Brit Bennett, _The Vanishing Half_

 I AM CATCHING up here--when school started, I fell woefully behind in my blogging. Fiona Hill (see post of a minute past) was our book club selection of August, and this novel that of September. I read Richard Thompson back in July. I have about five more to catch up on. But I will.

Anyway.

The main plot of The Vanished Half is about light-complexioned identical twin sisters, one of whom decides to pass and cuts ties with her family. Much later sisters' daughters, cousins who have never met, do meet; one of them figures out what is going on, leading to one final meeting of the original twins. A little soap-opera-ish, but plausible enough if the reader decides to just roll with it.

Bennett's novel reminded me much of Toni Morrison, thematically. Relationships between women, within and across generations, get more attention than relationships between women and men. We get to watch the dynamics of almost entirely Black communities; we get a sense of what differences darker or lighter shades of skin color can make. 

What the novel does not have, though, is that special Morrison density. Morrison would give you a paragraph from this or that character's perspective and the paragraph would be veined with that character's history, memory, regrets, and hopes, saturated with that character's discourse. Bennett just isn't there yet, maybe. 

Chapter 8 was the best episode, I thought. The twin who is passing (Stella) hazards all by striking up a friendship with the wife of the Black family that is integrating Stella's (supposedly) all-white neighborhood. Bennett gives us a convincing account of Stella's trying to manage her yearning to re-connect to her culture and her attraction to the new neighbor while also trying to stay friends with the neighborhood wives who want to freeze out the interloper. 

Fiona Hill, _There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century_

 IF YOU REMEMBER Fiona Hill, I expect it is because of her brave and revealing testimony in the first Trump impeachment trial. I imagine that testimony had a lot to do with why she got a book deal. 

Such being the case, I was expecting that testimony to be the book's big set piece: what led to her being called to testify, how it felt to be in the national headlines for a number of days, what it felt like to be in that room, and so on.

But...no. A few pages early in the book on picking out her outfit. That's about it.

What Hill really wants to write about, it turns out, is what she had to cope with as the daughter of a working class family in northern England: the petty snobbery of classmates, teachers who dismissed her abilities, the class warfare of the Thatcher era. The title is her father' advice to her, telling her to forget about trying to get ahead in County Durham. 

Hill pivots from the story of her own against the-odds rise to the top of her profession to the story of how the ever-shrinking opportunities for working class people in the USA made possible the election of Trump. The problem of self-perpetuating elites and the resentment they generate among the excluded and marginalized is the book's main (and continually underlined) point.

And it's a fair point. I would have liked maybe a chapter or two on that, though, and a lot more about testifying in an historic impeachment trial.

Richard Thompson (with Scott Timberg), _Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975_

THOMPSON HAD AN eventful youth and early manhood. He was a founding member of Fairport Convention, the seminal English folk-rock band, and he survived the terrible road accident in which the band's drummer and Thompson's girlfriend of the time died. After that disaster, the band, having accidentally arrived at their greatest lineup, went on to record their masterpiece, Liege and Lief, but nonetheless Thompson left the band to form another seminal folk-rock ensemble with his new wife, Linda. They both converted to Sufism. Then, when things went south, they collaborated on one of the greatest break-up albums of all time (rivaling Blood on the Tracks and Blue), great both by reason of its musicianship and its giving both sides.

In short, Thompson has the material for a page-turning musician's memoir. However, he elects to be not at all that forthcoming about any of it and tends to play down even the inherently dramatic moments. Maybe it's the Sufism? Or maybe just English reticence? Considering what Thompson had to work with, the book is a bit on the tea-with-the-vicar side.

Oh, well. Enjoyable nonetheless. I enjoyed reading Thompson on the recording of Fairport classic "A Sailor's Life," and there's a great Buck Owens anecdote.

Hilton Als, _Alice Neel, Uptown_

 AN ART BOOK, basically, with fifty-some full-page color reproductions of paintings by Alice Neel, who lived in Harlem in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s and mainly painted her neighbors there, a few of whom were famous (Harold Cruse, Alice Childress, Faith Ringgold) but were mostly not.

The paintings are remarkable, walking a line between European expressionism and social documentation, but I likely would not have tracked this down were it not for Als's contributions, a short introduction and texts for a dozen of the paintings. It was worth the tracking down. Als's criticism is at its most interesting when it is most autobiographical (see White Girls) and Als's introduction to this book suggests why:

I believe that one reason I began writing essays--a form without a form until you make it--was this: you didn't have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other stories. In short, the essay is not about the empirical "I" but about the collective--all the voices that made your "I." When I first saw Alice Neel's pictures, I. think I recognized a similar ethos of inclusion in her work.

Als's most fascinating criticism (I think) fascinates because he tells us his story in telling us about the art that engages him. That he himself grew up in Harlem and as a child might have walked by adults who had been the children in these paintings gives the book its spine.

Jack Underwood, _Happiness_

 FROM 2015--THIS is his first collection, I believe, with a second arriving last year. It feels like an old-school kind of poetry collection to me, in that it does not seem to be a "project," exactly, with a defined mission and some set of formal constraints. Instead, the book seems to say, "these are my best poems from the last n years, and I think they hang together, more or less."

I can see why project collections seem like a good idea; it's a way to catch the attention of a publisher, or a prize committee, or a hiring committee, I imagine. But nowadays there seem to be more project collections than non-project collections, so Underwood's book was a welcome change of pace, less "this book has a mission," more, "here are some interesting poems."

The book does have a kind of unity in Underwood's voice, though, with its dry-as-the-Gobi humor, its juggling of high culture and popular culture, its wit, its obliqueness, its quirky Syd Barrett style melodicism. I think I must have picked it up because I came across a poem of his I liked--in Granta, perhaps?--and taking that risk paid off, for I enjoyed the book greatly. (I went ahead and ordered the next collection).

I wonder what is going on in British poetry, which I admit to not having followed much for quite a while. Various poets I heard about (Robin Robertson, Carol Duffy, Christopher Reid, Mark Ford) I sampled and respected without feeling much enthusiasm. But I get the feeling some new current has entered the scene. Underwood's acknowledgement page tips the hat to Emily Berry, whom I also read this summer, and to Sam Riviere, whose novel Dead Souls and I have read about two-thirds of. Berry and Riviere's books  were both excellent as well. Something's happening.

Pat Rogers, _The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street_ (1 of 2)

IS ALEXANDER POPE one of the great English poets? Eighteenth century readers were willing to see him as such, by and large, and. it's hard to think of anyone else between Milton and Blake who might qualify, apart from Dryden. But I rarely come across readers who like Pope's work as much as I do. People nowadays rarely agree with Matthew Arnold about anything, but he sums up a widely-shared view on Pope: "Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose."

I can see what's not to like about him. The philosophizing of Essay on Man wobbles between the inane and the vicious, and he devoted astonishing amounts of of his gifts to attacking his enemies; it's hard to read either version of The Dunciad without being on the one hand amazed by his wit, erudition, and verbal command, and on the other dumbfounded by his willingness to expend his powers on such unworthy targets.

It's his elegance that wins me over, I guess. He's a tightrope walker, doing something that does not seem to have much intrinsic importance, that does not produce much or take us anywhere,  but doing it so gracefully, so seemingly effortlessly, so dazzlingly that I can only gawp at the display of skill.

I not only like to read Pope, I like to read about Pope, but I must confess I never made it through Maynard Mack's magisterial but airless biography. Rogers's book, though, I gulped down. Rogers is looking at one very specific dimension of Pope's biography, a long-running feud with the opportunistic, somewhat shady publisher Edmund Curll. At 450 pages including notes, The Poet and the Publisher may seem unduly exhaustive, but it's crisply written, entertaining, and illuminating.

A "bookseller" in 18th century terms normally had a shop where books were sold, as we might guess, but was also what we would call a "publisher," producing their own line of books. This was in some ways a more wide-open business than it is now. Bookseller-publishers had to deal with state censorship (vigilant about religion, politics, and sexual morality), but copyright was a good deal looser then (the first Act of Parliament trying to define copyright was passed in 1710). When Pope was just beginning to make his name, Curll obtained, somehow, some manuscript poems by Pope and printed them without permission or payment--and the feud was off and running. Pope retaliated by having an emetic slipped into Curll's cup of sack and writing an account of the explosive results. Curll then got a hold of some of Pope's private correspondence and published it. Pope fired back in The Dunciad. Curll fired back in attacks of his own of Pope's various vulnerabilities (Pope was short, hunchbacked, Catholic, and had friends who were suspected of wanting to put the Stuarts back on the throne). 

The masterstroke was that Pope and some confederates set Curll up to publish a large batch of Pope's correspondence. Getting these letters sounds like a windfall and a major coup for Curll, but his jumping at the opportunity to publish them enabled Pope to publish the correspondence himself, in a corrected version. Publishing your own letters would have been considered bad form at the time--but in the circumstances Pope could present himself as simply putting things right after Curll's unseemly appropriation. 

(to be continued)

Christian Wiman, _Survival Is a Style_

WITH WIMAN KNOWN as a poet who is also a person of faith, this new collection's opening with the lines--

Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form.

--seems like an announcement of sorts. The book's longest poem, "The Parable of Perfect Silence," doubles down with the opening line, "Today I woke and believed in nothing." Wiman's faith was never of the blessed assurance kind--the manifestations of faith in his writing tended to the edgy, astringent, and Kierkegaardian. But this seems like a new note, and I did wonder what was up.

As an accomplished poet whose work is often shaped by his Christianity, Wiman gets shelved next to T. S. Eliot in my mental library, so I pulled up a bit at "To Eat the Awful While You Starve Your Awe" precisely because it seemed like a critique of Eliot:

To eat the awful while you starve your awe,
to weasel misery like a suck of egg,
to be ebullience's prick and leak,
a character pinched. to characteristic,
hell-relisher, persimmon-sipper, sad Tom, sane Tom,
all day licking the cicatrix where your Tomhood lay.

Not an entirely fair critique, I would say, if it is about Eliot. Yes, there is a miserabilist streak in Eliot, likewise a deflationary one. He can seem joyless, and he does sometimes relish the idea of hell and find his own wounds fascinating. Okay. But this salvo seems reductive. Would a poem like Wiman's "Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party" even exist without the women who came and went talking of Michelangelo, or Hakagawa bowing among the Titians, or the pizzicato of tensed nerves in "A Game of Chess"?

Maybe Wiman is just tired of being shelved next to Eliot in readers' mental libraries and wants to move out from the shadow of a poetic father. "Something of the Sky" may be about saying goodbye to a kind of romanticized father figure, and "The Parable of Perfect Silence," the book's anchor, is a meditation-elegy on Wiman's own father. Wiman is no longer young (see "Fifty") and has had to think hard about death--that he is still alive probably surprised some of his doctors--but however old a man is, he is still a son. 

I should have said more about the poems, I think, looking back over this. If you like Wiman's poetry, you'll like the book. A little more acerbic, a little funnier at times, but he still sounds like himself.