Frank B. Wilderson III, _Afropessimism_

 I DECIDED TO pick this up after reading Greg Tate's review in The Nation last fall (Sept. 17, 2021). One of the last things Tate published, I guess, and characteristically sharp and memorable. It wasn't a rave review by any means, but it certainly left the impression that the book was strong and important.

Afropessimism (the book) aligns in my head with Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts in that it is critical theory, memoir, and capital-W Writing all at the same time. I can imagine it sitting on the same syllabus as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, or the same syllabus as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, or the same syllabus as Rebecca Solnit and David Foster Wallace. 

Afropessimism (the theory) is of Wilderson's own coining, I think, though he cites Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson, and Saidiya Hartman as foundational. The theory is that Black subjection, the white preconception that Blacks are slaves and not humans, is so basic to white people's identity that they will never voluntarily give it up. However many sermons are preached, or marches are held, or Obamas are elected, the assumption of superiority will keep percolating in the white unconscious, wreaking the same social havoc it has since at least 1619.

I hope he's wrong, but I don't know that he is, and a lot of our public life suggests he's right.

The more controversial aspect of Afropessisism is that Blacks are a unique kind of Other among America's Others, such as the brown, the Asian, the female, the disabled, and the queer. Whites can be maneuvered into seeing the humanity of these Others, but the humanity of the Black is simply inadmissible and unimaginable. Wilderson seems skeptical of any attempt at coalition-building that does not grant this premise. I gather this does not sit well with some (see the chapters "Punishment Park" or "The Trouble with Humans"). 

Oddly, and to my own surprise, I found it relatively easy to identify with Wilderson. He is just two years younger than I am, we both grew up in the midwest, and we were both fascinated as teenagers with the radical politics of the late 1960s. As a white kid in Iowa, though, there was no way I was going to hang out with the Black Panthers. But Wilderson did hang out with the Black Liberation Army, which meant he got the attention of COINTELPRO. Then, while I was slogging through my dissertation, Wilderson was a stockbroker during the "greed is good" era, then an MFA student hanging out with Edward Said, then an ANC cadre (and restaurant worker) hanging out with Nadine Gordimer, then completing a doctorate in Berkeley and having a breakdown or two along the way. In short, his life has been wildly different than mine in uncountable ways. Still, I kept thinking, I get this guy. Is it generational? Is it the midwest? Maybe it was his good words for Marguerite Young.

Brontez Purnell, _Since I Laid My Burden Down_

 SIMPLE ENOUGH PREMISE--gay Black man raised in rural Alabama, long since resident in Bay Area and deeply conversant in clubbing, drugs, and sex, goes back home for a family funeral, hangs around for a while, gains some clarity on a few points, then returns to Bay Area. 

Purnell himself, like his protagonist DeShawn, was raised in Alabama and now lives in Oakland, so one guesses that some aspects of the novel are autobiographical.

Autobiographical or not, though, it's highly entertaining.

Why is this novel so entertaining? The writing is colorful, shameless, brisk, often funny. The narrative toggles, sometimes very abruptly, between its Alabama and California settings, with appropriate contrast, but Alabama is its down-home way crazier than you would expect, San Francisco in its weird way more domesticated. DeShawn is on a pilgrimage of self-discovery, going home to the home you famously can't again go to, and apparently figuring something out...but what? He doesn't quite know, and Purnell wisely chooses not to lean on the point too hard. Purnell may actually be having a little fun with the old hero's journey trope. "He had been eating a lot of desserts. It felt good."

It's a foul-mouthed, gleefully wicked coming-of-age story that may actually be a never-grew-up story, and I don't think it will end up on any of the YA reading lists that Call Me by Your Name managed to sweet-talk its way onto, but if you're looking for entertaining--here you go.

Jonathan Coe, _Middle England_

 THE THIRD, PERHAPS final novel in a series that began with The Rotters' Club (which I have read) and continued with The Closed Circle (which I have not), revolving around a group of characters who meet at secondary school in (or near) Birmingham in the mid-1970s. The Rotters Club is set during their school days; this one, although it opens in 2010 and closes in 2018, centers around the Brexit election of 2016. 

I first became aware of Coe as the biographer of British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson, so I was expecting him to lean in an experimental direction himself, but no--he's a straight-down-the-middle realist, dealing in relatively familiar kinds of characters and settings in in the spirit of Stendhal's mirror on the roadway, a contemporary Trollope.

What the novel mainly registers is the bitter, burnt-air atmosphere of politically-inspired hostility rupturing work relationships, family relationships, even interactions with strangers--which is to say, as an American reader, that it is both revealing and all too recognizable.

For most of my life, it seems to me, Great Britain and the USA have been dancing the same dances at roughly the same time, politically. We had LBJ and the Great Society, they had Harold Wilson. They had Thatcher, we had Reagan. We had our "Third Way" moment in Bill Clinton, they had theirs with Tony Blair. They had Brexit; we had Trump.

I'd be interested in a novel that tries to do for the USA from 2010 to 2018 what Coe does here for the UK, but does anyone have any ambition to do the big-picture Dos Passos thing any longer? 

Franzen, maybe? But apparently his new one is set fifty years ago. 

Updike would have been up for it. Or Tom Wolfe. 

Oy, high on the list of things I would not want to read: Tom Wolfe's novel about the Trump era.

Seamus Heaney, _The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes_

 WONDERING WHAT DREW Heaney to this play, I figured it must have had something to do with Ireland. The translation of Dante and the Dantean influence in Station Island have something to do with Ireland, I feel sure--the Ugolino episode evokes civil conflict, betrayal, and the thirst for revenge: the main ingredients of most literature about the Troubles, from Juno and the Paycock and The Informer and The Hostage up to The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Cal and Milkman.

So is there something Irish about Philoctetes? Betrayal? The nursing of grievance? The passing along of grievance, the legacy of injury, to the next generation?

I'm guessing it's the hope for reconciliation that drew Heaney to the play. The story, briefly: Ten years ago, on the way to Troy to reclaim Helen, the Greeks marooned one of their warriors, Philoctetes, because he had an incurable wound in his foot so putrid-smelling that his presence was intolerable. Now, however, they learn from an oracle that they will never take Troy unless they have Philoctetes' bow. Odysseus recruits the now-dead Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, to gain Philoctetes' trust, obtain the bow, and skedaddle back to Troy.

Philoctetes, who is still on that island with his suppurating foot, is still angry at the Greeks and will do nothing to help them voluntarily. Neoptolemus does win his trust...but then feels bad about misleading him. He wants to bring to Troy not just the bow, but Philoctetes himself. He wants a reconciliation. 

And the point of The Cure at Troy is that such a reconciliation can happen; the seemingly impossible yet deeply hoped-for thing can occur. This leads to the lines of the play, spoken by the chorus, that Joe Biden often quotes:

History says, don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

Is this about Ireland? The Cure at Troy was published in 1991, quite a while before the Good Friday Accords. Is it about 1989, about what happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia? Heaney was acquainted with Milosz, I believe, possibly with Havel. 

The "hope and history rhyme" line is a striking one, which made me wonder how others had translated it.  Turns out it is not a translation at all, but all Heaney. At least, the choral song in which it occurs near the end of the play did not show up in the first three English translations I found. Heaney wanted it there, which, I suspect, tells us a lot about what he found in the play. Or maybe wanted, or hoped, or needed to find in the play, even if he had to write the passage that embodied it himself.

Alison Bechdel, _The Secret to Superhuman Strength_

 ALISON BECHDEL IS one of those people—Bob Dylan, John Ashbery, Todd Haynes, Johnny Marr come to mind, for me—who seem constitutionally unable to produce anything uninteresting. 

All of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections are worthwhile, by my lights. This is the third of the “book” books, and like its two predecessors it is funny, poignant, insightful, and a visual delight.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in some ways more ambitious than Fun Home and Are You My Mother? It’s physically larger, in full color, and, though still mainly autobiographical, it contextualizes Bechdel’s story in a wide historical perspective. 

The main current in the book is Bechdel’s conscious efforts, from childhood on, to become stronger. Each of the six decades of her life so far gets a chapter, and in each one she is pursuing one or more activity with the intention of becoming stronger and fitter: skiing, martial arts, bicycling, and running, for example. With each activity, she also gives us a sense of the culture around it, how at one time or another it was having its moment, with its particular buzz and patois, its particular equipment fetishisms. Even though this is mainly her story, we get a sense of how broad a movement physical fitness has become in the USA.

But bodies come attached to minds, perhaps to spirits, and Bechdel’s pursuit of bodily fitness intersects often with her pursuit of mental and spiritual fitness. Accordingly, we learn also of her involvement with yoga, meditation, Buddhism, and the Anglo-American culture of seeking, particularly as represented by the English Romantics (focusing on Coleridge and the Wordsworths) and the American Transcendentalists (focusing on Emerson and Fuller). 

Bechdel achieves the near impossible by taking herself seriously without…taking herself seriously. That is, she makes no apologies for devoting herself to physical and spiritual self-development. Her pursuits can seem like solipsistic self-absorption—do indeed seem so to some of her friends and partners, it looks like—but the reader never doubts that they are for her not just worthwhile, but indispensable, the activity that enables her to live a meaningful life. Yet she is so funny about it all—so self-deprecating, so clear-eyed about its absurdities, that the book never has the irritating smugness so many, many tales of self-improvement have. 

And her drawing—is it better than ever? I’m ready to say yes. The same painstaking detail, but also occasional pages in a loose gray wash…a greater tonal variety than ever. As I was saying, is any Bechdel going to be one you should skip? Nope.

Nathalie Léger, _Exposition_, trans. Amanda DeMarco

 THE BACK JACKET copy calls Exposition the first in a triptych--a painting in three panels--would we call Exposition a portrait, then? It's not historical fiction, but not a biography either. It lies within hailing distance of art criticism or art history, but what kind of art history devotes any space to the author's father's marital infidelities? So let's just say portrait. A portrait with a lot of other things in the background.

Exposition is a portrait of Virginia Oldoini (1837-1899), the Countess of Castiglione, a celebrated beauty and Parisian social figure of the Second Empire (1850-1870), for a time the mistress of Napoleon III. The Countess is famous for being photographed--"the most photographed woman on the 19th century," reputedly. A lot of painstaking preparation went into the photographs, attention to clothes, hair, setting; some are in costume or are representations of a historical character. Robert de Montesquiou--the main model for Proust's Charlus--was among those fascinated by her and by the photographs. The most famous of them, "Scherzo di Follio," you have probably seen; it often figures in accounts of the early history of the medium.

The France of the 1850s and 1860s was politically gruesome (see Robert Browning's "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society") but it was a flourishing era for French art--there were the Impressionists, of course, not to mention Baudelaire and Flaubert. So, is the Countess an artist? Is she a precursor of Cindy Sherman? Is she the ancestress of all the artistically-inflected self-representation that now occurs globally on the internet?

Maybe. Léger raises such possibilities, but she does not spend a lot of time or energy on them. Rather than turn the Countess into that familiar figure, the woman ahead of her time, or attribute to her motivations we can readily recognize, Léger ponders her in all her bewildering idiosyncrasy. What did she think she was doing? Why is it still interesting?

It has something to do with the male gaze, Léger seems willing to venture. If to be a woman has a lot to do with being looked at, all the more so if one is beautiful, even famous for being beautiful. Is that something one can work with, do something with, heighten, appropriate, turn inside out? Or is it just a cage, however you decorate it?

I'm hoping to have time this January to look at the next two panels of the triptych.

Kent Russell, _I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son_

 KING KONG THEORY could be crudely described as a book about the perils of being born female, and I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son serves to show that being born male is no stroll in the park, either--or at least not for American-born millennials.

Born forty years earlier than he was, Russell might have been a journalist in the Hunter S. Thompson vein, but the demand for that sort of thing has largely evaporated--not that you know that from the Knopf jacket copy that proclaims "a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld." Russell does no trade in fear and loathing, nor does he devote a lot of space to his drug intake. Instead he turns his reportorial attention to the bizarre sorts of things American men elect to do, such as: 

--acquire immunity from snakebites by letting themselves be bitten regularly by poisonous snakes ("Mithridates of Fond du Lac")

--design gory special effects for horror movies ("Say Good Morning to the Adversary")

--become one of professional hockey's "enforcers"--that is, the players who get rough with opposing player attempting to get rough with the team's best scorer ("Showing Up").

The jewel in the crown (and the reason I bought the book) is "American Juggalo," in which Russell attends a Gathering, the annual summer festival for fans of the Insane Clown Posse. As drop-in literary journalism goes, this essay can sustain comparison to Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," about Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, or David Foster Wallace's "Ticket to the Fair," about the Illinois State Fair. Russell is not of the scene, and he has a sense of its absurdities, but he does not want to merely mock it, and he almost kinda sorta gets it. I hope this piece becomes a classic.

(For contrast, like a sweet breeze wafted in from some pastoral Eden, we have "Artisanal Ball," about baseball as played by the Amish.)

What is going on with American men doing such stupid things? Is it because American men have always done stupid things--is this is our legacy from our fathers? The book's title, it turns out, is not something Russell's father said to him, but something Daniel Boone once said to a son who showed no interest in military service. Trying to be what our fathers were, or wanted to be, or  thought they had to be...is that what it is?

Interspersed throughout I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son are essays with dates rather than titles, almost all from September 2013, in which Russell describes a lengthy visit with his own father in Florida. Russell is trying to obtain his father's co-operation for a piece in which Russell will travel to the ancestral home of the Russells, Ohio, to write about the family's history. Dad, fearing his son will annihilate the family in a snark-blast for some snooty national magazine, won't go along. But even though Russell fails in his quest to get Dad up to Ohio, we get a convincing portrait of the man, and incidentally a glimpse into what fathers mean to sons, what sons means to fathers... not to mention a glimpse into a masculinity that is not exactly toxic but nonetheless hard on the liver.