Eula Biss, _Having and Being Had_

 I AM WONDERING about the number of emerging major American prose writers who started out as poets. Eula Biss, for one, but also Patricia Lockwood, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Boyer, Lucy Ives. Did this all start with Mary Karr? Kathleen Norris? Are any of these people going to go back to writing poetry? Karr and Norris did, to an extent, but poetry for them seemed to become something of a sideline. I can't blame people for wanting to write books that sell better than volumes of poetry, I guess. Still, I feel a pang of regret. 

If we might describe Anne Boyer's The Undying as an antagonistic assessment of capitalism through the lens of cancer, we might describe Having and Being Had as an antagonistic assessment of capitalism through the lens of real estate.  Married with a young son, Biss and her husband find themselves with an altogether understandable desire to own a house, but in multiple and unfolding ways the cost of owning a house includes complicity in the meshes of an economy organized around profit and exploitation. 

The book consists of usually quite short essays, well-informed, taut, brushed with a sort of satirical lyricism, and organized into four sections: "Consumption," "Work," "Investment," and "Accounting." As with The Undying, the surface tone tends to be cool, dry, and rational, but there is molten lava flowing underground, an anger at how our economic system coerces us.

I was particularly struck by Biss's analysis of "work." For her, her work--the thing she lives to do--is her writing. For all but her friends, though, her work is what she does to earn the larger and steadier part of her income--her teaching. For her, her teaching is what she does in order to have opportunity to do her writing--that is she works in order to do her work. And that perhaps answers my question about poets turning to the writing of prose.

Gail Collins, _No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History_

 ONE OF OUR book clubs chose this as the February selection; I don't think I would have read it otherwise. 

It's certainly readable, briskly written and skillfully synthesized from a wide range of secondary sources. But there is not much that is new in it. It usually focuses on already well-known figures (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Meryl Streep), and the main thesis (over the course of American history, older women have been taking on more visible and more important public roles) was not challenging. 

Reading it was like eating a box of Triscuits--easily and quickly done, but leaving you with the feeling that your time might have been better spent.

Paul Trynka, _David Bowie: Starman_

 TRYNKA'S BIOGRAPHIES of Iggy Pop and Brian Jones were excellent, I thought. His book on Iggy may be definitive--I don't expect it to be surpassed in my lifetime, at least.

This one is very good but perhaps not as impressive. 

One problem: it has the disadvantage of having appeared in 2011, during Bowie's extended hiatus before his re-emergence with The Next Day and the extraordinary final achievement of Blackstar. For another, the latter part of the book--covering the Tin Machine era, Outside, Heathen, Reality, the final tours--are merely workmanlike and not particularly illuminating. I wondered if Trynka had simply brushed off some of his journalism of the era.

On the early years, though, Bowie as lean and hungry chancer trying to claw his way into pop stardom, and on the career-defining breakthroughs of the 1970s, Trynka is excellent. As in the Pop and Jones books, he demonstrates a keen journalistic sense of whom to interview and how to gain their trust--e.g., key influence Lindsay Kemp, early days manager Ken Pitt, crucial sideman Carlos Alomar. And I hardly hope to get a better glimpse into the career of Tony DeFries. 

As in his Pop and Jones biographies, Trynka as author maintains just the right distance. He knows exactly what makes Bowie a major figure in his field, but he does not fawn or hyperbolically praise. Nor does he indulge in the sort of scandal-sniffing or pissing on idols that makes (for instance) Albert Goldman's books on Presley and Lennon worthless. 

I wonder if Trynka has a new edition in mind, now that Bowie belongs to the ages? I would certainly want to read what he has to say about the final chapter.

Edmund Wilson, _The Devils and Canon Barham_

I DISCOVERED EDMUND Wilson, the closest thing the United States ever had to Samuel Johnson, in graduate school--his Axel's Castle, a study of some key high modernists (Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, and Stein) was on the reading list for one off my area exams. 

Wilson was not fashionable then (late 1970s) and as far as I can tell is even less fashionable now, but I couldn't get enough. So, instead of mastering Foucault and Lacan, which would have been a much shrewder move, I was scouring Chicago's used bookstores for the likes of Patriotic Gore, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, A Window on Russia, To the Finland Station, and The Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which I devoured. 

I particularly enjoyed the volumes collecting his literary journalism: The Shores of Light (the 1920s and 1930s), Classics and Commercials (mainly the 1940s), and The Bit Between my Teeth (1950s up to about 1965). The old knock on C. A. Sainte-Beuve (the closest thing France ever had to Samuel Johnson) was that he was insightful about canonical writers but bad at judging his own contemporaries; Wilson, however, was brilliant unto prescient at identifying those of his contemporaries who would be of interest later (as his choice of subjects in Axel's Castle, published in 1931, shows). He was just as fascinating about writers whom later generations largely forgot: James Branch Cabell, Mike Gold, Elinor Wylie, Kay Boyle, Archibald MacLeish.

The Devils and Canon Barham is the last in the series--I only found it a few years ago and only read it recently. It's shorter than the other volumes, with just eleven pieces, but it has all of Wilson's characteristic virtues, especially his ability to make lesser-known writers (Harold Frederic, Henry Blake Fuller, Richard Harris Barham) sound worth tracking down. It also contains Wilson's last great attack, "The Fruits of the MLA." 

Wilson's pet project in his later years was an American equivalent of the French Pléiade editions--compact, well-bound, affordable, and expertly edited versions of the collected works of the nation's classic authors. The project eventually came to fruition in the Library of America, but in Wilson's lifetime the path to its accomplishment was blocked by the Modern Languages Association, with its endorsements of this or that scholarly edition--the Ohio Hawthorne, the Northwestern-Newberry Melville--as definitive. The problem was, as Wilson's angry and hilarious broadside repeatedly demonstrates, was that these editions turned out to be bulky, expensive, clogged with textual apparatus, and not at all the kind of thing anyone but a graduate student would care to spend time with. 

Fortunately, the Library of America did eventually come along, and I see that it, oh so fittingly, has republished The Shores of Light and Classic and Commercials along with other Wilson volumes of the 1930s and 1940s. The Bit Between my Teeth must not be too far behind, nor The Devils and Canon Barham much behind that. That will be a great day.

Richard Flanagan, _The Narrow Road to the Deep North_

ALSO A PICK by our book club, like the Setterfield novel, but as though to underline the folly of generalizing about book club selections, this one was astonishingly good. 

The only other Flanagan novel I had read before this one was, coincidentally, also largely set in a penal colony in the tropics. Gould's Book of Fish vividly presents a 19th century British penal camp in Tasmania, and The Narrow Road to the North even more vividly presents an even grimmer place: one of the Japanese prisoner of war camps whose inmates were charged with constructing the Burma Railroad.

A lot of men my age will remember this setting from the Pierre Boulle novel and David Lean film Bridge on the River Kwai, both of which struck me as shockingly realistic and de-romanticized when I was twelve, but are a Disneyland ride compared to The Narrow Road to the Deep North. If you are looking for a shockingly realistic and de-romanticized WW II novel, Flanagan is your man.

Beyond that, though, the novel is burningly memorable. The main character, Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, is all-but-engaged when he goes off to war, but the great passion of his life is a woman who happens to be married to his uncle. When he comes back, he does what seems the obvious thing and marries his might-as-well-be fiancée. And so two great silences are imposed upon him. While he is celebrated as a hero and an accomplished surgeon over the remaining course of a long life, he can never really speak of what the camp was like--it is just too grisly and terrible, shows everyone in too ugly a light, is just unspeakable. Nor can he ever acknowledge his most intense, transformative experience of love. The great defining experiences of his life simply may not be uttered. What does that do to a person? That also is what this novel is about.

And then there is the wholly unexpected turn that the novel, unsparing in its depiction of the brutality of the prison camp, also honors the beauty and depth of Japanese culture--the title, for instance, is also that of Basho's great poetic travel journal, and allusions to other great moments of Japanese culture are scattered throughout. The commander of the camp, a decent enough man made monstrous by circumstances, like Dorrigo survives the war and like Dorrigo has to live the remainder of his life with a shadow self he can neither acknowledge nor purge.

All that, and the prose is both supple and steely, its sentences landscapes of feeling and perception. 

Damn. What a good novel.

Diane Setterfield, _Once Upon a River_

 I READ THE Thirteenth Tale a few years ago because our book club selected it. I wound up not liking it much—mainly, I think, because of the way the plot was resolved. In The Thirteenth Tale, a famous novelist at the end of her career tells her last tale, apparently autobiographical, about two sisters in a complicated family. The novelist is one of the sisters, one guesses...but which one? The reader weighs this  question for a few hundred pages, at the end of which we find out...that neither sister is the novelist. A character we knew nothing about, living secretly in the same house as the sisters, is the novelist. 

What? Is that playing the game? In my mind, no. 

The rest of the club enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale, though, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before we chose Once Upon a River. In the opening chapters, a girl about four years old is rescued from the River Thames—she seems drowned, but revives, miraculously. But she cannot speak. Whose child is she? Two different local families have recently lost a child and think she may be theirs. For a few hundred pages, we are invited to speculate: is she the lost daughter of the Vaughns, or the lost granddaughter of the Armstrongs?

Guess what?

She is neither!

Ha! Same trick. I did not like it any better this time.

I wouldn’t mind this so much if the writing and overall texture of the novel were more up my alley. They just aren’t. The novel is an over-decorated Victorian parlor, loaded with bric-à-brac, embroidery, padding, and ornamentation. It’s like sinking into a plush, over-stuffed sofa. 

But the rest of the book club loved Once Upon a River, though, so I may be in for more Diane Setterfield.

Arthur Frank, _The Wounded Storyteller_

 FRANK IS A sociologist, but one with serious humanities chops—among the touchstones here are Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Spivak’s famous question “can the subaltern speak?” is recast by Frank as “can the patient speak?” The definitive narratives about illnesses are case studies, written by expert observers aiming at the perfect objectivity. What if, Frank asks, we complemented this with more narratives by the ill themselves, relying on experience rather than expertise and explicitly subjective?

This strikes me as obviously a good idea. When the book originally appeared in 1995, it probably was quite a curveball, but over the last 25 years it seems the trend has been exactly as Frank prescribed. I sought out the book when it was cited as particularly influential in a review I read of Anne Boyer’s The Undying.

The core of the book is Frank’s description of three large classes of illness narratives: the Restitution Narrative, in which modern science triumphs over the disease and the sufferer’s old life is regained; the Chaos Narrative, in which the sufferer’s world and selfhood just get dismantled and stop making any kind of sense; and the Quest Narrative, in which the illness is a journey the sufferer takes that transforms them, perhaps giving them some wisdom or gift that the sufferer can then share with others.

Frank is most interested in Quest Narratives. Medical professionals can learn from them what expertise can never teach them about the illness; the community learns something, too, since the sufferer has become a witness giving testimony. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness are Frank’s main examples.

I read the second edition (2013) edition that includes a new afterword that is definitely worthwhile—that is where Benjamin and Levinas (and a little Aristotle) particularly come into play, with powerful effect. It’s a profoundly moral book, and not at all in the Power-of-Positive-Thinking vein Boyer so sharply critiques.