Claudia Rankine, _Citizen: An American Lyric_

BALDWIN, THOU SHOULDST be living at this hour. But in his absence, it's good to have this, which like Baldwin's essays has an anger so cold you would hesitate to call it anger save that, like dry ice, it burns.

Not that there is an angry word in it, or even anything that looks much like sustained argument. Its rhetorical power lies in its refusal of rhetoric gestures, maybe, a bit like the deadpan anecdote-by-anecdote method of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke. Consider this. Now this. And this. All the argument lies in the withholding of argumentation, which somehow multiplies its force.

There are risks to timeliness (discussed 3/16/2013), but since most of this book must have been written before Michael Brown and Eric Garner were shot, its timeliness feels more like prescience, like the Zagajewski poem that ran on the last page of the New Yorker the issue after 9/11--actually composed before the event, but somehow eerily, proleptically attuned to what had not yet happened.

Except that the pockets of racism that even a well-established poet on a progressive-minded campus will keep encountering had been happening all along, I guess, had never stopped happening, "post-racial" though we supposedly were. The allusion to Trayvon Martin in the image on the book's cover (a hoodie's detached and empty hood) reminds you that the "post-racial" idea was already pretty much exploded before the summer of 2014.

I've been asking myself why Rankine called the book "lyric," so far without success. It would take a very ambitious composer to set it to music--Anthony Braxton, Art Ensemble of Chicago, say. The text is hybrid, some poetry, some prose, some documentation, some quotations (including Baldwin); if there were a word for the kind of texts John D'Agata collected in The Next American Essay, it would be one of those.

It's the form of thing, I suspect, something in the subtlety of its arrangement, that leads me to think it will be read long after its peculiarly grim moment of autumn 2014 is over.

That and the irony that so painful a book is, as an object, so beautiful--the design, by John Lucas, is a page-to-page astonishment. Hats off to him, and to Graywolf Press, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the College of St. Benedict for ponying up to support this kind of work.

Ian McEwan, _The Children Act_

I USED TO think of McEwan as the least interesting of the trio he formed with Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, but now I don't know...he's looking strong in the latter laps. This new one is not a vaultingly ambitious novel, but it's brisk and alive, which is more than you can say for Amis's recent production, I think.

The novel opens immediately after our protagonist, High Court Judge Fiona Maye, sixty-ish, has received the shocking humiliation of her husband's announcement that he wants to have an affair--"I want one last go, even if you don't." They have not had sex for a while, apparently, and the husband, Jack, is...what? Seeking anticipatory forgiveness? Permission?  Just keeping her in the loop? Anyway,  he is writing her off as a sexual being, and it's a blow.

The next 200 pages are about Fiona Getting Her Groove Back. She adroitly handles a very tricky and highly publicized case involving a brilliant almost-adult young man whose Jehovah's Witness family forbids the blood transfusion that could save his life. The young man falls a bit in love with her. Jack comes  crawling back. his hopes for one last ride on the roller coaster of ecstasy having crashed and burned. As the novel heads for its close, she demonstrates her classical piano chops for an audience of her peers and leaves them slack-jawed at her near-professional virtuosity. She and Jack head home, and the old glint is back in Jack's eye.

Fiona has Still Got It at sixty, in short, and her convincing display of said Still Having It would be a perfectrly satisfactory wrap-up for a novel as stylistically sharp and as keen in its perceptions as this one--but then McEwan has the sheer audacity to turn the novel's end into a revision of the ending of Joyce's "The Dead," but as it were from Gretta Conroy's perspective. The devotion of the young man who died before his devotion could ebb, the song in the rain--"Down by the Salley Gardens" standing in for "The Lass of Aughrim," a nice touch--the horny hoping-to-score husband abruptly brought face-to-face with his wife's ability to inspire a passion he himself may scarcely be capable of...it's all there.

The Children Act turns out to be ambitious after all--appropriating the justly famous ending of one of the greatest short stories in the English language takes some chutzpah, and damned if McEwan doesn't make it work. Yes, he may be pulling away a bit in these latter laps.

Edmund White, _Jack Holmes and His Friend_

JACK HOLMES IS, like Edmund White, from "an eccentric Midwestern family," like White attended a boarding school outside Detroit--Cranbrook Academy pops up as frequently in White's fiction as Weequahic High does in Philip Roth's--and like White arrives in New York City at the dawn of the 1960s, hoping for work in the literary world. And like White, Jack is gay.

Well, we've been here before, you may be thinking--The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, My Lives, City Boy--well, of course we have. With luck, we will be here a few more times. A White book set in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, like a Roth novel set in Newark in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is a sign unto you that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Jack's friend is Will Wright, from the Virginia fox hunting country, a would-be novelist, and straight. Jack loves Will. Thanks to Jack's good offices, Will meets not only the woman he will marry, but also the woman who will turn out to be the most charismatic of his mistresses. Jack will go to extraordinary lengths for Will, who seems hardly grateful for, or even cognizant of, Jack's devotion. Will, the reader is compelled to see, is a preening, self-involved, and painfully shallow man, an impression deepened rather than dispelled by the two length first-person-narration sections the novel grants him (Jack's sections are in close third person).

Very near the novel's end, Jack ponders the fact that Will is really not that lovable. But love is not about the lovableness of the beloved, is it? As Jack tells himself:

You love him, though he's as stiff as a scarecrow and about as human. He's a talentless writer. I've done a little snooping around, and I know his business is about to go under. He's turning into a drunk; he's a heartless father and a faithless husband married to a maniac.
     But I do love him. He's as attached to me in his way as I am to him. We belong together. We could grow into two old libertines together, beauty patches on our zinc-oxided cheeks, pitiless in destroying young lives, as devoted to each other as two alligators dozing in the mud.

At this point in the novel, Will is avoiding his home, virtually living with Jack, and Jack at last gets a quick glimpse of that long fantasized-about penis (Will is worried about a venereal infection he has contracted and wants advice). And what does he find?

Nice shape. Looks like the circumcision was botched, with that extra dewlap of flesh hanging down on one side. Milk white skin with that ropy blue vein rushing down the shaft. Neither big nor little. Just big enough to satisfy anyone.

And that's it. As unremarkable as that. But desire is as unaccountable as love.

Somewhat to my surprise, the opening section of Jack Holmes and His Friend kept reminding me of James Salter's All That Is. In both, a young man arrives in New York (Salter's novel starts about a decade earlier), finds a good-enough job in the verging-on-prestigious-but-not-all-that-remunerative publishing world, fools around a bit, and winds up attached to someone from Virginia old money (precipitating a memorably-narrated awkward visit to Old Dominion). From there, though, Salter's novel seems to wind down and dissipate its energies, while White's manages to gather liftoff velocity and land on the the epiphany quoted above. Mistake me not--both are fine books. But White's, I suspect, will stay with me longer.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, _Americanah_

ADICHIE'S THIRD NOVEL has some of the scope of her second (Half of A Yellow Sun, about Biafra and the Nigerian civil war), since it is set on three continents, but also some of the intimacy of her first (Purple Hibiscus), since it focuses on a particular couple. I would say it is not quite as satisfying as either of those books, but certainly worthwhile.

Adichie has become one of my favorite novelists. Her prose is supple and brisk. She has a new subject matter: not the rural villages of the classic African novels, but the world of the educated, prosperous, and cosmopolitan. (The educated, prosperous, and cosmopolitan get more than their share of attention in most national literatures, I know, but in African literature they have been scarce, so it feels like Adichie is filling a yawning gap.) Best of all, Adichie's has a true novelist's eye and ear.  She notices things, she knows how people talk, she knows how to make her novel's world pop into being in your readerly imagination.

Americanah concerns Ifemelu and Obinze, secondary school sweethearts in Lagos. Circumstances separate them--Ifemelu departs on a scholarship to an American university; Obinze, after a difficult sojourn in the U.K., returns to Nigeria to a comfy job in the family business and an arranged marriage. Years later, Ifemelu comes home. Will their affair re-ignite?

Well, duh.  Yes.

Oddly, though, this is the least interesting part of the book. It barely seems to interest Adichie, who dashes rather cursorily through the reunion and the renewal of the affair. The novel seems much, much more interested in Ifemelu's years in the United States, which, truth to tell, are quite a bit more interesting than anything that goes on between her and Obinze.  We get her take on being an African in America, her take on African-Americans, her take on the men she is attracted to and who are attracted to her, her alliances, her antagonists, her friends, her loved ones, including a young male cousin struggling to grow up in a culture that sees young black males as the scariest of threats. We get several of her blog entries, which are always sharp and funny and would make good reading all on their own. Her conversations in the hair salon--a recurring element--are a highlight of the book.

One feels that the novel wanted Ifemelu's American wanderjahre to be some necessary maturation that prepares for the fulfillment of her homecoming, but she's more interesting when she is wandering.

Dave Eggers, _Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?_

I READ THIS on a long plane trip about five weeks ago. In the early going, it reminded me a bit of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint--first, because it is all dialogue, and second, because in the first chapter one speaker has gone to a reckless, indignant extreme in his desire to hold the powers to be responsible for their wrongdoing, and the other speaker is trying to talk him down.

Hard to imagine Leon Wieseltier taking time out of his busy day to scotch this snake, though, because it turns out what we have is more of a radio play. The reckless, indignant, somewhat crazed kidnapper of chapter one turns out to be Thomas, a no-longer-young man whose life has never quite found its track. His whole generation, he feels, has been gypped, and he embarks on a series of kidnappings trying to get to the bottom of the scam, keeping his victims (most of whom he knows and all of whom he holds to some degree accountable) tied up in the barracks of a de-commissioned military base while he questions/harangues them.

As the interrogations/harangues proceed, Thomas seems less and less the John Brown of the millennials and more and more someone who just never solved the puzzle of being an adult. The people whom he forces onto the witness stand of this improvised trial--a worldly senator, a substance-abusing mom, a pedophile former teacher, the policeman who perhaps unnecessarily gunned down one of Thomas's friends--all turn out to be, as we hear them speak, not the clichés they come on stage as, but ordinary fallible people trying to figure out how to live. Thomas wants to turn them into the power-abusing villains who have wrecked his and his generation's hopes, but they all turn out to be just people trying, like him, to get by somehow. With every interview, one's conviction grows that Thomas is basically a (mostly) good-hearted fuckup, and that things have failed to pan out for him for the most obvious and ordinary kind of reasons.

Thomas is about to be captured as the novel ends; we don't have much hope for his future, although he does seem to have stumbled upon a vocation, having demonstrated a rare and real talent for kidnapping.

Whatever happened to radio plays, anyway? I would definitely give this a listen if NPR, say, gave it two hours.

Knausgaard vs. "speculative fiction"

FOR ADMIRERS OF genre fiction, I often have occasion to notice, it is not enough that their favorite reading sells by the truckload and is readily available at airports, drugstores, and such. No, they are not satisfied with mere popularity; they envy literary fiction's prestige, reduced to rags though it is.

Case in point, Marcel Theroux's review of Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things in the November 2 New York Times Book Review,  which after several hyperbolic paragraphs ends so: "Defiantly unclassifiable, 'The Book of Strange New Things' is, among other things, a rebuke to the credo of literary seriousness for which there is no higher art than a Norwegian man taking pains  to describe his breakfast cereal."

Oh, is it, now? It will take more than big scoops of praise for Jules Verne's latest descendant for me to feel rebuked, I can tell you that, especially since the praise admits--e.g., in the phrase "taking a standard science fiction premise and unfolding it with the patience and focus of a tai chi master"--that the work in question squats squarely within the familiar tropes of its genre.

Obviously, The Book of Strange New Things is another instance of the kind of thing one likes  if one likes this kind of thing--not that strange and not that new, certainly not as strange and new as a writer persuading you, for the first time in your life, to be mindful of your breakfast cereal.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, _My Struggle_, vol. 1

OKAY, GO AHEAD, say it--"Theobald's been drinking the Kool-Aid again!" Any time any writer starts getting plenty of buzz, I line up like the sucker I am, plunk down my $16 (in the present instance), and start at page one like a good little sheep...

...thing is, the buzz sometimes gets it right. The buzz led me to David Foster Wallace in the 1990s, and thereafter I bought every books the week it came out. In the oh-ties, the buzz led me to Roberto Bolaño, and no, I have not read them all, but I've read six, and they were all worthwhile. Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, James McCourt?  Buzz, buzz, and buzz. Believe me, you can do a sight worse than lend an ear to the buzz.

Take Knausgaard. Is My Struggle as compelling as the somewhat baffled reviewers keep telling us it is? Well...in a word, and somewhat to my surprise, yes. The comparison to Proust does not strike me as quite just, even though they both can describe the baldest, most ordinary event with the same extraordinary infinite patience; Proust's sentences seem symphonic to me, Knausgaard's like a drunk man's tour of the neighborhood. Knausgaard seems to me more like Wallace, the later Wallace of The Pale King, made ill by the society of the spectacle but unable to look away, the big wooly sentences with their demotic clumps, the unwillingness to dismiss anything as not worth mentioning.

My increasingly Ranciére-ified sense of things has been leading me to think of the history of the novel as the history of attention, the ever-extending, ever-broadening search to find the poetry and tragedy in lives, places, and events that had been previously written off as beneath literature's notice. Defoe, Sterne, Austen, Flaubert, Eliot (G.), Joyce, Proust, Woolf...they all opened up territory by daring to bring into the novel material that the novel up to their time had deemed insignificant. This is why, for me, Nicholson Baker is an important contemporary writer, but John Irving or Jonathan Franzen, not so much.

Knausgaard may not be in Proust's class, exactly, but a writer who can keep you interested in a teenager's attempt to score beer for a party or in the elbow-busting effort to clean the squalor of a dead father's house--the novel has not been here before, and here we are, silent, upon a peak in Darien.

And that account of his teenage band's first gig at that shopping mall...damn near perfect. I almost feel I was in that band.  God knows I was in several all too similar to it....