Chris Lehmann, "American Gothics: The Failures of the Trump Novel," in _The Baffler_ #81

I ALWAYS LOOK forward to reading Chris Lehmann, but the response of U. S. fiction writers to Trump and Trumpism has not been as inadequate as he claims in his piece in the most recent issue of The Baffler. I would take issue with him on several points.

(1) The novel is not a good genre for hot takes, because novels take a long time to write, and the gaining of genuine historical perspective takes even longer. The best American novel about the country’s potential for fascism in the 1930s is not Sinclair Lewis’s estimable but flawed It Can’t Happen Here but Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, written sixty years after the events it imagines. For similar reasons, the best novel about Europe in the Napoleonic era, War and Peace, was written more than fifty years after Waterloo. We will likely not live to see the truly great novel about Trumpism. 

(2) For now, no one novel is going to do the whole job of making Trump and Trumpism discernible. We have a lot of excellent non-fiction books devoted to that undertaking, by (for example) John Ganz, Kristin Kobes du Mez, Quinn Slobodian, and Laura Field, but no one of them does the whole job all by itself. Similarly, the novels by Ben Lerner, Hari Kunzru, and Gary Shteyngart that Lehmann criticizes do focus on aspects of Trump and Trumpism rather than all 360 degrees of that phenomenon; take them together, though, and we begin to get a convincing picture. 

(3) Lehmann objects that these novelists focus too exclusively on Trumpism’s “failings of language, etiquette, and aesthetic representation” while staying silent on “most questions of Trumpian politics and policy-making, from election denialism to DEI moral panics to evangelical militance.” I think Lehmann is mistaken in thinking these are two separate domains. The unforgettable playground scene in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School does focus on language and etiquette, but it does so in a way that reveals the worldview underlying election denialism, DEI moral panic, and a lot else. Making these connections visible is what the greatest novels do. 

(4)I am very glad Lehmann praised Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, one of the great American novels of this still-young century. I hope he will get around to The Unfolding by A. M. Homes, whose “Big Guy” gives us a portrait of Trumpism at the other end of the class hierarchy from Ellmann’s Ronny. Nicolás Medina Mora’s América del Norte makes a contribution too, showing us Trumpism from the perspective of a resident non-citizen. 

 

The complaints of Lehmann and others notwithstanding, the novelists of the United States are on the case. 

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 2: At Odds with His Time

 Continuing my section-by-section notes on Tanenhaus's new and excellent biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.:

(1) Tracking down a reference, I discovered that John Judis, author of the 1988 book that up until now has been the most thorough biography of Buckley, granted Tanenhaus access to his archive of interviews.  This had to have been an invaluable resource--for one thing, I imagine at least some of the people Judis interviewed died before Tanenhaus would have had a chance to talk to them. 

What a generous thing to do. Judis must have known that Tanenhaus's book would replace his own as the go-to on Buckley, but still shared what he could have hoarded, in the interest of a truer, more comprehensive history. As someone who spent a career in academia, where a lot of policing of territory occurs, I was impressed at Judis's selflessness.

(2) Like a lot of promising Ivy grads right after World War II, Buckley was invited to work for CIA, and yes, he did, for a while, in Mexico. Not surprising, really, but the real twist in the story is that during Buckley's brief stint as a spook, he met and befriended E. Howard Hunt, later one of the (ahem) masterminds of the fateful Watergate break-in.

(3) Buckley's emergence was well-timed. American conservatism was on the ropes in the thirties and forties, what with (a) the popularity of New Deal innovations like Social Security, collective bargaining, and the 40-hour week, (b) the fascist overtones of the "America First" movement, and (c) the Republican party's embrace of relatively moderate presidential candidates like Willkie, Dewey, and Eisenhower. The campaign against Communism perked things up a bit, but the tawdriness of McCarthyism soon clogged  the wheels of that effort. 

American conservatism needed an advocate who was young, intelligent, articulate, and energetic--and lo, one appeared.

(4) Buckley's energy was prodigious. A lot of Part 2 is about the launching of the National Review, a daunting undertaking, but one Buckley was equal to and that in a short time rearranged the landscape of American political commentary. That alone was a breathtaking accomplishment. But he also found time to found Young Americans for Freedom, a nationwide association of young conservatives, and (along with great friend and brother-in-law Brent Bozell, who ghost-wrote The Conscience of a Conservative) to get off the ground a campaign to elect Barry Goldwater President.

(5) National Review placed its marker firmly on  the pro-segregation side of the civil rights question, most (in)famously in Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail." This we knew. But Tanenhaus has made the further and truly eye-opening discovery that the Buckley family also funded a segregationist newspaper in Camden, SC, its hometown-away-from-hometown. The first issue carried a "Statement of Principle" by the newly-formed White Citizens Council. 

Cole Swenson, _Such Rich Hour_

 COUNT ON COLE Swenson for an original and surprising starting point for a collection, in this case the famously gorgeous late medieval illuminated manuscript, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, commissioned in 1411 by the duke himself (third-born son of King Jean II) but not completed at the time of his death in 1416--not completed, indeed, until 1440, by hands other than those of the originally commissioned painters, the Brothers Limbourg, who also died in 1416. And then the whole thing was lost for a few hundred years, to be rediscovered in a girls' boarding school in Genoa in 1855.

The manuscript is organized around the months of the year and depicts a serene, prosperous, well-ordered world, which the territory and court of the Duc de Berry supposedly was. Actually, early fifteenth century France was anything but serene, prosperous, and well-ordered. A lot of its territory was occupied by England, whose royal family was aggressively pursuing its claim to the crown of France, and the French royal family was enmeshed in a bloody intra-familial feud worthy of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Agincourt, the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, rival popes...that 15th century.

Swenson's poems represent both the beautiful world seen in the manuscript's illuminations ("the forest whole in its gentle bow / mirrored in color / love was something we invented/ / and perfectly enacted") and the terrible world in which the book was produced ("Choose a bridge in broad daylight, The Yonne drifting / by below while Tanguy du Châtel / simply kills him. Others lean / on the railing and watch"). Often the poems represent as well the processes that producing the book required, vellum and brushes and paints, the material bases by which it exists at all.

The book follows the manuscript in being organized around the months, but the poems do not make the mistake of trying to sound or look like facsimiles of 15th century poetry. They are thoroughly contemporary, disjunctive and paratactic, sometimes in ways that suggest erasures. The further I got into the book, the more sense this choice made, as it seemed to reflect how our knowledge of the world of 15th century France was necessarily fragmentary, composed of brightly colored but disconnected pieces that we had to assemble as best we could on our own, imagining our way into the lacunae, the empty spaces. Such Rich Hour steers well clear of pastiche, finding its own way to recreate the beauty of the art and world it honors. 

Catherine Lacey, _Pew_

THIS SHORT NOVEL teeters between realism and parable. 

Some small town churchgoers find the narrator asleep on a pew one Sunday and decide to take him--or her--in, temporarily, until they figure out where the stranger belongs. Pew, as they decide to call him or her, is of indeterminate gender and ethnicity and probably in their teens.

Pew does not answer any questions as to their name, sex, background, or anything else; they rarely speak at all, actually, save to a few people who themselves seem marginalized within the community. 

A few days go by--the action of the novel covers exactly one week--and Pew is taken around  to meet various townspeople. Lacey does an extraordinary job of conjuring up the ethos of the town in Pew's encounters with a variety of its citizens. Everyone wants to be charitable and welcome the stranger, but they also want to know exactly what kind of stranger they are welcoming. Then, too, there is something about Pew that compels them to open up a bit, to reveal more than they probably planned to reveal.

The undecidable aspects of Pew's identity start generating controversy, and some citizens grow belligerently insistent on getting answers to the questions about Pew's sexual, ethnic, and class identities.

The rising tension over who exactly Pew is coincides with the preparation for the town's annual Festival of Forgiveness, which will be held on Saturday. Lacey refrains from revealing exactly what happens at this festival while dropping dark hints--for instance, the townspeople want to squelch the rumor that it involves human sacrifice.

What it does involve, we learn, is the town's collective purging of its own hypocrisy, its own airing of the contradictions within its own supposed first principles, its confrontation with its own internalized lies. No one actually gets killed, but the scene of the festival in the final chapter does remind one a little of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," maybe a bit too of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or (on a different cultural plane) Grace Metalious's Peyton Place or (on some other plane altogether) David Lynch's Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, or any depiction of the sinister capabilities that can lie just beneath the calm and idyllic surface of an American small town.

Pew gets out, as do a few other unassimilable types, thank goodness. Lacey's epigraph is from Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and we no more where Pew is headed than we know where those who walk away from Omelas are headed. One is relieved that they have gotten away, though, even if it turns out the next town down the road is just another Omelas.

Camille Ralphs, _After You Were, I Am_

CAMILLE RALPHS IS the first woman to be poetry editor at the TLS, which is impressive all by itself, and she is only thirty-three, which is even more remarkable. This is her first collection, published in 2024 by Faber in England and this year by McSweeney's in the USA. I picked it up by because of a favorable review by Ange Mlinko--I'm something of a Pavlovian dog whenever Mlinko or Stephanie Burt praises a poet, slobbering all over the keyboard as I look online for a copy of the book. I think I scored this one  through Open Books in Seattle.

The normal approach for a debut collection is "these are the best poems I have so far," but After You Were, I Am is a good deal more thematized and focused than that, with its three sections all orbiting the idea of the religious or the spiritual. The book is actually a bit darker and less vaporous than the phrase "the religious or the spiritual" suggests, but that's the best I can do.

The first section remodels and rewires eighteen prayers, mostly Christian and mostly ancient (none post-date George Herbert), somewhat in the way Alexander Pope rewired Horace or Ezra Pound rewired Propertius, with saltings of contemporary vocabulary, contemporary references, and contemporary anxieties. Kyrie Eleison morphs into: "True plutocrat and understrapper, / sugar daddy, spirit rapper, / organ donor, entity-- / O world, have mercy on me." Too audacious to be adopted by anyone's meditation retreat, I imagine, but authentic. You hear the satire and the longing at the same time.

The second section is a series of dramatic monologues from an historical and disastrous witch trial in 17th century Lancashire. Most of the women we hear from were found guilty of witchcraft and put to death, and Ralphs's collective portrait of them, among its other virtues, makes a powerful case for the separation of church and state.

Finally, we have "My Word: From the Spiritual Diary of Dr. Dee." John Dee was astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and Ralphs's dramatic monologues in his voice evoke the last moment before religion and science go through their messy divorce. Besides his astrological pursuits, Dee studies alchemy and searches for traces of the original, unfallen, Adamic language, in which the phenomenon and its name would be fused in an integral whole--the goal of a good deal of poetry, as Charles Taylor has explained.

Ralphs's "Note on Spelling" at the end of the book might be worth reading *before* you read the book. It's not just an archaizing mannerism, á la Spenser or Chatterton, but more of a Finnegans Wake strategy, getting the word to reveal its many mycelial connections.

Maggie Nelson, _Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth_

 I WAS A couple dozen pages into Pathemata and persuaded that it was one wild ride when I checked the acknowledgements page in the back--I wanted to see what Nelson may have said there about partner Harry Dodge. At the end of the acknowledgements, I found this "Disclaimer":

"This work conjoins dream and reality; all representations of people, places, and events should be understood in that spirit."

Hence the wildness of the ride. The territory explored in Pathemata is a lot like the Wonderland explored by Alice, logical and absurd at the same time, frightening and consolatory at the same time, monstrous and familiar at the same time. And like Wonderland, it's a dreamscape--or some of it is. 

For me, it hearkened back to the old Maggie Nelson. After The Argonauts landed on so many coffee tables and syllabuses, Nelson seemed to be working from her new standing as a public intellectual in On Freedom, and she just did not seem comfortable. Nelson is more at home in the disruptive and transgressive, the strange and unsettling. In Pathemata, she is back home.

Pathemata is a (dream?) journal about buccal-and-dental health issues during COVID days, and it deserves shelf space alongside Huysmans's A Rebours or Mircea Cartaresçu's Solenoid in its evocation of the nightmarish aspects of dentistry.

It's not just about that, of course, given the range of Nelson's interests and the acuity of her perception, not to mention the complexity of her life. I was wondering whether Dodge was mentioned in the acknowledgements because throughout the book Nelson's relationship with "H" seems strained. Was the estrangement just in dreams, provoked by 2020's gamut of anxieties? Or actual? None of my business, anyway, and the acknowledgements do thank "the magical creatures with whom I shared heart and home during this time, including Dodge, presumably.

"Pathemata" is Greek for "suffering" or "pain," and the word is often used in a phrase, "pathemata mathemata," that means "learning from suffering." Does leaving "mathemata" out of the title imply nothing was learned? I would say no, it doesn't imply that, since the book ends with Nelson telling of a lesson about pain she did not get around to learning while undergoing labor but may be at last ready for: "The moment for the lesson is now."

Patricia Lockwood's four new poems in n+1 #51; Ben Philipps, "Evasive Species"

QUITE A FEW poets I like--Lucy Ives, Maggie Nelson, Ocean Vuong--seem to publish more prose than poetry lately. Can't blame them, really, given the relative sizes of the audience for poetry and the audience for prose, but I still feel a twinge of regret. Such being the case, it was heartening to see four new poems from Patricia Lockwood in the most recent issue of n+1.

I have been a fan of Lockwood since Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and that is going back a ways, even back before "Rape Joke." Lockwood has not published a collection of poems since 2014, but in the meantime the brilliant autofictions/memoirs Priestdaddy, No One Is Talking about This, and (quite recently) There Will Never Be Another You have made her famous (profiled in the New Yorker, no less).

The new poems did not remind me much of her earlier poetry, but after all, it's been ten-plus years, and a lot has happened in the meantime (see the three autofictions/memoirs). These poems still have some of the anarchic, she'll-say-anything streak of her early work, but I'd say they seem under more control. There are bows to illustrious precursors, Plath (not at all surprising) and Yeats (surprising, to me, but happy to see it), a fascination with minerals, and an idiosyncratic religious inflection.

I hope more are coming.

The same issue of n+1 has an interesting essay by Ben Philipps on climate-conscious poetry--okay, I admit it, I did not expect an essay on climate-conscious poetry to be interesting because, you know, déjà lu, but Philipps began with an interesting move, talking about the two large camps of American poetry. I think of them as representational and non-representational (see post for Sept 11, 2024); Philipps goes with "confessional" and "experimental." The poetry Philipps wants us to pick up on, which he calls "eco-confessional," perhaps bridges the divide, because it tends both to say "I have to tell you about this" and to aim at a kind of dislocation and upsetting of familiar tropes, trying to jar the reader out of complacency. 

Sounds promising, no? Philipps persuaded me to look into the poetry of Rachel Allen.

Daniel Mason, _North Woods_

 SO, I AM wondering, how does Daniel Mason maintain an enviable career as a novelist--this, his fifth, was a NYTBR "10 Best Books of 2023" honoree, and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth was a Pulitzer Prize finalist--while also handling his duties as an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford--Stanford!--a position that the author's bio tells me he holds. I mean, how does one do all that? 

North Woods has an unusual structure in that the main element of continuity is neither a character nor a plot but a setting, an old house in a wooded area in a remote part of western Massachusetts. The first version of the house, apparently rudimentary, was thrown together by a pair of lovers escaping the Puritanic rigors of Plymouth. It was added to over the years by a retired soldier who wants to grow apples and later by a wealthy man who wanted to turn it into a hunting lodge, but it finally falls into ruin, its abandoned grounds visited by amateur archaeologists and dendrologists.

So we get the longue durée of a novel like, say, Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming, but instead of following a family's genealogy, we see the transformations of a certain place, as in Prairyerth, William Least Heat Moon's non-fiction "deep map" of central Kansas.

Mason keeps this all moving along with well-tempered prose and intriguing characters (spirit mediums, lobotomy practitioners). We don't get to spend more than a chapter or two with any character, which is somewhat unfortunate, because of all of them are distinct enough to be interesting. Mason incorporates a supernatural element, though, that means that some of the characters, or their traces, reappear when we are not expecting them. And then there is that mountain lion. And that ax.

Percival Everett, _I Am Not Sidney Poitier_

 NOT EVERETT'S MOST audacious novel...but that is a high bar. 

The narrator's mother, a Poitier but unrelated to the famous actor, named him "Not Sidney," which is a good joke and sets the novel up for the kind of wordplay S. J. Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers. 

     "Are you not Sidney Poitier?"

    "Yes, I am Not Sidney Poitier."

The narrator's mother also invested in Turner Broadcasting when it was just a blip of a startup, so her death, when the narrator is just eleven, leaves him breathtakingly wealthy.

So the novel is a bit like Great Expectations. Like Pip, Not Sidney comes of age with no worries about how to provide for himself, and encounters a number of vivid characters who help, or hinder, or both as he figures life out--with the important difference, of course, that being a young Black man in the South is quite distinct from being a young gentleman in Victorian London, especially in one's relations with the police. He is also a bit like Voltaire's Candide, though, as these encounters have the effect of knocking down one or another illusion about how things work.

The extra Everettian fillip to the novel is that Not Sidney keeps finding himself in scenarios that are funhouse  reflections of Sidney's films--The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Not Sidney physically resembles Sidney, we are told, and does so increasingly as the novel progresses, until he is finally actually taken for Sidney. What's this about? I'm not sure--it reminded me of Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," a story that makes literal the old proverb of wearing a mask that one's face eventually matches. I'm still puzzling this one out.

Elizabeth Willis, _Liontaming in America_

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, but difficult to describe. "This book is not a memoir," the first sentence states, so that point is settled, but even without that caveat few readers, I think, would assume it was one. The word "I" does not occur frequently, and most of the book's attention is devoted to people who lived in the 19th century. 

The book is a poem, I think I can say, an American kind of epic poem that has some affinities with Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, parts of Louis Zukofsky's "A," and Charles Reznikoff's Testimony; that is, it includes a generous amount of the documentary, sometimes foregrounds its own processes, and often seems like a bold attempt to write a poem about the whole United States. (As in The Maximus Poems and Hart Crane's The Bridge, for instance, the woman we are used to calling Pocahontas appears.)

And while the book is not a memoir, Willis's own family background frames the project, for much it concerns the history of Mormonism and that movement's history in Utah. (And the end, unless I am jumping to conclusions, reflects the death of her parents in an automobile accident [p. 294].)

I don't know whether Willis would call herself a Mormon currently, and I would not call her a proselytizer or even an advocate, exactly, but she does provide a different kind of light on the church than we usually get. The section called "Boy" gives us a Joseph Smith who is neither a fast-talking charlatan nor a madman, but a made-in-America visionary. The church he founds breaks with precedent in a number of ways, especially in allowing polygamy, but in Willis's handling this is not patriarchy run amuck, but a willingness to reinvent the paradigm of the family in a way that might actually enable new kinds of communities, especially women's communities.

The book's title, we learn in a concluding "Author's Note," comes from "a 1926 essay in which Robert Walser compares a liontamer to a Mormon polygamist whose wives only appear to obey for the sake of public performance." The Mormon wives we meet in Willis's poem are a bit like the powerful medieval abbesses who, technically, had to acknowledge the authority of the church priesthood and hierarchy, but who nonetheless usually succeeded in managing what they wanted to manage, doing the work they wanted to do and creating communities that ran on their own terms.

Liontaming in America put me in mind not only of Olson, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, but also of Harold Bloom's The American Religion, Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, Lucy Sante's Low Life, and Saidiya Hartman's Waywatd Lives, Beautiful Experiments by foregrounding people and movements a little more shadowy, a little more idiosyncratic, a little stranger, a little more obsessed and less assimilable than the people and movements you will meet in, say, a Ken Burns documentary. America, Willis convinced me,  is not what we generally think it is.

Benjamin Labatut, _When We Cease to Understand the World_, trans. Adrian Nathan West

 I HAD READ about half of this collection of thematically unified stories, all about crucial figures in the sciences and mathematics in the early decades of the 20th century, when I decided it would make a good gift for my son-in-law, who has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. 

After buying him a copy and then finishing the book, I wondered how appropriate a gift for him it was, really, since all the figures in the book--Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger--come off as obsessed, or possessed, prey to delirium, making their advances by intuitive or counter-intuitive leaps, reckless about the short- or long-term consequences of their discoveries. Divine madmen, a priesthood high on their own prophecies.

We are leagues distant from any idea of scientific objectivity here, any idea of cool ratiocination or calm deliberation--it's all sturm und drang, visionary poetry by other means. For instance, Schrödinger arrives at a formula that "applied to any physical system" would enable one "to describe its future evolution." But the formula is built around an abyss:

The problem lay in its central term--the soul of the equation--which Schrödinger had represented with the Greek letter psi and had baptized as the "wave function." All the information one could wish to have about a quantum system was contained in  the wave function. But Schrödinger did not know what it was. It had the form of a wave, but could not be a real physical phenomenon, because it moved outside this world, in multidimensional space. Perhaps it was only a mathematical chimera. The only certain thing was its power, which seemed unlimited. In theory.

All the other figures in the book seem similarly poised on the edge of their own abysses, peering past the edge of the  knowable into some realm where matter turns into metaphor and then back into matter, forever flickering.

Is that what doing advanced physics is really like, or is it a fiction writer's fantasy? I can't judge, and my son-in-law hasn't said anything yet. It does make for compelling reading, however.

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Greil Marcus, _Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations_

 THIS "VERY SHORT book" (to quote from Marcus's acknowledgments) contains three pieces based on lectures Marcus gave at Harvard in 2013, each about a song: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" by Bob Dylan, "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley (and possibly Elvie [possibly L. V. ] Thomas), and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

The book has no introduction or conclusion, and thus does not present itself as thesis-oriented, but it does have a recurring idea: that the songs are not so much expressions of an individual performer's vision as they are a kind of convergence of a tradition, a performer, and an audience. Each song has recognizable antecedent songs, each has been given a distinctive stamp by the performer, and each found an audience for cherished the song, for whom became a kind of touchstone.

One of the performers, Dylan, is among the best-documented artists of our time, subject of innumerable books, including a few by Marcus; diligent research can turn up a good amount of info on Lunsford; we have nothing but ambiguous traces of Wiley. But the individual existence of the performer is only part of the story in this book, and maybe not even the most important part. The song chooses its vessel, in a way.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations is a late echo, I think, of the folk music boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I only vaguely remember that phenomenon, as I was in  the early primary grades at the time, but I do remember the breakout hits like "Walk Right In" by the Rooftop Singers and "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio. There was even a TV show, Hootenanny (and, much later, a mockumentary, A Mighty Wind). Once the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in early 1964, almost everyone moved on to something else, but "folk" loomed large for a few years.

An odd thing about "folk music" is that, in most countries, attention to folk culture is a marker of romantic-conservative leanings, a slightly perverse impulse to re-create some original purity that supposedly existed before modernity contaminated everything, but in the United States, folk music has long-established connections to progressive politics. This connection goes back to the WPA and Woody Guthrie, I suppose, and the Seeger family (Pete's father, Charles, was both a musicologist and a Marxist), and was certainly still strong in the early 1960s, as folk music was joined at the hip to "protest" music, as in Dylan's 1962-63 output.

Marcus's idea that these "folk" songs are, in some ineffable but discernible way, truly the creations of the folk, not entirely those of individual performers, and that they speak in some real way to our national circumstances, strikes me as participating in that connection between folk music and progressive politics. I am all for it--grateful for it, I will even say.

Robert Duncan, _Poems 1948-1949_

  I CONTINUE TO find out how wrong I was about the shape of Robert Duncan's career prior to The Opening of the Field. He published quite a few collections, it turns out, although with small presses and in small runs. Duncan's Collected Early Poems and Plays, published in 2012 by the University of California Press, runs to hundreds of pages. 

This volume was published by Berkeley Miscellany Editions in, I guess, 1949 or 1950 (it bears no date), printed by the Libertarian Press in Glen Gardner, NJ. It collects the poems Duncan was writing after those gathered in The Years as Catches (see post for August 18). 

Duncan is getting franker, more audacious, in some ways more playful than in his earlier poems. Duncan is more obviously out in these poems, the love poems more plainly addressed to other men, and the language saltier, although I know that mainly thanks to the efforts of a previous reader of the copy I obtained from a local university library.

(By the way, I was a little surprised to find this book in the public stacks, not in special collections.)

For instance, "The Venice Poem" has expurgated lines on pp. 31 and 32, Some prior reader of the copy I read had supplied the missing lines, e.g., "the forlorn c********* is not wonderful." (Written out in the book was a 10-letter vulgarism for one who performs fellatio, a word unprintable in 1949 and even now one that gets flagged by Blogger's vigilant bots.) I thought at first that someone was just taking liberties, but no, a cross-check of "Venice Poem" as published later confirms that the added lines are accurate. Interesting, no?

Even more interesting, the saltier, more audacious Duncan is also a more visionary Duncan. Wings are being stretched and readied for flight. The most obvious sign of this, I thought, was "I Tell of Love," a post-Pound refashioning of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega." The presence of Cavalcanti's poem in Pound's Canto XXXVI, in Zukofsky's "A"-9, and here makes me wonder about it being a kind of modernist touchstone--mainly due to Pound's standing, I suppose, but some possibility of modernist-poetry-as-mystery-religion is shimmering here too. 

I would love to see a performance of "A Poet's Masque," with which the volume concludes, but I am not getting my hopes up.

Álvaro Enrigue, _You Dreamed of Empires, trans. Natasha Wimmer

 I WAS A mite concerned, upon commencing this novel, to see it was about the arrival of Cortés and his Spaniards in Tenochtitlan in 1519, Enrigue already having made fictional use of that event in Sudden Death. Why revisit it? Turns out, however, that Enrigue changes things up by narrating mainly from the point of view of the indigenous Mexicans, so You Dreamed of Empires is well worth your time even if you have already read Sudden Death. (If you have not read Sudden Death, you really should.)

The Spanish conquest of Mexico does raise questions. Why did the Aztec empire not simply kill Cortés, enslave his men, and have done with things? My mid-1960s U.S. education suggested the Aztecs were technologically outclassed (horses, gunpowder), superstitious, and disorganized. None of that sounds likely at this point. 

Enrigue's evocation of the encounter sounds truer. The Aztecs did not know quite what to do with the smelly, hairy strangers who had arrived at the capital for several reasons. For one thing, the subject peoples of their empire were oppressed and resentful and looking for an opportunity to overthrow them. For another, their administrative protocols were so elaborate as to hamstring them, procedurally, creating fatal delays. Enrigue has a lot of fun with Tlilpotonqui, cihuacoatl (chief executive) of Tenochtitlan and his anxious efforts to see that the forms are observed--these chapters reminded me of Saint Simon explaining the proprieties of Versailles.

For another--these are likely Enrigue's own inventions--Moctezuma, the emperor, is (a) fascinated by the Spaniards' horses and wants to keep them around long enough to figure out how to use them and (b) is  tripping on mushrooms most of the time. 

So, one could say the barbarians won. Except there is an alternative-history twist at the end that I am still trying to figure out. 

The real stars of the novel, though, are Atotoxtli, Moctezuma's sister and wife, and Malinalli, a captive princess who is Cortés's translator. Their scene together is worthy of Schiller's imagined meeting between Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Tony Tulathimutte, _Rejection_

LAST MONTH, THE New York Times ran an article about "performative feminism," that is, young(ish) men who know their way around the discourse and cultural codes of feminism, but who have acquired these skills mainly in the interest of getting dates. The story, much to my surprise, did not so much as mention Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist," which is a cringe-inducing portrait of exactly such a character. The story ran in n+1 way back in 2019, and had a lot of readers at the time, so Im not sure why the Times writers did not give it a nod. 

Maybe the omission is weirdly à propos, though, since "The Feminist" is the lead story in this 2024 collection called Rejection, in which every story is about being the one who does not get picked, chosen, elected, noticed, mentioned, etc. The performative feminism strategy of the protagonist of "The Feminist," for instance, backfires spectacularly over and over again, and in the story's final sentence he seems to have drifted into the toxic precincts of incel-dom.

Tulathimutte's skill in presenting these...I guess I have to call them rejects, grim as it is...is so compelling that the book can be hard to stay with. You keep wishing you could tell a character, wait a minute, don't hit "send" on that one, but they always do, with catastrophic results. Part of you wants to quit reading, but there you are, driving slowly past the pileup, rubbernecking.

What I most enjoyed, though, and a good reason to keep going through cringe after cringe, is that the collection has not only thematic coherence, but some surprising internal connections that make it an unconventional kind of novel. Alison, the protagonist of "Pics," may be spending time with the protagonist of "The Feminist" while she tries to get over being  rejected by Neil, and then later winds up having to break loose from Max, the insufferable narrator of "Our Dope Future." Kant, the protagonist of "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," is the brother of Bee, author of  the epic post that accounts for most of the pages of "Main Character," and the Craig that Bee at one point has to fend off may be the narrator of "The Feminist." The stories add up to a portrait of a generation that grew up online. An unflattering portrait, but, well.

The final text in the book is a publisher's letter to Tulathimutte rejecting Rejection. This letter must be Tulathimutte's own work, since the publisher's greatest objection to Rejection is the inclusion in the book of the rejection letter itself. Not everyone likes this kind of Borgesian metafictional move, but I do. 

Marianne Moore, "Henry James as a Characteristic American"; Elizabeth Bishop, "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore"

A NICE SIDE benefit of Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting is picking up some excellent suggestions for further reading. Both of these items showed up in her chapter on Moore and Bishop.

I think only Moore could get away with calling the child of wealth and nearly-lifelong expatriate Henry James, Jr., a "characteristic American," but she does. The argument, I think, is that James studied what made Americans American with a singular assiduity and that his longtime residence in Europe and England made a better lab, so to speak, than the USA itself, since American-ness could be better studied in a contrasting environment. 

"Argument" may be too blunt a word, though, since the essay, like many of Moore's poems, is an intricate construction--a monkey puzzle tree?--of quotations from James, mainly from his non-fiction, that is meant more for contemplation than for the drawing of conclusions.

"Henry James as a Characteristic American" was published by Hound & Horn in the issue for April/May 1934, which is right around the time Bishop first met Moore. Bishop, as an undergraduate at Vassar already a great admirer of Moore, likely read it, which is why it comes up in Cohen's chapter. "Efforts of Affection" is Bishop's account of that first meeting and the long friendship that grew from it. 

It's beautiful--graceful, generous, wise, loving. 

Odd and maybe a little sad that it never appeared in Bishop's lifetime. She worked on it over the last ten years of her life, and it seems fully developed to me, but it was not published until 1983, four years after Bishop's death, in Vanity Fair. Did she not think it was quite done? She was famous for holding things back from publication until she absolutely positively thought they were ready. I'm glad someone decided it was worth publishing and that it was included in Bishop's Collected Prose.

Rachel Cohen, _A Chance Meeting: American Encounters_

 A BRILLIANT BUT hard-to-describe book. The original subtitle of 2004 does a better job of suggesting the book's project than that of the 2024 NYRB reprint I read: "Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967." We have something like a group biography (Leon Edel's Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men), but not exactly, because we are talking about a much longer stretch of time (over a century) and the figures do not constitute a movement or a group.

What we get are thirty-six chapters, each what Cohen calls a "double portrait," each presenting an occasion when one well known American writer (or photographer, or composer, or painter) met another: "intertwined lives," as the original subtitle had it. We have chapters, for example, on Gertrude Stein and William James (she studied with him at Harvard), on Mark Twain and Willa Cather (she got to go to his 70th birthday party, which was quite a big bash), on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore (two deeply idiosyncratic artists who got along famously).  Some meeting were fortuitous and never repeated (Matthew Brady photographed the eleven-year-old Henry James and his father), some became collaborations (Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes) or lasting friendships (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore), some went badly, badly wrong (Katherine Anne Porter and Hart Crane).

The book does not have a thesis, exactly. It does not seem to be making an argument. But you nonetheless seem to be watching a kind of tapestry being woven, or a kind of fantastically ornate braiding, the cultural life of a country coming into being as the practitioners of one art or another cross paths, acknowledge each other, strike sparks, and return to their paths. Something, the reader feels, is being intangibly communicated among all of them and passed on from one generation to the next, mysteriously making things cohere.

Not everyone who might be here is here--no Dickinson, no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway--and the figures chosen are mainly people who mostly lived and worked close to New York City. Somehow, the field we are looking out upon still feels broad, even representative. 

The time Cohen invested in this book must have been immense, but all her research is carried lightly, and the prose is as swift as a running brook. A Chance Meeting is one of a kind and a delight.

John Banville, _The Sea_

 JOHN BANVILLE AND J. M. Coetzee occupy adjacent niches in my memory palace of contemporary fiction. They are close in age: Coetzee was born in 1940, Banville in 1945. They both write in English, but neither is from the U.K. or the United States (Banville is Irish, Coetzee South African). Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize, and Banville ought to (methinks). Finally, even though they write in English, they seem much more influenced by the continental masters—Dostoevsky, Mann, Kafka, Musil, Nabokov—than by the English ones. 

The Sea won the Booker Prize back in 2005, and it seems to me his most Proustian novel, saturated in themes of time, place, and memory—not to mention another of Proust’s particular hobbyhorses, social class.

The recently-widowed art historian Max Morden is back in Ireland at the summer holiday spot his family stayed at in his later childhood. Shades of Balbec, but the Mordens stayed in the humbler cottages, while Max can now afford a nice B&B. 

Max spends part of the novel remembering his wife and her relatively early death from cancer, but he spends more time remembering a family, the Graces, that he attached himself to one of his last summers there.

The pubescent Max became erotically obsessed first with the mother of the family, Mrs. Grace,  then with the daughter, Chloe. The really cunning trick of Banville’s first-person narration, though, is that we see that Max’s story is not simply of sexual awakening, but simultaneously one of social aspiration, of getting out of his family’s working class world into the middle class world of the Graces.

More wrenchingly, Max seems to be starting to realize that his marriage, too, might have been not just about sexual attraction, but about getting up-and-out from the world into which he was born. That Chloe may have been his first love but was also a rung on a ladder, a means of ascent—and, terrible to realize, maybe his wife was too.

Alison Bechdel, _Spent_

GRAPHIC AUTO-FICTION, I guess we could say. Alison Bechdel enjoyed breakout success with a graphic memoir, Fun Home, about growing up in a family mortuary business with a closeted dad, a thwarted mom, and two brothers; the book became the source for a successful Broadway musical. The Alison Bechdel of Spent enjoys breakout success with a graphic memoir, Death and Taxidermy, about growing up in a family taxidermy business with a sister; the book becomes the source for a successful television series. Both the actual Bechdel and the Bechdel of Spent have a partner named Holly and live in Vermont; I do not know whether the actual Holly also raises goats. In short, Spent takes place in an alternate universe just a hair to one side of our own.

The political economy of this alternate universe works just like our own. Holly and her goats and Alison and her books have to navigate the same terrain of labor, commodification, exchange, and (unfortunately) exploitation that we do. The chapter titles of Spent are all taken from the chapter titles of Volume I of Marx's Capital: "The Process of Production of Capital," "The Process of Exchange," and so on. I wasn't sure how well this conceit worked, to be honest, but it does emphasize that artists, even though their work is highly specialized, idiosyncratic, and personal, are still workers, just like the rest of us, subject to the same economic forces as the rest of us, even when they are as successful as Bechdel.

The real treat of Spent's alternate universe is that it includes several characters from Bechdel's beloved and much-missed comic, Dykes to Watch Out For: Stuart, Sparrow, Louis, Ginger, and (briefly) Samia. (Not Mo, however--perhaps Mo and Alison being in the same universe would create a cosmic collapse.) They are older--Stuart and Sparrow have a college-age kid--but still they are a wise, funny, and affectionate portrait of the way at least some of us live now. New character Naomi is a welcome addition, and Alison's MAGA-fied Christian sister reveals some surprising dimensions by book's end.

Paul Muldoon, _Joy in Service on Rue Tagore_

 MULDOON'S LATEST, I am happy to confirm, contains plenty of what you are expecting/hoping to find in a volume by Muldoon.

Exuberant play with a variety of closed forms--sonnet, quaternary, pantoum, some you don't know the names of, some that probably do not even have names yet? Check.

Whirligig simultaneous development in the same poem of deeply unlike subject matter, like the fall of the Roman Republic and  the rise of glam rock? Check.

Outrageous rhymes (e.g., Aristotle's star pupil / Mott the Hoople)? Check. Several checks.

Due honor to those to whom honor is due? Check! ("Near Izium," on Ukraine's valiant self-defense.)

Oh, and of course, the long final poem, check, but moreover this one--"The Castle of Perseverance"--can stand beside "Yarrow" as one of Muldoon's most moving and vulnerable poems. 

And there's also the things you were not expecting but are happy to find: a couple of surprisingly moving Christmas poems ("Nativity, 2020" and "Whilst the Ox and Ass") and a convincing, cliché-less acknowledgement of one's own mortality ("The MRI"). 

Like the Union veteran in the Winslow Homer painting on the book's cover, swinging his scythe, Muldoon is still out there after all these years, gathering the harvest.

Mário de Andrade, _Mácunaíma: The Hero with No Character_, trans. Katrina Dodson

 ...WHAT THE heck is this? It's almost one hundred years old, for one thing, first published in Brazil in 1928. The main character, Mácunaíma, is a folklore figure, an infinitely resourceful trickster who outsmarts every opponent and sleeps with everyone's girlfriend while also being capable of feats of strength--so, maybe Br'er Rabbit plus John Henry plus Pecos Bill? Except that he at one point takes off for São Paolo and masters the accelerated, mechanized, bristling with modernity urban environment as thoroughly as he mastered the Amazonian forest and the backlands. 

Translator Dodson's afterword mentions Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and the Tropicália movement of late 1960s Brazil (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes), and both comparisons make sense: traditional material laced with the latest and most electrifying modernist concoctions, Paul Bunyan on LSD. Start with stories from the indigenous peoples living by the Amazon, stir in some of the traditional wisdom of the enslaved African peoples who slipped off to start their own settlements in the forest, top liberally with heteroglossia of Finnegans Wake, and serve. 

Dodson also mentions Rabelais--right about that too, the same erudite sending-up of erudition, the same blowing up of literary decorum, the same feeling that these characters are much, much larger, in every way, than we are.

I suspect that there are a good many expressions in Andrade's Portuguese that just do not go easily into English, leading Dodson to creaky colloquialisms ("pizzazz") that show up on the pages like leaky, wrinkled balloons. What are you going to do? Props to her for going ahead and getting it done (and props to New Directions for publishing it). What must it have been like to go from Clarice Lispector to this?

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 1: Prodigy in the Making

 THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY is as good as the reviews are saying it is, but with notes and index it does clock in at just over a thousand pages, and knowing myself as I do, I expect it will take me the better part of a year to finish. That being the case, it seemed better to post my notes on it section by section, rather than waiting until I have finished the whole book. This way, the details are relatively fresh in my mind.

The main outline of Buckley's career is relatively familiar stuff, given how famous he was, but Tanenhaus has added a wealth of detail.

(1) I already knew, for instance, that Buckley grew up wealthy and privileged in Connecticut with a great clan of siblings. What I did not know was that even though the Buckley children had the usual horses and private schools and extensive travel associated with their class, the family's devout Catholicism made them a bit apart, a bit of an "other." 

Tanenhaus conjures up the Buckley family childhood as a little bit Swallows and Amazons, a little bit Mitford sisters: a world of its own, with rivalries, private jokes, keen enthusiasms. Founded in privilege, yes, but also astonishingly self-sufficient psychologically and emotionally. Also surprisingly well-versed in the Spanish language and Mexican culture (The father had made his fortune in Mexican and Venezuelan oil.)

(2) Young Bill's first political passion was America First and Charles Lindbergh, the anti-intervention movement that was gathering momentum in 1940 and 1941 but evaporated after Pearl Harbor. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was passionately (and unsurprisingly) opposed to the New Deal and also, it turns out, dead set against American involvement in World War II. Son Bill, a teenager, enthusiastically joined the cause, taking the America First side in debates at his school (Millbrook Academy). 

(3) Buckley always seemed to have a Southern Agrarian, I'll-take-my-stand streak to his conservatism, and it turns out he came by it honestly: besides the big place in Connecticut, the family had a big place in South Carolina. Tanenhaus reports that the Buckleys treated the mainly Black household help in South Carolina well, but the family shared their white southern neighbors' opinions on the rightness of segregation.

(4) Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was written the year after he graduated and counts as an early example of one of the enduring American literary genres: the right hook aimed at academia (later practiced with great success by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Christopher Rufo).

(5) Again and again, one's jaw drops at Tanenhaus's spadework. For instance: World War II was still on when Buckley finished high school, and he went into the army. His unit was scheduled to go to the Pacific, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick close, so Buckley spent his stint doing administrative work in Texas. Tanenhaus found out exactly what he did and how well he did it. I'd call that going the extra mile. He doesn't spend a long time describing Buckley's duties and does not attempt to overstate their importance...but he does actually have the goods. Every page testifies to just how thorough his research was.

David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (1 of 2)

 TRINIDAD CAME UP with an ingenious way of organizing the book. Most "new and selected" volumes tuck the new poems at the end, but Trinidad put them in front and gave that section its own title, "Black Telephone." The section is about the length of a generous collection (120 pages), so I would not be annoyed to plunk down $19 for this even had I already purchased the volumes from which the "selected poems" were selected.

I don't know Trinidad's work well enough to say whether "The Black Telephone" is a staying-in-the-wheelhouse collection or a radical-departure collection, but I will say that (a) Trinidad's work is distinctive and (b) I like it. He combines elements I never would have expected to be combined: a passion for Sylvia Plath with a passion for Patty Duke, for instance, or thirty-four haiku based on episodes of the 1960s television series Peyton Place, or a list in the style of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book that includes "The voice of Dusty Springfield." . Much of the work is based on and quite candid about his own memories and experiences ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "AIDS Series"), but we also get formal experiments like an idiosyncratic erasure poem based entirely on phrases Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.

Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Sharon Tate appear, as does Dick Fisk (a gay porn star); steering by those stars, we know we are in queer baby boomer male waters, but there are more than enough surprises to keep things interesting. Had James Schuyler been born thirty years later than he actually was, he might have written not unlike Trinidad.

Timothy Egan, _A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them_

READING THE WORST Hard Time, Egan's book about the Dust Bowl, was a personal landmark for me; my parents grew up in the Dust Bowl, and Egan's book gave me a clearer idea than I had ever gotten before, even from their own stories, of what their childhood had been like.

This book did not have the same personal relevance for me, but considering it was about events of about one hundred years ago, it felt painfully relevant to our moment. 

The Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist vigilante outfit of the Reconstruction years, was revived in 1915 in the wake of D. W. Griffiths' popular and influential film Birth of a Nation (which, among other things, celebrated the exploits of the Reconstruction era Klan). By the mid-1920s, stoked by a variety of anxieties about "others" (Blacks moving north, Jews, Catholics, women's suffrage), membership had exploded, and the Klan had started to flex some serious political muscle.

Egan focuses on Indiana, where a particularly energetic Klan organizer and demagogue, D. C. Stephenson, had such a talent for provoking and channeling the fear and ressentiment of midwestern white Protestants that Indiana's local law enforcement, municipal government, courts, and state legislature were all crawling with Klan members. Stephenson saw himself, with some justification, as the most powerful man in the state. He could even tell the governor what to do.

Besides being a talented organizer and effective speaker, Stephenson was a serial rapist and sexual abuser, crimes he could commit with a degree of impunity, given his connections. However, Madge Oberholtzer, a woman he kidnapped, raped, and assaulted, lived long enough (despite poisoning herself in desperation) to  tell her story. Her parents, friends, and lawyers were foresighted enough to have her deathbed testimony witnessed and notarized, and that testimony was ruled admissible in the prosecution of Stephenson for what he did to her. In a verdict that surprised the whole country, he was convicted.

Because Egan focuses so closely on two characters, Stephenson the Caligula wannabe and the brave though grievously injured Madge, I kept thinking what a natural candidate for a film or television series A Fever in the Heartland is. I was thinking even more, though, of how much D. C. Stephenson--arrogant, entitled, vicious, dishonest, drunk on his own power, seemingly beyond the reach of the law--reminded me  of a certain DJT, and what a sweet and fitting thing it was that justice at long last caught up with him.

Robert Duncan, _The Years as Catches_

I SPOTTED THIS on a table at Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought--what have we here? I had always thought (a) that The Opening of the Field (1960) was Duncan's first collection of poetry and (b) that the five collections of his poems I had read were the whole shebang. Wrong on both counts, as I should have guessed, since Duncan was 41 when Opening of the Field came out and was obviously no beginner.

The Years as Catches was published by Oyez, located in Berkeley,  in 1966, and reprints poems that appeared in Heavenly City, Earthly City, published by Bern Porter in 1947, and Selected Poems, published by City Lights in 1959.  These count as rare books now--Heavenly City, Earthly City is available on Abebooks at prices ranging from $100 to $2500 and Selected Poems (Pocket Poets #10) for from $40 to $80, so I feel reconciled to having spent $40 on this, even though I could have purchased it for half that on Abebooks. Live and learn, or so one hopes.

I was hoping to glean some information about Duncan's decision to reprint these earlier poems from Lisa Jarnot's biography, but was thwarted by there being no entry for either  The Years as Catches or Heavenly City, Earthly City in her index. This may just be a question of careless indexing, but what a pain in the tush.

The poems? Right, the poems. My main impression was that Duncan, in  these poems, had not yet started sounding like Duncan. He had obviously been reading Eliot and Pound and like them liked to stir in some 16th and 17th century vocabulary and sentence construction when writing of contemporary phenomena: 

                     Already ere I wake

I hear that sound. Shout & fill the air with sirens.

No sound that you can make for war or human misery

can meet that sound nor cover it. No waste you wrake

upon the body, no ravaging of mind nor spirit can

make deaf nor blind nor insensate.

That is from the poem "The Years as Catches," written in 1942 and addressing (I think) the disaster of the Second World War in the vein of an older poetic idiom, as we might say Eliot's "East Coker" does. 

When we get to the 1946 poems, though, the poems start sounding less like Duncan's models and more like Duncan, especially those in which he is open about his sexuality. The  love poem "Heavenly City, Earthly City" in particular, while sounding a little like Shelley at times (it reminded me of "Epipsychidion"), looks forward to Duncan's distinctive marriage of a Romantic idiom to a Modernist one.

Nettie Jones, _Fish Tales_

THIS 1983 NOVEL was recently re-published, which is how I heard of it. It's a crazy ride. 

The narrator is a woman named Lewis, and as that detail suggests, fluidity prevails. The novel is set in Detroit and New York City, but we seem to be not so much moving between the two settings as to be now in one and now the other, without any explicit indication that Lewis has relocated. Similarly, although the novel seems set in the mid-to-late 1970s and occasionally the early 1980s, the narrative does not seem to be in strict chronological order, as mercurial in time as it is in space.. Sometimes we learn this our that character's eye color or skin tone, but their ethnicities generally go unspecified, and we rarely get anyone's last name. The characters' genders and sexualities likewise wander where they will, and the erotic is never far away.

In other words, for a forty-year-old novel, it feels very congruent with contemporary sensibilities. To me, it seemed comparable to Michelle Tea or Dodie Bellamy, but wilder, more operatic, with a sort of 1970s anarchic streak reminiscent of writers like Robert Coover, John Barth or Donald Barthelme. 

Part Two ("Connect"), about Lewis's relationship with a brilliant and well-connected quadriplegic named Brook, feels somewhat more linear than Part One ("Disconnect'), but it's still wild, an emotional roller coaster if you can imagine a roller coaster that operates in five or six dimensions rather than the usual three.

Olga Tokarczuk, _Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead_

 I GUESS THIS is a murder mystery...that is, some people are murdered, and we find out near the end of the novel who murdered them...fortunately, though, we the readers get a lot more than the mystery's solution to think about--to wit, we get the novel's narrator and main character, Janina Duszejko, whose voice and presence Tokarczuk conjures up with preternatural salience and clarity. 

Janina--whose name it feels awkward to use, since she herself does not much care for it--has a variety of appealing traits: self-sufficiency, an appreciation of William Blake (whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the title quotes), affinity with the natural world, and a willingness to call authority to account.

One expects Big Ideas and Grand Themes when reading a Nobel laureate. I'm not sure this novel has any big ideas, but it certainly speaks to the hope that there is some way to overturn patriarchy and its arrogance and entitlement. For 2025, that feels like plenty. 

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, _The Passenger_, trans. Philip Boehm

 BOSCHWITZ, A GERMAN Jew, got out of Germany in 1935, not long after the Nuremberg laws were passed, so he did not experience firsthand the post-Kristallnacht weeks of roundups, camps, and desperate attempts to flee in late 1938...this novel is so vivid and terrifying, though, that one would swear he did experience them. 

The novel's main character, Otto Silbermann, is a successful German Jewish businessman, a World War I combat vet, and married to a gentile, but none of that is doing him the least bit of good as he tries again and again to get out of Germany before he is hauled off. He takes train after train, back and forth across the country, clutching a briefcase full of cash, not knowing whom he can trust or which encounter with a petty official might be his last as a free man. He even attempts to cross into Belgium on foot, at night...to no avail.

The modifier "Kafkaesque" keeps coming to mind, given the central European setting, the nightmare-like circularity and repetition, and the pervasive hostility and suspicion Silbermann has to navigate around. But then one recalls it's Germany, it's 1938, and there is nothing either fantastical or allegorical about the accelerating dwindling of Silbermann's chances of getting out.

The novel's most terrifying aspect is that the people Silbermann deals with gradually stop seeing him as really human at all. He is becoming Agamben's homo sacer. 

Apparently the novel was published in the USA as early as 1939 and in the UK in 1940 without attracting much attention. Hats off to all involved in its rediscovery and republication.

Eduardo Galeano, _Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks_, trans. Cedric Belfrage

TRYING TO KEEP up my South American literature momentum after Zama and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, I picked up the second volume of Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, which I had been vaguely intending to get to ever since I read the first volume back in...well, let's just say it was a while ago.

I'm not sure the English translation of Memory of Fire is still in print, although apparently digital versions are available. It's brilliant. Imagine a history of the Western Hemisphere, focusing mainly on Central and South America, in three volumes, each volume a thousand close-printed pages. Then imagine each of those 1000-page volumes trimmed down to its most vivid vignettes, personalities, and episodes, the details and events likeliest to stick in your memory, so you have three books of about 250 pages apiece. That would give you something like Memory of Fire. 

The first volume, Genesis, covers the Americas from their pre-historic dawn up to the end of the 17th century, and the second, Faces and Masks, covers the 18th and 19th centuries. Galeano adopts a leftist perspective, so the 18th century is mainly about ruthless colonial exploitation and enslavement, the 19th century mainly about  efforts at independence and liberation that end up largely benefitting the better-off, but he generally avoids being explicitly political, instead letting the stories speak for themselves. Therein lies the genius of the book. Brilliant vignette follows brilliant vignette without any big conclusions being drawn or morals pointed out, but the overall message is impossible to miss.

Along the way we meet quite a few figures comparable to di Benedetto's Zama and Machado de Assis's Brás Cubas, parasites parading their entitlement. We also meet some of the people who were pushing back and working for change--and I expect we will meet a few more of those in the trilogy's third volume, on the 20th century: Century of the Wind.

Karen L. King, _The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle_

A LARGE MAJORITY of scholars think that the Mary of the Gnostic text "Gospel of Mary" is Mary Magdalene, but it is not at all likely that Mary Magdalene herself or anyone who knew her firsthand wrote the "Gospel of Mary." Insofar as the title of King's 2003 book implies she is writing about the actual woman mentioned in the Gospels, it's a little misleading; her book is actually a thorough analysis of the 2nd century "Gospel of Mary." It's a fascinating and illuminating analysis, however.

The book includes a translation of as much of the original text as survives (most of it is missing), a careful, cross-referenced analysis of the text's relationships to other Gnostic texts and to the New Testament, and a historical argument about what the text reveals about the early Christian church.

"The portrait of Mary as a repentant prostitute is pure fiction with no historical foundation whatsoever," King rightly emphasizes--as Susan Haskins and Philip Almond explained, that whole story was a bit of hermeneutical acrobatics by Pope Gregory I. When King goes on to say "The historical Mary of Magdala was a prominent Jewish follower of Jesus, a visionary, and a leading apostle," though, I was pulled up short by the last two nouns. 

The Mary of "Gospel of Mary" is certainly a visionary and a leading apostle, but to say the historical Mary was those things is to float presumptions as airy as Gregory's. One can imagine that some oral tradition of the historical Mary lies behind some of the details of "Gospel of Mary," perhaps. But we have no actual evidence of such an oral tradition. King or an editor should have tapped the brakes here, I think. 

But King's argument in Part III--that the Christian church of the first few generations was much less unanimous, much more roiled by controversy, than the usual narrative about those beginnings suggests--is utterly convincing. The grouching in 1 Timothy about keeping women from preaching only makes sense if we grant that women actually were preaching, King argues, and "Gospel of Mary" probably does give us an idea of what that preaching may have been like.

Will Hermes, _Lou Reed: The King of New York_

HUMORIST WILL CUPPY once wrote, "Great writers should be read, not met." (He made the observation in the course of a piece on Frederick the Great and the lengthy, increasingly awkward visit Voltaire made to the Prussian court.) 

Lou Reed was one of the greatest American songwriters of the post-WW II era, I would say, surpassed only by Dylan (n.b., Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Neil Young are Canadian), but he was perhaps better listened to than met. He could be curt, dismissive, insulting, and downright cruel to friends, family, partners, and bandmates, to say nothing of journalists, whom he often treated to unalloyed vituperation.

Hermes is eloquent and insightful about the power of Reed's writing and musicianship. What we now call indie rock would probably not exist, or would be unrecognizably different, without what Reed wrote and performed in the Velvet Underground. Hermes is also informative about and properly appreciative of the highlights of Reed's solo years: Transformer,  The Blue Mask, New York, Magic and Loss. Hermes even plucks a true gem, "Junior Dad," from sprawl of Lulu, Reed's widely-dismissed collaboration with Metallica. Hermes also made me resolve to listen to Metal Machine Music all the way through from beginning to end at least once, although I have yet to follow up on that resolution.

In between explications of Reed's music, though, we get story after story of Reed being mostly unpleasant to mostly everyone. These stories do not diminish Reed's accomplishments as a songwriter, but they do leave a sour aftertaste. In the latter part of Reed's life, at least, his marriage to Laurie Anderson and the gradually growing public recognition of his greatness make for a happy-enough ending.

The book's highlight, I think, is the digging Hermes did into the pre-Warhol years, Reed as a high school rocker and a protégé of Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse. Reed was not exactly a nicer person in those days, and his great accomplishments were still in the future, but Hermes does a brilliant job of conjuring up for readers the genius-in-embryo that Reed was.

Susan Haskins, _Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor_

 HASKINS'S 1993 BOOK surveys the same topics covered in the more recent book by Philip Almond (see post for June 10)--Mary Magdalene in the gospels and the gnostic gospels, Gregory the Great's creation of the "composite Magdalene," the astonishingly inventive medieval legends about her, her becoming the icon of penitence--but in a great deal more detail.

Almond's book is brisker and a little livelier, but if you are in the mood for a really deep dive, go with Haskins. Haskins has an extensive background in art history, so she is particularly well informed on the long and ever-evolving iconological traditions around the Magdalene.

Her book was published ten years before Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, so there is just a glancing reference or two to the conspiracy theory that Mary and Jesus had children and that their descendants were the kings of France. The less said about that, the better, methinks.

Is Mary Magdalene having a moment? The New Yorker ran an interesting article by Eliza Griswold on her in April, and the Urban Abbey, a Methodist-affiliated congregation in Omaha, had a program called "Six Weeks with Mary Magdalene." I myself hope she is, and about time, too.