Eleven Blue Men, Berton Roueché, 1953. Berkley Medallion Books (1968). No cover artist or designer credited. 191 pages.
Category: Books
Simulated stag | From Gene Wolfe’s novel Peace
And so will I search now for my knife, thus getting the exercise Dr. Van Ness prescribes. It was large, and stamped with the words “Boy Scout.” The scales were of simulated black staghorn, bringing to mind (at least to mine) the image of a simulated stag, his horns held proudly as those of any elm-deer, ranging the forest among the now-waking trees, trees whose leaves are dying with the summer in every color, like bruises, but bruises beautiful as the skins of races unborn, withheld from us because God, or destiny, or the bland chance of the scientists (whose blind, piping ape-god, idiot-god, we have met before; we know you, troubler of Babylon) has denied us the sight of all these scarlet and yellow—truly red, orange, russet-brown—races on our sidewalks, and all the wonderful richness of stereotypes we might have entertained ourselves with if only they had been permitted us: the scarlet people with tight fists and loose women, gobbling dialects, a talent for paintings done with chalk upon the sides of newspaper kiosks, and high abilities in the retail merchandising of hobby supplies such as tiny-toy jet engines, and model garbage trucks whose hungry rumps, trundled about the wooden tops of retired dining-room tables in basements, will devour the dross of train-station quick-eat restaurants; the orange people with their weird religion demanding the worship of sundials (as our own seems to others that of telephone poles), so that in friendly locker-room conversations, when we have at last and at the threat of certain legal pressures admitted them to Pinelawn and are discussing the round now past, they out with strange oaths. What is a wabe?
And all of them, since all the lands of this earth are occupied, must be from strange and farther countries, from Hi Brasil and the Islands of the Sun, from the Continental Islands and the Isles of the Tethys Sea. Only the rarest, the russet browns, belong here, native to St. Brendan’s land, and they are dying; the things they are famous for are not strange oaths, or ability at any art, or cunning in a trade, but alcoholism and gonorrhea and dwindling. They make good soldiers and that is fatal, just as is the bravery of the simulated stag, which will bring him to death, answering the call of the simulated war cry to meet bullets in the dry autumn woods and fall, his lungs hemorrhaging substitute blood at the edge of the potato fields. The imitation huntsman shouts and dances for joy, and then, having learned very well to shoot, but never to butcher, and being, in his own opinion, no longer of an age to carry heavy burdens, leaves him to rot and stink, the bait of plastic flies with fishhooks in their bellies. In time his flesh, torn by such fur-like foxes as remain, and by the teeth of curs, falls away, and only his horns and his celluloid bones remain, the prey of the boys’-knife maker.
A passage from Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace.
Mass-market Monday | Gene Wolfe’s Peace
Peace, Gene Wolfe, 1975. Berkley Books (1982). No cover artist or designer credited. 246 pages.
The uncredited cover artist is obviously and well-documentedly Gahan Wilson.
Maybe a hundred pages into Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace it struck me that this book is, like, an American post-modernist classic that we would now talk about alongside novels of writers like Pynchon, Barth, Reed, Coover, Barthelme, etc., if the Publishing Industry and Academia didn’t have hangups about sci-fi and fantasy. And the novel is only sci-fi or fantasy in the sense that, like, Gravity’s Rainbow is sci-fi fantasy or Pricksongs & Descants is sci-fi fantasy or Chimera is sci-fi fantasy. Anyway.
I “finished” Peace like an hour ago and I am going to reread it this week. The final chapter made some baffling moves; I realized that I missed a lot (not unlike my reading experience with Wolfe’s baroque postmodern fantasy epic The Book of the New Sun). Wolfe has a big bag of tricks in Peace; this is a haunted house, haunted by Sheherazade and her matryoshka dolls. The novel is larded with stories that loop and decay and engender new stories, moments of strange beauty and death and life; consider the narrator Den Weer, on the second page, describing roses who, “like mothers holding up their dead infants” show “the softly rotten shoots they put forth in the last warm weather of fall.” This is a novel about extinction.
I hope I manage more thoughts after a reread. For now, an incomplete list of books that I connected to Peace, as vibe or I do not know what:
Carpenter’s Gothic, William Gaddis
Benito Cereno, Herman Melville
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
Chimera, John Barth
It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on a Fourth of July | From Herman Melville’s Israel Potter
It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on a Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the riotous crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner, inscribed with gilt letters:
“BUNKER-HILL
1775.
GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!”
It was on Copps’ Hill, within the city bounds, one of the enemy’s positions during the fight, that our wanderer found his best repose that day. Sitting down here on a mound in the graveyard, he looked off across Charles River towards the battle-ground, whose incipient monument, at that period, was hard to see, as a struggling sprig of corn in a chilly spring. Upon those heights, fifty years before, his now feeble hands had wielded both ends of the musket. There too he had received that slit upon the chest, which afterwards, in the affair with the Serapis, being traversed by a cutlass wound, made him now the bescarred bearer of a cross.
For a long time he sat mute, gazing blankly about him. The sultry July day was waning. His son sought to cheer him a little ere rising to return to the lodging for the present assigned them by the ship-captain. “Nay,” replied the old man, “I shall get no fitter rest than here by the mounds.”
But from this true “Potter’s Field,” the boy at length drew him away; and encouraged next morning by a voluntary purse made up among the reassembled passengers, father and son started by stage for the country of the Housatonie. But the exile’s presence in these old mountain townships proved less a return than a resurrection. At first, none knew him, nor could recall having heard of him. Ere long it was found, that more than thirty years previous, the last known survivor of his family in that region, a bachelor, following the example of three-fourths of his neighbors, had sold out and removed to a distant country in the west; where exactly, none could say.
He sought to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead. But it had been burnt down long ago. Accompanied by his son, dim-eyed and dim-hearted, he next went to find the site. But the roads had years before been changed. The old road was now browsed over by sheep; the new one ran straight through what had formerly been orchards. But new orchards, planted from other suckers, and in time grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel. At length he came to a field waving with buckwheat. It seemed one of those fields which himself had often reaped. But it turned out, upon inquiry, that but three summers since a walnut grove had stood there. Then he vaguely remembered that his father had sometimes talked of planting such a grove, to defend the neighboring fields against the cold north wind; yet where precisely that grove was to have been, his shattered mind could not recall. But it seemed not unlikely that during his long exile, the walnut grove had been planted and harvested, as well as the annual crops preceding and succeeding it, on the very same soil.
Ere long, on the mountain side, he passed into an ancient natural wood, which seemed some way familiar, and midway in it, paused to contemplate a strange, mouldy pile, resting at one end against a sturdy beech. Though wherever touched by his staff, however lightly, this pile would crumble, yet here and there, even in powder, it preserved the exact look, each irregularly defined line, of what it had originally been—namely, a half-cord of stout hemlock (one of the woods least affected by exposure to the air), in a foregoing generation chopped and stacked up on the spot, against sledging-time, but, as sometimes happens in such cases, by subsequent oversight, abandoned to oblivious decay—type now, as it stood there, of forever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting in early mishap.
“Do I dream?” mused the bewildered old man, “or what is this vision that comes to me of a cold, cloudy morning, long, long ago, and I heaving yon elbowed log against the beech, then a sapling? Nay, nay, I cannot be so old.”
“Come away, father, from this dismal, damp wood,” said his son, and led him forth.
Blindly ranging to and fro, they next saw a man ploughing. Advancing slowly, the wanderer met him by a little heap of ruinous burnt masonry, like a tumbled chimney, what seemed the jams of the fire- place, now aridly stuck over here and there, with thin, clinging, round, prohibitory mosses, like executors’ wafers. Just as the oxen were bid stand, the stranger’s plough was hitched over sideways, by sudden contact with some sunken stone at the ruin’s base.
“There, this is the twentieth year my plough has struck this old hearthstone. Ah, old man,—sultry day, this.”
“Whose house stood here, friend?” said the wanderer, touching the half-buried hearth with his staff, where a fresh furrow overlapped it.
“Don’t know; forget the name; gone West, though, I believe. You know ’em?”
But the wanderer made no response; his eye was now fixed on a curious natural bend or wave in one of the bemossed stone jambs.
“What are you looking at so, father?”
“‘Father!’ Here,” raking with his staff, “my father would sit, and here, my mother, and here I, little infant, would totter between, even as now, once again, on the very same spot, but in the unroofed air, I do. The ends meet. Plough away, friend.”
Best followed now is this life, by hurrying, like itself, to a close.
Few things remain.
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But long ago it faded out of print—himself out of being—his name out of memory. He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.
From Herman Melville’s novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile
“…the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899″ (Pynchon’s Against the Day)
For years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899. Next day’d be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes, miners’ tags, fencenails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’ offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed. .
A passage from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day.
Mass-market Monday | Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America
Eye of the Heart: Short Stories from Latin America, ed. by Barbara Howes, 1973. Avon-Bard (1974). No cover artist or designer credited. 576 pages.
A promising mixtape, via many translators. Clarice Lispector might not have been a big enough name for English-reading audiences in the 1970s to make the front or back cover, but editor Barbara Howes included two of her stories.
Here is a piece (the shortest) from the collection:
“Why Reeds Are Hollow”
by
Gabriela Mistral
Translated by William Jay Smith
For don Max. Salas Marchant
I
Even in the peaceful world of plants, a social revolution once took place. It is told that in this case the leaders were those vain reeds. A master of rebellion, the wind, disseminated propaganda, and in no time at all there was talk of nothing else in the vegetal centers. Virgin forests fraternized with silly gardens, in a common struggle for equality.
Equality of what? Of their thickness of trunk, the excellence of their fruit, their right to pure water?
No, simply equality of height. The ideal was that all should raise their heads uniformly. The corn had no thought of making itself strong like the oak, but only of stirring its hairy tassels at the same elevation. The rose did not strive to be useful like the rubber plant, but just wanted to reach that high crown, and make of it a pillow on which to lull its flowers to sleep.
Vanity, vanity! Delusions of grandeur, even if they went against Nature, caricatured their aims. In vain, some modest flowers—the shy violet and flat-nosed lily—spoke of divine law and the evils of pride. Their voices seemed dotty.
An old poet, bearded like the River God, condemned the project in the name of beauty, and had some wise things to say about uniformity, hateful to him in every respect.
II
How did it all turn out? People tell of strange influences at work. Earth spirits blew upon the plants with their monstrous vitality, and so it was that an ugly miracle took place.
One night, the world of lawn and shrub grew dozens of feet, as if obeying some imperious appeal from the stars.
Next day, the country people were dismayed—when they came out of their huts—to find clover high as a cathedral and wheat fields wild with gold!
It was maddening. Animals roared with fright, lost in the darkness of their pastures. Birds chirped in desperation, their nests having risen to unheard-of heights. Nor could they fly down in search of seed: gone was the sunbathed soil, the grass’s humble tapestry.
Shepherds lingered by their flocks beside dark pastures; their sheep refused to enter anything so dense, afraid they might be swallowed up completely.
Meanwhile, victorious, the reeds laughed aloud, whipping their riotous leaves against the blue tops of the eucalyptus.
III
Thus a month is said to have passed. Then the decline set in.
And it came about in this fashion: violets, which delight in shade, dried up when their purple heads were exposed to full sunlight.
“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds hastened to say. “They’re a mere nothing.”
(But in the country of the spirits, they were mourned.)
Lilies, stretching their height to fifty feet, broke in two. Like the heads of queens, white marble heads lay lopped off all around.
The reeds argued as before. (But the Graces ran wild through the wood, lamenting.)
Lemon trees at that height lost all their blossoms to the violent winds. Adios, harvest!
“It doesn’t matter,” the reeds stated yet again. “Their fruit was so bitter.”
The clover dried out, its stems twisting like threads in a fire.
Corn tassels drooped, but no longer from gentle lassitude. In all their extravagant length they fell upon the earth, heavy as rails.
Potatoes, to strengthen their stems, put forth feeble tubers; these were little bigger than apple seeds.
Now the reeds laughed no more; at last they grew serious.
Blossoms of shrub or grass were no longer being fertilized: the insects could not reach them without overheating their little wings.
Furthermore, it was said that man had neither bread nor fruit nor forage for his animals; hunger and sorrow were abroad in the land.
In such a state of things, only the tall trees remained sound, trunks rising strongly as ever: they had not yielded to temptation.
The reeds were the last to fall, signaling the total disaster of their tree-level theory; roots rotted from excessive humidity, and even the network of foliage could not keep them from drying out.
It was then clear that, compared with their former solid bulk, they’d become hollow. They reached hungry leagues upward, but, their insides being empty, they were laughable, like marionettes or dolls.
In the face of such evidence, no one could defend their philosophy; no more was said about it for thousands of years.
Nature—generous always—repaired the damage in six months, seeing to it that all wild plants would again spring up in the usual way.
The poet, bearded like the River God, appeared after a long absence and, rejoicing, sang of the new era.
“So be it, dear people. Beautiful is the violet for its minuteness, and the lemon tree for its gentle shape. Beautiful are all things as God made them: the noble oak and the brittle barley.”
The earth bore fruit once again; flocks fattened, the people were nourished.
But the reeds—those rebel chieftains—bore for all time the mark of their disgrace: they were hollow, hollow . . .
Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations by Drew Lerman (Book acquired, 3 June 2026)
I’m a big fan of Drew Lerman’s work, and I’m always excited when he puts together a new collection. His latest is Conversations with Don DeLillo and Other Conversations, collecting his recent strips. I would describe these strips as functioning in the mode of pseudoautiobiographical postmodern literary interrogation, only that makes them sound pretentious, which they aren’t. They are very funny and very niche, and I often feel like I am Lerman’s ideal reader. This is my niche.
Each one-page strip features (a version of) Lerman encountering (and often trailing) a writer (DeLillo, obv., but also Joy Williams, Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, William T. Vollmann…); the conversations are often very one-sided and allow Lerman to interrogate his subject on the kind of minutiae that often overtakes our ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, when it comes to art. In one of my favorite bits, for example, Lerman critiques the implementation of (“middle school book report-ass”) Courier New Unjustified as the font for DeLillo’s novel The Silence. I could go on but I should save it for a proper review.
Conversations with Don DeLillo also features a great negative blurb by a certain grouchy “Myron Circle”:
And maybe this is corny of me, but I love that Lerman used Chris Ware stamps to mail me Conversations with Don DeLillo. (Chris Ware shows up in Conversations, btw — he tries to give Lerman a bunch of his books and tell Lerman how much he loves Snake Creek
More thoughts to come.
RIP Marjane Satrapi
RIP Marjane Satrapi, 19-2026
I was saddened to learn today of the death of the artist Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was only 56.
Satrapi is probably most recognized for her first published work, Persepolis, a graphic novel she completed in 2003. Persepolis was one of the first books I wrote about on Biblioklept, way back in 2007, when this blog was not half a year old. Here is the entire post:
“It was funny to see how Marx and God looked like each other.”
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis makes a nice introduction to the graphic
novelautobiography for anyone who hasn’t read one before. Marjane’s memoir weaves the political turmoil of the Islamic Revolution with the everyday stuff of childhood experience. As the the repressive Islamic regime revokes liberal freedoms, Marjane’s folks (secular intellectuals, of course) smuggle Iron Maiden posters back from Turkey; young Marjane sneaks cigarettes and rock music to a backdrop of political assassinations and war with Iraq.Persepolis succeeds by engaging the reader in a personal experience of revolution and cultural alienation. It works as a history lesson and as a coming of age story. Readers who try something different (maybe suspend some prejudices?) will be rewarded with an enriched perspective on a political/cultural upheaval still affecting global politics today.
I wrote that twenty years ago, and there are any number of things I could pick at, I think my defensive tone is the most interesting to me. I think that general audiences have come to understand that comics, just like any other medium, can express the highest ideals of art. Persepolis, now a staple on many school reading lists, contributed to that cultural shift.
I looked around for my copy, but then realized that my daughter took Persepolis with her when she left for college last year. I remember reading the book to her when she was little; later she read it herself. We repeated the process with our son. And then we watched Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation together a few times.
We also watched her film adaptation of her graphic novel Chicken with Plums. The film is good, but the book is better. My 2009 review of the paperback edition again highlighted an anxiety that mainstream audiences held prejudices against the comics medium:
Casual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums; the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Satrapi knows when to hold back and let her simple black and white images tell the story. There is a certain economy of storytelling that great comic writers can achieve in ways entirely possible in prose, and here Satrapi has surpassed her earlier work in Persepolis, which, while great, often relied heavily on textual exposition. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s evocations of troubled family life, unfulfilled love, the perils of Iranian immigration to California, and Sufi mysticism all blend into a poignant, often-funny, and occasionally devastating portrait that exemplifies the best of the comics medium.
While comparisons to her Persepolis series will undoubtedly hang over all of Satrapi’s work, Chicken with Plums is a wonderful successor, and in some senses, a more achieved work. Although it doesn’t convey the first-person immediacy of Persepolis, nor that memoir’s dramatic scope, the story of Nasser Ali is intimately detailed and achieves something rare in an age of overstuffed books: it leaves its readers hungry for more.
The plot of Chicken with Plums is devastatingly simple. Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian musician (and Satrapi’s great uncle), elects to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument. He quits eating and refuses to leave his bedroom. The story is very much an extrapolation of hazy events revealed in dreams and flashbacks, with a tint of magical realism.
I was a bit taken aback, given the plot of Chicken with Plums, while reading the following detail from Satrapi’s obituary in Le Monde today. The French newspaper reported that those close to the artist declared that, “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” How very sad. I hope she has found some peace.
Question | From John A. Williams’ novel The Man Who Cried I Am
Nine million, n-i-n-e million. Ah, the world got what it deserved. The lessons had been written on the board in big letters thousands of years ago and repeated several times every century since.
Question: How many men can I kill if I dig out the Suez Canal?
Question: How many men can I kill if I build myself a Great Pyramid?
Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we retake the Holy Land from the heathens? (We’ll call it a Crusade.)
Question: How many men, women and children can we kill if we establish a slave trade between Africa and the New World?
Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for democracy?
Question: How many men can we kill to make the world safe for communism?
Answer: Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions.
And then, we’ll start all over again.
From John A. Williams’ 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am.
Mass-market Monday | Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem
Home to Harlem, Claude McKay, 1928. Pocket Cardinal Editions (1956). No cover artist or designer credited. 180 pages.
The cover art, while unattributed inside the book, is likely the work of Isadore Seltzer. McKay’s first novel is now in the public domain and available online.
Sunday Comix
A page by Charles Burns from BLAB! no. 2, Summer 1987, Monte Comix Productions.
“This demon is capitalism. Special Ability: Ravenous hunger” | On Thomas Kendall’s cybernoir novel How I Killed the Universal Man
Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man is a near-future sci-fi novel working squarely in the cybernoir tradition of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson. Like Gibson, Kendall constructs a world where corporate systems saturate daily life and set the limits of perception. Like PKD, Kendall foregrounds reality’s instability, where what is seen, felt, and remembered can’t be trusted as one’s own. Kendall reworks the cybernoir lineage through a critique of media culture and wellness technology, showing how late-capitalist systems present themselves as therapeutic while covertly expanding their nefarious authority.
Our hero John Lakerman is a journalist for donkeyWolf, a “self-consciously edgy multi-social new(s) presence with a polyamorous approach to truth and ethics” that profits from “Attention Disordering Content.” From the outset, Lakerman understands himself less as an agent than as a conduit. He describes himself as “merely language, an impoverished language uninhabited by being,” and just “a data leak.” This diminished sense of self becomes explicit in one of the novel’s most telling admissions: “He had always wanted to be a robot…He’d always wanted to be a machine.” Lakerman’s desire isn’t so much a nihilist fantasy as it is an adaptive response to a world that already treats him as a tool, mere equipment.
Lakerman is sent to Miami to investigate Noumenon, a designer drug whose name strikes him as empty philosophical branding, “self-consciously clever and a total misunderstanding of the concept.” It’s a gonzo gig: he’ll take the drug himself and “report back from the other side of its meaning.” Under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Christoff at Lifepax (“here to carry you when nature can’t”), he enters a controlled Noumenon trial before exploring the Miami club circuit, where the drug circulates freely.
Crossing (literally) the threshold, Lakerman reads “cryptic messages” in the movement of club-goers’ bodies: “What they might see meant everything. What they could see was possibility. What they would see was another matter.” Capital, via biotech, mediates, manages, and tiers perception, parceled in preset doses. Kendall’s hyperheated dystopian Miami, a landscape of “block-shaped universes” and horizons “constructed by deprivation,” gives that logic spatial form. Space is segmented, experience preformatted, and Lakerman’s role as “reporter” starts to look like another interface the system ventriloquizes.
Lakerman leaves Miami, but the cityscape’s stratified logic stays with him. Back in London, news of a mass-shooting in Miami finds its way into his feed, and the “quaintness of a non-global catastrophe” showing up there strikes the jaded Lakerman as unusual. A too-specific detail from the report finds him returning to his last story on Noumenon, and his investigation widens into a corporate network linking Lifepax to the now-defunct Phenom Games. What began as a gonzo drug story becomes an inquiry into how experience itself is engineered, circulated, and monetized.
Lakerman’s investigation leads him to UbIQ, a biotech platform offering implants framed as “an advanced biometrics wellness program and early health warning system.” The smooth clinical reassurance of corporate jargon masks UbIQ’s reality as a tool of continuous emotional surveillance: “It registers how much you cry, when you cry, and at what.” As Lakerman encounters UbIQ (the name a loud, clear echo of PKD’s 1969 novel Ubik), the ground of proof gives way beneath him. Official records deny what he remembers, corroborating traces disappear, and even his own logs refuse to stabilize events into something demonstrably real.
He keeps investigating though, and the novel shifts to question not simply what Lakerman can know, but what kind of system makes knowing structurally dependent on corporate infrastructures and then repackages that dependence as “care.” Kendall distills this systemic condition, the internalization of capitalist infrastructure as perception, feeling, and “wellness,” into a blunt image of saturation: “Like plastic in fish, the way everything has a little capitalism mixed in.” Control arrives as smart drugs, implants framed as therapy, games that train attention and identity. It surrounds the self and takes up residence inside it.
A Boschian mural on the side of a church (titled a bit-on-the-nosedly Allegorical Futures) states the book’s critique outright: “This demon is capitalism. Special Ability: Ravenous hunger.” The mural is signed T.OR who Kendall later links to the game-world Lakerman is pulled toward. The mural names the engine; the game teaches how to live with it: “HIKTUM is a game that teaches you how to be multiple.” That “multiplicity” isn’t Whitman’s multitudinous freedom but training: become flexible, divisible, easier to manage. The endpoint is the Universal Man, “a thing [that] cannot be rendered but can be leased.” The novel’s late refrain “Nobody survives love” marks the cost of a world where even intimacy is folded into the logic of extraction.
Lakerman’s trajectory isn’t a personal tragedy so much as a case study in a world where media platforms, pharmaceuticals, and “wellness” tech jointly manage what can be felt, remembered, and proved — and where that management manufactures people who want to be managed. Kendall leaves Lakerman’s final position unresolved, but the arc is clear. The wish to become a machine (seamless, efficient, immune) collapses into submission to the systems already in place. In HIKTUM, control isn’t the existential threat of abstract violence, but rather what we feed to our heads and bodies. The diagnosis is that we don’t experience these systems as coercion. We submit to them as upgrades.
Readers drawn to cybernoir’s paranoiac pressures will get a kick out of Kendall’s transhumanist noir, which I’ve failed to describe the weirdness of here. How I Killed the Universal Man also makes a strong case for seeking out Whiskey Tit, an independent press committed to weirdness. Check it out.
On Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Robert Coover’s sophomore novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is in print again via New York Review Books, with a new introduction by Ben Marcus. First published in 1968, The Universal Baseball Association connects the comparatively grounded late modernism of Coover’s first novel The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the more overtly experimental postmodern fiction he became best known for — works like The Public Burning (1977), Spanking the Maid (1982), and Gerald’s Party (1986). In this light, The Universal Baseball Association makes an accessible point of entry into Coover’s oeuvre. (Coeuvre? Sorry. Sorry!) The Universal Baseball Association offers the conceptual daring and formal play of Coover’s mature work framed within a more emotionally-accessible narrative. Along with the metatextual fables collected in Pricksongs & Descants, it makes a strong starting place for readers coming to Coover for the first time. And unlike the zany and morally-elastic stories in Pricksongs & Descants (and a lot of Coover’s later work), UBA retains a realistic emotional core that many readers look for. It gives us someone to care about.
That someone is Henry Waugh, an accountant who spends his nights running a solitary baseball league of his own invention. He conjures his Universal Baseball Association with dice, elaborate scorecards, and meticulous record books — but most of all imagination. Henry’s is a coherent, vibrant world, a closed system with its own history, genealogy, politics, and language.
From the novel’s outset we sense that Henry’s game has already surpassed the imaginative confines of a normie’s pastime. Now in its fifty-sixth season, The Universal Baseball Association is an immersive, generative world, rich in folklore, mythos, culture. We also see (as those around him can see) that his fantasyland threatens to subsume him entirely. Our boy is hardly excelling at his day job, as his concerned coworker Lou points out. Much of the novel’s early tension comes from Henry’s attempt to bridge his fantasy world to the “real” world. But his endeavors to recruit others to the game fail.
Still, Henry tries. Early on, he describes his project to his “old friend” Hettie, a “neighborhood B-girl” he takes home from a dive bar after a few (too many) drinks:
“I’m an auditor for a baseball association.”
“I didn’t know they had auditors, too,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I keep financial ledgers for each club, showing cash receipts and disbursements…And a running journalization of the activity, posting of it all into permanent record books… Politics, too. Elections. Team captains. Club presidents. And every four years, the Association elects a Chancellor, and I have to keep an eye on that.”
Inebriated Henry boasts, fumbles, and flirts with Hettie; the scene is pure Coover — manic horniness wrapped in nerdiness (or maybe vice versa). Henry continues his awkward seduction with this zinger:
He took a grip on her behind. “People die, you know.”
It excites Hettie! And sure, hypothetical deaths on a game boy’s ledger are, like, sexy. It’s Henry’s idealism that really soars here though. He describes the hunt for perfection that drives his exquisite archival project:
…what a wonderful rare thing it is to do something, no matter how small a thing, with absolute unqualified utterly unsurpassable perfection! …to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better, because you had done it as well as it could possibly be done. …In a way, you know, it’s even sad somehow, because, well, it’s done, and all you can hope for after is to do it a second time.
How sad is Henry’s satisfied melancholy? — or is it melancholic satisfaction? A thing done perfectly is finished, fixed, closed. The league’s record books promise such permanence, but in doing so foreclose living possibility into completed fact. What could happen becomes only what has happened.
Henry tries to counter that closure by designing a system that lives, generates, and regenerates. He rejects games that repeat themselves mechanically, like pinball, which he dismisses as “a static game, utterly lacking the movement, grace, and complexity of real baseball.” Instead, he builds a structure governed by controlled randomness. It’s worth quoting at length some of Henry’s process to give you a taste of his rational mania:
When he’d finally decided to settle on his own baseball game, Henry had spent the better part of two months just working with the problem of odds and equilibrium points in an effort to approximate that complexity. Two dice had not done it. He’d tried three, each a different color, and the 216 different combinations had provided the complexity, all right, but he’d nearly gone blind trying to sort the colors on each throw. Finally, he’d compromised, keeping the three dice, but all white, reducing the total number of combinations to 56, though of course the odds were still based on 216. To restore—and, in fact, to intensify —the complexity of the multicolored method, he’d allowed triple ones and sixes—1-1-1 and 6-6-6—to trigger the more spectacular events, by referring the following dice throw to what he called his Stress Chart, also a three-dice chart, but far more dramatic in nature than the basic ones. Two successive throws of triple ones and sixes were exceedingly rare—only about three times in every two entire seasons of play on the average—but when it happened, the next throw was referred, finally, to the Chart of Extraodinary Occurrences, where just about anything from fistfights to fixed ball games could happen. These two charts were what gave the game its special quality, making it much more than just a series of hits and walks and outs. Besides these, he also had special strategy charts for hit-and-run plays, attempted stolen bases, sacrifice bunts, and squeeze plays, still others for deciding the ages of rookies when they came up, for providing details of injuries and errors, and for determining who, each year, must die.
That final detail, must die, is crucial. Mortality is a rule of the UBA, a key ingredient to the league’s emotional, psychological, and moral ballast. Death gives the game stakes, introducing irreversibility into an otherwise repeatable system. Death also exposes the risk at the heart of Henry’s design. The same randomness that generates excitement also engenders loss. And Henry must submit to that randomness, even though he created it, even if it means killing off one of his most beloved players:
Oh, sure, he was free to throw away the dice, run the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? Who would [the player] really be then? Nobody, an empty name, a play actor. Even though he’d set his own rules, his own limits, and though he could change them whenever he wished, nevertheless he and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice. That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game altogether.
Henry is the great Creator of this system, but he’s also subject to its rules, an order of his own grace. The autonomy of the league depends on his restraint. Without the rules, the players would collapse into pure fiction (which of course they are); with the rules, the players acquire a simulacrum of reality.
These rules restrain Henry; they are the mechanism by which his inventions become more than inventions, and nowhere is that mechanism clearer than in the act of naming:
…name a man and you make him what he is. Of course, he can develop. And in ways you don’t expect. Or something can go wrong. Lot of nicknames invented as a result of Rookie-year surprises. But the basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming.
Like Adam naming the animals, Henry brings his players into being through language. They do not preexist their names. Naming is not just merely descriptive, but generative. Once named, a UBA player can develop, succeed, fail, even die, but nothing happens until the name enters the system.
(An aside: in the UBA, Coover gives his contemporary Thomas Pynchon a run for his money in the zany names department. (Zany songs, too, but this review is already bloated.))
The naming, the rules, the chronicles are all bound in the auspiciously-capitalized archive of the Universal Baseball Association, The Book. A grandiose tome,
it consisted of some forty volumes, kept in shelves built into the kitchen wall, along with the permanent record books, league financial ledgers, and the loose-leaf notebooks of running life histories. He seemed to find more to write about, the more he played the game, and he foresaw the day when the number of archive volumes would pass the number of league years.
Too, Henry’s Book is an amalgam of discursive textual approaches, all filtered through his manic imagination:
Style varied from the extreme economy of factual data to the overblown idiom of the sportswriter, from the scientific objectivity of the theoreticians to the literary speculations of essayists and anecdotalists. There were tape-recorded dialogues, player contributions, election coverage, obituaries, satires, prophecies, scandals…His own shifting moods, often affected by events in the league, also colored the reports, oscillating between notions of grandeur and irony, exultation and despair, enthusiasm and indifference, amusement and weariness. Lately, he had noticed a tendency toward melancholy and sentimentality. He hoped he’d get over it soon.
Henry’s archive expands, its relentless growth challenging the Association’s foundations. Record-keeping no longer mediates the league but rather constitutes it, collapsing the distinction between event and commentary. Statistics, essays, interviews, and speculative fragments stand on equal footing, none quite stabilizing the others. In this sense, the novel anticipates the metatextual logic of later works like the stories of Pricksongs & Descants and The Public Burning, where narration proliferates without authority and systems generate their own interpretive noise. Henry’s text-making generates layers of discourse that displace rather than resolve one another, much as Coover’s infamous story “The Babysitter” multiplies incompatible narrative versions without privileging a final account. The archive thickens without coherence. Henry’s attempt at a complete archive results in formal excess. It’s born of love, or obsession, or both, but Henry’s discursive text-making ultimately exposes the instability of both the league and the act of narration itself.
Coover juxtaposes the league’s self-enclosed textual machinery against the crowded, bodily immediacy of Henry’s everyday life. Scenes with his coworker Lou, especially in bars and restaurants, are full of conflicting textures and excess:
They bundled in, warm odors assailing them gently, past a sign that read: Go thy way and eat thy bread with joy! Piped-in radio music floated over the kitchen noises, the whump of doors, rattle of cocktail shakers, the bubble and buzz of underwater voices. Walls in a lush green with gold sparkle, cedar wainscoting, soft glow throughout, yet at the same time, linoleum floors and tawdry leatherette booths. Frilly lamps at the tables like little flowers, massive paintings and prints of whaling ships and dead pheasants on the walls. Elegant bar of carved wood in the romantic style, but the tabletops were cheap speckly formica. Dark-suited business types were conferring in one booth, young kids necking in the next. Yet somehow it all hung together okay.
Their meal (in Coover’s Henry’s free indirect imagination) tips into vivid grotesquerie:
Pink sea monsters, washed up on a shore of lettuce leaves and parsley, arrived, iced, their pungent sauce piercing through the present aroma of the Old Fashioneds’ bitters like an arrow: zingo! right to the nose! and to the palate! terrific!
The real world is messy, abject, excessive, embodied, lacking the clean structure of the league, but alive in a way the league cannot be. In the real world, bodies eat, drink, touch, but meaning is diffuse, nothing is fully accounted for. Real reality is a system without closure, with no stabilizing center. The UBA is Henry’s answer to messy reality.
But so and when the aforementioned tragic death of a beloved player occurs, Henry finds his fantasyland shaken, destabilized in ways his imagination had not anticipated. His careful system, with its ledgers and tables and charts cannot make meaning of the grief he feels. Already predisposed to melancholy, Henry slides into a depression that league play cannot resolve. There’s no joy in the game. A veteran player diagnoses the situation succinctly:
What if…we have passed, without knowing it, from a situation of sequential compounding into one of basic and finite yes-or-no survival, causing a shift of what you might call the equilibrium point, such that the old strategies, like winning ball games, sensible and proper within the old stochastic or recursive sets, are, under the new circumstances, insane!
By the outset of the novel’s final third act, Henry is in a bad place:
Not once, in the Universal Baseball Association’s fifty-six long seasons of play, had its proprietor plunged so close to self-disgust, felt so much like giving it up, a life misused, an old man playing with a child’s toy; he felt somehow like an adolescent caught masturbating… He was destroying the Association, he knew that now. He’d kept no records, hadn’t even logged a single entry in the Book.
As the UBA unravels, so do Henry’s relationships in the real world. He alienates and insults Hettie and his drunken bid to get Lou to play the game with him ends in another intrusion of wet, messy reality — Lou spills beer over the Henry’s charts and ledgers, the corporeal material of the game.
Dejected and alone in his apartment, drunkenly spinning, Henry returns to his game, a vengeful God cheating at dice to produce a 6-6-6 roll in an act of premeditated murder. The Creator has finally violated his own rules. Reality then literally spews out of our Henry, as he abjectly vomits “a red-and-golden rainbow arc of half-curded pizza over his Association” before passing out.
As the penultimate chapter begins, Henry has settled down a bit. The UBA’s season is over with no fanfare, no additional textuality beyond raw stats: “Journalists quit writing, just watched. Nobody interviewed anybody. No one sought autographs.” Nothing more to write.
Revivified, but a bit insane, Henry finds a way back to the “perfection” he’s previously thought, but now understands it as something from the insulated system he’d previously imagined:
he’d discovered…that perfection wasn’t a thing, a closed moment, a static fact, but process, yes, and the process was transformation…
By the end of the chapter, our hero transforms, synthesizing the imaginative and the real. A fantasy baseball player walks into a bar. There he finds all his favorite figments:
…Witness York and Ham Craft and Maggie Everts and Walt McCamish and Bo McBean, here they come! and Rag Rooney and Jaybird Wall and Cash Bailey with his champion Patsies, the whole goddamn whooping and hollering lot of them! and Chauncey O’Shea and Royce Ingram!
Our hero is finally subsumed into the game. He will not appear again in the novel.
The final, eighth chapter is set a hundred years in the future (the future of the UBA, that is), and is populated by the league descendants of Henry’s creation, now more philosophical (and disembodied) than ever. As one player remarks:
We have no mothers… The ripening of their wombs is nothing more than a ceremonious parable. We are mere ideas, hatched whole and hapless…”
The players have moved on to their own meta-narratives, without the authorial impositions of Henry. A kind of fatalistic-but-perhaps-optimistic view takes hold: “Even if there weren’t [a record-keeper], I think we’d have to play the game as though there were,” one player remarks.
The novel ends with a baseball game, a match nestled comfortably into a mythology generated from fateful Season LVI (a season so fateful that it rattled the Creator J.W.H. such that he has disappeared from the narrative). Descendants of that season’s two victims face off as pitcher and batter — but with the reassurance of the new perfection:
“It’s not a trial,” says Damon, glove tucked in his armpit, hands working the new ball. …”It’s not even a lesson. It’s just what it is.”
The radical inconclusiveness here is mirrored in Coover’s architecture for his eight-chapter baseball novel, which refuses to give its readers a perfect ninth inning. The structure seems to dare the reader to imagine that ninth inning.
In the Universal Baseball Association, games require a witness. The continuity of record keeping requires the fiction of someone who guarantees continuity. The league persists only at the cost Henry has been paying from the start: life displaced by its administration. For The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the reader is the witness, called up to Coover’s minor majors (or is that vice versa?). It’s a workout for the imagination, I suppose — rules, events, records, history, myth.
And it’s more fun than I think I’ve expressed here — I’ve quoted Coover’s prose at length, maybe too much, but I don’t think I’ve fully conveyed how rich and hardy the text is, how warm and comforting the world that he conjures is, populated by singers and slingers and general bonhomie. It’s Famous Times All the Time, except when it’s melancholy, sad, or just plain bonkers. The Universal Baseball Association is part of the great American postmodern canon. Come and play.
Blog about some recent reading (Jan. and Feb. 2026)
Joy Williams’ collection The Pelican Child was the first book I read this year. I picked up a copy back in December and surprised myself by reading most of it over a few days. It’s a much heavier collection than the wry vignettes of 2013’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God or its sequel, Concerning the Future of Souls (2024). The stories here alight on mortality, human ecological cultural aesthetic, etc. Opener “Flour” strikes me as a postmodern riff on Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and the fable (literally fabulous?) closer “Baba Yaga and The Pelican Child” made me tear up a little and then hate myself a little. A book about death where young people, tattooed with the lines of long-dead poets, are the clean-up crew working the night shift sweeping up the detritus of the 21st century. (It was “Argos,” about Odysseus’s good and loyal boy, that really killed me if I’m honest.)
There are still a few stories at the back of Robert Bingham’s 1997 collection Pure Slaughter Value. I will tuck them away for another time. I loved these stories and then I found myself angry at his spoiled clever preppy narrators. “The Other Family” is one of the better stories I’ve read in a long time.
I reread Robert Coover’s second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), back in January and made some notes for a review. This is not that review. I am not a Coover expert but I think this is as good an introduction to his novels as anything. (No it’s not; get Pricksongs & Descants.)
Speaking of Universal—I had an early misfire with Thomas Kendall’s 2023 novel How I Killed the Universal Man, but then started it again the other night with a perhaps clearer idea of what the author was trying to do. I think I was thinking something more straightforward, more cyberpunknoir, something less, I dunno, formally meta or post. More thoughts to come.
I think George Saunders’ new novel Vigil fucking sucks.
Is Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool a novella? A novelette? A short story? Should we care? I loved The Last Samurai (2000), thought Lightning Rods (2011) seemed like a novel written quickly for money, and found myself embarrassed for everyone involved with her collection Some Trick (2018), including the editor, publisher, bookseller who sold it to me, and myself — but maybe I should go back and try it again? I thought The English Understand Wool was really good! It was funny and silly and sharp.
I have spent the past few months reading what I could get my little pink hands on of David Ohle’s incredible post-apocalyptic comedy, the Moldenke Saga (a term I have just now coined, maybe). I will do a Whole Thing on these novels at some point, but I read The Blast in one night and felt really sad that it was over and then the next night I read most of the last Moldenke novel, The Death of a Character, and then I woke up around 4am that morning and finished it and got a little choked up. In novels like Motorman, The Age of Sinatra, and The Old Reactor, Ohle has given us a fittingly grotesque, grody, gnarly, abject, hilarious, zany, and emotionally-resonant zombie funhouse mirror for our own gross times. These novels are woefully underread and still, for the most part, in print. Seek them out.
Wanting to scratch an Ohle itch, I turned to Literature Map to suggest some proxy; this machine offered Stanley Crawford as a proximal prosist. I picked up a few of his novels the other weekend, including 1972’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, which I read over the course of a few hours late at night and then reread the next night. It’s not like the Ohle oeuvre, excepting that it’s wholly, utterly original at the conceptual aesthetic rhetorical level, is generally tragicomical, mythical, epic — but also compact, and funny and alarming. So it’s very much in the Ohlesphere. Seek it out.
And also scratching that apocalyptic itch is Antoine Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls (in translation by Alyson Waters). It’s got this cracked bifocal Bardo thing going on, which I will not explain here and now. The print in the Archipelago edition is small for my aging eyes. I’ve read it in the afternoon; it is not an afternoon book, it is a 2am book.
I read the first half of Jan Kerouac’s “semi-autobiographical” novel Baby Driver (1981) last night. The writing immediately struck me as very bad, very overwritten, ostentatious and clumsy, but I kept going, charmed by the charmingly charming naivety of the novel, which is not a naive novel at all, which turns into a rough and ready sex and drug novel, or sex and drug autobiography, or autofiction. (My instinct is that this is an autobiography with a lot of whoppers.) Our heroine is on heroin pretty quick, then turning tricks, then on to other adventures. But there’s a glib smudging of purple prose over any would-be tragic contours. She likes it! She really likes it! At least I think.
And yes, J. Kerouac is J. Kerouac’s only (acknowledged) child, and yes, he pops in now and then, a jolly fibbing wino, the poseur some of us always pegged him for, maybe a better phrase-turner than lil Jan, but somehow I think less real.
Mass-market Monday | Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise
Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ, 1968. Ace Books (1968). Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. 157 pages.
From Joachim Boaz’s review at SF Ruminations:
Joanna Russ’ first published novel Picnic on Paradise (1968) delightfully subverts traditional SF pulp adventure tropes. Although not as finely wrought as The Female Man (1975), And Chaos Died (1970), or her masterpiece We Who Are About To… (1976), Picnic is worthwhile for all fans of feminist SF and the more radical visions of the 60s.
Unfortunately, the metafictional implications/literary possibilities of the Alyx sequence of short stories and novels—of which Picnic on Paradise is part of—are not realized until the publication of the short story “The Second Inquisition” (1970).
The Bookworm’s Rules | Reading advice from Michael Silverblatt
The great reader Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm, has passed away at 73. Silverblatt was a powerful influence on my development as an adult reader, and his approach to reading helped shape my own appreciation of fiction as I emerged from/recovered from academia. It’s been a few years since I listened to an episode; I think the last one I recall was with Robert Coover and Art Spiegelman together, maybe five or six years ago, by which point the show seemed to be initiating a slow winding down process. But for years, when blogging was still very much a real thing and social media wasn’t, Bookworm was one of the best outlets for literary discussion. Its archive remains impeccable.
Here are ten “rules” Silverblatt offered in a 1997 LA Times profile:
- Sit. If you’re lying down you’ll fall asleep.
- Read at least 100 pages in your first session with a new book. You must get well in.
- If you’re reading for pleasure, finish a book before starting a new one. Don’t keep three or four going.
- If your eyes get tired, try cotton compresses with witch hazel—they’re soothing and refreshing.
- Read a book about a country you’ve never visited.
- Ask close friends to name their favorite book, one that changed their life or one that accompanied a change in life. You will learn not just about the book, but about the person who recommended it.
- Don’t be embarrassed to keep a vocabulary list. Reading without understanding is not a virtue.
- Don’t torture yourself or read out of duty. A great book has an obligation to enrich and alter your life.
- There are certain books you’ll find you’re not ready for. Please suspend your judgment of them. It took me seven years and six tries to read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
- If you can’t discard preconceptions that come from bad classroom experiences—for example, A Tale of Two Cities and Silas Marner are not Dickens’ or Eliot’s best works—if you’ve X’d them out of your list, you’re missing something of pleasure. You’re ready now. Try them.
Blog about George Saunders’ novel Vigil, a novel I have not yet read (Book acquired 11 Feb. 2026)
I’ve been reading a lot of David Ohle lately — the Moldenke cycle, specifically. I read The Pisstown Chaos (2008) late last year, then kept going with The Old Reactor (2013), and then reread The Age of Sinatra (2004). I’m near the end of a reread of Ohle’s seminal weirdo novel Motorman (1972) right now, and I’ve got The Blast (2014) and The Death of a Character (2021) on the way.
The Moldenke books take place in an abject, stinky, ruinous post-apocalyptic landscape populated with jellyheads, neutrodynes, imps, Stinkers, and Americans. The world runs on broken logic and bureaucratic absurdity. Order is repeatedly disrupted by Chaoses and Forgettings. Bodies fail; technology fails. Ohle relates these stories in a genteel, dry tone (especially in the later books) that mocks any hint of a Hero Saving the Day. His novels, especially those published during US America’s foolish GWOT misadventures, capture the spirit of my country’s farcical post-twentieth-century trajectory.
But this blog post is ostensibly about George Saunders, or rather George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I have not yet read, having only just today received a review copy in the mail.
I do not think that a writer has a cultural duty to respond to now, or Now, or even “Now!” if you like–but I do think that Saunders has always aimed to respond to the US American zeitgeist in his fictions. And in the best of his fictions — including the stories “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — Saunders skewered US American absurdity with a tender pathos that balanced his dark humor without overpowering its core anger. But Saunders’ later fiction is perhaps over-seasoned with love, empathy, all that hippy-dippy shit. It’s not necessary to look through everyone’s eyes. Empathy has its limits. Latter-day Saunders often read to me as, in its worst moments, sanctimonious.
NYT critic Dwight Garner didn’t use the word “sanctimonious” to describe Saunders in his negative review of Vigil, but his lede comes close:
“Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. It was once difficult to imagine this dictum might apply to George Saunders.
From the start, in the mid-1990s, he’s been an American original, a briskly whiskered national asset. He’s an ineluctably strange, dark and funny writer whose work has some of Mark Twain’s subversive wit, Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic playfulness and Donald Barthelme’s laboratory blitzing of high and low culture.
It was my colleague who alerted me to this review, which I skimmed, noting the phrase “Downhill Alert!”, before dispensing with it. (My colleague wants me to read the book in some kind of, uh, I don’t know, tandem?, with him.)
This colleague loved Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not love Lincoln in the Bardo. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it maudlin, trite. It was like watching your dad try and impress your boss (I don’t know what that means). I wrote that year, 2017, that—
Lincoln in the Bardo might be a really good novel and I just can’t see it or hear it or feel it. I see postmodernism-as-genre, as form; I read bloodless overcooked posturing; I feel schmaltz. I failed the novel, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure it’s good, right? The problem is me, as usual.
By 2018 I had changed my mind on that last sentence. I read Saunders’ New Yorker published short story “Little St. Don” and thought it was a massive, massive failure to respond to the incipient fascist encroachment of the first Trump administration. I concluded that,
Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.
I thought Saunders’ next two New Yorker stories were a smidge stronger, calling “Elliott Spencer,” “a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters.” Of “Love Letter,” I suggested that the exercise “reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. But is that enough?”
Vigil is about a dying oil tycoon visited by a comforting angel, or series of angels, or something like that. It is, if I understand correctly, Saunders’ take on “climate fiction,” which I imagine will not really dwell in the nasty gross irreal reality of the fall we are falling into right now. But I could be wrong. I can’t help but notice that Vigil seems to be organized, like Lincoln in the Bardo, around a “Great Man” in USAian history — a mover and shaker, a powerbroker, a markmaker, etc. I’ll try to read it with an open mind, but I have to admit that even the prospect pales against my recent dip into Ohle’s sour, funky flavors. But we shall see.
Biblioklept 