Lan Samantha Chang, _All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost_

 About thirty years ago, there was a nasty splash in poetry world when Jorie Graham, one of the judges of the National Poetry Series, selected for the honor a volume by one of her own students, Mark Levine. Rumor had it Graham and Levine had had an affair as well. On the Richter scale of scandal, it came in well under Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding or the O. J. trial, but given that American poetry is a pretty calm pond most of the time, it felt like a big deal.

Levine was Graham's student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so when I learned that Lan Samantha Chang, currently director at the Workshop, had written a novel seemingly inspired by l'affaire Graham, I wanted to read it.

No copies of the novel are available in my town, but interlibrary loan came through, and a copy arrived from ... Coralville Public Library (rim shot). Ha! Coralville is a small town adjacent to Iowa City, home of the Workshop.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost  does not really feel like a roman á clef, though. It's more as though Chang took the crucial event--teacher has affair with student, then as judge in a contest gives him a big prize--and then imagined her own set of circumstances and consequences around it. Miranda Sturgis--famous, charismatic, demanding, dead earnest--could be a portrait of Graham, but she could pass for Lucie Brock-Broido as well, or the Annie Dillard we meet in Alexander Chee's essays. Roman Morris could be Mark Levine, but he comes across as a fairly typical cocky young male aspiring poet. 

Most of the novel is about how Roman takes advantage of his early career break to get a great job, more prizes, and a secure reputation while tromping on the feelings of those who love him: Miranda, his wife Lucy, his son Aidan, his friend and former fellow student Bernard.

Bernard is as monkishly, single-mindedly devoted to the ideal of poetry as Roman is to his careerist ambitions, and the contrast in their fortunes (Bernard dies in poverty before the masterpiece to which he has devoted his life is published) seems to be the point of the novel. 

In a lot of ways, it seems to be a novel about being a poet that only a novelist would write. Compared to Sam  Riviere's Dead Souls, it feels like a Lifetime movie.

William Allen White, _A Most Lamentable Comedy_

 A SHORT NOVEL, just under a hundred pages, included in a volume titled Stratagems and Spoils, published by Scribner's in 1901. I obtained a copy to read through the good offices of interlibrary loan (thank you, Sioux Falls College Library).

I know about this thanks to Thomas Frank's The People, No, which I hope to be blogging about before too long. Frank's book argues that the the term "populism" is routinely misused and that the American political movement known as Populism has been routinely misunderstood. Case in point: this work of fiction by legendary Kansas journalist William Allen White. It was news to me that White wrote fiction, so Frank inspired me to check it out.

The main character in "A Most Lamentable Comedy" is Dan Gregg, a village atheist type who discovers an ability to articulate popular resentment of bankers and financiers, despite a very slender understanding of how banking and finance actually work. Gregg's Will-Rogers-as-Marxist schtick gets him elected governor, at which point he soon finds himself involved with a crowd of corrupt fixers who take advantage of his naïveté. He is turned out at the next election, which he is convinced was fraudulent, and returns to his village and his wife.

Frank cites the novel as an example of how the Populists were caricatured as ignorant and demagogic even though they were nothing of the kind. It's an excellent example.

As a journalist's fiction, "A Most Lamentable Comedy" put me in mind of the fiction of the late Tom Wolfe: full of sharply-drawn representative types, satire of fashionable ideas, and an interest in the turning of the wheels of power, without much nuance as to character or setting or narrative modalities.  The book's preface, in which White sees his fiction, in its attention to the actual, as a departure from prevailing models of romance and domestic realism, likewise reminded me of the essays Wolfe occasionally published about why the contemporary novel should devote itself more to the mechanics of power, social and political, and less to the sort of thing they were encouraging in MFA writing programs. 

I wouldn't call Wolfe's fiction insightful about its times, though, entertaining though it often was, and I think Frank is right that White's fiction is not that insightful either. 

Still, White was famous for  his opposition to the KKK--I wonder whether he wrote any fiction about that?

Chuck Palahniuk, _Fight Club_

 HOW CAN THIS NOVEL be 27 years old this year? That means I must be...never mind.

So...one of our senior majors is writing her thesis on this novel. I suppose you already know that the novel's darkly charismatic anarcho-pugilist, Tyler Durden, turns out to an alternate identity of the put-upon, pushed-around, and nameless narrator, who may be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. At times, he "becomes" Tyler, without realizing it, and as Tyler he has an affair with a woman named Marla Singer, starts Fight Clubs, makes soap from the discarded fat of liposuctions, attracts disciples, and creates Project Mayhem, a small group devoted to random acts of disruption.

Our senior English major thinks Marla, too, is imaginary--an illusion conjured up by the narrator out of the same tangle of frustration, self-loathing, and helplessness that generated Tyler.

I had never heard of this reading before, but it's in circulation, according to our senior English major. Is this some kind of new orthodoxy about the novel?

In fact, our major even goes beyond the imaginary-Marla hypothesis and is convinced that the whole plot around Tyler--the Fight Clubs, Project Mayhem, and so on--is entirely in the narrator's head, has no substantial existence.

This seemed outlandish to me, so I re-read the novel...and some scenes do have a sort of implausibly surreal or dreamlike quality. Chapter 26, for instance, in which a bus-full of shaven-headed Tyler acolytes jump the narrator on a bus, or Chapter 29, when the narrator is having a final showdown with Tyler/himself atop a tall building, and Marla arrives along with "all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people" whose support groups the narrator and Marla have been crashing for months. Really? All of them?

So now I don't know. The whole plot has a somewhat fantastical, improbable air. Everyone in the novel seems more a type than a character. Maybe the whole thing actually is the narrator's pitiful power fantasy.

 What really worries me, though, is how this sustained-delusion interpretation could catch on a universal hermeneutic. Potentially, could we see any novel at all with with far-fetched and unlikely events enacted by characters who seems like types as the narrator's hallucination? I mean...that's almost all of them, isn't? 

Jennifer Moxley, _Druthers_

 WHY DO I like Jennifer Moxley's poetry so much? I suspect it is her deftness with traditional elements of poetry (rhyme, meter, complex sentence structures) being unblended with any starchy cultural politics. She is willing to risk elegance, but without any defense-of-civilization posing. 

She ought to be more famous than she is.  "Druthers (4)" and "On Her Success" suggest she is well aware of this circumstance, but final poem "The Spark" banishes regret.

"The Honest Cook's Insomnia" is about cooking, but it often sounds like it is about writing, Moxley's writing at least, and captures much of what I find appealing about her poems.

            Do  not try to please
"the crowd." It is better to
risk accusations of exclusivity
and stay honest to your vision,
than to go hungry cooking for those
whose tastes you do not share.
[...]
Beware of trends and fashions,
yet open to new techniques.
[...]
Learn from the masters. This is true
for amateurs especially, so often
exiled to the flimsy techniques
of the present day.
[...]
               However
much of an innovator you imagine
yourself to be, your time's tastes will
express themselves through you,
and cooks who come after will
scratch their heads.
[...]
Taste, like experience, feels individual
but is more often than not shared.

I hope the "neural plaques and tangles" mentioned  near the end of "The Spark" are hypothetical, as I am hoping to add some volumes to my Moxley shelf.

Richard Russo, _Bridge of Sighs_

 THIS IS THE fourth Russo novel I have read. All but one (Straight Man) were set in an upstate New York down in a gradual downward spiral, and four centered on a flawed but well-meaning man trying to pull together something redemptive from an accumulation of questionable decisions and missed opportunities. On that level, they all might be the same novel--but you can level the same charge at Jane Austen (young woman has to distinguish, without a lot of help from friends or family, Mr. Seems-Right-at-First from Mr. Truly-Right), which goes to show that a novelist can keep writing what is in the abstract the very same novel, yet continue to come up books worth reading.

In brief, Bridge of Sighs is characteristically Russo-esque in setting, character, and story, and be it because of or despite that, I liked it a lot.

Lou C. Lynch, known to most of the town of Thomaston as Lucy, narrates most of the novel, giving us a lot of background about his family, the town, his marriage to his high school girlfriend, Sarah, and his childhood friendship with Bobby Marconi, who has gone on to become Robert Noonan, an internationally recognized painter who now lives in Venice. Lucy is writing his memoirs at the same time that he and Sarah are planning a retirement trip to Italy, which is to include a stop in Venice to renew acquaintance with Bobby/Robert.

Russo steps out of Lucy's narration occasionally, though, with chapters from the points of view of Robert and Sarah, from which we gather that the two-couple high school friendship that defined their senior year--Lucy and Sarah, Bobby and prettiest girl in town Bev--trembled with the tension of a mutual attraction between Sarah and Bobby.

All the plans for visiting Venice, accordingly, are charged with the emotions of roads not taken, and we get a kind of retrospective reconstruction of a Jane Austen novel, with Sarah as the young woman who must distinguish, without much help from friends or family, Mr. Seems-Right from Mr. Truly-Right. We know from early on whom she chose--what unfolds for us is the question of whether she chose well. 

This is a generous novel, so there is a lot more alongside this central story: attention to how racial difference mattered in Thomaston, to families functional and dys-, to what the 1960s felt like if you were a teenager. One of my favorite chapters, even though its role in the plot was slight, was an analysis of what junior high dances of the era felt like. 

Russo is no minimalist, and a lot of readers may feel we could have used a bit less of this or a little less of that. But if you can appreciate some old-fashioned Victorian amplitude in contemporary fiction, Russo is your man.

John Murillo, _Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry_

 EVEN BETTER THAN his first book (Up Jumped the Boogie). This one too deals often with the rougher precincts of urban life in street-inflected language, but at the same time shows extraordinary formal control and familiarity with the traditions of English verse. 

This book includes the poem (or poems) that got my attention in the 2020 Best American Poetry, "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn." The title is a tip of the hat to Dylan Thomas, which is nice, but the astonishing thing is that Murillo pulls off a crown of sonnets, moreover a heroic crown of sonnets, while digging down into one of the most painful and urgent problems of our time and place, state violence against the Black community. 

The volume also includes "On Confessionalism" and "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Kinds of Birds,"likewise published in the BAP series (2019 and 2017, respectively). Both show how skillful Murillo is at taking an idea for a walk into some surprising places, a more compressed David Antin.

The penultimate poem, "On Prosody" manages to encompass Emerson and Frost while telling a terrible but all too credible story of how things were in Murillo's childhood neighborhood, and then ends with a sonnet that is a re-mix of a Notorious B.I.G. lyric but also a sort of apologia pro vita sua. 

How does he do it?

I also find myself also wondering...how old is he? Gray in the beard, so past 45, I guess, making it a surprise that Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is only his second book. There is not a dud poem in here, however, so maybe it's just a question of quality control.

Tracy K. Smith & David Lehmann, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2021_

 MY AMBITION EVERY year is to get BAP read before the next BAP appears, and every year I fail. My secondary ambition is to read it before the calendar year ends, and this year I made it, on December 31.

It's a good BAP. It checks my top two personal BAP boxes. 

1. The poetry does not all sound a lot like the year's editor's work. Check!

2. A good mix of old hands and new names. Check! Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Stanley Moss on the one hand, Su Cho, Adam O. Davis, Emily Lee Luan, Hannah Marshall, and Angbeen Saleem, Darius Simpson, and Monica Sok on the other.

Since a lot of the poetry herein was published in 2021, a good deal of it was likely written in 2020, and accordingly George Floyd is a presence, sometimes named (as in Terrance Hayes's "George Floyd"), sometimes not (as in Ed Roberson's "Air"). Traces of the pandemic linger as well, but the state and other violence visited on Black bodies is the volume's strongest undercurrent.

By my count, this is the fourth BAP to end with a Kevin Young poem. I wonder what the record is? Dean Young, may his memory be for a blessing, must have had quite a few. Besides his four anchor spots, Kevin Young has three appearances just ahead of Matthew Zapruder.