The Heaven-Sent Leaf
Katy Lederer
BOA Editions, 2009

Human Dark with Sugar
Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press, 2009

Revolver
Robyn Schiff
University of Iowa Press, 2009

Nomina
Karen Volkman
BOA Editions 2009

In his 1998 essay “The Shredding of Public Privacy,” philosopher Thomas Nagel writes that “The distinction between what an individual exposes to public view and what he conceals or exposes only to intimates is essential to permit creatures as complex as ourselves to interact without constant social breakdown.” Nagel says he, but the past couple of years have seen a wave of second and third books by female poets who rely upon the tension between concealment and exposure to drive their explorations of the self. The five poets above all, in different fashions and to varying degrees, explore the inevitable push and pull between the public and the private. Each of their most recent books reminds the reader that what an individual chooses to reveal to their friends, strangers, co-workers, lovers, gods—what they choose to reveal to their readers and what they refuse to reveal at all—serves to determine who they are. Considered as a group, these five books suggest that one of the many lenses through which a book of poems can be read—or traits by which almost any poetry collection can be characterized—is the way in which it handles the interplay between the interior and the exterior, the self and the other, introspection and the world of action.

“I’ll be a whole new person,” writes Brenda Shaughnessy in Human Dark with Sugar: “I’ll make her myself.” So, too, each individual controls, or attempts to control, who they are within a given context by adjusting what they present of themselves, a performance that varies in accordance with the audience, be it personal, political, professional, or scholarly. Such performances are not always successful: “The whole machinery of self-production is cumbersome…and sometimes breaks down,” writes Erving Goffman in his pioneering 1956 study of sociological dramaturgy, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. But in poetry—which always insists that the way it presents itself is the way it is—a reader can expect to find a highly distilled, well-oiled version of this performance: a deeply self-conscious, stylized simulation of the self by way of the interplay of secrecy and candor.

Nagel continues: “Each of our inner lives is such a jungle of thoughts, feelings, fantasies and impulses that civilization would be impossible if we expressed them all.” So, too, would poetry be impossible if a writer aimed for nothing other than the unchecked expression of their entire consciousness. Fortunately, none of these authors attempts that. But the inner lives, mental events, and fantasies described by the speakers in these books—that of a “brainworker” at a hedge fund, for instance, in Katy Lederer’s case, or of a citizen trying to parse an onslaught of dread-slanted news in Matthea Harvey’s— permit the reader to follow the movements of minds that are provocative, memorable, humorous, and stunning. Each of these poets skillfully discloses and withholds, exploring new selves on the page.

Piled together, these five collections constitute an embarrassment of riches; it’s tough to know where to begin. Proceeding alphabetically would mean starting with Harvey’s Modern Life, her third collection. It’s fitting that the alphabet should dictate that Harvey go first, since alphabetical dictates figure so prominently into two of this book’s most thrilling series, and since, as Harvey herself might to tell you, the pursuit of the seemingly arbitrary can sometimes lay bare an unexpected design. Early in the book, Harvey offers eleven poems, each titled “The Future of Terror,” each of them as acrobatic in their syntax and ambitious in their vocabulary as this passage from “The Future of Terror/2”:

Happy-go-lucky is just a decision to proceed
with an assumption of happiness and luck.
The Observation Station gained a toehold,
appeared on houseflags, had us hooked.
Don’t get the impression we weren’t
all dialing information every hour: we were,
if only intracranially. In an inversion of
the usual itinerary, we felt a jolt of bullets
before we even entered the jungle….

How, a reader may wonder, is Harvey choosing her words? What drives her decision-making? And of all the poets discussed in this review, she happens to be the most willing to explain.

In 2006, American Poet published Harvey’s essay “Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius.” Like most Americans during the Bush administration, Harvey had been hearing the phrase “the future of terror” over and over in the media, and she wanted to give the expression more solidity and meaning, to come to terms with it in her own terms. Thus, she writes:

One day, I ended up turning to my big fat red Webster’s dictionary and looking up the definitions of ‘future’ and ‘terror.’ There’s a lot of heft between those two words in the dictionary, and I decided to create a word list by writing down every word between ‘future’ and ‘terror’ that fell in the same place on the page as ‘future.’ It was just an experiment….

As she was writing, she realized she had “simultaneously created a mirror image, a ‘Terror of the Future,’” which ended up constituting another of the series in Modern Life. For these poems, Harvey “went backward through the dictionary, my finger this time tracing where ‘terror’ would fall on each successive page until I hit future and stopped.” By placing this private, idiosyncratic spin on political rhetoric—by creating her own complex system to respond to what has become a mindless public catchphrase, Harvey manipulates the tension between the interior and the exterior, and how this tension can provide a version of a self who knows “What to Live. What to Do.”

Harvey doesn’t really have a name for this latter technique, though she tosses out “backward abecedarian,” “decebarian,” and “zeyexewrius” as possibilities. Whatever one chooses to call them, it’s hard not to be glad that she wrote them, and gladder still that she has pulled aside the curtain to show the audience the gears and pulleys. In Modern Life, Harvey has devised an impressive kind of political poetry that reaches beyond mere partisanship or advocacy. These poems don’t try to preach to the choir or summon anyone to the barricades but rather call people to interrogate the blurry line between private and public citizenship—that space where one thing shades into its opposite, where “the centaur spells out Wall on his napkin, and sketches next to it a girl in sequins getting sawed in half.”

Like the sawing of a girl in half, The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer audaciously sets out to perform a seemingly doomed feat. In a 1962 BBC-TV interview, Robert Graves remarked, “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” The promotional copy for Lederer’s second book of poems, quotes Graves, thereby preparing the reader to watch Lederer prove him wrong. Practically every poem in this ambitious and uncompromising book is about money—dirty, shady, dubiously-gotten, impolite-to-talk-about, anti-poetic money. The book’s title, taken from Goethe’s Faust Part II, is a metaphor for the thing itself: brainchild of Mephistopheles, the “heaven-sent leaf” is nothing other than paper money.

If one of Harvey’s aims is to concretize an abstract phrase, an absent-yet-present threat, then one of Lederer’s is to make concrete an abstract system, the monetary system which, as we have come to discover, is often all too abstract. What Lederer seeks to accomplish is to give money a human face, presumably by adapting parts of her own autobiography (she has written a critically acclaimed memoir about her family’s professional gambling) and years of experience working at D. E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in country, described by Fortune as “the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street.” According to her poem “Brainworker,” the upwardly mobile young professional at this fund might find it necessary:

To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal.
To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk.
To long for your manager’s written approval.
So soon am I up for my year-end review?
The moon above settles into its shadow.
I am howling at you.

If the tone of the poems in The Heaven-Sent Leaf is often deliberately tough to get a read on, even disassociated, when you can in fact make it out, it is frequently just plain sad. In “The Parable of Times Square,” an uncommonly beautiful poem and one of the collection’s best, she writes:

I hate to be alone. The solitude of Brooklyn.
But outside, now framed by the window, a couple.
They stare at one another over pork chops and beer.
I call you on the telephone. I call to hear
Your muffled voice. “People aren’t the be-all and end-all of one
another’s lives,” you say.

Throughout the collection, Lederer gives voice to the ambivalence, anxiety, and erotics of acquisition, status, and greed. It’s said that Americans would rather talk about almost anything than how much money they make. Lederer’s not telling either, but the intimate glimpses she gives, however obliquely, of the private life and longings of an elite professional manage to feel both timeless—in part due to her simplicity of syntax, vatic pronunciations, and liberal use of lines that start out “O/h”—and utterly of our time. It is lovely to see her inflecting the corporate sphere with lyric sensitivity, and alchemically altering that world’s shopworn dross into poetry, or trying to, even as the impersonal machine of finance threatens to render her speakers drones.

While Lederer’s speakers sometimes seem sphinx-like in their impenetrability, the speakers in Brenda Shaughnessy’s second collection, Human Dark with Sugar, let the reader know exactly how they feel. Shaughnessy has an almost Sextonian policy of putting everything private up for grabs—of keeping no secrets. “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” she wrote in her first book, goofily borrowing from Alcoholics Anonymous, and in this book, she continues her candor, writing almost in defiance of decorum. In the book’s opening poem, “I’m Over the Moon,” she demands:

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard
and fast into you moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

Here and throughout this collection, Shaughnessy makes public those ecstasies and sufferings that are usually kept private. If she is sometimes raw, even vulgar, so too does she uphold the lyric tradition of making relatable and universal emotions that are often thought, at least by those feeling them, to be unique. The impact is not unlike that of music, as described in her poem “Replaceable until You’re Not”

Music’s ruthless that way: ‘Here are the words

and here’s the tune to how you feel. Doesn’t matter
you didn’t originate your own feelings.

We know you! Enjoy!” I may be a chump,
but at some point aren’t I irreplaceable?

Shaughnessy spares no one, not even herself, such sassy, frank criticism. In “A Poet’s Poem,” she admits, “Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike / off the roof with my bare hand // And used it to write a word in the snow. / I wrote the word snow. // I can’t stand myself.” Of course, even as she lets the reader in, publicly owning her self-disgust, our experience of that feeling is mitigated by its aesthetic transformation—constrained by the limits of language, it’s broken into tidy lines and stanzas for the reader’s consumption. But the bitterness here is real and refreshing, and the poet’s unhappiness with her expressive limitations effectively captures one’s inevitable failure to externalize his or her inner complexity.

Of all these poets, Robyn Schiff in her second collection, Revolver, seems most concerned with controls and limitations, imposing them rigorously on herself, thereby lending her exquisitely discursive a perfect balance between improvisation and refinement.

In the beautiful long poem that concludes the collection, “Project Paperclip,” Schiff indulges in the same explanatory impulse that Harvey does with her abecedarian poems, letting the reader know within the poem itself that:

…I began containing

Starry Sky Beetles in boxes of 42 syllables each

To honor my mother’s birth in 1942,

Three days after the B-29 Superfortress

flew

for the first

time (Japan was built of sticks),

but I say goodbye in 42 for each call Tom Ford fielded on

September 11, 2001 for the Yves Saint

Laurent purple peasant blouse.

In Revolver as well as in her debut, Worth, Schiff is drawn to investigate fashion icons for the way they embody a certain materialism, an excess held in check by artifice and discipline, but no less so for the light they shed upon consumer culture. Throughout, Schiff teeters expertly on the edge between exaggeration and proportion, as in “Dear Ralph Lauren,” in which she imagines of the Polo brand’s infamous logo: “I feared the forward waving his mallet / like a tomahawk / until you told me the / logo is based on me // merely hailing a cab.” Schiff appears to give her private research interests free rein before she reins them in, like Marianne Moore before her, with her meticulous syllabics, and puts them on display on the page like artisan-crafted artifacts. This seems appropriate, considering that the book takes on the cavalcade of objects presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

The flow of the poems—and the wealth of facts that comprise the poems—are clearly driven by Schiff’s private consciousness at work on connections and chains that others might not catch, but the results are always exhilarating, even (or especially) when they leave you spinning. The intrepid reader could, if they got the notion, do an online search, for example, about the life and times of Elsa Schiaparelli, the influential Italian fashion designer who provides the jumping off place for Schiff’s poem “The House of Schiaparelli,” and in doing so could discover that Daisy Fellowes, part of the inspiration for the subsequent poem in the collection, “Singer Sewing Machine,” was not just “heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune” as the poem states, but also an editor of the French Harper’s Bazaar and one of Schiaparelli’s best clients. But one would not have to do so to appreciate the poems themselves, which are so consistently self-contained and adrenalized, and to appreciate how deftly Schiff shapes the poems’ potentially boundless content into artful and satisfying wholes.

Part of the delight Revolver provides originates in its author’s desire to engage with the things of this world, its facts and its flaws, and to present to the reader her attempts to make sense of them. The delight of the 50 sonnets in Karen Volkman’s third collection, Nomina, on the other hand, proceeds from their author’s determination to veer as far as possible from common sense—i.e, an understanding we might share. If Schiff and the others are captivating in their varying investigations of the social, then at the opposite end of the spectrum—the foil—is Volkman, who throws the other poets into fascinating relief.

Nomina is nothing if not esoteric. For one thing, Volkman, clearly influenced by Stephan Mallarmé, probably knows more French and Latinate words than her readers, most of whom will be unacquainted with such terms as “ecume,” “alcool,” “orgueil” and “naufrage.” The book, if it is to be enjoyed, is not going to win people over by virtue of its content or its arguments; if Volkman is concerned at all with making stable meaning, she seems to be making it almost entirely for herself. Rather, that the poet retreats from the common into elaborate cells of her own making—with all the gains and losses this implies—is the book’s modus operandi and ultimate meaning.

If a reader is able to approach these sonnets not as units of sense one needs to understand but rather as a song in which the same chords keep getting played, or even a painting in which the same images—“signs” or “ciphers” as Volkman might have it—keep appearing, then the experience will be beguiling. The word “Blue” for example, would be the repeated color or note in this one:

The blue beneficence we call and spell and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well of constant waters, deepening a thee, a thou and who, touching every what— and in the or, a shudder in the cut— and that you are, blue mirror; only stare bluest blankness, whether in the where, sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught drowns and booms and vowels. I will not.

You can try to impose a clear through-line on this poem if you want—she appears to be meditating upon divinity—but why force it? Better to give yourself over to the wash of Volkman’s sonic obsessions, to experience their “blue beauty” as it “drowns and booms and vowels” into rare, compelling soundscapes.

Goffman writes that self-presentation arises “out of intimate interaction with the contingencies of staging performances.” One of those contingencies, of course, is the other actors with whom a performer inevitably interacts. For Harvey, Lederer, Shaughnessy, Schiff and Volkman—perhaps for any poet, really—the most critical other actor is likely the reader. It is a pleasure, here, to be so cast.

____

Kathleen Rooney is an editor of Rose Metal Press and the author, most recently, of the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010).

By Tom DeHaven
Yale University Press, 2010

Tom DeHaven, in his new book Our Hero: Superman in American Culture, grapples briefly with the question of Superman’s essential traits. As the author describes in the course of 160 giggly, guffawing, infuriating pages, Superman has undergone innumerable changes in the last 80 years, with whole rafts of details being added, subtracted, and transmuted as the character made his way through comic books, radio dramas, stage plays, TV series, cartoons, serials, and big-budget Hollywood movies. Indeed, most readers will be surprised to learn that some of the things everybody knows about Superman (that he works at the Daily Planet, that he’s vulnerable to an extraterrestrial element called kryptonite, and that he can fly, to name just three) originated not in the amateur little comic created in 1938 by Ohio teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster but in the more anonymous amphitheater of the Adventures of Superman radio show broadcast during the 1940s.

DeHaven settles on a small list of essentials: Superman is sent to Earth as a baby from the doomed planet Krypton; Superman lives among us as Clark Kent (DeHaven daringly asserts that Clark’s profession is largely irrelevant); Superman wears a costume (the costume, as DeHaven puts it); Superman’s story includes Lois Lane, in some capacity, somehow (DeHaven’s book is as squeakingly awkward about matters of sex as any Archie comic, so this isn’t really explained in detail); and most essential of all, Superman can fly and “perform marvelous feats of strength.”

It’s a neat list, and however some Superman fans might quibble with it, DeHaven has certainly earned the right to make it. His 2005 novel It’s Superman! is a terrific read, a genuinely worthy contribution to the long life of the character. In that book, DeHaven uses precise control over language to delineate very carefully what a young Clark Kent growing up in 1930s Kansas might really have been like, and the end result works perfectly. Opening this new book, taking up the altogether pleasing question of what makes Superman tick, you expect more of that fine rhetorical control.

Reading Our Hero, you find yourself wondering: what the hell happened? A Zatanna mind-spell? A Brainiac memory-ray? A face full of gold kryptonite?

The problem isn’t that the book is poorly written; the problem is that it’s trying to skip the step of being a book at all. When authors with newly-published wares go out on their publicity tours, they tend to approach the task in one of two ways: either they assume a vaguely befuddled air, as if the aspect of actually selling their work had never occurred to them and was a constant source of slightly anguished bemusement (you’ll know this type because when you’re in their proximity, you’ll be seized with an almost-uncontrollable urge to throw a brick at them), or they do their best to project a slideshow-and-bathroom-humor Spring Break demeanor – they did the boring old homework of writing the book, they seem to say, and now it’s time to have fun. It’s an infallible rule that an author who can make his audience laugh during a reading will sell out of his book at reading’s end – that’s the whole goal of this approach. Makes sense from a financial standpoint, but as a formality, you’re supposed to write your book first.

DeHaven hasn’t bothered to do that, and so Our Hero is littered with passages that only make sense when joked, ad lib, to an audience, probably accompanied by a computer slideshow. Here’s our author on very early comics art:

At the outset it was chaos, as violent and willfully transgressive as punk music would be forty years in the future. Sometimes you can’t tell what you’re looking at – is that a grizzly bear or the Rock of Gibraltar? Other times the clarity is so stark the image registers before the mind knows it. The figures and props are flat, emblematic, and ugly, direct from the id to the page, and the dialogue is fantastic, asinine, hilarious, like Richard Foreman’s Dadaesque incantations. Everything is dreamy, dreamlike, otherworldly, so fucking crazy.

Relatively smooth sailing until that ‘so fucking crazy,’ which is as much an affront to the reading eye as it would be a comic relief to the listening ear. Tell-tale signs like that are everywhere. Writing about the Superman Day held in 1940 in which an actor named Ray Middleton dressed as Superman for the kids: “The first actor to wear the suit. Ray Middleton, ladies and gentlemen”; writing about the post-WWII slump in superhero comics: “They were like a craze when it’s over; they were a craze when it’s over”; writing about third-tier film actor George Reeves’ decision to play the character on TV: “At this point Reeves couldn’t afford to turn down work, even when he wanted to. Superman, though. Ay yi yi”; mentioning that he, DeHaven, once tried to write a libretto: “Those things are hard!” You can practically see the laughter cue lighting up.

So, there are trials. Fortunately, DeHaven’s delivery is brisk enough so the reader is never mired in trials, and regardless of delivery, he’s got one heck of a story to tell.

It’s the story of Superman, and as DeHaven appealingly describes early on in Our Hero, it’s all-pervasive. You will search in vain anywhere in the world for a person who’s never heard of the character, and it’s genuinely difficult to go even one day without coming into contact with some aspect of it, from the cape to the costume to the big ‘S’ shield-emblem. Since the moment when Action Comics #1 first hit the stands in April 1939, there has never been a moment when some variation on the Superman theme wasn’t before the public eye. One comic title led to another, then a third; a radio drama ran for a decade and led to a half-hour TV show that was also a success. A tidal wave of merchandizing – toys, costumes, piggy-banks, cookies, bread – has been relentless, and relentlessly lucrative. The 1979 movie directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve made back several times its record-breaking price tag. The long-running TV show Smallville, which began as the story of young Clark Kent’s life back home on the farm, has gradually morphed into The Adventures of Superman in all but name and is watched by millions of people every week. The 2006 Bryan Singer movie Superman Returns, although a lackluster darling with the critics, made good money at the box office, and another movie – or perhaps even movie franchise – is in the works.

Clearly, something is going on here, and it’s tempting to chalk it all up to simplicity. Superman was the first superhero, after all, and in his original incarnation you could intuit what his powers were by a simple formula: anything you can do, he can do super.

I think there’s more to it than that, and DeHaven comes close to the crux of it a couple of times, noting that Superman began life as an essentially cheerful character. Even after the tragedy of his origin story began to take center stage in the comics (his whole homeworld blew up! He’s the ultimate orphan), Superman remained a happy presence. Not happy-go-lucky – superhero comics would have to wait until the heyday of Spider-Man to get that – but friendly, unstintingly upbeat. Even in ages enamored of angst, there’s something to be said for that. DeHaven encapsulates it nicely while singing the praises of Christopher Reeve’s performance as the Man of Steel:

More than anything else, he played Superman as a regular guy, smart and sincere, who loved what he did, was glad to be alive, and delighted in his gifts; he was amused and amazed, intoxicated by them, but lacked utterly in hubris. He was all four Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. A smidgen self-satisfied, but that was okay, who wouldn’t be, just a little?

Long before he gets to that movie role, DeHaven has a lot of comics history to impart, and he does so with the sloppy gusto that is Our Hero’s trademark. He gives a fascinating glimpse-portrait of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicolson, the “Major” who launched Detective Comics and may or may not have had a hand in launching Superman in Action Comics; he details the sad story of Jerry Siegel’s legal battles with DC Comics, as Siegel tried to get some just financial consideration for himself and Shuster from a company that had bought Superman outright decades ago (for a paltry sum, naturally) and proceeded to make millions off the character; he takes us inside the burgeoning empire of Superman comic book titles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including several swipes at the period’s inimitable villain, character editor Mort Weisinger:

The editor of the sprawling line, the overseer, the auteur (I’m kidding, but not really) was Mort Weisinger, Bronx-born, morbidly obese Mortimer Weisinger – picky, petty, intimidating, overbearing, and monstrously cruel to the men (or, as he called them, “idiots”) who wrote and drew for him.

Along the way, DeHaven consistently strikes a disgruntled purist/mystified outsider pose that won’t fool long-time comics fans for an instant. At times, he’s willing to imitate that particular kind of franchise-fan (regardless of item or medium) who’s convinced the franchise was great – right up until the second episode:

…cheap and tawdry and rushed, but snappy and impromptu. It related itself and was convincing. After Shuster, and despite the professional polish and more creditable, more variable compositions, Superman never again seemed as integrated into his environment, or as spiritedly alive.

Superman was never done better than when Joe Shuster was drawing him? Hogwash. Joe Shuster would have been the first to laugh at such nonsense. Equally unbelievable – or, if actually true, mighty damn irritating – is DeHaven’s imitation of Grandpa Simpson in the Android’s Dungeon:

I can’t make much sense of what’s going on in the Superman comic books these days. And God knows I’ve tried. But a story I’ll start reading in Action Comics continues over in Green Lantern, or Wonder Woman, then picks up again in Batman or Supergirl, but I didn’t get those, I didn’t know, and when I open the next issue of Action, everything and everybody has moved on, and a lot of new brightly costumed characters I don’t recognize are gathered on a strange space ship I’ve never seen before intoning gobbledygook about, oh, I don’t know, power stones. What the hell are power stones?

(Sadly, the italics are in the original)

One can only hope that this note of avuncular confusion is a marketing ploy designed to give Our Hero at least some crossover appeal to non-comics fans. In describing the rise in the 1970s of “the first generation of bona-fide geeks,” DeHaven harkens back to his days as a boy in Mayberry:

Traditionally (before, say, 1965), you didn’t “collect” comic books: you bought one, you read it, you rolled it into a tube and stuck it in your back pocket or school bag – then maybe you passed it along to a friend or it was confiscated by a teacher or parent, but pretty soon it disappeared. It cost a dime. It killed half an hour. It certainly wasn’t a lifestyle.

(The author, methinks, protests too much; elsewhere in Our Hero, DeHaven lists off various Krypton-related animals, including a super-dog, a super-cat, and a super-monkey but pointedly excluding a super-horse – Superman fans will spot immediately the true depth of geekhood this reveals).

And there are some odd oversights, none more egregious than the footnote that accompanies DeHaven’s mention of fan favorite artist/writer John Byrne’s 1986 retooling of the character:

DC comics also officially ended the Weisinger-edited Silver-Age Superman series, with a two-part story that ran in Superman number 423 and Action Comics number 583. Alan Moore, still riding the crest of his Watchmen triumph, killed off a large number of the famous cast of characters, but took what he was doing seriously, respectfully though not reverentially, and turned in one of the handful of indisputably great Superman stories.

Yes indeed. And the name of this indisputably great Superman story? Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen.

This curiously scattershot element is the biggest shortcoming of the book (DeHaven seems unwilling to give any real consideration to more-or-less contemporary depictions of the character – Smallville and Superman Returns are given skimpy treatment, the 1990s live-action Superboy TV series and the various excellent cartoon treatments of Superman from the 2000s are barely examined)(criminally, the seminal graphic novel Kingdom Come is never mentioned), because the precise-yet-passionate rhetorical ability of It’s Superman! most reliably appears in Our Hero when DeHaven is analyzing either the Richard Donner Superman movie, or – much to the delight of readers like me, who love it unashamedly – the 1950s Adventures of Superman TV show, starring George Reeves (“tall, dark, handsome – and decidedly thick around the middle”) and featuring a per-episode special effects bill you could pay yourself. Reeves won the role over 200 other hopefuls, and DeHaven is right that his portrayal of the character lodged in the national consciousness:

Yet for more than two decades – until Christopher Reeve, in the late-1970s – it was most likely/almost certainly knock-kneed middle-aged George Reeves with his brilliantined hair (not spit curl for him, just a slight pomp) and obvious tummy girdle that most of us saw as a momentary flash in our minds whenever the name Superman was mentioned.

The only disappointment here is that DeHaven makes it seem like random chance (or perhaps the lack of dreamy Christopher Reeve as an alternative) kept poor old knock-kneed George Reeves in the mind’s eye so long, when actually watching those old Adventures of Superman episodes reveals a far more immediate possibility. Yes, Reeves’ Clark Kent is a tight-lipped no-nonsense take-charge kind of guy … but not even that prepares the reader for what his Superman is: truly, sometimes terrifyingly alien. He blasts through walls, leaps into fist-fights, springs out casement windows with an abrupt, almost cutting kind of vitality that makes everyone else look rooted to the spot, and when he has a serious point to make (and since Reeves plays him as a neighborhood beat-cop, he always has a serious point to make), he looms up to his audience, as though to underscore the unthinkable consequence should anyone not do what he says. At one point when Inspector Henderson – of the Metropolis Police, mind you, and a few grades up from a traffic cop – is being less than forthcoming about a case, Superman happily, conversationally says, “Now c’mon, Bill – I don’t want to have to toss you around like a beach ball.” Henderson offers a tight little laugh – and gets right to the point. Because if he doesn’t, this Superman (and only this one – without Reeves saying the lines, they’re completely impossible) really will pick him up and bounce him around until he does. In the world of The Adventures of Superman, the Man of Steel is completely unaccountable to the law – even by the Law.

(This is further dramatized when the TV series takes a scene from the old radio show and has a pair of dedicated criminals mock Superman about his well-known refusal to take a life. They figure they’ll do some time in prison, then they’ll either escape or be paroled and be at their life of crime again, and they laugh. Whereupon Superman deposits them on the top of a snowy mountain – and simply flies away. “You’re right – I won’t kill you,” he tells them. “What you do from this point on is up to you.”)

Still, it’s great fun watching these episodes again through DeHaven’s eyes, and his insights about them are always sharp:

Reeves snaps out Kent dialog, then presses his lips into a grim line. He does the same thing as Superman. Never – not here [in the original B-movie “Superman and the Mole Men”] and not later in the television series – does he play Clark Kent as Superman in disguise. He plays him as Superman in street clothes, out and about in his cool fifties threads, the tortoise-shell eyeglass frames merely a fashion accessory. Both personae speak the same way, glare the same way, move and stride and gesture and abruptly pivot the same way. Of course they’re the same guy. But nobody notices. And Lois Lane especially doesn’t; Kent faces down a lynch mob and still the woman snipes at him as contemptuously as she’d been doing in the comics for thirteen years.

It’s invigorating stuff, and you wish DeHaven had bestirred himself to add another 30 pages onto his book’s svelte length by paying similar attention to, well, every other television incarnation of the character to appear since the 1950s. Maybe he’s saving it for a sequel.

Certainly there would be no shortage of material for such a book! The lackluster first season of the 1988-1992 Adventures of Superboy TV show, for instance, didn’t exactly inspire long-time fans of the character to songs of praise. But then for the second season the show replaced the pretty but lackluster John Newton with the more intense Gerard Christopher and installed the absolutely stupendous Sherman Howard as a grinning, hammy, genuinely threatening Lex Luthor, and suddenly fans started getting relatively complex and entertaining multi-part stories similar to what they were enjoying in the comics (the best of these featured former ‘Tarzan’ action hero Ron Ely as a white-haired, cardigan-wearing elderly Superman – making Eli the only actor to date who’s played both those iconic characters). And although the Bryan Singer Superman Returns had its deepset flaws (in a daring act of cinematic seppuku, for example, the movie’s villain and the movie’s hero were both played a vaguely effeminate milksops), its elaborate special effects surely merit a mention, since they come closer than any other filmed version to showing us what actually seeing Superman in action would be like (curiously anti-climactic, it turns out: everything would be happening so fast, you wouldn’t see much).

Or maybe the question isn’t sequels – maybe DeHaven is worried any of this will distract him – and his audience – from that opening question of Superman’s essential traits. On his book’s last page, DeHaven performs a slight elaboration on those essential traits. Oh, Lois Lane is still there, as is (or was) Krypton, and the Clark Kent persona, and the amazing physical abilities. But now there’s another element in the limelight, a decidedly off-putting one. Superman, we’re told:

… can fly, and perform marvelous feats of strength, which he chooses to do because it brings him great satisfaction.

Chooses to do because it brings him great satisfaction. The philanthropist’s dirty little secret.

As with athletes and artists, there has always been a selfish, even a self-serving quality to Superman, to Superman’s ego. He doesn’t require love from the multitudes; Lois Lane will do. Basically, what he needs, and all he needs, is the freedom to act in ways that are satisfying to him.

That’s why he’ll “never stop doing good.”

It makes him feel good, dammit.

Our hero.

So duty, sacrifice, altruism, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” get dropped in favor of “I do whatever feels good”? Sounds like something Lex Luthor would say.

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Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.

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Amy King Amy King’s most recent books are Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and, forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She edits the Poetics List (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO), and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. King also co-curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. For more information, please visit http://amyking.org.

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Many people considered our Uncle Mitrofan to be peculiar, eccentric – God’s fool even. But there were others, like my brother, the writer Anton Chekhov, who treated him with affection and respect. Uncle Mitrofan dedicated his life to charity. He served as a council member and churchwarden, and helped found the Taganrog Charitable Society, created for the relief of the poor. His house was always open to those less fortunate, and on his birthday he would set up tables full of food in the courtyard and open his gates for everyone to come eat.

With these lines, Mikhail Chekhov begins a memoir of his older brother and exposes all the book’s weaknesses at once. His brother has been a cipher to him in youth and a stranger to him in middle age; compiling a full-length book on the man will take great feats of padding, including a human resource department’s interest in the curricula vitae of minor characters. After nine more sentences about Uncle Mitrofan, Mikhail finds his way back to his theme: “Our family kept a carefully bound book of the letters [Mitrofan] wrote to my parents during his travels around Russia before his marriage in 1859. I am convinced that Uncle Mitrofan’s literary gift was passed from him to us, especially to my brothers Anton and Alexander, who both became published writers.”

Mikhail Chekhov began publishing his reminiscences in 1905, a year after Anton’s death at forty-four of tuberculosis. In 1920 he arranged them as a single volume, quotations of which have appeared in the writings of Chekhov biographers and scholars ever since. Only now, however, has the entirety of Anton Chekhov: A Brother’s Memoir been published in English translation. The basic outline of Anton Chekhov’s life is well-known: born in 1860, the second of five children to parents whose own parents had been serfs. His mother was pious and demure, his father irrational and violent, his siblings all talented and creative. From odd jobs selling newspaper subscriptions and writing and drawing short pieces on spec, the boys rose to varying degrees of prominence in Moscow’s magazine culture, Anton meanwhile completing medical school and beginning a private practice. His plays were usually received barbarously – picture Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debut crossed with Henry James’ theatrical disaster – but readership of his stories and novellas grew steadily, and medicine became Chekhov’s secondary profession. Both taxed his physical and psychological health, however, and Chekhov succumbed to TB in 1904, twenty-four years after his first publication, and six months after the opening of The Cherry Orchard, his first runaway hit.

Mikhail’s memoir, translated by Eugene Alpern, has more flaws than virtues, though the “good” flaws indicate Anton’s elusiveness as a subject, much as the thinner ice on a frozen river indicates a strong current underneath. The “bad” flaws are the patches of stilted writing and the long tracts of verbiage devoted to tracing Anton’s exact coordinates in a long-forgotten social and literary network of Russian ex-celebrities. Among the more interesting flaws are the pregnant omissions. Little is said about the more troubled circumstances that shaped Anton’s life: his abusive and alcoholic father, his series of failed romantic and sexual relationships, and his eventual estrangement from his immediate family, including Mikhail himself. A scant sentence is devoted to the latter, which was precipitated by Anton’s sudden marriage to a Moscow actress: “I lost touch with my brother Anton after that and never saw him again.”

Mikhail’s anecdotes miss the point with such regularity that one begins to wonder whether he is deliberately aiming short of the mark. He mentions their father’s religious devotion in order to explain how Anton, an atheist by conviction and a doctor by profession, acquired the liturgical knowledge displayed in his story “Easter Eve.” In Anton’s letters and in their brother Alexander’s memoir, however, references to their father’s religiosity are almost always bitter, coupled with memories of fanatically long and physically taxing sessions of family prayer, churchgoing at all hours of the day and night, and joyless participation as “convicts” sentenced to the church choir. Mikhail seems unwilling to address the bouts of poverty that punctuated their childhood except as opportunities for hardihood and filial piety to blossom. Yet he does seem to hint at the misery and narrowness of such a life, with throwaway lines like this one:

Once, [Anton] bought a live duck at the market. He kept poking at it and making it quack the whole way home – “Let everybody hear that we, too, eat ducks,” he said.

Mikhail immediately moves on to discuss Anton’s interest in birds, specifically homing pigeons, and the duck episode is left behind without comment. Yet one can fill in the psychological shading that Mikhail leaves out, and retell the story thus: imagine a boy who often goes to bed hungry, whose family, by some brief uptick in income or prodigality, is able to afford a luxury food. The boy, either because he fails to see how the duck’s suffering is like his own suffering – or, more interestingly, because he does see it – torments the duck all the way from market to kitchen. The noise of the duck tells the passersby that the Chekhovs can afford fresh meat tonight, and tells the readers something about pain or power or longing. Mikhail has just rushed a tragedy past us in its embryonic form; it remains unclear whether or not his failure to realize his story is a deliberate choice.

The Chekhov family in 1874; Anton is standing at the second to left and Mikhail is seated at the far left

Mikhail was not the only kinsman of Anton’s to immortalize their relationship, or rather, the negative space surrounding it: Alexander and Marya Chekhov also have their own accounts, each one patchy and unreliable in its own way. All three disagree with each other on several points, and disagree on all points with the memoir of Lydia Ivanovna, a Russian writer who seems to have entirely fabricated her tale of a multi-year romance with Anton. Poor Lydia Ivanovna’s account strikes one as self-delusion rather than intentional deceit, since the data she musters is real (letters between her and Anton, encounters at theaters and parties), but the conclusions she draws seem utterly out of keeping with the evidence. (Essentially, Chekhov continually tells her to go away, which her memoir interprets as the tortured cries of fatal attraction.)

The pen name Anton Chekhov used in his early twenties, Antosha Chekhonte, is a telling one: Chekhov was a man of disguises, but primarily of thin ones. He would be gregarious with men, flirtatious with women, and worshipped by both at dinners and parties, but whichever close friend or brother had shared a cab with him on the way to the event would remember how he had begged to stay home and had complained of society’s marrow-sucking appetite for its current darlings. Sometimes the disguises he wore were lighter and more literal: one slow week at his clinic, Anton had Mikhail dress as a female nurse and attend to patients with him; another invented game was to “play the Orient,” darkening his face and brow and challenging friends with a toy sword. Alexander’s memoir dwells even more on such pranks and disguises, casting the entire family as a tribe of imps. Alexander’s account was also completed shortly before he died of alcoholism, so both Masha and Mikhail take pains to remind their readers, in the most delicate and euphemizing terms possible, that Alexander’s stories are rife with errors and embellishments due to his illness.

For all their willed or unwitting mistakes, though, all four memoirists were canny speculators in literary futures: Anton’s successes were modest for most of his short life, yet the four write as if the man and his stories were the household names that now, a century later, they are. Mikhail’s account is innocent of real literary criticism, but he notes meticulously the composite sources for Anton’s characters and settings. We learn that while visiting their schoolteacher brother Ivan in the provinces, Anton observed a local military battery that inspired The Three Sisters; in particular, one Lieutenant Egorov “retired from the army with a passion to ‘work, work, work,’ just like the character Baron Tuzenbakh.” During Anton’s medical residency, “he got the plots for stories like ‘Escapee’ and ‘Surgery,’” while the local postmaster inspired “The Government Test.” If any of this trivia flies over your head, imagine how it struck original readers of 1905, before Anton’s work had settled comfortably into literature courses of high schools and universities around the world. Mikhail’s simple faith that people would want to know where a minor character in the novella Three Years had come from – he is based on a clerk in their cousin’s warehouse, apparently – is charming.

Anton and Mikhail at Anton's estate in Melikhovo on the steps of the outhouse (1895)

Sakhalin is a place of the most unbearable suffering that can befall a man, free or shackled…. I regret that I am not sentimental, or I would say that we need to pay homage to places like Sakhalin, the way the Turks do to Mecca…. From the books that I’ve been reading, it’s clear that we have let millions of people rot in prisons. We do it for no reason, without thinking, just like barbarians. Our country has forced people to walk in fetters in the cold for thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, and dumped them all into the hands of red-nosed prison wardens. All of the educated people of Europe should know that the wardens are not the only ones perpetuating these abuses – we all are.

Mikhail provides a sobering and honest account of the rest of Chekhov’s time on the island, although, in typical fashion, he closes the chapter (entitled, understatedly, “Anton’s Travels”) with a long report about the mongoose and the palm cat that Anton brought home as pets after purchasing them in India on the way home from Sakhalin. The story of the animals’ eventual fall from grace in the Chekhov family home and subsequent emigration to the city zoo is funny, but juxtaposed so soon after the twenty-eight thousand souls of Sakhalin, the animals’ little saga of exile must strike everyone except Mikhail himself as being in incredibly poor taste.

All along such anecdotes we see Anton through the cracks in the story, winking or wincing while Mikhail portrays an anodyne near-likeness. The “Anton’s Travels” chapter is, in spite of itself, a great key to understanding what I consider to be Chekhov’s best stories, those written between 1892 and 1896. (My list would include “In Exile,” “Ward No. 6,” “The Black Monk,” “Anna on the Neck,” and the novella My Life.) Here, I think, is a more fruitful angle for future criticism: instead of remarking, as Mikhail does, that Anton knew a man who received the Order of Saint Anna, which provides the title pun for Anton’s short story “Anna on the Neck,” it would be interesting to note that the story was written shortly after his return from Sakhalin, concurrent with his writing of The Island, and to explore the ways in which the main character Anna’s hideous marriage is like an incarceration. “Ward No. 6” stands most obviously to benefit from a parallel reading with the Sakhalin account, being concerned with the involuntary confinement of mental patients; the narrator of My Life finds labor itself to be a prison, albeit a blackly comical one.

In a photograph taken of the Chekhov family in the late 1880s, Mikhail and Anton sit together in front of the other eight figures. They wear nearly the same pair of striped pants, with Anton’s print a little wider and bolder. Anton’s coat is unbuttoned; Mikhail’s is not. Anton’s hands and feet hang loose, and his face is bare. Mikhail grasps his crossed legs tightly, and his face sports an older man’s pair of spectacles. Anton looks as though he accepts whatever understanding of life he has managed to glean in his twenty-eight years; Mikhail looks as though he is in the process of declining it. Both were writers of fictions, in their way, and like good fiction writers, they had a way of doing reverence to honesty even when they fabricated. Mikhail’s memoir in all its apparent simplicity reminds us of his brother’s tremendous inscrutability. Moreover, it reminds us of the continual need to discover in ourselves the blind spots, deliberate and accidental, that make both observation and recollection such idiosyncratic and partial acts.

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Laura Kolbe has written for the Harvard Book Review and the Oxonian Review. She lives in New York City.

By Thornton Wilder
Original printing 1927, many reissues

This article is part of a series which delves into a different short novel each month, revisiting classics and considering neglected masterpieces. To read the series introduction, “The Sweetness of Short Novels,” click here. To suggest a short novel for inclusion in the series, write to ingridnorton[at]live.com. Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a peculiar masterpiece. Its chapters and themes interlock with such grace and necessity that the book seems more like a marvelous and free-standing mechanism — a jeweled music box or perfectly sprung wrist-watch — than like a novel. At the story’s start Wilder creates a world and an over-arching theme. Over five chapters of only a few thousand words each, he proceeds to deftly populate the stage he has set. The parts fit together so perfectly that, as one gazes at the descriptive polish and intricate overlapping of plot and characterization, the force that underlies and propels the tale remains invisible until the very end.

I. Conceit

The nominal setting of the novel is 18th century Peru. But Wilder only takes history as his raw material. The book really unfolds in the world of parable, of fast narration and delicate, stylized descriptions which arise out of Wilder’s imagination. From the first line, Wilder envelopes the reader in a narrative arc: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.”

The subject of the first line is the eponymous bridge rather than the travellers — not the individuals but the snap of rope that determined their deaths. Using a baroque verb such as “precipitated” instead of a more conversational “throwing” or “dropping” serves to draw attention to the travellers’ fall, suspending them in a moment instead of simply dispatching them to finish the phrase. The precise date and confidently objective description of the bridge as the “finest in all of Peru” set the novel’s tone. Throughout, Wilder narrates with omniscient assurance:

The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.

The smooth way Wilder sets the tableau of Peruvians signing themselves and wandering as in a trance works because the experience he describes is common. Upon hearing of an accident at a frequented road or a misfortune coming to a close friend, most people feel the thinness of the line that separates good luck and bad, the presence of the dark gulf below our actions.

Wilder uses this universality to pivot to the heady question of determinism. An Italian missionary, the memorably-named Brother Juniper, is present when the bridge snaps. Stopping to rest on his way to Cuzco and gazing at the snowy peaks (all this transpires in the first three pages), he takes in the bridge — and “at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of a musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.”

Instead of being full of furtive relief that the bridge didn’t snap a few minutes later, when he was crossing it, a strange idea stirs Brother Juniper. Juniper, Wilder notes with wry bemusement, longs for theology to “take its place among the exact sciences.” In the past he has tabulated the results of prayers for rain and the piety, sin, and usefulness of survivors versus that of victims of a plague. But the experiments have never been adequate: “the gap between faith and fact is greater than generally assumed.”

But in the bridge’s collapse, the determined missionary sees the perfect laboratory for proving the existence of divine providence: “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” Unlike other calamities which involved human agency or probability, the fact that the bridge should fail at the exact moment a certain set of people were crossing seems to him an Act of God.

The Franciscan resolves to find out everything he can about the five who died in order to explain why they should have died at that moment. He spends the next six years knocking on doors in Lima, compiling a huge tome about the victims, recording every little detail. However, Wilder suggests that Brother Juniper’s pseudo-scientific labors miss the point. The slim and eloquent The Bridge of San Luis Rey is presented as a counter to Juniper’s grandiose compilation of details and theological surmises:

Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Dona Maria’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s. And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?

Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

The subject of the book, then, is what is later referred to as “the great Perhaps”: humankind’s search for meaning, poised between the cruel and random fall of a fly-swatter and the unlikely attention to detail of an invisible finger brushing a feather. The first chapter which sets forth the conceit is titled, “Perhaps an Accident.” It stands across from the last, “Perhaps an Intention.” In between, Wilder strings three chapters, each named for a victim of the bridge collapse. He narrates their lives, promising an answer to the ancient question of life’s meaning which will be more profound than all contained in Juniper’s furious prayers and investigations.

II. Style & Character

We know from the start that there are five who fall from the bridge, but only three chapters, for the Marquesa de Montemayor (Dona Maria), Esteban, and Uncle Pio. The other two victims are unknown, giving the sections a shade of suspenseful authority. Each chapter ends with its protagonist’s fall from the bridge, and it is a pleasure to watch Wilder shift from descriptions of their lives to the end we know is coming. We meet a host of characters — some who will live, and some who will die — all inhabiting a finely-wrought and idiosyncratic world.

First comes the Marquesa de Montemayor, who becomes posthumously famous in Peruvian literature for the letters she writes Dona Clara, her unloving daughter in Spain. The Marquesa persecutes her child with “a fatiguing love” and tries to win her admiration with monthly letters, full of wit and eloquent observations. The Marquesa is an alternately pathetic and tragic figure. Oblivious to those around her and often drunk, her red wig slightly askew, she lives almost entirely in her imagination and her compositions. But the Marquesa also loves her daughter deeply and sometimes feels a pang of shame, “for she knew…that though her love for her daughter was vast enough to include all the colours of love, it was not without a shade of tyranny: she loved her daughter not for her daughter’s sake, but for her own. She longed to free herself from this ignoble bond; but the passion was too fierce to cope with.”

We are also introduced to her precocious, diligent assistant, the 14 year-old Pepita, who comes to live with the Marquesa after growing up in an abbey, raised by the Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar. Madre Maria sees a successor to her work in the bright, serious girl. Wilder characterizes her as one of those people who have “allowed their lives to be gnawed away” by falling in love with an idea ahead of its time. In the abbess’s case, the independence of women, which she tirelessly organizes for among her nuns:

Looking back from our century, we can see the whole folly of her hope. Twenty such women would have failed to make any impression on that age…. She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of bystanders.

Of course, Wilder’s book is itself a sort of fable. His characters are archetypal, the settings evoked with embroidered confidence. He tells the tale through small, striking metaphors. Wise generalizations are dispatched with intimate ease. The neat, bird’s eye narration resembles the tone of a book of children’s folk tales. Uncle Pio, for instance, subject of the fourth chapter and mentor of the beautiful stage actress Camila Perichole, lives a varied, wandering life because he possesses “the six attributes of the adventurer—a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.”

Esteban of the third chapter, raised by the abbess with his twin brother Manuel, is torn by jealousy when Manuel, always extremely close to him, becomes infatuated with Perichole. “There was no room in [Estaban's] imagination for a new loyalty, not because his heart was less large than Manuel’s, but because it was of a simpler texture. Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.” Later he is torn apart by grief when his beloved brother, who gives up his infatuation for his sake, dies because of an infection.

Part of the fabulist feel arises from the fact that some of the characters are Wilder’s versions of real historical figures, distilled into archetypes. The Marquesa has her antecedent in Madame de Sevigne, a 17th century French marquise famous for letters to her admiring and loving daughter. Wilder changes the setting and character, and makes the poignant love for her daughter unreturned. Camila Perichole, a beautiful actress, is based on La Pericholli, a real 18th century street-singer-cum-aristocrat. But Uncle Pio, her world weary care-taker, who loves her with fatalistic remove and is ultimately spurned by her, is pure invention.

Each character, completely invented or partly derived from history, is stylized to fit the ends of Wilder’s narrative. Each attribute has its place in the novel. Wilder sketches whole biographies with a few authoritative words. The characters are like Mona Lisas painted on the head of pins in order to fit into his short, delicate narrative of meaning.

III. On Necessity

The framing device of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is justifiably famous. It has inspired authors as diverse as New Journalist John Hersey (he zooms in on the lives of six individuals in his famous account of the 1945 bombing, Hiroshima) and to the overlapping stories of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which features a character named Luisa Rey in tribute to Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is beautiful and brilliant, but the fact that every element fits in place— the very neatness of the plot — can be oppressive.

Wilder’s novel possesses an old-fashioned, sepia tint. Its Victorian conventions of asides to the reader and its neat third person were as unfashionable when it was published in the modernist 20s as they are today. The craft of The Bridge of San Luis Rey is overt and utterly earnest. The narrative manipulation is up-front, with nary a wink or untidy sentence. One longs to ruffle a feather or discover a crack. Wilder gets away the patness through the fantastic beauty of his writing and because of the tale’s Aesopean brevity (varying editions usually clock in at around 110 pages).

Wilder has written that he was inspired to write the novel by friendly arguments with his father, a strict Calvinist. But though the novel dismantles a certain kind of calculating Puritanism, it carries its own form of calibrated plan. Though it treats the question of whether things happen of divine necessity with bemused wisdom, there is no question that what happens in the book is pre-planned and inevitable. The plan is Wilder’s, not God’s. The pleasures of the novel are those of being carried along on authorial skill, watching a carefully structured narrative unfurl rather than participating in a drama. The joy of reading it lies in narrative necessity and beauty. Wilder’s artistry finds meaning and creates order, even if order’s existence is in doubt in the world outside.

IV. Resolution

The end of each character’s life, chapter by chapter, are like notes in an ascending score. The night before her walk over the bridge, the Marquesa is inspired by Pepita’s strong, tacit longing for the Abbess. When the girl tears up a beseeching letter she wrote the nun, the astonished Marquesa asks why she isn’t going to send it. “It wasn’t brave,” Pepita replies, causing the Marquesa to question her own grasping love from her daughter. That night, she sits down to write the first generous and brave letter of her life, demanding nothing in return for her love. The next day, she and Pepita both step onto the famous rope bridge to return to Lima. Esteban, who has lost the will to live in a world without his brother, crosses at the same time on his way to a dreaded sea voyage. Uncle Pio falls out from Camila and, in a last bid for inclusion in her life, takes her son away for tutoring — both also cross the bridge.

At the end of the book, the survivors gather. Camila Perichole mourns her inability to show to love to both her son and Uncle Pio; Dona Clara, brandishing the Marquesa’s last letter, praises her mother. The abbess feels resignation that her hopes for the next generation’s continuation of her work died with Pepita. Was the bridge meant to fall or not? There is enough narrative order that Intention seems possible. Perhaps it was planned that Esteban should fall from a bridge once he’d lost the will to live; that the Marquesa should die at the moment of her most brave and generous impulses, without living to fail them.

Then again, there is no good reason the Abbess’s bright teenage protegee should die with her years ahead, that Camila should outlive her son. Wilder doesn’t give an answer to his great Perhaps. Brother Juniper is ultimately burned at the stake by church authorities for being too inquisitive. The order of the novel’s plot and resolution make the reader aware of the human instincts toward story and purpose, the desire to impose a narrative on and find a reason for tragedy which Wilder makes manifest in his book’s conceit and execution.

V. Love

Yet ultimately, Wilder overturns his own game of narrative agnosticism, dissolving the dichotomy between Divine Intention and a universe woven of apathy and accident. If it seemed clear to the reader that the book’s careful structure was crafted in order to delve into the conflict between Juniper’s desire for certainty and the world’s refusal to supply it, Wilder in the last proves it was his design to make the very question irrelevant. Running beneath each sentence of the novel, animating each description, is a different purpose.

Wilder doesn’t merely borrow tone and narrative mode from fable — the novel is a fable of love. Wilder’s short novel gets to the center of each character’s life more than Juniper’s tabulation of sins because the novel gets to the heart of their passions. The fact that the book was about love all along is scarcely noticeable because Wilder articulates love in such completely different ways. There is a huge distance between the Marquesa’s fervent pining and the Abbess’s steady and self-contained empathy and idealism. Uncle Pio’s romantic, distant love for Perichole is utterly different than Manuel’s infatuation — or the profoundly tender way Esteban cannot function without his twin. Camila Perichole feels the greatest love for those around her when she is most keenly aware of her own coldness.

But in Wilder’s rendering, even lack of love, failed and distorted love, is part of the stream. The composite picture of love that emerges from the book’s pages is as idiosyncratic as it is indelible. The idealistic Abbess is allowed this insight. At the end of the day, with Dona Clara attending her, she goes to tend to the sick and talks to them of those alone in the dark who find the world “more than difficult, without meaning”:

But even while she was talking, other thoughts were passing in the back of her mind. “Even now,” she thought, “almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

The bridge Wilder builds between meaninglessness and purpose, the famous bridge of San Luis Rey, doesn’t belong to accident, God, or to his own authorial plotting, but to love.

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Ingrid Norton has written for publications including Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Soundcheck Magazine.

Paganini’s Ghost

By Paul Adam
Minotaur Books, 2010

The opening scene of this gem of a novel unfolds like a vintage noir movie. A convoy arrives at Giovanni Battista Castiglione’s unassuming dwelling. Castiglione, who modestly introduces himself as a “violin maker and repairer,” is, in fact, “the best luthier in Cremona.” Hence the procession of vehicles.

There were six vehicles in the convoy. I had been telephoned half an hour earlier to be given advance warning of its arrival, so that I was waiting outside my house when the procession appeared on the horizon, speeding towards me along the road from Cremona. At the front was a blue-and-white police patrol car with its roof light flashing, but its siren mercifully silent…. Behind the patrol car was a shiny dark blue Alfa Romeo with tinted windows, followed by a black armoured van like the ones banks use for delivering cash to their branches. Fourth in the line was a red Fiat Bravo, then a silver Mercedes saloon. Bringing up the rear was a second marked police car…. I had never seen anything like it.

The first police car skidded to a halt just past the entrance to the front of my house…. Two scruffy uniformed officers climbed out, both sporting the mirror sunglasses, stubble and institutional truculence that seem to be de rigueur in the Polizia Nazionale….the Alfa Romeo and the armoured van stopped beside me.

Two men got out of the Alfa Romeo…. Their smart black suits, white shirts, and highly polished black shoes were identical. Even their ties were the same…they were wearing mirror sunglasses like the police officers, but a class apart in every other respect—sleek, well-fed leopards to the policemen’s mangy alley cats…heads constantly moving, eyes searching…walkie-talkies clutched in their hands, they looked like bodyguards you always see accompanying heads of state…only the body they were guarding was made of maple and pine, rather than flesh and blood. Inside the armoured van—looking very small and insignificant—was a rather shabby rectangular violin case.

Everything about the occasion—the policeman, the bodyguards, the armoured van—seemed so over the top that I was almost inclined to laugh. But the precautions were understandable, for this was no ordinary violin…this was a Guarneri “del Gesù”—the most valuable, famous Guarneri del Gesù on earth. This was il Cannone—the Cannon—the violin that had belonged to Nicolò Paganini.

And thereby hangs a tale. The violin has developed a slight buzz—audible only to the ears of the prodigy, a rising young Russian, Yevgeny Ivanov, who is to play it at a world-famous, heavily promoted recital in the Cremona cathedral in a few hours. Castiglione’s not inconsiderable skills are required. Banishing all but Ivanov from his workshop (including the prodigy’s formidable diva of a mama, Ludmilla), Castiglione approaches the “patient” with all the delicacy that accompanies a royal birth. He saves the day and night. Ivanov makes the violin “sing like an angel” in the beautiful old basilica, and all’s well that ends well. Alas, not quite. Things, as we all know, are seldom what they seem.

The morning after the recital, Francois Villeneuve, a visiting Parisian art dealer with a somewhat unsavory reputation, is found murdered in his hotel room. Villeneuve was last seen at the post-concert reception in the company of Milanese violin dealer, Vincenzo Serafin. In the victim’s possession: an ornate gold box, obviously the work of a master craftsman, with an engraving of Moses on Mount Sinai on the lid. Even more curious, the unique combination lock uses letters instead of numbers. And in the man’s wallet, a scrap of paper torn from the Paganini piece, the “Moses Fantasy,” played by Ivanov.

Paul Adam

Gianni Castiglione is called into the case by his friend, police detective Antonio Guastafeste. He knows that Gianni’s musical expertise, knowledge of genealogy and provenance, so vital in the hunt for long missing treasures, is invaluable. (The pair were introduced in Adam’s The Rainaldi Quartet.) Plus, Castiglione has a “close” love/hate business relationship with Serafin. As he puts it, “Serafin has friends in low places.” And Serafin, when pressed, does, a very unconvincing act of distancing himself from Villeneuve.

The more pressing question is what’s in the gold box? Castiglione tries his hand at the combination, without success. Frustrating, because Guastafeste’s policemen’s nose tells him: “There’s something inside it; I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, it’s important.” He’s got that right. They will soon discover they are on to something that could knock the curious world of classical musicians on its heels.

And now, a literary digression whose core is page 69. Yes, 69. Bear with me. Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan suggested that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book, and, if you like it, read it. (Minor aside: I seriously doubt that McLuhan was being mischievous when he chose that number.) Captivated by McLuhan’s theory, Marshall Zeringue, whose blogging enterprises are clustered at The Campaign for the American Reader, started a daily feature called “the page 69 test,” in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of his or her book, if it is a key component of the plot. Put more complexly, if it is a concise microcosm of the novel’s narrative and thematic elements. As the blog reveals, many an author who thought this idea pure hokum has been converted. Trust me, this can wreak havoc with your time if you start going to your bookshelves.

At any rate, this takes me back to Paganini’s Ghost and page 68, which ends with Guastafeste’s emphatic pronouncement that the contents of the gold box are “important.” And on to what the author Paul Adam wrote after he applied the “page 69 test”:

Page 69 is something of a lull in the storm of activity that precedes, and follows, it. It’s something I believe every good thriller needs—a break from the action which can get too relentless, and a chance too for the reader to get to know, and understand, the leading characters better. The opening to chapter six, the page is a moment of quiet reflection when Gianni Castiglione takes a break from detection to return to his violin making and muse on his long career as a luthier.

And it is, of course, during this period of reflection, while playing Paganini’s “Moses Fantasy” for himself, that he figures out how to crack the code of the gold box:

“We were trying out the wrong notes,” I said to Guastafeste.

He’d driven out from Cremona and was sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of red wine in his hand. He’d brought the gold box with him, which must have breached at least a half a dozen official regulations. But he seemed to have a clear conscience. The Italian police are sticklers for rules only when not applied to themselves.

“The wrong notes?” he said.

Castiglione launches into an erudite musical explanation involving the notes of the “Moses Fantasy” and its connection to the combination of the lock which, per miracolo, opens the box.

Unfortunately, it’s empty save for a very old piece of paper that appears to be a letter. What is clear from the outline in the lining is that the box once housed a miniature violin. The letter divulges that the box was a gift to Paganini from Elisa Baciocchi, nee Bonaparte, the princess of Piombino and Lucca, Napoleon’s sister, and Paganini’s lover. Paganini, one of the most complex, charismatic, celebrated—some would say notorious—virtuosos in history, moved in very high circles.

It’s a lead that takes Castiglione and Guastafeste on a cross-continental search of the lushly carpeted, inner sanctums of the world’s leading jewelers and auction houses. As they travel around Europe, they find themselves following a trail that links back through time to Catherine the Great, to unravel a mystery that has remained unsolved for over two hundred years. And perhaps, put to rest the soul of a ghost.

Paganini’s Ghost is classy, low key suspense. It is filled with charming, anecdotal revelations about the 19th century music world, including a delectable portrait of the secret and scandalous world of orchestras like La Scala’s. It’s a puzzle with perfect pitch, that combines Italian ambience with exquisite pacing, meticulous plotting, and a masterful climax worthy of Paganini.

___
Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.

With Point Omega, DeLillo again wrestles with his usual preoccupations. The writer, born in 1936, also continues to write in what could be called his late style, which is characterized by economy and suggestiveness rather than elaboration and detail. The predictable responses, from those who want the old DeLillo and from those who wonder if DeLillo has gotten old, ensued again. If anything like a critical consensus emerged, it was that DeLillo ain’t what he used to be, but reviewers couldn’t quite agree on just what his problem was or when symptoms first appeared.

“No writer has been as prescient and eerily prophetic about 21st-century America as Don DeLillo,” Michiko Kakutani declares in a New York Times Review of 2007’s Falling Man. “His novels, from Players and White Noise through Libra and Mao II and the remarkable Underworld, not only limned the surreal weirdness of the waning years of the 20th century,” continues the critic (who in her own fashion has committed her share of weirdness to type), “but somehow also managed to anticipate the shock and horror of 9/11 and its darkly unspooling aftermath.” The sort of readers who say a work of fiction is “about” something necessarily specific would say Falling Man is about 9/11. Point Omega, involving as it does the war in Iraq, thus is “about” its aftermath, just as other novels Kakutani lists are “about” terrorism and political violence. Yet both Point Omega and Falling Man failed to meet the anticipation generated by previous achievement, in Kakutani’s assessment. In her review of Point Omega, she ranks it with other supposedly post-peak works like 2001’s The Body Artist and the 1987 play The Day Room. Novelist Geoff Dyer traces the turning point in DeLillo’s career ever further back to 1991’s Mao II. While Kakutani finds that novel fitting the period of DeLillo’s three-P prime, Dyer says in his Times review of Point Omega, that Mao II “was so self-derivative that one wondered how much he had left in the tank.” Though “self-derivative” seems to damn DeLillo for mining the same familiar vein but with diminished returns, Dyer takes Underworld as “an epic rejoinder” to his dissatisfied readers. Like his colleague Kakutani, however, he ranks Point Omega among DeLillo’s lesser efforts.

Reasons given in the New York Times and elsewhere for Point Omega’s perceived inferiority include its aim, its execution and even its size. Second Pass reviewer Alexander Nazaryan takes the shortness of DeLillo’s late-period work as indicative of an overall diminishment, resulting in “small, ornate miniatures that do not easily give up their secrets.” Where Nazaryan sees adornment, others spy its opposite. Kakutani says DeLillo uses “spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose,” and Charles McGrath, also writing for the Times, both quotes her line and recasts it by calling Point Omega “brief, spare and concentrated.” Dyer finds an uneasy mixture of “stripped down” and “padded-out” prose, occasionally forceful but unable to match the powerful earlier, more masterful stuff. “The good bits in Point Omega keep reminding you of older good bits that turn out also to be better bits,” he burbles. Nazaryan proclaims that the novel “barely has a structure,” while Kakutani, despite her almost total disapproval, allows that it does have “an ingenious architecture.”

DeLillo’s characters concern several critics. Judith Shulevitz writes in Slate that “it’s questionable that much happens here other than a transportation of characters and themes we’ve encountered before in DeLillo novels, the characters signaled rather than fleshed out.” Both she and Kakutani refer to them as holograms. For Kakutani, this means the three principal figures – Richard Elster, the “defense intellectual” who assisted in the conceptualization of the Iraq campaign; Jim Finley, the would-be documentarian wants to make a film of Elster; and Jessie, Elster’s daughter – are not believable human beings. Yet for Shulevitz, this means DeLillo is on to something. “[W]e can’t accuse his attenuated figures of being entirely unlifelike,” she says. “They are like more and more people we know. In our lifetime we are witnessing the dematerialization of the human personality” as people choose to dwell in cyberspace. Kakutani and Shulevitz also both liken the movie Finley hopes to make – Elster alone (“Just a man and a wall”) saying whatever he think in a single take – to Errol Morris’s Robert S. McNamara documentary Fog of War.

The focus on and fascination with film in Point Omega illustrates its close ties to DeLillo’s previous work. His first novel, 1971’s Americana, has television executive David Bell talking about an “anti-movie” involving a monologue, a single camera position and the “shot extended to its ultimate limit in time,” which, as Dyer notices, “sounds like a prophetic summing of the novel Point Omega.” He also points out similarities between comments on film, history and time in The Names and Point Omega. The latter opens and closes with an anonymous man reacting to 24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon’s conceptual artwork consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down so that screening it takes a full day. He contemplates the slow turn of Anthony Perkin’s head: “It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything.” In between prologue and epilogue, Finley flies to California to visit Elster and try to persuade him to participate in his project. He also discusses movies with Elster’s daughter, who, like the other two main characters, saw a portion of 24 Hour Psycho (and was seen doing so by the book’s obsessive, unnamed commentator). She prefers “old movies on television where a man lights a woman’s cigarette. That’s all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women.” Dyer concedes that this is “pretty good,” but insists that remarks about movies in other DeLillo novels are funnier. Benjamin Alsup in Esquire similarly finds Point Omega less humorous than DeLillo’s earlier work. (Alsup doesn’t mention Finley’s first film, a video collage of footage from Jerry Lewis’s telethons, which Finley also doesn’t speak of when staying with his prospective next subject.)

Adam Begley, writing in The New York Observer, says that DeLillo already “owned the Twin Towers” and terrorism as subjects because of Underworld, Players, The Names and Mao II and that with the “extraordinary” Falling Man, “he has exercised his right of ownership and stamped his name on 9/11: He has written a powerful and direct account of the atrocity and its aftermath.” Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Mathew Sharpe notices that critics of The Body Artist, Cosmopolis and Falling Man “seem to want DeLillo to be the Babe Ruth of novelist, to keep writing Underworld and Libra, those long, magisterial books about big events.” He correctly anticipated that such readers would not see Point Omega as “a literary home run.” Even though Sharpe is one of those people who reads novels as being only and ever “about” things, he discerns that Point Omega, even without Libra’s political assassination, White Noise’s airborne toxic event or Underworld’s cold war-era atomic anxiety, could still be “a splendid, fierce novel by a deep practitioner of the form.”

Readers who look to DeLillo as “a kind of secular prophet” (as Esquire’s Alsup describes him) seem to expect answers from him, but he prefers to ask questions. What causes people to surrender their individuality, to lose themselves in crowds or causes – or works of art? What convinces terrorists and dictators to disregard and destroy individuals in pursuit of their aims? How do artists retain and develop their individual identities, explore other people’s identities and persuade people that doing such things matters? Practitioners of both creative activity and political violence aim to make people looks at things in a certain way; what are the implications of this? In Mao II, Bill Gray, a novelist, says:

There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

Gray’s commentary on the link between writers and killers occurs in a conversation with a photographer, Brita, who travels the world to take pictures of writers. “Yes, I travel,” she remarks. “Which means there is no moment on certain days when I’m not thinking about terror.” Later the reclusive Gray meets with a friend from the publishing industry who serves as the “chairman of a high-minded committee on free expression” that hopes to help free a poet being held hostage in Beirut. Charlie Everson tells Gray that “with this one success we can open up everybody’s thinking. How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hard-line positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities?” It would have been possible to have, for instance, the organizer of the mass wedding that opens Mao II speak the those lines. Alternatively, DeLillo could have put them in the mouth of a terrorist. Or they could also have come from Point Omega’s Elster.

Eventually, George, an intermediary working with the hostage-takers in Mao II, persuades Gray to travel to Greece and then Lebanon. During one of their talks, Gray discusses the “zero-sum game” that novelists and terrorists play: “What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought.” Later, alone in Cypress, Gray realizes what he should have said about fiction and terrorism:

Elster in Point Omega echoes Gray’s musing about fiction and meaning, and DeLillo undercuts the pomposity implicit in their positions. “[W]hat’s the meaning of doing dishes if you’re not driven by something beyond sheer necessity,” he wonders after Jessie rearranges the dishes in the kitchen cabinet. The words “doing dishes” could be replaced with “making art” or “making war,” calling into question whether increasing the flow of meaning through not absolutely necessary actions is an unqualified good. Elster frequently considers the power, and the impotence, of words. He tells Finley that he’d wanted a “haiku war,” one that “means nothing beyond what it is” and links ideas to transient things. He describes the desire to manufacture actuality out of words: “Human perception is a saga of created realities.… We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resembled advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.” He’d written an essay about the word rendition that Finley took as “an implied challenge to figure out what the point was.” In it, Elster had said “that words were not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.” He says Jessie “heard words from inside them,” which leads Finley to conclude, “It was his job to say such things.” Elster explains his role in war preparation in almost identical terms: “That’s what I was there for, to give them words and meanings. Words they hadn’t used, new ways of thinking and seeing.” To ask why government officials would want to hear such words (as Kakutani does) might be reasonable, but only if asking why anyone should consider similar ones coming from a novelist like Gray (or DeLillo) is too.

Appropriately, DeLillo offers no clear resolution or answers to the questions he raises. Mao II concludes in the devastated streets of Beirut with the wedding of two people (in pointed contrast to the hundreds of couples of strangers getting married at the start). Flashes indicate a photographer making images. So it ends with a celebration of individuals rather than impersonal crowds and with artistic representation. But the poet-hostage was never freed, having been “sold” by one terrorist group to another. And Gray apparently dies, leaving behind a lousy book. We see him lying near death on the ferry from Cyprus to Lebanon. A cleaning crew member finds him, feels his faint pulse and steals his passport “and other forms of identification” in order to sell them to terrorists, who in Mao II, unlike Falling Man, are motivated by political causes rather than fundamentalist religious ones, though these groups too have members efface their identities for the sake of their leader.

In Falling Man, DeLillo doesn’t attempt to recreate precisely what happened on September 11. Characters don’t explicitly mention the date. Instead, they refer to “the planes” and measure subsequent time in how many days it’s been since “the planes.” They also only allude to the Twin Towers, as when Lianne Glenn (Keith’s wife) and her mother’s lover Martin look at a painting that predates the events involving the planes and both see the towers. They don’t use the formal name, though it does appear late in the novel, when Lianne see the obituary of the performance artist who outfitted himself with a harness and dangled from various structures around New York in a manner evocative of a man photographed plummeting from the north tower. Though DeLillo conveys impressions through fragments and vignettes rather than straightforward, sustained narrative, it’s clear from the start where Keith had worked for a decade. Falling Man begins (and ends) with what he did, saw and heard after he made it out of the disintegrating office building.

Just as the relationships between meaning, art and violence connect Point Omega with a novel published nearly two decades earlier, meditation on time links it with its immediate predecessor. If in Falling Man people in a particular city mark time since a specific catastrophe, in Point Omega cities in general “were built to measure time, to remove time from nature,” at least according to Elster, who seeks refuge in the slower, geologic time of the desert. 24 Hour Psycho, of course, experiments with perception of time, a recurring theme in DeLillo’s later works. “The last two or three novels are more philosophical, for better or worse, and more interested in the subject of time,” he told McGrath. (Much of 2003’s Cosmopolis centers on a man stuck in cross-town traffic.) Here, too, art functions as a response to pain – as a way to beat back unbeatable fear. Elster returns to the poetry he’d read as a youth, believing that literature intends to “cure” the terror of time’s relentless passage.

Unlike Mao II, Falling Man does not see characters pondering terrorists’ displacement of novelists as agents affecting human consciousness. Indeed, Hammad, one of the hijackers in on the plot with Mohamed Atta (called Amir), desires the end of consciousness, thought and awareness. He awaits the day “when there is nothing left to think about.” After the planes, people Lianne knew “were trying earnestly to learn something, find something that might help them to think more deeply into the question of Islam.” They read the Koran, which begins: “This Book is not to be doubted.” But Lianne? “She doubted things, she had her doubts.” Her mother, Nina, and Martin argue about terrorism, and their differences end their relationship. Nina tells Lianne that Martin thinks “these jihadists … have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies,” of which he’d been one. Beyond these few brief interludes, little attempt is made to explain terrorism, its motives or impact. DeLillo offers episodes, short segments of activities on the day of and after the planes: Keith’s unthinking impulse to go to the apartment where Lianne, from whom he’d been separated for a year and half, lives with their son, Justin; his short relationship with a woman who’d also escaped the burning towers and whose briefcase he’d inadvertently carried out; his later existence as a full-time poker player; Justin and his friends watching for more planes sent by “Bill Lawton”; freelance editor Lianne’s volunteer work with Alzheimer disease sufferers; the shirt – the man? – Keith saw falling from the sky after the planes.

In Point Omega Elster mulls the “burden of consciousness” and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the omega point in a manner suggesting that a post-consciousness state is not a desire limited to suicide murderers like Hammad. “We want to be the dead matter we used to be,” he tells Finley. “We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.” He says brute matter moved toward collective, analytical human thought, which then wants to go back: “now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” He calls this wished for event a paroxysm, and Finley comments: “He liked the word. We let it hang out there.” Regardless of whether terrorists or war strategists (or novelists) accelerated the thrust toward self-destruction, Elster sees this thought-annihilating thinking (something Delillo diagnosed in Falling Man) as having metastasized.

In her review of Falling Man, Kakutani strangely calls the novel flawed because Keith is both insufficiently representative of those affected by the events of September 11 and too self-absorbed (as if that’s atypical of New Yorkers then or afterward). She complains that other individuals suffered more – as if DeLillo is supposed to make his protagonist both typical and an extreme case. Finally, Keith and his wife simply aren’t “interesting,” especially him with his “stupid card games.” In perhaps her most egregious misreading of the novel, she bleats: “Whereas Underworld gave the reader a big panoramic window on history by tracing the intersecting, crisscrossing lives of dozens of people, Falling Man – like the author’s 1997 novel, Players, which also grappled with terrorism and also featured a character who worked in the World Trade Center – focuses on the lives of one man and one woman.”

Without dwelling on the odd suggestion that literary substance turns on the number of characters (which Kakutani gets wrong in any case), we can find in Point Omega a forceful refutation of the idea that concentrating on individuals and their connections with each other is somehow less important than themes intentionally engineered to achieve full three-P grandeur. Various critics apply different P-words to Elster, the “pompous intellectual” (Kakutani) given to “professorial pontification” (Shulevitz) that “smacks of pretension” (Nazaryan). If his commentary on pedestrian matters like doing dishes undermined lofty discourse on the flow of meaning, Point Omega’s central plot pivot lets the air out of Elster’s abstractions. He and Finley return from a grocery run to find Jessie has vanished. Elster becomes “inconsolably human” and his oracular pronouncements are reduced to meaninglessness in the light of real human loss and suffering. Finley says:

I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million miles away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.

Though unimpressed by his philosophizing, Shulevitz finds that “Elster’s anguish in the face of his daughter’s unsolved disappearance feels unusually real, at least for DeLillo.” Kakutani, however, doesn’t believe Elster’s eventual firsthand knowledge of “the meaning of death and loss” can compensate for portions of Point Omega consisting of his “dreary and highly portentous musing about mortality and time.” According to her, it differs from DeLillo’s “most memorable novels” because “the three characters here do not live in a recognizable America or a recognizable reality.”

Of course, prescience and prophecy become evident only in retrospect, and for some critics a novelist’s view can’t be called panoramic if it doesn’t include the Manhattan skyline. The desert of the America Southwest, where much of Point Omega occurs, just doesn’t qualify. The novel undeniably resembles DeLillo’s others in certain respects but has its own unique qualities. How could anyone expect otherwise?

____
John G. Rodwan, Jr.’s Fighters & Writers, a collection of essays, is forthcoming from Mongrel Empire Press in 2010. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Katharine Beutner
Soho Press, 2010

When I was a little girl, I was never without my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I brought it with me everywhere, strangely comforted by its endless variety of stories, by its author’s kindly old face looking out at me from the dust jacket, even by the weirdly authoritative pictures by its mysterious illustrator, Steele Savage. One of the Steele Savage illustrations that always stuck with me was titled “The Rape of Persephone (Proserpine)” – it showed Hades, the high-helmeted god of the dead, driving his flying chariot down into an enormous abyss, carrying away Persephone, daughter of the earth-goddess, down to his sunless realm. Something about the brightness of the day above – Persephone’s handmaidens, alarmed, are watching from the edge of the chasm – horrified me even before I could actually read the story (and certainly long before I knew the meaning of that word in the picture’s title).

Once I could read the story, it struck me even more deeply. Demeter, in her grief over losing her daughter, halts the fruitfulness of the earth itself (this impressed me during any rebellious phases, when I was bitterly certain my own mother wouldn’t halt the opening of Saks over my disappearance), allowing no seeds to take root, no harvests to grow. The seasons themselves become a desolate wasteland, until finally Zeus, the king of the gods, orders Hades to give the girl back to her mother. He does – but he tricks her into eating a pomegranate, which binds her to return to the underworld for a portion of every year. Persephone is reunited with her mother, but nothing is ever the same again, as Miss Hamilton puts it:

But all the while Persephone knew how brief that beauty was: fruits, flowers, leaves, all the fair growth of the earth, must end with the coming of the cold and pass like herself into the power of death. After the lord of the dark world carried her away she was never again the gay young creature who had played in the flowery meadow without a thought of care or trouble.

The title of Katharine Beutner’s powerful, despairing debut novel (which comes ready-supplied with an adulatory blurb from the mighty Elizabeth Knox – cause enough to pay it some attention) isn’t Persephone, but it could have been, for that poor stricken queen of the dead towers over the novel’s other three main characters, including the eponymous Alcestis.

Miss Hamilton covers this myth as well, naturally: the story of how the god Apollo, after serving for a time and coming to like the young mortal King Admetus, works out a deal with the Fates: Admetus need not die right now, if he can find somebody willing to take his place. Some deal, you say – who, in possession of a heart, would ever avail himself of such a deal? But Admetus is young and beautiful, and I’m coming to learn that young and beautiful men are seldom brimming over with compassion. The spoiled young thing turns first to his aged parents, and in one of Greek mythology’s most oddly cheering little moments, they flat-out turn him down. Disgusted, he turns elsewhere, in words from Miss Hamilton I’ve long since memorized:

He went to his friends begging one after another of them to die and let him live. He evidently thought his life was so valuable that someone would surely save it even at the cost of the supreme sacrifice. But he met with an invariable refusal. At last in despair he went back to his house and there he found a substitute. His wife Alcestis offered to die for him. No one who has read so far will need to be told that he accepted the offer.

In Alcestis he doesn’t accept the offer, he violently rejects it, but the god Hermes, the guide of the dead, is standing right there and doesn’t care; he was only waiting on a “yes.” Beutner’s joyless heroine steps forward not out of spousal devotion but for practicality’s sake: she knows that if Admetus dies, she’ll be known as the wife who didn’t sacrifice herself for him. A widow, she’ll be disgraced, denied shelter everywhere – she faces a choice between the underworld and a protracted living death, and she opts for the former. Of course, she’s also embarrassed:

I was shaking my head and I couldn’t seem to stop. This was not my husband; this was some other man, some shepherd, some slave. This was unworthy.

The underworld holds little terror for Alcestis, mainly because her life in the sunlight had, to that point, been no picnic. In Beutner’s mythical Greece, women (even royal women; Alcestis is the daughter of a king) are casually despised, routinely treated – and regarded – worse than farm animals. Add to this more individual sorrows: not only does her beloved sister Hippothoe die while still a child, but her married life to Admetus is rife with subversion and betrayal. The world of Alcestis is intensely, pervasively sexual, and the gods are at the heart of it, and Beutner’s telling of the old story, Apollo and Admetus are something more than just friends:

Once I had come back to the bedchamber in the middle of the day and overheard them arguing, Admetus shouting and Apollo responding in low, measured tones that sounded no less angry. … I thought they were in our bed together, and my throat closed. But when I pressed my face to the just-open door and peered through the crack, they were standing upright in the middle of the room, Admetus’s head on Apollo’s shoulder, Apollo’s hand glowing pale against my husband’s dark curls.

I’d stood and watched them for a long time. My husband’s face, turned toward me, was calm and smooth, his eyes closed and one corner of his mouth curled up, a child’s expression he wore in sleep.

“Lust is as pungent as a roasting sacrifice,” we’re told, and it’s the thought of this betrayal that prompts Alcestis as much as anything else to make her sacrifice and accompany Hermes to the realm of the dead. She also has some idea of finding her sister Hippothoe among the numberless shades – for what reason is never made clear (the persistence of that plot-strand, even after both Alcestis and every reader knows how pointlessly it will end, is the novel’s only flaw, its only mechanical allowance to the genre in which female-protagonisted not-quite-historical novels like this one hope to catapult through Sunday afternoon book clubs to bestseller status. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent has much to answer for).

But what Alcestis finds in the underworld quickly overwhelms all secondary narrations. There is Hades, yes, the king of the dead. “His hair fell about his shoulders in dark ringlets neat as a woman’s,” we’re told, “and he wore a silver crown that seemed to twist into the strands of his hair.” But most of all there is Persephone, the abducted queen of this blighted realm:

The goddess Persephone’s eyes were gray and reflective as adamant, set wide in her girlish face. Her cheek was leached of color, but its curve was apple sweet. Her hair was golden and smooth as flax, her thin lips the stunning read of pomegranates. Her crown was neither gold nor silver but a narrow sharp-edged circlet of adamant, and she wore a dress almost like my shift, fine gray cloth that clung to her slim body. Like me, she was a queen dressed as a slave or a shade. But she was not like me. She had a remote and dreamlike beauty, a feverish loveliness that called Hippothoe’s face to mind. It was the kind of beauty death lends to a beloved face, a beauty that spoke of last looks and last kisses, of tears falling unheeded onto cooling skin.

The irony at the heart of Alcestis is that she goes to the underworld to escape the shame of her husband’s supernatural liaison – only to find such a liaison herself once she gets there. And the awakening moment is parallel; when she happens upon Hades and Persephone making love, she glimpses a divine passion like nothing she’s ever seen before:

Did her lips still taste of the fruit? If he bit at her tongue, would her blood have the sweet savor of pomegranates? I watched the twisting of her limbs and the twisting of her face, her beautiful clear features going taut and sharp. Never did I think: I should not be watching. Never did I think: what I’m seeing is wrong. It was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen mortals do.

Through grudging stages (that never-ending search for Hippothoe again), Alcestis yields to Persephone’s obvious interest and soon enough finds herself “sitting on the grass beside this goddess in a dead garden, watching her suck the juice from the fruit that had doomed her.” In Beutner’s vision, the realm of Hades is an especially lonely place: the shades of the living crowd and drift everywhere, but since they’ve all sipped from the River Lethe’s mind-erasing waters, they are mere husks (in one of the book’s more disturbing images, we’re told that whenever these shades approach someone with more vitality, they “nudge like sheep”). It’s a realm not quite right, and its queen knows this better than anyone, as when she thinks back on her fateful snack before leaving the underworld that first time:

“I ate the fruit. No one had warned me. I did not think. It looked so beautiful and sweet, and the garden was empty. I did not even think anyone had seen me eat. It did not taste quite right,” she added suddenly. “Nothing here does. But I have learned to like the taste. It tastes like dust, and memories, and there is salt in it, like mortal tears. I cannot explain it to one who will not eat. But it lingers in the mouth.”

Readers familiar with Miss Hamilton (or with the other source, some guy named Euripides) will know what to expect from the rest of the story: in the myth, Heracles comes upon the house of his friend Admetus deep in mourning, makes an ass of himself as usual, and to make amends, tromps down to the underworld intent of wrestling Hades for Alcestis, intent on bringing her back to the land of the living. In the ancient Greek plays of which Euripides was a master, the audience always knows the rest of the story – the genius of the writing arises from how skillfully the author can bend the path and pile on the ironies, so that the conclusion the audience knows is coming feels nevertheless strange or poignant when it arrives. The genius of Alcestis is that it flawlessly preserves this duality. In the underworld, surrounded by shades, fascinated by (and fascinating to) Persephone, Alcestis is on the verge of becoming more alive than she ever was in the daylight, so when we see Heracles lumbering through the drifting shades, intent on bringing her back to her feckless husband and her joyless life, we feel the exact opposite of what we might have expected: we don’t want this rescue to happen.

Beutner’s book is a resolutely sad affair, so the rescue does happen (the exchanges between Alcestis and Heracles, who’s naturally nonplussed at her lack of enthusiasm, are priceless in their own grim way). Shortly before it, Alcestis has a bitter moment thinking about Persephone:

I’d thought I understood her. Such a stupid mortal way to think – I had been more blind than the seer [Tiersias]. She was not a human. She was not to be understood. Layers of her came off like sunburnt skin. If I touched her, I would be left with a sheath, an impression, a lie.

And yet, for all that, they are coming to understand each other, even to love each other, when fate and empty heroism intervene. Heracles arrives before the throne of Hades (who, in a excellent little touch by Beutner, disdains anything so silly as actual wrestling and simply releases the girl), and after a brief trip back to the light, he presents her to her clueless, self-absorbed husband (“Still she does not speak,” Admetus complains. “What has happened to her?” “Why, she died,” Heracles has to remind him), with whom she will live out the rest of her mortal life.

The end of that mortal life would seem to offer a distant happy ending for Alcestis, a possible reunion with the death-goddess, but no such ending is hinted at in Beutner’s book. There are no happinesses here that are not accidental or heavily revenged, and yet this is a beautiful, utterly enjoyable work, as wistful and note-perfect as a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Beutner has taken loss and sadness, sharpened them, and shaped them into a tale at once profound and daring in what it refuses to give its readers. This is the dawn of an extremely promising career.

____
Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen is currently completing her first year in the Ivy League. She writes occasional pieces exclusively for Open Letters Monthly.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

By Louis Menand
W.W. Norton, 2010

Like the novel or the morals of teenagers, higher education is always in crisis. A quick overview of recent titles from across the political spectrum includes Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, The Quiet Crises: How Higher Education is Failing America, Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, not to mention the more overwrought titles like David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

By comparison, the biggest surprise of Louis Menand’s short volume, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, is its measuredness. Adapted from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 2008, the book isn’t the polemic or set of proscriptions we might expect from the title. Instead, each chapter traces the background and history of various issues, outlining their evolution rather than railing against their deficiencies. Three chapters address the content and boundaries of disciplines – what kind of general education universities should provide, the role of the humanities, and the question of interdisciplinary curricula. Menand offers a lucid and readable account of these issues, along with a range of intriguing historical facts. He also unpacks a number of lazy clichés, ranging from how an undergraduate degree became a prerequisite to law and medical school to the crucial point that so-called “looser” standards in various disciplines have actually led to higher demands for the completion of the PhD. Along the way are a few tantalizing ideas and implied proposals, as in his outline of how academic and professional curricula might enrich one another:

Almost any liberal arts field can be made non-liberal by turning it in the direction of some practical skill with which it is already associated…. But conversely, and more importantly, any practical field can be made liberal simply by teaching it historically or theoretically.

Despite this measuredness, however, the more contentious background to Menand’s arguments frequently seeps through. While other hot-buttoned cultural issues have replaced the debates over the canon that flooded universities and the popular media in the eighties and nineties, Menand seems on the defensive about the changes that took place during those eras. He makes a point of emphasizing that theory and post-structuralism had undone the assumptions of the humanities before the “politically consequential critiques” of feminist, post-colonial, and queer theorists. His larger point – that the academic models of the post-war so-called “Golden Age” of higher education during which universities expanded at unprecedented rates were anomalous – is well taken. But in making it, he leaves out part of the story. In fact, conservatives in the eighties and nineties weren’t wrong to talk about the connections between these transformations and the political upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The creation of Black Studies programs came about largely due to the activism and sit-ins of students at institutions ranging from Cornell University to San Francisco State, and the founding generation of Women’s Studies was, in fact, organically linked to the evolution of second-wave feminism. Menand rightly points out that curricula during the “Golden Age” was neither inevitable nor unshaped by politics, but his account of more recent developments suggests the extent to which conservative charges of a politicized curriculum have succeeded in placing even mainstream progressive arguments on the defensive.

Louis Menand lecturing at the Gutman Conference Center at Harvard University; photo from Justin Ide/Harvard News Office

The title of the fourth chapter, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?,” suggests that here Menand will more directly confront the politicized questions that shape so many discussions of academia. Instead, something potentially more interesting but also stranger takes place. He begins with an overview of a 2007 study of the views of over 600,000 academics. Unsurprisingly, the numbers reveal that academics are, by and large, not the wild-eyed radicals David Horowitz has made a career of “exposing” but mainstream liberals. Then, instead of considering whether or not this is a problem and, if so, what should be done about it, Menand shifts to a discussion of the issues surrounding graduate education. The basic facts will likely be familiar to current or recent graduate students: graduate school takes longer to complete than ever before, especially in the humanities, nearly half in some fields like English drop out before completion, and many of those who do finish will not find tenure-track positions. To his immense credit, and unlike many critics, Menand recognizes that making graduate school more demanding or raising barriers of entry will only exacerbate the problem. Instead he suggests a shorter time to degree, with the completion of an academic article taking the place of the dissertation. He argues this on humanitarian grounds, but then notes the institutional pressures that demand a large pool of graduate students and underemployed PhDs as cheap labor. As if acknowledging the intractability of this situation, he shifts the argument again, suggesting that the long time to degree should be a concern because of the barriers to entry this creates to the profession. This is an essential point; however, rather than suggest that this would help academia attract more scholars from poor or working class backgrounds, more scholars of color, or more women (and men) turned off by the sacrifices to family and personal life represented by a ten year stay in graduate school, Menand returns to his starting point and argues that a more flexible model would diversify the political views of academics.

At first I was perplexed by the chapter’s two-step, starting with the “problem” of liberalism that may or not be a problem, then presenting the real problem of graduate education as a way of solving it. Then I started to wonder about Menand’s audience – not so much readers of his book but the faculty – and, perhaps, administrators – to whom he originally delivered these talks. Did he think they were likely to be indifferent to appeals to humanitarian treatment of young scholars or to calls for greater equality in access (old news) but sensitive to charges of liberal bias (also old news, but tapping into academics’ seemingly bottomless capacity for self-flagellation)?

Like most recent graduate students, I can imagine this scenario, as I’ve sat in on many variations of this discussion, and read more than a few of the legion of articles devoted to these questions. Recently, however, I’ve found myself more and more impatient with their arguments. It’s easy for me to understand why: I’ve spent the past four and half years teaching at community colleges. From the perspective of my daily life in the classroom, Menand’s framing of the issues seem more than a bit tangential, centered as it is around a hypothetical student who is less and less typical – a recent high school graduate secure enough in a middle-class future to brave four years of being asked just what it is she plans to do with that art history degree and likely to return to graduate or professional school in order to secure that future. By contrast, more and more college students are not eighteen to twenty-one. They are first generation immigrants or laid-off workers. They hold down jobs and go to school at night. More and more are taught by graduate students or part-time faculty who shuttle between campuses. Even those who are recent middle-class high school students are less likely to pursue a liberal arts path – understandably so, considering the pressures aligned against them: the stagnant wages of the past three decades, the need for a health-insurance-bearing jobs, the increasing cost of college and the resulting debt burdens carried by most graduates.

Menand knows all this, of course, but he quickly sets it aside:

Like most people who write about American higher education, I focus on what is in reality a very thin slice of the whole – undergraduate and graduate education in the liberal arts and sciences…. Most of what I have to say concerns higher education as it is experienced by the history major, rather than the business major, and most of my examples are taken from elite liberal arts institutions. This is because, historically, the elites have had the resources to innovate and the visibility to set standards for the system as a whole, but there are many institutions for which the problems I discuss are either irrelevant or non-problems.

Unstated here are other likely reasons for this focus. Most academics (and many journalists who cover higher education) attended elite liberal arts colleges or research universities. For academics, undergraduate and graduate school most often amounts to over a decade of acculturation into the ways and concerns of these institutions, much of it spent working towards the goal of being accepted to another elite institution as a faculty member. Many will end up teaching at large public universities, at non-elite private schools, and at community colleges. Many will seek out this work, find much of value in it, and discover different ways of thinking about colleges. Most will, however, be too busy teaching to write books about the state of higher education.

At the end of his introduction, Menand notes, “The modern American higher education system was and remains a great social accomplishment. It can handle a few questions.” But, like the great accomplishment of our health care system, its availability to anything more than an elite is far from guaranteed. The University of Virginia, where Menand delivered his lectures, is public largely in name only, receiving only eight percent of its revenue from the state. The crisis at the University of California, which, as The New Yorker recently reported, has laid off two thousand staff since Governor Schwarzenegger cut its budget by $637 million, is only the most striking case of the threat to public higher education. Menand’s acknowledged focus on elite research universities masks this wider context. Community colleges – which enroll nearly half of today’s undergraduates and where many of Menand’s PhDs will go on to teach – go largely unmentioned, as they do in so many discussions of higher education. (Whether the Obama administration’s stated interest in and commitment to community colleges will change this remains to be seen.) After the overheated debates of the eighties and the nineties, it’s easy to understand Menand’s desire for a measured, understated history of these issues. Today, however, with public universities – and, by extension, the possibility of higher education for any but the privileged few – on the chopping block, finding smart dispassionate critiques like Menand’s may be less helpful than what has been harder for the university to produce: advocates and defenders.

___
Laura Tanenbaum is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, in New York. Her fiction has recently appeared in failbetter and Steel City Review, and she is a founding editor of the on-line literary journal Vibrant Gray.

Shafer Hall, a red-headed, bearded bearish man in his early thirties, tended bar early on a Thursday night at the Four Faced Liar, an Irish pub in the West Village. He wore dilapidated running shoes, shorts, and a blue and white football jersey, Dallas Cowboys colors, colors from his home state. Shafer’s a poet. His first collection, Never Cry Woof, was published in 2007 by No Tell Books, a small, independent press specializing in poetry. Shafer is also a senior editor at The Painted Bride Quarterly, a literary magazine published by Rutgers.

Armed with the thick skin
that covers the knuckles, and
armored with the hubris that
hardens in the fingernails

(“Brooklyn Aubade”)

He’s lived all over Texas: Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Lubbock. Houston was his favorite, a big, weird town right on the ocean, he said, where everyone looks different. In Austin, everyone looked pretty much like him. Shafer moved around because his father, Grant Hall, was then an archaeologist, excavating Spanish missions. His mother was a petroleum geologist. If you look up Grant online, you’ll find, in addition to numerous scholarly articles, an old photo, taken at the Choke Canyon excavation site in South Texas. He’s tall, wearing a cowboy hat and dusty jeans, looking down at a dead bobcat he’s holding by the scruff of the neck. Shafer’s father is a carpenter now, happier than when he was as an archaeologist, “Doing something more useful,” Shafer shrugged. His mother consults on cleaning aquifers of toxins and sends Shafer books on geology by John McPhee.

Dawn
and water meet for the aloof
and curious alike

(“Brooklyn Aubade”)

Shafer talked to his regulars while he worked. Tina is ancient, with a beehive of perfectly curled orange hair, which the rest of the regulars inform me is real. Marco is Sicilian, pale and bald. He ended every one of his quickly delivered rants with “Why not?” before dumping another swallow of Guinness down his throat. Tina was careful with her drink orders, watching the clock as it neared 8 pm. She wanted to tip out before Shafer’s shift was over. “Me and Tina,” Shafer said, “We hate the heat and humidity. Makes our hair frizzy.” She nodded and said nothing, hunched over her bar stool.

Gentry landed me in this mess
of haystacks and merciful slaughter;
I am gentle with my ax – and quick

(“Pink Snow”)

“Ask me about poetry,” Shafer said. We were in a diner across the street from the bar, where Shafer ordered a grilled cheese on rye with a side of fries. Moving his fries around the plate, he told me the closest he’s been to killing anything was when he went hunting with his father. His father made him the bird dog, running after the dead birds and twisting the heads off their bodies. Shafer watched the blood eke out of the bird’s eyes, not knowing that you’re supposed to hold the bird to the side to avoid watching the gory unfold. “Pink Snow” is a riff on a Tom Waits song, “You wouldn’t believe how many of my poems start with that guy.”

I spent the remainder of the evening
handicapping the marriage of the couple next door
and the next morning
placed a long-term, sure-fire, big-money bet
with the sucker who lives downstairs.

(“Some Commotion Out My Door at Night”)

Shafer has a new collection of poems, written over the course of five years, ready to be published – except he doesn’t have a publisher. He was hoping Octopus Press would take it, but they didn’t, so he’s going to do another round of edits before he submits it somewhere else. Even his most humorous poems, I told him, have a core of sadness. Shafer doesn’t hesitate, “Yeah, I’ve been told that before. I like to think that people can access my poems in different ways. My ideal poem would be able to be interpreted as both funny and sad and whatever else….” He trailed off. “I think that’s a fairly accurate description of my work, and probably of myself too.”

Let spring blossom,
little possum, your world
is worse than you know.

(“Avery’s Possums”)

At nine that night, Shafer and I got on a C train to Brooklyn to go to a reading by C. A. Conrad, a poet from Philadelphia, and according to Shafer, a real lunatic. Shafer took a seat on an empty bench, looking at his reflection in the opposite window. He needs a haircut. A tattoo of a possum snakes up his arm and into the sleeve of his football jersey. Later he shook his head when I asked him what it meant. “I don’t know. It’s a polarizing animal,” he said, “You either love them or you hate them.”

From which it can be inferred
that life is like a train
and we are like cheap apartments
and we shake when the train rolls by.

(“How to Survive on Land & Sea”)

Shafer held the most recent New Yorker and a slim volume on geology by John McPhee in his hand. He tells me about the show trials in Iran. “Ee-ran. Ee-ron,” he says, as if deciding the correct pronunciation As we sat on the train, he opened the New Yorker and showed me two poems by Richard Wilbur. One was about the ocean; Shafer’s a sucker for the ocean. On a recent trip to Texas, where he turned 34, he motored around Galveston and navigated the remains of Hurricane Ike. Though the island is mostly cleaned up, the coastal areas aren’t, and one has to be careful.

I stunned myself
when I walked around a corner
and saw the evening;
it had out-dressed me
in blues and stars.

(“The Evening Wore Blue”)

We got off the train at Lafayette and crossed the Atlantic Yards to get to Freddy’s. We entered the bar and Shafer cleared a path towards the back of the room. A door leading to the basement opened up into a performance space filled with college kids. Instead of C.A. Conrad, a man in suspenders and a fiddle was playing onstage. Shafer paid my six dollar entrance fee and we stood on the steps, watching for a minute. A few moments passed, and Shafer caught my eye. He pointed at his eyes, his fingers in a V shape, and then at mine, and motioned at the door. GO.

Fat, waddling his swagger was a swagger of the soul and not the body (“Near Magical Skills”) Outside the bar, he gives me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and directions to the nearest street where I can catch a cab. After Shafer turned around, I watched him for a minute; the disappearing football jersey, hair curling at his neck, the shoulders of a mastodon, and clutching his geology book, he lumbered off and out of sight.

____
Jessica Breiman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and raised in both Salt Lake City and Berkeley, California. She received her B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and moved to New York City to study Art History and Library Science. She now works for the Women’s Refugee Commission and is a fellow at the CUNY Writers’ Institute.

Open Letters has published a couple of Shafer’s poems: “The Institute of Nautical Archaeology” and “A Fiction.”

BioWare, 2010

Decisions, decisions. This February put me in a tricky position: I was faced with two games I was dead set on reviewing. Both highly anticipated sequels to critically successful games, both made by brilliant development teams, both with distinctly different but powerful narrative methods. The choice was hard but, although it seems fitting that I’d review BioShock 2 on this, the anniversary of my article on the original BioShock, I find myself unable to produce that pleasing symmetry. First, because BioShock 2 would necessarily dim in comparison to its predecessor, and second because the betrayal of your origins is a central to ethical conduct (I read about that in a book!), and it’s ethics I want to talk about.

Specifically, the ethics of Mass Effect 2.

A little groundwork first.

Released by those masters of fantastical video game narrative, BioWare, the original Mass Effect and its sequel are single player role playing games (RPG) with an emphasis on action that draws from third person shooters, gunplay games played with the character visible from behind. Like an RPG, there is an emphasis on dialogue and interaction with characters in the game, as well as an action-driving central plot. The series is also the company’s first foray into their own sci-fi intellectual property.

Previously they had kicked out the incredible Knights of the Old Republic (its friends call it KotOR), a Star Wars role playing game set millennia before Luke Skywalker was even a twinkle in Natalie Portman’s eye. Their triumph was in breathing life into a beleaguered yet still rich franchise by being faithful to the ethos of Star Wars yet creating a space that was all BioWare’s own (subject to the approval of George Lucas, of course). Crucial to KotOR was the classic lightside/darkside paradigm, allowing you to aspire to Yoda-like goodness or, alternately, feats of evil that might make even Darth Vader blush. The choices between good and evil tended to be pretty clear cut. Do you defend Wookies from rapacious slavers, or do you sell out their species to those same slavers just to line your pocket with some extra credits? Not precisely a complex ethical situation.

With Mass Effect, the genre was still space opera, but in a galaxy of their own invention. Rather than being set long ago and far, far away, Mass Effect takes place in the latter decades of the 22nd century, with humans having recently stepped onto the interplanetary stage by discovering alien ruins on Mars, which taught them the secret of faster-than-light travel necessary for any serious space voyaging (one of the chief issues in the sci-fi genre). Of course, the galaxy is rich with other advanced races, all with various views on the appearance of a humanity that quickly make themselves known both for their innovation and their aggression. The player’s character, Commander Shepard, is the first human to be accepted into the ranks of the Specters, a corp of elite agents given free reign by the galaxy’s governing council. As such, the player’s actions determine to a great extent how humanity is viewed by the many other species with which we share the galaxy.

To underscore this responsibility, BioWare included a mechanic rather similar to the lightside/darkside measure in KotOR. Structured as Paragon/Renegade, the player could accrue points in either category through interactions with other characters in the game, as well as their teammates, a crew of occasionally conflicting personalities and values. In the original Mass Effect, Paragon actions tended to be heroic, self sacrificing, merciful and, most notably, invested in humans co-existing with alien races. Renegade actions were the opposite, invariably ruthless, self serving, aggressive and with a ‘humans first’ attitude bordering on full on racism/speciesism. The Renegade Shepard would openly state that he favored humans over aliens and, ultimately, decided to let the multi-species council that ran the galaxy die in a battle, allowing humans to take over in their place. The mutual orientation of the two was less directly obvious than in KotOR, since Renegade actions did have a beneficiary beyond the self, being closer to ‘ends justify the means’ than ‘motiveless malignance’. Nevertheless, Renegades always seemed like total jerks, which made them hard to play – I just disliked my Renegade-leaning character most of the time. KotOR, at least, gave you the certain pleasure to be found in sadism (see my article on Tropico for more in that vein).

Mass Effect 2 retained the space opera feel of its predecessor, but went way, way darker; ME2 feels like Empire Strikes Back to ME’s A New Hope. And, concurrently, the ethical dilemmas confronting the player become much less clear cut. Paragon actions are still heroic and interested in galactic peace and/or harmony. However, Renegade actions take on a much more ‘anti-hero’ feel, as in the finest tradition of action films, complete with cold-blooded one liners. Much cooler.

Rather than dismiss this as a matter of mere improved style and writing, I want to confront the implications of that very change in style and writing. And I would like to highlight those moments in the game where we’re confronted by the ethical ambiguity that haunts all the best sci-fi, and see how these gray areas are resolved in a game that not only creates but insists upon the participation in a certain ethical framework – the binary of Paragon/Renegade.

The first question: why the suddenly palatable Renegade?

I can speak only from my experience, but as I said, ME’s Renegade was a total bastard. Shoving his or her gun in people’s faces at the drop of a hat, bullying and blustering, incapable of a single conversation without threatening someone, the full-on Renegade came off as petty, his or her aggression often uncalled-for or excessive. ME2’s Renegade is ruthless, yes, and far from chummy or forgiving, but seems cool. Gunslinging rather than guncrazy, badass instead of just bellicose, the new game’s Renegade actions just feel different.

Let’s take a look at an example:

The big lizard looking guys? Those are krogan. And they’re angry due to some very legitimate grievances we’ll get into later. Legitimate or no, the ’sea of blood’ and ’scream while we dump space stations into their respective suns’ stuff doesn’t endear one to these particular political radicals. When the red thing on the side of screen started flashing, that was a sign that the player could choose to interrupt with a Renegade action. This video shows an example of just such an interruption, with a great cold-blooded line: “You talk too much.” Pure pulp gold.

That genre connection should clue us in – pulps are all about a cop over the edge or a full-on vigilante meting out the justice the real (and either corrupt or ineffectual) keepers of law and order are unable to administer. At its heart, the pulp impulse is a reactionary one, the idea that, to preserve the law, the law itself must be exceeded, and violently. ME’s Renegade menaced innocents. The new Renegade menaces the guilty. Asshole becomes anti-hero.

Setting is crucial here. ME2’s universe is set in deeper shades, and the government takes on more of the aspects of weakness common to stereotype legal authorities. This is a galaxy that needs a good cleaning, and Commander Shepard is here to make a combat sweep. The bad guys are often really bad – slavers, profiteers, pirates and terrorists – but the clip we just watched points to the reactionary alignment of the hero (Renegade Shepard) borrowed from its pulp cousin. What the monologuing krogan expresses is horrific, promises of death and ruin, but it is essentially, dimly, the promise of revolution, of counter conquest. The first section of the krogan’s speech is all threats and viciousness. The last, similarly, is a promise of galactic carnage. But, right in the middle, is a simple, clean demand for justice against galactic authority. Revenge, yes, but one motivated by genuine revolutionary passion, the need not just to even the scales but upset the very system of measurement, to recreate the galaxy.

So, when Shepard says ‘You talk too much’, we should see this statement’s two sides. First, that literally the krogan ‘talks too much’, speaking up too loudly and saying too much aloud. The reactionary vigilante intervenes to silence dissent and demands for justice. Second, paradoxically, that the krogan talks too little. He threatens to cease to just talk, to directly enact the justice he desires. The reactionary vigilante intervenes so that it will only ever be just talk, to use diplomacy as a stalling action to prevent any real change, promises continually deferred. In both cases, the prevailing order remains. The Renegade is a political conservative, not truly rebelling against the law, but behaving as what Slavoj Žižek would refer to as the law’s ‘obscene supplement’. It’s innate self-transgression, necessary for the law’s very continuance.

The appeal of the pulp hero, then, is that of getting access to the real power of the law, which is itself against the law. You are the cop sent over the edge, the lone soldier making his last stand, the man who is willing to do ‘what it takes’, the sort of figure embodied in Dick Tracy, or Frank Miller’s (highly conservative) depiction of Batman. It’s the pleasure of being a henchman, gilded to let you look like a hero, because no matter how ‘bad’ you are, you always know the other guy is worse. And that is the appeal, also, of ME2’s Renegade.

The above encounter is, due to more than coincidence, part in the same sub-plot as the dialogue below, which deals with the most poignant of Mass Effect 2’s ethical ambiguities, the genophage virus:

Brief fictional history lesson: The krogan were uplifted (given spacefaring technology) by the salarians (the frog-like race of the scientist in the clip) for use in a galaxy-wide war against the insectile rachni. The krogan, after defeating the rachni, rebelled against their position as a client race and, in turn, threatened to conquering the galaxy. The salarians developed the genophage virus as a way to defeat the krogan, a virulent disease that renders 99.9% of krogan sterile. This neatly ended the rebellion and have kept the entire krogan species weak and fragmented.

Mordin Solus, the scientist in the clip, was one of the salarians that helped develop the virus. He gives his reasons better than I can repeat, reasons which even he clearly recognizes as rationalizations. He is ‘responsible’ not ‘guilty’. ‘Genophage or genocide’, he insists, were the only available options. The virus, as he insists, doesn’t kill anyone, it simply prevents reproduction. And while it’s easy to blame him, as the player in this clip chooses to have Shepard do, from a very rational standpoint, Mordin has a point. And, for all Shepard’s criticisms, he doesn’t point to any obvious alternatives. If ‘genophage or genocide’ were the only options, surely sparing the krogan as a species is a better option.

I still don’t have a clear answer to this quandary, and the game similarly offers no choices outside either simply condoning (as a Renegade) or condemning (as a Paragon). Certainly, the reactionary principle of the Renegade is operative in its acceptance as ‘necessary’ this incredible crime in the name of maintaining the order of law. But the Paragon’s straight condemnation feels unsatisfying as well. While I played this section myself, my cursor twitched between the two extreme options available to me, and it was then I realized something. During this quandary, it’s Mordin I feel the most pathos for, not Shepard, even though I was Shepard in this scene. It’s Mordin’s conflict and uncertainty that I felt to be the best mirror of my own feelings, because Mordin’s ideology is closest to that of my own upbringing: liberal, pluralist, secular-spiritual, with Enlightenment ideals of reason and infinite perfectibility.

Okay, you’ve gotta bear with me for a second, because here’s where I bring out the big guns. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were philosophers and political thinkers in the Frankfurt school, a highly influential movement in Continental philosophy (they were colleagues and fellows of people like Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin). Making observations throughout World War II, and trying to explain how it is that modernity, an age of reason and secularism, could have produced the insanity and irrationality of Nazism and the Holocaust, Adorno and Horkheimer came up with an earth-shattering answer: the Enlightenment itself. They claimed that the very way a person shaped by the Enlightenment was constituted as a person, deep down inside, was a contradiction – a dangerous myth that undermines itself in its own negation, total unreason, reactionary horror. It’s a complicated idea, but one that Mass Effect 2 manages to play out right before our eyes, in sci-fi guise.

What is Mordin’s ‘wheel of life’ but the literalization of the idea of Historical Progress or the Cunning of Reason, key modern, dialectical concepts? Infinite perfectibility, the belief that if we know more, understand more, we can make everything better – something I can’t help but believe. When pressed on the matter of the genophage, Mordin states his belief in the need for diversity in the galaxy, and the virus, by saving the krogan from extinction, was the instrument of that diversity. Doesn’t the liberal pluralist, an Enlightenment subject to be sure, share the spirit of these good intentions? He is a being of reason, insight, forethought and resolve. And his ultimate conclusion, between either genophage or genocide, mass sterilization or mass murder, is frighteningly reminiscent of Adorno and Horkheimer’s own conclusions about the dialectic of the Enlightenment. The Nazis, who were both eugenicists and genocidal, were, to Adorno and Horkheimer, the ultimate consequence of Enlightenment thought. Therefore Mordin’s own deadlock was predestined, due to the very coordinates of his ideology.

Mass Effect 2 is stuck in its own dialectical trap, pinioned between Paragon and Renegade, a binaristic system that is structurally unable to adequately resolve the issue of the genophage. Yet, that it is able to present such a chilling reflection of the logics that motivate enlightened modernity is a feat in and of itself. There are few higher compliments a game could receive than to be described as posing questions its own system cannot answer. So while it cannot simulate a genuinely ethical position for the player, it can point to that space of unknown potential that emerges out of its own confines, gesturing, however helplessly, at an ethics beyond itself.

____
Phillip A. Lobo is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. His previous video game reviews can be read here.

I first came to know of Donald Windham through his association with the great gay American playwright Tennessee Williams, who was Windham’s friend and literary mentor for twenty-five years. In 1977, Windham published the correspondence he had received from “10,” as Williams often signed his letters, under the title Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965, a book I devoured. I had come to love Williams’ plays and to admire his courageous portrayal of shocking, taboo subject matter, especially homosexuality. As an aspiring writer still in my twenties, I combed those letters (Windham’s replies were not included) looking for the courage to write my own stories, looking for tips on how to be half as fabulous a gay man as Williams was, looking for clues as to how to cultivate a literary friendship such as the one he and Windham had.

The letters were such fun to read. I loved Williams’ campy patois, the coded language, the gossipy news: “The ‘crowd’ here [Provincetown, 1940] is dominated by a platinum blond Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dyke named Wanda who is a well-known writer under a male pen-name.” I loved the outrageous honesty: “There are only two times in this world when I am happy and selfless and pure. One is when I jack off on paper and the other when I empty all the fretfulness of desire on a young male body.” Loved, loved, loved Williams’ descriptions of writing The Glass Menagerie, the rehearsals, the subsequent triumphs, and the later flops. The letters were peppered with famous names, witty aperçus, and candid confessions of sexual shenanigans.

Windham and Williams had met in New York in January, 1940. Windham, then nineteen and “practically penniless,” had recently fled Atlanta with his twenty-one-year old boyfriend. They were living in a single furnished room. The romance of all that delighted me. As I read the letters, Windham seemed like the writer-in-training and literary acolyte I longed to be. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel any strong desire to delve into his novels. Perhaps that’s because Windham’s books were hard to find, mostly out of print; or perhaps because, in the last years of the seventies, newer gay voices—Andrew Holleran, Ed White, Joseph Hansen, Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin—had begun to appear. Whatever the reason, it was thirty years later that I finally got around to reading one of Donald Windham’s novels. It happened, really, quite by chance.

One day, browsing in one of my favorite used bookstores in downtown Boston, I came across a copy of Windham’s novel (his third, it turns out), Two People. I might have easily passed it by but for the author’s name, which triggered happy memories of reading the Williams-Windham correspondence so many years before. I pulled it off the shelf. The dust jacket—a sketch of the Spanish Steps in Rome, a few people lolling about—seemed innocuous, even old fashioned. And the title, such a generic one, seemed innocuous as well, promising little more than a safe plot, a pleasant read. But the book—its heft, its sheer physicality—piqued my curiosity. It was an immaculate copy, not a mark or tear, and the pages, creamy white, had the soft, thick, luxurious texture that hardback paper used to have. I checked the publication date: 1965. A quick glance at the dust jacket blurb—“the story of an American man and an Italian boy in Rome … a situation that another author might have made melodramatic or sensational”—clinched it. Code for a gay story! That night, curled up in bed, I began to read.

In the opening sentences, Forrest, the American, who is hanging on in Rome after his wife has left him, picks up a stray newspaper and reads that several people have jumped from bridges into the Tiber. Their intention, he soon realizes, was “diversion, not suicide,” just the Roman way of celebrating the New Year. This moment, which might pass as nothing more than a bit of scene setting, is, in fact, Windham’s deft way of announcing one of the novel’s main themes: that a diversion, even one that is “unique and unfathomable,” is preferable to emotional suicide.

A shy, amiable New York broker, Forrest is conventional in every way. He’s from the Middle West; he has two children. Twice a week he plays handball after work. His days in Manhattan have been “as much alike as the business suits” he wears to work. We soon learn that an aimless year in Greenwich Village and “some early promiscuous encounters” are long behind him. At thirty-three, he counts on his life being settled. But then, on the Spanish Steps, he meets Marcello, a seventeen-year old, whose attitude toward the American is “carefully balanced between the indifference of a departure and the deliberateness of an approach.” A casual buon giorno on Forrest’s part leads to a conversation, tentative at first, and then, when Marcello turns to him with a smile that’s “a part of the sunshine,” to an invitation back to the American’s apartment, where they make love.

At first, Forrest feels that he has made a mistake, that he has “started something that he would regret or that would end without anything having come of it.” A jaded gay acquaintance warns him that he’ll be robbed or blackmailed. When Forrest tells Marcello, “My friend says that boys in Rome began doing this after the war,” Marcello answers, “Your friend is wrong. Roman boys have been doing the same thing since ancient times.” It’s the matter-of-factness with which Forrest (and Windham) treat homosexuality that makes Two People so interesting, both from an historical and fictional perspective. Forrest becomes neither a possessive lover nor the boy’s surrogate parent. As a result of a much earlier homosexual experience, the American has learned that “categories do not account for everything,” and he seems content to let this affair play itself out in the “innocent male conviviality” that is Rome.

Marcello is “serenely beautiful.” At one point, he is described as “a youth on a Greek vase,” but in general Windham does not indulge in the kind of prurient encomiums to comely ephebedom that characterize, say, Mann’s descriptions of Tadzio in Death in Venice. This restraint is one of the novel’s many appealing qualities. And unlike Tadzio, Marcello is old enough—and Italian enough?—to have learned how to pick up guys in cinemas. (Windham notes that “promiscuous encounters are to Italian boys what ice cream sodas at the corner drugstore are to their American counterparts.”) There’s a dual practicality to these hook ups: “Instead of having pleasure alone, he had it with someone and was given money.”

A second encounter, a week later, leaves Forrest bewildered, unable to explain his new desire. “The boy’s figure, lean and rounded, evoked neither masculinity nor femininity, rather the undivided country of adolescence; and his silent receptivity, open equally to tenderness and passion, spoke of no special desires, but of a need for love so great that it prevented him from asking for it.” Those looking for hot scenes of passionate man-boy sex will not find it here. If you read the novel too quickly, you could almost miss the references to the times Marcello and Forrest go to bed. Still, there are beautiful passages that nicely capture the limpid dynamics of their lovemaking:

As soon as they were in bed, Marcello’s distance, awkwardness, and waiting vanished. His childish eyes, which had sought the floor or had looked into a nowhere just above their lowered kids—with a reflective quality that made it impossible for Forrest not to feel that the mind behind them was full of unspoken thoughts—sought him as directly as the hands and lips.

Although Forrest gives Marcello money and gifts, it’s clear that the relationship is about something more than prostitution. With Forrest, Marcello is alternately friendly and shy. In one particularly telling passage, Forrest offers to buy a present, and after some coaxing, Marcello hesitantly tells him he’d like a new shirt. With that, the boy opens an Italian grammar book he has brought along and inscribes it “A Forrest con simpatia.” Later, Forrest consults a waiter, asking him about the exact meaning of simpatia. Closer to love than friendship, the waiter tells him.

The chapters alternate between Forrest’s point of view and Marcello’s. Windham, who was forty-five when Two People was published, does an extraordinary job of getting into the head of a teenager, and a non-American one at that. The intense and confused needs, the egocentrism alternating with shyness, the self-consciousness, the moments of brutal honesty, the feelings of loneliness and loss and confusion. Marcello’s father, a Sicilian tile contractor, treats his son “as though he were an employee that he wanted to make a profit on.” He expects the boy to follow in his footsteps. He treats Marcello’s interests in other careers with grudging tolerance. Sundays are the worst, for then the whole family spends the day together—church, visits to relatives, dinner—where the two usually end up fighting.

Rome, too, is a character in this novel, a place of romance, beauty, eroticism, chaos, squalor, mystery. A city “charged with an elixir,” Henry James once said. All over Rome, Forrest encounters “sights that drew him out of himself, not through an attraction that he recognized in them, but through an obscure affinity that returned and persisted beyond understanding.” It’s the seductive elusiveness of Rome—the impossibility of pinning it down—that Windham offers up as the city’s most appealing quality. Like Marcello (or Forrest, for that matter), the city resists easy pigeonholing.

A further complication is that Marcello also has a girlfriend, Ninì, a girl with full breasts and skin whose “plumpness and whiteness … was more suggestive of a woman than of a girl.” In the context of his playful, but chaste, times with Ninì , Marcello thinks of his continuing relationship with Forrest as a “friendship.” The sex he and Forrest have, Marcello tells himself, is a stopgap measure before he can “properly make love” to Ninì. Forrest is, Marcello assures himself, “no competition to his feelings for Ninì, anyway.”
Windham doesn’t treat this arrangement ironically. His intention is not to write a novel about a “bi-curious” kid who is deluding himself. It’s about two people—note that the age discrepancy is absent in the title—each in search of something. For Marcello it’s autonomy, identity, maturity, experience. And indeed, through his relationship with both the girl and the American, he gradually enters into an understanding of “the process by which love, when the world expands, limits responses and makes intensity possible.” It’s the intensity of the adult, not the child.

And for Forrest? What is he searching for? What Forrest most wants from Marcello is to “enter the boy’s life,” to enter the life of Roman Italians, indeed, to enter “any life at all.” Like so many generations of travels before him, he discovers that in Italy “the heaven and the earth are mixed up.” Goethe called Rome the place in which to be reborn. Forrest is not exactly “reborn” here—Windham is too sober for that kind of earth-shattering epiphany—but he does achieve a kind of quiet, peaceful reconciliation to what has been, to what is possible, to what may be. For Forrest, Marcello has made things—Rome, and everything—real again. Glad is the word Forrest applies to himself toward the end of the novel—“glad that he had been in Rome and glad that he was returning home.”

Donald Windham and E.M. Forster

___
Philip Gambone is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction. His collection of short stories, The Language We Use Up Here, and his novel, Beijing, were each nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Phil’s longer essays and memoirs have appeared in a number of important anthologies, including Hometowns, A Member of the Family, Sister & Brother, Wrestling with the Angel, Boys Like Us, Gay Travels, Obsessed, The Man I Might Become, Wonderlands, and Big Trips. Phil’s collection of interviews, Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, received praise for “both the depth of Gambone’s probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included.” Phil has taught writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and Harvard University. Currently, he teaches English at Boston University Academy and fiction writing at the Harvard Extension School. His latest project is a book of profiles of important LGBTQ Americans.

Tom Cardamone is the author of the speculative short story collection, Pumpkin Teeth, recently nominated for a Dark Quill Award, as well as the erotic fantasy novel, The Werewolves of Central Park. He has edited an anthology, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, out this March.

Sepulchres

Ugo Foscolo
Oneworld Classics, 2009 (translated by J.G. Nichols)

I spent a year of college far from Italy, and I viewed it as no hardship. I was young and hungry for new experiences, but every so often a sentimentality would come upon me almost by surprise, and one such moment happened in a friend’s apartment crowded with boisterous fellow students after a tumultuous local basketball game. There was much wine and food, much laughter, and at one point I found myself in a small kitchen with several other students, including another exchange student from Italy. He looked at me across a cluttered table and said, “e me, che i tempi e il desio d’onore …”

In amazement, I stared at him. I was not struck dumb, far from it – I responded immediately, “Fan per diversa gente ir fuggitivo…”

And we finished together, “Me ad evocar gli eroi chiamin le Muse/De mortale pensiero animatrici.”

And in the midst of our happiness, we both sighed just a bit. There, in such a cheerful setting, prompted no doubt by the underdog exploits of our basketball team, we had both remembered our Foscolo:

I, whom the times and appetite for honor

Impel through diverse peoples as an exile,

I pray the Muses help me call up heroes,

The Muses who enliven mortal thought.

That’s part of the long poem that forms the centerpiece of Ugo Foscolo’s great work De’ sepolchri, here translated by J.G. Nichols as “Sepulchres,” issued by the British publisher Oneworld Classics (in a handy volume that also includes some sonnets and translations). The book is a pretty, slim little volume sporting a photograph of a pensive statue on the cover, facing-page Italian and English throughout, and some brief notes at the end. It’s an attractive book, and bless Oneworld Classics for choosing Foscolo, who is far too often neglected, even by students of poetry, outside of Italy.

The poet did not write lightly of exile: almost from the moment of his birth in 1778 (under the name Niccolo, which he himself changed to Ugo when he was in his teens) on the island of Zante in Ionia, he was forced to be a wanderer. His mother was Greek and his father a Venetian, and by the time Ugo was 10, he had lived in three countries. In 1792 his mother settled with him in Venice, and the boy continued his studies. Classical literature in general and ancient Greece in particular fascinated him, and politics fired his soul – he believed passionately in the unification of Italy and its freedom from the dominion of Austria.

He looked to Napoleon to bring both of these things about and joined his army to help him do it. So naturally, 1797’s Treaty of Campoformio, in which Napoleon handed Venice over to the Austrians like a cheap wedding present, came as something of a shock. Foscolo had criticized Napoleon publicly in the past – warning him against tyranny, as it happens – but his admonitions had always been fraught with hope as well, and they continued to be. 1800 found him a captain in Napoleon’s army, and from 1804 to 1806 he was in northern France as part of a force amassed for an invasion of England that never happened. The whole time, he kept up a steady stream of literary work, mistresses, and illegitimate children. All three of these created a certain amount of trouble, but only the first created trouble with Napoleon’s government.

And it must be said that if ever a soulless, monomaniacal despotism furnished perfect fodder for poetic ire, it was the Napoleonic Edict of Saint Cloud in 1804, which mandated that all burials be conducted well outside of inhabited areas, and that all graves themselves be plain and unadorned (the whole ‘distant from town’ part was for long-overdue sanitary reasons; the ‘plain and unadorned’ part was just a little bit of Napoleonic priggishness). This was about as grave a misreading of Italian culture as anybody would make until Rocky – in Italy, it’s only the elaborateness of your funeral and tomb that inform you unequivocally that you’ve made something of yourself – and Foscolo (who was at this time finishing the final version of his largely autobiographical political novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) responded in 1806 with De’ sepolchri, at once his most heartfelt and beautiful work of verse.

Heartfelt and beautiful, but fairly inaccessible, at least to most modern audiences. Steeped in classical literature as he was (and although Foscolo’s own professed fascinations were with the ancient Greeks, there is more than a little Horace in his verses), Foscolo reproduces in his songs and cycles a world where every rock is alive, where every road has a long and articulate history, and where every human act is attended by the gods. And virtually all of this is accomplished by a classicist for others classically trained – Aphrodite is never Aphrodite but always “the Cytherean,” Apollo is almost always “Latona’s son,” and so forth. A student coming to all this and knowing not much of Greek mythology will find himself spending a great deal of time thumbing to the back of the book. In that back section, readers will find clarifications like these:

Bellosguardo: Hill to the south-west of Florence, where Foscolo lived during the first half of 1813

‘Your priest, O Thalia’ – the poet Giuseppi Panni (1729-99)

To Leopold Cicognara: translated from the UTET edition of Foscolo. Included in a letter of 1813 to Cicognara, who was a politician and soldier, the poem is directed against the priest and journalist Urbano Lampredi, who made a habit of attacking Foscolo

In addition to identification of such personages as Bacchus, Ceres, ‘false’ Laomedon, a host of Roman gods, the Guelfs and Ghibelliines, Erichthonius and Ilus, two descendants of Electra … enough people, in other words (several of whom never appear by name in the poems that are about them), so that Oneworld Classics should certainly have taken these end notes, broken them up, and sprinkled them directly at the page-bottoms of all the poems that call for them. A few such allusions must not be allowed to mar the clean simplicity of the page – this I understand. But so many of them! Surely you serve your readers better to have the clarifications right at hand.

Not that all of Foscolo demands such diligence. A great many of these poems stand as simply and elegantly as the day he wrote them. His lampooning of literary silliness, for instance, is always direct and funny, and his compassion is always right next to us. In his third sonnet he sings to the night herself:

Is it because you seem the very sister

Of our fatal quiescence you are dear,

O Evening? Whether courted by a cluster

Of summer clouds and gentle zephyrs, or

Whether from snow-filled skies you slowly loose

Long-lasting shadows on the trouble world,

You always come invoked, and softly trace

Those secret ways in which my heart’s enthralled.

You sent my contemplations wandering

Toward eternal nothingness. Time flies,

This bad time flies, and with it bears along

This band of cares, killing me as it dies.

And while I look upon your peace, you bring

Peace to the spirit that within me roars.

What Nichols here translates as “toward eternal nothingness” (“al nulla eterno”) I might rather see as something less wooden (“toward an endless nothing,” or some such, but I am no poet), but the quiet power of the verses, the longing, comes through quite clearly. Likewise the central point of “Sepulchres” itself, tweaking Napoleon for what he does not understand about the grand art of being dead:

Only who leaves no legacy of love

Has little joy in urns; and should he look

Beyond the funeral rites, he sees his spirit

Straying lamenting in the infernal regions

Or sheltering underneath the enormous wings

Of God’s forgiveness: but he leaves his dust

To nettles spreading on untended turf,

Where neither loving woman offering prayers,

Nor solitary traveller hears the sigh

Which nature sends to us out of the tomb.

(I again here quibble with Nichols, who translates “tumulo” as “tomb” in the final line of this segment but then uses “tomb” again in the next line to translate “sepolchri,” when the rhythm – and of course the sense – of the two are not interchangeable)

In 1815 Foscolo’s love affair with that most obstinate of mistresses, Napoleon, was finally at an end, and the poet left Italy for England – not as part of an invasion force, but once again as a solitary exile. Foscolo knew English well (his translation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey into Italian had met with great success), and the English cheered him for all those repeated public criticisms of Napoleon. He found lucrative work writing and speaking on Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, and other Italian writers, but he spent himself out of any profits from that work and died in poverty in 1827. He was buried in Chiswick Cemetery, and you can still see his grave there – but he wasn’t done with wandering even then. Fifty years later, a united Italy called its exile home: in 1871, his remains were moved to Santa Croce in Florence, and you can imagine the tired ghost happily sighing his famous lines:

“Bless you Florence for your gentle

Breezes so full of life, and for your waters

Running from the ridges of the Apennines!”

Happy in such an atmosphere the moon

Clothes with her clearest light your clustered hills

Where grapes are gathering; and from your valleys,

Crowded with houses and with olive-groves,

The incense of a thousand flowers goes up.

____
Ascanio Tedeschi is a graduate student in the classics, born and raised in Rome. This is his fourth publication for Open Letters.

The Urban Whale

Scott D. Kraus, Rosalind M. Roland editors
Harvard University Press, 2007

Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment for South Africa

RJ Scholes, KG Mennell editors
Wits University Press, 2008

Although its composer meant it in a mostly lighthearted way, Symphony No. 45, Haydn’s “Farewell Symphony,” has become a handy metaphor for the sorrow of any accumulating loss. In the final movement, one player after another performs a graceful little solo, extinguishes the candle on his music stand, and leaves the stage – the sound thins and thins until only a couple of instruments are left.

It’s a hokey but effective bit of stagecraft, which is perhaps why it’s been so readily adopted for the purposes of elegy, but at the dawn of the 21st century, we must amplify its terms to get the full effect. Imagine instead of instruments whole symphonies bidding their farewells – and not for an evening only, but for all time, never to be heard again. While the orchestra is still swelling happily, the works of Schumann, Mozart, and Haydn himself bow out; as the evening’s sounds attenuate, we begin to notice the defections – the trickling, rippling magic of Corelli’s works, and the majesty of Brahms, all going quiet. At last only a handful are left, and suddenly it dawns on the whole audience that these departures mean a permanent lessening. There’s alarm among the listeners, caught between marveling as always at Tchaikovsky’s jagged, catapulting “Pathetique” or Dvorak’s sunny, laughing “New World,” or the mindless power of the Mahler 10 and worrying about their disappearance. Finally only Beethoven’s 5th and 9th are left, and when they’re gone, there will be no more.

When it comes to very large indigenous species living on Earth, our new century is playing just such a Farewell Symphony. It’s the soft, incredibly sad background music behind every conservation movement large and small. Elephant Management from Wits University Press and The Urban Whale from Harvard University Press are two recent, painstakingly thorough, resolutely optimistic transcriptions of that background music, as alike in their spirit as they are in the inevitable conclusions they refuse to draw.

Elephant Management is a heavily technical scientific and ethnographic profile of the elephants who live in South Africa – their social structures, their interactions with humans, and the effects their interactions with humans have on their social structures. The editors, R. J. Scholes and K. G. Mennell, are both trained ecologists, and the long document they’ve created here was commissioned by South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism in 2006 and is meant to be used by government agencies and private firms in South Africa (although as the report itself stresses, it “does not constitute policy at any level”) – this is not natural history so much as it is the raw documentary scaffolding on which natural history is later built, and it opens with three central observations about the once-vast populations of loxodonta africanus that used to fill Africa’s savannahs and woodlands:

The first is that elephants are the iconic and most charismatic mammals of Africa – indeed, its very symbol. In a continent renowned for its megafauna and wealth of raw materials, elephants and their ivory hold premier positions. The second observation is that elephants were once very widely distributed on the African continent, occurring wherever there was suitable habitat, while the third is that where large settled concentrations of humans occur, one will find either no elephants or very few.

The unspokens here are deafening, from the leaden allusion to ivory to the hint of the massacres in the late 18th and 19th centuries that drove the African elephant nearly to extinction to the understated but undeniable reality that ‘large settled concentrations of humans’ have been steadily growing in number and size for the past 25 years in most of Africa, most certainly including South Africa. These central observations, like the bulk of Elephant Management, put as diplomatic a face as possible on some very bad news: the press of 21st century humanity (7 billion humans and rising) is fundamentally inimical to the existence of wild African elephants (ironically, the elephants may have helped in their own demise, since their massive thicket-clearing and woodland-thinning probably helped to eliminate the sleeping sickness-bearing tse tse fly from the region).

The inevitable conflict between wide-scale human farming and wandering herbivorous megafauna is certainly mitigated here and there by what passes for good news, and Elephant Management reports every last bit of such good news it can get its hands on. Elephant populations have of course risen dramatically in protected areas; poaching has all but disappeared in South Africa’s better-managed and better-patrolled parks; and it’s been proven that because of their dramatic size, elephants are often over-blamed by farmers for crop damage that is in fact done by insects, birds, rodents, bushpigs, or the farmer’s own livestock (the government financially compensates for crop-loss, and the figure is higher for elephants). And there is mounting evidence that state-of-the-art electric fencing, while doing the elephants no lasting harm, is effective in keeping them out of farmlands.

And Elephant Management, having something of a forum, bravely offers a further element in the equation – an element that perhaps conservative African politicians don’t want to hear, but which is nevertheless common knowledge to anyone who’s ever dealt with elephants. The element is that elephants are of course sentient beings with as much right to be here as humans, although the report is as always cautious in its wording:

The level of self-awareness and empathy exhibited by elephants suggests that they might be considered to have a limited form of a ‘right to privacy,’ in other words, they should be harassed as little as possible. Knowingly causing unnecessary suffering to any sentient organism is unacceptable and forbidden by law. In elephants, there is reasonable cause to suggest that suffering includes emotional stress, for instance trough fear based on past experience, or through witnessing harm to other elephants, especially those in the same family group.

Talking about emotional stress in animals that are capable of wiping out whole acres of cultivated cropland in one afternoon – talking about it to the government representatives of the farmers who stand to lose those crops – is a whole new world from the slim and functional ‘management techniques’ that applied in South Africa even thirty years ago, when whole herds would be indiscriminately culled of their adults (and the screaming calves chased down, crated up, and sold to zoos in Europe and the United States). Here, Scholes, Mennell, and their teams are emboldened to talk about elephant rights:

A first possible right builds on the idea that humans should not lightly kill elephants: ‘No human may kill an elephant unless in self-defence, or when an independent panel of appropriate experts find compelling reasons to do so.’ The biggest harm we can do to elephants is to kill them. We thus first of all owe elephants the security of their lives that we cannot take away without good reason. Elephants … make decisions and experience a wide range of emotions. They have consciousness like us and are deeply aware of death. They thus deserve similar protection of their lives to that which humans get.

As encouraging as such sentiments are (even so carefully phrased – meant to shock no one, to astound no one, and so to offend no one), however, they are dutifully concerned only with first principles. If we don’t safeguard the elephants’ actual lives first, such reasoning goes, all other worries become meaningless. It remains for those who’ve known wild elephants for many years to say whether there is, in fact, a bigger harm humans can do to elephants than killing them. As farming becomes more wide-scale and more industrialized in Africa, as elephants become increasingly penned in to parks and game preserves (even now, life expectancy drops precipitously for animals that leave such preserves), will they cease to be elephants in the sense the millennia have known? Are we ready for the sight of elephant herds standing around waiting for a grain-truck to show up, as American caribou do today?

Elephant Management faces the central problem of an essentially intractable conflict between wide-roaming elephants and wide-settling humans, and it marshals numbers and plans for an elephant population that has shown vitality and resilience when protected. How much worse the situation faced by Scott Kraus and Rosalind Rolland in their comprehensive and quietly compelling 2007 study The Urban Whale! There, the subject – the North Atlantic right whale (eubalaena glacialis) is eight or nine times the size of an African elephant and covers a home-territory that stretches from Florida to Norway, along some of the most heavily-trafficked sea-lanes in the world, and in the open ocean where there’s no possibility of parks or preserves.

Worse the situation, and far, far worse the numbers. There are perhaps 200 North Atlantic right whales left in the world – perhaps as few as two or three distinct matrilineal lines, and despite the fact that relative to their body weight and length, males are the best-endowed whales in the world and among the best-endowed mammals (and despite the incredible all-day bacchanals that happen during the females’ mating window – bacchanals that have to be seen to be believed and are exhausting even for human spectators), there is evidence to suggest this has never been a reproductively robust species. The young gestate for 12 months and are totally dependent on their mothers for years (as in the case of elephants – and humans).

Female right whales give birth to a single calf, sometime between December and March, off the coast of the southeastern United States. Mothers and calves migrate north in the spring to Great South Channel and Cape Cod Bay, then move on to Roseway Basin and the Bay of Fundy. They feed on zooplankton at the surface, where they’re easily identified (they’re a very broad whale, and one of the few without dorsal fins) – indeed, that ease of identification almost led to their complete eradication. Humans have been hunting North Atlantic right whales since at least the 16th century, and the animals were given their designation of ‘right’ by 19th century whalers who noticed that a) the animals give large yields of baleen and oil, b) they’re slow swimmers, and c) they float after death. By the beginning of the 20th century, there may have been as few as fifty animals left.

Bans on commercial whaling in the last 80 years have helped the species to inch back from the brink, but in inching them back any further, scientists like Kraus and Rolland face both a discouragingly large number of environmental threats to the whales and a weirdly sketchy amount of information about the animals themselves.

We don’t know how many North Atlantic right whales there are; we don’t know what they do all day and all night; we don’t know where the males spend 90 percent of their time, nor do we know any of the species’ mating areas; we don’t even know how long they might live if humans weren’t constantly killing them early – a hundred years? Two hundred? We know what they look like – not only as a species but as individuals, thanks to the highly-visible callosities that form around their heads in individually unique patterns (these are not barnacles, though they resemble them – no barnacles have ever been found on a North Atlantic right whale). And we know that whatever collective memory of trauma they might retain from whaling days, many individual right whales are openly curious about the humans studying them, often approaching research vessels and staying for a while to watch what they do.

As mysterious as many of the details of right whale lives may be, the details of their deaths are all too well known: environmental pollution (the North Atlantic is one of the world’s most urbanized oceans, with some of the largest amounts of agricultural and industrial runoff in the world), ship collisions, and most harrowing of all, line entanglements:

50 percent of all confirmed right whale deaths are due to clearly identifiable anthropogenic sources. In the case of shipping collisions, most right whale habitats are also home to major shipping lanes serving ports of eastern North Amercia. In the case of fishing, 75 percent of all right whales display scars indicative of entanglements at some time in their lives.

The authors put forward some whale-friendly alternatives to the kind of indiscriminate line-netting that results in such horrific damage and lingering death, but again, two intractable obstacles get in the way: fences will not work on whales, and the human world hungers for undiminished amounts of cheap seafood. Industries along the eastern seacoast of the North American continent are better-regulated than they were thirty years ago, but the implementations of those regulations changes with every White House administration, and shipping and line-netting continue unabated, with scientists in boats racing to cut entangled animals free while the footage plays out in television.

“Human decisions over the next few decades,” Kraus and Rolland write, “will determine the survival or extinction of this species.” Human inertia too, will play a large part, and even the most optimistic observer, watching the desperate measures being taken to save a few thousand South African elephants or a few hundred North Atlantic right whales (and trying not to think about the hosts of smaller, less charismatic species that are being driven to extinction by human expansion everywhere else in the world), can’t help but wonder if these efforts aren’t coming too late, in the face of a mounting human tide that’s simply too great to accommodate any animals that are not hidden niche-exploiters, or parasites of mankind. All praise to the players for the dogged optimism with which they guard their individual candle-flames, but those of us in the audience are forced to wonder if we aren’t seated for a century of farewell symphonies.

____
Tucker “Tuc” MacFarland is an avid whale enthusiast and retired tour boat captain in the Florida Keys. He currently lives north of Seattle.

By Francisco X. Stork
Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine, 2010

Last Night I Sang to the Monster

By Benjamin Alire Saenz
Cinco Punto Press, 2009

Last year found Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World on virtually every “Best of” and “Notable” list for young adult fiction. The story of a teenager with Asperger’s Syndrome who is forced to work for a summer in a “real world” job at his father’s law firm resonated with critics and readers for its sensitive and realistic narration, as well as its broader themes of morality and family drama. In his follow-up to this critically lauded book, Stork has once again delivered a winning, character-driven novel that delves deeply into big questions without forgetting its intended young adult audience.

The unlikely journey of seventeen year olds Pancho Sanchez and Daniel “D.Q.” Quentin begins with Pancho’s arrival at St. Anthony’s orphanage in Las Cruces, New Mexico. To describe his circumstances as “hard luck” is an understatement: his mother dies when he is five, and the recent deaths of his father and sister within months of each other have left him alone and without a home. It’s a situation that even Pancho acknowledges is “so unbelievable, it was embarrassing. It was like he made the whole thing up just so people would feel sorry for him.” Uninterested in pity, Pancho’s mission is to find the man he believes is responsible for his sister Rosa’s death, a case officially closed by the police. Her body is found alone in a hotel room, circumstances that haunt Pancho into action.

He finds an unlikely, and at first unwanted, ally in D.Q., whose cancer-ravaged body does nothing to limit his sharp, philosophical mind. D.Q. is writing what he calls a Death Warrior manifesto, a list of rules on living life to the fullest. Unlike Pancho, D.Q. was brought to the orphanage by his bipolar mother. Now remarried and feeling remorse at her abandonment of her son, she wants D.Q. to return to Albuquerque for treatment in a clinical trial. After learning that the man he believes is responsible for Rosa’s death lives in Albuquerque, Pancho agrees to accompany D.Q. home to be his aide.

D.Q’s constant stream of life-to-the-fullest affirmations and engagement with the world around him stand in stark contrast to Pancho’s barely contained anger. Stork’s rendering of Pancho is masterful, and some of the best moments of the book occur when Pancho can no longer bottle up his emotions. After setting up a punching bag at the orphanage, he challenges another boy to fight:

He had planned to go like that through the whole match – receiving whatever Coop sent his way until he got tired, and then Pancho would bop him a few times – but something happened. Maybe it was Coop’s arrogant smile, or maybe it was his blue eyes and the golden skin glistening with sweat, or maybe it was just impossible to contain the rage that fueled him. Gracefully, effortlessly, Pancho dodged a wild right hook from Coop and buried his left hand in Coop’s abdomen. He sent the punch the way his father taught him, as if he planned for the arm to go through his opponent’s body.

With D.Q., Stork walks a fine line between a heartfelt character using the little energy he has left to enjoy life and a preachy know-it-all who wants to impose the rules of his strident manifesto on a reluctant Pancho. Even at his most exasperating, Stork infuses D.Q.’s New Age proclamations with a sense of urgency:

“The death of the spirit can come when we grasp life more than we should or it can come when we fail to appreciate life, when we are not grateful for it, when we don’t even notice we’re alive.”

Pancho exhaled loudly. It was pointless to even try to understand.

D.Q. continued quickly, “Like right now. Part of me just wants to give up. The feeling of wanting to give up, of thinking that life as I’m living it now is not worth living, that’s a kind of death. That’s the kind of death the Death Warrior fights against.”

The bond that forms between Pancho and D.Q. evolves slowly, with no singular, forced moment that makes them better understand each other. While the friendship begins as one-sided, ultimately Pancho cares deeply for D.Q.’s well-being, and even helps him escape from his mother’s home when he wants to leave the clinical trial and return to the orphanage. He has also taken D.Q.’s advice to heart. When given the opportunity to exact revenge for Rosa’s death, he walks away, opting to “appreciate life.” While the resolution of the novel is a bit rushed (Pancho’s encounter with Rosa’s boyfriend and D.Q.’s leaving home unfold in quick succession), the journey that the characters embark on is engrossing and the relationship between them is realistically portrayed.

With similar themes of loss and redemption, Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Last Night I Sang to the Monster tells the story of Zach, a high school senior living at an addiction treatment facility. Zach is fighting the push-pull of wanting to remember the horrible events that brought him to the facility while also desperately trying to submerge the memories. The book is written in the first person; we’re as much in the dark as Zach is, and the slow unraveling of his tragic family life makes for a heart-wrenching read.

It’s not just the mystery of Zach’s past that drives the novel, however. Saenz writes with a note-perfect clarity throughout, and while Zach’s head is an incredibly disturbing place to be, it’s a point of view that doesn’t wear out it’s welcome:

I’m beating the crap out of myself.
I’m living in a space between day and night.
I want to move. I want to stay still.
I want to sleep. And I want to be awake.
I want to be loved. And I want to be left alone.
I know that I’m better because I can name things now. I can place myself on the map of the world. I can. I can talk about myself to myself. I can be honest about a lot of things. But I don’t want to think about my mom or my dad or my brother.

As the pieces of Zach’s troubled past resurface, we’re given glimpses of his highly dysfunctional family: his unstable mother, his alcoholic father, and his violent older brother, Santiago. Even while relaying the terrible events of his childhood, Zach still sees the good in them. Being pushed to dredge up the past by his therapist Adam, Zach is forced to confront the impact that his family had on his life:

We had a decent house. And my dad liked having a nice lawn. I had it in my head that the nice lawn was my father’s way of telling the world that a real family lived there. A man, even a man who drinks too much, has to have some pride. Pride. Maybe God wrote that word on my dad’s heart.

But the thing was that he spent more time with the grass than he did with me. That messed me up when I thought about it. That’s the thing about remembering. If remembering messed me up, then why do it?

While facing his family trauma and his own alcohol and drug addiction, Zach forms a close bond with his roommate Rafael, a 53 year old man who takes Zach under his wing. Rafael is an obvious father figure for Zach, but as presented by Saenz the friendship is not a cloying distraction. Through several scenes of group therapy, we see that Rafael is wrestling with his own demons: sexual abuse by an uncle and his responsibility for the death of his son in a car accident. While Rafael encourages Zach to remember his past, we see his own pain as well, which levels the moralistic playing field. In Rafael, Zach sees a model for coping with the terrible memories that slowly bubble to the surface. In his sessions with Adam, however, Zach has difficulty admitting that he loves Rafael like a father, angry at the implication that he doesn’t have a father already. Zach’s need for a father figure becomes more apparent with the glaring absence of his family from the facility. There are no visits or phone calls, for reasons that become heartbreakingly clear as Zach finally remembers the events before he arrived at the facility.

Last Night I Sang to the Monster, for all its darkness, is, in the end, a story of hope and finding the power to forgive. Benjamin Alire Saenz triumphs over the serious subject matter to deliver a novel that is not depressing, but life-affirming. In the character of Zach he has created a relatable teenager who is equal parts stubborn and vulnerable. Dealing with similarly somber questions of mortality and faith, Francisco X. Stork’s The Last Summer of the Death Warriors is able to infuse his story with enough teenage boy banter to keep the novel from veering into exceedingly maudlin territory. Both authors are to be commended for crafting books that aren’t afraid to tackle serious subjects in a way that can captivate a teen audience.

____
Kristin Brower Walker received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in Boston. She currently lives in Cooperstown, NY where she still can’t escape Red Sox fans.

Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever

By Justin Taylor
Harper Perennial, 2010

Tetris is not a game you can win. It just gets harder and harder until you lose. It is “designed to end, not to be beaten; I doubt they even programmed a graphic for the YOU WIN screen.” This existential nugget is given us by the narrator of “Tetris,” a talented story in Justin Taylor’s consistently talented collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. In the story, a young man plays Tetris while the world ends. His girlfriend lies on the floor nearby, curled into the fetal position and clutching a Bible she is trying to make sense of. The image is a little too on the nose. In fact, all of the stories in this collection are palpably familiar, as if Taylor had purchased a short story kit – complete with disaffected teens, fading love, dysfunctional families, and oddly eloquent losers – to assemble at home.

That would seem to be a fatal strike against Taylor’s debut, but Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever remains very readable despite the seeming limitations of its forms and themes. These short stories may resemble and derive from the work of a long line of American short story practitioners, but they retain a freshness of execution and a depth of feeling that keep you engaged throughout. The stories are dense and efficient, no words wasted, without feeling stripped bare. The characters spring to life with just the faintest touches. The settings and conflicts are perfectly constructed, but rarely feel contrived. It’s an extremely successful book, and makes me immediately interested in knowing what else Taylor will have to say.

What he’s saying so far is summed up well by that doomed Tetris game. A sense of fatalism runs heavily through all the stories. The characters don’t expect much from life except for it to continue being hard. They are not idealists, dreamers, or problem solvers. Most of them are lazy, or just laid-back enough to watch their decisions being made for them. A lot of them feel persistently guilty – for being bad friends, bad Jews, bad boyfriends – but not enough to do more than notice their guilt and comment upon it. If there are better, more productive versions of themselves to strive towards, they don’t seem interested.

They live apart from the ideals, such as religion or love, that might make them try to become better. The romantic relationships in the stories are routinely uninspiring. I was struck by how often Taylor described a relationship both during and after it had taken place. For instance, “What Was Once All Yours” describes a high school couple, slightly mismatched, who are drawn closer together by an unexpected pregnancy. Watching their relationship deepen is quietly moving, but Taylor then goes on to describe their breakup and the narrator’s admission that “years later” he would think of his ex-girlfriend infrequently, and didn’t miss her. Their meaningful time together, we’re supposed to notice, was not wholly redemptive. They were not made new and complete by each other. They went back to being uninspired.

Religion, which shows up more than a few times, is similarly ineffective to these characters. Taylor’s narrators often have a brush with a religious person or idea, roll their eyes, and then continue with their day. In “The Jealousy of Angels,” literal angels from heaven steal the narrator’s girlfriend because they are jealous that God loves man more than them. The narrator has the option to “fill out a complaint form,” but doesn’t, and spends the rest of the afternoon watching the news and drinking beer with Satan, who has showed up to join him. “’That’s always how it is,’ Satan said. ‘They keep your days filled with the piddling shit so you don’t have the time or the heart to go after the big stuff.’”

And for the most part, no, the characters in Everything Here don’t go after the big stuff. But the absence of idealism, epiphany, or religion does not sink them into despair. They are all quite accustomed, if not comfortable, with the lack of certainty in their lives, as if they never expected anything else. Their personal failures are related with complacency, their trespasses seem inevitable. Their relationships always seem to be – and are described as – a matter of chance or convenience, or sometimes both.

Justin Taylor

I saw him on the first day of ninth grade – high school, the real big time – down the hall from me, in motion. He was taller, and not so zitty as he’d been. He was lean now, hair the color of wheat and shaggy about his ears. We saw each other, thirty feet of emptying hall between us. The bell was ringing – a digital bell that sounded like some bag of microwave popcorn was ready. The linoleum floors were freshly buffed for the new school year and the light flung down by the fluorescent tubes screamed back up at the ceiling. It was like being trapped between two horrible moons. He nodded at me – one acknowledging chin raise, that was all it was – and I gave him the same back. We were zeroed out, I understood this, strangers about to meet for the first time, though we didn’t. Not then. We had classes to get to and were both late.

Many of the stories in Everything Here are written with this same first-person tone, as if the characters are constantly aware of how they are coming across to you. A few times the narrator adds “you know?” at the end of a description, and once, “You know what I mean when I say that.” Taylor uses a kind of social shorthand to make the reader feel comfortable within the stories. All the bars feel like places you’ve been before, and all the characters feel like people you went to high school with, perhaps because a large number of the stories take place in high school.

Like a lot of high school students, then, Taylor’s characters are slightly overdefined by persona. Goth, hippie, grunge, anarchist, freak folk, and hipster are all terms used to introduce new characters without much elaboration. Taylor lets the classifications stand, knowing that most readers – especially readers that are roughly of his generation – will recognize these types. You don’t feel that this is authorial laziness, though. He treats his characters much like they treat themselves, people who are so accustomed to appraising themselves and others as a sum of their public habits and tastes that reading stories about them feels a lot like being their friend on Facebook.

But that’s not to say that learning about them as social personas doesn’t make for good reading. Taylor has a gift for the telling detail: “Aunt Lisa had long blond hair, split at the ends and graying at the roots.” “She had a decent singing voice but didn’t use it.” “He’s wearing dark skinny-fit jeans and a brown tee shirt with a stencil of a broken machine gun on it and the all-caps directive to MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR.” “He holds the door for a bottle blond in end-of-season-sale designer wear.” I suspect that Taylor is holding himself back when it comes to his flair for these pithy one-liners, lest the stories become oppressively clever, all-mot-juste-all-the-time affairs. In moderation, though, they help to reinforce the detached nature of Taylor’s characters, where all the details of their public image are pushed to the surface, and all their true feelings, if they can admit to anything so embarrassingly unironic, are harder to discern. So we learn a lot about what kind of clothes they wear and what kind of music they listen to. When one of them is genuinely moved by something, it’s as refreshing and rare to us as it is to them.

The kid playing Tetris describes it as “a sort of ecstasy of self-and-game where we are as close to becoming one being as we ever will and this lasts some amount of time and then ends.” This sense of oneness, where the characters slip out of detachment and into, not idealism but a fuller, more engaged sense of life, is scarce. It doesn’t even happen in every story. A character in “Go Down Swinging” narrowly loses a chance to have just such a genuine experience, and regrets that he missed something “totally nontheoretical. The Real.” His girlfriend has to remind him that they do actually “live in the real.” “You poor theorist,” she says.

In “Tennessee” the Real comes unexpectedly. The main character spends most of the story trying to bond with his younger brother, which he never does, but ends up connecting with (well, sleeping with) his brother’s best friend. In “What Was Once All Yours,” the narrator describes his friend’s uncle Judge, “the kind of man who’d swerve toward an animal in the road,” and then goes on to say,

Judge has nothing to do with this story…. Judge is simply a character on whom I can’t help but dwell some. Something pulls my thoughts back his way. He inspires a loathing so pure, to be silent about it seems no less a crime than denying love.

It’s this purity of emotion that is so rare, and that exerts an unexpected force on the stories. Taylor’s characters are used to assuming that powerful emotion is contrived or naïve, so that they have to remind themselves, and marvel, that they are capable of it. None do this more effusively than the narrator of “Weekend Away,” who says,

Real life. What a funny concept. When I think about it – This is it! Happening! Now! Andnowandnowandnow! – there’s nothing than can keep me from bursting out laughing.

Taylor’s characters muddle through their small, rather lackadaisical lives until that Tetris game eventually beats them. But until then they sometimes win small battles. They sometimes experience perfectly true moments. And those moments shimmer through the haze. As one character says, “The world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some.”

Clearly Taylor would dominate any creative writing workshop. His collection can be read like a handbook for the successful short story. Take a central character or two, make them slightly off-center but still relatable. Demonstrate their off-centeredness with a few skillfully chosen details, being careful to sprinkle these throughout instead of frontloading them, or you’ll look like you’re trying too hard. Give these characters a conflict which is equal parts momentous and private. Don’t make them heroes. It’s an unbelievably familiar genre.

But Taylor’s remarkable literary talent is obvious even when writing precise, formulaic stories—grace notes of true feeling are constantly shooting up through stories’ artificial constraints. He’s shown us that he knows all the rules. Now I look forward to when he starts breaking them.

___
Janet Potter has worked in bookstores in Boston, Dublin, Greece, and Chicago. If you ever meet her, she will try to make you read Cloud Atlas.

Tiepolo Pink

Roberto Calasso (translated by Alastair McEwen)
Knopf, 2009

From the very first moment he sold a painting or fresco (probably around 1715), Giambattista Tiepolo has been the favorite punching bag of condescending critics. Giorgio Manganelli said of him “he is an idolater of light disguised as a human being,” and he didn’t mean it in a friendly way. Critic Roberto Longhi referred to a Tiepolo as “a Veronese after a downpour.” Bernard Berenson, the avaricious procurer of so many of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s art treasures, sniffingly commented, “It was Tiepolo’s vision of the world that was at fault, and his vision of the world was at fault only because the world itself was at fault.” The consensus among the cognoscenti has always been that Tiepolo is an adequate coverer of walls but a far cry from the best Venice has to offer.

To be fair, he brought some of this on himself. He did virtually everything an artist needs to do in order to curry no favor with the pretentious snobs of future ages: he worked fairly quickly, he worked, so far as we know, exclusively for money, he wasn’t a particularly tortured individual, he trafficked in historical and mythological allegories (hoo-boy, nothing make modern snobs madder than that), and when the commissions started piling up, he was happy to merely oversee the drafting of works and let assistants (chiefly his sons) do the detail-work. In other words, from his own day to the present, he’s been suspected of being a hack, an odd-jobs man, a hired paintbrush with no more genuine artistic sensitivity than a Thomas Kinkade or a Bev Doolittle.

History moves on, critical schools form and disband, and those of us who don’t profess to be cognoscenti must look to other things in order to form our own opinions of someone like Tiepolo (if we’re smart, we’ll do it with every artist, in every medium, but let’s at least start with Tiepolo and see how we do). The first, last, and most important things to look at are the man’s paintings. And that has always saved Tiepolo, because his paintings are full of untroubled wonder, shining in the sun. Whenever an impartial viewer comes across one and sees it sprawling there smiling in the bright light of its own conception, that viewer will smile and exhale a little, the involuntary intake of a little rapture. Most painters are lucky if they’re able to cause such a reaction once or twice in a career; Tiepolo, with his massive processions of richly-costumed characters preening and cavorting, does it in every canvas, in every fresco. French critic Maurice Barres said of him, “My companion, my true self, is Tiepolo,” and countless viewers have felt the same way: that they were cultivating a secret preference, that they had found a friend among the numberless ranks of costume-ball painters whose work fills the halls, chapels, and churches of Italy and Europe.

Certainly I feel that way about Tiepolo, have for years. So it’s only natural that the prospect of well-known writer Roberto Calasso publishing a book-length appreciation of Tiepolo would fill me with a cold sense of dread.

Not because I’m so enamored of the delusion of privately possessing Tiepolo that I’d begrudge him the new attention such a book would bring him – no, I would dearly love it if more people, and even some among the cognoscenti, could have their eyes opened to the glories of this particular Venetian master.

No, the dread comes from the fact that as a writer, Calasso is so full of cow crap that if you planted seeds in his cerebellum in midsummer, you’d have a bumper crop of pumpkins come autumn. His many admirers have tripped over themselves to excuse – or honor – the fact that in his prose he often seems not to know what he’s doing or what points he’s making, probably because in certain literary circles even pure twaddle will get the laurel as long as it’s ineffable twaddle. But no number of ecstatic (and, alas, ruefully accurate) cries “Only Calasso could have written that!” can change the fact that his breakout title The Ruin of Kasch has hardly a single coherent sentence not cobbled together by a hapless editor or polished into prose by a heroic translator, nor the fact that his most popular book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, is a muddle so thorough I’m certain even its author has never read it.

So we come back to the cold dread. The idea of Calasso writing at length about my secret self, my Tiepolo, struck the same twisted-ironic note that genies always strike when granting some poor slob a wish. Eternal life? Certainly – but as a cucumber! A mainstream book about Tiepolo by a popular author? Certainly – but it’s Roberto Calasso! Ha ha HAH!

A certain irony hovers over bemoaning an author’s impenetrable self-indulgence while talking about Tiepolo, that most gaudy yet removed of artists, but it’s not a deep irony nor an instructive one. Peer beneath the color and riot of any major work by Tiepolo, and you will find not only consummate technical skill but a puckish brain at work. Peer beneath the garrulous showmanship of Calasso’s prose (translated here by Alastair McEwan) and you get passage after passage like this:

Although Tiepolo probably didn’t know the word – we may surmise – he would have found it indifferent and extraneous, an epistemological change seems to underpin his painting. It is as if the Vedantic maya had clandestinely seeped into the pigments and enveloped every figure, but without changing in any way the ceremonial of commissions, subjects, and techniques. But could this be a misrepresentation, an unjust attribution of significance to a style of painting that contemporaries did not even consider particularly new and admired above all for its skilled execution? There is no way of ascertaining this. But neither can we exclude it in principle: certain boundaries are stepped over unnoticed, without this being perceived by the one taking the step or being recognized by others. If we wished, we could propose a proof by contradiction, a kind of ordeal: in the absence of that all-embracing maya, Tiepolo’s world ought to be understandable in another way, in terms better suited to his times and milieu. But that’s not how it is.

Quick: how what is?

You see the problem.

But it’s not all bad – the most problematic part of Calasso is that he’s never all bad. His thoughts are spastic and rapid-fire, and sheer probability has some of them hitting the target. When he refers to Tieoplo’s paintings as “the last gasp of happiness in Europe,” you want to applaud – but then it’s followed by something like this: “No one, until then, had attributed a self to Tiepolo, who was probably devoid of one – far less had anyone thought of identifying with him.”

Probably devoid of a self? So what, he painted all those big walls in a coma? The line is probably a gesture in the general direction of some vague idea of historical phenomenology (perhaps in a crowded dining hall one day Calasso distantly overheard the phrase “Renaissance self-fashioning,” filed it away, incorrectly, and kept eating), but as usual, the author has forgotten that he isn’t the Book of Mormon – his readers shouldn’t be obliged to parse, cobble, and launch intuitive guesses at his meaning.

In Tiepolo Pink they are required to do that, over and over again, and the result is never worth the effort. It’s not the whole of the book; there are sections that demand acclaim and offer easy illuminations. For instance, Calasso devotes a refreshing amount of attention to Tiepolo’s Scherzi series of etchings (almost all the etchings we have from him), a mysterious sequence of black-and-white images that defy interpretation:

It is as if Tiepolo [in his Scherzi sequence], in the twenty-three images of the series, had radically reduced the elements that make up the world. As if he had said: the game, our secret game, is made of these entities, which the viewer is permitted to see, even though he is still an intruder. Every Scherzo is a variation of that game. Every time the figures meet up again, they exchange roles, take part in the same events, which are unclear and – for the viewer – never have any precise name. In over two hundred years, all attempts to define what is happening in these images have proved invariably inadequate. Only the actors know – and even they are often astonished. But hard on the heels of such frank wonder will come whole chunks of prose that are every bit as mysterious as the Scherzi sequence, but substituting blather and wind for beauty and wonder:

At one and the same time, theurgy contains within itself the most conspicuous and the most imperceptible parts of the magic arts. Often, it is based on talismans, liturgical gestures, offerings, and formulas, but it can also manifest itself in immobility and silence. Both are forms of theurgy, because both recognize that the world is inhabited by a variety of beings who are in some way a part of the divine, beings with whom thought can – indeed, should – establish constant relations, visible or invisible. Consequently, theurgy can assume opposite aspects.

It’s clear from Tiepolo’s paintings that he had a regular troupe of models for all his major figures – we see the same faces over and over again. Calasso charmingly points this out several times, noting: “Cleopatra [in Banquet for Cleopatra and Antony] has chosen the same dress she wore when the baby Moses was found. Then she was the pharaoh’s daughter. Now she finds herself playing the last Queen of Egypt.” The tone here is precisely right: when we study Tiepolo, we must never stray from bemusement. He himself knew he was often creating adornments his patrons would glance at a few times and then ignore for the rest of their lives (you can’t paint walls and ceilings and not know this), and this holds true even for his overwhelming masterpiece, the 7,000 square foot ceiling fresco he and his sons created for the Wurzburg palace in Germany. “The eighteenth century teems with ceilings that become skies in which figures wheel and circle, every time we come across a sufficiently magnificent and ambitious palace,” Calasso says. “But they are never as airy and intoxicating as those by Tiepolo.”

This kind of assessment is true and heartfelt, and readers wish for more of it from Tiepolo Pink. Unfortunately, Calasso has a loyal and vocal fan-base who must have certain quantities of rubbish shoveled their way in every Calasso book, and our author is only too happy to oblige:

In whatever situation they appear – festive or dramatic, secret or public – the Orientals wear the same expression: grave, absorbed, with something foreboding and sinister about it. They never intervene, they observe. And we cannot even understand if they approve or condemn what happens. But their presence points to the fact that something is happening, something that perhaps eludes the actors and the bystanders – and perhaps even those who look at the picture. You can run right through all painting at the height of the eighteenth century and find nothing like Tiepolo’s Orientals. It is as if they were a concentrate of everything that the period attempted to expunge from itself. What were they doing, first of all? Looking at something being destroyed by fire – and becoming invisible. They were looking at destruction of the visible. By now, this might seem like the practice of witchcraft. But it was the foundation of ancient liturgies in India and Persia – the places of origin of those Orientals who now found themselves on the high ground, in countryside perhaps not far from Venice.

Quick: what was?

As noted, Calasso is never entirely bad; Tiepolo Pink (originally published five years ago in Italian) has lines, sentiments, portions that will appeal to many readers, especially those unfamiliar with Tiepolo – in whose paintings, as Calasso happily writes, “There is space and air for all.” But air and space should be clean and clear, and this book is almost never clean or clear, because its author has seldom in his career stopped writing long enough to think. Grab at the sketch of a theory, slap together some melodramatic, slightly anachronistic terminology, and wrap it all in a thin veneer of inscrutability, then package it as the next Calasso rumination.

“Of all the greats of painting,” Calasso tells us, quite rightly, “Tiepolo was the last one who knew how to keep silent. No one managed to wring from him any declarations of faithfulness to nature or the sanctity of drawing.” And this dearth of first-hand information is used as a kind of rallying-point:

These huge lacunae should be respected, contemplated. Posterity’s pretensions to reconstruct, to weave something out of nothing, are a sorry affair. The works remain – and their eloquence may suffice.

At that point, Tiepolo Pink still has 35 pages to go.

____
Bartolomeo Piccolomini is a native of Fiumicino, Italy. He graduated from Rome’s John Cabot University and now works as a freelancer based in Rome.

“snoverkill” by Jeffrey Eaton
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Jeffrey Eaton is a fundraiser and amateur photographer living in Washington, DC. His photographs and essay Raging Bull have been featured in Open Letters Monthly where he is Editor-at-Large.

____

of “snoverkill” Jeff writes: “Average snowfall in Washington, DC is usually about 16″ – 22″. The winter of 2009-2010, already the snowiest of all time for the city, has produced snowfall amounts similar to what Anchorage, AK and Portland, ME typically receive, about 70″. This photograph was taken during our third blizzard of the season. Appropriately nicknamed Snowverkill, this high-wind storm followed only four days after the 4th largest DC snowstorm of all time, which President Obama publically referred to as Snowmaggedon. The two storms together dropped a combined 28.4″ over a six day period”

For more on this picture, see Maureen Thorson’s reflections here: http://www.reenhead.com/mole/2010/02/view-from-my-home-office-jeff-just-took.php

“Dominium” by Katie Caron

OL: Let’s start with materials: what is Dominium made of?

KC: Dominium is a multi-media sculptural environment incorporating many elements of our world including: oil, iron, plastic, acrylic, clay, silicon, motors, florescent lights, moss, salt, and water. Much like the Cabinets of Curiosities from the 1700’s, Dominium is an encapsulated space containing the whole world within. Before the information age, people understood the world through tactile specimens in museum displays. This work is both referencing that era of curiosity compared with the immersive experience of looking through the virtual windows of our era, the tv, computer, and iphone.

OL: How do you think of the different levels? What did you call them to yourself while you were building them?

KC: The work represents a cross section of a fictional landscape which of course references our own world. Each level reveals the hidden and unknown elements which both impact and even control the life on the surface. The bottom level I call the “Wasteworld,” as it is made up oil, latex paint, and iron filings. Magnets move below its surface causing small creatures to form and move in the ooze. It is the oil we extract for consumption and the primordial stew from which we evolved.

The “Waterwold” is the next level up from the bottom. It is comprised of clay, water, oil, moss and silicon forms. Backlit, there is a mysterious depth to the water. This layer is the spawning ground for life as the silicon forms reference egg sacks and growth.

The “Saltworld” is where salt water evaporates creating mineral structures. As the water changes from liquid to solid, it creates a moist atmosphere throughout the layer.

The “Wireroots” and “Motors” are the layer just below the surface. They control the movements of the iron filings, and reference our evolved technological condition.

Finally, the “Surface” of this world is a vacuumed-formed plastic landscape, sculpted from clay and computer parts. It references a topographical map of both a rugged and colonized landscape. Iron filings scurry about its surface much like ants; their efforts appear repetitive and futile. OL: I’m reminded when I look at these pictures of when I read The Recognitions, growing aware of the way in which the world is real and fake in equal measure, as are famous works of art and breathtaking landscapes (what’s been re-touched or restored? what’s been landscaped? How is it framed? How did you get there? It’s like the paradise of Hieronymous Bosch: whose paradise is this? And how real is the alternative?

Having done a bit of work with stop- motion animation and video, I am fascinated by our mind’s ability to transport us through a mediated lens to another time or world. It is so easy to create illusions with film, but how can you create an engrossing visual experience with an object? I am obsessed with human nature’s interest in being fooled. The complexity of the present moment is not enough as we seek 3d movies or video games to transport us elsewhere. So it is with theatrical lighting, motors and magnets that I seek to question the line between what is real and what is artifice.

OL: You lived in Colorado for many years, but Dominium was conceived and made outside Detroit. Do you see both places in the Box? I ask because there seems to be more of the technological world here — right angles, lights. It’s a different world than that of your Colorado work.

KC: That’s a great question! In some ways, it is a combination of the Detroit and Denver landscapes. The ariel perspective of mountains and city scape is very much what I missed about Denver when I moved to Detroit. The open sky and looming rockies, made the city and its inhabitants feel small and insignificant. Detroit is the “Underworld,” a place in transition from industrial decay to agricultural rebirth. Place is a huge influence on my work and inspirations.

Be it a third martini, or a second Gulf War, we’re all familiar with ideas that look great in theory but are disasters in practice. In the literary world, those disasters grate especially intimately; there’s no feeling quite like reading a book and wishing it were better, wishing it had seen more of its own potential – or even just wishing its author could write a little better. This month our “Bad Books, Good Hooks” feature examines some of those frustrating books, and you can look for more candidates to crop up regularly throughout the year on our Open Letters blogs, Like Fire and Stevereads.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

In The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, Laura Miller devotes an entire chapter to why children love talking animal stories: “If we have mixed feelings about the gifts of language and consciousness, we have no intention of surrendering them. Instead, we want to bring animals along with us, into the solitude of self-knowledge, perhaps hoping that they’ll make it a less lonely place for us.”

She has that right, and I suspect that’s especially true for bookish children. Certainly my way in to reading was the world of sentient animals. First the Burgess books, Dr. Doolittle, Paul Gallico’s cats, and yes, the Chronicles of Narnia. When I moved on, I went from talking animals to just… animals. Mostly dogs. I read every dog book in the library, had a shelf of my own, and never, ever missed an episode of Lassie—I wanted a dog like that so badly I could taste it. We owned a large, undisciplined Shepherd who was nice but not good (she once dragged my mother half a block and broke two of her ribs). I wanted a loving, steadfast canine companion the way teenage girls dream of finding a lover.

And in the same way that there’s a whole ocean of books speaking to the need for love and companionship and finding that one true other, for me there was The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. It grabbed me by sheer virtue of having everything I wanted in a novel when I was eight years old—super-intelligent, unswervingly loyal dogs, a brave mute dictionary-loving boy, an epic journey. David Wroblewski obviously knows his way around a kennel, and the details of the dogs’ whelping and raising and training were great. The loving nursemaid dog Almondine, Edgar’s lifelong protector, was dear Nana from Peter Pan rewritten for an adult palate. “Almondine followed Edgar up to his room and they lay on the floor, paw-boxing”— just a throwaway line near the beginning of the book, but for anyone who’s spent time rolling around with a beloved dog, doesn’t it make your heart squeeze a little? The book did that to me over and over. It got me where I lived.

I still can’t bring myself to call it a bad book. It was, however, underedited, bloated with distractions: the red herring search for the dog Hachiko, the mysterious stray Forte, Edgar’s extended conversation with an old farmer’s ghost. Using Hamlet as a framing device wasn’t exactly a fatal flaw, but it was often heavy-handed. The book’s climactic barn fire scene, though, was criminal. It thoroughly betrayed the characters, sacrificing all that sensitivity about dog-human relations to a grand finale. These marvelous animals, trained not just to obey but to have some kind of canine moral center, stood by while violence was done to their masters and then turned tail and ran off into the woods—it was wrong on every count. Wrong for storybook dogs, wrong for any dog that’s been fed regularly and trained right. For 509 of its 566 pages, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle played to the myth of the honorable bond engagingly, sometimes elegantly, and so earned my love. But Wroblewski threw it all away in a burst of authorial selfishness, and I’m not sure I can forgive that.

Still, I’m grateful for Edgar, and Almondine, and all the excellent Sawtelle dogs. I’ll never reread the book, but neither will I give it away—in the end my affection was all sentimentality, and that’s reason enough to keep it around. And if Wroblewski comes up with a sequel about how the Sawtelle dogs have a wonderful, magical life in the forest and only come out to save small children from wells, I’ll probably read that too, dammit. It’s all Lassie’s fault.

Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

After William T. Vollmann’s World War II novel Europe Central won the 2005 National Book Award for fiction, n+1 published a long, excoriating review. Vollmann’s work amounts to a “sort of anti-writing,” the essayist J.D. Daniels argued. The prose is of a livid hue, the metaphors “preening.” Recalling my undergraduate perusal of Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria (1991), I was inclined to agree with the last two charges, at least. After marching through Europe Central, though, I’m no longer sure they aren’t beside the point.

Vollmann is surely among the easiest writers to cherry-pick. For one thing, there’s just so damned much of him. Europe Central’s 800 pages represent a mere blip in his published corpus (five million words since 1987 (and counting)). Moreover, the linguistic accidents critics pride themselves on spotting are the very hallmarks of Vollmann’s style: misty diction; mixed metaphors; images that obscure, rather than clarify; inapposite bursts of pastiche; and above all, a constitutional aversion to subtlety. Here’s the first sentence of his recent doorstopper, Imperial: “The All-American Canal was now dark black with phosphorescent streaks where the border’s eyes stained it with yellow tears.”

The opening of Europe Central, too long to quote here, is a virtual shooting gallery for Reader’s Manifesto-types. But isolating a graphomaniac’s slips and juxtaposing them with the ecstatic encomia of his enablers does not sound criticism make; for every bad description, I could cite you a good one.

The larger experience of Europe Central is that of being drawn into an obsession, and your ability to appreciate it will depend on your patience for other people’s pathologies. Vollmann’s are at once as public as Theodore Dreiser’s (to name another famously clumsy writer) and as hermetic as Henry Darger’s. In Europe Central, he seeks to lose himself in the vastness of the Eastern Front. At the same time, his hobbyhorses – especially the tedious Madonna/whore fetish that flattens the female characters here and elsewhere – render this landscape almost autistically involuted. Europe Central’s reimagining of the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovitch – the spine that connects the book’s many stories – is a performance of noisy self-effacement, early Vollmann transposed to a different key. But at its best – as in long sections about Generals Vlasov and Paulus and Nazi traitor Kurt Gerstein – it brings another mind beautifully to life: if not these characters’, then the author’s own.

Unlike, say, Richard Powers’, Vollmann’s erratic prose advances the aims of the books. He is not after literary realism or the fine writing to which it sometimes gets reduced. Vollmann has been compared to such post-realist antecedents as Thomas Pynchon, but I think the real touchstones for Europe Central are the pre-realisms he studied as a Comp. Lit major – the epics, with their heroic and epithetic approach to description; the sagas, with their archetypal patterning; and the garrulous anatomists of early Modernity – Montaigne, Browne, Burton.

“Stop urinating on me, Vollmann,” J.D. Daniels concluded his jeremiad. But it’s worth noting that some people, if the internet is to believed, like golden showers. Vollmann, similarly, is not for everyone. I’m not even sure he’s for me. But he’s managed to attract enough fetishists, whether readers or editors, to keep the good folks at Viking churning out his exhaustive, exhausting, and weirdly compelling books. Hell, he probably wrote another one in the time it took you to read this.

The Last Ranger series, by Craig Sargent

John Cotter, the pitiless, iron-fisted tyrant in charge of this special OLM feature, has decreed that individual entries shall not exceed 500 words, so I won’t waste any in bootless filibustering or meandering protestations, even though the beauty of the feature’s conceit demands considerably more elbow-room than that afforded by a mere 500 words.

Instead, I’ll come straight to the saga of another beleaguered freedom fighter, Martin Stone. He’s the protagonist, the unwilling badass hero of Craig Sargent’s sublimely awful-yet-compelling “Last Ranger” series, 10 novels published throughout the 1980s and set in a post-apocalyptic nightmare version of the United States, a version even more thickly populated by cannibals, religious zealots, power-mad petty despots, and murderous albinos than the REAL U.S. of A.

Martin Stone – the faithful progeny of ‘The Major,’ a vanished father-figure survivalist whose mountain compound withstood the ravages of the war that destroyed civilization – is young headstrong, smart, handsome, muscular, and quite determinedly libidinous, and he’s got a mission: to find his virtuous sister April, who’s lost somewhere in the mutant-infested badlands of this depraved new world.

He takes on that world with nothing but his wits and fighting skills – and an apparently endless supply of guns and ammo, a kickass pitbull named Excaliber, and a bitchin’ Harley that never seems to run out of gas. These novels, whose nuclear apocalypse setting was the ultimate ‘great hook’ for the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, continue to fascinate me, though I can’t pinpoint exactly why. After all, most of young Martin’s adventures consist of him being captured by deformed lunatics, tied up, chained, strapped down or otherwise shackled, and then brutalized for his various offenses:

“You fucked up, didn’t you, Preacher Boy?” Vorstel sneered, his three-toothed mouth twisting around like the face of some nightmarish eel at the bottom of the sea. “You was planning to double-cross us.” His fist suddenly slammed down, and Stone’s head rocketed around on his body like it was thinking about flying off on vacation somewhere.

“That’s for lying,” said Vorstel …

Maybe the allure derives from the rampant Freudianism laced throughout the books – a Freudianism every bit as irradiated and mutated as everything else Martin Stone encounters (except that no matter how vile the backwoods encampment is, he always manages to find at least one buxom female with proper hygiene and the requisite number of teeth – and they always make like Adam and Eve, if you know what I’m saying. At least until she gets her arms chopped off and gets tossed screaming into a pit of mutated rattlesnakes):

A razor chill ran up and down his spine. He must be going mad. The fucking cumulus looked like a woman – like April – long flowing tresses of puffy hair sprayed out around mile-wide shoulders. And as he watched, the cloud seemed to come apart, the head being suddenly severed from the rest of the cottony body by a high current of wind. The cloud head soared off trailing tendrils of ethereal white as it spun around in the atmosphere miles above. And Stone knew that there was no rest. Not for him. As long as April was out there – alive – his journey couldn’t end. Though he wished more than anything to stay and heal, and to make sweet love to LuAnn for days at a time, when the next morning sun rose, Martin Stone would be on his way back out into Hell again.

That “his journey couldn’t end” is boldly stated in book 5 or 6 (The Warlord’s Revenge … The Cutthroat Cannibals … as in Trollope novels, the precise details begin to blur), but to put it mildly, it turns out to be premature. The last book in the series is called Is This the End? And it answers that question, without a hint of ambiguity. Poor Martin. All that sex for nothing.

Quaker Guns by Caroline Knox

This book is clearly the work of a poet with a deep love of language, of the sound of words, of formal inversions and esoteric vocabularies – nautical, architectural and dress-making terms in particular. The poems are rife with literary and historical quotations, factoids, and allusions. They are the commonplace book of an active and writerly mind. But they are just a commonplace book. They are not really poems so much as exercises with which a very clever student might dazzle teachers. This student has great style – can write parodies, pastiches, witty ditties on topics ephemeral and perpetual (see, she’s got me doing it now), but at bottom, the teachers may well wonder: if this kid is so good at saying things, how come she hasn’t got anything to say?

A prime example: the book contains a poem that catalogues all the forms of poems used in the book (haiku, a flock of rubayyat, sestinas, sonnets, erasures), giving rise to a Drosté effect: this poem is about the poems in the book in which the poem about the poems appears. Very clever! But what of it?

Quaker Guns is endlessly allusive and associative. But it leaves me cold. Detached in tone and refusing to come to any sort of point, the poems therein deflect all emotion, and actively work against any attempt to invest them with meaning. There’s no there there.

And yet, I keep coming back to Quaker Guns. There is the liveliness of diction, the use of historical facts and allusions, the openness to unusual words and turns of phrase, an overall attentive deftness. And despite their evident rejection of sentiment, in the best of the poems, what is being said forms nearly invisible brackets around what is left unsaid, in the way that arrows pointing leftward subtly draw your attention to the right.

“Dove,” for example, opens with a few beguiling lines from John James Audubon, recounting the interruption of a contentious debate by a dove that lands on one of the participant’s arms. Knox then simply repeats the reported facts several times, in short, journalistic phrases, refusing to either acknowledge or speculate on the obvious questions: How did the participants take this portent? Did it quell their quarrel, or make them lay it aside as unresolved but petty? Was there a portent at all?

Although not voicing these mysteries outright, Knox, through her repetitions, makes her poem frame them. This way of writing fascinates me, and I have tried to develop in my own work this knack for making each word not only denotative, but connotative of leaps of intuition, questions, and emotions unvoiced but somehow apparent. And so, despite all my former dismissiveness, I often return to the mechanical poems of Quaker Guns and shake them, trying to see how they work.

Generosity By Richard Powers

I was glad to learn about this feature because I knew I could use it to offer a brief defense of Richard Powers. Powers was raked over the coals of some prestigious literary braziers last autumn after his novel Generosity was published. I’d been enjoying the unique rewards of his fiction for nearly a decade; it felt base not to stand up for him.

I can only go so far in that, unfortunately. Generosity is on the whole a bad book. It magnifies Powers’ artistic weaknesses like no book before it. Powers is a genius – that’s his gift and his burden. Geniuses can be maddening company because you never have their undivided attention: you’re constantly aware that they are thinking of other things even as they speak to you, and processing your most mundane conversation into some broader experience. You’re a part of a pattern.

Such patterns are amazing to discern, and the more complex they have become, the more magical Powers’ books have been. But Generosity, in comparison to wondrous works like Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and The Gold Bug Variations, is structurally prosaic. It’s linear, and almost cinematic in its plotting. The narration is closely tied to the characters, so Powers has very little space for the omniscient diversions that have framed his most virtuoso passages. Human personalities and motivations Powers can only clumsily reproduce. He tries to substitute verbal gymnastics for the intricacy he’s often achieved with his interleaving stories, so he exaggerates emotions and overloads his sentences with adjectives and adverbs: “Her eyes are aghast, delighted” or “He wants to eat her flame.”

Nonetheless, there are moments in Generosity that are unlike anything being written in contemporary fiction. The premise itself is immediately intriguing: a phenomenally upbeat woman is thought by her classmates and University professors to be abnormally euphoric, perhaps possessing a genetic predisposition to happiness known as hyperthymia. Research into her condition comes to the attention of the national media. Her attitude makes her an inspirational bellwether for daytime talk shows; her genome is coveted by a fast-talking Faust at a bioengineering lab. Does this woman contain some secret to joy and kindness? Can people upgrade themselves to be as happy as she is?

The ageless conflict between free will and determinism is being staged here, in the topical parlance of genetics and neurochemistry. Powers uses science to fine effect. It’s not an abstract study to him, but always tied to and complicated by human emotion. And his set pieces, though unremarkable for the grace of their rendering, embody the paradoxes between science and sixth sense. They dramatize, in vivid, relatable ways, the modern world’s steepest epistemological dilemmas.

The best of these scenes in Generosity takes place at an aquarium, where our cheerful heroine has arranged to meet the slick bioengineer to start negotiations for the sale of her genome. As they stroll the aquarium, the scientist begins to become unnerved in his pitch. Accompanied by one evolutionary freak, he finds himself surrounded by tanks full of others, and at a loss to account for it all:

She takes him down to the leafy sea dragons. The scientist has somehow missed these creatures’ existence. He pushes his face up to the glass, boggled. They are, by any measure, beyond fiction, madder than anything out of Tolkien. A sea horse cousin, but gone Daliesque, the deformed things have flowing banners pasted all over them, from dappled branches down to frilly spines. The drapery looks like clunky high school theatrical costumes. Taxonomy’s late-night brainstorming, gone unhinged.

Powers, as it has been hammeringly observed, can be heavy-handed in promoting the essential mystery that lies below the chemistry of his characters. But in brilliantly staged scenes like this one, a sense of miracle and mystery is attained naturally. I don’t think I can recommend Generosity to many readers, but there are things about it I’m not going to forget.

Bay of Souls by Robert Stone

Friends have recommended Robert Stone for years – not with press-it-in-your-hand fervor, but with solid smiles. I was curious and not a little suspicious about a literary novelist who impressed not only the struggling poets I met in bars, but also my father – an ex-soldier with unexpectedly exacting taste in books (about my own novel he asked me two questions: 1) Does anyone get murdered? and 2) Does anyone eat meat? – What you need is a scene where someone describes a piece of sirloin that’s so delicious, the other guy has to kill him for it. Then you need to describe how he cooks it, get some grilling tips in there).

Cracking Bay of Souls, I found myself in a hackneyed story about an alcoholic English professor who falls, gradually and not without self-recrimination, for an exotic and mysterious colleague. In between coke and S&M sessions with the haunted Lara Purcell, Professor Michael Ahern goes hunting with his academic chums in the Michigan woods: Michael had come armed into the woods for the customary reason, to simplify life, to assume an ancient uncomplicated identity. But the thoughts that surfaced in his silence were not comforting. The image of himself, for instance, as an agent of providence. The fact that for every creature things waited.

But he can’t bring himself to be that agent. When he gets a deer in his sight, he chokes. And although he abuses himself for his cowardice, he’s reassured on seeing an old timer struggling through the woods with a fresh kill in a wheelbarrow: “It was a thing full of seams and joints and springs. Though it appeared altogether large enough to contain the kill, it could not, and its inutility was the source of his sobs and curses and rage and despair.”

Cut to Lara and Michael in a Caribbean hotel room. They are flying down to a Haiti-like country (not actually called Haiti, for some reason) ostensibly so that Lara can put her dead brother’s affairs in order and reclaim her soul from the Vodou loa Ghede, but actually so that she can do some drug and/or diamond smuggling for some shady Colombians, which has something to do with the CIA, for whom she might or might not work. We’ve had hints of this during the first half of the book – while Michael is out hunting, the limited-third point of view switches to Lara’s on vacation in Washington DC, and in doing so instantly becomes shallow, murky, and burdened with obvious contrivance.

But that damn deer, you see, keeps coming back to me. Once you shoot your deer, you have to carry your deer. All of Michael’s problems seem to lift into a bigger structural harmony that feels meaningful and maybe even true.

If the hunter below was possessed of the violent paranoid’s tortured intuition, of the faintest sense of beings pied out in his ghastly mortification – if he tilted back his head far enough to wail at the sky – he would see the witness to his folly. High above him lurked a Day-Glo-painted watcher in a tree, his masked delighted face warped in a fiendish grin, If he sees me, Michael thought suddenly, he will kill me. Michael slipped his shotgun’s safety off and pulled his gloved finger at the trigger.

Down in Haiti/not Haiti, Lara falls into a trance, and although Michael is seduced halfway into it along with her, he wrenches himself out, afraid for his soul. Although he dives for lost loot to save Lara’s life (long story), he’s frightened by a corpse underwater and lets go of his catch. And of course he’s betraying his own wife all along – he never fully commits, never “shoots his deer.” Yet he’s more-or-less a good man, a curious man who tries both to do a reasonable job living life, but also to satisfy his occasional curiosity. And he ends the book a degenerate mess. He never gets a deer. Something about Michael doesn’t let me go. Something about the uncertainty of difficult decisions, the way real commitment can make one look the fool, the difficulty of becoming one with something alien, up to and including the natural world. I think about Michael.

Bay of Souls is a mess as a novel, perpetually insulting its reader’s credulity, and again and again advertising the learned worldliness and brooding masculinity of its writer. And yet.

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle

Ask any Sherlock Holmes fan (and all Holmes readers are Holmes fans) what they like most about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous amateur consulting detective and his trusted companion Dr. John Watson, and you’ll get a variety of answers: the delicious period setting of fogbound Victorian England, the ingenious plotting of the mysteries, the vibrantly idiosyncratic personality of Holmes himself, and any number of other possibilities.

Ask any Sherlock Holmes fan what their fondest Holmes desire is, and you’ll get only one answer: More.

Doyle wrote only 56 stories starring his greatest creation, and fans treat them like Holy Scripture. Likewise they revere the iconic Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles (or else they mock it, but even their mockery is reverential). But when they run through the catalogue of their canon, it inevitably ends too soon. We want fifty more short stories, and we want more novels.

How extra bitter it is, then, when we recall that other Holmes novel by the master’s hand. How bitter and angry and sad and angry and frustrated and angry we are, when we think of The Valley of Fear.

It first appeared in the Strand magazine between September 1914 and May 1915 (collected into a book later that same year), and the story it tells is aptly described by one of its characters as a real “snorter”: Holmes and Watson, comfortably ensconced over the breakfast plates at 221b Baker Street, are untangling a cipher sent by a fearful underling of that diabolical criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty.The underling is trying to warn Holmes of a crime about to be committed – a man named Douglas, at Birlstone Manor House, is in grave danger. Our heroes have no sooner solved this cipher than they’re joined by Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard, who informs them that John Douglas of Birlstone Manor House has been brutally murdered and is duly thunderstruck that they already know.

The three investigators decamp to Birlstone Manor House, as perfectly English a crime scene as you could dream up: a stately old pile of a house, with an actual drawbridge over an actual moat. There, in a first floor study, is the dead man, his head almost entirely blown off by the discharge of a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The man’s beautiful wife and best friend are on the scene, and the details of who-heard-what-and-when are unfolded with the lean and intensely energetic skill of Doyle writing at the peak of his powers.

All the elements of a truly great Holmes novel are here. There are great lines (“We are before our time, and suffer the usual penalties,” “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius,” etc.), great personalities (Doyle makes the crucially smart decision of having MacDonald and the local Birlstone investigator be intelligent, capable men rather than buffoons), and a great conundrum (why would the murderer choose such a loud and messy weapon, and how could he possibly escape with the moat all around and the drawbridge up?). These things combine to form one of the greatest ‘hooks’ in the history of literature.

Then Doyle makes a hideous, utterly incomprehensible blunder: he shifts his narrative completely and tells us the entire back-story of the alleged murder victim. Which takes place in America. And doesn’t involve Holmes. And goes on for an unbelievable eighty pages. Doyle has a weakness for launching into background-excursions – we know that from A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four – but eighty pages? By the time it’s over, benumbed readers have forgotten their own names.

After which Holmes hurries back on stage and says “I still think Moriarty’s behind it all.” No deductions, no proof, no justification for that fatal, mind-boggling detour. The End.

A great hook, yes – and a bad book precisely where we would give anything for a great one. We’ve still got the Hound, and that will have to be consolation enough.

Armor by John Steakley

Armor is a sci-fi thriller that was partially inspired by and leans heavily on Starship Troopers for its basic premise: a faceless enemy of large, exoskeletal insects requiring extermination. In this case the insects resemble and are slangily referred to as ants. It is never revealed exactly why humans wearing nuclear-powered battle armor have to beam down to the ants’ planet – a poisonous hell known as Banshee – and duke it out with them mano-a-mandible. But after establishing the setting, Armor dumps the fascism and militarism explored in Starship Troopers to explore the psychological effects of being a tiny cog in a massive wheel.

As the main character, Felix, and his team get ready for the first drop onto Banshee, they receive hilariously telegraphed portents of doom: “Now before you members of A Team get too excited, we want you to know that there has been absolutely no evidence of enemy activity on the eastern side. None at all. Your job will be mostly sightseeing.” Making the portents and dialogue worse a few paragraphs later: “Don’t worry about the lack of back-up. As I have already stated, there is nothing there. You should spend a few boring hours simply waiting.” Whew! That’s a relief, right? Until, of course, the sentence where Felix jumps into the transit beam, which ends in a suspenseful ellipsis and is picked up in the next sentence as: “. . . and ANTS! ANTS EVERYWHERE!”

Felix’s team is wiped out and we finally get to the meat that gives the book its modicum of staying power. Felix develops a kind of dissociative personality disorder he calls ‘the Engine’ that allows him to cope with the horrors of Banshee. This efficient machine-like side of his personality is augmented by the rapport he has with his armor, and it makes him very good at killing ants.

After only 100 pages with Felix, we abruptly leave him to meet the first-person narrator for the next two-thirds of the book: a jailbroken, smooth-talking pirate named, if you can believe it, Jack Crow – at least he doesn’t insist on being called Captain Jack Crow. Jack has been both strong-armed and bribed into infiltrating a lonely science station. To win the scientists’ trust, he presents them with Felix’s armor, which he unwittingly stumbled upon earlier. The chief scientist quickly invents a way to review the videotape stored in the armor through direct mental link and he and Jack begin living through Felix’s eyes. EKGs confirm the Engine’s presence in Felix’s mind: “A terrified man, whose brain manages to compartmentalize the terror so that he is able to function smoothly. Yet the whole process is overlaid with total fatalism . . . no one exists like this.”

Felix’s machine-like heroism and medically verifiable fear have a profound effect on the noir moodiness of Jack Crow, all of which culminates in a big battle and some (not really very) surprising turnabouts. Though the dialogue is bad (“Damn! I didn’t have time for a concussion.” ) and the setting clichéd, the juggernaut armor and the determination with which Steakley hammers out his pseudoscientific psychological analysis of the characters make this a memorable tale.