Patricia Lockwood, _Will There Ever Be Another You_

 IN A HAPPY coincidence, I was reading this over the same span of weeks that I was reading Leonora Carrington's The Stone Door, and they both appealed to me in the same way. They both had a central idea, a big picture, but the real joy of each book lay in the dazzle of the details, the twists, turns, and leaps that went from one surprising sentence to the next. 

The big picture in Will There Ever Be Another You  deals with the mystery of personal identity. The title sounds like it could be the title of a break-up song--the singer wondering whether she or he will ever find another person they love as much as the lost "you"--and it happens also to be the sentence that was on the cover of the issue of Time magazine that covered the advent of Dolly, the cloned ewe--the pun addressing the question of whether "you," or anyone, could be reproduced exactly. 

In Lockwood's novel, though, the sentence seems to be raising a whole other question: whether the "you" of your self could at some point, say six months from now, be gone with nary a trace, replaced by another "you," your self inhabited by a startlingly different personality.

Something like that apparently happened to Lockwood, possibly the consequence of a case of long COVID, but the beauty of the novel is the complete absence of explanations or even speculations about causes. Somehow, everything has gone weirdly and unpredictably disjunctive, nothing connects very neatly to anything else, and the narration--third person in Part One, first person in Part Two, and in First, third, AND second in Part Three--ricochets from scene to scene without even pretending that it all makes sense or adds up or resolves into unity. It's a wild ride.

A few years ago, I taught Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This. The students were baffled by Part One, in which the Lockwood-esque narrator goes down a million internet rabbit-holes at once, but riveted by Part Two, in which the book becomes laser-focused on the narrator's niece, born with a rare and fatal condition called Proteus syndrome. I think these students would find Will There Ever Be Another You frustrating, precisely because it never does focus, never does zoom in on a single story. 

But that may be what I liked most about it. Take the chapter called "Shakespeare's Wife." I have a hunch Lockwood is talking to Jessie Buckley about a proposed film or television adaptation of No One Is Talking About This, but no such explanation ever emerges, and I actually found not knowing why Lockwood was talking to this unnamed actor a little more satisfactory than having things spelled out. Or "Mr. Tolstoy, You're Driving Me Mad," a chapter of scattershot observations about Anna Karenina. No explanation offered here, either, but Anna Karenina also gives us a heroine unable to pull in single focus her own multiplicity, so it works without working...if you see what I mean.

Right at the moment, having just finished the book, I feel like it's her best yet. The characters--her parents, Jason, her sister--seem like old friends at this point, after Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This, and Lockwood seems even more herself in not being herself...if you see what I mean.

And I am glad to see she is publishing poetry again.

Leonora Carrington, _The Stone Door_

 I HAVE READ Carrington’s short fiction (thanks to The Dorothy Project) but not her other and more widely read novel, The Hearing Trumpet. I am certainly eager to read The Hearing Trumpet, though, after reading this.

Anna Watz’s helpful afterword tells us that Carrington wrote The Stone Door “ostensibly to celebrate her recent marriage to her second husband, Emérico “Chiki” Weisz, in Mexico City in 1946.” It has a loosely articulated plot about the opening of the titular door to allow freer circulation between and among the sexes, but the plot is really the least interesting thing about the novel—it’s not what pulled me in, at least. What I most relished was the atmosphere of the fictional world and the texture of the prose, an adventure and a delight from sentence to sentence. 

So yes, there were characters, and yes, they were in pursuit of something and encountering obstacles, but what kept me reading was something else. Imagine a collection of tales by the Brothers Grimm interleaved with a Victorian translation of The 1001 Nights, and further imagine that this volume has ingested a non-trivial amount of LSD. That’s what this book is like.

For instance:

“On a sunless Wednesday morning Zacharias began to work in O Ucca. Furnished with a small black book and a pencil he set about sorting the varied, dust-ridden possessions of Ming Lo.While groveling in an ornate tin trunk, he came upon a triangular box covered in black feathers fixed one upon the other as cunningly as if they grew on a bird. With some difficulty he opened the box and saw that it contained a stone key of Mexican workmanship.”

It’s the key to the titular door, as you may have guessed, but what I loved was the feathered triangular box. And in what world but this so cunningly imagined one does a Ming Lo, living in a city named O Ucca, hire a Zacharias, who comes across a Mexican-made key? And I love “sunless,” which takes us right back to Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.”

Huzzahs to New York Review Books for bringing this back into print.

Mosab Abu Toha, _Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear_

 I PICKED THIS up in the Barbara’s Bookstore outpost at O’Hare Airport. My flight had been cancelled the night before, my rebooked flight was going to be delayed four hours, and I had finished reading everything I had brought along, so I was feeling sorry for myself as I browsed for more reading material. 

I might have passed this book up had I not recently read a poem by Toha in the most recent (and final, apparently) Best American Poetry, but since I was impressed by that poem (“Two Watches”), I thought, well, this is probably a good bet. As it happened, I finished it before my flight took off.

It’s not only a fine collection, but also a quick cure for any self-pity, or at least the self-pity of someone whose worst problem is a cancelled flight. Most of Toha’s poems are about living in Gaza, as his family has since 1948, and the problems of living in Gaza after having been dispossessed of one’s home and forced into exile make even the worst of my problems seem hardly even to deserve the designation “problem.”

And the book was published in 2022–that is, well before the horrors of the last two years.

The book includes an interview with Toha. The interviewer does not ask him why he writes poetry in English rather than Arabic, but we do learn he began studying English at an early age and was much influenced by such classics as Marlowe, Shelley, “Kublai Khan,” and The Waste Land. I wonder if he writes poetry in Arabic as well; bi-lingual poets are rare but not unheard of (e.g., Amelia Rosselli).

The book obviously qualifies as “poetry of witness,” but is also better-than-usual poetry. Toha uses anaphora effectively (see “Home,” “To Ibrahim Kilani,” and “To My Visa Interviewer”), and the longer poems—“Palestine A-Z” and “The Wounds”—are extraordinarily well sustained. 

Richard Ayoade, _The Unfinished Harauld Hughes_

 I AM GOBSMACKED, to use a British phrase, that the typically staid New York Review of Books let Richard Ayoade write a first-person appreciation (as the fictional "Chloë Clifton-Wright") of the  British playwright and screenwriter Harauld Hughes (also fictional). I imagine this is the NYRB's indirect way of endorsing Ayoade's The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a novel that masquerades as a journal about the making of a documentary film about Hughes. "Clifton-Wright" dismisses The Unfinished Harauld Hughes in a curt footnote.

Not only has the august NYRB been persuaded to participate in Ayoade's guerrilla campaign of creating an aura of reality around his fictional playwright and screenwriter, but the just as august Faber and Faber publishing house has been so persuaded as well, for they agreed to place ads for Harauld Hughes's (fictional) books on the back cover and back pages of Ayoade's novel.

The novel does not quite match the ingenuity of the guerrilla campaign, in my opinion, but is nonetheless hilarious and entertaining in a Waugh-ian vein. Ayoade, as the planned documentary's presenter, drags the filmmaking crew from one interviewee to another, each more prickly and uncooperative than the last. The El Dorado of the documentary is to figure out what Hughes's final, unfilmed screenplay, O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, was about, but just as Ayoade is winning near the goal...well, no spoilers.

Ayoade seems to be a well-known and popular television presence in the UK, which means we might start seeing more of him here. I hope it works out better than it did with Russell Brand. Judging from novel, it is bound to do so.

Paul Tran, _All the Flowers Kneeling_

THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION on the back cover calls All the Flowers Standing "a profound meditation on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the aftermath of imperial violence and interpersonal abuse," and as publishers' descriptions go, that one is uncannily on the money.

Tran juxtaposes his mother's experience as refugee from Vietnam with the sexual assault he himself lived through when what seems to have been a relatively ordinary sexual encounter took a terrible turn (or so I am interpreting--it seemed comparable to the story told by Édouard Louis in Une histoire de la violence.)

This intersection of personal trauma and historical trauma, it occurred to me,  appears elsewhere in Vietnamese-American literature. Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Diana Khoi Nguyen's Ghost Of, and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer all deal in intimate trauma multiplied by the devastations of colonialism. 

Hardly surprising, given Vietnam's history and the USA's role in that history, but it got me thinking. Other instances of personal trauma intersecting with historical trauma come quickly to mind.

Given that Japan was for many years a colonizing presence in Korea, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko might serve as an additional example, or Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony.

Tommy Orange's novels could serve as examples, too, even though the colonizing mainly occurred generations ago; Wandering Stars in particular suggests a kind of subterranean connection between the violent empire-building of a hundred and fifty years ago and psychological instability in the present. Then think of the relatively recent books reflecting the long-term reverberations in the present of enslavement in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. Yaa Gyasi's Homecoming and Roger Reeves's Best Barbarian could start a long, long list.

That's what we see if we zoom out. If we zoom in, we see that Tran is an extraordinarily deft and fluent poet. The publisher's copy gestures in this direction ("innovative poetic forms") but definitely seems more interested in the psychological or therapeutic ("rediscovering and reconfiguring  the self").

But consider the sequence at the collection's center, "I See Not Stars but Their Light Reaching Across the Distance Between Us." Each of the sequence's thirteen sections has thirteen lines (a truncated sonnet that Tran dubs a "Hydra"), the thirteenth line always having thirteen words. Then too, "The first word of the last line in section X becomes the first word of the first line in section Y," as Tran explains in the notes at the end of the book, and there are additional constraints as well. 

That Tran imposed upon himself a fiendishly byzantine set of rules and further indulged himself in any amount of verbal jonglerie (e.g., "Seeded? Yes, Like a plot. Ceded? Absolutely not") yet still produced a confession/accusation/self-examination so fearful and fierce, so near the bone even as it aims for transcendence...well. It's quite a poem. Tran seems to be both a writer of his cultural-historical moment and a very distinctive poet of Merrill-like versatility.

Terence Winch and David Lehman, eds., _Best American Poetry 2025_

 IT SEEMS SO strange that this is the last one, but if what I read on the internet is true, it is. 

I can understand David Lehman being ready to be done with it, but wouldn't someone else (Kevin Young?) be willing to take it on? I'm using it sells at least reasonably well, since every year it shows up in  bookstores that do not carry much other poetry. I mean...what gives?

I did not recognize Terence Winch's name when I saw it on the cover, which was a little surprising--the  guest editors tend to be a relatively famous poets. It turned out, though, that I must have seen his name at least a few times, since he has had poems in BAP several times and has been very involved in the BAP Blog. 

His selections tend to the mainstream, I suppose we could say--mainly in conversational language, mainly about readily recognizable experiences and observations, mainly the sort of thing that turns up abundantly in the reviews (Kenyon/Southern/Georgia/Massachusetts/Threepenny et alia),  mainly by people with established careers.

It would have been nice to go out with a bang, I think, stir in a few things from Zyzzva or Oversound or Conjunctions, but, well, no. It's an enjoyable read, but more of a plunk than a bang.

At least Heather Christle is in it.

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

 THE "SELECTED" SECTION of this generous (almost 500 pages) "new and selected" collection has its own title, "Dear Prudence," and the poems are arranged in chronological order, each with the year of composition noted--a very satisfactory way to proceed, I thought. 

Trinidad's books started appearing in the 1980s, when he was in his later twenties and earlier thirties. I don't remember exactly what new poets I was reading at the time, but I wish I had been reading Trinidad instead. "The New Formalism" was getting attention at the time, and I must have read some of that, but none of it has stuck with me; Trinidad's "Playing with Dolls," however, a sestina about being a boy playing with Barbies, would definitely have made me a fan for life. 

I could say the same for "Fluff," with its syllabic verse about a short-lived addition to the Barbie line, or "Monster Mash," a catalog of movie monsters in a Shakespearean sonnet, or "Chatty Cathy Villanelle," or the quatrains of "Evening Twilight," or the terza rima of "Garbo's Trolls," or the list of early 1960s top 40 hits in "In My Room," or "Every Night, Byron!", a long poem from the point of view of Trinidad's dog, its title a nod to Jacqueline Susann. 

And I may as well mention Trinidad's extended pantoum about the Bette Davis film "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" and its epigones (which Trinidad titles "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been," which was the title of Mad magazine's parody of "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"--I remember it well). 

Trinidad has a near-Wildean genius for treating trivial things seriously and serious things with a sincere and studied triviality. If that doesn't sound like your sort of thing, well, there's always Robinson Jeffers.

The high point for me was "A Poem Under the Influence," about fifty pages long and under the influence, I am going to guess, of James Schuyler. Schuyler was one of the American poets who figured out how to be modern without being a Modernist, and the whole of contemporary American poetry is in his debt. Trinidad's is a fitting tribute.

Nicolás Medina Mora, _América del Norte_

 IF A NOVELIST invents a new name for the character whose circumstances map closely onto his own, does that make the resulting book an "autobiographical novel" rather than "autofiction"? I don't have a literary taxonomist handy to answer the question, so I will just note that the narrator of América del Norte, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, shares with his creator (a) Mexican citizenship, (b) an undergraduate degree from Yale, (c) a stint as a long-form journalist in New York City, and (d) study in the nonfiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I don't know whether Medina Mora, like his protagonist, grew up in the none-more-elite Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, nor whether his family is as wealthy and powerful as Sebastián's, nor whether his ancestors are Spanish with virtually no admixture of indigenous DNA, but I suspect all that is likely the case as well.

Sebastián/Nicolás's own term for people of his class--"Austro-Hungarians"--is a complex joke based on that class's vanity about their being descended exclusively from Spanish colonizers. The Hapsburgs were the longtime royal family of Spain who happened also to be the royal line of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so Mexicans without any indigenous ancestors are...Austro-Hungarian.

The configuration of Sebastián's identity is a crucial ingredient of the novel. It is set during the first couple of years of the first Trump administration, and Sebastián is sometimes in Iowa City, sometimes in Mexico City visiting family, sometimes in New York City hanging out in his old stomping grounds. 

In Mexico, he is the son of a Supreme Court justice, beneficiary of family wealth and of an elite education abroad, someone who gets (and needs!) a bodyguard. In the United States, though, he is a Mexican, object not just of longstanding xenophobic hostility but now also of state policy, a target for ICE.

Medina Mora stirs into the novel some historical vignettes of Mexican-U.S. relations and of creole-indigenous relations, so we meet the cadets of Chapultepec, Sor Juana, Alfonso Reyes, Jose Vasconcelos, and a good many writers and thinkers as well as many characters that (I am guessing) would be quickly recognized had you been hanging out at the Fox Head Tavern circa 2017.

The question hovering before Sebastián is whether to make his career in the United States or Mexico. He is fluent in both Spanish and English, so he could work in either country. In the U.S., he would have to deal with Trump and Trumpery. In Mexico, he would have to deal with the ascendancy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, who seeks to once and for all undermine the long-standing power of the class to which Sebastián's family belongs. To complicate things, Sebastián's mother is dying, and his girlfriend is Anglo. 

We don't find out, exactly, which way he is going to go. In the final scene, he is in an airport, watching planes depart. Most of the book is written in English, but the chapter titles and a fair bit of dialogue is in Spanish. As if that weren't ambivalence enough, consider this: the book's final sentence is in what looks to me like Coptic. 

América del Norte is a big, cranky, ambitious, witty, brilliant, brimful of attitude novel. And a great read.

Min Jin Lee, _Pachinko_

"SWEEPING MULTIGENERATIONAL SAGA" is the phrase that recurs in the reviews excerpted on the paperback edition's cover and opening pages, and it is true enough. The phrase got me wondering: do novelists still go in for multigenerational sagas? There were more around, I think, a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty years ago or so--Mann's Buddenbrooks, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude would count, certainly, but I am having a hard time thinking of more contemporary examples. 

The main family in Pachinko is the Baeks, represented in Part One (of three) by two Korean brothers, both Christian converts. (The family name is a fairly common one in Korea, "also often spelled Paek, Baik, Paik, or Back," according to Wikipedia). The main action begins, however, with Sunja, daughter of a couple that keeps a boarding house in Busan (also spelled "Pusan"), who is seduced and impregnated by a Korean businessman, Hansu, visiting from his main base of operations, Osaka, in Japan. The businessman is married with children and won't leave his wife for Sunja, but the younger Baek brother, Isak, selflessly does offer to marry her. Together they move to Osaka, where Isak's older brother Yoseb lives with his wife, Kyunghee.

And so it goes. Isak and Sunja have two boys (including the one fathered by Hansu), who grow up, have children of their own, and so on, and as chapter follows chapter we soon have a multi-generational saga. A key thread to this saga is the difficulties of being Korean in Japan, which turns out to be not much easier for the second and third generations than it was for the first, owing to what seems like a deeply-entrenched Japanese prejudice against gaijin, foreigners, even when the "foreigners" were born in Japan, are native speakers of Japanese, and have no intention of living anywhere else.

The family establishes itself and becomes prosperous thanks to pachinko parlors. This game is never explained in the novel, but apparently it is rather like pinball, but with slot-machine-style payouts (the house always wins in the long run, of course). Pachinko is legal but a little disreputable, since (as with legal gambling in the USA) organized crime (the yakuza) has a history of getting involved. The Baeks stick with it, however.

Pachinko turns out to be a thematic thread of its own, since playing a game that always ends up favoring the house is a bit like being Korean in Japan: that is, the odds are always a bit against you, and disappointments will be frequent. We do want the Baeks to pull through, though, and by and large they do, difficult though it has been. The novel's final scene, in which Sunja, now a grandmother, visits her husband Isak's grave, is very affecting.

Chaim Grade, "The Rebbetzin," trans. Harold Rabinowitz and Inna Hecker Grade

 I CHECKED THE recently-published version of Chaim Grade's Sons and Daughters out from the local public library and, truth to tell, found it more generously provided with description and exposition than I felt like continuing with. (I do enjoy 19th century novels, but there's a reason novel-writing took a different direction.) There was something in the voice I liked, though, so I took the advice offered by Daphne Merkin in her NYRB review of Sons and Daughters and picked up one of Grade's novellas.

"The Rebbetzin" (i.e., "The Wife of the Rabbi") is set in Lithuania, I think, although it may be in northeastern Poland or western Belarus (googling the names of the towns that figure in the story did not quite pin things down). The title character, a rabbi's daughter, was as a young woman betrothed to an up-and-coming rabbi who broke off the engagement, offering her family a relatively plausible excuse but telling his own family that Perele was a "shrew." He goes on to become the Horadno Rabbi, leader of his city's Jewish community and famous throughout European Jewry for his wisdom and scholarship. Perele instead marries Uri-Zvi Koenigsberg, who becomes the rabbi of a smaller town, Graipewo. He is loved and respected by his community, but is nowhere near as big a deal as Moshe-Mordechai Eisenstadt, the Horadno Rabbi.

Decades have passed, but Perele has not forgotten what she takes as a slight, and her slow campaign to get back at the Horadno Rabbi drives the plot. She persuades her husband to retire early, then to move to Horadno, then to take on various tasks that will give him some standing in the Horadno rabbinate. Somewhat mysteriously, misfortunes befall the Horadno Rabbi: his adult daughter sickens and dies, his wife is prostrated by grief, his own health falters. Perele never articulates any particular plan or expresses any particular animus, but the reader nonetheless gets the distinct impression that she has engineered the whole thing.

The novella put me somewhat in mind of Nikolai Leskov's "The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk." As in the Russian fiction, we meet a woman who is constrained (a) by the subordinate situation she is locked into by her sex and (b) by the provinciality of the setting she happens to occupy, but who otherwise has the same relentless ambition and the same willingness to do whatever that ambition requires that we see in Lady Macbeth. Koenigsberg, the Graipewo Rabbi, is no Macbeth; he would rather study Talmud than assassinate Duncan and would have preferred to stay in Graipewo. But, as his and Perele's daughter Serel exasperatedly puts it in the novella's last sentence, "My dear little mother will win out over everyone. Everyone!"

I am not quite ready to attempt Sons and Daughters again, but I would definitely read another Grade novella. 

James Atlas, _Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet_

NOT SURE WHAT to make of my loving to read about Delmore Schwartz but never much liking to read Schwartz's poetry. His critical essays have some snap to them ("The Duchess' Red Shoes" takes a healthy bite out of Lionel Trilling) and I think the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is an American classic. He thought of himself as a poet, though, and I can't think of a single poem of his I wholly admire. He had a rare talent for titles: "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," "The Heavy Bear that Goes with Me," "Starlight Like Intuition Pierced  the Twelve." Poems that lived up to those titles I would cherish, but the poems Schwartz actually wrote for those titles never get out of second gear.

When people are writing about him, though, he lights up the page.  William Barrett's The Truants, for example--I have kept that tiresome book on my shelves for decades just because of its passages on Schwartz. Or Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a brilliant book, especially for its portrait of Schwartz. Or Humboldt's Gift, the only Bellow novel I would ever be tempted to re-read.

Atlas's biography appeared in 1977. I was a bit reluctant to pick it up, not sure I was up for a book-length treatment not by Bellow, but it's very good. Focused more on the astonishing liftoff of Schwartz's career with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) than on the sputtering descent of the 1950s and 1960s, Atlas's biography conveys the wit, energy, and chutzpah that made Schwartz such an unforgettable figure. Its prose is graceful, its pace swift, its judgments sound. Good book.

T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens all thought Schwartz was the real deal. He was the next generation of Modernism, but then it all came apart. The dissolution of his career probably had a lot to do with his own precarious mental health. These days, he would have drawerfuls of prescription meds. In the 1940s and 1950s, though, he had to manage as best he could with sleeping pills, dexedrine, and alcohol, which went very badly. 

Somehow, though, I think the real problem was not him, not Schwartz's particular history and demons, as much as it was that there couldn't be a second generation of High Modernism. Its classics were not imitable; they did not serve well as models. Lowell and Berryman did their best work once they gave up trying to be High Modernists. Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer decided they weren't going to try. Schwartz tied himself to the mast...and went down with the ship.

Rachael Allen, _God Complex_

 BEN PHILIPPS'S RECENT REVIEW of this book in n+1 persuaded me to pick it up. As I read it, to my surprise, I kept thinking of Eliot's The Waste Land, but maybe The Waste Land would fit Philipps's category of "eco-confessional," now that I think about it.

Besides being, like Eliot's 1922 volume, a book-length poem ("a sweeping and corrosive epic," according to the jacket copy), God Complex resembles The Waste Land in showing both the natural world and social institutions locked in some feedback loop death spiral, each coming unglued in response to the other's coming unglued.

Once, twice, three times a year,
the river would burst its bank.
The river would burst its muscly bank
all over the closed bars and into our house,
dark, destroying our rooms,
like someone in an unpredictable rage.
The parasols and our belongings heading out to sea.

Phrases like "one sanitary pad floated in the river's dank" and "rat-sweetened water" might have come right out of that description of the Thames that opens "The Fire Sermon."

And, as in The Waste Land, at the core of all the coming unglued lies a disastrous relationship--there are several in Eliot's poem, actually: the "my nerves are bad tonight" couple and Albert and Lil in "A Game of Chess" and the typist and the clerk in "The Fire Sermon." God Complex has just the one disastrous relationship, but it is as bad as all of Eliot's put together. The speaker is in a slow-motion shipwreck with a fellow next to whom Eliot's clerk, the "young man carbuncular," seems like a chivalrous charmer. 

"I called the wrong thing love for so long / I cannot switch it back," Allen writes. Much to one's relief, however, the very last poem in the book (p. 99), cast in the third person, suggests she has started to do a least a little better. Just about anything, though, would be better than what she has been through:

In this pain I was a charred donkey in an office chair--steaming, stupid and unusual. I'd have whole conversations with myself pretending half of me was you. I was so alone, so deeply, there was only river, and an inexplicable dome of smoke in  the sky.

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.