Barry Unsworth, _The Songs of the Kings_

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, in historical novel mode -- operating under the assumption that Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, et al. were every bit as petty, hypocritical, opportunistic, duplicitous, and unwilling to acknowledge their real motives as Bush, Blair, & Co.

And not an assumption you need strain much at, provided you are willing to go along with the premise that these fictional characters are the real scoop on characters who were fictional in the first place.

The Songs of the Kings thus belongs in "twas ever thus" category of historical novels, rather than the Lukács-approved "things were wholly different once" category. Or perhaps the historical-novel-as-oblique-commentary-on-contemporary-events category, like, mmm, Felix Holt the Radical, perhaps, or Wajda's film Danton.

A good novel, but I found myself continually making unfavorable comparisons to Mark Merlis's An Arrow's Flight, one of the great novels of recent decades, to my mind, as well as one of the most compelling contemporary re-imaginings of the matter of Troy, and one which so far as I can discern gets nothing like the accolades it deserves. It's up there with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, if you ask me. So get around to asking me, won't you? Thanks.

Sixth note on _Witz_

6. Cohen likes long, extraordinarily long sentences. Here is what Benjamin encounters as he crosses from New Jersey into New York City via the Holland Tunnel (p. 520):

Landscaped from one of the two mouths of the tunnel, for the many tunnels of this mutated city are monstrous throats that never digest or ever waste what they swallow, without intestine or stomached gargle, how they merely gorge then regurgitate and then gorge themselves again down to the bottom of Broadway – willows groved tightly, their trunks lashed together to prevcnt from being uprooted by the tunneling wind, their boughs hung with many other objects, or forsakings, the harps of the Philharmonic, disbanded since last season’s interruption, and then with their strings, all their sections: their violins firsts and seconds, violas and violoncellos, the occasional weepy, drooping bass, their strings wilting in memory, going loose and detuned in the howl coming up from the bay – trees hung not just with bisbiglissandoing harps and with fiddles gutted and bows but with memories, too, and forgettings, pleas and supplications, signs and notes slipped and tied dire: help me find my father, one says, have you seen my partner? Another, this posted alongside a photo faced grainy from its constant reproduction, a losingly lined courtroomsketch, if so contact Sassoon & Silver LLP., cash reward for information leading to his recovery, all (succor) wanted, need, & offered […]

That’s not the end of the sentence, but let’s stop and take the census so far. We begin with a participial phrase, but have to wait a bit for the noun it modifies (“willows”) because the tunnel’s having a “mouth” triggers a short excursus on its being the maw of this Moloch of a city. The willows get an interesting nonce verb – “groved” – then turn out to be lashed together, which seems peculiar, but even more peculiarly have been festooned with the abandoned instruments of the Philharmonic, disbanded since so many its musicians died (a lot of the orchestra’s members are, indeed, Jewish, but these days the Asian musician might be able to keep it going). The surreal image of the now useless string instruments in the willows shifts suddenly as we next are presented with the kind of notes that appeared all over Manhattan after 9/11, with a striking inversion (‘tied dire”) and another noun-into-verb transformation (“photo faced grainy”). Then there’s the “losingly lined courtroomsketch” – does the hand-drawn image that Sassoon provides of Silver (or Silver of Sassoon) somehow suggest that their law practice has been infrequently victorious?

Cohen often makes use of absolute phrases – “their strings wilting,” “signs and notes slipped and tied dire,” “trees hung etc” – a classic maximalist’s device for adding detail after detail to a sentence, as we see as the catalog of objects left in memory of the dead continues:

…tins of spam dangling from giftribbons, plastic liters of generic soda, empty jars of mayo weeping ornamentally wrapped from these trees, trays of decorative cupcakes and cookies, novelty balloons; these groves nymphabandoned, lining Canal Street west to the Bowery with equity neckties, daytrader suits on hangers commoditized fresh from the drycleaners, high heels, dressy pearls’ strands – this the highest rate of return, a reversion to our natural state, a great comfort unconfined: this season, menschs let out their bellies; womenfolk smear their makeup onto the faces of streets, pink and streaks of red like rainbows trailed by snails, then pray for an innerly inclement weather, asking the cloudfall to cool their lusts, to purify their souls; their kinder pitch pennies worthless into the sewer green and gold, dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow … skyscrapers once new, abandoned to scaffolds; earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying as symbols of an emptiness within; ambition unfinished, thrusts unfulfilled; lorded over by an inutile silence and the holy stillness of cranes. (520-21)

We note the Yiddish – the novel invariably uses “mensch” for “man” or “person,” “kinder” for “children” – and the high modernist touches, the Joycean aversion to the hyphen, for example, as in what may be an allusion to Eliot’s Waste Land: “these groves nymphabandoned”. The plague has laid waste not only to symphony orchestra but to Wall Street, with homely details (drycleaned suits still on hangers) and grimly ironic puns (“highest rate of return”), an image of made-up women collapsing on the street heightened with a simile both beautiful and queasy-making (like rainbows trailed by snails). Next, we have an image of orphaned children, perhaps not long to live themselves, and abandoned dogs in a stunning string of monosyllabic words (‘dogs once theirs now stray dash lame from snow to snow”) that almost sounds like a William Carlos Williams poems. Then Cohen pulls out all the stops, piling up absolute phrases that read like Whitman-out-of-Ginsberg (‘earthworming giants idle, dumpster hulks sanctifying”) before flipping in a wholly surprising but perfect French adjective and a final image that sounds like Li Bai until you realize it completes the picture of arrested construction.

Joshua Cohen, _A Heaven of Others_

LITERARY HEAVENS, FROM Dante to Mitch Albom, gravitate towards explanation, clearing up the big questions, reconciliations, and the like, but Joshua Cohen's afterlife in A Heaven for Others is if anything stranger, more bewildering, and more abounding in loose ends than ordinary earthly existence.

On his tenth birthday, Jonathan Schwartzstein of Jerusalem is in a shoe store with his father when a suicide bomber crashes in. The explosion kills Jonathan, but due to some cosmic missed exit he winds up in the Muslim heaven, complete with houris, camels, and a K'aba ("Schawartzstein" could be translated "Black Stone"). He sets off on a pilgrimage to find Muhammad and learn how and why he is there, but Muhammad is unlocatable. He does come across a boy his own age who seems be the suicide bomber who crashed into the shoe store.

There is a risk of sentimentality in this scenario (the text is dated "Yom Hazikaron, 2004," an Israeli holiday honoring fallen soldiers and civilian victims of terrorism), and Cohen is not wholly successful in avoiding it (e.g., p. 142). But the book's uniqueness and strangeness prevent one from drawing ready conclusions. Why the occasional shift from Jonathan's first-person narration to that of an omniscient third person? (God? Cohen?) Why the three poems, titled "Alef," "Beit," and again "Alef," prefaced by designs by Michael Hafftka based on those three letters, which spell "ABA," that is, "father"? Why the epigraph from Russian Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichovsky, about a student acquiring a disgust for what his teachers most want him to learn?

And what can we make of Jonathan's gnomic utterances such as "Limitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God [...]"? That the lesson we emphatically learn about God is that God is a God of some (us) but not all (them)? Or what about "heaven must be understood as borderless if it is to have any borders at all" or "an eternal boy matures eternally"? We are far indeed from Albom or Alice Sebold here -- as we are from Beatrice's painstakingly precise scholastic commentaries.

Plenty to ponder, then; fair enough. But I was most taken with the final section, "A 'Metaphor'," in which Jonathan recalls his bath on what was to be the last night of his life in the river-overflowing-its-banks prose of Witz.

Fifth note on _Witz_

5. I began by saying that the events of the story are readily summarized, and have just noted that the book vividly conjures up its settings, but event and setting are always seen through the decorated scrim of the book’s narrative style; like a scrim, the style is not fully transparent, and as with a decorated scrim you may find yourself paying as much attention to the decorations as to the action occurring behind it. More attention, perhaps – as in Gaddis’s Recognitions, tracking the turns of the sentence is so absorbing that you may fail to take in what is being narrated. The reader is always conscious of Cohen’s style: le style, c’est le livre.

And his style beggars description. It’s a torrent, for one thing, a deluge, an outpouring. Sentences routinely take up most of a page. The sentences are self-interrupting, constantly breaking in on themselves to illustrate, expand, make a joke. They usually embrace several tonal registers during their course, from the demotic to the epic, sometimes sounding like Lenny Bruce on amphetamines, sometimes biblically ornate like Cormac McCarthy, if McCarthy liked to pepper his prose with Yiddish and Hebrew. Alliteration and puns abound.
Consider some of the phrases from the sentence on the fart salvoes, quoted above. “[E]normous sortie wet and thick” – note the little internal rhyme on the “or” sound, the adjectives before and after the noun, the military flavor of the noun, conveying how men enjoy bringing a martial ardor into even the most ludicrous circumstances, figured later in the sentence with “barrage,” “booms,” “bombs.” Or “bucking the uppers,” with its surprising assonance, the animated-cartoon image of bunks lifting and falling from the abrupt shock of the farts. The odd Miltonic inversion of “from cot to cot echoing.” The quirky juxtaposition of homonyms in “there their.” The outlandishly apt figuration of farts as “dark graffiti.”

Arielle Greenberg, _My Kafka Century_

HERE IS THE book's back jacket copy:

"In My Kafka Century, Arielle Greenberg raises the gothic European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture. Trying on the sometimes hilarious, sometimes discomforting guises of Jewish folk humor, pop eroticism, and kiddie epistemology, she reveals and revels in the cracks and contradictions of a bristling, brainy Babel."

I despair of improving upon that. I don't know about "glib facade" -- if you recall the original meaning of the word "facade," the figure may seem silly -- but the writer seems to have read the book and actually grasped something of its strategies and achievements, as opposed to 99% of jacket copy for volumes of poetry ("So-&-so's brilliant new collection embraces themes of change, vision, and history in astonishingly evocative language"). The jacket copy is a much better indicator of the volume's contents and quality than the blurbs: "intellectually challenging" (zzz), "dazzling explorations" (yawn), "a dark confection" (nice try, but...).

So who was writing the jacket copy for Action Books in 2005? Some U. of Alabama grad student, I suppose, but whoever it was, he or she sure nailed it. As you might gather from the copy, this volume is like some sweet, funny, clever kid you met in fourth grade who turns out to have a pet tarantula and a scab collection.

That would be plenty, I'd say, but there's more -- startling, strange, moving poems on pregnancy ("Honey," "One Hundred and Eighty," "Red Rover," "Katie Smith Says [...]," for instance, and remarkably original meditations on Jewishness. The final poem, "Synopsis," reads like a highly compressed and highly idiosyncratic montage of the history of the Jews -- or of one person's memories of learning that history -- in 46 short sentences. Lines 18-30:

Boys are plied with wine and snipped.

I pray according to daylight.

Next year will return to the city of gold.

I shield my eyes from the priests' blessing.

Girls get two candles each.

I stood at the bottom of a mountain with my soul.

A very small parcel of real estate was promised.

I was taken for a fool by my village to make a story.

He offered the angels his most finely sifted flour.

I hid in an attic with my diary.

The tents are goodly.

I was a lost tribe and came out black.

Fourth note on _Witz_

4. As for plain-label realism itself, the book has many episodes of nuanced social observation, vividly presented. There’s an extraordinary account of Israel and Hanna’s wedding (241-46); the museum gala with which the Benjamin part of the book closes is another excellent set piece. Ditto for the accounts of the Florida apartment complex of Benjamin’s grandfather, or of the Vegas hotel in “Los Siegeles,” or of the Southwest, or the suburban development in which the Israelsteins live, of Israel’s law office, of Chinatown. The novel is very good at the kind of thing novelists like Trollope and Updike are good at – noticing what it is about the way we live now that we are too inattentive to notice, helping us to see our own world.

The novel’s many extraordinarily effective mimetic passages are all cast in the book’s idiosyncratic style, however, which is a whole other topic.

Gary Shteyngart, _Super Sad True Love Story_

I STARTED THIS soon after finishing Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, and that may be why they seemed to have so much in common. The central main character in both is a shlimazel, a misfortune magnet, whose hold on his job is tenuous and whose beloved is starting to notice better prospects. Both have a satirical thrust, Lipsyte's novel exaggerating (slightly) the vice and folly of our time to blackly humorous effect, Shteyngart's extrapolating from that vice and folly to create an all-too-possible near future (all are rigorously judged according to youthfulness, wealth, and conformity to current fashion, the country erupts in violence when China and the E.U. call in their chits), again to blackly humorous effect. Both seemed to me...

Time out. OK, what is the right way to form an adjective based on Evelyn Waugh's name? "Waughian" won't do. Perhaps add a "v," on analogy with Shaw --> Shavian? We'll go with that.

...Wauvian (looks peculiar, but I'm sticking with it), especially the Waugh on Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, hilarious and chilling, laughter with a bleak, frozen wasteland at its core.