Category: Reviews

Between Parentheses — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner9 Comments

Between Parentheses (new from New Directions and deftly translated by Natasha Wimmer) collects over 400 pages of Roberto Bolaño’s essays, speeches, introductions, and newspaper columns, composed between 1998 and 2003, the year Bolaño died. The bulk of the book, as well as its title, comes from a column that Bolaño wrote for the Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias. As one would expect, these pieces are relatively short, sometimes under 500 words, punctuated with a depth that belies their brevity. Bolaño writes about everything (or, everything worth writing about, I suppose), but, as those familiar will guess, literature is his main subject, whether he’s reviewing a Spanish-language translation of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, comparing Kafka and Philip K. Dick, explaining his affection for William Burroughs, or discussing the merits of translating literature. If these samples tantalize you, let me go further: Bolaño writes about detective novels, Walter Mosley, Jonathan Swift, Jorge Luis Borges, magic, devils, memoirs, Gunter Grass, murder, troubadours, the Hell’s Angels, poetry, and more, more, more.

Despite its discursive topics, a unified tone inheres throughout Between Parentheses, a distinctly Bolañonian tone, at once grand and romantic (and Romantic) and profound and cynical and biting and flippant. In her blurb on the back of the book, Marcela Valdes (The Nation) declares that in Between Parentheses “we hear Bolaño’s real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction.” This is perhaps a too-bold statement—I’m not sure if Bolaño can be said to have a “real voice”—instead, we find an author who’s constantly inventing and then reinventing, inflating and deflating, expanding and contracting.

And yet I think we’ll have to take Between Parentheses as Bolaño’s “real voice”—it’s perhaps the closest thing we’ll get to memoir or autobiography from the man (at least for now: his literary estate seems to be  in a constant state of excavation, so who knows). But Bolaño, ever the winking imp, is there to warn us against taking memoir at face value—

Of all books, memoirs are the most deceitful because the pretense in which they engage often goes undetected and their authors are usually only looking to justify themselves. Ostentation and memoirs tend to go together. Lies and memoirs get along swimmingly.

If Bolaño may occasionally employ invention in some of the passages here, it’s all to his credit, and all perhaps in the service of Higher Artistic Truth (whatever that means). He shares much of himself in Between Parentheses, especially in the book’s first section, “Three Insufferable Speeches,” (you may have already read “Literature and Exile”) and its second section, “Fragments of a Return to the Native Land,” detailing the writer’s return to Chile in 1998. These are indeed fragments, sketchy, pained moments where we glimpse Bolaño trying to process a difficult and emotional journey. The tone is at once comic, analytical, and depressive—familiar territory to Bolaño’s readers, I suppose. Besides its obvious appeal as a Bolaño memoir, “Fragments” is also fine travel literature, as is the later section “Scenes,” which comprises evocations of various locales, chief among them Bolaño’s adopted home Blanes. Several of the pieces in “Scenes” seem to extend into the realm of pure fiction; a few are narrated by speakers who are only partly-Bolaño (if such a construction can be said to exist). In any case, they are the book’s closest approximations of short fiction.

The book’s fifth section, “The Brave Librarian,” features one of the highlights (and longer pieces) of the volume, a preface for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn called “Our Guide to the Abyss,” where Bolaño parses Twain and Melville, delving into American literature. I’m sure that for many this piece alone will be worth the price of admission. If you still need convincing, the book’s final section offers a treatise on book theft, advice on the art of writing short stories, a transcript of Bolaño’s last interview before his death, and more, more, more. “More, more, more” might be a simple way to summarize this book.

Between the Parentheses does little, ultimately, to explicate Roberto Bolaño. If anything, it helps to further confound those of us who’ve been puzzling out his fiction for the past few years. And thank God for that. I’ve written before about “the Bolañoverse,” about Bolaño’s labyrinthine genre-crossing intertextuality. Between Parentheses, despite its claims to reality or truth, is nevertheless a part of Bolaño’s maze, a maze by turns dark or illuminating, tragic or comic, and stark and enriching. Most of all, this maze is a strange joy to get lost in. Highly recommended.

Wilson — Daniel Clowes

Edwin Turner2 Comments

In the first line of the first panel of the first strip in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Wilson, the eponymous character, looking directly at the reader, claims, “I love people!” The statement is both ironic and strangely true. Our hero Wilson loves the idea of loving people, and goes about his daily business (walking his dog, drinking coffee, mailing boxes of shit to his former in-laws) in a way that maximizes human contact. With no real family of his own, Wilson reaches out to every person he passes by, addressing them as “brother” or “sister” in an embracing, Emersonian spirit. The problem is that, as much as he loves the idea of loving humanity, Wilson pretty much hates every person he meets. Here’s the opening episode—

Wilson comprises about 70 one-page episodes, each with six or seven panels, each essentially self-contained yet part of a loose plot. The episode above is indicative of the structure of each chapter: a build-up, a monologue, often delivered to disinterested stranger, and then an anti-punchline in which Wilson reveals the ironic cognitive dissonance at the core of his being. The effect can be hard to process, and Clowes’s acerbic humor is clearly not for everyone. Although Clowes uses a traditional Sunday comic page structure, his technique is unsettling: the humor is drawn not so much from the deflationary punchlines that end each chapter, but the overall disconnect between perception, desire, and reality that those punchlines reveal.

Clowes uses this method consistently throughout Wilson, but alternates styles and color palettes, moving from a classic-Clowes style familiar to anyone who’s read Eightball or Ghost World, to a bouncy, cartoony style (see: “Marriage”). The choice to change up the styles calls back, again, to the Sunday comic pages of yore; it also underscores Wilson’s unstable identity, as the narrative slips through gradations of more realistic to more cartoony representations. It is a consistent inconsistency.

Surprisingly, Wilson has a cohesive plot. After the death of his father, Wilson seeks to reunite with his ex-wife, whom he believes to be a drug-addicted hooker. He also hopes to meet the child she was pregnant with when she left him—

Wilson does find his wife. And then he finds his teenage daughter. And then he kinda sorta kidnaps her, or at least doesn’t bother to return her to her adoptive parents. And then he goes to prison. But maybe I’m spoiling the plot now. In any case, Wilson’s adventures are hardly zany. They are poignant and sad and pathetic and cringe-worthy. Clowes is willing to punish his already-tortured protagonist, and yet there’s a payoff for pour Wilson. Throughout the graphic novel, Wilson yearns for human connection, yet is always disappointed by the humans around him who can never measure up to his ideals. Like any sociopath, Wilson lacks a meaningful emotional core; throughout the narrative he longs to experience an epiphany, staring at the ocean, for example, in the hopes illumination. He finally earns this epiphany near the close of his life. The moment is unexpectedly touching, and provides the kind of balance that proves Wilson a work of art and not merely a collection of funny strips. Recommended.

Wilson is available now from Drawn & Quarterly.

Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones Is Lurid Abject Art

Edwin Turner7 Comments

Yesterday, I finished listening to the unabridged audiobook version of Jonathan Littell’s 900+ page novel The Kindly Ones, the plot of which is too long and complex and detailed (and frankly, often boring) to unpack here. To make a very long story short (after which I’ll talk about the book’s scandalous and (deservedly) tawdry reputation), Maximilien Aue is an SS officer of mixed Franco-Germanic parentage, who, amazingly, seems to be present at an unlikely number of key events during WWII. These events include time at the eastern front, orchestrating mass killings in Ukraine and holing up during the battle of Stalingrad, where he gets shot through the head yet miraculously survives. After this, Aue convalesces in Berlin, and later visits his mother and stepfather in Antibes. He soon takes up the project of improving conditions for concentration camp prisoners, visiting camps like Auschwitz, all the while meeting and working with Nazi bigwigs like Albert Speer, Adolf Eichmann, and Heinrich Himmler. After an intense illness (the book is full of illness–more on that in a moment), Aue seeks his twin sister (uh, yeah, more on her shortly) at her husband’s house in Pomerania, where, finding her absent, he indulges in a psychotic wine-fueled masturbation binge (yes, more presently). The end of the novel ups the psycho-ante, detailing the last days of the Third Reich in Berlin, a period Littell depicts as dripping in decadent nastiness. Aue survives via murder murder murder.

This is a very brief outline of a very long book, the kind of book that dares to be important, and Littell surely knows his history. In fact, the book is often incredibly dry, dusty even, constipated by historical facts that Aue and other characters frequently reveal in long, clunky passages of exposition. Indeed, one of the great weaknesses of The Kindly Ones is Littell’s tendency to use his characters as mouthpieces, little pawns who will discourse on politics or linguistics or music or whatever for a few pages. At the same time, it’s clear that Littell wants certain passages to bore the reader. A lengthy episode in the Ukraine concerns the fate of a group of Caucus mountain people of whom the SS wish to determine a “racial origin.” Littell presents the process of deciding whether or not these people should be exterminated or not in excruciatingly bureaucratic (bureaucratically excruciating?) detail. One of the novel’s core points is an observation of the Nazi Reich as a lurching machine, a sick machine whose various limbs were often at bureaucratic war with each other.

If The Kindly Ones is often dry, its wetness is all the more foul. This is a novel that might as well take place in the asshole, or at least the colon. Our hero (?!) Aue spends much of his time describing his alternate diarrhea and vomiting; indeed, emetic purging seems to be his only form of absolution from the constant sin he’s wallowing in. It’s as if the entire Nazi project—its racial purging, its mass murder, its bureaucratic domination, its lies that were obvious to any person with eyes—is a constant stream of shit and vomit that Aue is forced to (yet unable to) process. The Nazis worked to elevate their unnatural sins to a kind of weltanschauung, yet Aue is unable to reconcile this world view with the visceral reality of the organized mass murder he daily helps orchestrate. This hardly absolves him; indeed, Aue seems to engage in every perversion and sin imaginable as a means to release the metaphysical pressure valve that’s pushing down on him all the time.

And this is the core of The Kindly Ones, and certainly why the novel is so infamous. The Nazis were an abject regime, a force that sought to “cleanse” Europe and the world of a perceived filth, and set about doing so in the most paradoxical way imaginable—by engaging in genocide, the worst kind of moral filth. Littell’s novel explores the bureaucratic nature of these abject sins in detail, but Aue is the very (tortured) soul of abjection. He is a paradoxical figure, a “true” SS party member who nevertheless idealizes Greek culture—an ironic twist, given the book’s title, a not-so-subtle nod to Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Quick warning: spoilers ahead—although, given Littell’s potboileresque structure, you’d have to be a blind Oedipus to miss these twists.

Yes, young Max Aue is a thoroughly Greek figure. He’s a homosexual who longs to be a woman so he can feel the “pleasure” that only women can feel, yet he’s obsessively in love with his twin sister, whom he buggered regularly in their pre-teen days (and perhaps a few times afterwards). He fights Nazi bureaucracy to improve the living conditions of doomed concentration camp victims, yet he periodically murders the people around him, for no discernible reason. He delights in his own illnesses, his own filth and shit. He facilitates child murder. He fantasizes about coprophagiac feasts, sticks bottles up his ass while wet-daydreaming about Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, and pays starving boys a few marks for a dirty fuck. And, like Orestes, pursued by the Furies, he kills his mother and step-father. The novel’s greatest concession to Greekness is its reveling in horror, horror, horror.

The Kindly Ones is a bizarre book, one that asks its readers to sympathize with the lowest of low-lifes, and yet somehow nevertheless succeeds, at least in a marginal sense. Littell requires tremendous patience from his readers—and strong stomachs as well, perhaps. In short, I don’t know who The Kindly Ones is for. It’s a bit of a potboiler, yet hardly a genre novel, and certainly not the kind of thing most people would want to read on the beach. I’m not sure if most folks who read historical WWII fiction want theirs served up with so much psycho sickness. To call The Kindly Ones an oddity is an understatement. There are stunning (and I don’t use that word loosely here) passages in the book, moments of overwhelming psychosis, dream sequences that might match the verity of war, including its utter spiritual despair. There’s also a fine tawdriness to The Kindly Ones, an overwhelming sense of the lurid and grotesque, overcompensated, as I mentioned earlier, with the dry crust of historical detail. The result is messy and brutal and uneven, but nonetheless compelling, like a foul, open wound that attracts even as it repels.

The Third Reich: Part I — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner5 Comments

Two years ago, a typed manuscript for Roberto Bolaño’s unpublished novel The Third Reich The Third Reich was discovered. The Paris Review is serializing the novel, publishing it in full over four issues in a translation by Natasha Wimmer. I finished the first part of The Third Reich last night, reading the 63 pages in one engrossing session.

Udo Berger, a German from Stuttgart with a passion for war games, narrates the story in the form of a journal he keeps, detailing the daily events of a vacation he is taking in a Spanish resort town with his girlfriend Ingeborg. The couple checks in to the Del Mar, a seaside hotel where Udo spent a few teenage summers with his family. He seems driven to return to this particular hotel, at least in part, by memories of the enigmatic Frau Else, an alluring German woman who married the hotel’s Spanish owner. Frau Else barely remembers Udo, a fact that disappoints him, yet he nevertheless pursues strange awkward conversations with her; it’s unclear to both Udo and the reader what, exactly, he hopes to gain from talking to her.

Indeed, Udo’s intentions and motivations are strange and murky in general. He’s the classic unreliable narrator. In particular, Udo’s perceptions (and descriptions of those perceptions) seem to be clouded by a radical fear of otherness, and an underlying contempt for almost everyone. He’s also a little paranoid, perhaps, in part anyway, because we get the sense that Ingeborg might be just a bit out of his league. Consider the following scene—

Ingeborg was at her most radiant, and when we walked into the club we were greeted with covert admiring glances. Admiring of Ingeborg and envious of me. Envy is something I always pick up on right away. Anyways, we didn’t plan to spend much time there. And yet as fate would have it, before long a German couple sat down at our table.

That German couple is Hanna and Charly, and Udo quickly comes to detest them, although he repeatedly points out that he covers his disgust at all times (and, by the end of Part I, it’s clear that he has an unvoiced sexual attraction to Hanna). Charly is boorish, foolhardy, and quick to make friends with the locals. Through him, the Germans become acquainted with two locals Udo dubs the Wolf and the Lamb. The Wolf and the Lamb take the four tourists to the kind of working class haunts that only locals go to; Charly and the girls find adventure in this, but Udo is contemptuous and disgusted of these clubs, bars, and restaurants. His depictions of the local spots veer into classic Bolaño territory, that mix of unnerving dread and surreal energy, a kind of Lynchian anxiety that suggests abyssal darkness looms under the veneer of every “normal” surface.

Udo would rather stay in the hotel and work on his war game; he’s devoted the summer to playing out a new strategy and writing an essay about it for one of the various magazines devoted to the hobby. Ingeborg is embarrassed and ashamed of Udo’s passion for games, and when Hanna shows interest in the large hexagonal board set up in their room, Ingeborg quickly rushes her out to the beach. Udo, for the first time realizes this division in his relationship with Ingeborg, who spends her time on various daytrips (perhaps, although Udo doesn’t seem to recognize this, with the Wolf and the Lamb)—yet he fecklessly makes amends by buying cheap gift store jewelery, and avers that losing Ingeborg would destroy him. A dark set up.

The only person apart from Frau Else who Udo takes any interest in is El Quemado (“the Burned One”), a horribly burn-scarred, well-muscled man who makes a living renting paddle boats to tourists. Udo becomes obsessed with El Quemado when he realizes that the man seems to build a shelter out of the paddle boats each night; over time, he strikes up a strange friendship, leading to the revelation that they share a trait: both consider themselves writers.

The Third Reich, composed at the beginning of Bolaño’s career as a novelist, doesn’t feature the labyrinthine syntax or heteroglossia of later works, but it does showcase the particularly Bolañonian sense of dread that seethes under so many of his works. The novel feels like a slow burn, with plenty of sinister elements in play—but there’s also the possibility that this nervous dread stems from Udo’s internal paranoia. In any case, Bolaño is beginning to play with the tropes of the detective novels and crime fiction he loved so much. As I argued in my review of Amulet last month, the more one reads Bolaño, the more difficult it is to parse his fictions from each other. Instead, they seem part of the Bolañoverse, a dark visceral inversion of our own world. Thus The Third Reich strongly recalls the title story in the collection Last Evenings on Earth, where the narrator B and his father take a bizarre, sinister vacation in Acapulco. The Third Reich also obviously recalls Nazi Literature in the Americas, which featured an entire chapter on neo-Nazi boardgames.

Of course, my observations are only drawn from the first fourth of the novel, but as a Bolaño fan I was not disappointed. I just wanted more—but I guess I’ll have to wait for the summer issue.

First Love and Other Sorrows — Harold Brodkey

Edwin Turner8 Comments

One way to measure how great a work of literature is might be to ask how true (or “True,” if one is feeling particularly romantic) the writing is. We can find facts anywhere, but details and data are not the same as art. Great literature happens in the arrangement of that data, by presenting details with the right ear and eye for truth—and also, the good sense to know what to withhold from the audience, who, after all, are a part of the equation. The stories collected in Harold Brodkey’s First Love and Other Sorrows, both inspiriting and crushing, are some of the most psychologically true pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.

First Love collects nine stories, all composed and published in the 1950s; all but one was originally published in The New Yorker. Although discrete entities, the stories function together. First Love is very much a novel-in-stories, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. Brodkey’s stories document the strange little bubble of time between WWII and the turmoil of the sixties, and his writing, a kind of late modernism, reflects this period, when the ideal of the American Dream began to be redefined in terms of new modes of class and education.

The first few stories in the collection are told from the first-person perspective of an adolescent, likely an iteration of Brodkey himself. Opener “State of Grace” serves as an overture to the collection, introducing a family that will be transposed throughout the tales. There’s the narrator, a sensitive, awkward boy, beginning to feel strains of alienation from his older sister and his mother. Dad is out of the picture, and with him, the family’s fortunes have fallen: big sis is expected to marry the right man for money—and for class.

These themes are explored in greater length in the very-long short story “First Love and Other Sorrows,” a compact little novella, really, that everyone should read at some point. The narrator, likely the same boy from the first story, describes his life at the end of his high school career in St. Louis, as he prepares to move on to college soon. Again, the major explicit conflict of the story revolves around his sister’s romances, as their mother pressures her to marry the right man. The real conflict though is the boy’s emerging realization of his own dramatic detachment from his family; or, more accurately, the young man is coming to realize the underlying instability that adults tend to hide from children. The boy observes his older sister, whom he reveres—

It occurred to me that she didn’t really know what she was doing; she was not really as sure of everything as she seemed. It was a painfully difficult thought to arrive at, and it clung to me. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Also, she sort of hated me, it seemed to me. I had never noticed that before, either. How could I have been so wrong, I wondered. Knowing how wrong I had been about this, I felt that no idea I had ever had was safe. For instance, we were not necessarily a happy family, with the most wonderful destinies for my sister and me. We might make mistakes and choose wrong. Unhappiness was real. It was even likely…

The narrator’s epiphany is articulate and crushing and wholly real: it documents the ugly realization that the fantasies of a middle class childhood — “happily ever after” — are, indeed, mere fantasies. Brodkey twins this moment in another epiphany at the end of the story that I would love to discuss but fear spoiling; suffice to say that the final line of the story, forever etched in my brain, is simply one of the finest and most fitting moments I’ve ever read.

The next story, “The Quarrel,” finds our young hero, a bit more jaded, off to Harvard, where he falls in with a bitter rich kid named Duncan; they quickly make it their business to despise everything, adopting (unearned) world-weary poses and contrarian natures. Against the advice of their families, the two take a semester off college to tour Europe, spending much of their time bicycling across France. The story documents the kind of friendships that many young people emerging from adolescence engage in: fierce, passionate, identity-defining relationships that always buckle under their own weight. Hence—

Duncan enjoyed Pernod. It made me sick. Duncan hated talking to people. I talked to everyone. My French vocabulary was better than Duncan’s. His pronunciation was better than mine. I became terribly adept at not irritating Duncan before breakfast. I couldn’t see that he appreciated any of this, or that he responded with any similar awareness. For the fiftieth time, I thought him unfair. The moment came when I could no longer stand the sound of his voice, or his ideas. After traveling with him day and night, without a break, for fifty-three days, I felt my senses suffocating in an awareness of Duncan.

“The Quarrel” perfectly captures the strange paradoxes of youthful, immature friendships that can’t survive; reading it forced me to remember myself at eighteen, and to recall a friendship similar to that between the narrator and Duncan, an intense friendship that burned out bitterly and quickly, yet nevertheless helped me to define myself.

“The Quarrel” is the last story in the collection written in first-person perspective; indeed, Brodkey’s narrative shift signals a shift in development; as his characters age (as they do through the collection), he allows himself to step outside of them a bit, as if the psychological pain he explores is almost too much to bear. “Sentimental Education” tells the story of an intense first love (the male lead seems like another iteration of the narrator from the first three stories). In a free indirect style, Brodkey glamorizes, valorizes, and satirizes the young lovers, all at once, exploring the passion and shame and confusion of early adulthood. Here, he describes what happens when the pair begin a sexual relationship—

Their first dip in sensual waters left them nonplussed. They didn’t know what to make of it. They tried to persuade themselves that something had really happened, but the minute it was over, they couldn’t believe they had ever done such a thing. They rushed into further experiences; they broke off in the middle of embraces and looked at each other, stunned and delighted. “Is this really happening?” they both asked at different times, and each time the other said, “No,” and they would laugh. They knew that nothing they did was real, was actual. They had received a blow on the head and were prey to erotic imaginings, that was all. But at the same time they half realized it was true, they were doing these things, and then the fact that they, Caroline and Elgin, shared such intimacy dazed and fascinated them; and when they were together, they tried to conceal it, but this indescribable attraction they felt for each other kept making itself known and draining all the strength from their bodies.

“Sentimental Education” retraces the fallout explored in “The Quarrel,” as the young lovers inevitably fall apart.

After this love story, Brodkey shifts his attention to a character named Laura (or, in one version, “Laurie”), who seems to be a version of the narrator’s sister from the first few stories. The five Laura stories are much shorter than the other narratives. These tightly detailed miniature portraits trace the development of Laura as she chooses the man her mother didn’t approve of; this plot is very much in the background of the stories, though, an implicit detail that nevertheless hangs over Laura’s psychological development. The Laura stories seem to trace what it means to grow old but not mature. They recall the narrator in “First Love and Other Stories” epiphany that adulthood might be a murky or unhappy place. “Laura” documents postpartum depression and “Trio for Three Gentle Voices” subtly explores the ways in which parents seek to avoid repeating their own parents’ mistakes. “Piping Down the Valley’s Wild” is a simple, elegant story about Laura’s husband’s college roommate coming over for dinner. Reading it, I experienced an uncanny transposition, as if I were observing a reinterpretation of something I experienced a few weekends ago. The story ends with another sad epiphany—

She just wanted this day to go on forever and ever, unending, with all its joys intact, and no one changing, nothing new happening, just these same things occurring over and over. Because how did you know happiness would come back? Or if it came back, that it would be as good as this? Laura sighed and wiped her eyes surreptitiously. The trouble with being happy was that it made you frightened.

This realization again encodes the paradox of adulthood, pointing toward its radical instability. To grow up, in Brodkey’s terms (terms I again point out strike me as utterly true) is to face irretrievable loss at every single moment, even as you gain new friends, new lovers, or new children. The joys of life are predicated on the necessary loss of these joys: existence costs.

First Love and Other Sorrows is a book that deserves more attention. In its spirit and art, it matches (and perhaps surpasses) other mid-century American narratives like The Catcher in the Rye or The Glass Menagerie, and in its spare, precise, minimal style, it points toward the later fiction of writers like Raymond Carver. This is a beautiful, sad book, the kind that leaves a deep impression. Very highly recommended.

In Brief: Novels from Siri Hustvedt, Katherine Shonk, and Benjamin Black

Biblioklept2 Comments

The narrator of Siri Hustvedt’s new novel The Summer Without Men is Mia Fredrickson, a sharp but wounded poet whose husband decides to put their marriage on “pause” after thirty years so he can shtup his younger assistant. Diagnosed with Brief Psychotic Disorder (“which means that you’re genuinely crazy but not for long”), Mia finds herself confined to a psychiatric hospital. The summer after her stay, she leaves Brooklyn for the “backwater town on what used to be the prairie in Minnesota” where she grew up, where she can be closer to her mom, who lives in an assisted living facility. Mia’s plan is to fill the summer with rest and poems—and ultimately restore her sanity. She spends time with her mother and her friends, becomes involved in the lives of a neighbor with two young children, and teaches a poetry workshop for pre-adolescent girls. Here, she encounters the “Gang of Four,” mean girls who spend their summer tormenting an alienated Chicago transplant with whom Mia strongly identifies. Composed in tight vivid prose, The Summer Without Men is energetic, and handles its subjects with depth and wit, painting its characters and their complex emotions in the kind of detail that rings true to life. 

Katherine Shonk’s début novel Happy Now? also features a heroine dealing with the psychic shock caused by the end of her marriage. Claire Kessler’s husband Jay commits suicide on Valentine’s Day, leaving a book-length suicide note on the coffee table that Claire cannot bring herself to read. Claire moves in with her sister, who emotionally abandons her husband during the process. Her parents try to help too, but her overprotective father ends up trailing her every move and smothering her. Claire’s adventures in psychoanalysis become a tragicomic journey, but one handled with compassion. Shonk has an ear for dialog and the good sense not to clutter her novel with too many plots or characters.

Elegy for April is the fourth novel of John Banville’s detective noir series under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. April Latimer is a doctor in conservative 1950s Dublin, whose unconventional behavior scandalizes what is essentially a big small town (her prominent Catholic family isn’t too keen that she’s dating a Nigerian man). When April disappears, her friend Phoebe Griffin enlists the help of her (sort-of) recovering alcoholic father, the brilliant pathologist Garret Quirke. Quirke’s investigation—also Phoebe’s investigation, of course—plumbs into the conservative mores of a secretive upper echelon of families, revealing hidden truths that are at times painful. Bleak, dark, and often morally ambivalent, Black’s book is best suited for those who don’t mind their mysteries delivered with ambiguity and loose ends.

The Summer Without Men, Happy Now?, and Elegy for April are all new in trade paperback this month from Picador.

Orlando — Virginia Woolf

Edwin Turner4 Comments

The plot of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando hangs on two key conceits: the title character transforms from male to female; the title character is immortal. Orlando has been a staple of gender studies courses since before such courses existed, and is in many ways the pioneer text (or one of the pioneer texts) of an entire genre. And that’s great and all—there are plenty of stunning passages where Woolf has her character explore what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and how power and identity and all that good stuff fits in—but what I enjoyed most about Orlando was its rambling, satirical structure.

Orlando functions like an inverted picaresque, detailing the adventures of an aristocrat who finds him- (and then her-) self flung into every sort of damn predicament: Elizabethan intrigues; ice-skating during the Great Frost; a dalliance with a Russian princess; an attempt at artistic patronage; an attempt at art; an ambassadorship in Constantinople; an encounter with the Fates (I suspect); time with a band of gypsies; time with Alexander Pope; a marriage to the great sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine; and, finally (if that adverb might apply to an apparent immortal), the publication of her great small work The Oak Tree. Sorry to laundry-list plot points, but, gosh, don’t you want to read this now—or at least listen to the audiobook, like I did?

Woolf seems to be channeling Voltaire’s Candide at all times, subtly ridiculing era after era, until Orlando finally emerges into Woolf’s (Modernist) present—it’s the fuzziest moment of the novel for our protagonist, as if she, or the author operating behind her, cannot parse out the post-industrial landscape. It’s also the moment at which Woolf’s prose becomes its most fluid and free—its most Woolfian, I suppose.

I thoroughly enjoyed Clare Higgins’s smart, confident reading of this unabridged production (BBC/Chivers). At not quite nine hours long, it’s a great way to spend a few afternoons of chores or gardening, or perhaps a week’s commute. It made me fish out Mrs. Dalloway, which I haven’t read since my undergrad days, and shove it into a “to read” stack. It also prompted me to revisit Sally Potter’s admirable 1992 film adaptation starring Tilda Swinton, whose very being seems like call and cause enough for an Orlando movie. I recommend both the audiobook and the film. Great stuff.

Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories — Sandra McDonald

Edwin Turner6 Comments

Fantasy gets a bad rap. While science-fiction has enjoyed something of a restoration of sanctified hipness in recent years, thanks in part to the genre-bending efforts of authors like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem, as well as a reappraisal of the works of authors like Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood, novels that find themselves classified in the fantasy genre can often be outright dismissed as having no artistic or literary merit. Amazingly, even the work of king daddy J.R.R. Tolkien still finds itself in need of critical defense from time to time. And while fantasy certainly has more than its fair share of rote genre exercises, including countless copycat cash-ins, it’s also an imaginative space buzzing with invention and the capacity for social commentary. Sandra McDonald’s Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories exemplifies the best kind of invention and social commentary that we might expect from post-modern fantasy.

Diana Comet collects fifteen stories connected via shared motifs, characters, and settings. McDonald crafts a world that inverts or displaces our own. This world, with its lands like New Dalli and Massasoit, is slightly decentered from our own: we find familiar iterations of our history here—there’s war and imperialism, colonialism and poverty, homophobia and racism—but the idioms are all slightly off, displaced enough be paradoxically familiar and alienating at the same time. “Diana Comet and the Lovesick Cowboy,” for instance, seems set in a 19th-century American milieu amidst a civil war (there’s even a poet named Whit Waltman), yet the transposition, articulate as it is, is also nebulous, disturbing even. McDonald’s spare distortion forces the reader to reconsider his own notions of cultural history, and she does this to great effect, whether taking on gender ideologies (“Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover”), homophobia (“The Fireman’s Fairy”), or racism (“Fay and the Goddesses”). None of these issues are presented glibly, didactically, or clumsily; indeed, it’s through the slightest distortions of fantastic imagination that the reader must re-examine his own society through McDonald’s reflective lens. Most of the stories end with enumerated discussion questions, often silly or whimsical, that serve to puncture the seriousness of the tales; they sometimes force details from our “real” world into the texts of Diana Comet in a way that’s doubly disconcerting. It’s a meta-textual gambit that pays off, however, both in belying any self-seriousness to the narrative proper as well as establishing a thin membrane between fantasy and reality—a membrane of questions that allows the reader to “play,” to disrupt that boundary through his or her own imagination.

McDonald’s world-building in Diana Comet never comes at the expense of good storytelling. With a few exceptions, most of the stories here piece together the frame of a world, leaving the reader’s imagination to fill in most of the gaps. Most of the stories seem to take place in an iteration of the nineteenth century, but some to be set earlier, later, and even in a displaced future, like “Kingdom Coming,” a playful apocalypse tale. McDonald’s expositive restraint does wonders; too many writers of inventive fiction feel the need to tell the reader every single detail and nuance of their worlds. I think here of Ursula K. LeGuin’s marvelous novel The Left Hand of Darkness, a book toward which I believe Diana Comet bears considerable comparison, particularly with respect to the exploration of how gender and sexuality functions in a society. While LeGuin’s book is terrific and fully-realized, she spends a bit too much narrative energy transmitting every detail of that realization to her audience. Diana Comet is rewarding in its gaps and mysteries, as well as its ability to evoke a sense of the uncanny in its reader. Oh, I should probably add that McDonald can write; her prose is elegant, lively, wry, and spare.

Diana Comet is a smart, thoughtful post-modern fantasy that may appeal to the kids out there who have outgrown the narrative simplicity of Harry Potter and are looking for a challenge; it will undoubtedly appeal to fans of writers like LeGuin and Atwood, writers who know how to channel narrative traditional tropes of imaginative fiction through distortion and ambiguity and force their readers to think, even as they entertain. Recommended.

Amulet — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner3 Comments

When one takes on the project of reading the novels of Roberto Bolaño — and 2666 is the sort of beast that is likely to hook a reader into such an endeavor — it becomes increasingly impossible to separate and compartmentalize his fictions. Instead, the reader becomes ever more entangled in a labyrinthine Bolañoverse, a chilling, dreadful mirror-maze world that discharges its echoes across continents and epochs. In a fascinating essay at The Quarterly Conversation, Javier Moreno attempts to map out this world. I’d read the essay (and commented on it) a few years ago, but I revisited it after finishing Amulet, mostly because I was pretty sure Moreno had already succinctly stated a key idea that I wanted to bring up in my review. He writes—

Amuleto, which tells the story of an Uruguayan poet that claims herself to be the mother of all Mexican writers, may be seen both as an extra chapter to Los Detectives or as a short introduction to 2666—or both at the same time.

Readers of 2666 and The Savage Detectives will find in Amulet a channel between Bolaño’s “big books,” just as Nazi Literature in the Americas serves as a strange, ironic connective tissue for the violence and chaos of the rest of Bolañoverse. Amulet is narrated by Auxilio Lacouture, and her story appears in a much shorter form in The Savage Detectives. I’ll let her summarize Amulet’s plot (such that it is)—

I am the mother of Mexico’s poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in. I stayed there on my own in the Faculty, shut up in the a bathroom, with no food, for more than ten days, for more than fifteen days, from the eighteenth to the thirtieth of September, I think, I’m not sure anymore.

I stayed there with a book by Pedro Garfias and my satchel, wearing a little white blouse and a pleated sky-blue skirt, and I had more than enough times to think things over. But couldn’t think about Arturo Belano , because I hadn’t met him yet.

In these two short paragraphs, late in the book, we get so many of the motifs that populate Bolaño’s world: the self-naming poet, the influence of violence in Latin America, the horrors inherent in resisting this violence, exile, hints of madness. We even get Bolaño’s elusive alter-ego, Arturo Belano, who floats through Amulet and the rest of the Bolañoverse like an unknowable specter.

The fact that Auxilio couldn’t think about Belano when she was stuck in the bathroom in 1968 does not actually stop her from doing so. She is, to borrow a phrase from Vonnegut, a woman unstuck in time. It is as if the entire novel, that is to say her narrative, her telling of her story, is tenuously anchored in the those traumatic days of September, 1968. She tells us, echoing Stephen Dedalus perhaps, that “History is a horror story”; unlike Dedalus, she can’t awake from the nightmare. Here’s a relatively early passage that describes what Auxilio can never really explain—

I don’t know why I remember that afternoon. That afternoon of 1971 or 1972. And the strangest thing is that I remember it prospectively, from 1968. From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are.

The life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are, will be somewhat familiar to anyone who’s read some of Bolaño’s other novels: plenty of dread, lots of sinister shadows, and many, many drunk poets. The anecdotes and small set pieces that fill Amulet seem culled from Bolaño’s own life (real or imagined), and can be alternately thrilling, dull, or even maddening. For my taste, the novel works itself into its finest moments when Auxilio’s grip on reality — both temporal and spacial — is at its weakest. At one point she tells us—

I don’t know if I’m in 1968 or 1974 or 1980, gliding, finally, like the shadow of a sunken ship, toward the blessed year 2000, which I shall not live to see.

Auxilio’s sanity both unravels and compresses, and Bolaño codes these movements in images of descent and ascension. Auxilio moves through fever dreams and nightmares, memories and prognostications, alternate realities and astral projections. Near the end of the novel, still in the bathroom, starving, probably in shock, she experiences her ordeal as a difficult climb up a frozen mountain. Along the way, she begins casting bizarre literary prophecies. A quick taste—

Virginia Woolf shall be reincarnated as an Argentinian fiction writer in the year 2076. Louis-Ferdinand Celine shall enter Purgatory in the year 2094. Paul Eluard shall appeal to the masses in the year 2101.

These pronouncements continue for a few pages. Underneath the madness, one can sense Bolaño’s goofy joy, but there’s more here than just list-making: Auxilio is pointing toward metempsychosis, suggesting her own soul’s migration, perhaps—here we find a way in which literature might transcend the violence and horror of history. And yet there’s also a sense of doom, of repeated violence and exile. Late in the novel Auxilio finds herself cast in the role of Erigone, daughter Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, forced from home by her half-brother, Orestes. There’s a sense that tragedy capitulates throughout time; that even if Auxilio can survive the army’s occupation, it will nevertheless scar her forever. Cycles of violence are bound to recur indefinitely.

This recurrence evinces in what might be the book’s most famous passage. Auxilio is walking home with some friends—

Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

The passage names Bolaño’s opus: there is no mention of “2666” in 2666. The reference rests outside the book; or, perhaps Bolaño demands that we read his books intertextually. In any case, 2666 has its graveyards and its corpses, its own demanding geometry of memory. One gets the sense that this oblique reference to “2666” is really part of Bolaño crafting his own canon, an internal canon of the Bolañoverse, almost as if he were J.R.R. Tolkien or even Philip K. Dick. I think again of Auxilio’s prophecies, of her list of writers who will be reborn or forgotten, where we find Bolaño securing a historical place for the writers he loves and values.

Looking over this review, I realize that it might not be helpful for readers new to Bolaño: mea culpa. Amulet is a very fine novel, but not the right starting point. That would be 2666 or, if that prospect is too daunting, Last Evenings on Earth. To me, Amulet reads like the “Mexico” chapter in a trilogy about violence and exile in Latin America; the other two parts would be Distant Star (which I enjoyed more) and By Night in Chile. But perhaps I’m simply reaching for evidence to support this idea that Bolaño’s books are best read together. I’m sure that one can enjoy them on their own—only, at this point, I’m not sure how to do that.

Amulet, translated by Chris Andrews, is available now from New Directions.

In Brief — New Books from Gabrielle Hamilton, Meg Howrey, and Frances Stonor Saunders

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The memoir-in-food is something of a cliché at this point, but Gabrielle Hamilton’s new book Blood, Bones & Butter came with enough accolades (including a glowing blurb from Anthony Bourdain) and positive early reviews (like Kakutani’s at The NYT) for me to spend a few hours thumbing through it. Much has been made of Hamilton’s writing bona fides (an MFA in fiction writing from University of Michigan), and while she can put a sentence together without relying on the stock phrases and tropes that lard most memoirs these days, that skill wouldn’t really matter if she didn’t have a tale to tell. Blood, Bones & Butter follows a strange culinary career (it’s subtitled The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef), complete with drug abuse, theft, and, of course cooking. Only I wish there was more cooking, more time in the kitchen, the butcher’s, the market. Instead, Hamilton seems to channel her (often mean-spirited) energy on her family; her parents’ divorce hangs over the narrative like a Greek tragedy, and her own attitude toward her husband is bizarre, to say the least. The results are mixed, but fans of food-writing à la Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential will likely enjoy Blood, Bones & Butter. New in hardback from Random House.

Meg Howrey’s new novel Blind Sight tells the story of Luke Prescott, a bright, introspective seventeen year old obsessed with brain biology. Raised by a hippie mother and two half-sisters, Luke gets the opportunity to the summer before college with his estranged father, a famous television star. In Los Angeles, Luke gets to know his father better, sorting out the difference between public persona and private truth; this process in turn leads Luke to re-evaluate his own sense of identity. There’s also some pot-smoking and sex. Howrey moves the narrative between Luke’s first-person voice (in the past tense) to a third person present tense narrator. At times this disjunction seems like a lazy shorthand to allow the reader to see something Luke can’t see (or doesn’t want the reader to see), but it works nicely on the whole, underlining the gaps between truth and belief that the novel seeks to explore. Blind Sight is new in hardback from Pantheon.

In The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, Frances Stonor Saunders plays historical detective, reconstructing the story of Violet Gibson, who fired on Mussolini in April of 1926 (she grazed his nose). Gibson, the daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was 50 when she shot Mussolini, and perhaps more than a little crazy. She was almost lynched after shooting Il Duce, but the not-so-benevolent dictator pardoned her, and she was quickly returned to England, where she spent the rest of her life in an insane asylum. Saunders’s book explores whether Gibson’s attack was the motivation of an insane woman or part of a bigger conspiracy theory, illustrating her mystery with poignant black and white photos. And although Saunders focuses on the little-known Gibson, she works to draw parallels between the would-be assassin and Mussolini. Saunders’s exploration of an otherwise unremarked upon episode balances historical scholarship with the pacing and rhythm of an historical thriller. New in trade paperback edition from Picador.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying — Simon Critchley

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Simon Critchley’s latest book How to Stop Living and Start Worrying picks up where his last work, The Book of Dead Philosophers, left off. Both works explore what Critchley contends to be the signal problem of all philosophy; namely, how one might live a meaningful life against the backdrop of inevitable death. In Dead Philosophers, Critchley plumbed this question by surveying the deaths of dozens of famous philosophers, ultimately affirming a positive reality in death (both our own deaths and the deaths of others), and arguing that philosophies (and religions) that advocate the idea of a spiritual afterlife ultimately negatively disrupt human existence and lead to inauthentic lives. How to Stop Living reiterates these themes in a new form, essentially arguing that in asking “how to live,” we must also ask “how to die” — and also how to love and how to laugh. How to Stop Living takes form as a series of conversations between Critchley and Carl Cederström, an Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Research at Lund University in Sweden. There’s a warm rapport between the pair, and although Critchley does most of the talking, there’s a genuine dialog in play, not merely a flat interview. The book unfolds over six chapters. The first, “Life,” is a discussion of, well, Critchley’s life, both personal and academic. I originally thought I’d be doing a lot of skimming here, but it’s actually kind of fascinating; more importantly, though, it establishes Critchley’s contention that a philosopher’s work cannot be divorced from his biography. To philosophize is to live. This idea is reiterated succinctly at the beginning of the second chapter, “Philosophy,” when Critchley states—

The first thing to say is that philosophy is not a solely professional or academic activity for me. Philosophy is not a thing, it’s not an entity; it’s an activity. To put it tautologically: philosophy is the activity of philosophizing, an activity which is conducted by finite, thinking creatures like us. Now, my general view of philosophy is that this activity must for part of the life of a culture. Philosophy is the living activity of critical reflection in a specific context; it always has a radically local character.

What follows in “Philosophy” is a somewhat discursive overview of the philosophers who will pop up again and again in the book: Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Nietzsche, and, of course, Derrida. While I’m laundry listing, I might as well add Freud, Lacan, Beckett, and Hegel as key figures in How to Stop Living. In the third chapter, “Death,” Critchley discusses how many of these philosophers frame a subject’s individual relationship to his or her personal death. In a particularly enlightening passage, Critchley explains Heidegger’s “possibility of impossibility,” the idea that to be authentic, to lead an authentic life, one must internalize and master the finitude of a personal death. The chapter continues, working through other conceptions of death, including those of Freud, Beckett, and Derrida. Perhaps because of its dialogic structure, How to Stop Living often feels like a rap session, a big brainstorm, a work in process, and nowhere is this more evident in a chapter called “Love,” where Critchley moves from Hannah Arendt to The Song of Solomon to Lacan and Freud to a story about his marriage proposal. It’s all a bit messy, a bit watery, a bit undefined, and therefore difficult to summarize, so I’ll let Critchley dish on love in his own words—

Love is the attempt to break the logic of masochism that defines the subject, and to behave in a different way. That’s something that has to be wound up everyday . . . and it’s something with no end; and it requires a constant experience of faith. That’s the only sense I can make of love.

The next section, “Humour,” is better defined—and one of the highlights of the book. Critchley discusses jokes against a backdrop of psychoanalysis and anthropology, ultimately arguing that humor has the power to disrupt an individual’s relation to time or place, and thus reconstitute that relation in some meaningful way. Critchley’s book itself is indeed a meta-joke, a play against the sophistry of New Age self-help books. Indeed, the very name of the book is an inversion of Dale Carnegie’s 1948 “classic” of the genre, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. If you find the cover of Critchley’s book as off-putting and cheesy as I do, just remind yourself that it’s a parody of Carnegie’s cover. And yet Critchley’s sense of humor is not ultimately black irony, but rather a humor of affirmation of — and confrontation of — the absurdity of contemporary life. It’s not irony but authenticity he wants. “Authenticity” is thus the final chapter of this relatively short book, and here Critchley invites his friend (and partner in the International Necronautical Society) novelist Tom McCarthy to participate in the conversation. The chapter is lively, almost frenetic, and frankly all over the place, as Critchley and McCarthy rocket from subject to subject — Finnegans Wake, the Challenger explosion, Terrence Malick, J.G. Ballard, Levinas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, McCarthy’s first novel Remainder — each reference seems to slip into the next, reined in occasionally by Cederström, who steers the conversation back to its center (leave it to deconstructionists to get off center). Good stuff.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, despite its tongue in cheek title and cover, and its discursive flow, is serious (if playful) about philosophy. Those interested in the thinkers and topics I’ve mentioned in this review may be interested, but it’s not necessary for one to have a working knowledge of Continental philosophy to enjoy Critchley’s latest. Recommended.

How to Stop Living and Start Worrying is available now from Polity Books.

The Subject Steve — Sam Lipsyte

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A few years ago, I wrote about cult novels, and, in trying to define them, I suggested that “a cult book is not (necessarily) a book about cults.”  Sam Lipsyte’s first novel The Subject Steve is a cult novel about a cult, or at least heavily features a cult. Like many cult novels, there’s an apocalyptic scope to Steve, one in this particular case (or subject, if you will), that extends from the personal to the universal.

I’ll let Lipsyte’s compressed acerbic prose spell out the book’s central conflict—

The bad news was bad. I was dying of something nobody had ever died of before. I was dying of something nobody had ever died of before. I was dying of something absolutely, fantastically new. Strangely enough, I was in fine fettle. My heart was strong and my lungs were clean. My vitals were vital. Nothing was enveloping me or eating away at me or brandishing itself towards some violence in my brain. There weren’t any blocks or clots or seeps or leaks. My levels were good. My counts were good. All my numbers said my number wasn’t up.

The problem of death, or the problem of how to live a meaningful life against the specter of death, is of course an ancient conceit, and Lipsyte makes it the core of his book, upon which he hangs an often shaggy picaresque plot. The Subject Steve is post-modernist caustic satire in the good old vein of Candide; put another way, it’s just one damn thing happening after the next.

So, what are some of those things that happen? Steve (not his real name) is condemned to die of a disease with no name; he tries to make contact with his estranged wife and not-quite-a-genius daughter; he blows his life savings on hookers and blow; he heads upstate to a cult’s compound in the hopes of finding a cure to his unnamed (unnameable) disease; he suffers the cult’s sadistic practices; he escapes the cult’s sadistic practices; he reunites with his wife and daughter; he abandons his wife and daughter; he reunites with a new version of the cult somewhere in the Nevada desert; he becomes enslaved by the cult in the Nevada desert; he escapes the cult; &c. And he reflects on his life (and his death) repeatedly. I’ll let Steve reflect on his life at length, if for no other reason than to share more of Lipsyte’s marvelous prose—

And I was still dying, wasn’t I? Who would note? What had I ever noted? I’d taken my pleasures, of course, I’d eaten the foods of the world, drunk my wine, put this or that forbidden particulate in my nose until the room lit up like a festival town and all my friends, but just my friends, were seers. I’d seen the great cities, the great lakes, the oceans and the so-called seas, slept in soft beds and awakened to fresh juice and fluffy towels and terrific water pressure. I’d fucked in moonlight, sped through desolate interstate kingdoms of high broken beauty, met wise men, wise women, even a wise movie star. I’d lain on lawns that, cut, bore the scent of rare spice. I’d ridden dune buggies, foreign rails. I’d tasted forty-five kinds of coffee, not counting decaf.

I love this passage. In almost any other book I can think of, the final detail about coffee would puncture the passage’s inflation, serve as a comic anti-climax. In Lipsyte’s phrasing it’s both tragic and triumphant.

I don’t mean to gloss over the plot of The Subject Steve, but the book’s narrative, its sense of time, is so radically compressed (again, I think of the compression of Candide) that reading it is more like experiencing a rapid series of scenarios. I’m particularly fond of books like this, that seem to ramble and erupt in strange and unexpected moments. I think of Ellison’s Invisible Man or Woolf’s Orlando, but there’s also something of Aldous Huxley in Steve, that apocalyptic-comic axis, the satire of despair. The book is one of those pre-9/11 novels (forgive the phrase) that seems utterly prescient. Take the following observation for example—

Someday sectors of this city would make the most astonishing ruins. No pyramid or sacrificial ziggurat would compare to these insurance towers, convention domes. Unnerved, of course, or stoned enough, you always could see it, tomorrow’s ruins today, carcasses of steel teetered in a halt of death, half globes of granite buried like worlds under shards of street. Sometimes I pictured myself a futuristic sifter, some odd being bred for sexlessness, helmed in pulsing Lucite, stooping to examine an elevator panel, a perfectly preserved boutonniere.

The language here anticipates the Dead America that Lipsyte explores in his latest novel, The Ask, and reinforces a general argument I’d like to make, which is that Lipsyte is at heart a writer of dystopian fictions, fictions so contemporary that their dystopian nature becomes effaced.

These dystopian tropes coalesce in the frantic, hyperbolic ending of Steve, where our subject becomes the object of a bizarre cult’s ritual sadistic practices, all available via the panopticon of the internet. Lipsyte’s vision is of a post-human existence, a radical otherness of degradation through technological alienation. At this late moment in the book, the satire is so black that even Lipsyte’s tightest, pithiest sentences fail to elicit a laugh or a smile — indeed, I am almost certain that they are not intended to do so. Instead we are immersed in the apocalyptic horror of dehumanization (the book here reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing, of all things, both in its desert location and in its gradual movement from sardonic humor to vivid terror).

Like any cult novel, or destined cult novel, The Subject Steve is Not For Everyone. Those looking for plot development and tidy endings will not find them here, and, if the tone of this review has not already made it clear, the book is extremely dark. But it’s also very, very funny, and there are few stylists working today who can match Lipsyte’s mastery of the sentence. Highly recommended.

The Subject Steve is now available in trade paperback from Picador.

Home Land — Sam Lipsyte

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[Editorial note: Biblioklept ran a version of this review last year; we run it again in the spirit of Sam Lipsyte Week].

In Sam Lipsyte’s 2004 novel Home Land, minor loser Lewis Miner sends missives to his high school alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes, about his awful, sad misadventures in small-time drug use, petty copy-writing, itinerant busboyism, and chronic masturbation (he has a strong erotic disposition toward leg warmer porn. If this idea repels you (with no reciprocal attraction) this book is not for you). Miner wants to be sweet but he can be mean. He’s obsessed with the past–and who can blame him? His nickname in high school was Teabag, an appellation literally thrust upon him by the dumbest of jock-bullies. He carries this kernel of spite for years like a pebble in the sock, one that rubs up a giant blister–Miner is all blister. Writing ostensibly to his former classmates, but really just for himself, another form of masturbation:

It’s always been this way, as many of you might recall. Somebody chucks a snowball, I’m scouring the school yard for rocks. The bully just wants to shove sadness around, shake me down for spare change, I’m looking to scrape out his eye. I lack a sense of proportion. I have no sensitivity to sport. I’m the aggrieved rider on the grievous plain. I’m still pissed about the parade.

For all his anger though, Miner is an engaging, preternaturally sensitive voice. Along with his best friend/foil Gary, he muddles through a wretched life, finding solace (and an outlet for an outsized comic voice) in his letters to Catamount Notes–even if disgraced Principal Fontana won’t publish them. Despite his censorious discretion, Fontana reignites a downright silly mentorship with Miner. Fontana, a man after Holden Caulfield’s heart who calls everyone a “phony,” plays a weird father-figure to our favorite loser (even though Lewis’s own “Daddy Miner” is an ever-present terror in this tragicomedy).

Fontana, Daddy Miner, and the other characters in Home Land often feel like props rather than fully-drawn beings. Take the aforementioned Gary, for example, flush with cash after suing the hypnotherapist who convinced him that his parents sexually abused him repeatedly as part of elaborate Satanic rituals. His ridiculous past is par for course in the book. Such characters are the stock-in-trade of Home Land; they are, paradoxically, both its strength and weakness, beings who seem to speak entirely in misplaced metaphors and fucked-up aphorisms. There are too many of them for the book’s 200 pages. The fast writing never sags under the huge cast, but, nonetheless, its spine, its plot, its quick rhythm can’t bear their weight. There’s a much bigger novel here, but I don’t think I’d want to read it. Even Lipsyte’s normals are grotesques–or maybe it’s just Miner’s bilious perspective. In any case, sympathy is in short supply in Catamount country.

None of this is meant to disparage the reading experience of Home Land, which is marvelous, quick, funny, and a little bit gross (in a good way). Lipsyte crafts his sentences with a concrete, witty excellence that is near unrivaled in contemporary lit. It’s true that he sacrifices the depth of his characters here from time to time, and then includes passages that add nothing to the plot as a whole, like this one:

An older shapely woman swerved past on rollerblades. Bronzed, undulant in black Lycra, she clutched a pack of menthol cigarettes, danced on her wheels to something pumped through headphones. It was an admirable kind of ecstasy, hard-won. I wanted her for a lewd aunt.

That last line, of course, tells us so much about Lewis Miner and is also indicative of his overall method of storytelling. Not that he sees his letters to his alumni newsletter as part of a larger narrative–indeed, he’s to be forgiven all his esoterica, his mean, incisive commentary on contemporary life that doesn’t add up. Halfway through the book he tells us:

It occurs to me, Catamounts, sitting here composing this latest update, that someday, if and when the collected works of Lewis Miner ever see the light of day, some futuristic editor-type might attempt to assemble these dispatches in a certain manner, to, for example, tell a story, or else effect some kind of thematic arrangement of interwoven leitmotifs: Work, Love, Masturbation, Gary.

This would be a mistake. There are no leitmotifs. There is no story.

Miner then goes on to makes a pretty convincing case against stories (or at least against narrative arcs) and, tellingly, Home Land is better as a series of ugly, gross, hilarious anecdotes than it is as a novel with a traditional character arc. Which it is–a novel with a traditional character arc, climax, all that good stuff. Strangely, this is the book’s biggest failure. But that failure doesn’t get in the way of what is a pretty great and often very funny reading experience. Miner’s voice is a pleasure to inhabit for a while, a postmodern Falstaff heavy on the self-loathing. Home Land is a quick, easy read, a novel destined for cult-status, and Lewis Miner’s pathetic ironic braggadocio will hit home for many folks. Recommended.

Home Land is available in trade paperback from Picador.

 

Venus Drive — Sam Lipsyte

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[Editorial note: Biblioklept ran a version of this review last year; we run it again in the spirit of Sam Lipsyte Week].

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 in trade paperback from Picador.

Airships — Barry Hannah

Edwin Turner6 Comments

In his 1978 collection Airships, Barry Hannah sets stories in disparate milieux, from the northern front of the Civil War, to an apocalyptic future, to the Vietnam War, to strange pockets of the late-twentieth century South. Despite the shifts in time and place, Airships is one of those collections of short stories that feels somehow like an elliptical, fragmentary novel. There are the stories that correspond directly to each other — the opener “Water Liars,” for instance, features (presumably, anyway), the same group of old men as “All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail.” The old men love to crony up, gossip, tell tall tales. An outsider spoils the fun in “Water Liars” by telling a truth more terrible than any lie; in “Harkening,” an old man shows off his new (much younger) bride. These stories are perhaps the simplest in the collection, the homiest, anyway, or at least the most “normal” (whatever that means), yet they are both girded by a strange darkness, both humorous and violent, that informs all of Airships.

We find that humor and violence in an outstanding trio of Civil War stories (or, more accurately, stories set during the Civil War). The narrator of “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb,” a Confederate infantryman relates a tale of heroic slaughter with a hypberbolic, phallic force. Observe—

I knew the blueboys thought they had me down and were about ready to come in. I was in that position at Chancelorsville. There should be about six fools, I thought. I made the repeater, I killed four, and the other two limped off. Some histrionic plumehead was raising his saber up and down on the top of a pyramid of crossties. I shot him just for fun. Then I brought up another repeater and sprayed the yard.

Later, the narrator defects, switches to the Union, and claims he kills Jeb Stuart, a figure that towers over the Civil War tales. The narrator of “Dragged Fighting” hates Stuart; the narrator of “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed” is literally in love with the General. In contrast to the narrator of “Dragged Fighting,” the speaker in “Knowing” — an avowed “sissy” whom the other soldiers openly detest — hates the violence and madness of war—

We’re too far from home. We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore. We’re just bandits and maniacal. The gleam in the men’s eyes tells this. Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of being simply too far from home for decent return. It is like Ruth in the alien corn, or a troop of men given wings over the terrain they cherished and taken by the wind to trees they do not know.

He despairs when he learns of Jeb Stuart’s death. In the final Civil War story, “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony,” a Union spy is given the task to communicate news of Stuart’s death through enemy lines. Rather than offering further explication, let me instead point you, dear reader, to more of Hannah’s beautiful prose, of which I have not remarked upon nearly enough. From “Behold the Husband” —

Isaacs False Corn, the Indian, the spy, saw Edison, the Negro, the contact, on the column of an inn. His coat was made of stitched newspapers. Near his bare feet, two dogs failed earnestly at mating. Pigeons snatched at the pieces of things in the rushing gutter. The rains had been hard.

The short, descriptive passage rests on my ears like a poem. Hannah, who worked with Gordon Lish, evinces in his writing again and again that great editor’s mantra that writing is putting one sentence after another.

Although set in the Vietnam War, “Midnight and I’m not Famous Yet” seems an extension of the Civil War stories. In it, an officer from a small Southern town goes slowly crazy from all the killing, yet, like the narrator of “Dragged Fighting,” he presents himself as a warrior. Above all though, he laments that the war has robbed him of some key, intermediary phase of his late youth, a phase he can’t even name—

The tears were out of my jaws then. Here we shot each other up. All we had going was the pursuit of horror. It seemed to me my life had gone straight from teen-age giggling to horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.

This ironic sense of a “pursuit of horror” pervades Airships, particularly in the collection’s most apocalyptic visions. “Eating Wife and Friends” posits an America where food shortages and material scarcity leads people to eating leaves and grass — and then each other. In “Escape to Newark,” the environment is wildly out of balance—

In August it’s a hundred fifty degrees. In December it’s minus twenty-five and three feet of snow in Mississippi. In April the big trees explode.

A plan is made to “escape” these conditions via a rocket, but of course there’s not enough fuel to get past Newark. In Airships, modes of flight are transcendent but ultimately transient. Gravity’s pull is heavy stuff.

Just as Hannah’s war stories are not really war stories, his apocalypse tales are really about human relationships, which he draws in humor, pathos, and dark cynicism. In “Green Gets It,” an old man repeatedly attempts his suicide, only to fail again and again. His suicide note, written to his daughter, is scathing and shocking and sad and hilarious and wise–

My Beloved Daughter,

Thanks to you for being one of the few who never blamed me for your petty, cheerless and malign personality. But perhaps you were too busy being awful to ever think of the cause. I hear you take self-defense classes now. Don’t you understand nobody could take anything from you without leaving you richer? If I thought rape would change you, I’d hire a randy cad myself. I leave a few dollars to your husband. Bother him about them and suffer the curse of this old pair of eyes spying blind at the minnows in the Hudson.

Your Dad,

Crabfood

Although Hannah explores the darkest gaps of the soul in Airships, he also finds there a shining kernel of love in the face of waste, depravity, violence, and indifference. This love evinces most strongly perhaps in Airships trio of long stories. These tales, which hover around 30 pages, feel positively epic set against the other stories in the collection, which tend to clock in between five and ten pages. The first long story, “Testimony of Pilot,” details the development of a boyhood friendship over a few decades. It captures the strange affections and rivalries and unnameable bonds and distances that connect and disconnect any two close friends. The second of the long tales is “Return to Return,” a tragicomic Southern drama in the Oedipal vein (with plenty of tennis and alcoholism to boot). As in “Testimony of Pilot,” Hannah finds some measure of redemption, or at least solace, for his characters in their loving friendship, yet nothing could be more unsentimental. The final long story, which closes the collection, is “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt,” a daring work of stream of consciousness that seems to both respond to — and revise — Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” The story concludes (and of course concludes the volume) with a vision of love that corresponds to the imagery of The Pietà, a kind of selflessness that ironically confirms the self as an entity that exists in relation to the pain of others.

I could keep writing of course — I’ve barely touched on Hannah’s surrealism, a comic weirdness that I’ve never seen elsewhere; it is Hannahesque, I suppose. Nor have I detailed Hannah’s evocations of regular working class folk, fighting and drinking and divorcing and raising children (not necessarily in that order). Airships is a world too rich and fertile to unpack in just one review, and I’ve already been blathering too long, I fear, when what I really want  to do is just outright implore you, kind reader, to find it and start reading it immediately. Very highly recommended.

Bourbon — Sam K. Cecil

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Hey. Do you like bourbon? I like bourbon a lot. It’s always been of a mild shame to me that the men in my family prefer the smoother stylings of Canadian whiskeys to the more robust corn-fueled liquors we produce here in the south. Now, as to whether Kentucky or Tennessee makes the finer product, I abstain from any definitive opinions (although a particular favorite brand of mine comes from Kentucky) because, as Sam K. Cecil’s book Bourbon: The Evolution of Kentucky Whiskey shows, there are many, many, many distilleries of bourbon (and that’s just in Kentucky alone).

Cecil’s book aims to be a comprehensive cataloging of every bourbon distillery in Kentucky, and he devotes over 200 pages to brief histories of these distilleries — a full two-thirds of the book. And while his stories are hardly dry, I found myself thirsty for more of what leads the book, an overview of the history of corn alcohol in the South that winds through days of yore to prohibition problems, from running moonshine under the Volstead act to the brass tacks of bourbon business after the repeal. Cecil incorporates many images in this section, including pictures of the distilling process, excited drinkers, and more than one vaguely racist advertisement. It’s a fun, snappy summary, delivered with love. As the bulk of the book — the detailing of Kentucky distilleries, county-by-county — attests, Cecil knows his stuff. Bourbon is hardly the kind of gimmick book that one often encounters when alcohol is the subject, nor is it for casual fans of the brown stuff. Serious drinkers only. Bourbon is new in trade paperback from Turner Publishing.

Under the Volcano — Malcolm Lowry

Edwin Turner12 Comments

Most of Malcolm Lowry’s dense, depressing novel Under the Volcano takes place over the course of November 2nd, 1938, the Mexican Day of the Dead. Like a reticent, dour Virgil, Lowry guides the reader through the day’s tragic arc, floating between the minds of his novel’s three protagonists: Geoffrey Firmin, his half-brother Hugh, and Geoffrey’s estranged wife Yvonne. Geoffrey is British Consul to Mexico — ex-Consul, really, as British-Mexican relations sour against the backdrop of Spanish fascism and the rise of nationalism in Mexico — but he is almost always referred to as “the Consul,” a blackly ironic title. See, the Consul bears little authority aside from an extreme expertise on how to stay drunk (or “drunkly sober un-drunk”) 24/7. He’s ambassador to bar stools, a manager of mescal and little else (certainly not his own life; certainly not diplomatic affairs). The Consul is a wreck, an alcoholic to put Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s (and even Bukowski’s) alter-egos to shame.

After a first chapter that seems to derail all but the most patient readers, the narrative conflict arrives when Yvonne returns to Quauhnahuac, Mexico, a year after leaving (and divorcing) the Consul. She arrives to find the Consul (“Geoffrey,” as he’s called when the free indirect style inhabits her mind) drinking whiskey in a hotel bar in order to sober up (yep). It’s not immediately clear why Yvonne has returned to the Consul, but it seems that she hopes to save him from drowning in a drunken downward spiral. As the pair walks to the Consul’s house, they pass numerous advertisements for a boxing match; a child’s funeral proceeds down the avenue. These motifs of fighting, death, and futility permeate the novel.

During the walk we learn that Yvonne is not the only one concerned about the Consul’s health; his (much) younger brother Hugh has come to stay with him in the hopes of sobering him up. (Hugh employs a revolting and unsuccessful “strychnine cure”). That Hugh has also returned doubly complicates the plot. Much of Under the Volcano remains implicit, unnamed, hinted at, and this seems especially true of the implication that Yvonne cheated on the Consul with Hugh in the recent past (this implication may have been stated conclusively at some point in the novel, but I’ve only read the book once, which is perhaps like not having read it at all). What’s certainly clear is that Yvonne cheated on the Consul with a French filmmaker, Jacques Laruelle, a man whom the Consul, through sheer bizarre coincidence (but of course it isn’t sheer bizarre coincidence), spent a childhood summer with, and experience which bonded them as brothers in an Edenic holiday that eventually (inevitably) soured.

Despite her infidelities, Yvonne is generally present (I choose the verb “present” over “presented as” to highlight Lowry’s impeccable Modernist style) as a sympathetic character. Still, it is hard not to identify with the Consul (with “Geoffrey,” I suppose, if we are going to be familiar), the dark soul of this novel, and his complicated, painful feelings for Yvonne form the core of Volcano’s tragedy. He longs for her, pines for a complete life with her, yet resents her, cannot forgive her, hates her. For what? For leaving him. For betraying him. But perhaps foremost, he despises her inability to understand his alcoholism (he is particularly upset when she refuses to share a morning libation with him when they meet for the first time in a year). I’ll quote a passage at length now, one that showcases Lowry’s free indirect style, and one that reveals the strange indignities of the Consul’s sense of his own alcoholism. For context, dear reader, you must only know that Yvonne has suggested that she and the Consul might make long-term plans when he is sober “in a day or two”—

The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, he were not sober now! Yet there was some elusive subtlety in the impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No, he was not, not at this very moment he wasn’t! But what had that to do with a minute before, or half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he would be sober? And even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached this stage again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he could, as she put it, “cope,” this precarious precious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober! What right had she, when he had sat suffering the tortures of the damned and the madhouse on her behalf for fully twenty-five minutes on end without having a decent drink, even to hint that he was anything but, to her eyes, sober? Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could judge what was anterior to her arrival? And she knew nothing whatever of what all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his aplomb, coolness, even bravery there—the Burke’s Irish whiskey! What a world! And the trouble was she had now spoiled the moment.

The “fall in the Calle Nicaragua” the Consul references is quite literally a drunkard’s blackout (followed by the aforementioned fortifying whiskey, courtesy of a tourist), but it — falling — is perhaps the dominant motif in a novel crammed with motifs. In allegorical terms, if we want to ruin a good book (I don’t recommend this, of course), Volcano is pure Faust-stuff: end of innocence, fall of man, intractability of the human condition, ethical peril, moral inertia. While the Consul’s fall dominates the novel, Lowry brings this decline into dramatic relief in a late, climactic episode when his (anti-)heroic trio encounter a dying (dead?) man on the side of the road. Hugh tries to help, but the Darwinian venality of Mexican commonplace law makes his attempt impotent. Yvonne and the Consul are basically paralyzed.

Hugh’s attempt to save the man is a desperate call to action, an endeavor to perform some good in a world dominated by war and fascism. Hugh’s character fascinates. We learn of his past in one of the novel’s most intriguing episodes, a mini-bildungsroman that finds young Hugh working in the merchant marine as a calculated ploy to lend romance to his persona — he longs to prevail as a songwriter. He returns to find that no one cares about — has even heard — his guitar compositions; his publicity stunt fails. Although Hugh is only twenty-nine, he already seems himself as a failure, a fallen hero; he obsesses over the Battle of Ebro, daydreaming of helming a ship laden with hidden arms that he will deliver to the Loyalists who oppose the Fascists. Hugh’s greatest pain — and perhaps (only perhaps) Lowry’s greatest cruelty — is the awareness that the idealism of romantic heroism is intrinsically bound to a kind of selfish egoism. Hugh, perhaps with the visceral signal of his half-brother as a kind of radical prescience, can already see his own fall; his parts in Volcano are in a sense a constant meditation on falling. Hugh tries to save the dying man on the road, the cold double of his brother, whom he also tries to save — and yet it is all to little avail.

In Lowry’s world, in the volcano-world, there is only expulsion from the Eden. Lowry spells out this theme near the middle of his novel in a strange episode. The Consul wanders into his neighbor’s garden and reads a sign —

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?
¿QUE ES SUYO?
¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one’s being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne’s departure.

Significantly, either the sign is posted with improper punctuation, or (and?) the Consul’s translation is wrong — in either case a meaningful misreading occurs. We later receive the “proper” version of the sign: “¿Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! – “Do you like this garden that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!”  The Consul’s first reading is a corruption, a cruel misreading that questions humanity’s right to happiness, and, tellingly, he connects the sign to the end of his relationship with Yvonne. The second version of the sign, while still foreboding, perhaps signals a kernel of hope in Lowry’s bleak work — the idea that a garden might be preserved, might be tended to; that children might be raised who do not kill, cheat, steal, rape, enslave, or otherwise prey on each other. Still, Lowry refuses to imagine what such a world might look like for us. Did I mention that Volcano is really, really sad?

For all its bleak, bitter bile, Volcano contains moments of sheer, raw beauty, especially in its metaphysical evocations of nature, which always twist back to Lowry’s great themes of Eden, expulsion, and death. Lowry seems to pit human consciousness against the naked power of the natural world; it is no wonder then, against such a grand, stochastic backdrop, that his gardeners should fall. The narrative teems with symbolic animals — horses and dogs and snakes and eagles — yet Lowry always keeps in play the sense that his characters bring these symbolic identifications with them. The world is just the world until people walk in it, think in it, make other meanings for it.

In many ways, Under the Volcano is an antipodal response to Joyce’s Ulysses. Both novels stream through a number of consciousnesses over the course of one day; both novels invert and subvert mythical frameworks against diurnal concerns; both novels point to the ways that the smallest meannesses — and kindnesses — can color and affect our lives. And while there are many divergences (chiefest, I believe, the spirit of redemption in Ulysses that seems entirely absent from Volcano), the greatest similarity may be their difficulty. Simply put, Lowry, like Joyce, throws his readers into the deep end. The first chapter of the novel inhabits the mind of Jacques Laruelle and takes place exactly one year after the events of the rest of the novel. It is both overture and context for all that follows, and yet it is radically alienating; indeed, it only fully makes sense after one finishes the novel and goes back and reads it again, realizing it is the rightful coda, the sad epilogue of a sad story. Lowry leads with his conclusion, show us the fall-out up front, the splinters and shards of the narrative to come. Picking up these pieces is hardly easy and never joyful, but it is a rewarding experience. Very highly recommended.