John Philip Newell, _The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home_

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL is a former clergyman in the Church of Scotland (he "let go" of his ordination a while ago, as he says in his introduction), and the search named in his title is for a spiritual movement that can provide the wisdom, energy, and inspiration needed to act on climate change.

As he mentions at points throughout the book, a lot of traditional Christian teaching will not be helpful toward this end: the doctrine of original sin and fussing about the ontological status of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance. Insisting on the duality of spirit and matter will cause problems as well; one of his chief recurring ideas is that he need to think of the Earth and the natural world as being as ensouled as we are. The Golden Rule should extend not just to our human neighbors, but to our animal and plant neighbors as well, the whole of the environment.

Most of the book is devoted to discussions of nine figures from several traditions whose ideas could contribute to the Earth-focused spiritual movement: Thomas Berry, Nan Shepherd, Martin  Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Etty Hillesum, and Edwin Muir. The friend who lent me  this book likely had in mind my attachment to Julian, and what Newell says about her resonated with me. All nine chapters were illuminating, especially those devoted to people I knew little about (Hillesum, Muir, Berry, Shepherd).

One surprise: American indigeneous spirituality seems obviously well-suited to Newell's search, but he does not mention it. As much as he gets around--he mentions being at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico--he surely knows about it...but not a word. I hope someone hands him a copy of Jerome Rothenberg;'s anthology Technicians of the Sacred soon, and that he writes about it.

David Foster Wallace, _Both Flesh and Not_

BOTH FLESH AND Not collects essays, articles, and reviews by Wallace that did not appear in either of his essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). I bought it in December of 2012, not long after it came out, but I have put off reading it for (brief pause for arithmetic) almost fourteen years because even though I knew I would enjoy it, I also knew it would sadden me to know that this is it, there’s no more.  That’s exactly what happened.

The title essay, which comes first in the book, may be the best thing in it. It originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, where it was titled “Federer as Religious Experience,” and it describes the unique and astonishing prowess of the tennis player Roger Federer. I know almost nothing about tennis and never watched Federer play, but the essay was such a bravura display of Wallace’s characteristic virtues as a writer—patient and conscientious explanation of fine points, mastery of infinite shades of tone, verbal ingenuity, and the eerie sense that he is talking just to you—that my ignorance of tennis proved no obstacle to deep relishing of the essay.

Also excellent are Wallace’s review of Peter Johnson’s The Best of the Prose Poem and his introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays (which Wallace edited). Both take original and inventive approaches, but their dazzle is not strictly for dazzle’s sake, as it only makes clearer Wallace’s love of the possibilities of writing.

“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” is good to have, too. Like Everything and More, it highlights Wallace’s lonely eminence as a great American writer who was also a math nerd.

Some of the pieces from the 1990s have not aged as well. Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Daughter is a welcome tribute to that excellent book, but seems over-lengthy at almost fifty pages.

But it’s all good to have. After all, there will be no more.

Michael Clune, _Pan_

 PAN IS CLUNE'S sixth book and his first novel; it is also, as it happens, the first book of his I have read. I had heard his memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013) was good, but I tend to avoid drug memoirs. I probably would not have picked this one up had it not gotten adulatory blurbs from Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Blake Butler, and Tao Lin, all writers I read with great delight. So I did pick it up, and a few pages in was thinking, "Is this as good as I think it is?" By the time I finished, I thought it was a masterpiece. 

Our narrator and main character is Nicholas, or Nick, a high schooler in Libertyville, Illinois (a relatively remote suburb of Chicago) in what seems to be the early 1990s (Nick listens to CDs, goes on the internet, and has a Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt). He lives with his divorced father, having proven too much to handle for his mother. Early in the book, he starts having panic attacks. He confides in Sarah, a girl he likes, after they bond over Boston's "More Than a Feeling," and she joins in his search for answers about his attacks. Sarah comes up with the hypothesis that Nicholas is occasionally possessed by the god Pan.

This supposition gives Nick entrée into a group of kids, some a little older, that Sarah knows. Led by college student Ian, the group meets a little outside of town in the Barn--a disused barn repurposed and re-decorated to serve as a place to take drugs and listen to music. Ian takes a particular interest in Nick's case, and the history of that interest gives us our plot.

What did I particularly like here? 

One, Clune gets the Midwest as hardly any other recent writer of comparable skill has. David Foster Wallace got the Midwest in The Pale King, I'd say, but I can't think of anyone else who quite conveys that reverberant emptiness, that featurelessness that becomes a feature.

Two, Clune conveys that sense of burgeoning selfhood when one is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and riding a surge of self-stuff that has no particular shape at all, but seems able, for a few hours at a time, to take any shape that anyone, friend or foe, suggests. Tell me who I am, the burgeoning selfhood asks the world. And the world has an infinity of answers, any one of which can take us over completely and then abruptly vanish.

Three, the climactic epiphany, which has to do with the flight of a fly and what we might see if we could see time as we do space, feels like a real epiphany.

In the acknowledgements at the book's close, Clune writes: "Dave, T. , S., L.: je n'ai pas oublié." (Actually, in my copy the accent aigu on "oublié" was missing, but I assume it is supposed to be there.) That Clune wants certain folks to know he has not forgotten inclines me to think that the Barn has some kind of analogue in his own background. He would have been in high school circa 1990-93. Maybe someday we will know. But Pan is a masterpiece in any case.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (3)

 SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death. 

Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.

I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:

          Who was I

then but the space that had

always been around me, never

not touched, the end, was it?

of my distinction, having

worked so hard to separate

myself, to distill, for decades, 

who I was, vessel, given

in in reverent surrender,

thinking always of the world

that let me stay this

long, the branch of 

air I become that is the room's

air, and the meadow's.

I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (2)

 KLINK'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INCLUDE thanks to Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks, which got my attention because Klink's poems often reminded me, very generally, of Graham's. I may not have noticed this had I not been reading a lot of Graham recently, because there is no very close resemblance in voice or tone, but it did occur to me that both Graham's and Klink's poems tend to be situated outdoors and to render a fine-grained, multi-sensory inventory of a chosen outdoors moment. 

Nothing all that surprising about this, I suppose, since it has been going on since Wordsworth (at least), but there is a particular heightening or intensity in the poetry of Graham and Klink. It's a little as though psychotropic pharmaceuticals were involved, although I imagine that Graham's and Klink just have more amplitude in their sensoria than I do. Nothing in the great blooming, buzzing confusion is lost on them.

Even in the sequence "Rothko Chapel," about an indoors space, Klink places us outdoors.

We are stone changed by light.
We brood against walls of
violet, see by feeling, moving
our eyes into the black silk 
surround. We hold 
still like flames. Bored through
by dusk, skeletons of dusk
watching the tides' silver shadows
blow out across  the lawn.
We pass like the day through
clouds--watching cargo
cross cold water, a blurred
phosphorescence flowing beneath
ice.

I'm not sure whether we are in an actual outdoors here or an "outdoors" conjured up by Rothko's paintings,  but whichever it is, we are immersed in it, and there is no clean separation between it and us. We and it make a whole--not exactly an "everything fits together" whole, not a "no loose ends" whole, but an inseparability, an evaporation of boundaries.

"Called" is a good example.

     [...] the rising 
scale of that bird I cannot 
see, burst of burbling
gold from the tree where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by those branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I 
was [...]

"Phenomenological" is the word that comes to mind. "Descriptive" won't do, because we get not just a picture, not just a scene, but the mutual near-dissolution of the perceiving subject in the perceived surroundings and of the perceived surroundings in the perceiving subject. One of my favorite Graham poems, "Emergency," does this, and Cole Swenson might be cited as an example too. I wish Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections had taken up these poets.

Yongsoo Park, _Boygenius_

 I HAVE NOT been able to find out whether the title of this novel inspired the name of the group formed by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. No such rumors are afloat on the internet, I can attest. Even so, it seems at least possible that at least one of them might have picked up on this novel, a cult favorite in some quarters. 

Boygenius was published in 2002 by Akashic Press, and it is still in print, which is no small accomplishment. It struck me as a revision and updating of Candide. 

Narrator and main character Boy Genius was born in South Korea in the middle 1960s (I would guess) and became a national hero with his own TV show after getting the nation's highest score on an intelligence test.  His fame and privileges (which include occasional meetings with President Park Chung Hee) are abruptly yanked from him, without explanation, after an attempted assassination of President Park. 

Shunned and disgraced, he and his parents choose to emigrate, arriving in a city that is like New York City in every respect save that it is named Bogota. After a rebellious period, some of which he spends with a gang of talking dogs, he decides to go straight, finish school, and make it big. This leads to extended time in (southern) California and a total makeover in which he becomes a handsome Euro-American. He marries another Korean emigré who has similarly become a beautiful Euro-American.

Memory of the wrongs done to him and his parents will not leave him alone, though, and he embarks on a mission of vengeance, ending in...well, I'm not sure. I think he ends up in heaven, though.

Like Candide, Boy Genius in his youth is loaded up with a wobbly bundle of assumptions and expectations that go disastrously wrong for him, after which he acquires a new set of assumptions and expectations which also eventually backfire, and so on. People take advantage of his naïvete or do their best to help him out, and neither he nor the reader quite know whom to trust. As in Voltaire's tale, the structure is picaresque, a series of episodes taking Boygenius all over the world, the mode satiric, in that what Boygenius learns is that no institution or authority should be trusted. We arrive at an expectedly happy ending though, Candide in his garden, Boy Genius in paradise. If that's where he is.

(By the way, there is a very insightful 2004 blog post about the novel's relationship to Candide from a writer who goes by "Mumpsimus.")

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume II_, trans. Barbara Haveland

 IN VOLUME ONE, Tara Selter was preoccupied with how to break the spell and get out of November 18 and into November 19. When Volume Two opens, she has been in November 18 for over a year--that is, she has had more than 365 November Eighteenths--and she seems to have decided that for the time being she will just have to reconcile herself to being in November 18 indefinitely. If she is well and truly stuck on this day, how can she make the best of it?

She makes a kind of farewell visit to her family, explaining to them daily, as she did to her husband Thomas in Volume One, why she is popping in so suddenly on November 18. Then she simply starts moving around Europe. It occurs to her that she can create a kind of "year" of her own by traveling to a place with a wintry November 18, then a while later to a place with a springlike November 18, and so on. This creates a focus for her for a while, but eventually the tactic ceases to satisfy her, and she hits a Slough of Despond.

In her lower moments, Tara reminded me of a Clarice Lispector narrator: minutely attentive, self-aware, articulate, but at a profound loss for how to account for her own circumstances.

Tara settles into Düsseldorf. November 18 was a pleasant day there, she won't be bumping into anyone she knows, she finds comfortable accommodations, and there is lots to do: attending university lectures, for example, and studying up on the history of Rome. And then, after more than another couple of years have passed, she meets someone else who is stuck in November 18. I expect an interesting development is in store in Volume Three.

It's not suspense that keeps one reading On the Calculation of Volume, though, but the voice Balle has conjured for Tara and the resourcefulness and resilience Tara has to keep finding in herself.

Alan Hollinghurst, "It's queer how I'm lonely"; Edmund Wilson, "A Revival of Ronald Firbank"; Evelyn Waugh, "Ronald Firbank"

EMILY WILSON'S SMACKDOWN of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey no doubt got more attention than anything else in the August 13 issue of the London Review of Books, but the real keeper in that issue,  the real gem, the real prize, was almost 8,653 words from Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. 

Hollinghurst is one of the great British novelists of his generation, I am convinced. His recurring theme is English queer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, could serve as a history of that culture from Wilde to the advent of AIDS, as The Stranger's Child could for the period from World War I to Tony Blair. The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair cover shorter time frames but are likewise vivid historical portraits.

I should emphasize that I do no mean that Hollinghurst is a chronicler, or produces elephantine historical novels like those of Edward Rutherford or James Michener. He is, I suppose, a historical novelist, but one more like Anthony Powell or Proust--sharp, observant, writers of graceful and assured prose.

Novelist Ronald Firbank is a kind of icon in English queer culture because his novels (which appeared in the teens and twenties of the 20th century), while far from realistic, capture something of the queer sensibility of their time. It's hard to say what that something is. The novels are campy, but not simply that; they have a gravitas even while seeming to float free of reality. The effect is hard to describe, but Hollinghurst comes closer to explaining it than anyone else I know of has.

That "anyone else" includes such distinguished writers as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh. Wilson and Waugh, as it happens, are the ones who got me reading Firbank forty-five years ago or so. They too tried to get at what makes Firbank's novels much more than period pieces, and I appreciated Hollinghurst giving both of them a shout-out. I would say, even so, that his is now the go-to short piece on Firbank. As Wilson and Waugh got me once to read Firbank, I suspect Hollinghurst will get me to re-read him.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?

Richard Siken, _I Do Know Some Things_

 I HAD READ and heard that this book is good, but I was still taken by surprise. It is...jaw-dropping good. 

I thought very well of Siken's first book, Crush, which twenty years on from its publication stands as a contemporary classic, if we are ready to concede there is such a thing.  I don't know why I never picked up his second collection, War of the Foxes, published ten years after Crush. Checking my records, in 2015 I seem to have been reading Lisa Robertson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Susan Howe, Mary Hickman, and Patricia Lockwood, so I was not wasting my time...still, looking back, I feel like scolding myself. I hope to rectify the omission soon.

As you probably know, Siken suffered a debilitating stroke in 2019. Somehow, besides re-learning how to talk and walk, he re-learned how to write poems. 

In many respects, these poems feel different from the poems of Crush. Siken's earlier poems performed a variety of feats of legerdemain with lineation and sentence construction while orbiting various men over whom Siken was obsessing. The poems of I Do Know Some Things are printed as prose, with no special lineation at all, and the sentences tend to be short. Most of the poems are about his own situation or those of family members, especially his father, who died in the period when Siken was writing these poems.

Unchanged, though, are Siken's audacity, powers of invention, and ability to land some startling leaps.

"I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a  long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

Some leaps launch him into the surreal, as in "Fear":

"I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves."

But I was most amazed by "Sentence" in the book's seventh and final section, where Siken reflects on his own practices, explaining how lines differ from sentences and then dropping a sentence whose length and elaboration David Foster Wallace might envy.

The backstory of this collection, compelling as it is, is overshadowed by the poems themselves.

_The Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956_, Rupert Hart-Davis

MAX DOES NOT give away a lot about himself here. Although editor Hart-Davis believes one of the letters to Florence Kahn, whom Max later married, suggests that Max was asexual (and perhaps it does),  Max is not one for confessions and revelations, generally. Charm, perfect manners, inimitable style, piercing eye--the reader does get all that, and a generous helping of reproduced drawings as well. 

I can hardly explain to myself why Max always dazzles me. He's one of the great caricaturists, I'd say, and this collection of letters makes clear that a lot of his caricatures were of friends...and that they stayed friends. Perhaps because however unflattering the caricatures are, one never senses malice.

And then there are those Max sentences. Perfectly clear, perfectly turned, yet still able to come around from behind and startle you. 

And different as I am from Max, unlike him in so many ways, I enjoyed finding out that we both admire the prose of Lytton Strachey.

Sybille Bedford, _The Trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover_

 THE 1960s REALLY were the golden age of long-form journalism. Rachel Carson. Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote. Norman Mailer. Gay Talese. And Sybille Bedford, who is perhaps not as famous as the others but whose account of The Crown v. Penguin Books, the trial over the legality of publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, was published by Esquire magazine in 1961 and is available as an 80-page book from Daunt Books.

On the cover of the Daunt version, the words "Would YOU let your WIFE read this BOOK?" are much larger and more prominent than the book's actual title--a canny design call, since Bedford spends less time on what is or isn't obscene about Lawrence's novel than on the prosecutor's assumption that upper- and upper-middle-class men need to be in charge of what women and the laboring classes read. 

Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones clearly does not think reading the book would do him or men like him any harm, but he keeps asking the large cast of writers and academics Penguin call to testify to the book's artistic value whether they would let their wives and servants read it. 

We remember this trial mainly for legalizing the literary depiction of human sexuality--fair enough--but what Bedford also brings out is the overturning of the idea that the upper classes knew what was best for everybody. And that was a big part of the 1960s, too.

Sigrid Nunez, _The Vulnerables_

 THE NOVEL BEGINS, "It was an uncertain spring"--just like that, within quotation marks, because Nunez's novel's first sentence quotes the  first sentence of another novel, Virginia Woolf's The Years. Like The Years, The Vulnerables is a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, of novelistic narrative and essay, of invention and reflection on what actually happened.

The novel mainly concerns how the unnamed narrator, whose circumstances (age, profession, residence) are quite a bit like Nunez's own, managed during the COVID lockdown of 2020. She is parrot-sitting and living in the New York apartment of a friend who is about to give birth in the Bay Area; she is also sharing that apartment with the son of other friends of that friend, a young man who has dropped out of college during his final semester before graduation and is on the outs with his parents.

The Vulnerables does not have a lot of plot--not much intrigue, conflict, suspense, tension, resolution, etc.--although the narrator's relationships with the parrot (Eureka) and the young man (Vetch [ha!]) do develop in interesting ways. Much of the novel, though, has to do with the chance encounters, ruminations, memories of the narrator during those months.

What exactly makes the novel so compelling, then? Why did I enjoy it so much? Why did I find it hard  to put down? I cannot say. Nunez ignores about every maxim one would receive in a fiction workshop (including, as she notes, the recommendation that one not begin a novel by talking about the weather), but for some reason, The Vulnerables is more a delight than almost any of the novels that do adhere to those maxims.

If I had to pin down a reason, I would say The Vulnerables gracefully engages the question of the relation of the written to the real. So ponderous a question, but Nunez spins it like a frisbee and sends it aloft to you. Catch it if you can, or simply enjoy its flight.

Naomi Baker, _Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century_

THE SUBTITLE WOULD be a little more on-point if it were "Radical Religious Women of 17th Century England," but this is an excellent book. I might not have come across it save for Erin Maglaque's review in NYRB, so a tip of the Puritan black felt hat to her.

The middle decades of the 17th century were a time of upheaval all over Europe and certainly in England:  the civil war, the deposition and execution of a king, the founding of a new form of government, the radical remaking of the Church of England, and a brief but intoxicating period when all sorts of books that would never have made it past the royal censorship were being published. Some of the men who took advantage of this opportunity to publish wildly original theological and political ideas, like Gerrard Winstanley and Abiezer Coppe, began getting some attention in the 20th century. Only more recently have the women who published similarly bold pronouncements and proclamations attracted historians' notice. Baker's book brings some of these women vividly to life for the general reader.

None of the dozen-plus women Baker introduces us to is a well-known name to anyone but scholars of the period, but Rose Thurgood, Sarah Wight, Anna Trapnel, Hester Biddle, Mary Fisher, and Jane Lead (to name a few whose stories I found especially interesting) were all remarkable figures. Simply by publishing their experiences and speculations, they were upending hierarchies; they were (a) women, (b) not university-educated, (c) not ordained ministers, and (d) not from the upper classes, and therefore utterly without any of the qualifications or standing that the 17th century would have regarded as conferring authority. That didn't stop them, though. And it turns out what they had to say--about the church, about Christianity, about religion's role in society, and about what is Godly and what is not--still strikes a few chords. Consider this from Jane Lead: "Dive into your own celestiality and see with what matter of spirits you are endued, for in them the powers do entirely lie for transformation." (William Blake's parents may have known Lead's works.)

I wanted immediately to find some of these texts for myself, but most have been out of print for hundreds of years. One can turn up things online--but what I really would like to see is a nice fat Penguin, edited by Baker herself, with choice excerpts from all of these writers. (I have to say that what I found online would benefit from careful editing.) How about it, Penguin?

Chelsey Minnis, _Opera Fever_

 OPERA FEVER READS much like Part Two of Minnis's 2018 collection, Baby, I Don't Care. The book's design is again by Jeff Clark, which accounts to some degree for the feeling of continuity, but the sense that is one reading a continuation of the same book comes more from the recurring poetic form (ten lines per page, in two groups of five lines each), and most of all from a similarity of voice, with frequent leaps and veerings from one line to the next and a second person addressed as "Darling." 

Also like its predecessor, the book evokes Golden Age Hollywood. The frequent "Darling"s land with a certain Tallulah Bankhead drawl, and the imagery put me in mind of what Jack Smith might have come up with if he edited his favorites bits of Now, Voyager together with his favorite bits of The Big Sleep.

There are differences, too, but subtle ones. The poems in Baby, I Don't Care frequently address someone as "baby," but that familiarity is avoided in Opera Fever. Ellipses at the ends of lines, a salient feature of Poemland (2009), disappeared from Baby, I Don't Care but appear often in Opera Fever. (I'm not sure what to make of this, but the ellipses in Opera Fever are often just two periods rather than the conventional three.)

I don't know how to feel about the very marked similarity between the two books. Generally, I like poets who change it up some from collection to collection. Victoria Chang and Ariana Reines could serve as examples. Jorie Graham has sometimes settled into similar forms for two or three consecutive collections, but over the course of her career has changed things up quite a few times. 

On the other hand, other poets succeed by finding their thing and sticking with it. Merwin from The Lice on, say, or Ashbery in his last four or five volumes, or Paul Muldoon in his last four or five. As a friend observed, think of Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin. They found their thing and stuck with it, with spectacular results. 

Minnis is far too canny a poet for me to conclude that she is simply in a rut. If she is in a rut, she is deliberately in one, and we her readers need to roll with it.

Alexandra Kleeman, _Something New Under the Sun_

AN EXCERPT FROM this appeared in The Baffler and caught my interest, so I picked it up. It's very good, but not quite what I expected.

The initial premise, very much to the foreground in the excerpt: our main point-of-view character, Patrick Hamlin, is a NYC-based literary novelist who has not quite broken through. A couple of film producers have, however, bought the film rights to his Hamlet-inspired novel, Elsinore Lane, and he has come out to Hollywood to serve as a production assistant and, he expects, to offer invaluable advice to the production, being the author of the source material.  And to maybe give his career a boost, too.

However, it turns out that being a "production assistant" mainly amounts to transporting objects and people, and the producers are less interested in Patrick's novel than in whipping up a CGI-enhanced ghost story to reboot the career of former child star Cassidy Carter, who has had a difficult, paparazzo-ridden transition to adulthood, including a few public scenes, á la Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. 

Meanwhile, Patrick's wife Alison, anxious and conscience-stricken by the approaching climate catastrophe, has taken herself and their daughter to an all-but-inaccessible experimental community in far upstate New York.

Interesting set-up. Can Patrick save his novel from Hollywood exploitation and save his family in the bargain?

If Something New Under the Sun were a film, both questions would be answered in the affirmative, but it is actually an ingenious satirical novel. 

Patrick's production assistant duties mainly involve transporting of Cassidy Carter, who turns out (a) to be a lot more interesting, in Kleeman's hands, than Patrick is and (b) to actually possess in real life the sleuthing skills of the character she played for several seasons on television, teenage detective Kassi Keene. Cassidy comes across a California scam of Pynchonian dimensions in the mass marketing of WAT-R, a manufactured water-substitute that is making billions for somebody but unfortunately inducing dementia in its consumers.

Something New Under the Sun, however, does not turn into a Pynchonian noir. The enigmatic closing chapter takes our two main characters out to the desert, where they encounter a grey-suited figure and...meet their ends? I don't know. Patrick and Alison's daughter Nora is going to be all right, I imagine, as she possesses visionary powers, but everyone else seems to be sliding into the chasm.

So, not a book for folks who like loose ends tied up, but Kleeman's satirical insight is sharp and the novel has at least one unforgettable character in Cassidy Carter. Kleeman also has a gift for description--a gift not in high demand these days, perhaps. As Maureen McLane put it in a poem in the most recent LRB, 

description is decadent and passé

some say         some say

 And yes, description can get tedious, but try this: "As Cassidy follows the curve of the road out to the desert, the valley fades into the long, brown flats of Riverside, adorned by a sarcastic smattering of palm trees. Out past the highway, terra-cotta-shingled houses huddle around twisting inner streets and culs-de-sac. [...] In the backyard of a sand-colored ranch, pale concrete surrounds an empty swimming pool, punctured by short, tough plants with tiny blue flowers growing through cracks in the surface."

Katherine Rundell, _Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne_

 I APPRECIATE DONNE, but I picked this up mainly because I enjoyed Rundell's reviews and essays in the LRB, the NYRB, etc.  She carries her learning lightly, and her prose is lucid and witty. Not unlike Donne, she snaps a neat metaphor. On the deanship of St. Paul's: "it was also a fantastic piñata of a job: hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out." On the facial hair of Edward Alleyn: "a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice-skate." Topping it all, on p. 254, an abecedarian prose poem indicating the range of erudition evident in his Donne's sermons.

Donne was not only one of the great poets in a golden age of English poetry, but also "star preacher of the age," not to mention courtier, diplomat, military man, lawyer...he even did a prison stint. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery producing his body of work while also being celebrated for his sermons and accompanying American troops into Baghdad, but that's the kind of career Donne had. Those were different times, as Lou Reed once sang.

To be clear: Rundell's is neither a definitive nor a critical biography; it does not aim at comprehensive detail and touches only on some highlights of the poetry.  Worthwhile? Yes. Clocking in at just under 300 pages, authoritative and crisply written, it would make a perfect starter book for anyone curious about Donne.

Hua Hsu, _Stay True_

HUA HSU IS a staff writer at the New Yorker, and this book, his second, is a memoir focusing on a college friend, Ken Ishida, who was robbed, kidnapped, and murdered in the summer after their junior year. 

Hsu and Ken did not, judging by the surface of things, have enough in common to serve as the basis of friendship; Hsu was an indie kid, a 'zine writer who got his clothes at thrift stores, Ken a business major and frat brother who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch. They were both "Asian-American," but the Hsus were Taiwanese-Chinese and the Ishidas Japanese, so their family cultures were distinct, too. Still, they became close friends, sharing smoke breaks on the balcony of their dormitory.

College-age folks typically embrace their chosen cultural affiliations with a certain ferocity, especially if they are indie kids, but the book goes to show one can still have a kind of flexibility and openness at that age. Or maybe the secondary-family aspect of dorm life explains the friendship, the live-and-let-live tolerance we (sometimes) extend to those with whom we share living quarters. A lot of the book is a convincing portrait of a not-that-likely friendship.

The main turn in the book, of course, is Ken's terrible death. Stay True is set mainly in the late 1990s, and I was reminded over and over of something that happened about the same time on the campus at which I was teaching: the death of one of our English majors in a house fire. Carlos's death had a galvanizing effect on his friends, I recall. The English majors at our small college tended to know each other well and socialize together, and mortality's abrupt interruption of the relatively idyllic routine of campus life was for them a psychic revolution. Real Life, when one is that age, is supposed to be some number of months or years away, yet here it was, grim and implacable and iron-visaged. Reading about what Ken's loss meant to his friends, and to Hsu in particular, was so minutely evocative of what Carlos's death meant to his friends that I am prepared to say that Hsu got this traumatic event exactly right.

Richard Siken, _Crush_

 A FRIEND'S GIVING me Siken's recent book, I Do Know Some Things, inspired me to re-read this one, his debut from 2005, a Yale Younger Poets selection. I think I read it in 2007, probably because of the selections from it in the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I remember thinking it was good, but I didn't pick up on his next collection, perhaps because it didn't arrive until 2015. 

Re-reading Crush now, I think it is not just good, but excellent, one of the outstanding debut collections of the 21st century's first decade (alongside, say, Ariana Reines's The Cow and G. C. Waldrep's Goldbeater's Skin). It seems a key precursor for collections like Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Sam Sax's Bury It. 

In Louise Glück's introduction (she was the Yale Younger Poets judge that tapped Siken), she writes, "For a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing). Books of this kind dream big; they trust not only what drives  them but the importance of what drives them. When they work, as Plath's Ariel works, they are unforgettable; they restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form." 

That's exactly right, I think. Obsessives can be precise and passionate at one and the same time, exact and extravagant at one and the same time, because only too much comes close to being enough.

I should quote a least a bit, don't you think? Let's go with this, from "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves":

      The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

            and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

                  and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

      because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

                        your life is over anyway.

Joshua Hammer, _The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts)_

 BY THE WAY, the author is the Joshua Hammer whose journalism on events in Africa appears in The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, not the Josh Hammer associated with the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. As a case of noted authors working at the same time and sharing an unusual name, this coincidence is up there with P. Wyndham Lewis (avant-garde writer and painter) and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (popular biographer).

For quite a while, western scholars assumed that there was not much of a documentary tradition in Africa before European colonization, but they were mistaken, for Mali had extensively developed such a tradition in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Collecting, preserving, and cataloguing as many of these manuscripts as he could was the work of Abdel Kader Haidara, the bad-ass librarian whose activities we follow for much of the book.

The collection is in jeopardy after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which enables al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, in cooperation with Tuareg separatists, to sweep into Mali from the North. The manuscripts are the fruit of an Islamic culture, yes, but one the jihadists regard as heretical, so Haidara has to find a way to get the immense collection away safely before it is captured and destroyed.

He succeeds--as the books subtitle lets us know, so that's hardly a spoiler. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a brisk read, an inspiring story, and an illuminating look at both the history and the current circumstances of Mali.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 5, Last Campaigns (1974-2008)

 1) Finishing this biography, I had the odd thought that it is a kind of inverse of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. When Boswell met Johnson in 1763, Johnson was already 53 and had already accomplished most of what he is famous for: the dictionary, above all, but also the Life of Savage, Rasselas, the Rambler essays, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Yet most, maybe three-quarters, of Boswell’s biography is about the last twenty years of Johnson’s life--not Johnson's most productive years, but the years when Boswell often had him under close observation, writing everything down. 

Tanenhaus spent quite a bit time with his subject as well, something at least close to the twenty years Boswell knew Johnson. As far as I know, they did not travel together, as Johnson and Boswell did to the Hebrides, or belong to same famous club. Still, Tanenhaus spent a lot of time with Buckley, and he could have brought in a lot of anecdotes based on direct observation, á la Boswell, yet he seems to be deliberately refraining from doing so.

Part 5, the book’s concluding section, contains the whole of the time Tanenhaus was in contact with Buckley, yet it is the shortest, even though it covers the widest range of years.

Tanenhaus’s having long known his subject does nonetheless leave a kind of dusting on things, transmitting a familiarity with his subject that is felt by the reader in lots of hard-to-pin-down ways. Take his account in Chapter 49 of the celebration of the entrance into the priesthood of Brent Bozell, Buckley’s longtime friend, co-worker, and brother-in-law. Tanenhaus may not have been an eyewitness at this event, but his account of it all but puts Buckley right before us.

2) I don’t know that Tanenhaus explicitly says anywhere that the election of Ronald Reagan, possibly the culmination of the movement Buckley had been helming for three decades, actually represented an anti-climax for Buckley. He sure leaves this reader with that impression, though. 

Tanenhaus skillfully conveyed the excitement of Buckley and the National Review-ers in getting Goldwater nominated in 1964. In 1980, their man Reagan--a friend of Buckley and a subscriber to National Review--not only gets nominated, but wins. Victory! However, Buckley and Reagan disagree about the Panama Canal...Reagan declines to attend the NR 25th anniversary bash in December 1980...Buckley is not offered a Cabinet position...it's just not the way anyone might have imagined it.

Buckley pulls back a bit from the magazine, Firing Line starts winding down, Buckley seems more involved in his a-week-in-my-life memoirs, in his series of spy novels, in being host-with-the-most than he does in the revolution.

3) Tanenhaus does not explicitly address the question of whether Buckley bears some responsibility for the election of Trump eight years after Buckley died. Anyone attempting to answer that question would need to read Tanenhaus's book, certainly, but he leaves it alone (Trump references in the index = zero). 

Having read the book, I'm not sure how I would answer the question. It's hard to imagine Trump being elected without the modern conservative movement behind him, and without Buckley there might not even have been a modern conservative moment. On the other hand, Buckley was principled, Trump is not, and it's not clear that Trump is even "conservative" in any of the senses that Buckley was. It's hard to imagine Trump on Firing Line. I'm going to say Buckley has some responsibility for the election of Trump, but I don't think he would be much pleased about that.

Kathryn Neurnberger, _Rue_

 I POSTED ABOUT Nuernberger’s previous collection, The End of Pink, and that post is the second-most-visited post of my blog, a bit north of 1,200. Surprising, no? I mean, Nuernberger is accomplished and respected, but still. 

Given the date of the post—October 17, 2016—perhaps Russian bots were looking to latch onto anything that might help elect Trump, and perhaps the phrase “the end of pink” had promising overtones of anti-feminism and anti-socialism, just the thing for stopping Hilary. 

Eh, who knows. If the post got one person to read the book, mission accomplished. It’s a fine book, as is this one.

Rue is both a plant and an emotion, making it an apt choice of title for this collection, which pays a lot of attention to the landscape, especially its plants, and which does betray regret. In various poems, Nuernberger seems to regret or half-regret her job, her decision to live in the country, and her marriage (see the title poem). What I can find on the internet suggests that at some time after 2020, when this book was published, she found a new job and moved to Minneapolis. The internet does not seem to know how things went with the marriage.

Rue (the book) tends toward the conversational—that is, the poems often begin with observations about the speaker’s immediate surroundings, the sentence structure and diction are plain, the language mainly matter-of-fact—but never stays there. Just when the reader is lulled into a kind of passivity, out jumps a surprisingly candid revelation, or an unexpected new topic, or an audacious image. Rue makes a lot of bold moves.

The collection is worth reading just for those jumps, but we also get portraits of other women artists whose work is highly involved with plants, such as Maria Sibylla Merian and Anna Atkins, and if you, like Neurnberger, are interested in plants, you will also pick up some lore. 

Edmund De Waal, _The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss_

 COULD THIS BOOK, I wondered, actually be as great as so many people say it is? Turns out, yes.

De Waal’s book begins with a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese carvings in wood and ivory) assembled by Charles Ephrussi in the 1880s and 1890s. The Ephrussis were a prominent European banking family with origins in Odessa; Charles was a connoisseur of the arts in Belle Époque Paris (being the third son, he had not that much to do for the family business). He is the figure in the top hat towards the back in Renoir’s famous painting Le Déjeuner des canotiers and may have been part of the inspiration for Proust’s Swann. De Waal does an extraordinary job of evoking the art world of that time and place and how it crashed into the anti-semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. (Charles’s grandfather is De Waal’s great-great-great-grandfather).

Charles gave the collection as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor, who belonged to the part of the family running the Vienna branch of the bank. De Waal turns out to be as sure-handed and evocative in conjuring up Secession Vienna as he was with Belle Époque Paris. Here too, however, anti-semitism exerts pressure, thanks to the anti-semiotic mayor Karl Lueger.

The real, fatal pressure comes in 1938 with the Anschluss, when Austria is incorporated into Nazi Germany. The Ephrussis lose their business, their house, and their art collection to Nazi appropriation. The netsuke, however, being so tiny, are smuggled out by a house servant, and find their way to Viktor’s son, Ignace, who got out early to the USA and joined the army when America entered World War II.

After the war, Ignace moves to Tokyo—and once again De Waal skillfully represents a legendary milieu. De Waal, great-nephew of the gay and childless Ignace, becomes the next inheritor of the collection.

Besides being compulsively readable, De Waal strikes an extraordinary balance in presenting, on the one hand, the beauty of artistic objects and the sensibility of those who love and preserve them, and on the other, the cruelty and brutality of history (including not only the Holocaust but the bombing of Tokyo). The Hare with the Amber Eyes is a book that will continue to attract readers for generations, I will venture to say.

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 4: Controlling the Message (1966-1974)

 THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.

Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China. 

Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else. 

The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001). 

Marjan Kamali, _The Lion Women of Tehran_

 I AM GUESSING that this novel is about Kamali's parents' generation. She was born in 1971, but the two main characters, Ellie and Homa, were born in 1943, and most of the novel is set during their childhood and young womanhood, in an era before Kamali was born. I wondered whether some of the characters and events were drawn from Kamali's own family history, but for all I know the whole story is imagined.

It's a novel about female friendship. Ellie and Homa become best friends during primary school, are separated for a few years, then again become best friends in high school and college, then are estranged when Ellie inadvertently tips off a government agent that Homa is behind the distribution of certain anti-government pamphlets. Homa is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured and raped in prison. Ellie emigrates to the United States with her husband and loses touch with Homa. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, Homa reaches out to her old friend to see whether she can help Homa's daughter (Homa was impregnated in being raped) to get to the U.S.A. She can and does, and the old friends are reconciled.

As a study of female friendship, I found the novel not quite as compelling as Elena Ferrante's famous Neapolitan quartet. I got a good idea of what Ellie found dazzling in Homa, but less idea what Homa saw in Ellie. Surprisingly, Homa is much more interesting in the chapters narrated by Ellie than she is in the chapters narrated by herself.

The chapters narrated by Homa seem to pay less attention to revealing her character than they do to filling readers in on what is happening in Iran after Ellie emigrates. In these chapters, we learn about the Shah's somewhat paradoxical modernizing-yet-repressive regime and about the advent of theocratic rule under the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Homa herself is not that strong a presence.

The novel has its share of memorable scenes, especially when Ellie and Homa are young and scooting around Tehran, and Ellie's mother is a memorable character in a Mrs. Bennet sort of way. The Lion Women of Tehran does have a kind of "book club" texture and aura, though. It's a brisk read, but I don't expect it will stay in my head the way Ferrante's novels did.

George Saunders, _Vigil_

 I DO NOT always appreciate Adam Mars-Jones's harsh reviews of recent novels in the London Review of Books--I sometimes wonder whether there are wicked giggles in the LRB office as the editors discuss whom he will eviscerate next--but I thought he had a reasonable complaint about Saunders's new novel. In Saunders's previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, the reader could gradually piece together how the afterlife in which the book is set worked: what its options were, what the better and worse choices were, what was at a stake. Vigil is also set in some liminal zone between our life and the afterlife, but as Mars-Jones noted in his review, it's harder to tell how things work.

The narrator, Jill "Doll" Blaine, has been operating in this liminal zone for about fifty years. Has she remained close to our world because she is still attached to it? Because she has unfinished business? Maybe--she died young when a bomb intended to kill her police officer husband killed her instead, and at the time of her death everything in her life was going extremely well, so she may feel not ready to leave.

Or is she still there (here) because she has been given work to do? She hovers near people who are on the point of death, offering comfort and consolation, helping reconcile them to  their new condition, a special class of angel, perhaps.

However, she is currently assigned to K. J. Boone, a dying oilman, more crucially an oilman who did much to undermine and discredit climate science in order to enhance the profitability of his business. Is Jill supposed to be helping Boone to see the damage he has done, so as to achieve contrition, opening a path to a better afterlife? At certain moments, she seems to be working more towards this end than that of comfort.

None of these questions, so far as I could judge, got a definite answer, and that was frustrating. 

Saunders still has that uncanny ability to conjure the internal voices of his characters, and he does an especially good job with Boone's, I think. Given how insightful and moving Lincoln in the Bardo was, though, Vigil was worth reading but mildly disappointing.

Paul Molinari, _Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic_; Frances Beer, _Julian of Norwich_

I HAPPENED TO read these two books on Julian one after the other and was struck by the contrast between them. Both writers approach Julian with respect, insight, and reverence--even with a love that lifts right off the pages of their books. But they seem almost 180 degrees apart.

Molinari was a Jesuit, and his book from 1958 puts its greatest energies into showing how completely Julian’s experience and conclusions align with Roman Catholic tradition and doctrine. 

Beer’s 1998 book is mainly a translation of the shorter version of Julian’s Revelations, with the Jesus-as-Mother chapters from the longer version appended. She also provides an introduction and a concluding essay; in the latter, she sees Julian as “however inadvertently, something of a radical,” noting her “transcendence of misogyny” and her “rejection of hierarchy.” 

Beer’s view is closer to my own, certainly. Julian seems to be pushing back against the idea that the divine is totally male and against the exclusion of women from conversations about the divine. I also have the feeling that she doesn’t believe in damnation. But Molinari certainly makes a thorough, carefully documented case for her perfect orthodoxy. 

Duck or rabbit?

Nam Le, _36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem_

 EVEN THOUGH THERE has been an extraordinary flowering of Vietnamese-American poetry in recent years—e.g., Ocean Vuong, Paul Tran, Truong Tran, and Diana Kho Nguyen, to name only the authors of collections I have read—the title of Nam Le’s debut collection took me by surprise. It’s as though some contemporary of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth had titled a book Another Jewish-American Novel.

The title does acknowledge, though, that the historical and cultural experience out of which Le is writing has been written about often enough by others that it has begun to have its own recognizable contours. The traumas of colonization, imperialism, and war; the further traumas of relocation to the United States; life among the stereotypes American have about Asian cultures (Ezra Pound is mentioned often); the subject matter of Le’s poems carries with it a kind of déja lu familiarity.

But let’s also note the phrase “36 ways” in the title, hinting as it does at Le’s formal versatility. The experiences out of which Le writes and the conceptualizations he works to dismantle may be recognizable and even familiar, but page by page he keeps finding new ways to bring it before his readers. Hardly any two poems here have quite the same voice or quite the same form. While each poem has something to do with Vietnam and being Vietnamese, lending the collection unity, each poem is also methodologically distinct, lending the collection variety. 

Whether a poem can be this attentive to formal variety and still be “sincere” is a question the book addresses (see poems 13 and 14), and it’s a good question. Le’s poetry is as knowing and as conscious of itself as a seminar paper. Does it still work? By and large, I’d say yes.

Catherine Lacey, _Biography of X_

AS A NOVEL that purports to be the biography of a recently deceased brilliant figure as written by a longtime close associate with no claims to being brilliant, Biography of X has some interesting predecessors: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is the most famous, but Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Stephen Millhauser and Ticknor by Sheila Heti are also worthwhile. Lacey takes the whole conceit further, though.

First, "Biography of X" by C. M. Lucca not only has its own title page inside Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, but also its own copyright page, author bio, and author photo. Small touches, yes, but they add a tablespoon of verisimilitude, and I appreciate the extra ingenuity.

Second, the biography is set in an alternate-history 20th century USA, á la Roth's Plot Against America.

X was an artist--versatile (filmmaker, novelist, songwriter, and more), transgressive, and internationally celebrated. She gave up her name and lived as a variety of different characters for years in sustained performances that eventually became her breakthrough piece, The Human Subject. She is also what Jenny Offill in Dept. of Speculation called an Art Monster, a creator so single-mindedly focused on her work that she she leaves a trail of human wreckage behind her. She is not meant to be a portrait of anyone in particular, I'd say, but figures like Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, and many others contribute details to X's life and legend. (Many of the things X says are adaptations of quotations from actual artists.)

C. M. Lucca is X's widow--that is, part of the trail of human wreckage. Lucca tries to steer away from the topic of how she herself was damaged by X, but keeps getting closer to candor as the novel proceeds. The emotional stakes keep rising as we get further  and further in the novel, in (I thought) an utterly convincing way. Henry James would have been impressed, I think. As we begin, Lucca mainly wants to clear away the mistakes and misjudgments of X's first biographer, but the deeper we go, the more visible her grievances against X become.

The tricky, even audacious device Lacey combines with the cowed-but-resentful biographer narrator is setting the story in an alternate history. "Biography of X" by Catherine Lucca is set in a U.S.A. in which the states of the old Confederacy seceded again in 1945 and existed as a separate nation for fifty years, establishing a fascist-theocratic government with old school patriarchal customs. X, as Carrie Lu Walker, was born and raised in this society, became a resister, and eventually was lucky enough to get out.

The alternate history has a few other striking touches (Emma Goldman is part of FDR's New Deal cabinet, Frank O'Hara did not die in that road accident), but the Atwood-like misogynistic dystopia of the "Southern Territories" gets most of the satiric energy. (The depiction of life in the "Southern Territories" has some points of contact with Lacey's Pew, we should note.)

Biography of X became harder to read as X's capacity for cruelty became more evident, but it was still compelling. And Connie Converse is a character! Check out her album How Sad, How Lovely on Bandcamp.

Ocean Vuong, _Time Is a Mother_

I THINK THIS is actually a bit stronger than Vuong's first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The longer poems, in particular, struck me as sturdier, more surprising, and more ambitious than those in  the debut collection.

A good deal of this collection reflects the passing of Vuong's mother, who was vividly represented in Vuong's novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. My having read that novel likely added to the impact these poems had with me.

The title (I think) refers to the idea that time gives birth to us, but no doubt it also means that time can give us a very, very hard time.

Johnny Marr, _Set the Boy Free_

AS YOU MIGHT expect, Marr’s memoir is clear, unfussy, down to earth, and a reminder of how different he is from his onetime songwriting partner in the Smiths.

He is especially good at conveying his excitement about music, which goes back to some of his earliest memories, and at capturing the euphoria of the extraordinary takeoff of the Smiths.

As to the breaking up of the Smiths, in Marr’s telling it seems somewhat comparable to that of the Beatles. Like McCartney, Marr wanted to entrust management to a certain party, and the other three wanted a different party, and they could not settle the question. So no more Smiths.

Marr is full of praise for his many later collaborators (e.g., Bernard Sumner, The The, Modest Mouse, and the Cribs), but this part of the book is anticlimactic, I have to say.

Set the Boy Free came out in 2016, by which time Marr had started making solo records, beginning with The Messenger in 2013. I saw him live in I think 2014, in Omaha. It was a not-very-large club, and the crowd was not that large either, but Marr gave us a fiery, no-holds-barred set that even included great Smiths songs such as “How Soon Is Now” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” It was a glimpse into the molten core of rock and roll for the two hundred or so people who were there--one of the best shows I have ever seen. The encore included “I Fought the Law,” in the Clash arrangement. Stunning.

I saw Morrissey about a year later, and he fully lived up to his reputation for petulance. His Smiths cover was “Meat Is Murder,” which might be the consensus pick for the Smiths song one is least interested in hearing played live. No encore. Yes, Morrissey and Marr are different indeed.

Henry James, _The Outcry_

 YOU DON'T HEAR about this one much—it’s the last novel James completed, published in 1911. Don’t go in hoping for anything like The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, or The Ambassadors, though, for you will be (as I was) disappointed.

For one thing, it comes from an idea James had for a play. As such, the novel is mainly scenes of dialogue, and particularly ponderous dialogue at that, as it carries much of the novel’s exposition and tends toward people staking out debate positions rather than having conversations. The sympathetic characters line up tidily opposite the not-so-sympathetic, and there is a not-very-interesting romance that tips towards matrimony by the novel’s end. The Outcry seems more the work of James the would-be playwright than James the novelist…and that’s not good.

For another, the novel is (by James’s standards) topical, and the topic is probably of slender interest for a contemporary reader. James was inspired by a 1909 newspaper-led campaign to dissuade the Duke of Norfolk from selling an Old Master painting his family owned (Holbein’s The Duchess of Milan) to the American millionaire Henry Frick. (The campaign succeeded, and the portrait is now in the National Gallery in London, not in the Frick Collection in New York City.)

In The Outcry, Lord Theign is in embarrassed enough circumstances (thanks to daughter Kitty’s gambling debts) that he is tempted by American millionaire Breckinridge Bender’s interest in a Joshua Reynolds portrait of one of Theign’s ancestors. Stakes are raised when a bright young English connoisseur, Hugh Crimble, spots another of Theign’s families Old Master paintings as the work of an Old Master other than the one to whom it has been long attributed, making it much rarer and more valuable.

Theign is meanwhile hoping that his younger daughter, Grace, will agree to marry Lord John. Lord John is serving as middleman for Bender, probably in hopes that the painting’s sale will pump up Grace's marriage settlement. But Grace has eyes for…Hugh Crimble.

It all seems a bit on the rattletrap side, doesn’t it?  I have read about two dozen novels or short novels by James, and The Outcry, I’m sorry to say, is the first one that seemed to me not really worth the reading.

Catherine Lacey, _The Möbius Book_

 VERY UNUSUAL TRICK here. One side presents title, author, and a white outline of a Möbius strip on a blue background. Open it up, and you get jacket copy, title page, copyright page, a dedication, and a memoir of what sounds like a terrible break up. Flip the book over, and you have the very same cover, the very same jacket copy, title page, and copyright page, but a different dedication, and (it turns out) a different text: a fiction (88 pages, a short novel or long short story) in which the character whose point of view gets the most attention is worrying about the (apparent) bloodstain seeping from the door of the neighboring apartment while she is being visited by a friend who has been through a terrible breakup.

The neat thing about a Möbius strip, as you may recall from math class, is that one starts with an ordinary two-sided strip of paper, but a half-twist and a piece of tape will you give you a strip of paper with only one side--as you can confirm by yourself by trying coloring it with a crayon.

So the memoir and the fiction seem like two texts, but are in some sense one text.

But in what sense? 

The memoir part, which by sheer chance is what I read first, tells a grim story. The man who in the text is only known as The Reason (as in "A man downstairs was The Reason I'd turned from inhabitant to visitor") breaks up with Lacey via an email, even though they are in different rooms of their shared apartment at the time he sends it. Most of The Reason's reported behavior is similarly odd and cruel. (Googling suggests that writer Jesse Ball is The Reason.)

The memoir might remind you of other getting-myself-back-together narratives, like those of Elizabeth Gilbert or Cheryl Strayed. Lacey explores quite a few different avenues--spiritual, sexual, pharmaceutical--and makes what seems like progress in purging her life of The Reason and his inexplicable behavior. The most interesting parts for me, I'd say, are Lacey's memories of an intensely Christian adolescence in Mississippi. It was easy to connect these memories with the setting of Pew or X's Southern Territories years in Biography of X.

The fiction is interesting in that even though it does have a character who has been broken up with, it gets (for the most part) well away from the experience of the broken-up-with person. The fictional situation includes but also gives the slip to Lacey's own breakup, and that bloodstain under the door becomes the focus of our attention.

I'm not sure The Möbius Book will catch on with the book clubs, but it certainly shows Lacey's resourcefulness and powers of writerly invention.

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume, I_, trans. Barbara Haveland

THE QUICKEST WAY to describe this novel is to invoke the film Groundhog Day. Like Phil, the character Bill Murray plays in that movie, Tara Selter keeps waking up to find she is starting anew the day she lived yesterday—November 18th, in her case. The 121st time this happens, she starts keeping a journal of her experience of being stuck in the calendar, and that journal is the novel. The novel ends when she attains a full year of November Eighteenths and decides she has to get out of where she is (setting up Volume II).

Not an original concept, then, obviously, but I thought this novel was actually more interesting than (the undeniably charming) Groundhog Day for a couple of reasons.

First, this being a novel and a first-person novel at that, we get a lot more interiority than we do from a movie (from just about any movie, really—novels are the hands-down champion art form for interiority). Tara does a lot thinking about what is happening, what she can do to get back to the calendar everyone else is on, what the rules of her new mode of being are, and so on. We get to know her a lot better than we get to know Phil.

Second, her situation is more interesting than Phil’s. For one thing, she can move around. On her original November 18 she was in Paris on a book-buying trip (she and her husband are rare book dealers), but she finds that she can leave Paris and go back to her own house in her own hometown. When she wakes up in her own house, though, it is November 18th again, and her husband is surprised that she is not in Paris.

Tara tries explaining to her husband what is happening—something Phil never tries to do—and he is sympathetic and wants to help. The problem is, she has to explain it all again the next day, which is November 18 again, and eventually this wearies her. She starts staying in the ground floor guest room and avoiding her husband—whose November 18 movements she knows by heart—just to avoid the frustration of the explanation that never moves things along.

Tara also discovers that she does leave traces as one November 18 is followed by the next. If she has three apples in the kitchen and eats one, on the next November 18th there are only two applies in the kitchen. Similarly, the books she bought in Paris on November 18 are still with her the next November 18th…sometimes. 

The accidental discoveries accumulate, experiments are made, and Tara is growing towards something even though she is on some kind of time loop.

We figure out soon enough why Phil is stuck in a loop—he has to keep reliving February 2nd until he is a better person. With Tara, it’s not that simple, obviously. But why, then? Perhaps there will be some answers in Volume II.

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (2)

 FIELD PROVIDES A classification system in a chart on page 7 of Furious Minds, dividing the scene or movement she is surveying into four groups: "National Conservatives," “Claremonters,” “postliberals,” and “Hard Right Underbelly.” The groupings don’t seem to represent sharply distinct schools of thought, though there are differences in style and emphasis, we might say.

The “Hard Right Underbelly” people are mainly online presences and tend to be wilder and more ferocious in their rhetoric. Field places Raw Egg Nationalist, Mencius Moldbug, and and Bronze Age Pervert in this group. Their outrageousness places them outside the mainstream of the movement in some ways, but they have large followings among the base, and Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) apparently has the ear of Peter Thiel, who has the ear of J.D. Vance, so they are not exactly marginal. 

“Postliberals” tend to be Roman Catholic with theocratic tendencies. Patrick Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed got a nod from Obama a few years ago, is the best known of them, Adrian Vermeule the most formidable. A key idea here is “integralism,” that is, incorporating Catholic doctrine and values into civic laws and institutions. 

The “Claremonters” are associated with Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute. The Founders and the original Constitution, with its varieties of brakes on full democracy, are particularly revered in this group.

The “National Conservatives” tend to take a very hard line on immigration.

The thing is, the Hard Right Underbelly also takes a hard line on immigration, the Claremonters would also like to see church and state get cozier, the National Conservatives like the idea of restoring traditional patriarchal family arrangements, etc. Mutual influence, networking, and ideological convergence mean that Field’s group lines can’t be tidy—she often makes remarks along the lines of “we will see more of him in a later chapter,” so the whole phenomenon is more a rhizome than her categories suggest.

As I mentioned in the previous post on this book, Field disagrees with her subjects on most topics and does not bother to conceal her feelings. Michael Anton, discussed in her book as a “Claremonter,” went on at length about Field’s abandonment of any kind of objectivity in a flame-snorting review in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I found her book immensely enlightening, but I would be curious to read a book on the same people by someone more sympathetic to their views, just to get an idea how things look from their perspective. I imagine, though, that Field’s take is the one that would sound most true to me. For all of them, making America great again seems to boil down to “put white straight Christian men back in charge of everything.” I would hate to see that happen.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (5)

A CURIOUS COUNTERPOINT is struck, though, when the next poem, “Suddenly,” begins by suggesting that farming is still going on:

as if beside me

the solitary horse

neighs in the

 

neighbor’s distant

 

field […]     (77)

The furrows, the field, and the horse together recall Edward Thomas’s “As the Team’s Head-Brass,” written in 1916, less than a year before Thomas was killed on the Western Front. The poem’s speaker is having an intermittent conversation with a farmer, who pauses for a minute at the end of each furrow he cuts with his horse-drawn plow. The conversation is about the devastations of the war. Had the war not come, the speaker says, they would be living in “[a]nother world”; “‘Aye, and a better,’” the farmer replies, “‘though / If we could see all all might seem good’” (Thomas CP 29). The farmer has some faith in the future; indeed, the very act of plowing affirms that faith. At the beginning of the poem, two lovers are glimpsed slipping into a nearby wood, slipping out again at poem’s end. Their presence, too, suggests ongoing life amid disaster.

     Graham re-envisioned and expanded Thomas’s poem in “The Hiddenness of the World,” published in Runaway(2020), developing the idea of the disruption and possible renewal of natural cycles. She winked in the direction of Thomas’s poem, I believe, in “In Reality” in To 2040: “The winning ticket is still in my pocket. / The disappearing lovers are still in my satchel. / I have the stories we needed ready” (46). That the two closing poems of Killing Spree make contact with “As the Team’s Head-Brass” floats just a whiff of hope, as does an even more surprising quotation from Pound on the book’s last page: “what thou lovest well / remains” (80)—a line from the Pisan Cantos, a line about what cannot be lost even in defeat.

     And we also have the cicadas. They appeared in “Dawn 2040” in To 2040 and reappear in “Suddenly,” at a crucial juncture:

& the rising & falling silences

of terminal hunger

like the cicadas

revving up again

 

after having ceased long enough

 

for us to have forgotten the story

 

completely, for us to be

 

surprised again

 

by their engine     (78)

The disappearance of the cicadas, even for long periods, does not mean there are no more cicadas. Similarly, perhaps, some hopes can disappear, some principles can disappear, poetry of the farthest-reaching kind can disappear, but all these things may be underground, biding their time, to reappear when we have forgotten all about them. 

Raise yr voice in my voice.

Or raise my voice in yrs.

What remains is

 

always, only, voice—this, here,

this creature in the bony

enclosure, these cicadas in

 

the burning trees.  (79)

Laura K. Field, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right_ (1)

OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT does not strike anyone, I guess, as an ideas-and-principles person. He himself says he likes to go with his “gut”; people who like him might instead talk about his instincts and intuitions, while people who don’t like him (as I do not) might talk about his whims and impulses. He’s a canny gamesman, we could probably all agree, but he probably hasn’t cracked a book since college, if he did even then.

There are plenty of ideas-and-principles people around him, though—Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and J. D. Vance come to  mind—and plenty more in various think tanks, foundations, and  the blogosphere who are making and disseminating arguments for why Trump is the right person at the right time for the U.S.A. Field’s book, which has been cited all over the last place during the last half-year or so, is a survey of a wide array of these folks.

Field has a doctorate in political science—more specifically, in political theory (the three main domains of political science as an academic field are U.S. politics, international politics, and political theory). Political theory shares a long border with philosophy, going back to Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic. Field came up as a Straussian, that is, someone working within the conceptual frameworks created by Leo Strauss, an influential and controversial figure who thought the west made a terrible wrong turn in the early modern era.

Most Straussians would be roughly classed as conservative or neo-conservative, and Field herself might have been classed so before (as she writes in her preface) she had a crucial encounter with the conservative movement’s deeply rooted sexism and patriarchal assumptions. 

Field’s own experiences with and takes on contemporary conservatism are a large part of the book, actually. Even though her book is published by a university press (Princeton, no less), it does not seem academic, at least not in the narrowest sense. First person singular pronouns crop up often, and she does not conceal her distaste for some of the ideas held by her subjects. The book is more intellectual journalism than an academic study, we might say.

It’s certainly illuminating, though. Having recently read two books covering adjacent territory—Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards and Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take It by Force—I noticed that while Slobodian and Taylor end up talking about distinct, non-overlapping groups of MAGA-ites, Field talks about some people discussed by Slobodian, some discussed by Taylor, and a whole lot discussed by neither. She gives us a very wide chunk of the MAGA intellectual spectrum.

Furthermore, she gives us an important clue about what may be holding that spectrum together. The free-market fundamentalists Slobodian writes about may not have a lot in common with the independent charismatic Christians Taylor writes about, and neither group may have much in common with mavericks like the Bronze Age Pervert, but they would all agree that white straight (or profoundly closeted) men should be in charge. And that, Field helps us see, may be the real core of the phenomenon.

Jorie Graham, _Killing Spree_ (4)

IRONICALLY, THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of ultimate defeat may itself belong to this particular high modernist tradition. Eliot’s last major poem, Little Gidding, written when the outcome of the Second World War was in doubt, dwells on “a king at nightfall,” on “three men, and more on the scaffold, / And a few who died forgotten / […] / and of one who died blind and quiet” (CPP 143). The warriors and combatants in Yeats’s late poems are badly besieged (“The Black Tower”) or sole survivors (“The Curse of Cromwell”) or finally overcome (“Cuchulain Comforted”); “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” faces the problem of having nothing left to say, and “Man and Echo” wonders whether what he did manage to say did more harm than good. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” could not be terser or more final, and Pound’s admission of defeat in Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX – CXVII could not be more explicit:

But the beauty is not the madness

Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod, 

I cannot make it cohere. (Canto CXVI, Cantos [1972] 795-96)

Defeat was perhaps inevitable. Acknowledging defeat, though, is not the same thing as wishing one had never made the attempt. Even Pound, amid his wreckage, “a blown husk that is finished” (“from Canto XCV,” Cantos [1972] 794), seems to feel the effort was worth making. And so with Graham in Killing Spree. She did not win the race. Hypocrisy, cruelty, greed, and exploitation won the race. But she is still on the track, taking her defeat lap, and there is a dry, radiant joy in seeing her take it.

     Killing Spree is dark, but even so, there are cracks where the light gets in. Some of the cracks, examined closely, open into surprising vistas. The book’s penultimate poem, “Then,” begins with a moonrise and the speaker’s arm around a sleeping beloved. The speaker wants to “let go / of the world / as it was / once,” and chastises herself for past delusions:

& we thought we were

free, we thought

there was history

 

in the world—

but it was an

illusion, wasn’t it, it

must have been,

 

because otherwise how

could it have

disappeared

so suddenly.     (75)

The poem ends with the image of surviving wildlife—"all the watchers in their dens”—inhabiting

what were once

the sun-warmed furrows

farmers cut

into the earth

 

when there were farmers.   (76)

Farmers have disappeared along with the hummingbirds in this terrible future. Since farming relies on an enormous reservoir of faith in the future, faith that the labor will be worthwhile, that the plants will survive, that the social structures distributing food will be intact, that there will be people to whom the food will be distributed, the imagined disappearance of farmers is as dire a dystopian detail as any in Killing Spree.