Ben Lerner, _Leaving the Atocha Station_

A BRILLIANT SHORT novel, perhaps of autobiographical inspiration, since Lerner himself grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and did a Fulbright year in Spain, and the novel's narrator, Adam Gordon, grew up in Kansas, went to an Ivy League school, and has a grant to live in Spain for a year and write a long poem about the Spanish Civil War... except that Adam, a good Ashberyean, does not believe poems are "about" anything, so the idea that the book is "about" Lerner himself may be a red herring.

The novel could hardly be more convincing, though. It feels as knobbily real as anyone could wish, Ashbery notwithstanding. Lerner makes little to no effort to make Adam Gordon likeable, even in a roguish bad-boy way. He's a bit self-absorbed, not always honest, and given to pretending he understands more of what his Spanish interlocutors are saying than he really does. (Hilariously, Lerner often gives several versions of what a Spanish character just said.)

Adam's warts-and-all self-presentation does tend to win the reader over as the book proceeds, though, mainly because his engagement in the place and the people deepen. At first, he devotes almost all of his time either to writing poems by substituting words and rearranging lines in English translations of Garcia Lorca poems or to getting stoned. His first acquaintances occur in a fog of guesswork translation. Luckily, though, he gets the benefit of a doubt from some young Spanish artists and writers, who befriend him in, set up readings for him, and let him into their world. If these bright, energetic people like Adam, I found myself thinking, he must be OK.

Tension between the real and the represented heaves into view again at the end of Part 2, when Adam has an instant-messaging chat with a stateside friend who has actually witnessed a stranger's death, and then History raises the stakes in the question when Adam is in Madrid at the time of the Al-Quaeda bombing and the election that ousts Spain's pro-Bush government. Suddenly, in his po-mo, multiply-mediated way, he's in the tradition of Auden, Orwell, and the other writers who came to Spain during the crisis of the civil war. By the end of the novel, he's planning to stay in Spain. One suspects he won't...but his wanting to suggests to me that his heart has found its over-medicated, wandering way to the right place.

Timothy Donnelly, _The Cloud Corporation_

A LONGISH WAIT -- seven years -- who does he think he is, Elizabeth Bishop? -- but worth it. Donnelly still has the capacity, demonstrated repeatedly in Twenty-Seven Props..., to keep you teetering off-balance while moving recklessly forward, ultimately landing you in some spot you never saw coming until you were already there.

I keep thinking I detect some of the same species of way-too-late-Romanticism that Harold Bloom detected in middle-period Ashbery. "In His Tree" seems a contemporary busted-quest poem, along the lines of Shelley's Alastor, Browning's Pauline, Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre or Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower."

I set out to find that thing, drawn down by an under-

water instinct true to the warp and weft of a small

false deafness, locked deep in the blue-green private

compartment broken up into shifts and strung

in accordance to the wiles of arachnid light, a light too

truant from its source to reflect a compact back

with fidelity: the sun its half-remembered lozenge

trapped among the birch.

I plucked this virtually at random, but it's a good sample of the pleasures of the volume: the whiplash-inducing enjambment of "a small / false deafness," the twisty syntax (does "strung in accordance" modify "compartment" or "deafness"?), the baffled engagement with the natural world... which baffled engagement makes one think of the Romantics again, as does Donnelly's juggling with religious feelings he's not sure what to do with:

a lifelong feeling that I feel now, remembering

down the highway half-hypnotized in the

backseat feeling what I feel now, and moderate

happiness has nothing to do with it: I want to press

my face against the cold black window until

there is a deity whose only purpose is to stop this.

("The New Hymns")

There are hi-jinks as well, such as a hilariously terrifying blending of phrases from Springsteen's "Born to Run" with phrases from the Patriot Act ("The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports"). "Dream of a Poetry of Defense" works almost as well -- it blends Shelley's Defense of Poetry and the 9/11 Commission Report -- but the one blending the Beverly Hillbillies theme song with one of Osama bin Laden's addresses, ennh, I don't know. But the hits far outnumber the odd misses in The Cloud Corporation.

Jonathan Safran Foer, _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_

TO BE HONEST, I did not care for Everything Is Illuminated and had no plans to read Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, but then it ended up being one of the monthly selections of the book club, so... oh, well.

I enjoyed it more than I did Everything Is Illuminated. It certainly has what we could call a family resemblance. Oskar Schell, our narrator, is as richly provided with quirks as was Alex Perchov. We again have personal traumas nested within historical ones, the Holocaust in Everything, 9/11 and the Dresden fire-bombing in Extremely. In both novels, New World descendants come to terms with what happened to Old World ancestors.

I cannot quell my suspicion that J. S. F. is drawn to historical trauma and Old World settings because they all by themselves (he might hope) lend a gravitas that his fictions otherwise would not quite attain. For my money, Joshua Cohen blows him out of the water.

But I was fond of the almost Dickensian A. R. Black, his index cards and exclamation points, and I loved that Oskar was cast as Yorick in his school's streamlined production of Hamlet. I may give Foer's third novel, when it comes, a shot. I won't be letting him tell me what to eat, however.

Jonathan Franzen, _Freedom_

FINISHED THIS A few months ago, but you know how it gets once the semester starts... in any case, I emerged thinking Freedom certainly a good novel, but not a great one; not as compelling as The Corrections, I would say, which might turn out to be a great one. There is nothing in Freedom to match the streak of satiric fantasy that came up with Corecktall, for one thing, and more damagingly Franzen does not inhabit any of the characters of this novel -- save Joey Berglund, perhaps -- with the uncanny intimacy he brought to the Lambert siblings.

As for the comparisons to Tolstoy that were in the air a year ago... what were people thinking? After all, Tolstoy did write about an infidelity-racked marriage, so direct comparisons are possible. In the fascinatingly caddish betrayer with rare flashes of conscience role, the matchup is Richard Katz vs. Vronsky. No contest, really. There is no scene here to rival Vronsky's steeplechase on Frou-Frou. One gets the feeling Richard was supposed to be a swirling vortex of nihilistic energy, but he more often comes off as just a grouch. Moreover, his putative status as 80s indie rock cult figure is unpersuasive next to Jennifer Egan's much more knowing depiction of that scene in A Visit from the Goon Squad.

In the role of the devoted, conscientious, uncharismatic plodder occasionally capable of lashing out, we have Walter Berglund and Alexei Karenin. We can call it even, I suppose.

Then we have Anna herself and... Patty Berglund. Oy.

The best part of Freedom is the subplot with the Berglunds' son Joey, his doggedly (and doggily) devoted high school girlfriend Connie, and the dazzlingly well-connected rich girl who is the sister of his college roommate. Is it as rich as the Levin-Kitty subplot? Erm, no. But Franzen knows Joey to the bone, and everything about the character convinces.

Still -- if posterity ever wants to know how the white American professional class of the late 20th and early 21st century walked, talked, argued, and fought, what they read, watched, and listened to, they could hardly do better than to pick up Freedom. Franzen is not our Tolstoy, but he may well be our William Dean Howells.

Barry Unsworth, _The Songs of the Kings_

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, in historical novel mode -- operating under the assumption that Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, et al. were every bit as petty, hypocritical, opportunistic, duplicitous, and unwilling to acknowledge their real motives as Bush, Blair, & Co.

And not an assumption you need strain much at, provided you are willing to go along with the premise that these fictional characters are the real scoop on characters who were fictional in the first place.

The Songs of the Kings thus belongs in "twas ever thus" category of historical novels, rather than the Lukács-approved "things were wholly different once" category. Or perhaps the historical-novel-as-oblique-commentary-on-contemporary-events category, like, mmm, Felix Holt the Radical, perhaps, or Wajda's film Danton.

A good novel, but I found myself continually making unfavorable comparisons to Mark Merlis's An Arrow's Flight, one of the great novels of recent decades, to my mind, as well as one of the most compelling contemporary re-imaginings of the matter of Troy, and one which so far as I can discern gets nothing like the accolades it deserves. It's up there with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, if you ask me. So get around to asking me, won't you? Thanks.

Sixth note on _Witz_

6. Cohen likes long, extraordinarily long sentences. Here is what Benjamin encounters as he crosses from New Jersey into New York City via the Holland Tunnel (p. 520):

Landscaped from one of the two mouths of the tunnel, for the many tunnels of this mutated city are monstrous throats that never digest or ever waste what they swallow, without intestine or stomached gargle, how they merely gorge then regurgitate and then gorge themselves again down to the bottom of Broadway – willows groved tightly, their trunks lashed together to prevcnt from being uprooted by the tunneling wind, their boughs hung with many other objects, or forsakings, the harps of the Philharmonic, disbanded since last season’s interruption, and then with their strings, all their sections: their violins firsts and seconds, violas and violoncellos, the occasional weepy, drooping bass, their strings wilting in memory, going loose and detuned in the howl coming up from the bay – trees hung not just with bisbiglissandoing harps and with fiddles gutted and bows but with memories, too, and forgettings, pleas and supplications, signs and notes slipped and tied dire: help me find my father, one says, have you seen my partner? Another, this posted alongside a photo faced grainy from its constant reproduction, a losingly lined courtroomsketch, if so contact Sassoon & Silver LLP., cash reward for information leading to his recovery, all (succor) wanted, need, & offered […]

That’s not the end of the sentence, but let’s stop and take the census so far. We begin with a participial phrase, but have to wait a bit for the noun it modifies (“willows”) because the tunnel’s having a “mouth” triggers a short excursus on its being the maw of this Moloch of a city. The willows get an interesting nonce verb – “groved” – then turn out to be lashed together, which seems peculiar, but even more peculiarly have been festooned with the abandoned instruments of the Philharmonic, disbanded since so many its musicians died (a lot of the orchestra’s members are, indeed, Jewish, but these days the Asian musician might be able to keep it going). The surreal image of the now useless string instruments in the willows shifts suddenly as we next are presented with the kind of notes that appeared all over Manhattan after 9/11, with a striking inversion (‘tied dire”) and another noun-into-verb transformation (“photo faced grainy”). Then there’s the “losingly lined courtroomsketch” – does the hand-drawn image that Sassoon provides of Silver (or Silver of Sassoon) somehow suggest that their law practice has been infrequently victorious?

Cohen often makes use of absolute phrases – “their strings wilting,” “signs and notes slipped and tied dire,” “trees hung etc” – a classic maximalist’s device for adding detail after detail to a sentence, as we see as the catalog of objects left in memory of the dead continues:

…tins of spam dangling from giftribbons, plastic liters of generic soda, empty jars of mayo weeping ornamentally wrapped from these trees, trays of decorative cupcakes and cookies, novelty balloons; these groves nymphabandoned, lining Canal Street west to the Bowery with equity neckties, daytrader suits on hangers commoditized fresh from the drycleaners, high heels, dressy pearls’ strands – this the highest rate of return, a reversion to our natural state, a great comfort unconfined: this season, menschs let out their bellies; womenfolk smear their makeup onto the faces of streets, pink and streaks of red like rainbows trailed by snails, then pray for an innerly inclement weather, asking the cloudfall to cool their lusts, to purify their souls; their kinder pitch pennies worthless into the sewer green and gold, dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow … skyscrapers once new, abandoned to scaffolds; earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying as symbols of an emptiness within; ambition unfinished, thrusts unfulfilled; lorded over by an inutile silence and the holy stillness of cranes. (520-21)

We note the Yiddish – the novel invariably uses “mensch” for “man” or “person,” “kinder” for “children” – and the high modernist touches, the Joycean aversion to the hyphen, for example, as in what may be an allusion to Eliot’s Waste Land: “these groves nymphabandoned”. The plague has laid waste not only to symphony orchestra but to Wall Street, with homely details (drycleaned suits still on hangers) and grimly ironic puns (“highest rate of return”), an image of made-up women collapsing on the street heightened with a simile both beautiful and queasy-making (like rainbows trailed by snails). Next, we have an image of orphaned children, perhaps not long to live themselves, and abandoned dogs in a stunning string of monosyllabic words (‘dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow”) that almost sounds like a William Carlos Williams poems. Then Cohen pulls out all the stops, piling up absolute phrases that read like Whitman-out-of-Ginsberg (‘earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying”) before flipping in a wholly surprising but perfect French adjective and a final image that sounds like Li Bai until you realize it completes the picture of arrested construction.

Joshua Cohen, _A Heaven of Others_

LITERARY HEAVENS, FROM Dante to Mitch Albom, gravitate towards explanation, clearing up the big questions, reconciliations, and the like, but Joshua Cohen's afterlife in A Heaven for Others is if anything stranger, more bewildering, and more abounding in loose ends than ordinary earthly existence.

On his tenth birthday, Jonathan Schwartzstein of Jerusalem is in a shoe store with his father when a suicide bomber crashes in. The explosion kills Jonathan, but due to some cosmic missed exit he winds up in the Muslim heaven, complete with houris, camels, and a K'aba ("Schawartzstein" could be translated "Black Stone"). He sets off on a pilgrimage to find Muhammad and learn how and why he is there, but Muhammad is unlocatable. He does come across a boy his own age who seems be the suicide bomber who crashed into the shoe store.

There is a risk of sentimentality in this scenario (the text is dated "Yom Hazikaron, 2004," an Israeli holiday honoring fallen soldiers and civilian victims of terrorism), and Cohen is not wholly successful in avoiding it (e.g., p. 142). But the book's uniqueness and strangeness prevent one from drawing ready conclusions. Why the occasional shift from Jonathan's first-person narration to that of an omniscient third person? (God? Cohen?) Why the three poems, titled "Alef," "Beit," and again "Alef," prefaced by designs by Michael Hafftka based on those three letters, which spell "ABA," that is, "father"? Why the epigraph from Russian Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichovsky, about a student acquiring a disgust for what his teachers most want him to learn?

And what can we make of Jonathan's gnomic utterances such as "Limitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God [...]"? That the lesson we emphatically learn about God is that God is a God of some (us) but not all (them)? Or what about "heaven must be understood as borderless if it is to have any borders at all" or "an eternal boy matures eternally"? We are far indeed from Albom or Alice Sebold here -- as we are from Beatrice's painstakingly precise scholastic commentaries.

Plenty to ponder, then; fair enough. But I was most taken with the final section, "A 'Metaphor'," in which Jonathan recalls his bath on what was to be the last night of his life in the river-overflowing-its-banks prose of Witz.