Author: Edwin Turner

Poetry After Auschwitz and Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Right after WWII, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Adorno later recanted on his knee-jerk reaction, stating that “‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream… hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.” Still, his initial proscription is often invoked as something of an imperative, or at least guiding principle, in 20th and 21st century art. Often stated boldly as “no poetry after Auschwitz,” it’s usually taken to mean that, after the horrors of the Holocaust, art has no valid aesthetic response to history, or perhaps even humanity, at least not in any of its traditional forms. Even more tricky, of course, is just how to represent the Holocaust itself. The severity of the event seems to call for a witnessing limited to facts alone, one devoid of any artifice or metaphor.

Over half a century later authors still wrestle with this issue. I just finished reading Yann Martel’s forthcoming novel Beatrice and Virgil, his follow-up to 2001’s Booker Prize-winning book club favorite, Life of Pi, a novel I’ve never read. (Beatrice and Virgil comes out mid-April and I’ll run a full review then). Very early in the book the protagonist Henry, a successful author, describes the book he is writing, a follow-up to his bestseller. It’s about:

the ways in which that event was represented in stories. Henry had noticed over years of reading books and watching movies how little actual fiction there was about the Holocaust. The usual take on the event was nearly always historical, factual, documentary, anecdotal, testimonial, literal. The archetypal document on the event was the survivor’s memoir, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, for instance. Whereas war–to take another cataclysmic human event–was constantly being turned into something else. War was forever being trivialized, that is, made less than it truly is.

After waxing a bit more on artistic representations of war — romantic, epical, comedic, etc. — Henry seems to come about to Adorno’s point (never named in Martel’s text, for what it’s worth):

No such poetic licence was taken with–or given to–the Holocaust. That terrifying event was overwhelmingly represented by a single school: historical realism. The story, always the same story, was always framed by the same dates, set in the same places, featuring the same cast of characters.

Henry concedes a few exceptions to this rule, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, before wondering:

why this suspicion of imagination, why this resistance to artful metaphor? A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. Was there not a danger in representing the Holocaust in a way always beholden to factuality? Surely, amidst the texts that related what happened, those vital and necessary diaries, memoirs, and histories, there was a spot for the imagination’s commentary. Other events in history, including horrifying ones, had been treated by artists, and for the greater good.

Henry’s desire to write an artistic account of the Holocaust, or to write about how one writes about the Holocaust–to write a poetry (of sorts) after Auschwitz–does not, significantly, derive from any personal, historical, or cultural impetus. His concern seems, in many ways, an academic’s regard for aesthetic theory, leading him to envision his book as a split between fiction and essay, with the pieces being published in one book at “opposite” ends (i.e., one would have to flip the book upside down and over to access the text on the other side). What Henry fails to see–Henry, not Martel, let’s be clear–is that he has no legitimate response to the Holocaust. When pressed by a gang of editors, along with a bookseller and a critic, to answer the simple question “What is your book about?”, Henry retreats into a series of wonderfully vague literary generalities:

My book is about representations of the Holocaust. The event is gone; we are left with stories about it. My book is about a new choice of stories. With a historical event, we not only have to bear witness, that is, tell what happened and address the needs of ghosts. We also have to interpret and conclude, so that the needs of people today, the children of ghosts, can be addressed. In addition to the knowledge of history, we need the understanding of art.

But just what “the understanding of art” might mean here, Henry is unable to say. His book is shot down, and, thankfully, Martel’s book Beatrice and Virgil manages to be a novel-about-not-being-about-the-Holocaust-but-being-about-the-Holocaust-but-not-really-being-about-the-Holocaust, which is all for the better, really. (Did that sentence make any sense? No? Sorry. I promise to (attempt to) clarify in my full review of Beatrice and Virgil). Otherwise, Henry might have fallen into the sweet lull of what critic Lee Siegel has described as Nice Writing. Here’s an excerpt from Siegel’s 1999 essay “Sweet and Low”:

For at least the past decade, American writers have been pouring forth a cascade of horror stories about their condition or the condition of their characters. The Holocaust, ethnic genocide, murder, rape, incest, child abuse, cancer, paralysis, AIDS, fatal car accidents, Alzheimer’s, chronic anorexia: calamities drop from the printer like pearls. These are elemental events of radically different proportions, and the urge to make imaginative sense of them is also elemental. Some contemporary writers treat these subjects strongly and humbly and insightfully, but too many writers engaged in this line of production turn out shallow and distorted work. They seem merely to be responding to a set of opportunities created by a set of social circumstances. In their hands, human suffering goes unimagined, and the imagination goes hungry and deprived.

To return to Adorno’s dictum–no poetry after Auschwitz–the grim spectacle of history should not be fodder for “a set of opportunities created by a set of social circumstances.” Henry, a young French Canadian with no Jewish roots is utterly divorced from any authentic response to the Holocaust. He could write an academic essay on the subject, or a navel-gazing bit of metafiction that dithered over storytelling itself, but he essentially already has an answer to his own question of why there are so few artistic responses to the Holocaust–that to re-imagine or re-interpret or otherwise re-frame the real events of the Holocaust in art is to, at once, open oneself to dramatic possibilities of failure. Failure would derive from the radical inauthenticity of having merely used, rather than illuminated, one of history’s worst horrors (my verb “illuminate” here stands inauthentic, I admit). Henry–and perhaps, implicitly, Martel–eventually manages to respond to the Holocaust in his art, but I’ll save a discussion of that for a full review of Beatrice and Virgil.

Why I Dislike Dustjackets

Edwin Turner2 Comments

I’m lazy. I let other people do good reporting and then hijack their work. Here’s Dennis Johnson at MobyLives citing a recent Guardian story:

What, exactly, is the point of a dustjacket, asks Peter Robins in this Guardian story. “The clue can’t be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn’t cover … the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance.” And now, he says, “some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.”

The Guardian article cites a number of recent books (including Zadie Smith’s latest, Changing My Mind) that forgo jackets in favor of art printed directly on the cover. I wish this trend would normalize in publishing. Dustjackets are annoying. They are ineffective as bookmarks, they tear and curl easily, and they tend to slip off of the book. They make grasping books difficult, especially larger volumes, and I always find myself removing them to read. Because I don’t want to throw away the “cover” of the book, the jacket has hence to languish in some weird droopy unstackable blip in a random corner of my house or office. Again, annoying. I can think immediately of three recentish books which are far more lovable aesthetic objects; all eschew dustjackets.

David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries is a beautiful cloth-bound volume; the biker-icon, title, and author appear to be embossed but are actually slight depressions. A simple sticker on the back of the book displays retail cost and isbn info. The inside front cover and first page display the blurb and author info that one would usually find on a wrap-around. There’s something wonderfully tactile, warm, and pleasing about the book. It’s also a really good read.

I bought Douglas Coupland’s novel Hey Nostradamus! despite its silly name because I was enamored of its lovely embossed cover. There’s a smooth elegance to the design. The back cover repeats the kneeling figure, leaving room for embossed blurbs. I should really get around to reading it.

McSweeney’s hardcover edition of Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital doesn’t feature anything as fancy as cloth or embossing. No, it’s just a plain old image–a good design, to be sure–but nothing that you wouldn’t expect on a dustjacket. Only there’s no cumbersome dustjacket. McSweeney’s issued the book with a slight wrap-around–more like a bookbelt than a dustjacket–displaying isbn and other info. The peripheral bookbelt was easy to throw away. McSweeney’s has released plenty of beautiful jacketless books, but they also know how to do a jacket right. Several hardback editions of McSweeney’s Quarterly (numbers 13 and 23, for instance) feature “dustjackets” that unfold to reveal short short stories, comics, and paintings. If you’re going to do a dustjacket, make it an aesthetic object worth keeping.

Venus Drive — Sam Lipsyte

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Sam Lipsyte’s forthcoming novel The Ask is already poised to be one of the major critical successes of 2010. In concordance with its publication, Picador will print a new trade paperback edition of his short story collection Venus Drive, the first such publication since its original debut from Open City a decade ago.

The thirteen stories in Venus Drive compose a sort of novel-in-stories. The title of the collection takes its name from a banal suburban street mentioned in a few of the stories, and many of the characters seem like iterations of the same type or voice. There are washed up would-be indie rock stars, small-time coke peddlers, and underemployed and overeducated addicts. There are deviants and perverts and outsiders. There are bullies. There are dead or dying mothers, dead or dying sisters. In short, Venus Drive is its own tightly-drawn, tightly-coiled, and highly-compressed world.

As the plot points double and re-double in these stories, so do the themes. “Our culture is afraid of death, and considers it something we must wage battle against,” says Tessa, a pain specialist, a peripheral character in “Cremains.” She continues: “I say, surrender, submit. Go gentle. Terminal means terminal.” Death informs almost all of these stories in some way, and Tessa’s commentary presents the problem with death, or at least the problem these characters have with dealing with death: it’s not easy to go gentle. It goes against our culture and our nature to surrender. If she’s presented as a voice of wisdom, she’s also an ironic character, one of the many would-be authorities Lipsyte’s weirdos and outsiders can’t help but mock. “The Drury Girl,” part-suburban satire and pure pathos, posits a pre-pubescent narrator obsessed with his teenage babysitter; his dad’s cancer plays second fiddle to his lust. Thus the story neatly ties together the overarching themes of Venus Drive, sex and death. Admittedly, these are probably the only real themes of proper literature, but Lipsyte does it so damn well and lays it all out so bare and does so in such humor and grace that it really sticks. It’s good stuff.

That humor is desert-dry, of course, and succeeds so well because his characters are so endearing in their pathetic pathologies. The antiheroes of “Beautiful Game” and “My Life, for Promotional Use Only,” are also-rans in the sordid history of underground rock, addicts approaching washed-up (Are they the same person? Maybe. They have different names, of course. Doesn’t matter). A scene from “Beautiful Game” shows the ambivalence at the core of many of these characters: “At the bank machine, Gary doesn’t check the balance. Better to leave it to the gods. Someday the bank machine will shun him. Why know when?” Gene, the ex-rocker in “My Life, for Promotional Use Only” now suffers the indignities of working for his ex-girlfriend. Everyone in the story is an ex-something, everyone is growing up and leaving art (or is it “Art”?) behind. In a poignant and funny and cruel scene, familiar to many of us, Gene sees some of himself in a waitress:

Rosalie calls over the waitress and they talk for a while about somebody’s new art gallery. The waitress is famous for a piece where she served the Bloody Marys mixed with her menstrual blood. Word had it she overdid the tabasco.

I wait for the moment when our waitress stops being a notorious transgressor of social mores and becomes a waitress again, look for it in her eyes, that sad blink, and order a beer.

Gene, a former “notorious transgressor of social mores” himself feels both sorrow and hate for the waitress. He sees her job as menial and pathetic — just like his own. He doesn’t seem to think much of her art, either. Lipsyte telegraphs so much there with so few words, his sentences clean, spare, precise, and rarely of the compound variety. There’s a truncated, clipped rhythm that Lipsyte builds over the thirteen-story run that helps propel the immediacy of his tales. The stories are short, too; the longest is sixteen pages and most run to eight or ten. Lipsyte’s rhetorical gift is to shine the grubby and, at times, his sentences can feel almost too perfect, too-fussed over–but this (minor) complaint, it must be noted, comes from someone who admires occasional ambiguity or incoherence. Lipsyte removes his own authorial voice and thus achieves lucidity in his characters’ voices; somehow, though — and paradoxically — these voices bear the ghostly trace of his absence. But that seems like a silly conversation, and certainly not one for this post.

Venus Drive reminds me very much of one of my favorite books, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which I would also call a novel-in-stories, also a spare and precise collection, also a study of weirdos and addicts and outsiders. Jesus’ Son is something of a standard in creative writing workshops (or at least it used to be) and a sensible teacher would add Venus Drive to her syllabus as well. Finally, like Jesus’ Son, Lipsyte’s book is seething, funny, and poignant, with characters tipped toward some redemption, awful or otherwise, for all their myriad sins. The book might take its name from a geographic location, but the “Venus drive” is also a spiritual inclination toward love and hope. Highly recommended.

Venus Drive is available March 2nd, 2010 in trade paperback from Picador.

“The Narrative Is the Meaning”: More on Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

Edwin Turner7 Comments
After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000 -- Jeff Wall

Why didn’t Ralph Ellison publish Three Days Before the Shooting . . . in his lifetime? I’m coming to the end of Book I–about one quarter of the way through the massive, newly-published volume from Random House’s Modern Library, and it’s beyond me why Ellison didn’t just publish the damn thing. I’ve been reading a chapter every day or so–a leisurely pace, to be sure (the book isn’t going anywhere, and this is more or less it for Ellison’s fiction), and each chapter reads like a discrete little story, but one that folds right into the overall narrative nonetheless. As I pointed out in my early review of the book, editors John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley suggest that Ellison thought his material was strong but lacked a “meaningful form,” that he didn’t want the book to repeat the picaresque romp of Invisible Man. According to citations in Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Ellison always felt a certain ambivalence about his works. Writing about one of the few pieces of fiction he actually allowed published after Invisible Man, a story called “Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar,” Ellison noted that “it stands on its own if only as one of those pieces of writing which consists mainly of one damned thing after another sheerly happening.” Noting that “Out of the Hospital” was part of an unfinished early section of IM, Ellison suggested that his readers, “take this proffered middle, this agon, this passion, and supply their own beginning, and if an ending, a moral, or a perception is needed, let them supply their own. For me, of course, the narrative is the meaning.”

I happen to like one damned thing after another happening in my novels. Here’s what I don’t get–it’s hardly as if Ellison’s connective tissue between his episodes and riffs and romps is weak or insubstantial. Book I of Three Days reads, warts and all, like the beginning of a masterpiece (a de facto flawed masterpiece, of course). I’m not expecting an end or a conclusion or any sense of finality here–editors Callahan and Bradley have judiciously seen to that (perhaps underestimating contemporary audiences’ tolerance for ambiguity)–but, given the sheer weight of Ellison’s writing, and the many, many–over 40!–years that he worked on the second novel, it’s hard to find any exterior reasons as to why he couldn’t just wrap it up. Given that Invisible Man was received as a novel of definitive and important social commentary, was the burden to follow-up too much? Was it the special pressure of having to be the voice of a generation that led to Ellison’s sustained muteness? (Okay, okay, the guy published essays and gave lectures. But you know what I mean).

I can’t help but think of William T. Vollmann as I write this. Vollmann is the greatest living American writer that no one reads. His latest novel Imperial is an opus in the tradition of social realism (as well as the counter-tradition of experimental fiction). It’s 1344 pages, over 250 pages longer than Three Days. It’s particularly ungenerous and frustrating for the few folks that will actually dare to read it. But it’s hardly the pinnacle of Vollmann’s career. The guy’s published almost 20 books in as many years; many of these novels–most of them, really, run to over (many way over) 500 pages. Like Ellison, Vollmann’s best work is a sustained interrogation of culture that surpasses the limits of journalism, while at the same time honoring the journalistic technique’s regard for truth. It seems to me that we no longer live in an age where a writer as erudite and cunning and forceful as Vollmann might be a public figure, and that this has somehow paradoxically freed the man to write and publish whatever he wants. While voluminous Vollmann has left too much for posterity, too many entry points for daunted readers (although The Rifles or The Ice-Shirt will do fine), Ellison seems to have been paralyzed by the monolithic shadow of his canonical entry Invisible Man.

Perhaps Ellison’s unresolved hesitation was the manifestation of his anxiety to get it right, to speak not only perfectly for African-Americans, but also for his generation. The ’50s turned into the ’60s (and then the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s) and the social spectrum shifted. Against the backdrop of these changes, Ellison still felt like the core schema of his novel applied, yet he also felt the need to continue sculpting its many nuances. Why couldn’t trust his readers to “take this proffered middle, this agon, this passion” and make meaning of it? In any case, we’re left with the not-minor consolation of Three Days, a book which will surely go down in history as one of literature’s greatest puzzles.

The Union Jack — Imre Kertész

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Cerebral and often ethereal, Imre Kertész’s The Union Jack attempts to recount an attempt to recount a simple anecdote, the unnamed author’s epiphanic sighting of a jeep bearing the British flag during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. No, there’s not a typo in the previous sentence: Kertész’s slim novella is more about a storyteller’s inability to accurately and properly communicate spirit and truth than it is about a student uprising against an oppressive Stalinist regime. The unnamed narrator (presumably a version of Kertész) is prompted by his former students to tell the story of the Union Jack; he spends most of the novella attempting to tell his readers of that attempt to tell his anecdote. The problem is that to really tell the story of the Union Jack, our narrator tells us:

I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, about my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of destiny or the absurdity of destiny, is in any event our destiny; I would have to tell you about when that passion started, and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story.

The narrator then concedes that to tell one’s whole life story is “impossible,” and sets out then instead to build to his story about the Union Jack by first explaining his initial encounter with the opera of Richard Wagner, one of several epiphanies that form the essential plot of the novella. The narrator is an old man looking back on a young man who is somehow the same man but also somehow not. As a way of understanding this disjunction, the old man narrates his tale as a series of the young man’s “formulations” of possibility and identity. These formulations include an early encounter with the Hungarian writer Ernő Szép, a transcendent viewing of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and an obsession with Thomas Mann’s The Blood of the Walsungs. For the young narrator (who surely must be Kertész), these moments offer “a kind of metaphysical solace” amid the horrors of the Stalinist regime, which the narrator calls “the disaster.” He continues: ” . . . put simply, even in the depths of disaster, and in the lowest depths of consciousness of that disaster, I was never again able to carry on living as if I had not seen and heard Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre.” These experiences offer the narrator hope in the form of Platonic aesthetic ideals, vibrantly extant in striking relief against the grim disaster-world of communist Hungary. And yet, despite the literary bent of the narrator’s experiences, he ultimately eschews them in favor of pure, unmediated living, fearing that “literature has fallen under suspicion”:

One should strive for formulations that totally encapsulate the experience of life (that is to say, the disaster); formulations that assist one to die and yet still bequeath something to posterity. I don’t mind if literature, too, is capable of such formulations, but what I see increasingly is that only bearing witness is able to do this, possibly a life passed in muteness without being formulated as a formation.

For the narrator (come on, he’s got to be Kertész!) to bear witness is beyond problematic; it approaches impossible, hence the elliptical layering of his narrative. He spends almost seventy pages spiraling toward telling an anecdote that clocks in at just one page. He admits again and again that the construct of his narrative, “the spirit of formulability,” is “by no means the same thing, of course, as the real spirit of those details” of life during the “disaster.” Kertész writes of the

. . .iron curtain that rises between formulation and being, the iron curtain that rises between the storyteller and his audience, the iron curtain that rises between one person and another, and, in the end, the impenetrable iron curtain that rises between a person and himself, between a person and his own life.

If the problem of witnessing through formulation always rises like an iron curtain, then Kertész does offer some of his own metaphysical solace at the end of The Union Jack, to both his interior audience of former students and his exterior audience of readers. He tells them–and us–that:

. . . anecdotes apart, every story and everybody’s story is one and the same story when it comes down to the essentials, and that these selfsame stories are really essentially all horror stories; that essentially every event is really a horror even, and even history too had long, long ago become, essentially, at best just horror history.

Okay, sure, that seems mighty grim for something I’ve claimed as “metaphysical solace”–but it does speak to an essential connection, an essential ability for formulations to match in a shared “horror history” that might transcend time and place. For Kersétz (or the young narrator, to be fair), there must have been something at the core of Wagner’s opera, something in the spirit of its storm, that connected to–and in some way sublimated–the horror of “the disaster.”

I’ve tried in this review to convey a sense of Kertész’s challenging style. His long, elliptical sentences branch out over pages at a time, often–very often–floating into awfully abstract territory. At times, The Union Jack reads more like a work of continental philosophy than a novella, and it’s not the first place to go to for an account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. I read the book in two sittings, but one would’ve better matched its breathless rhythm. The book reminds me very much of the work of W.G. Sebald in a number of ways: its philosophical density, its challenging allusiveness, and its melancholy tone. Like Sebald’s stuff, The Union Jack is a personal coming-to-terms, with not just history, but with how one might witness to history. It’s a very rewarding book, and Tim Wilkinson should be commended for his translation, as should Melville House for their continued commitment to bringing under-translated authors to an English-reading audience. Highly recommended.

The Union Jack is new in trade paperback from Melville House. The book is part of Melville House’s continuing series, The Contemporary Art of the Novella.

Book vs Film

Edwin Turner6 Comments

The AV Club’s fun little inventory of literary works that should never be adapted to film again got us to thinking about that age old question — book vs. film. Common wisdom holds that “the book is always better than the film,” with any number of examples as evidence. Some of the works cited on the AV Club’s list are novels that can’t really be translated to film, at least not in philosophical essence (Moby-Dick, for example, and Nabokov’s Lolita, a film that for reasons social and legal, can never be made properly).

Our own observation, or rule of thumb, is that, while canonical “high” literature rarely makes for masterpiece filmmaking, genre fare–done right–can make classic films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s hands, Mario Puzo’s airport bookstore pickup The Godfather became two of the greatest films of all time. Look at what Stephen Spielberg did for Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws, or what Kubrick did for Stephen King’s pulp horror The Shining. In more recent times, Alfonso Cuarón turned P.D. James’s capable thriller Children of Men into cinematic gold, but, tellingly, stumbled in adapting the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Terrence Malick turned James Jones’s war novel The Thin Red Line into cinematic art and Martin Scorsese spun Goodfellas from Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy–hardly Shakespeare. Danny Boyle has made a career of turning lesser works by writers like Alex Garland and Irvine Welsh into fantastic films.

Very few films present a tough choice, really–we’re still not sure if the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is better than the book, but it might be. Gary Sinise’s measured take on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men gets just about everything right. Heck, Harold Bloom has even argued quite publicly that John Huston’s version of The Grapes of Wrath is superior to Steinbeck’s. We’re not sure about that one either. Suffice to say that they’re different; that watching a film is not the same as reading a book, nor should it be. We close by saying that we’d love to see Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital adapted to film, preferably by someone awesome like David Lynch or Cuarón, and that, as Sam Peckinpah is long dead, no one should try to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Ruby’s Spoon — Anna Lawrence Pietroni

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In her debut novel Ruby’s Spoon, Anna Lawrence Pietroni tells the story of thirteen-year-old Ruby Tailor, an orphan living in the industrial town of Cradle Cross, England in the blighted and confused years after the Great War. Ruby works at a fish and chip shop run by her ersatz father-figure, Captin, and although she’s happy, she dreams of escaping across water. Enter the alien and alluring Isa Fly, an old (or maybe not-so-old) woman who arrives unbidden to Cradle Cross late one night and immediately charms both Captin and Ruby. Ruby and Isa are soon drawn to Truda Blick, an over-educated, under-loved heiress whose button factory is crumbling into decline. Ruby, Captin, and Truda are the minority in their welcoming of Isa, however, and as her visit to Cross Cradle continues, her odd demeanor–and other factors–cause her to be labeled a witch. Climax ensues.

Lawrence Pietroni’s tale evokes Dickensian grime and magical-realist sparkle at the same time, interweaving the highly-specific myth and folklore of the Black Country with the coal and soot economy of a factory town. To capture the spirit of her setting, Pietroni employs the Black Country dialect in her characters’ speech; the vernacular rhythms are a lovely feature of the novel that might challenge some readers. Like Zora Neale Hurston, who preserved Eatonville’s strange colloquialisms (and thus much of its culture) forever in her writing, Lawrence Pietroni uses her characters’ odd speech patterns as more than just a gimmick. However, unlike Hurston, who refuses to provide context to help readers glean meaning from her Southerners’ voices, Lawrence Pietroni at times stages interjections that clarify peculiarities of the Black Country dialect. This is the foremost of several concessions to clarity in a novel that, on the whole, would be more endearing if it allowed its central mysteries freer rein over narrative. The third-person narrator is strongly attuned to Ruby, an insightful girl to be sure, but often Ruby’s realizations, both in their acuity and profundity, read like exposition rather than characterization. Still, these are minor gripes, ultimately more about editing than writing, and they shouldn’t steer one away from the vividly-imagined Black Country world that Lawrence Pietroni presents here. Fans of Susanna Clarke and Sarah Waters will wish to take notice.

Ruby’s Spoon is new today in hardback from Spiegel & Grau.

Hiding Man — Tracy Daugherty

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Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s excellent and insightful biography of Donald Barthelme begins with a fascinating anecdote. Daugherty, a student of Bartheleme’s, is told to “Find a copy of John Ashbery’s Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.” We’re not sure if that sounds like fun homework or not, but it does signal both Barthelme’s imaginative trajectory as well as Daugherty’s intimacy with his subject. Elsewhere in his introduction, he notes that “it’s wrong to think of Don as a victim of neglect. He was, rather, a connoisseur of it.” In short, Daugherty argues that Barthelme was a “Hiding Man,” an artist of structured subtlety who remains under-appreciated and misunderstood.

Daugherty’s book is at once a well-researched biography, a work of cultural and literary criticism, and a writerly affair–that is, its written with a novelist’s fine ear. He weaves Barthelme’s personal life with the man’s stories against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society, weighing Barthelme’s themes and methods along with a shift in literature, art, film, and culture. The book is most interesting when Daugherty situates Barthelme’s writing along/against other writers, particularly the other authors at the forefront of the so-called post-modernist movement. In one late episode, Barthelme organized what has come to be known as “The Postmodern Dinner,” inviting literary giants like William Gaddis, William Gass, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Susan Sontag to a fancy SoHo restaurant (Thomas Pynchon politely declined the invite). By 1983, postmodernism had fallen out of favor in lieu of minimalism; Barthelme wasn’t the only writer at the dinner who we might–even now–see as a “victim of neglect.” Many of these writers were attacked (and continue to be attacked) as verbal tricksters, hacks playing at a literary shell game. But, as Daugherty makes very clear in Hiding Man, Barthelme was deeply concerned with matters of meaning and art and philosophy and life and love. He was, like most postmodernists (and Modernists, and post-postmodernists), simply willing to remove some of the strictures that bound distinctions of high and low culture, all as a means of getting closer to a core of truth and perception–not as a means of displacing or denying it. He was an artist.

Hiding Man both begins and ends with an assignment. Daugherty invites Barthelme to read at Oregon State University in early 1989, six months before his death. After the reading, in a moment of utter poignancy, Barthelme asks his former pupil, “Did I do okay for you?” As Barthelme gets in a taxi to leave he gives Daugherty one final assignment: “Write a story about a genius.” Daugherty gets more than a passing grade on this one. Recommended.

Hiding Man is new this month in trade paperback from Picador.

Three Days Before the Shooting . . . — Beginning Ralph Ellison’s Posthumous Second Novel

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In 1952, Ralph Ellison secured his place in the American literary canon with the publication of his picaresque verbal tour de force, Invisible Man. He never published another novel in his lifetime. Five years after his death in 1994 saw the publication of Juneteenth, a book cobbled together from the sundry drafts that Ellison had spent over forty years crafting and revising. Those papers ran to over 2000 pages. Now, editors John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley have made good on the promise to release an expanded version of Ellison’s proposed second novel. That effort, new in hardback this month from Random House’s Modern Library series, is Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., a massive, complex, and perplexing volume running to 1101 pages — not including editors’ notes, chronology, prefaces, and introductions.

I usually eschew introductions (or at least read them after I’ve read the text proper) in the hopes of not having my reading colored by some critic’s own thoughts, but in the case of Three Days, with its bulk, with its mystery, it seemed necessary to see what Callahan and Bradley had to say. What, exactly, would I be reading? How was it put together? Is there a real novel here? Our esteemed editors point out that:

. . . one might reasonably have expected to find among [Ellison’s] papers a single manuscript very near to completion, bearing evidence of the difficult choices he had made during the protracted period of the novel’s composition. One might have expected, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a fragmented with a clearly drafted, clearly delineated beginning and middle, whose author’s notes and drafts pointed toward two or three endings, each of which followed and resolved the projected novel as a whole. Or, to cite a more contemporary example, it might have resembled Roberto Bolaño’s 2666; upon its posthumous publication in 2008, Bolaño’s editor remarked that, had the author lived to see it through to publication, “its dimensions, its general content would by no means have been very different from what they are now.” In the extreme, one might have expected something like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a glorious mess of a novel that defies the very generic restraints of the form.

Callahan and Bradley pose these novels only as examples to contrast Ellison’s work as “something else entirely: a series of related narrative fragments, several of which extend to over three hundred manuscript pages in length, that appear to cohere without truly completing one another.” There’s a fun laundry list of where and on what Ellison composed the work, including the various types of paper he used and the different machines on which he wrote. The logistics are important from an editors perspective, of course, and as an interested reader it’s fascinating to see how Callahan and Bradley put all of Ellison’s disparate sources together. But what becomes most apparent in their general introduction to the work is that, even as he was always writing, Ellison was stalling, hoping to revise his novel in light of social changes–only, those social changes were happening relatively rapidly. It took Ellison over eight years to produce and edit Invisible Man, a novel that brilliantly captures American identity in the postwar era. For his second novel, Ellison clearly wanted to engage in such a critique again, but the rapidity of social and cultural change seems to have outpaced his ability to write and edit. He satisfied his public and the literary establishment by publishing excerpts of the novel (eight in total, all reproduced in Three Days), but most of his writing career, at least in terms of publishing, was spent writing (and revising) essays and critiques.

Still. Forty years and only eight published snippets? Really? Our fearless editors seem exasperated themselves, writing, “The longer one puzzles over what Ellison left behind, the more maddening it seems that he did not simply will himself to bring the book to a close, that he didn’t find his way to that ‘meaningful form’ he sought.” And there is so much narrative here; Ellison’s major concern — beyond revising in light of cultural and social upheaval — was simply fitting his pieces into a coherent whole. Not that there isn’t a plot. To borrow again from our generous editors:

The basic plot of Ellison’s novel as it emerges in these manuscripts centers upon the connection, estrangement, and reconciliation of two characters. The one is a black jazzman-turned-preacher named Alonzo Hickman, the other a racist ‘white’ New England Senator named Adam Sunraider, formerly known as Bliss–a child of indeterminate race whom Hickman had raised from infancy to adolescence. The action of the novel concerns Hickman’s efforts to stave off Sunraider’s assassination at the hands of the Senator’s own estranged son, a young man named Severen.

Callahan and Bradley go on to point out that, of course, this is simply the bare bones of the plot; that Three Days teems with characters and voices and motifs and strange little riffs. So far, my reading of the book upholds this assertion–and also suggests that the best way to enjoy this book is simply to dive right in. Yeah, that’s right. Ignore all the context. Skip Callahan and Bradley’s prefatory material completely–it’s well-written, highly informative, and will get right in your way. Just start at page one and enjoy Ellison’s rhythm, his inimitable language, his bizarre sense of humor and his deep pathos.

The book opens with a prologue that details a visit Hickman and his congregation make to Washington, D.C. three days before the shooting of Senator Sunraider. They attempt to warn him but are blocked at all turns. Book One then opens immediately with that assassination attempt, seen from the perspective of a journalist named McIntyre who narrates Book One in first-person. The first few chapters are set in the panicked claustrophobia of the post-shooting Senate where police detain everyone present. These chapters detail the strange rumors that circulate about Sunraider, including

. . . the rumor that for a time during his youth the Senator had been the leader of an organization which wore black hoods and practiced obscene ceremonials with the ugliest and most worn-out prostitutes they could find. Like certain motorcycle gangs of today they also engaged in acts of violence and hooliganism and were accused of torturing people — derelicts and such. They were also said to have distributed Christmas baskets and comic books to the poor.

What a great punchline. These early episodes made me laugh out loud at least three times. They’re also rather unsettling, and, more than anything, intriguing. In short, so far the book compels reading, and it’s hard to believe that such inspired riffs won’t add up to greater things. Our editors warn that the book doesn’t so much “end” as simply “stop,” but, right now, I’m fine with that. Ellison fans who don’t own this will want to pick it up forthwith; anyone daunted by its size, scope, or the context of its creation might miss some really great writing. More to come.

Bright Star — Campion Does Keats

Edwin Turner2 Comments

So I finally got around to watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star last night, a film that quietly studies the final years of Romantic poet John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. When Keats moves next door to the Brawnes, eldest daughter Fanny, a talented seamstress and flighty flirt, soon becomes intrigued by the poet. Keats, with his love for beauty and truth, represents a world of greater depth than the wits and dandies who usually attempt to court Brawne. Their relationship is, of course, doomed from the outset. Perpetually broke Keats doesn’t have the moolah or means to properly engage Brawne in marriage, but that doesn’t stop the pair from undertaking a furtive, pensive love affair, carried out in long walks on the heath and passionate letters. Oh, and Keats gets sick and dies at 25. That shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve studied your Romantics properly, now should it?

Both Abbie Cornish who plays Brawne and Ben Whishaw who plays Keats are excellent in their understatement and reserve, but the standout turn in the movie comes from actor Paul Schneider (from NBC’s Parks & Recreation) who plays Keats’s bankrolling friend Charles Armitage Brown. Brown is a lesser poet whose love and envy of Keats leads him to vex Brawne and Keats’s love at every turn, plaguing them with doubt, and that enemy of Romance, Reason. Schneider invests his character with a boorish charm that never veers into the rote tropes that afflict modern romance film. It’s emblematic of the Campion’s film in a way: Bright Star has every opportunity to devolve into a mundane exercise in doomed romance or a stuffy period piece, but under Campion’s delicate care it manages to match the depth of its subject matter.

Campion wrote the screenplay, presumably using letters from the principals as her primary source. She honors her viewers’ intelligence — far too rare these days — by never cobbling her plot together with easy exposition or forced narrative developments, and it’s that sense of history that lends the film authenticity. Cornish’s Brawne is a protagonist whose personality transformations read as real, and Whishaw’s Keats is never a cartoonish mystic or a moody caricature, but a fully-drawn human. Campion also has the good judgment to let her cinematography convey her story, letting gorgeous shots of the English countryside and cloistered chambers alike convey the mood and rhythm of her story. At times, Bright Star‘s beautiful camerawork recalls Terrence Malick, another director who allows film to “happen” to the viewer as an evocative experience rather than a spoon-feeding. Campion also shows considerable restraint with the film’s wonderful score, never allowing it to color a scene unduly when her actors can do a great job on their own. Bright Star avoids all of the pitfalls that might afflict a period piece, and does a far better job handling the subject of Romantic poetry than a movie has any right to. The film is hardly for everyone (sorry guys, no Jason Statham), but it’s very, very good. Recommended.

Occupied City — David Peace

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“You want to know what happened, yes?” an old detective asks near the beginning of Occupied City. “No? You want to know the truth? Make up your mind! Which do you want to know; what happened, or the truth?” This preoccupation of “what happened” vs. “the truth” fuels the central tension in David Peace’s new novel, a postmodern noir exercise set in the desolation of 1948 Tokyo. Based on the true story of the Teikoku Bank Massacre, Occupied City investigates the postwar slaying of twelve bank employees who were poisoned by a man dressed (perhaps) as a government official. There’s a parenthetical “perhaps” around just about everything in Peace’s book; he cites Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s short stories “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” (as well as Kurosawa’s film adaptation of that story) as inspirations for the structure of Occupied City.

And rightly so. The few witnesses who survived the massacre get to tell “what happened”; their testimony is combined in a pastiche of sources including official government documents, a detective’s notes, newspaper reports, and personal and professional letters from an obsessed American Lieutenant Colonel. There’s a classically-neutral narrator whose reportorial rationality is undercut at every turn by the interceding lamentations of a Beckettian speaker dipping into madness. And there are the dead, the victims who cry out to be seen as more than just victims. Peace’s techniques are somehow both stochastic and tightly controlled at the same time, as he weaves the disparate voices through his tale to square the different perspectives of “what happened” in an attempt to reach “the truth.” Peace’s language frequently vacillates between elliptical and elusive abstraction and the visceral immediacy one would expect from a detective novel. The verbal tics add up to a visual poetry, as Peace’s repetitions, redaction, strike-throughs, and columns reinvigorate a genre that too-often relies on stodgy convention. For many readers, this eclectic style will be at times challenging or even come off as pretentious, but those who submit to Peace’s tumult of language are in for quite a ride.

Occupied City is a smart, well-researched historical thriller that recalls the verbal grit and energy of James Ellroy, who Peace interviewed earlier thie year. Like Ellory, Peace’s detectives investigate the seamy gaps in history from myriad perspectives, prodding readers into violent alien territory. And like Ellroy’s work, there’s no easy “truth” at the bottom of this book, but there are plenty of unsettling questions. Occupied City is a stark, bewildering challenge from a writer who deserves a wider audience. Recommended.

Occupied City is new in hardback from Knopf this week.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned — Wells Tower

Edwin Turner5 Comments

Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned takes its title from the name of the final story in the collection, but the phrase is also an apt descriptor for the underlying themes that most of these stories explore. Tower’s world is a neatly drawn parallel reality populated by down-on-their-luck protagonists who we always root for, despite our better judgment, even as they inadvertently destroy whatever vestiges of grace are bestowed upon them.

There’s Bob Monroe in “The Brown Coast,” who has “perpetrated three major fuckups that would be a long time in smoothing over.” He’s lost his wife and his job, but he finds a measure of solace in adding fish to an aquarium–until that project is ravaged. There’s the father of “Down through the Valley” — estranged against his will — who attempts to make nice by driving his ex’s injured new husband home from a New Age retreat. The poor guy, like so many of the characters here, stumbles into one bad situation after another. He’s not the only dad here — there are plenty of fathers in Everything Ravaged, and there’s also a strong undercurrent of Oedipal rage. In “Leopard,” (written in that rare beast, the second-person), Tower explores the psyche of an angry pre-adolescent boy who hates his dickish stepfather. When the lad discovers a flier warning that a pet leopard is on the loose, he fantasizes that the creature will solve his problem. The teenage lead of “Wild America” — the only female protagonist in the book — lives with the shame of having “tried to stab her shy father with a nail file.” In “The Brown Coast,” Bob calls his home to find that his Uncle has taken up with his wife. “Executors of Important Energies” brims with Oedipal tension, as a failed inventor has to come to terms with his father’s dementia. He’s had to live most of his life in ambivalence over his stepmother, who splits the age difference between him and his father:

The particulars weren’t absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.”

If “Night Moves” is the dream, Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” is the reality for most of the characters in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. And Tower’s world is strangely beautiful, an evocatively drawn portrait of the little rural pockets that permeate the American Southeast. Sure, there’s a story set in New York City, and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” is about Vikings in the Dark Ages, but for the most part Tower sticks to the weird, unstable borders between civilization and wilderness. It’s a world where seemingly peripheral characters all of a sudden fall into the narrative as essential players; it’s a violent world–and an engrossing one.

“Retreat” might be the finest of the stories here. It tells the story of two long-warring brothers who try, at least on the surface, to make amends. The protagonists (or, more rightly mutual antagonists) are typical of Tower: rough and physical, but also prone to moodiness and obsessive self-reflection. There are two versions of the story, initially published in issues 23 and 30 of McSweeney’s. The one published here is the later version, told from the perspective of the more financially-prosperous brother (the first is told from the viewpoint of the less well-off brother. Both brothers are total assholes). We kinda sorta wish that both versions were included in the collection, because they’ve come to form a composite story in our mind, but hey, you can’t always get what you want. “Retreat” unfurls in muscular, organic prose, bristling with fresh metaphors and similes. Great stuff.

Tower is a writing talent that we’ve been following for awhile now, and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is the sort of book that makes you want to track down the stray stories not collected here (a good starting place for those interested: “Raw Water” in McSweeney’s 32). And while we’ll never knock the short story as a lesser form, surely this man has a novel waiting in the wings. We’d love to read it. We very highly recommend Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is available today in trade paperback from Picador.

Point Omega — Don DeLillo

Edwin Turner4 Comments

Don DeLillo’s latest work Point Omega takes an oblique, subtle, and unnerving tackle at themes of time, perception, family, and, ultimately, personal apocalypse. It’s not a particularly fun book nor does it yield any direct answers, but it’s also a rewarding, engaging, and often challenging read.

Point Omega pretends to be a novel about two subjects: the Iraq War and film. Its narrator Jim Finley is an experimental filmmaker who travels to the Arizona desert in an attempt to convince aging intellectual Richard Elster to participate in a film comprised solely of one long, unedited take of Elster talking about whatever he likes. Although Finley repeatedly claims that Elster can talk about whatever he chooses to in the film, it’s clear that that the younger man wishes for the subject to be Elster’s involvement in the planning of the Iraq War, a sort of mea culpa from the intellectual elite who rolled over to the Bush administration. Elster’s involvement was essentially to provide academic credibility to the invasion:

He was the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government. He sat at a table in a secure conference room with the strategic planners and military analysts. He was there to conceptualize, his words, in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency. He was cleared to read classified manuscripts, he said, and he listened to the chatter of the resident experts, the metaphysicians in the intelligence agencies, the fantasists in the Pentagon.

Elster becomes disillusioned with the whole process soon; he comes to realize the hollowness of his role and soon moves to the desert. “He’d exchanged all that for space and time,” writes DeLillo, announcing his theme. Later in the novella, Elster claims that the geologic time of the desert allows him to feel, “Time falling away . . . Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time.” He contrasts this “deep time” with the time of cities:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Elster appears concerned that humanity is approaching Teilhard’s omega point, the maximum level of complexity of consciousness toward which the universe is evolving. He concedes that this idea might be “a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea our experience.” For Elster, the omega point is inevitable and leads to either “a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion.” Ultimately, his viewpoint seems nihilistic: he’d rather human beings somehow be transformed into stones, be somehow absorbed into a new time, a geologic time.

The obsession with time and film literally wraps the book in two short chapters called “Anonymity” (a prologue) and “Anonymity 2” (an epilogue (or a prescient epitaph, perhaps?)). Both sections describe a man who spends all of his time at MOMA’s presentation of Douglas Gordon’s videowork 24 Hour Psycho, a silent showing of Hitchcock’s Psycho over 24 hours. Neither section is narrated by Finley, although it later becomes clear that he–along with other principals in the story–is present at the showing. The unnamed man whose consciousness permeates these chapters finds his own omega point in the crawling pace of the film. 24 Hour Psycho divorces itself from the healing powers that stories give us, the power to narrativize all the gaps and crevices of life. It’s no longer the medicine that Elster suggests literature (or film) might be. It now exists outside of narrative cohesion and somehow resonates with the purity or transcendence of geologic time.

Fortunately, DeLillo is gracious enough to his readers to not attempt replicating the pace of geologic time in his book. Point Omega is particularly slim–under 120 pages in hardback–and reads with a the conciseness and clarity which has been a hallmark of DeLillo’s style. As perhaps the signal writer of post-postmodernism (whatever that means), DeLillo continues to engage and anticipate new and emerging forms of alienation, and he does so without gimmicks or trickery, just the purity of considered ideas. Point Omega works best when he allows those ideas some room to breathe; the late-night scotch-soaked dialogues between Elster and Finley are some of the finest passages of the book and it’s a pity there aren’t more of them.

But it seems like we’ve digressed from some of our starting points, doesn’t it? Many critics will call Point Omega DeLillo’s “Iraq War novel,” which is a mistake akin to calling Underworld a book about baseball or White Noise a book about Hitler. The war is merely an entry point to the greater, more personal tragedy that underlies the book, a tragedy that will perhaps make Elster reassess his own value system. We won’t name the trauma at the core of the book–to do so might spoil a twist in a book largely devoid of conventional concrete plotting–but it is worth noting that DeLillo optimizes suspense and tension as the novel builds to its own omega point. While many will feel left cold by the book’s ultimately ambiguous invocation of personal calamity, we found in it a meaningful counterpoint to Elster’s explicit commentary on time and identity. DeLillo’s novel, in the end, requires an intellectual–or perhaps, dare we say spiritual–leap. Point Omega is hardly a satisfying read, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Highly recommended.

Point Omega is available February 2nd, 2010 from Scribner.

A Few Thoughts on The Catcher in the Rye

Edwin Turner1 Comment

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a great read. It’s also a great way for a reader to measure how he or she has changed over the years. Like many (very, very many) readers, I cut my literary teeth on The Catcher in the Rye. I was probably 15 when I first read the book and I sympathized wholly with Holden Caulfield. Like most teens, I was selfish and insular and thought that I was special and unique in my alienation. I was also pretty sure the world was filled with phonies and fakes, and I was determined not to become one of them when I grew up. I must’ve read it three or four times in high school, maybe more.

I was in college, maybe 19 or 20 when I read the book again. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, I had converted (or masked) my cynicism–always an unearned pose of world-weariness for a teen–into a resolute idealism (the earnestness of which was always undercut by a generational infection of irony, of course). I could now peer into Catcher‘s great irony; I could see that Holden was a big phony too, maybe the biggest in the novel, that he was as cruel as anyone else in the book, and that his obsession with the innocence of youth was not a virtue but a sort of blindness, an ideological defense mechanism rooted in adolescent wish fulfillment. In fact, as an undergrad I begin to see the underlying themes of pedophilia that permeated Salinger’s work. They were minor and covert, to be sure, but also a bit unsettling. I’m sure I read at least twice in college, once for an English class and once on my own. I might’ve read it more than twice.

I read the book again in my mid-twenties, inspired perhaps by Will Smith’s monologue in the film adaptation of John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation. Here’s the monologue, where Smith’s character (who, spoiler, turns out to be a big phony) tries to explain why so many psychos and killers find justification for their mad agendas in Catcher:

At this point, I was detached enough from my own teen years to be somewhat disturbed by Holden’s behavior. I found him arrogant and clueless and largely unsympathetic. It was the end of the novel in particular that pointed toward psychopathic tendencies: Holden’s wish to “catch” all the kids who will “fall” from innocence, purity, spontaneity, whatever–this looked more to me now like a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder than the mark of tragic hero. I haven’t read the book since then.

Now that Salinger’s dead, like many fans, I’m excited. I’m excited to see what’s been stacking up in Salinger’s retreat in Cornish all these years. Given the inscrutability of later work like Seymour: An Introduction and the fact that Salinger wrote solely for his own pleasure in later years, it’s difficult to even imagine what the unpublished work will look like–if we even get to see it. In any case, it seems unlikely that any posthumous work of Salinger’s will ever penetrate the national literary consciousness (and conscience) the way Catcher has. I have a stack of galleys by my bed that measures close to four feet, but I think I’m going to put aside some time to see how Catcher measures up after all these years–or, rather, how I measure up to it.

Jane Bites Back — Michael Thomas Ford

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In Michael Thomas Ford’s novel Jane Bites Back, Jane Austen (you know, the Jane Austen) is an incognito vampire/bookstore clerk in upstate New York. Poor Jane is trying to get a new novel published (under a pseudonym, of course), but she suffers scores of rejection letters for her new work. Even worse is the horror of the Jane Austen industry, which, under the auspices of public domain laws, clutters Jane’s own bookshop with awful books that, like, don’t “get” the Austen oeuvre (in the climactic scene of the book’s opening chapter, Vampire Jane gets some measure of revenge by consuming the boorish author of an execrable volume entitled Waiting for Mr. Darcy). Of course, there’s got to be a plot, so Jane does get an offer for a book deal, one that’s complicated by accusations of plagiarism and other woes. To make matters worse, her old lover Lord Byron shows up (yeah, Byron, duh. How else would Jane Austen catch the vampirism?) There are other ghosts of literary past who show up, too, but why spoil surprises?

Jane Bites Back reveres its subject, Jane Austen, even as it blatantly cashes in on the very trend that it satirizes. The book’s program shouldn’t be confused with the absurdity behind Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters (which we liked) or the wackiness of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (which we didn’t like), but it does adhere to the same sense of fun. Ford seems to delight in corny, over the top passages, and we’ll take it for granted that his literary tongue is in his cheek when he writes a paragraph like:

When his hand cupped her breasts she gasped, and when his mouth touched her skin she felt her knees buckle. He caught her, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed. He placed her atop the sheets and stepped back. She watched through half-closed eyes as he removed his clothes. His chest was lean, his skin pale as milk. When stepped from his trousers she glanced briefly at his manhood before looking away.

His “manhood”?! Jeez, we hope this is parody. In any case, we were laughing. (Sidenote: How does this stack up against the sex scenes in the Twilight books? Are there sex scenes in the Twilight books? What Biblioklept reader will even admit to having read Twilight?)

Ford’s style is, on the whole, redolent with the tropes of YA fiction–not that Jane Bites Back is necessarily YA–but there’s not a challenging sentence in the book, which may or may not be a compliment for the writer. Clear, lucid writing is difficult to do. Still, we tend to value ambiguity around here; being perplexed and furious is a good reaction from time to time. Jane Bites Back reads with an anonymous speed that’s not particularly invigorating.

If we were really feeling adventurous today, we might wax heavy on the all the implications, meta- and otherwise, of a book that purports to criticize the Austen fad while at the same time indulging in it…but we’re not feeling up to it. There’s also a neat Venn diagram in all of this: vampires, Jane Austen, feminism (yeah, there are feminist themes here. Did we forget to mention them? Sorry). Suffice to say that any reader whose ears perk up at the notion of “Jane Austen + vampires” will not be disappointed in this book.

Jane Bites Back is new from Ballantine Books.

Nazi Literature in the Americas — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner9 Comments

I was talking with a friend last weekend about Roberto Bolaño and he remarked that many of the early slim novels from this remarkable writer tend to read like sketches for his masterwork 2666. This is a more than fair assessment and also one that shouldn’t–and doesn’t–detract from enjoying these books. But it’s difficult to read the nightmare-rant of By Night in Chile or the paranoiac dread invested in the tales in Last Evenings on Earth without recalling the layered themes of violence and art that underpin 2666. Bolaño’s fake-encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas is perhaps, by its very nature, the sketchiest of these sketches, yet that term, “sketch” — well it’s just plain wrong here. While most of the book’s entries are marked by brevity, none are undercooked. Rather–and I hate that I’m about to crib from critic Francisco Goldman’s blurb on the back of the book, but he’s spot on–the book is a “key cosmology to Bolaño’s literary universe.” In short, Nazi Literature in the Americas helps to confirm that, like J.R.R. Tolkien, Bolaño was a writer with a fully-realized universe at his disposal, one with its own heroes and villains, histories and myths, and yes, like Tolkien, its own literature.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a stunning, ugly, highly-enjoyable, and often hilarious book. It details the exploits, both literary and non-, of over two dozen fictional writers from North, Central, and South America. While few of the writers are actually practicing Nazis, all are right-wingers and most are crazy failures. Big surprise that Bolaño would write about crazy, failed writers, right? And that is the central paradox of the book: while the writers here are anti-Semites and fascists and neo-Nazis who represent the worst in human values and ethics, they also darkly mirror Bolaño himself, or at least his fictional stand-ins. For example, the (anti-)heroes Ignacio Zubieta and Jesús Fernández-Gómez are Colombian writers who side first with the fascists and then the Nazis, yet they come across as doubles for the Mexican lefty poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the (anti-)heroes of The Savage Detectives. The pair pops up a few times in the course of the book as well, most notably in the section on Daniela de Montecriesto, who was a minor character in 2666.

She’s not the only character to traverse Bolaño books. The final chapter of Nazi Literature, its longest, tells the story of Ramírez Hoffman, the aviator-poet-serial killer whose story is extended in the novella Distant Star. Hoffman’s entry, besides being the longest, is also the only written in the first-person. The narrator is even identified as “Bolaño.”

At times the reader will find himself sympathizing with Bolaño’s monsters. The sci-fi writer Gustavo Border says: “I have been tormented, spat on, and deceived so often–the only way I could go on living and writing was to find spiritual refuge in an ideal place.” Bolaño immediately cuts the pathos with humor; Border ends his sad comment: “In a way, I’m like a woman trapped in a man’s body.” Elsewhere, what’s most shocking is not how much sympathy Bolaño evokes, but how interesting the literature he describes sounds. Take Segundo José Heredia’s Saturnalia, for instance:

Saturnalia, the story of two young friends who in the course of a week-long journey through France are confronted with the most horrendous acts they have ever witnessed, without being able to tell for sure whether or not they are dreaming. The novel includes scenes of rape, sexual and workplace sadism, incest, impaling, and human sacrifice in prisons crowded to the physical limit; there are convoluted murder plots in the tradition of Conan Doyle, colorful and realistic descriptions of every Paris neighborhood, and, incidentally, one of the most vivid and spine-chilling female characters in Venezuelan literature since 1950: Elisenda, the enemy of the two young men.

It sounds horrific but I’d love to read it. It also sounds like a Bolaño novel, with its nightmare violence, prisons, and detective plots.

In one telling aside, one of Bolaño’s writers realizes that “literature . . . is a surreptitious form of violence.” Bolaño’s oeuvre seems to work from this thesis, or perhaps work to enact this thesis. If the writers of of Nazi Literature are villains, they are also sympathetic in their villainy, not for their racist viewpoints, which are subtly but repeatedly mocked and condemned, but rather for the fact that as writers and artists they have no hope; like Oedipus they are fated to violence. Like Bolaño himself, they both channel and engender violence. Their failure, of course, is to seek to regulate or otherwise give meaning to that violence via ideology and dogma. Tellingly, Bolaño investigates–and perhaps corrects–this failure in his opus 2666 which resists easy answers and scapegoats.

And so to return to our point of entry: Nazi Literature in the Americas will probably be enjoyed most by those who’ve trucked through 2666 or some of Bolaño’s other works. It’s a quick, propulsive read, and while quite funny–and at times scary–it’s most fascinating as a document that further fleshes out the Bolañoverse. Highly recommended.

The Spare Room — Helen Garner

Edwin Turner1 Comment

We’ve all had house guests who stay too long. But what happens when a house guest who overstays her welcome is dying? What if you invited her there hoping to prove in yourself some measure of humanity, humility, maybe even heroism, by taking good care of her? What if you found her irritating? Grating? Self-absorbed? What if  she didn’t seem to even notice what a great caretaker you were? What if she didn’t seem to appreciate your prowess as a host? What if she outright ignored the disease that was killing her, just refused to even mention it, denying you any hope of closure? Worst of all would be the shame that compounded all of these feelings about the dying house guest, the sense that you are wrong, inhuman, cowardly, right? Helen Garner’s novella The Spare Room (new in trade paperback from Picador) tackles these questions and the emotional turmoil behind them in measured, spare prose making a compelling and rewarding read.

Little irks me more in journalism than a book review (or any media review, really) that seeks to intertwine the personal dramas of the reviewer. I am about to do just that right now, gentle reader, so you are forewarned. Stop reading now if you wish and know that Biblioklept recommends The Spare Room. It’s a marvelous piece of writing, one that gives proof to the cliché “brutally honest.”

Reading The Spare Room I could not help but identify with its narrator, an Australian woman in her 60s named Helen who takes care of her free-wheeling, slightly daffy, cancer-infested friend Nicola. I am not an Australian woman in my 60s, but, like Helen, I know what it is like to live with and care for a person whom you love who also happens to be dying. From the time I was 12 years old, my maternal grandmother Mama Dot lived with my family. The doctors, prognosticating wise men all, gave Mama Dot just a year or two to live and my folks wanted her to spend that time with us. She was very sick, and, as if to prove the verity of certain stereotypes about Southern women,  she was also very stubborn–mulishly so (the woman could hold a grudge). She went on to live another 10 years with my parents, during which time both my brother and myself of course left the house (but always came back to visit). I loved her very, very much and, perhaps as a result of that love, fought with her constantly and fiercely about any little thing. Unlike the narrator Helen, who bottles up her irritation with Nicola (particularly her fury at her friend’s pursuit of quackish cures), I found it easier to confront my grandmother about her faults in illness–her lapses of memory and judgment, her lack of cooperation, her unbearable slowness. I could even be mean. But like Helen, I always felt bad about it too. What makes The Spare Room such an affecting, gripping read is Garner’s honesty, her ability to capture the negative, selfish feelings that we all must feel when comforting the sick.

Narratives about the dying often disengage the emotional turmoil of the caretaker by applying a veneer of sentimentality, morality, or even whimsy. Garner handles her subject matter with a realism that denies sentimentality and faces the ugliness of death head on. Her narrator is compassionate toward her friend but it’s always clear that the book is not about Nicola–it’s about how Helen reacts to Nicola. It’s about what it means to be selfish at the very moment you are trying to be selfless. It’s about how hard it is to get past your flaws as a human being. Take the book’s humor, for instance: The Spare Room is frequently hilarious, yet the humor never seeks transcendence or escape. When Helen seems to mutter to her audience, “God bless morphine” at the beginning of a chapter, she isn’t drolly avoiding her friend’s pain–she’s thankful that the drug has given both of them a night’s sleep. Similarly, her observation that the “station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer,” reveals that Helen’s selfishness is wrapped in minute details, details that compound in the narrative and build tension toward its awful final sentence (a final sentence that I won’t spoil by revealing here, dear reader).

The Spare Room is a tightly-compressed novella that one might read in an afternoon or two, yet the book will undoubtedly stay with most readers for a long time to come. We might not all be like Helen (and, thankfully, not all of our patients are as trying as Nicola) but there is certainly bound to be some measure of her in even the best of us. Garner has captured here some of that rage against the dying of the light that Dylan Thomas encouraged of us, and she’s revealed that that rage, falling impotent against illimitable death, might end up aimed at those we love dearest–as well as ourselves. Highly recommended.