Scholastique Mukasonga, _Our Lady of the Nile_, trans. Melanie Mauthner

 SET ABOUT TWENTY years before the genocidal catastrophes of 1994 and published not quite twenty years after them, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a Rwandan Catholic girls' school established not long before independence for the daughters of the native elite. The Mother Superior and most of the teachers are European and almost all of the students are Hutu, but in a bow towards democratic inclusion, each class includes two Tutsi girls as well. The two in the final year class, Veronica and Virginia, are earmarked for destruction by Gloriosa, daughter of a government minister and self-appointed queen of the final year class.

Most of the novel is a deft, often charming, often funny satire along the lines of Mary McCarthy's Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, but Gloriosa's glowering presence keeps the reader mindful that things could get very, very dark, and in the closing chapters they do.

Virginia and Veronica, alert all along to Gloriosa's hostility, have made contrasting provisions against disaster. Veronica plans to rely on the protection of local French planter de Fontenaille, whose deeply peculiar fetishization of the Tutsi has led him to promise Veronica he will take her to Europe and make her a star. Virginia, on the other hand, has noticed that de Fontenaille's property contains the desecrated grave of an ancient queen, whose spirit Virginia placates through an elaborate traditional ceremony.

I won't reveal how that works out, but I sure hope you wouldn't expect a colonizer with Gobineau-ian racial theories to be a better bet than an ancient African queen.

Lester Bangs, _Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader_, ed. John Morthland

 I WOULD NOT have admitted it to anyone at the time, even to myself, but from about 1971 to 1977 my favorite writer was Lester Bangs. My official answer to that question in those years would have been James Joyce or William Burroughs, but Bangs was the writer I devoured and re-devoured, whose sentence rhythms I walked to, whose pronouncements I took as gospel. I subscribed to Creem for most of that period mainly in order to get my monthly dose of Lester Bangs.

Bangs wrote record reviews, mostly rock although he was perhaps more interested in avant-garde jazz, and articles about rock musicians. I don't think he ever published a book, save for a quickie paperback on Blondie. Since his death in 1982, however, there have been two impressive, 400-page anthologies of his work, this one and its predecessor, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus. Both include some interesting unpublished work (of which Bangs apparently left behind boxes when he died).

What was it in him I was drawn to? I found myself drawn to it all over again reading these pieces, most of which I had read before, many of which I found I had retained phrases from for over forty years. 

Bangs was honest, for one thing. His reviews never seemed to be trying to curry favor with the artists being reviewed. He wasn't just a hatchet guy, though. He could be extremely enthusiastic--I don't know how many albums I bought largely on his recommendation, most of which became favorites (the Stooges' Fun House, Roxy Music's Stranded, Patti Smith's Horses)--but he could be brutal, too, especially towards big names he suspected were phoning it in, as the Stones, Dylan, and Lou Reed arguably were in the mid-seventies. And he could be illuminating about bands most critics took as jokes (e.g., Black Sabbath). 

He had a wide frame of cultural reference that he could invoke without ever sounding particularly pretentious. He could be savagely funny. He had a talent for letting a sentence loose to roam whither it would (this may have had something to do with his fondness for speed). 

Above all, I think, you had the feeling he cared. Not that he was incapable of cynicism, snide dismissal, posturing of various kinds, self-parody. But he seemed genuinely pissed when a big name was cruising on his reputation and genuinely excited when he discovered something new and vital. 

Morthland's book includes among its previously unpublished pieces some written when Bangs was only 20, before he started reviewing, and some from the latter days, when Bangs's drink and drugs consumption was taking its toll. These pages were as brilliant as the rest, I thought--Bangs found his voice early and still had it at the end.

Library of America...how about it?

Sarah Broom, _The Yellow House_

 OUR BOOK CLUB read this National Book Award winning memoir for January. It's more of a family memoir than an individual memoir, commencing well before Broom herself is born and focusing on the house where she grew up and where her mother and some of her siblings continued to live until displaced by Hurricane Katrina. 

The Yellow House has some of the allure of a big multi-generational novel, like Buddenbrooks...I mean, you know,  mutatis mutandis. A Black family doing their best to make ends meet in New Orleans in the last quarter of the twentieth century differs in important ways from a German family in bourgeois splendor in Lübeck in the last quarter of the nineteenth. Nonetheless, the attention to forebears, to local historical context, to the different choices those in the rising generation make, the looming impact of huge, unforeseeable events--at its richest, The Yellow House has that kind of texture.

The book loses momentum whenever Broom is not in New Orleans, I feel.  A chapter on her experience working in Burundi, for instance, seemed to me to belong in a different book. The Yellow House, its neighborhood, and the family within it all pop into vivid life, though, in a portrait of New Orleans from a perspective outside its fabled Quarter.

Miles Connolly, _Mr. Blue_

 I HAD NEVER heard of this until a few months ago when a student said she would like to write a senior thesis comparing it to The Great Gatsby. They were both written in the 1920s, are both set or partly set in New York City (some chapters of Mr. Blue are set in Boston), and both involve charismatic young men who are flush with money, full of big dreams, and meet early deaths. Sounded plausible, so green light on the senior thesis, and I proceeded to find a copy of the novel on the Abebooks site. 

Mr. Blue did not sell well upon its first publication in 1928; Connolly moved out to Hollywood soon after and had a long successful career as a screenwriter (working with Frank Capra, among others). He published a few other novels, but this one is the best known. It attained a kind of cult status among Catholic readers and has been more or less continually in print since its publication.

The novel is narrated as a reminiscence by a friend of Blue's who, like Nick Carraway, is sometimes fascinated, sometimes awed, sometimes baffled by his friend and subject. Blue, like Gatsby, seems omni-competent; he charms everyone he meets and seems perfectly positioned to make the most of whatever potentiality awaits in the booming days of the mid-1920s. 

While Gatsby's quest is eroto-romantic, however, Blue's is spiritual. According to the introduction (by John B. Breslin, S. J.) in my Loyola Classics edition, Connolly had been reading Chesterton's life of Francis of Assisi before writing the novel, and it's easy to see the novel as an answer to the question: what would a saint like Francis be up to had he appeared in an Eastern seaboard city in the 1920s? Some of the answer makes obvious sense (give all he has to the poor, try to start an order for doing good works, die in saving someone else's life), some not so much (formulating eccentric opinions about film and architecture). There is also some allowance for the utterly whimsical, like Blue's love of balloons and marching bands. And like Gatsby, he has an astonishing car.

I can't see Mr. Blue as a rival for The Great Gatsby's canonical status, though. Fitzgerald's novel has an extraordinary cast of supporting characters--the Buchanans, the Wilsons, Jordan Baker, Meyer Wolfsheim--but in Mr. Blue, only Blue himself gets any sustained attention. Nick Carraway is a good deal more interesting than Blue's nondescript biographer. As far capturing any of the adrenalized buzz of the Jazz Age, Connolly just isn't interested. 

Easy to see how it won cult status, though. Blue the character is original and enigmatic, a surprising hybrid of Gatsby and Ignatius O'Reilly.

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.