Peter Orner, _Still No Word from You_

 I DO MISS The Believer, one of the country's most consistently worthwhile periodicals. It's where I first read Michelle Tea, Madelyn O'Gieblyn, and quite a few others, including Peter Orner, whose "Notes in the Margin" were a regular feature: short, punchy, personal essays on writers, sometimes famous ones but more often "writer's writers," and books, sometimes famous ones but more often relatively neglected, out-of-print ones. There would usually be four or five Orner essays scattered through an issue, usually occupying half a page or so, and they were always worthwhile.

Still No Word from You collects 107 short Orner essays, quite a few of which appeared in The Believer. Most are about particular books or writers, although a few are more traditional personal essays (e.g., a quick sketch of his father's electrician). The writers are not exactly unknowns, but do tend to be ones you hear about less often (Penelope Fitzgerald, Wright Morris, Stacy Doris).

Reading whole batches of Orner pieces at once, rather than a few sandwiched between longer pieces, makes for a different and maybe not quite as satisfying reading experience, somewhat like polishing off a box of chocolates all by yourself over the course of an hour. His own memories, often painful (estrangement from his father, a failed first marriage, career disappointments), are often hinted at in the essays, hovering in the background, but when the essays are read in one go, the painful bits drift more into the foreground, throwing longer shadows on the essays' love and appreciation of particular books. If I read the collection again, I might restrict myself to an essay a day, short as they are.

That love and appreciation still shine through, though. Orner's mindful attention to so many writers who merit attention but only occasionally get it--Larry Levis, William Bronk, Gary Lutz--and the precision and energy with which he conveys what he has found make this a book that, like the books he writes about, at least a few people are going to find and cherish.

Ruben Bolling, _Tom the Dancing Bug: All-Mighty Comics_ and _Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse_

 I HAD BEEN reading reprints of Ruben Bolling's brilliant comic Tom the Dancing Bug for years in the Funny Times when I saw an ad for the All-Mighty Comics collection and thought, hmm, that is probably good. And I was right.

If I am reading the copyright page correctly, the collection was first published in September 2022, but it gathers comics from 2003-06. On the cover is one of Bolling's wittier conceits: God-Man, i.e., God imagined as a white-bearded 1950s-1960s comic book superhero, his adventures a series of theological conundrums. Just as enjoyable are Louis Maltby, an adolescent male whose obtuseness about himself and other human beings was painfully recognizable to me, and Harvey Richards, lawyer for children, who in one comic herein explores the legal scope of "cross my heart and hope to die." Then there is Lucky Ducky, one of the working poor, who always winds up with some unexpected benefit, of sorts, from capital's relentless campaign to destroy his meager means of subsistence.

Bolling's wit is original, his satire politically astute, but his great gift is versatility. A God-Man page really does look like a 1950s vintage DC comic; Lucky Ducky looks like he was drawn by Carl Barks himself. Bolling frequently draws on old comics for inspiration, and whether the source is genius (Peanuts) or thoroughly mediocre (The Lockhorns), Bolling captures its likeness uncannily well.

The strips in Into the Trumpverse (which collects more recent strips, 2016-19) include several examples of Bolling's most successful attempt at putting to incisively satiric purpose his ability to capture the image and spirit of a classic comic: "Donald and John," which re-purposes the world of Calvin and Hobbes. John, a "publicist" Trump pretended to be back when he was making calls trying to get himself on the front pages of the supermarket tabloids, is Hobbes, the imaginary-friend-as-enabler, and Trump, of course, is Calvin, a shameless fantasist with an instinct for making trouble and a desire to see himself as all-powerful as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That Calvin is seven or eight makes it possible for us to adore him a bit, so Bolling's "Donald and John" may provide insight into why some adore Trump at the same time that it makes devastatingly clear that for four long years our nation's chief executive was a hulking, 70-year-old brat.

Hernan Diaz, _Trust_

 CRAFTIER THAN USUAL for a Pulitzer winner, it seems to me. Most of the recent winners have been excellent novels, I would say. The winning books by (for example) Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers, Joshua Cohen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen were all thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written but tended to play by the usual rules (The Underground Railroad not so much, perhaps, but The Nickel Boys was fairly straightforward). Trust demands that you stay on your toes as a reader as well as being being thematically compelling, richly imagined, and masterfully written.

Trust purports to be four different texts by four different authors. The first is a slightly catty gossip-based novel by one Harold Vanner, about Benjamin and Helen Rask--a wildly wealthy financier of the 1910s and 1920s and his wife, whose high-profile patronage of the arts is derailed by the wife's mental disintegration. This part conjured up Henry Blake Fuller, Louis Auchincloss, that sort of thing.

The second is an unfinished--and fatuous and self-serving--memoir by Henry Bevel, who, we gradually realize, is the real-life model of Benjamin Rask. Rask is obviously mighty pissed-off at the Vanner novel and wants to set the record straight, as it were, not that he is going to openly acknowledge the existence of either Vanner or his novel. He just wants to make clear that financiers are the real backbone of the country and that his wife Mildred was a sweet guileless woman with her whimsical art projects who unfortunately died young of a terrible incurable disease.

You don't suppose that a busy man like Henry Bevel has the time to write his own memoir, do you? No, no--he hired a ghost writer, whose story we get in the third section. Ida Partenza, writing her own memoir decades later, describes how Bevel hired her, what he wanted, and she managed to intuit the  written voice Bevel wanted to have and convey Bevel's message. Almost needless to say, Ida is a hell of a lot more interesting than Bevel, and she suspects there is a lot more to Mildred than either Bevel or Vanner grasped--

--a suspicion confirmed when Ida turns up the journal Mildred Bevel's kept during her final illness. Not only is her patronage of the arts much more important than the dilettantish activity described by Vanner and Bevel (she backs Hindemith and Alban Berg), but she is actually the real brains of her husband's operations.

What is the book about? The power of money, for one thing, of the power of enormous wealth to actually bend the course of events, about male obtuseness, about the stories that don't get told but still leave traces by which they can be reconstructed, if you know where to look.

Janet Malcolm, _Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial_

 JANET MALCOLM AND Joan Didion, both gone now. And both missed. Didion was more a culture hero than Malcolm was, perhaps. I suspect no book by Malcolm shows up on reading lists for courses in MFA programs as often as The White Album or Year of Magical Thinking does. And Malcolm's work is quite a bit less personal, which makes a difference. They were both journalists, though, at bottom, and both gifted ones. 

They had that knack of getting people to trust them enough to start talking and keep talking...talking a little too much, even, revealing more than they ever planned to. Reading this book, I began to wonder, why did people continue to talk to Didion and Malcolm even though perusal of their books reveals that they are going to serve you up to their readers, done to a turn, slow roasted in your own juices?

Didion put it as plainly as possible, in italics, right at the end of the preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem: "That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." So they weren't coy about it. People still talked to them...and talked and talked.

Case in point--this book, about people from the small, tightly-knit, somewhat closed-off community of Bokharan Jews in New York City. In the trial the book presents, Mazoltuv Borukhova is convicted of hiring a hit man to murder her ex-husband, Daniel Malakov. She pleads not guilty, but if a motive could be discerned, it might be her fears that her ex-husband was abusing their daughter, Michelle Malakova. Going to fatal lengths to address a wrong to her daughter makes Borukhova a kind of Clytemnestra--hence the book's title.

The trial does not Borukhova's way, but Malcolm, I would say, does. Malakov's relatives, then, get to be the slowly-roasted-in-their-own-juices ones. They seem wary of Malcolm, conscious of how she could make them look, but they just can't help themselves. And Malcolm serves them up to us.

Eric Burdon with J.Marshall Craig, _Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood_

 ERIC BURDON WAS the lead singer in the Animals, a British band of the 1960s whose biggest hits you still might hear occasionally wafting through the air today--the song named in this memoir's title, for instance, or "It's My Life," "Don't Bring Me Down," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," or especially their version of "House of the Rising Sun," with its arpeggiated guitar intro, bluesy organ, and Burdon's vocal, moving from ominously quiet to searing howl over three minutes. 

I don't think Burdon had a hit after "Spill the Wine" in 1970 (with a different group, War), but he remained a live draw over most of the world for quite a while. He lived a lot of different places and met a lot of interesting people and has a lot of good stories, so the book is a good read if you are interested in the British rock explosion of the 1960s.

Lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of touring--not to mention bad management, troubles with the law, "musical differences," and disappearing money--so it's understandable that the book's chronology is fuzzy and some episodes are just swallowed in the mist. For instance, I was curious how the original Animals of "House of the Rising Sun" turned into the later Animals who played Monterrey Pop and had hits with "Sky Pilot" and "San Francisco Nights," but we don't find out. Perhaps Burdon doesn't actually remember that precisely.

What he does remember vividly is Jimi Hendrix. They were friends and shared a stage on Hendrix's last night alive--Burdon was one of the first people to know Hendrix had passed. Even if you are not that interested in the Animals, Chapter 7 is worth a look for its up-close view on one of the 20th century's most remarkable musicians.

Thomas Frank, _The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism_

FRANK IS ONE of my indispensables. Not only does he write well, but he also has a better historical foundation for his political analysis than most of his pundit peers, and furthermore his heart is in the right place, by which I mean right here in the Midwest, even though he now lives "outside Washington, D. C." You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the boy.

The Midwest is where the 1890s version of American Populism flourished, and Frank writes to correct the misapprehensions that mushroomed during the Trump administration. Trump's appeal was often ascribed to something coastal pundits called populism, by which they meant a foul brew of racism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and ignorance found in its highest concentration here in the red states. 

No, no, writes Frank. The foul brew is real enough, but let's not call it populism. Actual, historical populism was something else--democratic, progressive, community-minded, knowledgeable.  And he's got the research to back up his claims (unlike historian and Populism-hater Richard Hofstadter, whose unfamiliarity with the primary documents of populism Frank notes more than once). 

Another fine book from Frank, then. I do have a demurral on one point. 

Frank has a chapter ("Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade") that dwells on some of the cultural products  of the Popular Front Era--Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, James Agee, various WPA projects--and why not? Good on them. I was a bit surprised, though, when Frank's praise of Carl Sandburg's book of poems called The People, Yes (obviously, the source of Frank's title) included the claim that "what we expect from our poets is abstruseness, exclusivity, peer-reviewed professional excellence" (p. 114). Jeez. Does he read any contemporary poetry? Little of it sounds like Sandburg, true, but it is about as engagé as anyone would ask. Somebody get this man a subscription to Oversound or any boom that won the Pulitzer for poetry in the last ten years. He sounds like one of those folks who never forgave their high school English teacher for assigning The Waste Land. 

Bob Dylan, _The Philosophy of Modern Song_

 I READ OR heard a heaping armful of reviews of this when it came out last year (timed for holiday gift season, it seemed), and no one mentioned how bonkers it is--no one, that is, except Andrew Male in Mojo: "This book is weird."

"Weird" has seemed a descriptor of choice for Dylanology since Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic enshrined the young Dylan's reference  to "the old, weird America" as shorthand for the cosmos invoked by his songs and their landscape of carnivals, tent revivals, whorehouses, juke joints, and bus stations, populated by street preachers, soapbox orators, bootleggers, and doe-eyed beauties with derringers in their handbags. 

But Philosophy of Modern Song is also weird in the WTF sense, its ability to baffle.

For instance, half the space, maybe more, is devoted to pictures, some of which have obvious connection to the text (shots of 1950s record stores or of the artists whose songs the book honors), others of which seem slyer (an outtake from the session that produced the inner gatefold photo of the Rolling Stones' Beggars' Banquet accompanies "Take Me from This Garden of Evil," Albert Einstein playing the violin appears in the commentary on Johnny Paycheck's "Old Violin," a flying car illustrates "Volare," Jack Ruby's mug shot shows up with "Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man"). Were these chosen by Dylan himself, or by designer Coco Shinomiya? Are they integral or incidental to the presentation?

Then there are the songs selected for scrutiny. Most are reasonably well-known, but few are famous or widely beloved, and some are downright obscure. Dylan makes no argument that these are the best songs, or the most influential songs, or the most representative songs of the composers who write them or the singers who performed them or of modern popular music. They are simply, I guess, the songs Bob wanted to write about. He could have written about a different sixty-six songs and had, I suspect, essentially the same book.

The people one thinks of as Dylan's strongest song-writing contemporaries--Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richard, Ray Davies, Lou Reed--don't show up at all.

Sometimes I wasn't sure he actually liked the song in question: "This song has a lot of defects, and it knows how to conceal them all," he writes of Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up." 

He has generous things to say about a lot of folks, though--e.g., the Osborne Brothers, Johnny Paycheck, the Grateful Dead--and he is never less than interesting, even when he goes off on a tangent about polygamy or Vietnam. 

Is it worthwhile? Sure. It did not impress me all that much on first pass, true, but neither did Saved, and now I play it all the time.