SO...THERE WAS no hardback edition of this? What is the world coming to? Graham is among the nation's most accomplished and most honored poets, this is her eleventh collection of new poems, and... no hardback? No review in the NYTBR, none in the NYRB? What the blue trundling fuck?
At the back of this volume is the usual author bio, plus a piece of prose commencing thus: "In PLACE, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience--increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as 'mere' subjectivity--aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable."
This sounds an awful lot like the sort of the thing that goes on the front inner flap of a dust jacket, does it not, and not at all like an "endnote"? It makes me wonder whether Ecco was planning a hardback edition, got this jacket copy written, and then, poof, plans changed and there was nowhere to put it (the back cover is chock-full of admiring reviews of Graham's earlier work). So why not print it as back matter? I'll tell you why--because it sounds stupid there, as if you are trying to sell me the book I just finished reading.
Splutter, splutter. We should talk about the poems, no? Graham has been at this long enough that she is fearsomely adept at writing Jorie Graham poems. This facility has its drawbacks--in part III of Place she seems to be on autopilot. But the book has plenty of poems that are both distinctly Graham-ian and powerfully affecting.
Graham's characteristic vein, for me, is as a phenomenologist of the moment, peeling back the sensory layers of a now, sifting it for its finest grains, then letting in a cross-wind of history, or consciousness of what is happening elsewhere in the world, that pulls you up and out of the moment while (somehow) still keeping you rooted in it. "Fission" is my own favorite example. Sometimes, as in a good bit of Overlord, it does not entirely come off--but when it does, there's nothing else quite like it.
In Place, "Mother and Child (The Road at the Edge of the Field)" is a poem where it does not quite come off--the jump to a torture scene (Guantanamo?) seems to me to be Straining at Meaningfulness. But the poems that acknowledge the recession, "Employment," "Treadmill," take the Grahamian to a new destination; "Message from Armagh Cathedral 2011" arrives at our current wars after a tour of a cathedral turns into an evocation of pre-Christian Irish mythology, all in a way that will turn your head inside out.
Impossible for me not to love "Lapse"--a poem based on the memory of the first time Graham pushed her now-going-on-thirty daughter in a swing--since I can't pass any local playground without remembering the times I took my own now-mid-twenties daughters there.
Graham is still using the lineation trick that is all over Sea Change--a longish left-justified line, followed by a group of several shorter lines indented two inches or so. Speaking for myself, I like this--I like how the shorter lines are at the same time new lines and continuations of the first line (as in printings of traditional verse, or Whitman). This device and Graham's expansive, dash-riddled syntax create that suspended-motion effect that I particularly associate with her, time turned to molasses in January, the moment gathering everything into itself--
--which all reminds me of Keats, especially "To Autumn." Graham too can do that motion-in-stasis, stasis-in-motion effect. And to make it all more perfectly Keatsian, there's a great bird poem--"The Bird on my Railing."
life-lived--this gold its center--and beyond it, still on
the rail, this
bird, a
secret gift to
me by the
visible--
of which few in a life are
given--and how
when it opens its
yellow beak in the glint-sun to
let out song
into the cold, it
lets out the note on a plume of
steam,
lets out the
visible heat of its
inwardness
carrying a note--
This connects--the pushing-out, the giving birth, the self-discovery, the mystery of animation and the inevitability of the cessation of breath--to "Lapse" in all sorts of ways I wish I had time to go into, but let's just let it stand.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
G. C. Waldrep, _Archicembalo_
LAST SUMMER'S POETRY WEEK having been such a success (dozens of hits! Heady stuff for a blog that usually lingers in the single digits), it's time for LLL to have another. G. C. Waldrep being one of my favorites among American poets under fifty, Sunday (yesterday) was devoted to his Archicembalo.
An archicembalo is a keyboard instrument designed (an endnote informs us) to play intervals other and smaller than those of an ordinary piano or harpsichord--e.g., microtones. The volume Archicembalo is structured (another endnote tells us) like a gamut, a guide to musical theory conducted through a series of questions, like a catechism, often featured as front-matter in published music collections like The Southern Harmony or The Sacred Harp. The endnotes do not mention, but I happen to know, that those two collections are classics in the American shape-note singing tradition--and, sure enough, there on the book's cover, designed to look like a mid-19th century title-page for such a collection, are four shape-notes pencilled in red (presumably by the red pencil lying atop the title-page).
We have 56 prose poems, 55 titled with (mainly) musical questions such as "What is a Hexachord," plus an "Apostrophe to the Memory of Benjamin Britten." The question sometimes has a easily spotted connection to the prose poem it heads; "What is a Tritone," for instance, includes the phrases, "when I first heard it I was in a spacious hall with poor acoustics in Cambridge," and "mi contra fa diabolus est in musica," a traditional definition of the tritone. Sometimes the connection is more elusive, more a matter of being on G.C.W.'s wavelength, as in "Who is Steve Reich," which reads, in its entirety, "EVERY. GOOD. BOY. DOES. FINE". Reich is...too well-tempered? Too good a boy? Too wedded to the treble clef?
More often, though, the prose poem is only evanescently tethered to its title and immediately finds a path of its own. Some seem like memories:
He would see me down in the lower field on his way from the house to the paddock and I would be staring raptly at a stone the size of my fist and he would call, "Everything OK?" And I would toss the stone into the wheelbarrow that rested ten, maybe twenty feet distant and I would call back "Yes. Everything's fine."
("Who was Scheherazade")
Some seem like dreams:
Every sound is tropical;, every sound is perishable. My aunt sends one wrapped in butcher paper & string. I refuse to open it and so it remains next to Blackwell's Curious Herbal and a bag of homemade noodles, quivering.
("What is the Real Answer")
Some seem--like music--a matter of finding sounds, blending and repeating and patterning and re-patterning them, with a sometimes Steinian effect:
I have walked to the south pond and back and I have walked Long Cove on the east side and I have walked Long Cove on the west side. I have seen Tarbox Cove and Jewett Cove and Knubble Cove and Brooks Cove and I have walked on the East Shore Road and on the West Shore Road. I walk and have walked and in walking so walking do.
("What is a Hexachord")
Somehow, though, the antecedent that struck me was Eliot's Four Quartets. This may be just an accident, owing to the first poem ("Who is Josquin Des Prez") mentioning snowdrops, which reminded me of the opening of "Little Gidding," and "being given in marriage," which reminded me of the opening of "East Coker." Even if it is only an accident, though, Four Quartets is also an attempt to bring musical form to poetry, also has a preoccupation with the spiritual and sacred (shape-note singing was typically used for worship), and also ponders losses--which it seems to me Archicembalo does. Something happened, something is gone, and it haunts every poem.
In the ancient kingdom of Arrhythmia the person of the deity was conceived to be bipartite, shaft vs. fletch, pulse vs. caesura. A capricious god. Nightly the cakes of dull flaxseed. Elmflicker. Ashtigmatism. Cerements in the garish of the banefire: we are all (br)others now.
("Who is Friedrich Schiller")
An archicembalo is a keyboard instrument designed (an endnote informs us) to play intervals other and smaller than those of an ordinary piano or harpsichord--e.g., microtones. The volume Archicembalo is structured (another endnote tells us) like a gamut, a guide to musical theory conducted through a series of questions, like a catechism, often featured as front-matter in published music collections like The Southern Harmony or The Sacred Harp. The endnotes do not mention, but I happen to know, that those two collections are classics in the American shape-note singing tradition--and, sure enough, there on the book's cover, designed to look like a mid-19th century title-page for such a collection, are four shape-notes pencilled in red (presumably by the red pencil lying atop the title-page).
We have 56 prose poems, 55 titled with (mainly) musical questions such as "What is a Hexachord," plus an "Apostrophe to the Memory of Benjamin Britten." The question sometimes has a easily spotted connection to the prose poem it heads; "What is a Tritone," for instance, includes the phrases, "when I first heard it I was in a spacious hall with poor acoustics in Cambridge," and "mi contra fa diabolus est in musica," a traditional definition of the tritone. Sometimes the connection is more elusive, more a matter of being on G.C.W.'s wavelength, as in "Who is Steve Reich," which reads, in its entirety, "EVERY. GOOD. BOY. DOES. FINE". Reich is...too well-tempered? Too good a boy? Too wedded to the treble clef?
More often, though, the prose poem is only evanescently tethered to its title and immediately finds a path of its own. Some seem like memories:
He would see me down in the lower field on his way from the house to the paddock and I would be staring raptly at a stone the size of my fist and he would call, "Everything OK?" And I would toss the stone into the wheelbarrow that rested ten, maybe twenty feet distant and I would call back "Yes. Everything's fine."
("Who was Scheherazade")
Some seem like dreams:
Every sound is tropical;, every sound is perishable. My aunt sends one wrapped in butcher paper & string. I refuse to open it and so it remains next to Blackwell's Curious Herbal and a bag of homemade noodles, quivering.
("What is the Real Answer")
Some seem--like music--a matter of finding sounds, blending and repeating and patterning and re-patterning them, with a sometimes Steinian effect:
I have walked to the south pond and back and I have walked Long Cove on the east side and I have walked Long Cove on the west side. I have seen Tarbox Cove and Jewett Cove and Knubble Cove and Brooks Cove and I have walked on the East Shore Road and on the West Shore Road. I walk and have walked and in walking so walking do.
("What is a Hexachord")
Somehow, though, the antecedent that struck me was Eliot's Four Quartets. This may be just an accident, owing to the first poem ("Who is Josquin Des Prez") mentioning snowdrops, which reminded me of the opening of "Little Gidding," and "being given in marriage," which reminded me of the opening of "East Coker." Even if it is only an accident, though, Four Quartets is also an attempt to bring musical form to poetry, also has a preoccupation with the spiritual and sacred (shape-note singing was typically used for worship), and also ponders losses--which it seems to me Archicembalo does. Something happened, something is gone, and it haunts every poem.
In the ancient kingdom of Arrhythmia the person of the deity was conceived to be bipartite, shaft vs. fletch, pulse vs. caesura. A capricious god. Nightly the cakes of dull flaxseed. Elmflicker. Ashtigmatism. Cerements in the garish of the banefire: we are all (br)others now.
("Who is Friedrich Schiller")
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Michel Houellebecq, _The Elementary Particles_
BACK AROUND THE time the English translation of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 came out, I mentioned to a friend that I planned to buy a copy. He rolled his eyes. "What, you don't like Bolaño?" I asked. It turned out that my friend had not actually read anything by Bolaño, but was just tired of hearing about him. He had come to think that enthusiasm for Bolaño meant one had drunk the book reviewers' Kool-Aid, so to speak, was a slavish follower of literary fashion.
That is more or less how I felt about Michel Houellebecq. You hear about a new novelist from X who is provocative, or transgressive, or controversial, and you think, "hmm, interesting," then you hear about him (perhaps her) again, and again, and again, and all of a sudden you have burned out on whoever-it-is before you have even looked her (perhaps him) up on Amazon. You have gone through the whole intrigue/enthusiasm/weariness/annoyance cycle without having read so much as a page.
Fortunately, I came around to thinking that I should not dislike a novelist solely because he has been touted as le dernier cri over and over and over. So I picked this up--and what do you know, it really is good.
The blurb on the back likens Houellebecq to Beckett (a certain preoccupation with western civilization's death spiral, check), Huxley (rooting around in contemporary science for ideas on which to base novels, check), and Camus (can't see it, frankly). He seems to me more a less exuberant, stylistically more chaste Céline, in demonstrating a deep disgust with contemporary liberal mores without in the least being a traditional church-and-state-and-family conservative. Unlike Céline, though, he is giddily optimistic about the future, imagining an already-unfolding transvaluation of all values. Maybe he's more of a Thomas Carlyle...?
The novel presents itself as a biography of Michel Djerzinski, a molecular biologist who dies/disappears about 2000 (the novel was published in 1998), leaving behind several groundbreaking treatises that usher in the new dispensation of the future (the novel purports to have been written circa 2079), in which cloning replaces sexual reproduction and makes possible the creation of a world-mind, hence peace and contentment for all (there is a somewhat similar conception in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, interestingly enough).
Most of the novel is about Djerzinski's works and days 1958-2000, with considerable attention to his half-brother, Bruno Clément. Sons of the same proto-hippie, boho-vagabond mother, they meet only as teens. Bruno is a teacher, a mostly unpublished writer, and a sex addict, I guess we could say. Michel, by contrast, is virtually asexual, wholly wrapped up in his research, breaking the heart of the beautiful Annabelle, who has loved him since their youth.
Bruno and Michel collectively illustrate--this is the key idea, I am guessing--the dead end of materialist ideology, born in the early modern era with the collapse of Christian faith, relentlessly pursued through the scientific, economic, and political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, issuing at last in the late 20th century as atomistic individualism, hedonistic, self-absorbed, incapable of love. Michel Djerzinski's new paradigm, over the course of the 21st century, liberates humankind from this dead end.
The real unifying theme of the novel, though, is that the supposedly liberating ideology of the 1960s was really a trap, an apparent explosion of transformative energy that rapidly degenerated into the Me Decade, drug addiction, promiscuity.... On this point, Houellebecq puts me in mind more of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, or T. C. Boyle's Drop City, or even P. J. O'Rourke or Martin Amis.
This reminds me, I need to find copies of Edward St. Aubyn's novels with the New Age settings. I bet they're ruthless.
That is more or less how I felt about Michel Houellebecq. You hear about a new novelist from X who is provocative, or transgressive, or controversial, and you think, "hmm, interesting," then you hear about him (perhaps her) again, and again, and again, and all of a sudden you have burned out on whoever-it-is before you have even looked her (perhaps him) up on Amazon. You have gone through the whole intrigue/enthusiasm/weariness/annoyance cycle without having read so much as a page.
Fortunately, I came around to thinking that I should not dislike a novelist solely because he has been touted as le dernier cri over and over and over. So I picked this up--and what do you know, it really is good.
The blurb on the back likens Houellebecq to Beckett (a certain preoccupation with western civilization's death spiral, check), Huxley (rooting around in contemporary science for ideas on which to base novels, check), and Camus (can't see it, frankly). He seems to me more a less exuberant, stylistically more chaste Céline, in demonstrating a deep disgust with contemporary liberal mores without in the least being a traditional church-and-state-and-family conservative. Unlike Céline, though, he is giddily optimistic about the future, imagining an already-unfolding transvaluation of all values. Maybe he's more of a Thomas Carlyle...?
The novel presents itself as a biography of Michel Djerzinski, a molecular biologist who dies/disappears about 2000 (the novel was published in 1998), leaving behind several groundbreaking treatises that usher in the new dispensation of the future (the novel purports to have been written circa 2079), in which cloning replaces sexual reproduction and makes possible the creation of a world-mind, hence peace and contentment for all (there is a somewhat similar conception in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, interestingly enough).
Most of the novel is about Djerzinski's works and days 1958-2000, with considerable attention to his half-brother, Bruno Clément. Sons of the same proto-hippie, boho-vagabond mother, they meet only as teens. Bruno is a teacher, a mostly unpublished writer, and a sex addict, I guess we could say. Michel, by contrast, is virtually asexual, wholly wrapped up in his research, breaking the heart of the beautiful Annabelle, who has loved him since their youth.
Bruno and Michel collectively illustrate--this is the key idea, I am guessing--the dead end of materialist ideology, born in the early modern era with the collapse of Christian faith, relentlessly pursued through the scientific, economic, and political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, issuing at last in the late 20th century as atomistic individualism, hedonistic, self-absorbed, incapable of love. Michel Djerzinski's new paradigm, over the course of the 21st century, liberates humankind from this dead end.
The real unifying theme of the novel, though, is that the supposedly liberating ideology of the 1960s was really a trap, an apparent explosion of transformative energy that rapidly degenerated into the Me Decade, drug addiction, promiscuity.... On this point, Houellebecq puts me in mind more of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, or T. C. Boyle's Drop City, or even P. J. O'Rourke or Martin Amis.
This reminds me, I need to find copies of Edward St. Aubyn's novels with the New Age settings. I bet they're ruthless.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Alan Bennett, _Untold Stories_
I HAVE BEEN plugging away at this since, I think, 2008. Took a while not only because of its length (630 pages) but also because it is one of my bedside table books, and since my spouse typically retires well before I do, I rarely have need to resort to one of my bedside table books; they tend to linger there for years. Zeitoun has been there for about three years.
Bennett is better known in England than he is here; in England, I gather, he is a national treasure on the order of Garrison Keillor, both graceful writers with a distinctive vein of mainly gentle but occasionally tart humor, with some high-culture credentials (Keillor's novels, Bennett's plays, though Bennett seems to have higher standing as a playwright than Keillor has as a novelist).
They are easily distinguished, to be sure--Bennett is gay, Keillor straight, Keillor went to the University of Minnesota, Bennett to Oxford, Bennett will bring up cathedral architecture or Pre-Raphaelite painting where Keillor would bring up baseball or F. Scott Fitzgerald--but the two are still highly comparable. Both grew up in humble, pious families in the provinces in roughly the same stretch of the 20th century (Bennett born 1934 in Yorkshire, Keillor 1942 in Minnesota). Both were raised by parents who didn't expect or ask for much, and taught their children not to expect or ask for much. Both can be hilarious about the world they grew up in without tipping over into mean-spirited satire on the one hand or gluey sentimentality on the other. Both embrace the politics of the underdog, staunch defenders of what government can make possible for ordinary people; as Keillor excels as deflating a certain kind of entitled, puffed-up, self-righteous Republican, so Bennett does in skewering the Thatcherite Tories.
Untold Stories is a collection of largely autobiographical or memoiristic essays with a generous section (close to 200 pages) from Bennett's published diaries (which appear annually or so in the London Review of Books). Everything in here is worth reading, and a couple of pieces are the sort you immediately wish to tell all your friends to read: the book's opening piece, "Untold Stories," a long essay about Bennett's parents' lives and deaths, including his mother's slide into dementia, told with candor, extraordinary attention to detail, and love; and its closing one, "An Average Rock Bun," about Bennett's ultimately successful battle with colon cancer.
I already have a similar volume of Bennett's, Writing Home, which I imagine I'll be dipping into over the next four years.
Bennett is better known in England than he is here; in England, I gather, he is a national treasure on the order of Garrison Keillor, both graceful writers with a distinctive vein of mainly gentle but occasionally tart humor, with some high-culture credentials (Keillor's novels, Bennett's plays, though Bennett seems to have higher standing as a playwright than Keillor has as a novelist).
They are easily distinguished, to be sure--Bennett is gay, Keillor straight, Keillor went to the University of Minnesota, Bennett to Oxford, Bennett will bring up cathedral architecture or Pre-Raphaelite painting where Keillor would bring up baseball or F. Scott Fitzgerald--but the two are still highly comparable. Both grew up in humble, pious families in the provinces in roughly the same stretch of the 20th century (Bennett born 1934 in Yorkshire, Keillor 1942 in Minnesota). Both were raised by parents who didn't expect or ask for much, and taught their children not to expect or ask for much. Both can be hilarious about the world they grew up in without tipping over into mean-spirited satire on the one hand or gluey sentimentality on the other. Both embrace the politics of the underdog, staunch defenders of what government can make possible for ordinary people; as Keillor excels as deflating a certain kind of entitled, puffed-up, self-righteous Republican, so Bennett does in skewering the Thatcherite Tories.
Untold Stories is a collection of largely autobiographical or memoiristic essays with a generous section (close to 200 pages) from Bennett's published diaries (which appear annually or so in the London Review of Books). Everything in here is worth reading, and a couple of pieces are the sort you immediately wish to tell all your friends to read: the book's opening piece, "Untold Stories," a long essay about Bennett's parents' lives and deaths, including his mother's slide into dementia, told with candor, extraordinary attention to detail, and love; and its closing one, "An Average Rock Bun," about Bennett's ultimately successful battle with colon cancer.
I already have a similar volume of Bennett's, Writing Home, which I imagine I'll be dipping into over the next four years.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Gore Vidal, _Point to Point Navigation_
THE LIBRARY OF America is planning a Vidal volume, surely? I suggest there should be at least three. One volume for the essays, of course, to me his greatest achievement--United States plus The Last Empire and the later pieces. One for a selection of the novels--which were not so consistently strong as to justify republishing all of them, as they did for James and Faulkner and intend to do for Roth, but imagine a collection including The Judgement of Paris (the first novel in which Vidal sounds like Vidal), Burr (the best of the American history cycle, animated by Vidal's intuitive understanding of the founding fathers), Julian (Vidal the classicist at his feistiest), Myra Breckinridge (Vidal as gender/sexuality provocateur), and Two Sisters (not so famous as the others, but every key strand of Vidal is braided into this short novel).
For the third volume, let's have the autobiographically-inflected books--Palimpsest, Screening History, and this one.
Point to Point Navigation is subtitled "A Memoir, 1964-2006," suggesting it is a continuation of Palimpsest, and at times it almost is, but it is less a narrative of those years (which would have been amazing to have, for Vidal's accounts of his encounters with Buckley, Mailer, and Midge Decter, or of his California senatorial campaign, or his correspondence with Timothy McVeigh) than a tour of the contents of Vidal's capacious mind, circa 2005, conducted in the episodic fashion suggested by the title.
A lot of it is about the dead--dead friends, dead enemies, dead frenemies (e.g., Tennessee Williams), dead loved ones, especially his grandfather, his father, and Howard Auster/Austen, Vidal's longtime partner. ("Partner" is a word Vidal handles with tongs--despite The City and the Pillar and "Pink Star and Yellow Triangle," he was never the spokesman the gay activist community thought it wanted--had he been, he might be on more syllabi now.) Quite a bit of it is about what the authors of books about him got wrong or, occasionally, right. Quite a few of the book's stories he has told before--as he himself notes.
His last book, in effect--Snapshots in History's Glare is technically the last, I guess, but witty as its captions are, it is not a book in quite the sense that Point to Point Navigation is. What a voice Vidal's prose had--the last of a kind, one would say, except that he was always one of a kind.
For the third volume, let's have the autobiographically-inflected books--Palimpsest, Screening History, and this one.
Point to Point Navigation is subtitled "A Memoir, 1964-2006," suggesting it is a continuation of Palimpsest, and at times it almost is, but it is less a narrative of those years (which would have been amazing to have, for Vidal's accounts of his encounters with Buckley, Mailer, and Midge Decter, or of his California senatorial campaign, or his correspondence with Timothy McVeigh) than a tour of the contents of Vidal's capacious mind, circa 2005, conducted in the episodic fashion suggested by the title.
A lot of it is about the dead--dead friends, dead enemies, dead frenemies (e.g., Tennessee Williams), dead loved ones, especially his grandfather, his father, and Howard Auster/Austen, Vidal's longtime partner. ("Partner" is a word Vidal handles with tongs--despite The City and the Pillar and "Pink Star and Yellow Triangle," he was never the spokesman the gay activist community thought it wanted--had he been, he might be on more syllabi now.) Quite a bit of it is about what the authors of books about him got wrong or, occasionally, right. Quite a few of the book's stories he has told before--as he himself notes.
His last book, in effect--Snapshots in History's Glare is technically the last, I guess, but witty as its captions are, it is not a book in quite the sense that Point to Point Navigation is. What a voice Vidal's prose had--the last of a kind, one would say, except that he was always one of a kind.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Julian Gough, _Jude: Level One_
THE BLURBS ON my copy compare Gough to Flann O'Brien and J. P. Donleavy, which comparisons I am guessing are meant to convey that he is male, Irish, and funny. He reminds me less of those two writers, though, than he does of a certain 1960s-ish vein of anarchic satire--Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Southern, Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!--in his gleeful embrace of implausibilities and impossibilities as it skewers every pomposity that hoves into view.
Á la Rasselas or Candide, we follow a naïve, likeable, and luckless young man on a picaresque journey from Tipperary to Galway to Dublin (later installments will take him, I gather, to England and then to the United States), in the course of which he gets a series of upsetting (but hilarious) lessons in the idols of this world--wealth, power, love--in the peculiar manifestations they took on in Ireland during the real-estate bubble years of the mid-1990s.
Some familiarity with Ireland will help the reader, such as knowing about such personalities as Eamonn de Valera and Charles Haughey, and such entities as the Irish Times and Fianna Fail. It will help, as well, to be able to recognize the contours of Irish nationalist ideology, for Jude: Level 1is as incisively funny about that animal as are Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore and (going way back) Denis Johnston's The Old Lady Says No.
It may all be a little too Irish for many, but I laughed out loud a good dozen times reading this--and it takes a lot to get me to laugh out loud.
Á la Rasselas or Candide, we follow a naïve, likeable, and luckless young man on a picaresque journey from Tipperary to Galway to Dublin (later installments will take him, I gather, to England and then to the United States), in the course of which he gets a series of upsetting (but hilarious) lessons in the idols of this world--wealth, power, love--in the peculiar manifestations they took on in Ireland during the real-estate bubble years of the mid-1990s.
Some familiarity with Ireland will help the reader, such as knowing about such personalities as Eamonn de Valera and Charles Haughey, and such entities as the Irish Times and Fianna Fail. It will help, as well, to be able to recognize the contours of Irish nationalist ideology, for Jude: Level 1is as incisively funny about that animal as are Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore and (going way back) Denis Johnston's The Old Lady Says No.
It may all be a little too Irish for many, but I laughed out loud a good dozen times reading this--and it takes a lot to get me to laugh out loud.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
More mystifying pronouncements from the NYTRB
MY ANNOYANCE AT Martin Amis had not entirely dissipated when the Thomas Mallon review of Tom Wolfe's latest (NYTBR, October 28) began this way: "Tom Wolfe's move from the New Journalism to fiction writing, undertaken a quarter century ago, now seems on a par with Babe Ruth's shift from the pitcher's mound to the regular batting order."
Pardon me--it seems nothing remotely of the kind. Ruth abandoned pitching, something at which he was quite good but not extraordinary, and became one of the very greatest--arguably the greatest--hitter in the history of baseball.
For this analogy to work, Wolfe has to be, as a novelist, on a par with Tolstoy or Proust. He is not even on a par with John Updike. John O'Hara, perhaps. Perhaps not. Too close to call.
To say nothing of Mr. Mallon's grave disservice to Wolfe's earlier work. I still meet 20-somethings who have read or plan to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and you know what? They should read it. Better that than yet another volume of Bukowski. Its status as a classic, like that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is peculiar but secure. Ditto for Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Right Stuff, "The Last American Hero," "The Me Decade," the pieces on Hugh Hefner, Marshall McLuhan, Phil Spector...anyone hoping to understand the American 1960s has to read Tom Wolfe. This amounts to Babe Ruth's pitching career? Please.
The novels? No one has to read or ever will have to read the novels. A Man in Full was a bit less interesting than the only moderately interesting Bonfire of the Vanities, and I decided a short ways into I Am Charlotte Simmons that I was not going to bite the baited hook next time. Excuse me, I think I am going to go enjoy that description in The Right Stuff of landing a plane on an aircraft carrier one more time.
Pardon me--it seems nothing remotely of the kind. Ruth abandoned pitching, something at which he was quite good but not extraordinary, and became one of the very greatest--arguably the greatest--hitter in the history of baseball.
For this analogy to work, Wolfe has to be, as a novelist, on a par with Tolstoy or Proust. He is not even on a par with John Updike. John O'Hara, perhaps. Perhaps not. Too close to call.
To say nothing of Mr. Mallon's grave disservice to Wolfe's earlier work. I still meet 20-somethings who have read or plan to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and you know what? They should read it. Better that than yet another volume of Bukowski. Its status as a classic, like that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is peculiar but secure. Ditto for Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Right Stuff, "The Last American Hero," "The Me Decade," the pieces on Hugh Hefner, Marshall McLuhan, Phil Spector...anyone hoping to understand the American 1960s has to read Tom Wolfe. This amounts to Babe Ruth's pitching career? Please.
The novels? No one has to read or ever will have to read the novels. A Man in Full was a bit less interesting than the only moderately interesting Bonfire of the Vanities, and I decided a short ways into I Am Charlotte Simmons that I was not going to bite the baited hook next time. Excuse me, I think I am going to go enjoy that description in The Right Stuff of landing a plane on an aircraft carrier one more time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
