Lauren Groff, _Matrix_

 I LIKELY WOULD not have read this had our book club not chosen it for our September meeting, but I was game, given Groff's generally solid critical reputation. I was a little worried, though, when the prose in the opening pages offered several examples of the kind of overcooked writing typical of the cheesier end of historical fiction--pointless adjectives, crude psychologizing, over-explanation. To wit:

"delicate mushrooms poking from the rich soil" (p. 3)

"felt her greatness hot in her blood" (p. 5)

"Eleanor extended her hand, encrusted with rings" (p. 7)

"she felt ebbing out of her the dazzling love that had filled those years" (p. 9)

"the abbess Emme, to whom an internal music had been given as solace for her blindness" (p. 11)

I stuck with it, though, and while the prose did not get a lot better as things went along, Groff did conjure up an interesting character. 

The novel takes the point of view of Marie de France, author of the Lais, a 12th century collection of narrative poems in Old French. Little is known of the author save that she was French and named Marie--not even that much is solidly established, actually--but one intriguing speculation is that she was Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the out-of-wedlock daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and hence half-sister to England's Henry II. Groff takes this idea and runs with it.

Her Marie is somewhat in love with Henry's wife, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, but also in her later years both a visionary and an extremely skillful administrator, somewhat along the lines of Hildegard of Bingen or Gertrude the Great. She turns the abbey into a thriving feminist utopia, materially prosperous, well-protected, and a center of learning. (The Lais get short shrift here, just a few pages early in the novel).

I wondered if the novel was a kind of argument that menopause unleashes women's power. Part I of the novel, about fifty pages, is about Marie's early, unhappy days at the abbey, when she writes the Lais; Part II is mainly about her erotic intrigues in the abbey. Marie hits menopause at the beginning of Part III, which is about 150 pages, and that is when she really comes into her own, transforming the abbey into a powerful community. 

Is menopause a kind of rebirth for women? All that distraction vanished, a clearing of the mind, a claiming of one's power? It seemed that way in Matrix.

Steve Silberman, _NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity_

 AN OUTSTANDING BOOK and an important one, I'd say. Silberman provides not exactly a history of autism, but an history of how it has been known, named, and treated by western medicine from the early twentieth century to the present. It's a history full of bad guesses and unintended harm, but still gradually making progress.

Silberman's first chapter is about Henry Cavendish, an 18th century Englishman and scientist of very eccentric habits; his second is about Leo Rosa, a boy in the contemporary USA, also of very eccentric habits. Leo has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, while Henry lived and died before "autism" was known and named, but both thrived because they were given the space and accommodation they needed. 

The knowing and naming went on between Henry and Leo, and it's a story of both progress and regress, of illumination  in  unlikely partnership with darkness. Hans Asperger and his associates in a Vienna do crucial pioneering in identifying autism, but their work is fatally compromised by association with Nazism and eugenics. Leo Kanner makes comparable progress in the United States, but gets balled up in assumptions about causes and cures (and his own infallibility) to damaging effect.

Causes and cures are the recurring bugbears of the middle of the book. Whose fault autism is and how to fix it becomes the sole topics of interest among professionals. Eventually, gradually, the parents of autistic children and the autistic themselves start getting their say, and some light breaks through. Rain Man comes out, and a little more light comes through. Adjustments get made, handbooks get rewritten, and children like Leo Rosa are no longer doomed to a lifetime of misunderstanding.

Not that everything is all better for everyone on the spectrum. Progress remains to be made. It's a hopeful story, though, of people eventually being heard and getting something like what they need.

Maia Kobabe, _Gender Queer_

 THIS IS THE graphic memoir that is being banned and attacked all over the country. Briefly, it is about Kobabe's personal journey of discovery that ey (Kobabe's preferred pronoun) are nonbinary and asexual.

The boiling outrage over it had led me to expect that it was quite a bit edgier, or more militant, or more confrontational, or more shocking, or more something than it is. There is a little bit of nudity, but not much--some sexuality, but not much. Kobabe's drawing style is clean, in a kind of juste milieu between realistic and cartoon-y. The story line is clear and easy to follow as Kobabe moves, sometimes painfully but nonetheless steadily, from one breakthrough realization to another. The book is eminently accessible.

So--is that the problem? Kobabe presents eir circumstances lucidly and unaffectedly, in a way that any middle school student could read this and understand. Is that why Moms for Liberty et al. are all frantic about it? If it were weirder, more avant-garde, more experimental, more out-there, more obviously intended for a niche readership, would the guardians of morality have left it alone?

Kobabe also makes the point that she has family and community support. Her parents are unreconstructed hippies who are somewhat bewildered by their offspring's development but want Kobabe to be happy and do their best to support em. Her school is a private, non-traditional one with a flourishing pride group. Ey have a lot to deal with, but eir parents are not bloody-minded Southern Baptists who rush em in to conversion therapy, and eir schoolmates are not out to bully em into suicide. 

Is that too a problem? That Gender Queer not only presents clearly and understandably that gender and sexuality are complex, but also makes clear that sympathetic and supportive communities exist, that not all one's fellow Americans are red-hot to judge and persecute?

I would not say that Gender Queer is one of the great graphic memoirs, but I am convinced it ought to be in every library for middle and high schoolers. It is a valuable and timely book.

Fredrick Exley, _A Fan's Notes_

 THINKING BACK TO the question that came up with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Loads of Learned Lumber, August 18), would this make anyone's list for a great American autobiography?

I recall it getting a lot of praise and attention when it appeared back in 1968, including a National Book Award nomination. My copy is a "Vintage Contemporaries" edition, which in the 1980s was a serious endorsement all by itself, putting Exley in such company as Denis Johnson, Harold Brodkey, Paule Marshall, Barry Hannah, and Cormac McCarthy. Just carrying a Vintage Contemporaries in those days was a sign that you knew who the cool-but-not-yet-famous writers were.

Then again, perhaps A Fan's Notes does not count as autobiography. Exley subtitled it "A Fictional Memoir." The National Book Award nomination was for fiction. Autofiction avant la lettre, we could say.

Exley could write, and the book remains interesting to read. It might be interesting to pair with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, because Exley's book is all about not overcoming adversity, about not achieving success, about fucking up every opportunity and not being able to do yourself a lick of good. Alcoholism, depression, going home to live with mom, institutionalization, getting fired, wrecking one's marriage and family, humiliating bouts of impotence...yet all with the strong, all but unkillable conviction that one is more capable than most people, more intelligent than most people, certainly a better writer than most writers, and that somehow, someday one will become the center of attention and adulation that one seemed destined to be, like a star halfback...until one realizes, no, one is just another spectator, just another face in the bleachers...just a fan. Hence the title.

I would certainly hesitate to assign the book to undergraduates of 2023, though. Exley's presentations of women, blacks, and LGBTQ+ folks are none too aware even by the standards of 1968, and today they are just...urk. Exley could catch on with fans of Charles Bukowski, perhaps, but Exley feels a lot sorrier for himself than Bukowski ever does, and few Bukowskians would find that appealing. 

Odds of a revival are slim, I suspect.

Maybe Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh? I should look at that again.

Charles Péguy, _Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc_

 I'M NOT SURE why I never read this before, as I have a long-held interest in literary works about Joan of Arc, but somehow I had not. I've known about it since grad school, but it took Bruno Dumont's film Jeannette to motivate me to read it. I'm happy to report that it is every bit as strange as Dumont's film.

It presents itself as a play--that is, the text is arranged as speeches for characters, with details about the setting and stage directions in italics--but it is hard to imagine the play being performed uncut. For one thing, it is long (over 150 pages in the Pléiade text). There are only three characters, but no action to speak of--the whole play is speeches about God, faith, and grace, some of which run for pages. 

One of the characters is Joan (here, Jeannette) at age thirteen, right before she has begun hearing her voices. As the play opens, Joan delivers and then at some length dismantles the Lord's Prayer, asking God for an explanation why, 1400 years on, the kingdom still has not come. Jeannette's friend Hauviette enters, trying to persuade Jeannette to take it down a notch, just be a good parishioner and not make waves. Jeannette's not having any of that, thanks.  Hauviette exits to make way for Madame Gervaise, who seems to be a former teacher (maybe? not sure about this point) who has become a nun... or perhaps she was always a nun but has withdrawn into seclusion. 

Mme. Gervaise's counsel to Jeannette makes up most of the rest of the play. She too, like Hauviette, is trying to gather Jeannette back into orthodoxy, but Mme. Gervaise shows considerably more insight into Jeannette's misgivings as well as greater theological depth. 

This sounds as dry as a bone--but Péguy lends Mme. Gervaise's disquisition the intensity of a fever dream. Rhythmic, repetitive, obsessed, it seems more like an incantation than a sermon, especially in its hallucinatory depiction of Jesus's Passion, which pays special attention to Mary as witness. Among the passages that struck me is this one, a memorable depiction of Jesus as disruptive healer:

Jusqu'au jour où il avait commencé le désordre.
Introduit le désordre.
Le plus grand désordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.
Le plus grande ordre qu'il y ait eu dans le monde.
Le seul ordre.
Qu'il y ait jamais eu dans le monde.

Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc appeared in 1910 during a particularly turbulent era in French letters. The Dreyfus Affair had polarized writers (and the society as a whole), the poles roughly definable as secularist-socialist-universalist on the one hand and Catholic-monarchical-nationalist on the other hand. Plenty of cordial hatred on both sides (not unlike USA in Trump times, though I don't think Trump has many littérateurs on his side).  Péguy had been a socialist dreyfusard for most of his career--did Le Mystère mean he had changed sides, given Joan's connection to Catholicism and militant French patriotism? It did not, but in the context of the time, the question of whether Péguy had switched sides dominated response to the work. I'd like to learn more about this.

Of particular interest to me is the Yeats connection. Iseult Gonne (Maud's daughter) read Le Mystère to him in Normandy in 1916, translating it as she read I suppose. It made enough of an impression on him  that he noted it a key essay of his from 1919, "If I Were Four-and-Twenty." The final part of the play, where Jeannette angers Mme. Gervaise by insisting that the men of France would not have abandoned Jesus during his trial and execution as the apostles did, particularly impressed him. 

That Yeats would have connected to Jeannette's/Joan's passionate advocacy for her countrymen always made some sense to me, but now that I have read the whole play, it's hard to imagine his sitting through a reading of it, even by the young and lovely Iseult Gonne. His appetite for Catholic theology was small, I think, and he was not really all that interested in Jesus. Perhaps he appreciated Iseult's appreciation of it. 

Barry Hannah, _Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories_

 A POSTHUMOUS COLLECTION, but only by half a year or so--Hannah died in March 2010, and this came out in December of that year. It may have already been in the works when he died...indeed, seems like it must have been, given how large a project it is (456 pages), but no one is listed as editor, and no information is provided on the production of the book save a perfunctory acknowledgements page.

Hannah was a Mississippian, and most of the book's stories are set in the South, mainly among men. Lots of alcohol and firearms, lots of hunting, lots of music, lots of military service. Not my usual kind of thing, to be honest, but Hannah's prose is so surprising, so idiosyncratic, so tangy that that I enjoyed the stories even though I would move away fast if I encountered any of his characters in public.

Some random samples:

The yard was shaggy.

My love for Felice went on belligerently, sullenly, for a month. 

The streets of the town were a long heart attack themselves to Smith.

When Boléro was over, the audience stood up and made meat out of their hands applauding.

There is usually not a lot of plot to the stories--sometimes they feel more like character studies--like Chekhov's "The Darling," say. Like that story, they often unfold over a longer time than a lot of modern short stories do, over years sometimes. Once in a while, you would swear the story is about someone Hannah knows and has known over a long time (especially "Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other," which seems to be about William S. Burroughs).

By and large, I found the stories vivid, funny, and distinctive. They tended not to have much emotional punch, for me, except for the previously uncollected ones at the end of the book. I'm not sure why those four felt different--a heightened vulnerability, maybe? Those are the stories that felt deep as well as dazzling.

Brandon Som, _Tripas_

 THERE ARE ENOUGH young American poets working through the complexities of their identities that another volume of poems "built out of a multicultural, multigenerational home" (as the back cover puts it) would not necessarily get me to plop down $19.95 and start reading... but this one got a strong review from Stephanie Burt in the LRB, and that makes a difference. If Stephanie Burt says, "plop down your $19.95 and start reading," I am likely to say, "well, okay."

And Stephanie Burt is right again--this is a fine book. 

For one thing, Som's identity is complex in a relatively unusual way. He has a Chicana grandmother who worked the night shift at a Motorola assembly line until the factory was moved to Mexico, and Chinese-American grandparents who ran a corner store. Each strand, on its own, conjures up a relatively  familiar kind of story, but the interaction of the two has a particular twenty-first century fizz to it, a different poignancy (see, please, "Close Reading"). 

That one grandmother's job involves circuitboards generates a cluster of electronic imagery that becomes a way of talking about how poems come into being:

Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau's Orpheus
copies the broadcasts from a netherworld for verses--

his muse a circuitry my grandmother inspected

nights at Motorola. Before her shift, she put me to bed,
laid down beside me and smoked Parliaments--

each drag like a tower light to planes overhead. ("Antenna")

Electricity makes a useful figure for how poetry moves through the  world, if you think about it--operating in some boundary between the material and the immaterial, both controllable (circuits) and uncontrollable (lightning), powerful but visible only in its effects. (see also "Resistors.")

Som's inwardness with the grain of language is what really keeps the book moving. In "Tattoo," someone tells of the word "maseros" tattooed on her brothers' hands, which is not exactly "mesero" (waiter) or "masera" (a kneading trough) or "macero" (a mace bearer)--but what is it? does it "sound a resistance"?

               Addendum or 
annotation, their maseros revised
the sentence written on their body.
I carry that archive--what's stored
without inventory: a leaf, an aleph;
a casita in husk; a feminine eye inside
hoja: maize, maíz, masa--a maze
on fingertips. Hear the word again--
at its center a gristmill of cicada,
a mesquite both vessel and wishbone.