Christian Bök, _Eunoia_

I WAS INSPIRED to pick this up after reading an interview with Bök in The Believer some time last year. Eunoia is a text with five chapters, each chapter named after a different vowel, and each chapter containing only words that contain only that vowel. ("Awkward grammar appals a craftsman" is the first sentence of "Chapter A.") The chapters for A, E, and O run close to twenty pages apiece; those for I and U are shorter. Each paragraph of each chapter gets its own page, a not-quite-square block of print, all of very similar length, say eleven or twelve lines long.

Can such a project possibly be readable, to say nothing of interesting, intriguing, revelatory, moving... any of the things we hope a poem will be? Turns out it's all of those things. But how is that possible? What does it mean? Working under a constraint that would seem to nearly preclude persuasive mimesis or honest self-expression or the speaking of truth to power or compelling fantasy -- to identify some of things readers ordinarily say they are looking for -- how does Bök nonetheless draw you into his text and keep you there?

I have no idea. My best guess is that he is astonishingly talented.

What also interests me is that Eunoia (which, it turns out, is the shortest English word in which each vowel is used once and only once) might be seen as a case in which experiment leans over so far backward it bumps into literary tradition on the other side -- for what are meter and rhyme if not constraints?

Almost every spring I have the responsibility of getting a group of undergraduate English majors to acquaint themselves with some specimens of 19th century English poetry, and the larger part of them come in skeptical that rhyming, metered poetry can be poetry at all, since all that artifice -- the counting of syllables, the patterning of accents, the line-endings that have to contain a vowel-consonant cluster that matches the vowel-consonant cluster of an earlier or later line-ending -- can only be an obstacle to achieving persuasive mimesis, honest self-expression, and so on, right? Why would any poet who really has anything to say put him- or herself through so many hoops? I wonder if Eunoia would help me here -- or if they would just see it as an oddity.

I also wonder about the news borne on the back of my copy: "A BESTSELLER IN CANADA." What? Can that be true? Are Canadians that much smarter than we are? Hmm, possibly -- there's Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Atom Egoyan, Sheila Heti... there's also that fact that Eunoia was written with support of the Canada Council of Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. They're either that much smarter than us or they just never had a Jesse Helms messing with public arts funding.

Roth, _The Humbling_

I KEEP BUYING and reading Philip Roth novels, I've decided, rather the way I keep buying and listening to Neil Young albums. Both of them settled upon a handful of characteristic moves and gestures quite a while ago and are largely content to replay them. Both of them, odds are, have already done the work for which they are most likely to be remembered. As influences, they are dead ends; both of them are so utterly and idiosyncratically what they are that it would be foolish for any young writer or musician to imitate them. In an uncharitable mood, one could accuse both of simply imitating themselves.

The Humbling certainly gives one feelings of déja lu. The main character, Simon Axler, is an actor who has suddenly lost the ability to act, putting us in mind of other Rothian versions of the artist whose inspiration is blocked or dried up, Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson, Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater, "Philip Roth" in Operation Shylock. Like those three characters, Axler gets himself into some unsuitable shenanigans, throwing himself into an affair with a lesbian named Pegeen (named for the Synge character), who turns out to have a dangerous penchant for unsuitable shenanigans herself, like her many, many sisters in the Roth gallery of shikses fatales. And then there is the recurring late Roth pondering of death: following Everyman, Exit Ghost, and Indignation, The Humbling seems to wrap up a death tetralogy (unless we count A Dying Animal as the inaugural volume).

So far, so familiar. And then there's the Rothian trick of having some major plot development occur in a gap in the narrative, so that we readers learn of it only after it has occurred. The Rothian way of folding-in episodes that occurred years before the action begins. The marathon male-female dialogues, like Chinese ping-pong, enormous exertion and strategy put into the volleying back and forth of a tiny, nearly weightless ball.

And you know what? I couldn't put it down. I read it in a day. I can't stop myself. As long as he keeps publishing them, I'm going to be reading them. When whatever he leaves unfinished, his Original of Laura, gets published, I'll read that too, if I'm alive. I just can't get enough.

Narayan, _The Ramayana_

WELL, YES, I really should have read a translation of the complete original Sanskrit version. Maybe someday. This version, written in English by the 20th century novelist R. K. Narayan, is not even based on that Sanskrit original; it jumps off from a version written in Tamil by the poet Kamban in the 11th century C.E. So no authenticity points for me. That concession made, I found this a marvelous book, witty, highly colored, brisk, charming, utterly engaging. Given the likelihood of my bogging down at p. 43 of whatever late-Victorian translation I would likely have been able to procure at the library, I think I made a good call in picking this up. The effect is rather like reading Edith Hamilton -- if Hamilton had brought in a few sly jokes and had risked a Fielding/Gogol kind of intimacy with the reader.

Zoé Heller, _What Was She Thinking?_

A REVIEW I read of Heller's latest novel mentioned how good this one was; I took the bait, read it, and I agree -- it's very good.

As we begin, one of the characters, Sheba Hart, is the much-beleaguered center of a scandal; an arts teacher in her mid-30s, married and the mother of two, she has been discovered to have been conducting an affair with one of her teenaged students, Stephen Connolly. Dismissed from her job, dropped by her underage lover, abandoned by her family, hounded by the tabloids, she is being looked after by her friend and fellow teacher, Barbara Covett. Barbara is our narrator, and she embarks on a reconstruction of the affair, told in parallel to the story how she became friends with Sheba.

So, we are in Unreliable-Narrator-Land. As James Wood has pointed out, unreliable narrators actually have to be more reliable than most -- the strategy works only when we can detect that the narrator's account is systematic in its distortions and omissions. Barbara takes a while to sort out, though. Her last name is a clue that there's a streak of envy in the friendship (Heller is obviously not above such Wauvian signal-names: the passionate Sheba is "Hart," the smarmy headmaster of their school "Pabblem"). There is also admiration... resentment... a longing for intimacy... a lust to dominate. Complicated.

For instance, it turns out that Barbara is not only Sheba's last refuge, but also the person who let out her secret. Somewhat impulsively, even somewhat inadvertently, as a way of getting back at a third party for a perceived slight... or does she really want to destroy Sheba? Or does Barbara perhaps intuit that this a way for her to have Sheba to herself?

The novel put me in mind of Mary Gaitskill's two novels, both of which have partly to do with the dangerous waters of friendships between two women, one of whom is attractive and popular, the other of whom is plain, lonely, intelligent. It's easy to see why Sheba would become friends with Barbara, who is the one gleaming intelligence on the school's dull faculty, wickedly witty, a promising candidate for confidante. It's easy to see why Barbara would become friends with the sophisticated, dashing, talented, cosmopolitan new arts teacher. But is it going to matter that Sheba is well-off, with an elite education, an interesting past, a successful husband, a big rambling house, and two kids, while Barbara, dateless for decades, has a flat, a cat, a dispiriting job, and no future prospects for anything but more of the same?

Oh, yes, it is going to matter. And we haven't really gotten to the whole class thing yet. In the truly unnerving final scene, we realize that Barbara has Sheba wholly within her power, and that the prison term Sheba is hoping to avoid may be the better of her two possible outcomes.

Juliana Spahr, _The Transformation_

IN THE LAST few years I've been coming across examples of poets' autobiographical prose taking surprising forms. There was Under Albany by Ron Silliman, a memoir in the form of a commentary on the first section of his poem The Alphabet. I'm about halfway through Jennifer Moxley's The Middle Room, which surprises by its Edwardian detail and amplitude. And there is this, The Transformation by Juliana Spahr, a memoir which dispenses almost entirely with proper names and even with first-person pronouns.

"This book tells a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001," Spahr tells us in her afterword. In the book, Spahr and two other women resolve to form a household and together move to Hawaii for a university teaching job (that is, one of them has the job; another I think is an adjunct, and the third has a non-academic job). They love the natural beauty and the perfect climate of the islands, but become increasingly conscience-stricken about the ways their being in Hawaii involves them in the legacy of imperialism. Their politics tend to align them with the Hawaiians who want to restore the cultural and political autonomy of the islands, but their livelihoods connect them to an institution firmly cemented to the cultural and political power of the imperial interlopers. Eventually, the sense of living in bad faith drives them to relocate to New York City (perhaps Long Island?) in the summer of 2001, where they become eyewitnesses to the attack on the World Trade Center, prompting further reflection on what James Baldwin called "the weight of white people in the world." Furthermore, the world is warming. On the other hand, there is the community of writers, a countervailing source of hope and joy.

The thing is...The Transformation is really nothing like the book I would imagine after reading the above paragraph. First of all, there is the avoidance of proper nouns. Hawaii is referred to as "the island in the middle of the Pacific" (later in the book, Manhattan and Long Island are designated as "islands in the Atlantic"). Academia is "the complex," and the University of Hawaii at Manoa is "the local branch of the complex." Native Hawaiians are "those who had genealogical ties to the island from before the whaling ships arrived." Spahr even avoids phrases like "avant-garde poetry" or "experimental poetry"; this kind of writing is always identified as "writing that uses fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on." Persons are not identified by name (though some are identified in the afterword), not even the other two women in the household. The collective identity of the household is so crucial that Spahr does not refer to herself as "I." She rejects even the cozy comforts of "we." The household is always "they." Whenever it becomes necessary to refer to a single member, the designation is "one of them."

My problem of description is deepening, for The Transformation is nothing like the book I would imagine from that paragraph, either. It sounds unreadable, doesn't it? Trying too hard to achieve some politically correct purity, stiff as cardboard, bleached-out, flavorless? I don't know why, but that's not what happens. Somehow, a phrase that would be clunky and ungainly if used once gains a peculiar balletic-hippo kind of grace by dint of repetition. Something like this also happened in the This-is-the-house-that-Stein-built repetitions of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Spahr knows what she's doing -- she writes at one point, "they refused to get rid of any of the awkward repetitions or the weird turns of phrase that they heard in their writing as musical but they knew those in the complex often heard as just weird and awkward" (62). Like a dancer that has for some reason decided to perform with five-pound weights on each ankle, the Spahr's prose is graceful with a different grace.

Graceful -- and purposeful, too. Hers is a language continually alert for what it may be complicit with , not unlike the household's anxiety over its (I would say) very attenuated links with imperialism. That alertness leads to détournements and anomalies aplenty, but as I read I became increasingly confident that Spahr always had a good reason to insist of her chosen designations. Also worth noting is that even though the book often touches upon the controversies of high academe and the most rarefied flights of aesthetic theory, the vocabulary stays resolutely on a plain-language level. There's scarcely a word in here that a smart 8th grader wouldn't know.

This will sound odd -- one more failed attempt at trying to describe this utterly singular book -- but it often reminded me of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. (A book I admire, I ought to say). The household's painstaking self-scrutiny of its complicity in imperialism reminded me of Teresa's continual examination of her own conscience for traces of pride and vanity. When the household begins to feel "uncomfortable among their friends who did not think about colonialism all the time [...] so uncomfortable it was hard to hang out with them" (112), I thought of Teresa finding it harder and harder to talk with people who did not share her pursuit of union with God. Like Spahr, Teresa develops an idiosyncratic language with a certain amount of sprawl and repetition to it, but so deeply hers you wouldn't alter a word.

So -- St. Juliana of Spahr. She would bridle any such suggestion, I'm sure. For all I know, she curls up on the couch with Cheetos and a beer to watch the Oscars just like the rest of us. But there's something inspiring about this book. The account in chapter 4 of trying to fit into what Spahr calls "the complex" is perhaps the most painfully truthful I've come across.

S. Yizhar, _Khirbet Khizeh_

AS THIS NOVELLA is about historical events that Israel would prefer to have disappear down Orwell's memory hole -- the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes in 1948-49 -- it would matter even if executed at journeyman level. Turns out it's much better than that.

The narrative begins in the morning and simply describes the Israeli soldiers doing a job, surprising the village, rounding up the villagers, putting them on the trucks. The soldiers make jokes, talk about family, break for lunch -- it's all routine, and the routine insulates them from thinking too hard about what they are doing. The first person narrator finds himself, nonetheless, thinking about what he is doing, in long, somewhat Thomas Bernhard-like sentences that wind between observation and reflection, bumping into realizations that the narrator backs away from, then is led back to even more forcibly. Here he gazes over the villagers' fields:

Some plots were left fallow, and others were sown, by design, everything was carefully thought out, they had looked at the clouds and observed the wind, and they might also have foreseen drought, flooding, mildew, and even field mice; they had also calculated the implications of rising and falling prices, so that if you were beset by a loss in one sector you'd be saved by a gain in another, and if you lost on grain, the onions might come to the rescue, apart, of course, from the one calculation they had failed to make, and that was the one that was stalking around, here and now, descending into their spacious fields in order to dispossess them.

The translation by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck is that dry, that sober, throughout, and the narrative has the same understated plainness. The narrator murmurs, but does not make any great gestures. The similarity of the rounding-up of the Palestinians to the rounding-up of Europe's Jews only a few years previously is visible, but not melodramatically underlined.

The novella has been well-known, though controversial, in Israel for a long time, but had to wait until 2008 for it English translation. Hmm. Well, we can be glad it's here, for many reasons.

Ben Doller, _FAQ:_

As an admirer of Radio, Radio, Ben Doller's first book (he was then Ben Doyle), I've been looking forward to reading FAQ:.

Each poem is an answer to an unstated but presumably frequently asked question; almost all begin with "Thank you for your question." Occasionally one can deduce from the answer what the question was, but not always, so I found helpful the index at book's end listing all the questions.

The format has a lot of interesting angles. For one thing, "FAQ" sections, often encountered in websites and brochures, have a reader-writer transaction all their own.

As a reader, one turns to the "FAQ" section when one has a question, but the questions it contains may or may not include yours; they address questions that are statistically probable, as determined by the tabulation of inquiries preceding yours, but is your question among the statistically probable ones? Do you fit in the schema created by those who have already asked questions? Or does the "FAQ" section ask you as a reader to inhabit a kind of fictional subject position, asking questions that in fact are not the questions you would have asked?

As a writer of an "FAQ" section, you are under a variety of awkward obligations. You do not get to choose the questions you will answer; the history of questions has done that. You are nonetheless obliged to be helpful, to know what the asker seeks and be able to provide it. But you do not get to assume that the reader has the basic background he or she needs; if the reader had such background, why would he or she be checking the "FAQ" section? The audience for an "FAQ" section is a writer's nightmare: numerous, anonymous, needy, ignorant.

Both writers and readers of "FAQ" sections are at a disadvantage going in. Neither is in control of the transaction (statistical probability is in control), both have a lot to live up to (the reader has to have "normal" questions, the writer has to know things "normal"people don't know). It's a format designed to be maximally helpful that has enormous room for frustration, misunderstanding, and self-doubt. Using it as the format for a book of poems is a stroke of weird genius.

Doller ups the ante by having his frequently-asked questions include not only classics of the FAQ form like "What is a widget?" but also questions that are genuinely frequently asked: How's the weather? What is your name and what do you do? What do you say? Why didn't you just pick up the phone? There is even the unanswerable question of Eliot's woman whose nerves are bad tonight, "What thinking, what?"

Doller's answerer tries hard, answering the weather question almost intelligibly, giving us dozens of names and occupations, going nuts with with "what do you say?" --

Shirt, I say.

Shirt shirt.

I said shirt.

-- and so on for several pages, like a soul singer exhorting the crowd to let it all go (in homage to the Bonzo Dog Band? I can only hope).

At times the answerer begins to sound beleaguered, ready to give up. In response to the question "And just what song would that be?", we get an unintelligible word-blizzard that may, sung to the right melody, turn out to be an anamorphized version of familiar pop song lyrics, on the order "'scuse me while I kiss this guy."

But our answerer, having tested us to our limits and tested himself to his, seems at peace by volume's end. In the penultimate poem, he looks back in weary and wary amazement at what he has done:

I simply imagined a shape & I stepped into it. Like a trans-fat, straight up, spackled into a capillary. There was the moment before, then this other moment. A very long moment. A shot of air.

And then, answering the final question, "How do you feel?", he can give James Brown's answer. And he deserves to feel good, as he knew that he would.