eventually separates, grows up in New Jersey with frequent visits to New York City, and comes of age during the expansive and turbulent 1960s. As far as the bare bones of his biography go, Archie Ferguson has a great deal in common with Paul Auster, born in the same place at the same time to a highly similar family.

Thus 4 3 2 1 has become the first Auster novel to remind me of the work of that other Jewish-American novelist who grew up in northern New Jersey, the one born 14 years before Auster and much more widely known. Philip Roth fictionally re-jiggered his boyhood and youth repeatedly. Besides the characters like Neil Klugman, Nathan Marx, Gabe Wallach, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, and Marcus Messner, who all seem to embody aspects of Roth himself, we have Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, and the "Philip" of The Plot Against America, all born in 1933 and raised in Newark in families like Roth's own. Not exactly like Roth's own, of course--there is always some juggling and rearranging, such as Nathan Zuckerman's having a younger brother while Roth himself had only an older brother. But consider the number of Weequahic High alums in Roth's fiction. The Weequahic neighborhood is almost Roth;'s Yoknapatawpha.

Auster had avoided drawing on this material his whole career, then towards the end of his career opened the floodgates--which I suspect is why the sentences in 4 3 2 1 got so long and so loaded with specifics. Auster had been saving them up his whole writing life and finally gave himself permission to use them. Take this relatively short sample, on Archie's typewriter: "How he came to love that writing machine, and how good it felt to press his fingers against the round, concave keys and watch the letters fly up on their steel prongs and strike the paper, the letters moving right as the carriage moved left, and then the ding of the bell and the sound of the cogs engaging to drop him down to the next line as black word followed black word to the bottom of the page." And that's just about typing. Auster really lets himself go when writing about playing basketball, or taking the train into the city, or watching old Laurel and Hardy films. 4 3 2 1 is the big old 19th century David Copperfield bildungsroman he never before let himself write.

But I haven't even mentioned the biggest surprise--that the novel gives us not just one Archie Ferguson, but four. That will need its own post.