Fred D'Aguiar, _Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020_

FIVE YEARS AGO, just about to the day, I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. I had surgery the following April, and it was successful--no sign of recurrence so far, knock wood. 

In 2017-18 there was plenty to read about prostate cancer, but it was of the practical variety, How to Survive Prostate Cancer, and so on. Useful, obviously, but as a reading kind of person I was hoping for something like Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals or Anne Boyer's The Undying--i.e., something about the experience of having it written by a person who could really write.

I wanted this book, basically, and now here it is. 

D'Aguiar is a novelist and poet, "born in London to Guyanese parents," as it says in the jacket copy. He grew mainly with his grandparents in Guyana, came back to England a a young man, and has been resident in the USA for quite a while; he teaches creative writing at UCLA. I haven't read any of his books before this one, although I have seen occasional pieces by him in Conjunctions. 

It's not a practical guide sort of book--it does not explain what your Gleason score means, for instance, or how laparoscopic surgery is performed, or how to obtain an erection with a vacuum pump, or anything of that sort. 

It's excellent, though, on all the topics that the practical guides ignore. What is it like to have a potentially mortal illness that has no symptoms--to have a hostile familiar dwelling inside you that you know about only because a doctor has told you that you have it? What is it like having the operation that will deal this hostile familiar, an operation that will utterly change the circumstances of your life, but during which you will  be perfectly unconscious, after which you will  have no memories? How do you manage the three months before they check your PSA again, the three months during which you will not know whether the operation made a difference for not? 

D'Aguiar had the added fillip of going through all this during the COVID lockdown months. I did not have  to deal with that, praise the Lord. But reading this book was like reliving one of my life's strangest episodes. I never thought of myself as a "cancer survivor," but I did have cancer, and I am still here, so I guess I am one, and this book was what I needed to get me to shake hands with that identity.

Sasha Steensen, _Gatherest_

 FROM 2017--NOT her most recent (that would be Everything Awake, 2020), but the first of her books I have read, and I was impressed. Three long poems or sequences, with two based on elements ("Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made") on either end of "I Couldn't Stop Watching," a montage of short essays and heterogeneous documents.

"Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made" are about water and fire, respectively, but also seem to be about faith and spirituality, and about writing, and about family--Steensen's daughters are a presence in "Waters," her parents in "Aflame" (the fire that destroyed their home is the poem's occasion). 

"Waters" is subtitled "A Lenten Sequence." It was composed, one poem a day, during Lent of 2012. The subject matter is sometimes religious--

taking up

what no one

else wants

to carry

this is its own 

kind of worship

faith 

is the substance

of faith

the difference

between air

& water

--but by no means exclusively, as the poem also takes up events of the moment like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Adrienne Rich. The quoted poem (# 11 of the sequence) is reasonably typical of "Waters": pared down, well-balanced between the concrete and the abstract, seemingly surrounded by a deep quiet.

"Aflame, It Itself Made" was my favorite--an odd thing to say, it occurs to me, since a lot of the poem is terrifying. It carries an epigraph from Eliot's "Little Gidding"--"redeemed from fire by fire"--but it reminded me more of another poem written during the London Blitz, H.D.'s Trilogy. And sure enough, what should Steensen mention on p. 110 but "H.D.'s burnt tree," with its prophecy that fire not only destroys, but renews.

"I Couldn't Stop Watching" works as a link by not trying to be a link. Is it somehow Earth and Air, with its ruminations on syntax and prosody and its tributes to predecessors both famous (Catullus and Dante) and all but forgotten (Jones Very)? Or the workshop out of which the other two poems came? Not sure I could quite make the case for any such argument, but the piece does seem to belong where it is, a bricolage tugboat bobbing along between the two visionary flights, somehow responsible for getting them out in the wider spaces that is their proper haunt, well out, beyond.

Kevin Wilson, _Nothing to See Here_

 AFTER THIS AND The Family Fang, I'm ready to admit Kevin Wilson to the club of Novelists-Whose-Next-Novel-I-Will-Always-Plan-to-Read. 

Now, it's true that a novelist's being in that club does not mean I will get around to it right away. I still haven't read that Jennifer Egan novel about the scuba diver although...you know...I plan to. But Wilson now has a track record with me, having written two novels that were smart, funny, moving, and deft at such novelistic tricks as establishing point of view, switching among time frames, and nailing the narrator's voice.

Narrator Lilian's life is at loose ends when she is contacted by old friend Madison, who makes an attractive offer to look after her step kids. Then Wilson fills in some background. Lilian's family was hard up, Madison's wealthy. They were friends in college, both stars on the women's basketball team, but when Madison's illegal drug stash was discovered in their dorm room, Madison's rich dad paid off Lilian's hard-up mom so that Lilian would take the fall. (The payoff is to enable Lilian to continue her education elsewhere, but Lilian's mom ends up spending most of it on herself.) Madison has stayed in touch, sort of, but she is now married to an intensely ambitious politician, so there has been drift. Until now.

Oh, and the step kids? They spontaneously catch fire. Hence the offer.

Amazing premise, no? The development does not disappoint, with witty and insightful dramatization of the challenges of raising children, of navigating class differences, and of the hypocrisy acrobatics of politicians, who have to appear to be normal-family-types while pursuing a career that requires their utter absorption 25 hours a day. (Wilson renders Jasper, Madison's husband, as a character one loves to loathe.) The denouement is utterly satisfying in a Horton Hatches the Egg sort of way. 

And a new Wilson is just out, it appears. I'm on it.

Maggie Nelson, _On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint_

WE HAVE THE ingredients for a cautionary tale here. No sooner does Maggie Nelson have a breakout, crossover hit with The Argonauts than she gets wrong-footed by the zeitgeist. 

Seeing as she wrote an eloquent apologia for transgressive art that abrades our sensibilities (The Art of Cruelty), it seems ironic the her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with the "stay in your lane" moment, with artists like Sam Durant and Dana Schutz getting stiff blowback for abrading sensibilities, and without the consolation of culture-hero standing that Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe got. 

Seeing as she has also written frankly about owning and pursuing our erotic desires (in The Argonauts, for example), it again seems ironic that her arrival at literary celebrity coincided with #MeToo and a kind of renaissance for Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

At moments in On Freedom, she does not seem best pleased with these developments. In the first of the four essays, on art, one hears subtextual tongue-clucking when she writes, "Suggesting that certain pieces of art should be treated as acts of violence, or on par with the violent power of sovereignty, plays into the same arguments that have long been used to undermine art's legal protections." 

She brings in a similar guilt-by-resemblance charge in the second essay, on sex: "Even--or especially--when we are in pain, it's worth taking the time to make sure our pain is not partnering with our puritanism or punitiveness, as such partnering reinforces the flawed dichotomies of innocent/guilty, dangerous/non-dangerous, disposable/worthy, upon which the carceral state depends."

I don't know how many would find this persuasive. Probably a lot of people are quite reconciled to the carceral state's getting a hold of Harvey Weinstein.

The third essay, on drugs, has some interesting things to say about a good many literary expressions of drug experience. The fourth, on climate change...I don't know. Not her wheelhouse. 

I wonder if she will ever get back to doing things like Bluets and Jane? I hope so.

Emily Berry, _Stranger, Baby_

THE TITLE COULD be read as a response to the statement from Freud that stands as the book's epigraph--"The loss of a mother must be something very strange..."--but it is also a phrase in the poem "Everything Bad Is Permanent," where the phrase seems to be shorthand for a period when an infant is taken from its mother to be placed ion the care of another, before being left on its own:

Blank tearful retreat from mother
Mother, Baby. Stranger, Baby. Baby Alone.

A good deal of the book seems to be about losing a mother. It's not perfectly clear how recent or. how remote the loss was, whether it happened when the speaker was a child or an adult; the distinctive thing about the book is that the loss seems to be both recent and to have occurred in childhood. It's as though the adult can immediately gain access, in the here and now, to the feelings of the child, however many years have passed.

Stranger, Baby has a lot in common with Berry's first book, Dear Boy (see Loads of Learned Lumber for July 1, 2020): deadpan wit, formal versatility, a wide range of registers. The underground river of disquiet in it,  though, is wider and deeper.

Dash Shaw, _Discipline_

 A GRAPHIC NOVEL with virtually no dialogue--there are occasional excerpts from letters written out in longhand, but for the most part Discipline is unfussy line drawings arranged on the page without panels. Opening to a random page, you have the impression of opening someone's sketch book. 

Although the approach is spare, the story is nuanced.  Charles Cox is a young Quaker man in Indiana. When the American Civil War breaks out, he has to make the impossible choice between his faith's commitment to pacifism and its commitment to the abolition of slavery. Much to his family's dismay, he joins the  army and goes to war.

He doesn't have an easy war. His unit does set some slaves free, but he also sees friends die, gets wounded, and is taken prisoner. 

Back home, there are other kinds of problems. Charles's sister, Fanny, gets involved with a local man and becomes pregnant, but he will not marry her. The disgrace and humiliation she goes through are a painful domestic counterpoint to what Charles endures.

I'm not sure why this book is as moving as it is, but I think it has to do with the absence of dialogue. Take a general midwestern taciturnity and combine it with a faith that requires one speak only when the Lord moves one to speak, and a great deal is going to go unsaid. The pressure of the unsaid--even though the drawing too is understated, without expressionist exaggeration or unusual detail--is continually felt. Is the maintaining of such quiet in the face of such pain what the title refers to?

Dave Hickey, _Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy_

 I HAD HAD this on the shelf for years and had read in it desultorily, but it took the news of his death to get me to actually go through it from beginning to end...and he really is as good as people always said. 

And as distinctive. Hickey gets cited by fully-credentialed art historical sorts of people (e.g. Alexander Nehamas), even though he writes about subjects beyond the pale of traditional art history (customizing cars, Hank Williams, Perry Mason, Siegfried and Roy) in an aggressively personalized style much more reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson than of (say) Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, or Michael Fried, to say nothing of Roger Fry. Or Walter Pater. (Although it's fun to imagine Pater and Hickey having a dinner in Art Critic Heaven.)

He takes mass culture as seriously as high culture--maybe more seriously, as he sometimes plainly states (e.g., in noting "my own predisposition to regard popular recorded music as the dominant art form of this American century"). He does not seem to take writing art criticism seriously at all, hence the book's title: "It [criticism] is the written equivalent of air guitar--flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music."

Notwithstanding his penchant for popular culture and his unabashedly shoot-from-the-hip prose, Hickey was about as well-regarded a writer on art as anyone else in the U.S.A. So, I am wondering--why does literature not have anyone like this? Someone who, with literature as home base, could go this far afield, could leave so definitive a fingerprint on their prose, could as persuasively analyze the smudged groove of Watts, Wyman, & Richards, and then turn around and tell exactly what was going on in Pynchon, DeLillo, Ashbery, Notley, Robinson, etc.? The long-gone John Leonard had a bit of this quality, maybe...but it's hard to think of anyone extant who is even close.