Category Archives: nonfiction reviews

ABDUCTING A GENERAL, a memoir by Patrick Leigh Fermor, reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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Abducting a General book jacket; men in military uniformsABDUCTING A GENERAL
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
NYRB, 206 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

In 1933, aged only 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Clad in an old greatcoat and a pair of hobnail boots, he had left his native England on the deck of a Dutch steamer and set off on foot with a few letters of introduction, some notebooks, and a copy of Horace’s Odes in his rucksack, It was an extraordinary thing to undertake but we’ve long known that Leigh Fermor was an extraordinary man; a skilled linguist, a vivid, ebullient writer, and a lover of literature, people, and the world in all its variable wonder—of life, essentially—he has become celebrated for enjoying an existence so improbably charmed that his travel books often read like stirring, romantic fictions.

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Leigh Fermor—then living in Romania—returned home and was accepted as a candidate for a commission in the Irish Guards, a posting he quickly came to regard as dull. It was with some relief, then, when the Intelligence Corps took note of his lingustic capabilities and offered him courses in military intelligence and interrogation before dispatching him, in 1940, to the Mediterannean as a member of the British Military Mission.

At this point, Greece had been invaded by Italy and it was the Mission’s primary responsibility to help the occupied country in any way they could. In April 1941, this difficult task was rendered almost impossible when a German blitzkrieg tore through the Balkans, forcing most of Britain’s troops from the European mainland. Some, Leigh Fermor among them, managed to flee to Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, and were soon treated to a fresh barrage by the Nazis who, sensing an advantage, sought to capitalize. While the islanders’ resistance was noble, the outcome was inevitable; luckily for the author, the Royal Navy evacuated him to Egypt before the Axis powers could impart a less merciful fate, and it was in Cairo that Leigh Fermor proposed a plan to return to Crete in order to kidnap a German general.

Headshot of Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor

This book is Leigh Fermor’s account of this outrageous operation. Published here in its entirety for the first time, it was written in 1966-67 after being commissioned by Barrie Pitt, the editor of the mass-market, weekly anthology, Purnell’s History of the Second World War. Requesting a piece of around 5,000 words by November, Pitt was instead sent 30,000 in installments, the last of which arrived a year late. Facing little choice, and with probably little care at that point, the editor hired a journalist to drastically cut the document and published the trimmed down entity in the compendium. That we can now read Leigh Fermor’s original manuscript in full is a valuable and interesting gift to readers, both of the man and history. But there’s one area in which this unedited account is especially fascinating, and that is the insight it affords us into Leight Fermor’s struggle with the consequences of his scheme.

Specifically, the consequences for the Cretan population, which are both the central pillar and the haunting spectre of Abducting A General. Whether the author is explicitly addressing it or not, the sense that Leigh Fermor was deeply troubled by what happened because of his actions is never far from the adventurous rhythms of the prose’s surface. Unsurprisingly, we don’t need to look far for an example; on only the second page of the account, with scarcely enough time having passed to have set pace or tone, we find the following, earnest testament to the character of the island’s people:

We became,as it were, part of the family. Our cave-sojourns were often brief. They were a cruel danger to the villagers that supplied us with runners and with food and look-outs and we were often dislodged by enemy hunts in force. It was a game of hide-and-seek usually ending in a disorderly bunk to a new refuge in the next range. We could not have lasted a day without the islanders’ passionate support: a sentiment which the terrible hardships of  the occupation, the execution of the hostages, the razing and massacre of villages, only strengthened.

This is the first of a steady stream of munificence towards the Cretans that pours through the book. Leigh Fermor was clearly a man who loved Greece and its people and the idea that he might have contributed towards any of them being on the receiving end of German retaliation must have pained him deeply. Nevertheless, this is what seems to have happened some months after the SOE’s successful abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe. An eyewitness account of the reaction was provided by Lieutenant Colonel Tom Dunbabin:

The inhabitants of the raided villages were caught in their beds and a given number of hostages was taken in each village. These were selected either because of their relationship to some known person on the wanted list or because they were sturdy fellows who would make good guerrillas. They were shot two by two and their bodies thrown into a building which was then blown up.

Later, Leigh Fermor specifically takes up the possibility that these horrors were visited upon innocent villagers because of the kidnapping:

Apart from the shattering nature of the event it was, as one can imagine, deeply upsetting that, in spite of all our insistence in keeping clear of villages and avoiding incriminating the inhabitants, this tragedy should be associated, rightly or wrongly, with the operation.

The tension between the rip-roaring adventure and its fallout lends Abducting A General its particular fascination. Leigh Fermor writes with a swashbuckling swagger that is learned, vigorous and full of color. Numerous times, he recounts the daily complexion of the operation with a touch revealing both his eye for detail and his ear for drama, each of which remained alert in relativley hospitable and not so hospitable environments. Passing through “nearly airless stalactitic dungeones littered with the horned skeletons of beasts,” for example, is how he begins a particularly evocative passage that is just as well-drawn as the memories of the team’s hideouts throughout the island—dwellings that often reverberated with the sound of singing and swam in the aroma of the varying means of sustenance, including “a paschal lamb roasting whole and a demijohn of wine,” not to mention the litres of raki that never seemed too far from reach.

This devil-may-care feel is the adrenaline-soaked surface that conceals the anxiety at the book’s heart. Once the seriousness of the abduction’s possible consequences has been mentioned, it’s impossible to follow the narrative without some discomfort. What was Leigh Fermor’s operation really worth? Indeed, when the author admits, in the account’s opening that “I had only a vague idea” how bloodshed and reprisals would be avoided and that, “to my amazement, the idea was accepted,” these lines fall into the reader’s memory and sit there, growing heavier as the tale progresses, until they become leaden with an insouciance that feels awfully close to incriminating carelessness.

That this tension is the dominant characteristic of the book says a lot, especially when considered in comparison to the eponymous abductee. General Kreipe himself comes out of the ordeal remarkabaly well; so much so that the book’s very title comes to sound like a slight disservice to the man. Abducting a general? The use of the indefinite article suggests that any of the high-ranking Germans on Crete would have been a suitable target and, in one sense, that may be true. But there can have been few, if any, individuals capable of reacting with quite the equanimity and good humour this particular individual displayed, and to imagine the book without him is to imagine a very different book indeed.

With the singular General in tow, the journey across the island is scattered with episodes between Kreipe and his kidnappers that reveal common humanity. During this operation, for example, Leigh Fermor famously recalls hearing the General recite the opening line from an ode of Horace—one the Englishman just happened to know by heart. With dawn “streaming in the cave’s mouth,” and the small group “lying smoking in silence,” Leigh Fermor did what the romantic potential of the scene required, and recited the rest of the poem to the captive. “For five minutes,” the author touchingly observes, “the war had evaporated without trace.”

Going beyond the well known anecdotes, this unusually composed abductee provides a number of instances of levity and humor that bring a short, welcome relief to the galloping pace of the prose and, no doubt, provided some much needed respite to his abductors. One such moment comes when Leigh Fermor’s party is joined by Micky and Elias, two men who bring news of how the kidnapping has been received throughout the island and, in particular, at the villa at which Kreipe had been stationed:

Micky, after the General had been introduced to the missing two of his captors, told him,    through me, that all the guards of the villa were under arrest and his ADC was in prison, on suspicion of complicity. The General’s blue eyes opened wide with disbelief, then he laughed delightedly. He couldn’t bear him, the General told us. The man was a complete dunce.

These lovely moments lend a delightful softening to a narrative that rushes around and tumbles over the beautiful, and often harsh, Cretan landscape. As if further proof were needed of the singular characters at the book’s heart, one of the eight pages of photographs included in Abducting a General displays a moving shot of Leigh Fermor and Kreipe reunited in Athens in 1972. “We had both drunk at the same fountains long before,” runs the caption; “and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Despite a number of such heartwarming occasions, however, and although the tale is told in language that revels in life and the excitement of the task at hand, Leigh Fermor’s account of the Kreipe operation is memorable chiefly for its palpable unease. The purpose of such a venture, beyond humiliating the German garrison on the island, was hard to see then and has grown no clearer with time. As Roderick Bailey observes in the book’s foreword, other than for propaganda purposes, “it remains difficult to attach much value to the operation,” and no strategic or tactical advantage could be gleaned from its success. The possibility that this was a pyhrric victory for the SOE seems likely to have haunted a man who loved Greece and, particularly, the people of Crete; Abducting a General only serves to reinforce this sense of anguish.

Author Photo of Rory McCluckieRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG reviewed by Justin Goodman

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Cat is art spelled wrong book jacket; upside cats CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG
edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz
Coffee House Press, 160 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Anonymous’ Internet Rule 38: “one cat leads to another.” This rule is played out, true to form, within the universe it governs. I think of Douglas Davis’s classic “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” which (half Mobius Strip) perpetually leads, and (half Internet) begins with “cat purring softly”; or, in the same vein, the more contemporary “Drei Klavierstücke op. 11” by Cory Arcangel, composed of cat-on-piano videos molded into Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music.

The Internet seems to have returned us to what Schoenberg’s contemporary, the painter Gustav Klimt, asked with his bijou palette and bourgeois nudes: when does something exit coincidence and enter art? As with Klimt’s regal-looking prostitutes, we might ask, where is the line between artistic intention and the more accidental capturing of internal feeling? Now, amidst a flurry of cat media, editors Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz have gathered the work of 14 authors to discern meaning in the paw swipes virtuosity. The work is gathered in the collaborative Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong.

This is what is presumed. What happens is that one cat leads too literally to another. Instead of an analysis of the artistic merit of cat videos (the book is sponsored by the Walker Art Center in Minnesota), Art, should it appear, is lost among the fur. In the memoir-ish, semi-paean “Sparrow the Cat,” Alexis Madrigal, deputy editor of The Atlantic, stresses his experience as a cat owner in order to criticize art’s hegemonizing: “We use the nature we find, then make up the rest.” It’s a confession of guilt, seemingly earnest, yet ending with the unsettling change of his Instagram bio from “mostly pictures of my cat” to “mostly pictures of my son.” The former proves a menace to the latter and by luck, not morality, can be moved to Madrigal’s parents’ house. The implicit failure to escape the oddly authoritarian nature of cat loving pairs well with the “slippery and mutable” truth of the Internet.

Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz

Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz

That is Joanne McNeil’s description, anyway. Her essay, “Finding Half Cat,” is not far removed from her essays about perception and technology. She answers a question no one asked about a photoshopped image of a cat on Google Maps; we are inevitably led to the beautifully constructed, although remarkably uninteresting, idea that human memory–symbolized by the dementia of the Canadian Rene Chartrand, keeper of a cat sanctuary near the Parliament–is as flawed in its conception of truth as the Internet, where half cat still walks, still fake.

Of Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong though, David Carr’s ennui-reading “Cats” is the only essay so thoroughly disconnected in its approach to art (and cats) that he sums up his argument with “we will continue to click because it is in our nature.” The late New York Times columnist makes this assessment from the sound principle of his personal dislike of cats. Cat videos, he says, are “where cats should live…imprisoned by my browser.” Carr’s presence in the volume seems merely to be as a counterpoint to cat lovers and this makes his writing come off as tired , dismissive, and disengaged. For a writer who had garnered so much respect, his essay feels more tangential than it could be.

But we are here to earnestly read about the art of cats and cat videos. Carr’s reflective style is akin to those cat videos where the cat’s adorable mewing is muted by the babying voice of the YouTuber. This is when the medium, too aware of its intentions, emphasizes them by imposing them. This is how the dichotomy in McNeil’s “Finding Half Cat,” between Chartrand and the Internet, is pristine as a beach after an atom bomb; how Elena Passarello (continuing the premise of her 2012 collection, Let Me Clear My Throat) gives voice to 18th century poet Christopher Smart, adding to his incomplete “My Cat Jeoffery” (from Jubilate Agno) “seventy-four other lines, each beginning with the word ‘Let’” to match the original seventy-four beginning with “For.” Art, instead of unexpected recording, manufactures the recordable.

The collection is substantially benign, but it’s fundamentally powerful in its coincidences. The very aspect that threatens to drown Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, buoys it: Several of the authors–Carl Wilson, Jillian Steinhauer, Sasha Archibald – struggle with this antagonistic inanity, all alluding to Sianne Ngai’s research on “cuteness,” widely agreeing that the “apparent triviality [of cat videos] resist grander designs and systems.” This is the “stuplime.” Literature’s recent frothing through the boredom of Tao Lin and the wackiness of Miranda July attempts to reign in these qualities that are visible in Junot Diaz and Rachel Kushner, all trace back to this, according to Wilson, “mundane material or circular or fragmentary language from which the rational mind flees.” The scholastic appearance is only nominal.

Cultural critic Wilson continues, “the domestic cat–dependent on us for its existence and yet indifferent…Perhaps not even…except by some circular reasoning that defines music as human-made.” The same tale comes from Brooklyn-based art critic Steinhauer, who says, “YouTube…allows us to create our own spectacle.” And LA curator Archibald offers that “the pet cat was bridled by human heartstrings and tugged further from the wild and closer to the hearth.” For Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, art is the miscommunication of identity; coincidence is art. How art is cat spelled wrong, or how Madrigal’s essay means nothing without what was to come, or how “we make up the rest.”

Whether Henri, Le Chat Noir, Grumpy Cat, Maru, the art of cat videos is an awareness of coincidence, always being at a remove from the object of attention. Dissociation. The art of cats is, as Wilson claims, “the depths of its strangeness, alike to us perhaps only in its basic needs.” Sontag’s description of “Pure Camp” is perfect: “Unintentional; they are dead serious.” The substance of art is coincidence.

Author Photo of Justin GoodanA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz reviewed by Rory McCluckie

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Talk cover art. A woman lies on sandTALK
by Linda Rosenkrantz
NYRB, 215 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What’s more, they’re pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided to capture the conversation of friends on tape, a process that eventually lead to her picking out three personalities, and presenting their interactions in the form of a “novel in dialogue.” Stephen Koch’s introduction fleshes out the context: “I had the tape recorder running all summer,” Rosenkrantz recalls,

even dragging the bulky monster to the beach. At first there were about twenty-five different characters and fifteen hundred pages of single-spaced transcript, which I took close to two years honing down to the three characters and two hundred fifty pages.

Quite the project, in other words. A little later in this same introduction, however, there’s another phrase that ultimately proves more striking. As Koch introduces the conceptual basis of the book, he posits that the guiding vision behind the work was one of exploring how daily existence might function when presented as an act of creation, thus acting as a literary experiment the results of which were hard to foresee. The framework, he offers, within which Talk should be viewed is crystallized into the following question: “Why not see if life really imitates art?”

This short inquiry resonates throughout the book and employing it as a lens through which to view the work is a useful way of thinking about both its accomplishments and its problems—two things that are entwined in an unsually involved way here. Starting with the obvious is a good way of beginning the disentanglement, and the most salient characteristic of the book is its presentation. Talk has, impressively, retained something of its essentially innovative core. The pages follow the dramatic format, punched with the names of speakers on the left hand side so that any reader picking up the book without foreknowledge of it would presume it to be a work for the stage. And yet, the lack of even theatrical instructions is conspicuous and adds to the sparse, stripped-down feel that emanates from the text. Rosenkrantz presents the three characters, Emily, Vincent, and Marsha, in mundane scenarios that range from sunbathing on the beach to preparing the evening’s meal, all the while exchanging thoughts and feelings with no authorial embellishment and in a way that is completely free of commentary from anywhere outside themselves. It’s quick, it’s insular, and it’s entirely unpredictable:

EMILY: What’s the matter, darling?
VINCENT: I’m so sad.
EMILY: Why?
VINCENT: Because that’s what being alive is.
EMILY: I know it, I’m sad all the fucking time, you have no idea.
VINCENT: I head something last week about what makes humans different from animals, some gorgeous basic thing, like that humans have memories, but it’s not that.
EMILY: What is it?
VINCENT: Something absolutely beautiful. Are you putting garlic powder in too? Wow, is that cheap. Why use fresh garlic then?
EMILY: Completely different tastes. They are, as one might say, complementary.
VINCENT: Marsha darling, I can’t bear it when you’re sad.
MARSHA: I’m not, I’ve just got a lot of work to do.
VINCENT: Who hasn’t? I began a new painting today.
MARSHA: Yes, and were you interrupted?
VINCENT: Yes, continually, by my memories. Do you want to get married, Emily?

The manner in which the diaologue flits around here, rapidly opening avenues of conversation before turning away from them just as swiftly, isn’t unusual for the work at all. There are no guarantees that subjects, once raised, will be followed past an initial line or two and there are occasions when these swift changes are downright brutal in their spontaneity. As a reader, it’s hard to remain neutral to this sort of thing and it’s this insistence on making us feel one thing or another that’s in rude health in Talk, even decades after its original publication.

This insistence turns out to be problematic for the book. After only a couple of chapters of such choppiness, and once their novelty has started to dim, the tangential interruptions very quickly begin to pall. Accumulating rapidly and falling more abruptly than they might in a more conventional work, they lack the descriptive preludes or explainations that would usually accompany them. Consequently, they very quickly become a regular reminder that the life in Talk is failing in its aforementioned attempt to imitate art. In effect, these interruptions are like chimes from a clock tower—we can sit beneath it for minutes at a time without paying attention to the fact that time is passing, but as soon as it sounds, we are reminded of the moments that have been lost. In a similar way, there are passages in Rosenkrantz’s book that come off as being at home in a literary work; they explore themes with patience, at length and with an interested, and interesting, tone. But because these sections are always eventually bombarded by this inattentive disturbance, the reader keeps being jolted from the rhythm of the conversation. Persisting begins to require a distractingly conscious engagement with what comes to feel like a clunking artificiality.

Which is curious, of course, because there’s nothing whatsoever in Talk that is artificial; this is bona fide conversation transcribed verbatim. So where does this fraudulent aura come from? Part of it is born of Rosenkrantz’s commitment to carrying through her project. She was so immaculately fastidious in her presentation of—and only of—her recorded exchanges that the result can feel ruthlessly clinical in its presentation of material that doesn’t always seem worth presenting in the first place. But that doesn’t quite get to the heart of the issue. To do so requires revisiting Koch’s initial question in order to effectively strike it from the record: Does life imitate art? No. Not here, at least. The part of life that is captured in Talk isn’t imitating anything and to seek its doing so is to miss the point: this isn’t artificial, but it is an artefact. What we’re doing when we read this book is eavesdropping on conversations that took place almost fifty years ago. The lack of an authorial presence leaves us free to interact, not with a novel or a literary creation of any other sort, but with a piece of history. This, primarily, is what the book amounts to—a chatty and irreverent slice of archived dialogue that illuminates the cultural atmosphere of the 1960s.

And, as such, it’s a fascinating document. The society in which Talk unfolds is one undergoing enormous changes; the pill has revolutionized the way sex is thought about and engaged in, the drug scene has expanded in an excitingly psychedelic direction, while the artistic milieu the protagonists are orbiting is a bustling source of gossip and parties. Emily, Vincent, and Marsha drop names from the worlds of literature and politics with a delicious regularity; the cultural zeitgeist in general is richly contextulaized in passages of the following sort:

EMILY: Let’s see, I love Fitzgerald—Gatsby is one of my favorite books, and Tender Is the Night; the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Sun Also Rises, the poem Kaddish. I love Proust, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Durrell, Robert Creeley, I like Rilke, I like Martin Buber, the idea of I and Thou, even though I don’t know much about it. I like Bob Dylan and I love the Beatles. I like Frank Sinatra. I have a couple of favorite songs in the word, I think one of them is “Speak Low” by Kurt Weill.

Emily and friends insist on analyzing themselves and the people around them. Everyone is seeing a therapist and there’s a lot of time spent answering questions about the significance of this event or that dream, the tendency becoming almost laughable in its occasional degeneration into self-obsession:

EMILY: Oh you and your art, you and your related images, you and your no one thing stands by itself; you, you, you.
VINCENT: Marsha’s coming back. Let’s close the door and show them we’re alone.
EMILY: Can we analyze a little about her and Tim Cullen?
VINCENT: Marsha No, can we be honest about ourselves?
EMILY: I want to tell you a story about my sister.
VINCENT: All right, but make it short?
EMILY: My sister’s a lot like me on certain levels.
VINCENT: Aw, let’s talk about ourselves.

These aspects of Talk jolt the reader; they force an awareness of the discrepancies—and similarities—between our own age and that of the book. Perhaps it’s most rewarding to think of Emily, Vincent, and Marsha as vessels for a time that has, by now, become a distant, storied, and almost mythological, completely beyond our reach. It’s the insight into this era, and the people who were living through it, that we should focus on here—much more than the stuttering way in which these same people might be contributing to a work of art.

Rory McCluckie author photoRory McCluckie is a freelance writer and editor from Manchester, England. A graduate of the University of Leeds, he currently resides in Montreal.

PUNK ELEGIES by Allan MacDonell and DADDY Madison Young reviewed by Johnny Payne

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Punk Elegies and Daddy book jacketsPUNK ELEGIES
by Allan MacDonell
Rare Bird Books, 306 pages

DADDY
Madison Young
Rare Bird Books, 323 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

“Let my heart tell you what prompted me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only mischief that made me do it.” Thus spoke Saint Augustine of Hippo, and with those words, invented the confessional memoir and spawned the talk show in which the recounting of misdeeds leads—it is hoped—to self-reflection, repentance and salvation. When you put the peccadillos in print, it is difficult to escape this literary paradigm, for, as with Augustine’s sins (and our own), the more you struggle, the more surely redemption will drag you toward a hopeful destiny, like the mighty Mississippi at flood tide, and you borne aloft on your own self-damning words.

Two such memoirs have just been issued from Rare Bird Books. The first, Punk Elegies, is the sometimes desultory, occasionally comical, and moderately self-aware account of Allan MacDonell’s drugged and drunken misbehavior as a skilled yet dubious reporter of punk music for Slash magazine in Los Angeles, present at what is dubbed the birth of stateside punk, via a band called The Screamers. He has given himself his toughest assignment ever in this memoir, because it’s all been done before: promiscuous sex, alcoholic stupors, watching friends overdose into comas. After sixteen centuries, the genre has grown a little tired. And what do you do when you weren’t really that close to the main action, nor played a prominent role? What if you were a journalistic hanger on, and not even of the sweetly naïve Almost Famous variety? What if you were an annoying lout?

Slyly, MacDonell turns these facts to his advantage. He neither preens nor tries to win us over too insistently. He accepts his insignificant place among the night crawlers, and acknowledges that his quintessential brush with fame is when a teenage Joan Jett, wearing a wife beater, shoulders him in the midst of an alcohol-fueled, bickering fight with three “heavyset girls who wear a lot of makeup.” Dispassionate as the Living Jesus, Joan takes a knife from Allan’s hand and dispenses this wisdom: “You’d be a pretty cool guy if you didn’t drink so much.”

Allan-MacDonell Headshot

Allan MacDonell

Midway through the memoir, we’re treated to a reflection worthy of Augustine: “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that this entire set of memories so far, with no indication of changing, recalls the author as unpleasant, grasping, an indulger, boorish and wishy-washy, selfish and afraid, a groundless snob, arrogant and without achievement, a self-suckered chump.”

His salvation—not the spiritual kind, but the literary one—is to portray himself as the buffoon of blind hedonism. When his girlfriend and a busty knockout named Viva coax him into a skinny dip in a borrowed pool, and initiate him into a threesome, the naughty transgression ends with his premature ejaculation followed by awkward silence.

The best moments of Punk Elegies are predicated on pure style, simple but effective. A memorable moment occurs in a hotel hallway, when a woman and a man are having a physical fight, with neither getting the final upper hand. This momentary tragedy is rendered as comedy.

With a sick, ripping sound, the woman’s hair tore loose from her skull and came away in her companion’s hands.

“He’s scalped her, Allan! Do something!”

Shock stopped me mid-breath. Then I saw . . .

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.

The woman’s wig had come unhinged. For an instant, the man stood baffled, the tresses lax in his fist. Then he began whipping the girl with her wig.

And so it goes. Amid this slapstick, who can really get stuck in depravity?

Daddy stands as more soulful and sincere, entirely devoid of humor. Despite its accolades from Dave Navarro for “eroticism and intellect,” and a peppy, cheery introduction from Annie Sprinkle, this tell-all of initiation into sadomasochism begins in a less than promising manner, with amateurish writing (“the first blush of sunrise,” “my stomach knots and suddenly lurches,” “my heart begins to race”).

In the familiar frame of experience-forged adult looking backward at relative innocence, we are, like the abused heroine, in good hands, constantly reassured that we are following a feminist parable of girl power, in which “the BSDM community” is civic-minded, equipped with “safe words,” and better than Mitt Romney at staging conventions. Descriptions of sex sometimes sound as if culled from a reader’s forum (“his long, hard cock penetrated my wet cunt,” etc.). Most problematic of all, everything is over-explained, as the title implies, in pat Freudian terms, and I sometimes wish to run shrieking from the group therapy session.

Madison-Young Headshot

Madison Young

I pushed on, and like our happy slave, when she finally earns the prize of a leather dog collar with a lock on it, I was rewarded. Halfway through, as Madison Young casts off the need to represent her journey as a wholesome and uncomplicated progression to higher consciousness, she gets raw and the prose quality takes an upward jump: “I ran my fingers across the large, rusted chain collar that Daddy padlocked around my neck before placing me in my cage. It was heavy. Many collars could pass for stylish chokers and necklaces, like the ones you might buy at the jewelry store, but this collar was a symbol of humility. A huge chain that looked like it came from a mechanic’s garage.”

The ritual humiliations that follow, which Young compares to premarital counseling sessions for Catholic fiancés, carry the sting of fear and doubt, even as they carry the first-person protagonist toward carnal transcendence. The scenarios acted out don’t seem entirely in good fun. One of Daddy’s many educational reminders to his little girl reveals the cold center of the heart of sadomasochism, which teaches that the suffering of a non-entity is the path to higher consciousness: “This collar is just a vehicle, a prop. It will be used on others after you and you will give it up at the end of the week. Understood?”

After her inevitable victory over pain, so right for this genre, the story’s authenticity is sealed with her getting pregnant, worrying that their apartment complex has no laundry, and the other petty concerns of daily life for an expectant mother. Among the stretch limos and models, the extended descriptions of her pornographic acting under Daddy’s direction, the sometimes stilted and theatrical dialogue of women begging for degradation and humiliation, my favorite grotesque image of the book comes, not from the world of kinky sex, but from that of giving birth. It’s written in good, old-fashioned plain prose: “On March 2nd, at about 4:30 a.m., a blood tinged snot-like mucous plug dropped from the hole of my cervix into the toilet.”

She is now a mother.

In its lurching way, Daddy fulfills the requirements of a book of confessions, taking us from light to dark and back to light again. If the journey’s prose is sometimes tortuous as well as torturous, it should come as no surprise, for as every good Catholic knows, it isn’t always easy to get to Heaven.

Author Photo of Johnny-Payne

Johnny Payne is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles.  His most recent book of poetry is Vassal.  Forthcoming is the poetry collection Heaven of Ashes, from Mouthfeel Press.

FAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays by Timothy Kenny reviewed by Beth Johnston

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Far Country book jacket; cobblestone alleywayFAR COUNTRY: STORIES FROM ABROAD AND OTHER PLACES, essays
by Timothy Kenny
Bottom Dog Press, 144 pages

reviewed by Beth Johnston

In the preface to Timothy Kenny’s new essay collection, Far Country: Stories from Abroad and Other Places, Kenny links his stories to the new journalism of the 1960s, the work of “Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion.” Yet although Kenny positions himself as Didion, personal and revealing, he more often echoes New Yorker journalist John McPhee. His essays hold back, shield the author’s character, and confess little. The best of them capitalize on Kenny’s strengths: carefully observed detail, compelling stories, and flair for sentence. But only a few of them require Kenny to risk baring himself and his responses to distant places.

Kenny is a former USA Today journalist and a journalism professor who has worked abroad since 1989. He’s seen a lot: Belfast during the Troubles, Berlin right before the wall fell, Sarajevo during the siege, and Kabul as Afghanistan is rebuilt. He’s interviewed Vaclav Havel in Prague and fought off feral dogs in Kosovo. His character feels like the movie version of a Western journalist abroadhe’s Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously or Stephen Dillane in Welcome to Sarajevo. Kenny himself might resist the comparison, since, he notes, he “was neither a war correspondent nor a traditional foreign-based journalist . . . [but] a reporter fortunate enough to travel overseas frequently.” Still, Kenny is true to journalistic type: he’s jaded enough not to be shocked by what he sees, pragmatic enough to resist heroism, and reluctant to indulge in unbridled idealism.

Like most veteran reporters, Kenny has a great eye for detail, especially those that evoke how different these far countries are from home. In Kosovo, when he wears a green silk scarf, women smile at him. “A teenager once leaned over from behind the counter to feel the smooth fabric between her fingers,” he writes. “She pursed her lips together silently in appreciation but said nothing.” The wordless interaction speaks volumes about the rarity of beauty and luxury in this place. In Kazakhstan, he bargains with a taxi driver for a ride and is about to step into the car, “when a woman who had been standing next to me at the curb said in English, ‘No mister, don’t go.’ Then ‘Look at his face.’ I stepped back and stared at the driver. . . . His fingers twitched on the steering wheel and he could not hold eye contact. If he wasn’t a junky, he was doing an excellent impression of one.” Anyone who has spent time overseas will recognize these dizzying moments when a traveler suddenly decodes a culture that has seemed obscure.

Equally striking are Kenny’s fine turns of phrase, which help him paint in details with economy. Take, for instance, the description of those dogs in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital: “In the day, Kosovo’s feral dogs were skittish and fearful. . . . They looked furtively over their shoulders at pedestrians; loud noises turned them sideways in fright, their bodies forced into a cringing, U-shape of submission. The dark of an unlit night altered the equation.” Often, Kenny’s writing is this powerfully visual.

Given these talents as an observer and a wordsmith, it makes sense that Kenny often stands in the background and lets his story unfold. In the brief but resonant “Death in Tel Aviv,” he recounts a conversation among older men in a gym locker room. One of the men tells the story of his father’s suicide, and when the story ends, it leaves a silence behind. In an essay about a month he spent in Kabul, Kenny finds the humor in a situation instead, recounting his exchange with a stubborn border guard looking to collect an exit card. Kenny replicates the dialogue with a precision that captures the Kafka-esque experience of being detained by any immigration official anywhere:

“Where your exit card?” the guard asks.

“I didn’t get one. Nobody was giving them out when I arrived.”

“Yes. Where your card.”

“I don’t have one. No one gave me one.” I am suddenly very thirsty and reach into my handbag for bottled water; I crack it open and take a sip.

“Why you get water? Get card. Where your card?”

But paired with these reportorial gifts, Kenny has a reporter’s reluctance to practice self-examination in lieu of talking about others. The weakest essay here is Kenny’s admittedly dramatic account of “The Siege of Sarajevo,” which opens with Kenny in the bed of a truck under sniper fire. Instead of writing about what the experience means to him two decades on, Kenny seeks out the other journalists who were with him in the truck for their recollections. As a result, “The Siege of Sarajevo” is anecdote, not essay; it recounts events, but doesn’t analyze them. Kenny could explore how it felt for strangers to try to take his life, but he doesn’t; he simply relates that when his plane from Sarajevo landed, he kissed the tarmac.

Other places, where Kenny has digested his experiences and isn’t as reluctant to extract lessons from them, the essays blossom. A beautiful reflection on the month Kenny spent teaching journalism in Azerbaijan moved me. Kenny gracefully evoked the mixture of love and exasperation professors feel for students. He hates when they text in class, but his pride radiates when he describes accompanying his students to man-on-the-street interviews: “In Fountain Square and the older sections of Baku the three women who have paid the closest attention in class, Gunel, Lala and Neza, impress me with their willingness to walk up to strangers and get them to talk. They ask the same question, ‘What makes you happy?’”

In the last part of the book, Kenny tacks on a pair of essays about becoming a father again at age 60. Here, Kenny is appealingly vulnerable, talking openly about the relentless math that rations out his time with this new person. “There will never be such a time again,” he writes of a month spent in Italy with his wife and daughter. “There may be better times, times just as good, certainly; but inevitable change is fierce, uncompromising.” Kenny’s next book is a memoir of raising his daughter. It’s a wise choice for Kenny to turn from topics where he can hide behind journalistic objectivity to one where that detachment simply isn’t available, and he is forced to let his readers know just what he thinks of the world, whether far away or closer to home.

Timothy Kenny’s essay “Duckpin Bowling with Caitlin and Buffalo Bill” appears in Issue No. 2 of Cleaver.

Beth-Johnston Author Photo

Beth Johnston trained as a lawyer before earning an MFA from Bennington College. She has written about books and law for The New Republic, Legal Times, and other publications. She lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches writing at George Washington University.

THE ARGONAUTS by Maggie Nelson reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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The-Argonauts book jacketTHE ARGONAUTS
by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press, 160 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan
Sometimes an idea reverberates and echoes for a long time, like a song. This was my experience reading Maggie Nelson’s revelatory new memoir, The Argonauts, which starts with an idea Nelson found reading Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…” She goes on to describe that its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.” Nelson wrote the book while she was with her partner, the non-binary trans artist Harry Dodge, and pregnant with their first child. At one level, The Argonauts recounts her experiences as a writer in a relationship with Dodge, whose gender identity consciously resists the traps of language. In attempting a reconciliation of the two perspectives, Nelson tries to find a freedom through language.

More than simply telling a ‘story’, Nelson considers here the act of trying to bring experience into language and ideas, particularly those which seem to oppose this very act. She incorporates an array of ideas from theorists ranging from Judith Butler to Wittgenstein in order to consider the inexpressibles of gender, sexuality, joy, and the seeming contradiction of queer parenthood and marriage—an experience increasingly brought into the mainstream of social structures and away from radicalism.

In the brief interval between my first reading of The Argonauts and the writing of this review, the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. This is, in many ways, an important and very positive development for queer rights, yet it is also far from an ending. In the book, Nelson pointedly notes, “if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.”

Nelson’s was one of two defiantly queer books on motherhood I read this year. The other was Miranda July’s novel The First Bad Man, a fitting companion. Both books resist the idea of living a queer life inside restrictive structures. Both are guides, of a sort. For some, Nelson’s memoir provides a new way of seeing one’s place in the world against the “binary of normative/transgressive, ” with additional readings provided to go alongside. On the queerness of pregnancy, Nelson powerfully notes, “how can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolise or enact the ultimate conformity? ”

The Argonauts is an urgent work, an intimate and fearless act of communication with the reader as Nelson describes moments of radical transformation: falling in love with Harry, and her pregnancy happening at the same time as Harry’s top surgery. Of this moment, she beautifully writes to Harry:

on the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

The Argonauts brings to the reader many moments of becoming, in both consciousness and body. I could write of  many more powerful moments in this book, but will stop here. This is a memoir to be individually discovered, read, underlined and reread. For its readers, The Argonauts should leave its own constantly transforming echoes.

 

Gabriel-Chazan Author PhotoGabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He continues to study art history at Sarah Lawrence College after an exchange at Wadham College, Oxford University. He particularly enjoys writing about contemporary art and photography.

THE ART OF ASKING by Amanda Palmer reviewed by Justin Goodman

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The Art of Asking book jacket; nude woman holding flowerTHE ART OF ASKING
by Amanda Palmer
Grand Central Publishing, 333 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“Art is the Artist”
I first heard of Amanda Palmer while driving a flashy, cherry-red Mustang convertible blasting “Girl Anachronism” from a speaker system clearly not made to handle any song at full volume, let alone one already deafening at standard volume for an ipod-earbud combo. It didn’t help that it was my car, and that my first girlfriend and I were the ones in it.

By 2009 a year had passed since Palmer’s band, the Dresden Dolls, broke up, and three years before she would give the TED talk that would inspire the memoir The Art of Asking. My relationship and my car had both broken down by that point and as I, that bachelor now in a minivan, would likely have said about Palmer’s memoir-essay, there is one thing the three have in common: they deeply affected my life, and then repeated themselves enough that I wanted them to be done with.

Memoirs often annoy me, in part, because they take Whitman’s advice too literarily: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” And that’s not to ignore that such songs lend themselves to marketing nicely. That is the function, generally, of celebrity memoirs. But Amanda Palmer, musician-blogger turned memoirist, was already given this treatment, wrongly, when her more than successful and record-setting Kickstarter became journalist gossip about, as she summarizes, “what a terrible person I was, on top of being an untrained, unprofessional, shitty musician.”

This book doesn’t feel like it intends to sell itself. It even comes across as if it has no idea who the audience is, as when she explains crowdsourcing, “for the uninitiated.” (What Palmer fan purchased this book “uninitiated?”) Like any good memoir, be it Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, or anything by David Sedaris, it uses its jointed memory to propel it towards insight. How the joints connect, though, is what makes a memoir work. So, while Sedaris uses a series of essays, and Woolf the titular moments of being, Palmer’s book seems nebulous in that it has no organizing function. The text switches between her budding romance with Neil Gaiman (now her husband), to her record label experiences, with essentially random stories intermixed, as new experiences accrue over time.

Despite this contextual shuffle, there is more than the semblance of a theme. “It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think.” So she insists that we “take the flower,” or “take the donuts,” or “take the coffee.” The point being that to learn and practice asking, you must accept the help of others: “the truth of the matter is that your acceptance of the gift IS the gift.”

It’s precisely this mutual aid which, conveyed in non-hierarchical mini-stories mimicking the brief and charged nature of forum posts, evokes a socialist critique of American mores: from “typical tale[s] from the failing American health system,” to reminders that Thoreau’s legacy of roughing it at Walden Pond involved his mother and sister bringing him “a basket of freshly baked goods, including donuts,” and references to social worker Brené Brown’s writings on American individualism’s limiting us by turning us against asking for help. While it’s hard not to want more than a book spine to hold the argument together, credit must be given for what comes across as Palmer’s unquestionable backbone.

Also equally unquestionable, perhaps due to lurking grudges of my ex, is how simply annoying and disruptive her font and space usage is. This element, too, makes the book not dissimilar from a forum post. Palmer’s tic is to capitalize and italicize, and place several one-sentence paragraphs beside each other, as if to reproduce speech on the page (every italic, above, is hers, not mine). This may be effective at drawing attention, or it may simply betray a lack of subtlety. Possibly I’m just not playful enough. To avoid coming across as curmudgeonly, I must say I did like the addition of the tour pictures and lyric sheets that divide the book.

But there is a target audience for this style, the same one, I imagine, that forms a cult of followers who see Amanda Palmer as vaguely divine: an audience of dispossessed, outsider, high school students for whom she, the “Eight Foot Bride,” offers this flower. It’s hard for me to ignore the undertones here of the Bride of Christ, the church which offers peace to the suffering. That’s to say, Palmer treats herself like a religious institution. In a particularly egregious example, after having her ukulele stolen, and after the cynical response that follows, the thieves return it and are forgiven as she “watched [her] faith in humanity…blossom a new little flower.” Do we take this flower?

At a show in 2011, Amanda Palmer learned that a fan, Diane, had lost her entire family in the Christchurch Earthquake. Palmer and fans attempted to comfort and support Diane. Only later they discovered that her story was false. Palmer writes of the experience of giving of herself under false pretense, “Oddly enough, her lie had pulled us all together.” Was this the goal of The Art of Asking? The reader can only wonder. Whether she is self-aggrandizing or not, I admire and respect Palmer for her persistence and openness. I was even taken up in the stories. But as with poor game-design, after a while I started to recognize the repetition and the illusion broke entirely. I suppose also like my first relationship. After finishing the book, I did realize something. I’m unsure whether the unavoidable fact that “the story was fake, but the impact was real” is enough for me.

Justin Goodman Author PhotoA recent graduate from Purchase College, Justin Goodman is working to establish a career and develop knowledge of the literary scene. His writing has been published in Submissions Magazine and Italics Mine.

33 DAYS by Léon Werth reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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33 Days book jacket; family carrying possessions33 DAYS
by Léon Werth, with an introduction by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[translated by Austin Denis Johnston]
Melville House Publishing, 116 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

There are occasions when a phrase or a paragraph or a book hits the main line and after the dose everything is different.

33 Days arrived in the mail ten days ago, on a Friday. Guests were coming for the weekend. Already, the city was filling with people. The weather was warm, finally; pink and purple and white flowers garlanded the city. Fragrance smothered street corners. Whole neighborhoods were ripe for seduction.

The book, slender and impeccably designed, put itself in my hands. I gazed at it quickly then put it down on the cushion in the old grocery store window where in winter we take turns stretching toward the sun. I picked it back up. I hadn’t heard of Léon Werth. But Saint-Exupéry—we forget Saint-Exupéry at our peril.

Still, with masses of people sweeping by the window just as the leaves do in autumn, I skipped the introduction, which Saint-Exupéry wrote in late 1940 to accompany both French and English versions of 33 Days. I went straight for the narrative itself, a memoir of Werth’s flight, along with his wife, Suzanne, from their Paris apartment in June and July 1940 to their country house in the village of Saint-Amour, in the Jura region north of Lyon.

In the morning of June 10, 1940, Werth, a Jew and a leftist, met a friend, “Tr.,” on the Champs-Élysées to assess the situation in the city. Rumors of a German invasion had been intensifying. Could it be true? A sprinkler was watering the lawn along the center of the boulevard. “This sprinkler makes us think childish thoughts,” Werth wrote,

it gives us confidence: “If things were that serious, they wouldn’t think of watering the grass…”

Léon Werth photo

Léon Werth

War’s initial days, particularly, overturn, disrupt, and confuse. This surreal state is the subject of 33 Days. Some eight million people fled German occupation in June, 1940, one of the greatest mass exoduses in human history. L’exode is hardly recognized in the United States, in part because this book has never been published here until today. Werth, the author of more than two-dozen books of art criticism, memoir, and fiction, met Saint-Exupéry in 1931. Their friendship was permanently disrupted by the German invasion, when Saint-Exupéry, with Werth’s manuscript for 33 Days in hand, went to New York to lobby for American involvement in the war. There, he convinced Brentano’s, the bookstore and publishing house, to publish the book in English. In occupied France no Jew was allowed to publish. But while Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince, which he dedicated to Werth, while living in New York, Brentano’s never published 33 Days. The manuscript was thought lost until 1992, when it was published in France; Saint-Exupéry’s plaintive introduction was only just discovered last year by Melville House, which has put it into print for the first time.

At nine in the morning, June 11, Werth and his wife headed south from Paris. Traffic didn’t seem terrible. Their son, Claude, who was fifteen, had left a few hours earlier with friends. Claude’s unknown fate, a kind of accidental metaphor for the future of France, hovers anxiously over Werth’s lucid description of the journey. Expected to last eight hours, it took, amidst the massive caravan of exiles trying to flee German guns, thirty-three days.

Mid-way through the first day on the road, Werth learned that Russia had declared war on Germany. Things were getting real. He wept with the female gas station attendant who told him the news. Soon, they ran into military roadblocks. They had to follow detours right into a caravan of other exiles backed up for miles. For days, they sat in this traffic. “We stop, we start again, but each restart becomes a problem,” Werth wrote. “After several hours it’s exhausting. It’s nerve-racking. The gravity of the moment means little. Less so as the gravity of the moment and mechanical worries combine. We are afraid of breaking down.”

Werth’s style is hallucinatory. The words drip forth as the cars creep, as time loses meaning. “The caravan moves and creaks like the chain of a well. It has neither beginning or end,” he wrote. But to stay alert, Werth sharpened his gaze; his gaze is for Saint-Exupéry, for whom he was certainly writing, his gaze is for us, three-quarters of a century later. “I enter a café,” he recorded,

Refugees, like flies around a packet of sugar, crowd around the proprietor, who half fills the glasses they hold out to him with pale coffee. For the first time I hear the words, uttered by a drowsy woman with a sullen face: “France is betrayed.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry photo

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The aim of the caravan was to cross the Loire River. The German military could take Paris and all of the north, but they wouldn’t be able to overtake the Loire. This was conventional wisdom in the early days of the journey. French soldiers seemed to be heading south as reinforcements. But all of a sudden, there are German soldiers everywhere. In this moment, Werth’s his sharp gaze encountered a stone wall of confusion. These were familiar roads, but amidst gunfire and dying horses and broken down cars, Werth and Suzanne, and the millions of others, began to lose their bearings. “That’s when,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, in the introduction, “the real journey outside oneself begins.”

Outside of time and normalcy, Werth confronted a totally provisional world, of France governed above the Loire by Nazis and below it by what he thinks is still “libre” France, by German soldiers who sunbathe nude and by the housewives who hand them glasses of champagne. Werth’s own confusion was magnified by the circumstances of moral corruption. For weeks, in the longest period of the journey, he and Suzanne were forced to rely on the pinched generosity of Madame Soutreaux, who let them stay on the grounds of her farm, while she cozied up to the German officers camped nearby.

Werth had for years been an outspoken Bolshevik. He wrote disparagingly of colonialist France’s gluttony. And yet restraint is the great moving force of this book. Gentle despair and calm distance produce the moral authority that ultimately transformed Werth from a class warrior into a Gaullist. For now, he trained his eyes on Soutreaux, to try to understand the woman who while feeding and protecting this Jew and his wife from Paris could brag of confidential conversations with German officers. “I only wish to describe Soutreaux as I saw her day by day, kind or contemptible, hateful or ridiculous,” he wrote.

Could they continue to take refuge from the abhorrent woman? Some 124,000 French soldiers were killed by the German military and 200,000 were wounded—more than U.S. casualties during the Korean and Vietnam wars combined—during the six weeks of the 1940 siege, but inside the historical moment Werth couldn’t have comprehended the true proportion of Madame Soutreaux’s moral treason. “One shouldn’t judge categorically or translate honor into a written code. It’s all circumstance,” he concluded, “everything depends on nothing…”

With nothing to steady oneself in this moment of complete upheaval, at least the reader has Werth’s intellectual honesty, precision of observation, and sensitivity to particularity. To Saint-Exupéry, he was a lodestar. “Léon Werth,” wrote Saint-Exupéry at the close of his once lost, now found introduction,

…I so needed to reassure myself of your presence…so that one of the cardinal points of my world would be preserved. Only then, while wandering distantly in the empire of your friendship, which has no boundaries, could I feel like a traveler and not an emigrant. For the desert isn’t where we think it is. The Sahara is livelier than a capital, and the most crowded of cities becomes a desert if the essential poles of life are demagnetized.

This is the skill of a writer, of a man, that so attracted the wise Saint-Exupéry, and that can, in unusual circumstances, turn an author into a necessary interpreter of an increasingly unfathomable world.

Author Photo of Nathaniel PopkinsCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

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Undoing the Demos book jacket; abandoned lecture roomUNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Zone Books/MIT Press, 296 Pages

reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

“SEN. KIRK: RE-ELECT RAHM OR CHICAGO COULD END UP LIKE DETROIT,” reads the Chicago Sun-Times headline.

In the ensuing article, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk argues that the bond market supporting Chicago’s debt respects current mayor Rahm Emanuel over challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Those of us who care about democracy wonder if democratic self-determination—whether defined minimally as self-rule, or, more robustly, as participating in popular sovereignty—is extinguished when one’s vote is determined by the bond market and its assessments. This is the question U.C. Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown explores in her latest book, Undoing the Demos.

Moody’s does not have a citizen’s concern for public schools, parks, museums, local ecology, or Chicago’s other common institutions. Yet these are the political conditions through which citizens find meaning in their lives. For those of us who care about democracy, the worry is whether the authority of finance capital on our political imagination relegates democratic citizenship to being simply the medium through which the investment market controls public life.

The transmogrification of democratic processes to financial ones, a process Brown calls economization, is not only a concern for cities. We economize souls. When Jay-Z rapped, “I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man,” in 2005, he conveyed the spirit of his times. Five years later, the US Supreme Court codified this thought into legal precedent.

Headshot of Wendy Brown

Wendy Brown

In Undoing the Demos , Wendy Brown details why the Courts’ Citizens’ United decision of 2010 does not commit the oft-cited heresy of treating corporations like people, “but rather, the Court’s decision converts people into corporations. She rehearses how Justice Kennedy conflates citizens’ speech with corporate speech and unmoors citizens’ speech from justice concerns. This move casts off the distinctive political valence of the terms rights, equality, and the state. Kennedy replaces the terms’ political valence with economic valences of the same terms. Citizens’ speech is thereby transported from a political register to an economic one.

By leveling down the distinction between citizen speech and corporate speech, the Citizens’ United verdict turns all speech into a form of capital deployed by economic actors to try to enhance their competitive positions and values. Instead of charging the government with the duty of protecting the fragile voices of citizens and respecting the qualitative difference between speech grounded in political concern and corporate speech calibrated to enhance market positioning, Justice Kennedy construes the government as the illegitimate obstacle to free speech in general. The economization of citizens and their speech makes the equivalence between persons and corporations possible. This leaves Kennedy to argue for protecting free speech as the free barrage of undifferentiated speech in a “marketplace of ideas.”

The Citizens United decision is one of a handful of examples Wendy Brown marshals to demonstrate how neoliberalism in contemporary America—that is, the extension of market principles to all aspects of our lives—transforms the subjects of American democracy into roving bits of human capital. While Jay-Z may be right about being a business, the rapper misinterprets his business as one that hawks CDs or cocaine. Jay-Z’s business, like all of our businesses, is that of selling ourselves as sites for capital investment. Our worth as humans is a matter of how much our capital appears poised to appreciate.

Wendy Brown’s contribution to the literature lies in her demonstration of how contemporary neoliberalism legitimizes political behavior: not by transforming people and political sites into consumables, bought and sold on the market for consumption. Rather—because finance dominates market behavior—contemporary neoliberalism renders people and social formations as sites for either capital investment or divestment to spur capital appreciation. Neoliberalism, like Bill Clinton at a wedding, sucks all of the air out of the room, crowds out other justice concerns, and measures all of our actions, public or private, on the scale of whether the actions appear to attract investors.

In recent US-led adventures in Iraq, the confusion between democracy and neoliberalism is given a transnational form. American Paul Bremer served as the spearhead for administrative efforts to establish democracy after Hussein had been toppled, and as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, he declared, “Iraq is open for business,” in 2003.

In the name of democracy, Bremer issued a series of orders to sell off hundreds of state-run businesses—to permit full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses to foreign firms with the repatriation of all profits to the foreign firms, to allow foreign ownership and control of Iraqi banks, to eliminate tariffs, to throttle back public goods, and to circumscribe organized labor, outlawing strikes and banning union activity in most sectors. According to Brown, “lest future elected governments not be so pliable, one order declares that no elected Iraqi government will have the power to alter them [Bremer’s orders].” These efforts describe neoliberalizing, rather than democratizing, post-war Iraq.

Neoliberalism as a governing rationality recasts noneconomic spheres as markets in a way that reforms principles, norms, and subjects. Democratic citizens are reformed as human capital, and this burdens every individual person with the responsibility to invest in herself not for the sake of justice or joy, but in order to develop her knowledge, character, and visage to attain the appearance of a good capital investment, each person knowing that the shape of her life depends on how well she manages her own investments, debt, credit rating, and other market metrics calibrated to present herself as a profitable risk. Government stands on this model as just another potential investor, willing and able to disinvest from citizens as soon as the metrics show them to be a bad investments.

“Human freedom” is no longer the opportunity for life long learning for the sake of her humanity, nor the opportunity to participate in collaborative and contestatory decision making. Neoliberal freedom is, in Brown’s terminology, “responsibilized” to freight individuals with the duty to take another test prep class, to “adopt best practices”, to remain, in every way, competitive and attractive in shifting markets.

When divorced from the greater political concerns of economic health, government support for liberal education—in other words, education for free democratic citizens to participate in self governance—is considered an irrational indulgence. To drive these points home, Brown reviews Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address in which economic health provides the normative force grounding such diverse priorities as lowering teen pregnancy rates, slowing climate change, and ending domestic abuse.

Each of these issues is an obstacle to freedom and democracy and could stand on its own as a justice issue, demanding the attention of a careful public. However, neoliberal rationality only legitimizes arguments aimed at capital appreciation: in other words, domestic abuse is bad because it is “bad for business”.

I found that Brown’s most novel arguments concern the ways in which neoliberalism inflects political sacrifice. Neoliberal notions of shared sacrifice in the age of financialization takes the form of austerity. Brown writes, “In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, for example, 700 billion taxpayer dollars and over five million homeowners were fed to banks ‘too big to fail.’”

In Chicago’s upcoming April election, an apparent gesture of patriotism calls for offering up Chicago’s poor, ill, and vulnerable to further privation in order to propitiate the fickle God Moody’s, demonstrating the city’s radical dependence on a supreme power—a credit agency, that owes us nothing in return.

Political sacrifice is economized, and according to Sen. Kirk, so is my vote in April.

Author Photo of Irami Osei FrimpongIrami Osei-Frimpong is a writer living in Chicago. He is the author of two novels and a stack of short stories. He and his wife created Another Chance Productions, a multimedia company that specializes in political programming including “Disciples,” an original workplace drama that explores the political turning points of an active Midwestern Protestant church. He has a background in academic political philosophy, and his scholarship concerns how public institutions train citizens for their lives as free and equal people living interdependently in America. He plays the oboe and loves how his studies inform how he parents his two daughters.

THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD by Justin Hocking reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld book jacket THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD
by Justin Hocking
Graywolf Press, 266 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

“Grand Programmes of Providence”

Boys can be so mysterious, so closed off with their feelings. Surely they must feel things. But what are they feeling? And what are they thinking about those feelings? Why don’t they talk about those feelings? What do they expect women to do, simply divine those feelings like a barometer at sea—blind to the gathering clouds, deaf to the sound of the gulls and the waves, unable to smell the saltiness of the air? What is the deep wonderworld of a boy’s mind? What do boys want?

Let’s get this out of the way: According to Justin Hocking, it’s not not sex. In his recent memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Hocking shows that boys also want emotional gratification that often, coincidentally, happens with sexual encounters. And he wants it pretty badly. He might even want it as badly as Ahab wants revenge on the white whale.

Hocking’s desire—his addiction—certainly leads him to some strange and dicey situations, and, like Ahab’s quest, often has harmful effects on the people surrounding him. Hocking makes many analogies to characters and situations in Melville’s epic novel. Comparing his life quest for emotional fulfillment with Ahab’s vengeful leadership of the Pequod is only one, and a relatively undeveloped parallel at that.

Headshot of Justin Hocking

Justin Hocking

The narrator is much more attracted to the unskilled Ishmael’s adventure aboard the whaling vessel, and his feelings of lostness in the vast watery world. The memoir describes Hocking’s sojourn of a few years in New York City. After moving from suburban Colorado to the crowded “isle of the Manhattoes”—sorry, rather, Brooklyn—he discovers the pleasures and compulsions of the great sport of surfing. Yes, surfing! Long Island is no Southern California, but for city surfers the shores of Far Rockaway more than suffice.

Throughout the book, alongside his personal history as a reader of Melville, Hocking compiles a history of the sport of surfing, showing its colonial origins and its development in the twentieth century as a popular and competitive endeavor. The sport, a lesser sort of addiction, keeps him buoyant despite an unsatisfying job as a manuscript editor; his friendships among other surfers, as well as the fellow members of an addiction group he joins, are among his strongest in that monumental anonymous city which can often feel about as lonely as an ocean.

Hocking has a knack for describing a sight or a scene with both lightheartedness and emotional heft. At Rockaway, he discovers “a destination worthy of hitchhiking or the squandering of a day’s wages,” a place that, despite the occasional garishness and clamor, offers fleeting glimpses of the sorts of objects that draw Hocking’s attention, like the distant, officious “cargo ships and oil tankers…off on the glimmering, gun-metal horizon.”

These passages of description, among the book’s strongest, are textbook examples of the writer’s aphorism “show-don’t-tell.” They give a sense of what sorts of objects Hocking finds compelling, what objects draw his attention, and watching this gaze is very often more interesting than the explanation he will then launch into about how his journey has been represented by these external objects—the shore, the waves, what lurks beneath, and Melville’s encyclopedic epic novel that narrates them.

Hocking loves surfing as much as he loves Melville, and his love expresses itself in both cases through acts of explanation. For the latter, he diminishes history in favor of a focus on mythic–transhistoric–archetypes devised by Carl Jung and championed by his disciple, Edward Edinger. His affection for this idea can’t be anything but endearing—how much can you really resist the bronzed enthusiasm of your surfer friends in college, who could have such serious fun watching Star Wars on Saturday afternoons. You can almost see Hocking’s bleached curls bounce when he shrugs to acknowledge—yeah, his theoretical guides aren’t “much in vogue these days.”

According to Hocking’s Edinger, the journey of Moby Dick—it’s Melville’s journey, too, evidently—is a “Nekyia,” one in which the hero must descend into the depths before rising again. The astute reader has, by now, correctly guessed that the narrative of Great Floodgates will end in triumph. The trauma’s past. “The drama’s done.” He gets the girl. He moves to Portland.

It’s hard to say that Justin Hocking hasn’t read Moby Dick closely enough and not worry about hurting his feelings. It’s harder still, though, to claim that anyone in Moby Dick has a hero’s journey, even Ishmael. Hocking says that “Ishmael is reborn through the wreckage; having assimilated his shadow after this deep psychic battle.”

That’s certainly one way to read the novel, an interpretation that depends on an optimistic and buoyant desire to make literature neatly useful. Melville may be up to something else, though. Consider that the first edition of the novel had no closing epilogue: the whale sank the ship and everyone, including the narrator, died. Melville added an epilogue to the second edition to explain how Ishmael lived on—wretched and clinging to a coffin. In the first chapter, Ishmael introduces himself, probably insincerely, and speaks darkly of the unshakeable “drizzly November in [his] soul,” of the temptation to throw himself on his sword, like Cato. Moby Dick’s last word is “orphan.”

In addition to powerfully externalizing those often-submerged masculine feelings, the boyish vulnerability that lingers on into adolescence, and post-adolescence, and adulthood, Hocking’s genius is in his sincere, un-self-conscious performance of the countervailing dynamism of literature, the paradoxical way that a work of narrative art can give a sense of closure while denying that same satisfaction to its own characters.

That closure has great utility: Freud once wrote, for example, that literature allows us to imagine that we can imagine death although we actually can’t imagine our own dying. It’s politically useful, too: In the terms of classical Greek literary criticism, this is the principle at work in catharsis—the fear and pity evoked by the downfall of the sovereign. In modernity, it’s tougher to identify a sovereign—is it the whale, the captain, or the norms of plot and character development that only appear to be self-evident after one too many novels?

Author Photo of Ana Schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

THE UNSPEAKABLE: AND OTHER SUBJECTS OF DISCUSSION by Meghan Daum reviewed by Jamie Fisher

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The-Unspeakable book jacketThe Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
by Meghan Daum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

Authenticity is Her Bag

So here’s the problem with coma stories: not everyone gets a coma story. Life-threatening medical emergencies chased closely by miraculous recoveries are, for most of us, in short supply. People who do find themselves with a coma story shouldn’t be surprised when friends, relatives, and neighbors want a piece of it. They want your Ninety Minutes in Heaven, absent the ignominious retraction. They want to know how your near-death experience has changed you, brought you closer to God. They want your spiritual lesson, and they will be insistent.

Meghan Daum’s coma story caps off what you might call a tough year. First her grandmother died, then her mother. Then she began to feel woozy with grief or flu, except that it turned out to be flea-transmitted typhus that knocked her prone on a hospital bed, hovering for days in a medically induced coma. Her total recovery is so unanticipated that her neurologist is prompted to call it miraculous. (Not the word you want to hear from the man with his tools inside your skull, Daum observes.) Because she is a writer, her friends request a “coma story”. But it seems unfair to expect anything beyond a convalescence. Daum is satisfied with coming out of the crisis with her personality, and basic motor skills, intact. “And in this story, I am not a better person. I am the same person. This is a story with a happy ending. Or at least something close enough.”

As the closing essay in a book about authenticity, “Diary of a Coma” makes for a kind of fairy tale about the durability of the self. The collection’s title, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion coyly alludes to the vision of many contemporary personal essayists, that they are to ordinary writers what the war journalist is to the desk-bound blogger, spelunkers whose specialized function is dropping deep into the damp, unpleasant regions of the human soul. Daum both encourages this mentality (“Once or twice I’ve imagined confronting myself at a party, asking, ‘How could you say those things!’ and throwing a drink in my face”) and, a little severely, corrects it.

Her central duty in these essays is a crusade against cliché, in favor of the authentic reaction. She observes that “human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses. I wanted to look at why we so often feel guilt or even ashamed when we don’t feel the way we’re ‘supposed to feel’ about the big (and sometimes even small) events of our lives.” Sometimes that requires Daum to keel towards darker emotions, but just as frequently it calls for more evenhanded treatment.

“So many aspects of American life,” she writes, “seem to come shrink-wrapped in a layer of bathos.” The metaphor implies that what too many memoirists hit is fool’s gold. Where Daum finds Edward Albee-level hysterics, she peels them back to get at the real thing.

In that spirit Daum opens with the stunning “Matricide,” a chronicle of death, obligation, irritation, and inheritance down the female line. As her mother enters the late stages of gastrointestinal cancer, Daum reads “death books” to prepare herself for the final moment: “Medically speaking, I’d found these books to be extremely accurate about how things progressed, but some put a lot of emphasis on birds landing on windowsills at the moment of death or people opening their eyes at the last moment and making amends or saying something profound.” As it was, her brother was on Facebook, and she was on the second page of a Vogue article on Hillary Clinton. So it goes.

At an earlier stage in her mother’s illness, Daum fails to console her mother with the idea of reincarnation. “I don’t want to be a bird,” her mother says. The dying woman’s resistance is so sensible that it stops Daum short. “It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying,” she writes. “We expect wisdom, insight, bursts of clarity… We expect them to clear our consciences, to confirm our fantasies. We expect them to be excited about the idea of becoming a bird.”

Headshot of Meghan-Daum

Meghan Daum

Her honesty can move quickly from the droll detail to the jolt of terror, a tonal trajectory that will remind readers of Donald Antrim’s 2006 memoir-essays, The Afterlife. (Not least because the parallels are unnerving: both Daum and Antrim’s mothers begin to die just days after their own impossible mothers pass away.) Daum’s essay is as sympathetic as it is exasperated with her mother’s artificiality and attempts at self-invention, and frank about her own failures of courage. She admits pretending not to notice when her mother soiled herself, waiting instead for the orderlies to clean up. It’s a choice she makes out of a desire to protect her mother’s dignity, but also out of fear, resentment, and rage. In interviews, Daum has said that this was a detail she nearly dropped.

And that’s the plan. For all the openness a title like “Diary of a Coma” promises, Daum doesn’t refer to her essays as confessions, but “events recounted in the service of ideas.” To fit the service, events require shaping. “While some of the details I include may be shocking enough to suggest that I’m spilling my guts, I can assure you that for every one of those details there are hundreds I’ve chosen to leave out.” In her tribute to Joni Mitchell and the closely tailored confessional, Daum explains, “The lyrics people always interpret as confessions are really just invitations for the listener to come in closer. They’re saying, This isn’t about me. It’s about the whole world.”

By trimming herself back, Daum leaves room for the world she is so marvelously attentive to. Many of the essays have a novelistic feel; they are layered with recurring experiences and characters. Foreshadowing and hindsight bounce off one another, making even the slighter pieces feel internally resonant, like part of a greater tapestry.

Beyond her complicated relationship with her mother, Daum writes movingly and well about her own relationship to motherhood. Despite warnings that she would wake up with her biological clock ringing in her ears, Daum explains, “I would still look at a woman pushing a baby stroller and feel more pity than envy. In fact, I felt no envy at all, only relief that I wasn’t her. It was like looking at someone with an amputated limb or a terrible scar. I almost had to look away.”

Almost, but not quite. Daum’s willingness to look—at death and family obligation, self-deceit and foster care—makes these essays a smart corollary to Leslie Jamison’s compulsively readable essays on pain and empathy. Like Jamison, she writes about the project of self-expansion, but also the necessity of finding one’s limits. Learning to be yourself is, mostly, learning not to be everyone else: “To grow up and get to know yourself is primarily an exercise in taking things off the table.”

◊ 

Daum first came to national attention with My Misspent Youth in 2001. The title essay is one of the most anti-romantic romances ever told about life in New York—a catalogue of credit-card debts and compromises Daum accumulated trying to inhabit the place, and more crucially the Meghan Daum, of her imagination. She described the situation with unsettling forensic ease, and with a wit that would endear her to a generation of would-be Manhattanites. Daum wound up in debt, she explains, “like a social smoker whose supposedly endearing desire to emulate Marlene Dietrich has landed her in a cancer ward.” The experiment ended with Daum apparently settled in Nebraska, but the collection was closely chased by Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir of real-estate infatuation and madness.

In this collection, Daum divides her adulthood, and by extension her publishing history, into two stages. The first act was about “delirious career ambition and almost compulsive moving”; the second act seems “mostly to be about appreciating the value of staying put.” Houses are so neatly the perfect metaphor for questions of identity—certainly Richard Ford has squeezed ample mileage out of them—that Life Would Be Perfect often felt uncomfortably spot-on. Daum called her dream home “an ID badge for adulthood, for personhood, even.” We go shuffling through selves as we shuffle through rooms, and wind up, eventually, in a place where we can live. Identity is a commodity, but also a home. 

One of the joys that comes with following Daum over time is watching her grow into her long, lyrical bones as an essayist, becoming herself and not, say, David Foster Wallace. She has relinquished the bad habit (inherited, I think, from DFW and perpetuated by Charles D’Ambrosio) of slackening her best moments with a put-on folksy eloquence, as if she was embarrassed to be seen writing.

It’s a tendency Daum herself has acknowledged, and one that she hasn’t entirely escaped. See her disquisition, in “Honorary Dyke,” on “all the crap in the media that suggests that not only are women a special interest group, they’re a group whose primary interest is themselves.” That’s pure Wallace: thoughtful analysis distended over long paragraphs, leavened with “crap” and “stuff” and other shrugs towards a laid-back sincerity which say, in total, This phenomenon I am describing is very serious but it’s not a conspiracy or anything like that, dude.

Daum is best, instead, in her sureness. Rather than render equivocation with deliberate clumsiness, Daum renders it exactly. She writes with breathtaking precision about ambiguity and yearning, particularly the preteen—and very post-teen—longing to hurry up and become whatever it is you’re supposed to become, only to find that you’re already, frustratingly, there. In “Not What It Used to Be,” she captures the full-hearted anxiety of her twenties:

I lay on my bed and listened to “So Real” and thought that I was mere inches away from being the person I wanted to be. My fingertips could almost touch that person. That person was both very specific (respected essayist, resident of the 10025 area code, lover of large, long-haired dogs) and someone who took multiple forms, who could go in any direction, who might be a bartender or a guitar player or a lesbian or a modern dancer or an office temp on Sixth Avenue. That person was usually the youngest person in the room.

“The Older Self of our imagination,” she continues, “never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage… It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something.”

Daum’s endings can feel neat, too easily achieved; for all the author’s bristling against convention and resolution, there’s something to be said for the effect of ten years as a columnist on her closing style. She’ll repeat or rephrase a joke, or move into a series of repetitions, tricking you into a sense of rightness. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the insufficiency of her endings is deliberately achieved. Like adolescent yearning, you never really want these essays to cut off. You hope that she’ll invent some way of moving between stories without ever ending. Perhaps a dip, then a fading away, folding inevitably into the next chapter.

Author Photo of Jamie-Fisher

Jamie Fisher is a freelance writer, Chinese-English translator, and budding manuscript conservationist working out of Philadelphia.  She graduated recently from the University of Pennsylvania, where her majors were Linguistics and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. She can be reached at [email protected].

HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE by Clarissa Rile Hayward reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

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How Americans Make Race; chainlink fenceHOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE:
Stories, Institutions, Spaces
by Clarissa Rile Hayward
Cambridge University Press, 234 Pages

reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

I attended a White Protestant church last Sunday. The question, you ask, is what makes a church White? Sure, all of the congregants, except this reviewer and his children, were White. But that fact alone does not a White space make.

The church’s ethnic Whiteness is not a matter of congregation clapping to the hymns on beats one and three. Nor do I suspect that a significant number of the congregants make an effort to keep the congregation all and only White. The overriding signal that I attended a White church is that next Sunday, the Sunday of Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday, I have every reason to believe that this church in Mississippi will have a crisp, efficient service that will start promptly at 10 and let out at 10:55 with nary a reference to King, nor will the general congregation notice King’s absence.

This omission will not be a matter of calculated indifference or passive-aggressive spite; rather, a characteristic feature of this White church is that it simply operates from a different historical, narrative context that does not include memorializing King on the Sunday of his national holiday.

In contrast, invoking King’s legacy on the appointed day is part of the rhythm of the Black church life in America. A Black church failing to recall King on the Sunday of his holiday would be as bizarre as a Christian church holding an Easter service without mentioning Jesus’s resurrection. I suspect that King’s absence would be noteworthy in many American churches because he is one of the few religious leaders whose memory is enshrined in a national holiday, yet still the characteristic feature of the Whiteness of the former church is that next Sunday will come and go and the man will not be referenced.

This omission has the power to reproduce a White church running a racialized service without any avowed racist in the congregation. The Whiteness of the space is not a matter of racist identity stories any of the individual congregants themselves about themselves; rather, the church’s ethnic Whiteness has been institutionalized in the settled, ordinary context of this church’s life.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King

In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward argues that the persistence of racialized spaces is not merely a matter of the remarkable, particular stories individuals tell themselves about themselves; rather, racism persists because of the way racialized commitments are embedded in the unremarkable narrative context, the physical objects and the mundane habits of thought and action, that serve as the unacknowledged backdrop of White community space. If Jill’s identity emerges from stories told against a backdrop of political investment: strong public schools, smooth roads, well-paid teachers, etc., then Jill will have a hard time making sense of herself in a space characterized by political disinvestment. This second space will be felt as hostile in an existential way, even though the space may not be any more physically dangerous.

Hayward argues against the “narrative identity thesis,” the notion that racial identities are matter of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. She argues that, while this thesis can explain how Americans produce race through narrating racial hierarchies and racialized aspirations, the thesis cannot account for how racism is persistently reproduced, once the initial racist narrative identities evolve into seemingly race-neutral stories.

Recall our White church. A feature of the church’s Whiteness is how it participates in an institutionalized context that is normalized to omit reference to King, even as a large share of American church life embraces the opportunity to remember the pastor and civil rights icon. It is important to remember how this church is White even if every congregant individually embraces a gospel of inclusion and rejects their forebears’ explicitly racist beliefs; however, it is these racist forebears who put the church on an ethnically White path by institutionalizing a context that disproportionately depreciates King’s relevance for the life of their church.

Hayward argues that racist housing policy has put Americans on a path that disproportionately shunts community resources to ethnically White spaces, regardless of the post-racial identity stories Americans tell themselves about their political behavior. The simple argument is that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private developers made money by selling houses to White Americans. The deep political problem is all of the public, institutional structures that had to be contorted to help developers build housing and get White Americans to want to buy houses.

Detroit, 1942

Detroit, 1942

There was a sophisticated campaign launched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to tie the American identity to being a white owner of a detached, single-family home. However, while Americans, by and large, fought in wars, avoided polio, worked, and died; they did not, contrary to the narrative, own single-family houses. The notion that real Americans were White nuclear families who bought single-family houses was novel and needed to be marketed. Beyond marketing, the notion needed policies that subsidized building these single-family houses and people with political authority to use their office to convince Americans to take out mortgages. This campaign involved a strategically contrived sense of patriotism. American masculinity was tied to owning and providing for a single-family house, and American femininity was tied to taking care of a single-family home.

Stories, insofar as they are coherent and legitimate, can produce racism, but American racism is reproduced when these stories are institutionalized by the politics of material incentives nudging people to follow the racist housing script. For example, for a large swath of the housing construction boom, the Federal Housing Administration would only insure mortgages to segregated neighborhoods because they were deemed more stable, so even if Americans wanted to live in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, they could not qualify for the federally insured lower minimum down payment or lower interest rates. Even if the homeowners were not bigots, it was still in their material interest to go along with the segregationists.

These policies and the material exponents of these policies are how we created contemporary White America. If this marketing of American identity sounds familiar, De Beers ran a frighteningly successful campaign in the same era to tie a real wedding engagement to purchasing a diamond ring. But De Beers did not bargain with American politicians to use public money to subsidize suitors’ abilities to buy wedding rings. Twentieth century developers not only successfully lobbied for policies that incentivized buyers to buy—and make it almost financially irresponsible not to buy these homes. They also succeeded time and time again in getting community resources in direct and indirect aid marked to build their for-profit housing adventures.

Headshot of Clarissa Hayward

Clarissa Hayward

Hayward binds her arguments together in a stirring theory of how the play of racial housing policies and contemporary local governance structures work in a colonial manner to extract wealth from urban centers to fund the public resources of racialized suburbs. This is clear in a metropolis like Chicago, where you can have a doctor who lives in a wealthy suburb, for example, Highland Park, and earns her salary at a downtown Chicago hospital. This hospital remains a viable institution because of the labor of janitors, nurses and security guards who do not live in Highland Park. This doctor takes her salary back to Highland Park, pays taxes and politically deliberates with the Highland Park lawyers and bankers who also work in downtown Chicago, and together the elite professionals of Highland Park decide to support Highland Park public resources, indifferent to public resources available to the Chicago janitors, nurses, and security guards who participate in generating the wealth invested in Highland Park’s public infrastructure. For this reason, thoughtful anti-racists have to think about how the fragmented governance of the American metropolis works to benefit already privileged groups.

Hayward’s book is taut piece of political scholarship written in accessible prose by a careful thinker. She draws from a store of political knowledge as well as bevy of interviews to explain how our political structures and history account for the persistent reproduction of racism in contemporary American life, even when the narratives individuals tell themselves about their behavior are pointedly post-racial.

Author Photo of Irami Osei-FrimpongIrami Osei-Frimpong is a writer living in Chicago. He is the author of two novels and a stack of short stories. He and his wife created Another Chance Productions, a multimedia company that specializes in political programming including “Disciples,” an original workplace drama that explores the political turning points of an active Midwestern Protestant church. He has a background in academic political philosophy, and his scholarship concerns how public institutions train citizens for their lives as free and equal people living interdependently in America. He plays the oboe and loves how his studies inform how he parents his two daughters.

Image Credits: Martin Luther King, Jr., Pixabay; Detroit, 1942, Library of Congress 

THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS by Marina Keegan reviewed by Colleen Davis

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The Opposite of Loneliness cover art. A woman in a yellow coat stands in a park.THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
by Marina Keegan
Scribner, 240 pages

reviewed by Colleen Davis

There’s a stretch of Philly’s Walnut Street Bridge that makes me tap my brakes. I’m not a slow driver by nature, but that corner with the new streetlight always makes me reduce speed. About a year ago, a young man lost his life right there, when two cars collided. As one of the vehicles spun onto the sidewalk, Zachary Woods climbed the streetlight to avoid the car. Unfortunately the vehicle knocked both man and lamppost over the bridge. If the story isn’t sad enough, consider how talented Zachary was: he’d received dual admission to the MBA program at the Wharton School and a selective International Business program with the Lauder Institute. The guy was fluent in Chinese, skilled in international investment, and a record-breaking NCAA swimmer. No calculator is sophisticated enough to tally what the world lost during that crash.

The memory of this incident haunted me as I read The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of pieces written by Marina Keegan. Her title essay scored more than a million Internet hits shortly after its online publication. Marina, whose lovely smile adorns the book jacket, earned a Bachelor’s Degree, Magna Cum Laude from Yale, and had a job offer at The New Yorker. But her promising life ended in a car crash just five days after her graduation ceremony. You can read the book to commemorate her life and talent—or read it just to be impressed by the skills a young person can acquire when fully immersed in the craft of writing. Marina clearly had the literary ability needed to launch a promising career.

I approached the volume with some reverence, thinking often of talented college students I know and the love their parents invested in every aspect of their growth. What solace is there for a mother or father who sees the life of their prodigious child erased under such tragic circumstances? I believe that Marina’s parents published the book as a means of seeding their daughter into our consciousness—as Marina might have, if she’d lived out her literary dreams. I began reading the book as if it were a tribute, and I tagged the first few sections as precocious work from a young adult immersed in the college experience. But I also found myself wondering if I could have written something that good at her age. If I answer with total honesty, I’d have to say her technique was better than my collegiate approach, but her imagination seemed no more exceptional than most people I studied with. Then I got to a section called “Reading Aloud,” one of the book’s short stories, and became convinced that Marina really did have a kind of nuanced understanding that very few people possess in their early 20’s. Her writing captures the experience of a young blind man—and the middle-aged woman who reads to him—in a way that feels real, raw, and compelling.

Among the book’s pieces, the short stories offer the best barometer of Marina’s talent. She writes convincingly about the experiences of people trapped in a lost submarine, a woman who gives a baby up for adoption, and a young American civilian working in Iraq’s Green Zone. The stories have a striking elegance and precision. An unusual number of her pieces mention the topic of untimely death. I couldn’t help wondering if the author had some strange sense that she might not live a long and eventful life. Even the quotes between sections seem to suggest that she had an acute awareness that our existence could be extinguished at any moment.

Whether we escape tragedy, or live with what Jon Kabat-Zinn calls “The Full Catastrophe,” the experience we call life is really a fragile illusion, easily undone by random events. We nurture those we love and plan for what we think will happen next. But there is no guarantee that things will proceed in the safe and predictable way we crave. As a reader, I’m glad that the Keegan family decided to publish their daughter’s writings. Together they document Marina’s interest in other people, her ability to capture unique emotional experiences, and the extent to which her work can inspire young people to develop their full range of talents. Her story also provides a potent antidote to complacency. We are beginning a new year. Don’t wait to write your stories. Don’t wait to share your love. Tap the brakes, pay attention, don’t wait.

Colleen Davis author photo

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. Her writing has been featured in Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, Elephant Journal, and on episodes of the television documentary  Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. 

A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH by Kathryn Hellerstein reviewed by Alyssa Quint

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A-Question-of-Tradition-Hellerstein book jacketA QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987
by Kathryn Hellerstein
Stanford University Press, 496 pages

reviewed by Alyssa Quint

Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women’s Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987.

Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” To Eliot’s eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what “compels a man to write,” (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture.

The Yiddish poetry of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is most gratifying for the reader as literary tradition to the moderns rather than as literature in its own right. It consists mostly of prayers shaped by piety and mortal fear of a community in crisis. Under these conditions, East European Jewry every so often generated the rare thing: a female composer of verse. Not in Hebrew, the usual language of Jewish prayer, these examples of Yiddish vernacular “brought women’s voices into the synagogue service,” as Hellerstein explains. But they only barely rise to the level of poetry.

These small bundles of Yiddish prayers became sturdy tradition for modern Yiddish poetesses. As a group, the twentieth-century female poets were cosmopolitan and multilingual. Still, the old Yiddish prayers were “in their bones,” as Eliot might have observed.

One of the most singular voices belonged to Kadya Molodowsky, born in White Russia who came of age during World War I and cultivated her poetic voices over decades. A secular Jew, Molodowsky nonetheless deploys the prayer’s form to plead for heavenly attention:

I have so much prayer,
But, as a blade of Your grass in a distant, wild field
Loses a seed in the lap of earth
And dies away,
Sow in me Your living breath,
As You sow a seed in the earth.
(135)

Lovely in its unexpected syntax, “I have so much prayer”, the phrase simultaneously expresses abundance and desire. For Molodowsky, poetry as Jewish prayer is complicated; it doesn’t yield enough of a creative or intellectual canvas without work, without unfurling its corners. She can’t settle into the language of traditional Judaism, for instance, without judging its neglect of women’s intellect:

And why should this blood without blemish
Be my conscience, like a silken thread
Bound upon my brain?

As Hellerstein comments, “the binding thread [. . .] evokes the straps of the phylacteries (two small leather boxes containing prayers worn by observant men during prayer).” Why should the “blood without blemish,” or menstruation be one of the only ways Jewish women are bound by Jewish law when the legal tradition for men is so rich and varied?

The poems of the moderns stem from their pious grandmothers but generate a new Yiddish poetic language. In it, Molodowsky writes about her adulterous relationship and Celia Dropkin, also of White Russia, writes of sexual desire:

Spoiled, stroked by many women’s hands
You were the one I met on my way,
Young Adam.
And before I had placed my lips on you,
You begged me
With a face more pale and tender
Than the tenderest lily:
-Don’t bite me, don’t bite me.
I saw that your body
Was entirely covered with teeth marks,
So tremblingly, I bit into you.

Here the man is the delicate lily, the woman, not a seductress but an active aggressor. Elsewhere in this body of poetry, as Hellerstein highlights, prostitution and scenarios of pregnancy and abortion move these poems far from the modality of prayer.

Headshot of Kathryn Hellerstein

Kathryn Hellerstein

Hellerstein’s book is comprehensive, supplying the biographical details of six important poets’ lives in one volume for the first time. Letters she quotes are revealing. She includes the female poets’ shy asides in their letters when they are asked for photographs of themselves. By this time, studio photographs of smartly-dressed male Yiddish writers circulated widely as postcards and appeared in Yiddish newspapers. In contrast, the female poets are embarrassed by their appearance.

We already knew about the six poets; Hellerstein herself had translated some of their work into English previously. Anna Margolin is probably the best known: “This is the night, the grief, the not-becoming,/The treacherous light of dreams.” Hellerstein might have pointed to lesser-known modern female Yiddish voices and she might have drawn on greater scholarly discussions about women’s literature to refine the poetic tradition her book presents.

Still, her book provides an amplitude to the discussion of these women that was previously denied them. The translations, accurate in meaning and still with the effortlessness of poetic language, capture the urgency of their voices. And Hellerstein’s book lays to rest any question of tradition; it is there: inflected by prayer as the book’s framework suggests, but also colored by difficult lives and a confidence born of their survival.

Here is one of the last Yiddish poets, Malka-Hefetz Tussman, in a poem she wrote after she emigrated to America:

My cheek on the earth
And I know why mercy

Lips to the earth
And I know why love.

My nose in the earth
I know why theft.

Teeth in the earth
I know why murder.

Tussman’s verse reflects a voice shaped by difficult circumstances, but this time post-prayer, all-knowing, and self-assured.

Sometime in the late 1920s the Yiddish poet Roza Yakubovitsh noted in a letter from her native Polish city of Kalisz that “little by little indeed the visage of the Yiddish woman poet rises to reveal itself.” (404) In Hellerstein’s study, it is indeed revealed.

Author Photo of Alyssa QuintAlyssa Quint is the author of a forthcoming book on the Yiddish theater entitled The Social Life of Jewish Theater in Imperial Russia.  She lives in New York City.

THE DEEP ZOO by Rikki Ducornet reviewed by Kim Steele

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The Deep Zoo book jacketTHE DEEP ZOO
by Rikki Ducornet
Coffee House Press, 106 pages

reviewed by Kim Steele

Rikki Ducornet begins her newest book of essays, The Deep Zoo:

To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies. Writing is reading and reading a way back to the initial impulse. Both are acts of revelation.

And, just as a text is unknown until it is written, the deep zoo—the essential potencies at the core of humanity—exist unknown until explored. In this book of essays Ducornet boldly ventures into this essential human core.

Ducornet is the author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays, and five books of poetry. She has received an Academy Award in literature as well as a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. Ducornet is also a painter who exhibits around the world.

Rikki Ducornet, photo by George Marie

Rikki Ducornet

While slim, The Deep Zoo is not a quick read. In the barely three page piece, “Eros Breathing,” Ducornet manages to reference Lewis Carroll, Dick Cheney, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, Rig Veda, Victor Jara, and Borges. She draws connections with the grace of someone who has been doing this a while, the breadth of reference speaking to her intelligence. You get the sense that she sees pathways everywhere and draws connections where others don’t. This kind of connecting of people, concepts, and ideas naturally makes for a slow and methodical read.

A handful of Ducornet’s essays include visual examples of the art she references. In “The Egyptian Portal: The Art of Linda Okazaki,” Ducornet explores Okazaki’s personal history and the ways that history informs her visual art. This essay is embedded with examples of Okazaki’s art, the presence of which adds richness to the analysis. “In Her Bright Materials: The Art of Margie McDonald,” Ducornet includes a photograph of the artist in her studio. This photograph works to remind the reader of how much a work space or–if we want to keep up with the reading analogy–a draft or notebook, also acts as a reading of the world.

In “War’s Body” (just a page and a half long), Ducornet proposes that “[a] chronic fear and loathing of the body, our own bodies and the bodies of strangers” is a contributing factor to the undoing of our democracy. It’s an ambitious and interesting theory that Ducornet only barely begins to explore. The brevity of essays such as this one makes the book as a whole seem a bit more casual than it might otherwise. It is as if she is in conversation with us, suggesting ideas and theories as they occur to her.

What struck me most about this collection, and what I am confident will pull me back to it again, is Ducornet’s obvious passion for life. She is, as a writer and presumably a person, all the things she asks us to be: attentive, fearless, and curious. And for a hundred pages we get to see how it feels to exist like that, what it’s like to think critically and still be open to the world.

Ducornet left me with a list over half a page long of other authors and artists to research during my next trip to the library. The book made me feel even more compelled to slow down and take notes. I wanted to understand the arguments and ideas that Ducornet proposed. I wanted to uncage my own “deep zoo,” a task she claims requires one “to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time.”

Author Photo of Kim-SteeleKim Steele lives in Chicago where she spends most of her days reading near the space heater. You can follow her on Twitter at KJ_Steele.

ON THE ABOLITION OF ALL POLITICAL PARTIES by Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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On-The-Abolition-of-All-Political-Parties book jacketON THE ABOLITION OF ALL POLITICAL PARTIES
by Simone Weil, translated by Simon Leys
New York Reviews of Books, 71 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

When Albert Camus heard that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1957, he ran and hid. Averse to the frenzy of the press, he sought refuge in the home of a friend. He landed at the apartment of the family of Simone Weil in Paris’s 6th Arrondissement. Another friend, Czeslaw Milosz, in an essay on Weil, recalls that home fondly. He notes the humble, ink-stain-covered kitchen table, and he recalls the generous hospitality of Mme. Weil, mother of the young philosopher. He all but represents the quality of morning light illuminating the desk at which the young Weil would do her thinking. He never directly states that by 1957, Weil had been dead for almost fifteen years.

Simone Weil’s short 34 years leave a high-water mark for any politically committed life. Her primary occupation was education, one likely reason for her lucid and straightforward prose. After a precocious youth, she attended university in Paris in the same class as Simone de Beauvoir. The two of them, apocryphally, achieved the highest marks for the certificate in Philosophy and Logic. De Beauvoir came in second. Finishing there, she went on to teach philosophy for high school girls. Alongside her vocation, she participated actively in Marxist politics of the day, and her writing in trade union papers received wide circulation. Not only did she participate in the Spanish Civil War, but she also boldly confronted many of her politically powerful contemporaries. Before dying of tuberculosis, she had won several sparring partners, such as Trotsky and Gorkin, but also several committed friends, among them, Camus.

Simone Weil

Simone Weil

Weil’s 1943 essay On the Abolition of All Political Parties is short and provocative. The New York Review of Books Classics has republished it in a slim volume that includes Milosz’ essay and a second essay by Simon Leys, the translator, on the friendship of Milosz, Weil and Camus. In Weil’s central essay, barely over 30 pages, she briskly paces through an argument against the existence of political parties. Political parties pretend to serve some greater good yet they can only seek the good for their own members rather than the collective good. The noise of political competition excuses the existence of parties that never exactly detail the stakes, their positions, nor how any given decision would affect the common good. Furthermore, political parties quash the conscience of any individual participant. One wills themselves a member before fully understanding the party’s positions, an impossibly vague task. After joining, the party’s single-minded pursuit of power makes conscientious and attentive thought impossible. Nothing is easier, Weil asserts, than to provoke minds to quickly agree or disagree. Much more strenuous is the command “Meditate on this text, and then express the ideas that come to your mind.”

Simone Weil’s critique of political parties isn’t an argument against democracy. Her short historical account of the development of political parties in Europe is pessimistic: She calls political parties a sort of “artificial crystallization” that are “an inheritance from the Terror;” in answer to her own rhetorical question on whether they do any good, she concludes: No, and follows up with an even more damning rhetorical question: “Are they not pure, or nearly pure evil?” Yet she highly values democracy for the central place it holds, even if often nominally, for subjective conscience. The challenge for post-1789 democracies is how to bring citizens together around shared truths in an honest way, yet one that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own pluralist ideals. For Weil, one of the most hopeful solutions is the world of letters, the loose and porous communities that come together over print publication—sometimes only brief associations, sometimes deeply enduring ones. Despite its strong polemic aims—“The Abolition of All Political Parties,”—the reader’s reaction to this print publication might be rather modest: Few readers today earnestly affiliate with political parties, and would be more apt to have casually agreed with her title before even opening the book.

But its powerful intervention might reside less in the discussion of the party system, and more in the metaphysical implications of her argument. Weil’s book participates in an ongoing contemporary discourse on the relationship between politics and religion. The early 21st century has revived early 20th century debates on Political Theology, the premise that politics is theology, might even be religion by other means. Weil most directly puts this forward in her historical account of totalitarianism before 1789. She writes of the pre-rational fealty that the Catholic Church at one time demanded: faith first, then reason. Only the difference for Weil, herself a complicated Catholic convert, is that the church puts forward stronger claims to knowing the truth. For one, the church dares to make those claims, which political parties have not the courage to explicitly do. By contrast, her prose makes direct and concise claims: “There is only one answer. Truth is all the thoughts that surge in the mind of a thinking creature whose unique, total, exclusive desire is for the truth.” Therefore notice, in this essay at least, that when she turns to the idea of truth, she is also bringing into her argument a subtle element of the theological, a desire for larger assertions of value that resonate with an attentively cultivated inner light.

Czeslaw Milosz observes, in the first of the two essays that append this volume, that for Weil, attentiveness is another way to pray. In this light, Weil’s project in this volume is a re-sacralization of Western politics. On its own, the essay might not appear that way. Her prose is sparing and brusque and she glosses over history with an expedient, and at times uncomfortable swiftness. But insofar as this little volume represents one instance of the print communities that she so valorizes, the posthumous collaboration among Weil, Milosz, Camus and Leys reinvests this essay with a prayerful attitude. In accord with her Catholicism, the experience of reading this book is a little like communion with the saints, no less nourishing and needful than the quiet moments at the breakfast table, after coffee, merely meditating.

Author Photo of Ana Schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

Bolaño: A BIOGRAPHY IN CONVERSATIONS by Mónica Maristain reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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Bolano book jacket; glasses Bolaño: A BIOGRAPHY IN CONVERSATIONS
by Mónica Maristain
Melville House, 288 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

“Companionable Fictions”

The first section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 describes a small but ardent group of academic literary critics who dedicate their lives to the work of an obscure German author, Benno von Archimboldi. Almost five hundred pages later, in the last section, “The Part About Archimboldi” Bolaño finally introduces the author. In between stretch many strange adventures, but most are not directly related to the work of the author. But neither, really, was the first part, “The Part About the Critics.” Instead, Bolaño narrates the friendships and rivalries of four dedicated readers. If not for the table of contents, the fictitious novelist would appear to be merely the occasion to build a story out of these otherwise unremarkable lives. Actually, for the characters, Archimboldi, who keeps evading their grasp, really does turn out to be an excuse for them all to sustain richer and more companionable lives.

Mónica Marstain’s recent biography of Roberto Bolaño is a little like that. What’s different is that she interviews almost everyone in his world. Reminiscing on their various relationships with the cult author, one gets a more vivid picture of the many worlds in which Bolaño circulated, more vividly and clearly than the author himself appears. It is the first major biography of Bolaño, but instead of a neat and easily digestible chronicle of one man’s short, brilliant life, Maristain has assembled a loose, and for the most part, satisfying bio-picaresque. Bolaño, perhaps the most famous Latin American literary figure of the 21st century, appears in these pages as a literary savant—a poet and a novelist—and a playful friend.

Critically, Marstain appears to revitalize the biography genre, not by presenting a new perspective on the author, but by including the many new perspectives and anecdotes shared by his companions. The volume is brisk and animated, and, as Maristain reminds us over and again, unweighted by the burden of mythology that Bolaño’s memory has suffered for the past two decades.

roberto-bolano-at-paula-chico

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño appeared on the Anglo-American literary scene in 2006 with the translation and publication of his fourth novel, The Savage Detectives. It was hailed for its iconoclasm and daring. Within two years, English-speaking readers received his tenth and ultimate novel, the weighty 2666. A few of his early short works had already been translated into English, but this rapid succession of major and well-recognized sub-genres of the novel—the road trip and the encyclopedic novel—cemented his status as a major contemporary novelist, regardless of national origin. The fame was shored up by his commercially satisfying biography: an early sense of destiny; his nomadic travels within the Spanish-speaking world, primarily Chile, Mexico and Spain; and a relatively young death, an unfortunately short life decorated at its edges by rumors of serious drug addiction. It’s the sort of thing that a mainstream American book review might lyricize as “a long period of displacement and travel and drug-taking and odd jobs in France and Spain.”

Maristain’s biography militates against this myth. In the conversations with fellow writers, critics and friends, the tragic writer myth does reappear frequently. It’s difficult to avoid, of course. One virtue of this biography’s aversion to smooth and linear narrative is that it can remind readers of how addictive such narrative can be.

Maristain follows traditional biographical narrative to open the book. The first chapters are about Bolaño’s childhood in Chile, his family life, and his youth and early adulthood in Mexico. These chapters give a strong sense of his early dedication to literature. His family and early friends consistently recall Roberto as a relentless reader and savage writer, and here and there in these memories, they note that he could also be self-conscious, sometimes jestingly so, about deliberately cultivating the personality of a writer. He smoked, he read, he smoked, he wrote.

The Savage Detectives book jacketHe persists with this persona into the later years, but his friends recall a more spontaneous, and often more fun adult than the Bolaño of myth. Bolaño was active in a group of avant-garde Mexican writers who called themselves the Infrarealists. He may even have been the founder. The group was memorialized in The Savage Detectives as the Visceral Realists. Juan García Madero, the narrator of that novel, writes at its outset: “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realist. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.”

The Infrarealists rejected the too-commercial, too-sentimental literature of the generation before, the writers of the Latin American Boom, which was represented in its most popular form by authors like Isabel Allende or Octavio Paz. It’s a perverse pleasure to be treated to the literary shade-throwing Maristain includes so early in the book: The insults exchanged between Bolaño and Allende are particularly sour, and if they seem unfairly directed at the writer’s person, it’s a tacit, reasonable consequence of the Infrarealist idea that aesthetics ought not be separated from an artistic life—a sentiment familiar to avant-garde movements throughout history. This is one reason it’s so hard to extricate the myth of Bolaño from any account of his life. Good literature is, evidently, a totalizing life endeavor.

But if it’s a holistic life pursuit then it also includes the camaraderie and influence of other writers. Maristain preserves the camaraderie in the form of the conversational biography. When she turns to the author’s friends to describe his personal development, she emphasizes how even the most determinedly individual authors depend on their communities. These friends and companions are themselves major contemporary Latin American authors and literary figures in their own rights. Maristain tracks down Ignacio Echevarría, one of the leading critics of twentieth century Latin American literature and Bolaño’s “executor,” Jorge Herralde, the founder of the publishing house Anagrama, and Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico’s eminent contemporary novelists and playwrights. Accidentally, the biography does double duty as an introductory primer to Contemporary Latin American literature. This feature doesn’t depend on the conversational format, but readers benefit from getting an intimate account of the relationships among authors, a first-hand account of aesthetic and intellectual affinities.

The polyphony leads to perhaps one of the best features of this format in retrospectively assessing Bolaño’s work: if these conversations tell us anything, they collectively tell us that it’s okay to not actually like all of Bolaño’s work, or even like him at all. Just as the rumors about his tragically high place in the line for the liver transplant that might have saved him, no one seems to really agree on what his importance for Latin American letters will have been. Some of his closest friends happen to love his writing; others don’t care for it much at all. But even when their assessments of the aesthetic qualities conclude in the negative, all seem to agree that Bolaño’s existence as a character has impacted 20th century literature, particularly for Latin America in its relation to the world.

2666-roberto-bolano book jacketLatin America’s relationship to English-language readers is essential here. According to some of Maristain’s interlocutors, the popularity he’s enjoyed in the United States is evidence of the a loss of faith in literature following the “postmodern games” of the late 20th century. In addition to the fantasy of a writer who gives up everything for his craft, there’s the playful earnestness of the Infrarealists. Like Juan García Madero, Juan Pascoe, a real-life poet, reminisces on the moment that “everyone said: ‘The Infrarealist movement has begun,’ I can’t remember if we signed a paper or not, and then we left.” Yet it’s not so simple as a reckless pursuit of literary poverty. According to pretty much every source, Bolaño’s primary goal was indeed literary fame, and yes, it did lead him through certain precarious jobs—there were times when he worked at a campsite half the year in order to save money for the other half, when he lived in Madrid, for example. But from his earliest days, his friends and family point out, he aspired to a middling class status, and to perform it well. He was a fastidious dresser, for example, always ironing his clothes; there had to be dignity despite low income.

From these interviews, Maristain composes an example of an artistic life inseparable from historical and national context. In some ways, this is disappointing: it’s less glamorous to imagine such an intense and moving writer having to go about daily life, even working to construct for himself the life that most of us happen to already live. On the other hand, there’s a persistent humor to the dullness, one that Bolaño himself, evidently, grew into. Even if he knew from a young age that he would become an important writer, his relationship to that personal goal changed over time. His friends often observe how he used to be much more intense about his love life, for instance, but grew into an ironic amusement about his intensity. After his death, the city of Girona named a street after him; it’s quite an honor, and more than one friend observes that No. 2666 on that street will be worth quite a sum one day. Still, these friends share the pleasant and laughable irony that for now, the street is empty, in the middle of a distant suburb.

Headshot of Mónica Maristain

Mónica Maristain

Mónica Maristain holds the ambivalent distinction to have held the last interview with Roberto Bolaño. Melville House also published the text of that email exchange, in 2011, as part of the press’s Last Interview series. Transforming from an interviewer into a biographer has its rough patches for Maristain, and, with tactful circumscription, she admits the difficulty. For example, in the chapter on the escribidoras, the popular (mostly female) writers of the Latin American Boom, she includes one of the few references to her own opinion and tastes. She presents herself in the third-person, acknowledging that the work of a literary critic is to some degree distinct from the work of the interviewer, but that the biographer must be both. The same sense of self-alienation is apparent in a remark, near the end of the book, that the gossipy anecdotes of the popular press have “nothing to do with appreciating Bolaño’s work, which essentially is all that matters.” The disavowal might be legitimate, and it might not; but what’s interesting is her intensity. There is the chance that, given the generic strangeness of this book, and the intense personal nature of the Infrarealist movement, that the personal anecdotes might matter to the literary appreciation, and matter quite a bit.

But more often than not, Maristain’s enthusiasm serves her well, even if it’s awkward. Sometimes she asks questions to her subjects that seem awfully over-determined, or just contrived. “Would you say that you were perfect for each other,” she asks his publisher; to Echevarría, she asks: “Is that how you were seduced by Roberto’s literature?” “Is Roberto a ghost?” she asks Carla Rippey, one of his life-long close friends and correspondents. With patience, however, these questions often lead to the most fascinating answers. Especially memorable is the answer Rodrigo Fresán gives to her almost impatient question: “What happened the day he came to urgently ring your doorbell?” Her impatience jumps off the page, and awkwardly. The answer is so delightful it all but leaves behind the lame question. Bolaño had left dinner at Fresán’s house only to return within the hour and with a story about how he had, in the meantime, killed a man. Fresán’s reconstruction of Bolaño’s story unfolds with great vividness. Then Bolaño revelas that he wasn’t serious; it had been a joke all along. This is the best sort of fiction. It may have been possible in a biography, but the interview preserves some of the immediacy of Bolaño’s own ad-libbed invention, his skill as an “excellent oral narrator.” It reminds the reader that, whatever his or her historical circumstances, the most treasured experiences of living the life of the artist are when we can enlist our friends in our fictions, and enlist them in circulating those fictions anew.

Author Photo of Ana Schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

MY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: A MEMOIR by Brian Turner reviewed by Jamie Fisher

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My-Life-as-a-Foreign-Country; two soldiersMY LIFE AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: A MEMOIR
by Brian Turner
W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

Just a few years into the Iraq invasion, I remember a certain amount of critical hand-wringing over the absence of War Literature, or the absence of an audience willing to receive it. We had the relentless daily body counts, the Iraqi countryside reduced to numbers and the names of cities. We had news. What we were waiting for was a sense of perspective: writers who could walk into the news cycle and persuasively inhabit the numbers. Preferably we wanted soldier-poets, in the Wilfred Owen tradition, who could combine the insiders’ perspective and personalization with a capacity for irony. In a decade characterized by the deterioration of public institutions and increased privatization, we wanted, oddly enough, more privatization. 

Ten years later, we have a crop of fine veteran-writers and a receptive market, from Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay’s stories in Redeployment, and Brian Turner’s poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner, who has been praised as the poet of the Iraq/Afghanistan Generation soldier-writers, has now released his much-anticipated memoir of seven years spent fighting in the Army. Even in its title, My Life as a Foreign Country seems to offer up that promised personalization of the war.

Ironically, Turner writes best, and most personally, about feelings of depersonalization. The book opens with Turner’s vision of himself as a drone, a phantom hovering over his sleeping body, ready to perform reconnaissance. Here and elsewhere, Turner’s work emphasizes the tension between the soldier-writer as observer and as participant. “Soon local Iraqis will refer to us as ‘the ghosts,’” Turner writes, “because of the speed and silence of our approach.” Ghosts become a broader theme, encompassing the dead but also the living displaced. He imagines the “slow-moving ghosts” of Mosul, “returning to their homes each night to sleep with the ones they love.” Meanwhile the soldiers at war slip away each night to clean sheets with their girlfriends in Baton Rouge. The book is a love song to the infrequency of ever occupying your own body.

It’s also a loving, complicated tribute to the marital culture that runs down the male side of his family, which seems to have fought in every armed conflict since the American Civil War. It’s a record of what it means to inherit masculinity, and the skittish terror of inadequacy stamped on its backside. After being mauled by a drunk trucker, his father “never had to say a word about it. The scar said it all. The scar said he could take it. Pain. Hardship. Trouble… The scar said—that which is written in the flesh is irrefutable. This is the mark of a man. This is what it takes.”

Making napalm with his father, he recalls, “I wanted to see it break open in fire. I wanted the world to be shaken by it. And, most of all, I wanted to be shaken by it, too.”

Headshot of Brian Turner

Brian Turner

Turner understands the childishness of that wanting. In a perfect moment, he recreates the war film he made with friends in middle-school, the boys darkening the peach fuzz on their upper lips with mascara. It’s a rehearsal for the role-play and artifice of real armed conflict—the enemy soldier’s head replaced, for the kill-shot, with a watermelon “filled with sheep’s blood and pig brains from Cherry Auction.” It makes you wonder what all this mannishness will come to. After the explosion of sixteen Iraqi policemen, Turner writes, “There is a mustache, alone, on a sidewalk.”

Turner can make masterful use of understatement: At one point, having almost blown up an old woman and her family, he compensates her for the two chickens that did die with “the seven dollars I have on me at the time.” More often, he overreaches. His usual cinematic range is high and furious. This is the kind of book where, when sheep get blown up, “you can watch their jaws mouthing upward toward God.” It’s also a book with strong sympathies for the Gothic imagination; he perpetuates an angsty set of vocabulary and imagery for pain, depression, and despair. There’s a lot of darkness and whispering here, a lot of plaintive references to autumn. Foreigners have “ancient” faces and voices, eyes like stone or rivers or anything else that situates them in a vaguely Middle Eastern landscape.

From a poet, all this is surprisingly prosaic, and often frustrating. For some readers, it may raise the uncomfortable question of how far Turner’s soldier credentials have gotten him in the literary world. One of his poems from Poetry magazine observes, “Nothing but hurt left here./ Nothing but bullets and pain.”

While presented as a memoir, the book isn’t quite so candidly that. Readers who come to Turner looking for a sense of what really happened will leave disappointed; while the memoir is filled with discrete events, it’s mostly plotless, a series of reveries just a few paragraphs long. Turner is a poet; he prefers to occupy moments, rather than narratives.

He also prefers to occupy other bodies, exploring depersonalization in another sense. In a book marketed as autobiography, Turner spends a remarkable amount of time inhabiting other people: a fellow solider, a female suicide bomber, a Japanese kamikaze pilot. These feel like drills in empathy—admirable exercises, on a spiritual level, but not done well enough to justify their frequency.

Turner works best as a poet of the group consciousness. As he writes near the end, “I don’t know what it’s like to have killers at the door, but I know what it’s like to be one of the men with a rifle coming in.” I marveled at his virtuoso “the soldiers enter the house” passage, one of the longest in the book:

The soldiers enter the house with only nine credits earned toward an associate’s degree in history from the University of Maryland… The soldiers enter the house with Mrs. Ingram from the second grade at Vinland Elementary School… The soldiers give chocolate to the frightened little children in the shadows of the house… The soldiers switch off their night-vision goggles and set their padded helmets on the floor while the frightened children pretend to eat the chocolate they’ve been given, their mothers shushing them when they begin to cry.

That’s a gorgeous rendition of moving parts, carefully plotted into movements—death, education, children—that don’t, for the main, feel easy or condemnatory. It’s the most intensely novelistic section of the book, all sides felt out with empathy.

As a quick consultation with the footnotes will tell you, it’s also one of the many sections of the book drawn from other writers. This section is modeled on Rick Moody’s much more civilian, but much more terrifying, “Boys” (as in, “The boys enter the house”) from Demonology. Sometimes the footnotes show that dialogue you had winced over was drawn from someone else’s poem—the whore whispering “a damn sad thing,” the cousin observing that “we seem to be floating, rising, transparent as smoke.”

Turner doesn’t have a responsibility to present, in his writing, his “real” self or what “actually” happened. But his best work demonstrates a responsibility to his own perspective, even as he strains to escape it. In one of his most successful passages, he describes his company making models in preparation for a raid:

Torn pieces of cardboard from an MRE package serve as houses, arranged to resemble a suburban street. And the men laugh and joke with one another while they create the model. They don’t talk about the people who live in the target house, third cardboard square from the left… For now, they are soldiers. They are giants standing over the model of someone else’s life.

Even his less-than-successful inhabitations are admirable, if immature, motions towards empathy. Turner has acknowledged this in interviews, calling himself “a rookie”: “I’m a very incomplete spokesperson because there are so many voices.” Observation Points, he calls them, borrowing military terminology. The unvoiced story here is the narrative of a kid from Visalia struggling to inhabit a more public space, something greater than himself—a country, an army, a man. It’s that ghost leaning out from his body, trying to become more than he is.

Author Photo of Jamie Fisher

Jamie Fisher is a freelance writer, Chinese-English translator, and budding manuscript conservationist working out of Philadelphia.  She graduated recently from the University of Pennsylvania, where her majors were Linguistics and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. She can be reached at [email protected].

BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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Balthus book jacket; two men talking

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BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY
by Nicholas Fox Weber
Dalkey Archive Press, 656 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

When looking at the paintings of Balthus, the viewer can’t help but react. Seeing paintings of young and often pre-pubescent girls and women in poses loaded with a strange sexuality, there is no possibility of cool remove. The viewer is made to consider actively their role in looking at the young women in these sometimes cruel, always compelling, provocative and often beautiful images. Balthus’s images have a strange, almost dreamlike hold, as they look back at us, impenetrable and confrontational. Balthus himself is somewhere in them yet distant. He wished his life to be separate from his work, something to be never included in exhibits or official publications, only “a misleading and harmful screen placed between the viewer and painter…paintings do not describe or reveal a painter.” He almost entirely obscured the true facts of his life, recreating himself as a count and rendering himself a challengingly elusive subject for biography. He placed the most responsibility on those looking at his work to react to whatever sexuality or darkness they might find in the work as their own perception.

The relationship of the work and the man and the simple question of what about Balthus continues to compel and scare us pervade Balthus: A Biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, recently re-released by Dalkey Archive. To dismiss Balthus’s work and our interest in it as being for its prurient content alone seems a disservice. Though at the beginning of his career he did, in his own telling, aim to shock, in later works such as “Girl at a Window” there is a great sense of beauty and a far different tone. Weber shows Balthus’s brother’s paintings and drawings of similar subject matter that come devoid of the elegance and interest of Balthus’s work. There is unquestionably something peculiarly un-nerving in Balthus’s traditional paintings, made often in the style of far older painters such as Piero della Francesca. Even the subject matter is not unprecedented.

thérèse-dreaming-1938 painting

Thérèse Dreaming, 1938

Recently, walking through the Clark Museum, I found myself facing a delicately painted canvas by Renoir of a girl in stasis, sleeping with a cat upon her lap—precisely the subject upon which Balthus would fixate, almost unceasingly, for his career. A similar Balthus, “Thérèse Dreaming,” shows a girl, her head leaning back and her legs spread apart, as a cat drinks milk. In this canvas, there is none of the calm of the Renoir but a feeling of uncomfortable voyeurism, harshness amid the beauty. The most difficult moments in Weber’s book are the all-too-believeable descriptions of Balthus’s difficult and torturously controlling encounters with his models. As Weber correctly notes, in the art of Balthus, “the central act is dreaming and desiring.”

Girl at a Window, 1955 (Painting)

Girl at a Window, 1955

Balthus was an artist of surfaces. Francis Bacon is quoted in the book with perhaps the most perceptive appraisal of Balthus’s work, noting his work in redecorating the Villa Medici in Rome and re-doing the walls. Balthus was a designer of stage sets as well as an artist who painted canvases. His work was often about traditional exteriors and appearance, at a time when so many artists were moving toward expressive technique. His almost unceasingly consistent subject matter might have also offered him a way to have great focus on painting while allowing variation through the repeated subjects of these young girls that he found “amusing.” This distance is part of what makes the work of Balthus so distressing and powerful for the viewer.

Balthus himself proves similar to his paintings, both accessible and elusive, a constant contradiction. He allows Weber to conduct interviews while obscuring his biography and creating new and fantastic narratives of his own. Through years of interaction Weber manages to find the true life of Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola that ends up being, as most lives are, all too mundane and expected. He finds himself surprisingly connected to the man as he tries to approach his work and life critically. This forces some repetition of similar arguments, for just as Balthus’s work was repetitive so this book must be, but allows for some quite revealing moments and interesting analysis of the work, showing all the more clearly Balthus’s prodigious skill as a painter. Fittingly the book becomes not a simple biography of the artist but also a story of Weber’s tumultuous relationship with the artist, much like the relationship we have with the work, moving quickly from love to distaste for this work that, Weber writes of one painting, “had left me no room for escape.” While Balthus’s life, much like his work, may not always be easy to take, it is also often fascinating.

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Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is a student at Sarah Lawrence College studying film history, art history and poetry and will be studying at Oxford University this coming year. He writes on film at Home Movies: The Sarah Lawrence Film Journal.

MY STRUGGLE: BOOK THREE: BOYHOOD by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Dan Bartlett reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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MY STRUGGLE: BOOK THREE: BOYHOOD
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
translated by Dan Bartlett
Steerforth Press, 432 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

If all one reads is Proust, it might be easy to forget that some young boys—a lot of young boys—are really fascinated with the body and its messy, abject creations: excrement, urine, semen, saliva. What a relief to see that Karl Ove Knausgaard is, at least in this respect, less Proustian than the great hubbub would have it.

You have probably have heard of his six-volume memoir-novel, My Struggle. Most famously, Zadie Smith, in a tweet, called it her “crack.” The third volume, Boyhood, translated by Dan Bartlett and published in London earlier this year, has, thanks to Steerforth Press, finally arrived here in the states. This installment takes readers back to the childhood of the narrator-protagonist, roughly from when he is eight to twelve years old. The plot, such as there is one, is picaresque: young Karl Ove’s adventures with his friends. It describes his early intuitions of history, and his discovery that his parents were real people.

There’s an early scene that very quickly establishes Knausgaard’s seemingly effortless skill. Young Karl Ove and his neighborhood friends decide to follow a rainbow in search of its pot of gold. They traipse into the forest up to a small crag to where the rainbow’s arc would have stopped. There is no pot of gold. But they all need to urinate, so they do, into the open air past the cliff. All except for young Karl Ove:

Piss outdoors when Dad was down there and might be able to see? Leif Tore was already out of his water proof pants and fumbling with his fly. Geir and Trond had taken up positions either side of him and were wriggling their hips and pulling down their trousers.

Afraid of his father finding out, young Karl Ove watches their impressive arcs of gold from a near distance.

“What shall we do now?” Trond said.
“No idea,” said Leif Tore.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Knausgaard sets his sights on treasures that the novel generically holds—adventure, discovery, epiphany—and shows them for all their quotidian transience—a boring walk through the woods, say, or a bowl full of corn flakes. But somehow, in the vividness of his descriptions, these little moments have surprises of their own. In a cloud of smoke—or steam—they come to mimic the anticipated treasure—and not only the treasure, but the map used to find it. That these moments lack glamour is part of the appeal, and readers seem to find these accounts of memory highly relatable.

But what about the unrelatable elements of the novel? Because those do exist. Throughout the books, and especially in this one, Knausgaard describes his justified hatred towards his father. But in this book, his father also utters the wisest line in the more than four hundred pages. While chopping wood, his father asks him about his teachers at school. The child describes his favorite. His father responds:

“Since you say she’s nice, there must be someone who isn’t nice. Otherwise the word loses all meaning. Do you understand?”

It’s worth speculating on the unspoken comparison lurking alongside, and indeed, sustaining the urgently reiterated greatness of these books. Young Karl Ove thinks about it quietly. His father leans over for another piece of tinder. Karl Ove hears him fart.

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Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS by Hillary L. Chute reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

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OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS
By Hillary L. Chute
University of Chicago Press, 272 Pages

reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. If you know comics you’ll recognize this as the auteur scene, and if you don’t you’ve just been given your starter syllabus. Many of these interviews appeared before, especially in Believer magazine, but those have been expanded, and several others are appearing for the first time in print. It is a valuable record of some of the industry’s greatest talents contemplating their work, their influences, and comics culture at large.

There is some precedent for such a collection, such as Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (2007), which interviewed many of the same artists. That work, as its title suggests, was more about the creative process, and Hignite was mostly interested in the physical details of draftsmanship. Chute, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is possibly the world’s only full-time graphic novel scholar, so approaches her interviewees with a wider range of subjects. The result is a less focused volume than Hignite’s but allows for, say, Tomine’s interesting accounts of dealing with race in his work, or the inclusion of Mouly, who, while not a creator of comics, has been central to the growth of comics culture over the past generation.

No one is better poised for such a project than Chute. She edited Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, and co-taught a course on comics and autobiography with Bechdel. But more importantly, Chute is one of the best writers we have on comics. Her first book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), as well as articles in academic journals like PMLA and Modern Fiction Studies, are models of comics reading and criticism.

Chute is unobstrusive with her questions, and often the simplest ones lead to the richest (and longest) meditations. Lynda Barry delivers a wonderful, Gertrude Stein-esque ramble on what numbers look like, all prompted by Chute’s short remark, “Yes, the book has a questioning mode.”  It helps that most of these artists are veterans who have had ample time to contemplate their medium.

Headshot of Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute

One theme that many artists return to is that of physicality and print culture. (Kinko’s gets its own line in the index.) Several interviewees speculate that the increase in serious attention given to comics is the result of the virtualization of so much of today’s media, so that a heavy, thick-papered book cuts against the grain of contemporary culture and compensates for a lost connection to physical objects. While McCloud is bullish on web comics and dismisses the paper attachment as a “fetish,” most of the other artists relate their unwillingness to imagine their work independent of paper. This inevitably leads to a culture of nostalgia, visible in the work of Barry and Ware (and if we draw farther afield, artists like Ben Katchor or Seth). And while Tomine laments that “there’s almost a cultural stereotype of the nostalgic cartoonist guy, and you don’t want to play into it too much,” he must know he is doing a poor job of it during his interview, where he defends his decision, unique amongst the interviewees, to put out his work as separate issues initially available only at comic book stores. Clowes, by contrast, regrets publishing his great work The Death Ray as a comic and now only does work straight to book form.

A related issue is the long and painstaking process of creating a comic that is so out of step with the instantaneousness of social media. Sacco, a comics journalist, is the most salient example here: he went to Bosnia in 1995, and the result was the impressive Safe Area Gorazde…published in 2000. For a culture habituated to a continuous feed of information, his creative process reads like a geeky form of sadomasochism. But Sacco’s work—he signs and dates every page—never lets us forget how his source material has been manipulated and formed, and reminds us that we misuse the term “immediate” to refer to the fast speed of new kinds of mediation.

With the exception of Mouly, all of these interviewees are artists who write, or writers who draw. This is auteur tradition, as opposed to the collaborative work that is standard at Marvel or D.C. It’s this attention to literary, often autobiographical work that has drawn some negative attention to Chute, since it taps into some unease over what the comics canon is going to look like. Chute’s success has made her a target for critics—mostly male—who accuse her of snubbing genre comics, especially superhero comics. Some of the comments you can find on academic chat boards are so strident in their misogyny you wonder if it’s parody—one poster lists his favorite critics and writes, “No Chute here!” Does he know he’s supposed to be writing academic discourse and not a sign for his boys club that meets in a treehouse? The fact that a woman has earned alpha dog status is not sitting well with an audience who turned to comics in the first place because of their issues with girls. (I speak from personal authority.)

Sexism aside, Chute takes seriously the issue of canon creation, and even includes, in her introduction, some passages verbatim from an exchange she had in PMLA, in which she defended her work against charges of elitism. While it may seem like a paradox to be an elitist comics scholar, Chute has displayed little interest in superheroes throughout her career, and Outside the Box has no Alan Moore, Frank Miller or Grant Morrison. Chute makes clear her preferred genealogy: “The underground comics community of artists and publishers was, in large part, the genesis of contemporary comics,” and “I am more interested…in the single vision of the auteur of fiction or nonfiction comics.” However, this is not to preclude or circumscribe what scholars should be writing about: she states her desire “for more, not fewer, conversations about comics…with many kinds of perspectives and objects of analysis.” Most scholars do not have to defend themselves like this—if you write on James Joyce, no one asks what you have against crime fiction—but such debates are inevitable as comics scholarship grows up (even as some individual scholars refuse to do so). Quality works like this will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit—readers, scholars and artists alike.

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Seamus O’Malley is an English Lecturer at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University. He received his Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank McGuinness, Edmund Wilson, and Alan Moore. His book Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2014.

FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR by Diane Johnson reviewed by Colleen Davis

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FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR
by Diane Johnson
Viking, 265 pages

reviewed by Colleen Davis

It takes guts to become a writer. Not because it’s a dangerous profession, but a person drawn to serious writing often discovers that there’s no clear employment path. Some people pursue newspaper or magazine jobs, and these positions can offer training and guidance to novice writers. But for those like me, who feel no calling for hard journalism, becoming a writer has meant making a series of strange, often irrational, choices. The careers of beloved authors provided me with my only roadmap. Unfortunately, most of the writers I admired were men who never faced the same social dilemmas (marry/don’t marry; kids/no kids, etc.) that stymied me, a resolute female from birth.

Despite the gender issues, Fitzgerald and Hemingway inspired me to pursue the expatriate tradition. I traveled in France, Brazil, and Japan. I moved to Mexico, lived on a vineyard in Italy. I searched for unusual opportunities to write and when they were not forthcoming, I invented new ones. My efforts brought me years of random joy and satisfaction. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled on the novels of Diane Johnson. It was incredibly reassuring to discover that out there in the big world there was an accomplished novelist who had gone everywhere and done all the things the guys did – while raising four kids and enjoying stable relationships.

Johnson’s work always struck me as elegant, unique, and truly intriguing. Not just because she shares my female perspective, but also because she’s lived a compelling life that brings depth and nuance to her stories. When I heard that she’d published a memoir, I was thrilled by the prospect of reading (and reviewing!) the book. I was expecting a tale filled with literary gossip and acute observations since most of her books hinge on those aspects of social discourse. I was also hoping she’d explain how she developed her inner compass and found the courage to make the choices that led to her literary success.

Headshot of Diane-Johnson

Diane Johnson

Although the first chapters were exactly what I wanted, the book leapt from a provocative lunch in Paris to a dense historical narrative about her ancestors. At various times of my life, I’ve been a serious student of history, but my patience for reading diary entries isn’t what it used to be. I was hungry for juice, drama, and personal revelations. The historical chapters felt so dull to me that I almost stopped reading the book. Thank goodness I didn’t give in to that temptation. I later realized that the ancestral chapters provided an unusual foundation for understanding Johnson’s life, and maybe the lives of all women. There’s nothing like a dose of 18th century facts to make you grateful for today’s liberties. Women no longer feel obligated to endure ten pregnancies. Nor must they watch many of their children die from horrid, incurable diseases. These tales also remind us how much bravery was required to survive the trials of ordinary life. Modern problems like uncertain employment and publishing shifts seem far kinder by comparison.

Nevertheless, I was thrilled when Johnson’s focus shifted to the challenges of her career. Her stalwart ancestors seem to have provided her with the inspiration she needed to leave an unhappy marriage with four kids in tow. She departed from California on the magic carpet of a research grant, faking a sense of economic stability as she raised her kids and pursued her writing dreams in England. It brought me great relief to learn that I wasn’t the only person who lied to their family about having enough money to fund a writing adventure abroad. But I only lied about having enough income for myself—Johnson was pretending she could afford to feed, clothe, and educate four kids on foreign soil.

It’s reassuring to know that her now-grown kids still love her and never made Johnson regret her unusual choices. In fact, their lives were enriched by years of living in France and other spots abroad. While her novels did well, not all of Johnson’s writing projects flourished. In chapters on screenwriting, she describes working on scripts with renowned directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Nichols, etc.) whose movie concepts never made it to the finish line. On the other hand, one of her own books was made into a Merchant Ivory film, set in Paris—Le Divorce—and she also wrote the screenplay for a cinema classic—The Shining—in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. She got to meet Elizabeth Taylor and Dr. Jonas Salk. Not too shabby for a mid-Western native, mother of four.

My only true regret about this book is that it wasn’t there for me to read twenty years ago. It would have been nice to study her sober, confident approach to literary life when I was making my early choices. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al., gave the impression that you had to be sloshed or mad with ambition to attain creative success. Johnson created a wonderful body of work and achievement that inspires in a totally different way. Her life was no less courageous or original for reaching these heights gracefully, in the company of a happy family. Johnson’s biography is nutritious reading for anyone trying to craft a literary life today. Becoming a writer may still seem like a confusing and risky process, but the valiant will find that it’s an adventure worth pursuing.

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Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich and Baghdad: The City in Verse edited by Reuven Snir reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City
by William Helmreich
Princeton University Press, 449 pages

BAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE
edited by Reuven Snir
Harvard University Press, 339 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin 

Writers, this one included, have long struggled to capture in words the dynamic and multi-layered ways that cities change. Cities themselves are powerful change agents in the wider world, but they are defined and redefined constantly by the evolving tastes and desires of their residents (who themselves are always changing), technology, culture and religion, structural political and economic shifts, and the feedback loop of history and history-telling, characterized through myth, poetry, and mass media. Here’s how I try to make sense of it in Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books):

BAGHDAD--THE-CITY-IN-VERSE book jacket

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Think of the city as a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink, and grow simultaneously. Imagine hundreds or thousands or millions of cells, each living and dying not in parallel or even in sequence, but overlapping from one generation to the next. The whole place moves in several directions at once. Unless calamity hits, no city dies in a single instant. Despite what you read in the papers, no city, no neighborhood even, is ever miraculously reborn.

I want to say cities change because people, in all their contradictions, make them. But urban change can also be terribly unnerving, even terrifying, and sometimes violent. We might reject it outright, and fight it to the death. We might campaign to preserve a building that harkens to another time, or demand that a neighborhood remains “Italian” or “Puerto Rican” or “black.” And we might mourn for a city “that once was.”

Perhaps, in part, it’s the very conflict between change and constancy that makes cities such interesting and powerful places. Now, two very different but surprisingly related books published at the end of last year, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich (Princeton University Press) and Baghdad: The City in Verse, edited by Reuven Snir (Harvard University Press), help us frame and reframe the discussion. Both Helmreich, a sociologist who has studied New York for four decades and Snir, a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Haifa, seem to agree about the organic nature of urban change. “A city is not a static unit,” writes Helmreich in the introduction to his book. “It’s a dynamic and constantly environment, adapting to the needs of its residents.” Citing the prominent sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, who passed away a month ago, Snir writes in his excellent introductory essay, “Cities are ‘living processes’ rather than ‘products’ or ‘formalistic shells for living’,” an idea I mirrored in Song of the City, which is organized into parts: pulse, body, soul, and seed.

Both of these admirable new books are indeed necessarily open-ended explorations: Helmreich’s across space, Snir’s through time. Over four years beginning in 2008, New York native Hemreich walked 6,000 miles across nearly every block of New York’s five boroughs;  Snir, whose parents were exiled from Baghdad to Israel in 1951, parceled through more than a century of poetry about Baghdad, translating and ultimately presenting 199 poems by some 123 poets.

The cities, too, are distinctly comparable. Baghdad was founded in an instant, in 762, by the Caliph al-Mansur, who called his city Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. It was to be the first city in the Arab world that would eschew placelessness. Until then, according to Snir, the Bedouin notion of genealogy framed one’s Islamic self-conception far more than the idea of homeland. Within a century, having made “place and self mutually interdependent,” Baghdad became one of the largest cities in the world, and beyond that, writes Snir, in a manner that makes us think of New York as a symbol for America, “Baghdad has been the city of Islam and Arabism par excellence—the center of the Islamic empire and the Arab world, in reality and certainly metaphorically. Baghdad was at times a metaphor even for the entire East.”

It became an open and pluralistic and hedonistic city through the end of the first millennium, into the second. It was, as the poet Ibn al-Rumi writes in the 9th century, “A city where I accompanied childhood and youthfulness;/ there I wore a new cloak of glory./When she appears in the imagination, I see her budding branches aflutter.” And then, in 1258, the city was destroyed by the Mongol Hulagu, a founder of the Persian dynasty Il-Khanid. This was all but the death of the place; Baghdad didn’t quite recover until the late 19th century into the 20th century, when it flourished as a tolerant, modern metropolis. The Baghdad of a century ago, in 1914, Snir points out, was majority Jewish, and filled otherwise with Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Kurds, Persians, and Turks. At that very moment, melting pot New York was enjoying the heights of 20th century immigration and the first great migration of African Americans to the more tolerant north.

Of course, Sadaam Hussein and the modern Hulagu, the United States, eventually put that to an end; and in a sense, the cities’ fates became intertwined, as the poet Adonis, whose work on Baghdad Snir has collected in this volume, notes in the poem Salute to Baghdad (2003),

Put your coffee aside and drink something else.
Listening to what the invaders are declaring:
“With the help of God,
We are conducting a preventative war,
Transporting the water of life
From the banks of the Hudson and Thames
To flow in the Tigris and Euphrates

Snir presents a great deal of poetry on Baghdad from the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, a time marked at first by modernity and cultural blossoming and at last by utter destruction and despair. Writes the poet Bushra al-Bustani in A Sorrowful Melody, “The tanks of malice wander./My wound/Is turned away like an abandoned horse/Scorched by an Arabian sun,/Chewed by worms./Picasso paints another Guernica,/Painting Baghdad under the feet of boors./Freedom is a lute/Strummed by a nameless dwarf./Paintings in Baghdad’s museums/Are at the mercy of the wind.”

In the book’s afterword, the Iraqi writer Abdul Kader el-Janabi notes that with its history of destruction, “Baghdad is an easy metaphor for revival and eclipse.” Indeed, despite attempts to conjure more complex and dynamic narratives for their cities, both Helmreich’s and Snir’s books are infused with that traditional broad stroke urban metaphor, of life and vitality followed by decline and death and (hopefully) life again. The difference is the point of view. New York, in the dusk of the Michael Bloomberg era, is triumphant: safe, utterly vital, nearly entirely tolerant. New York today is New York par excellence. As the protagonist of his story, Helmreich, who grew up in upper Manhattan in the 1950s, carries this prejudice into his exploration, which tends to downplay the challenges to New York’s massive homelessness problem, for example, or ethnic tension. He has a right to, for certain. New York, which lost more than 800,000 people during Helmreich’s formative years, has soared in the last two decades. He is, I think, both proud and amazed. And though Baghdad is now and again one of the largest cities in the Middle East (its population is 7+ million; New York’s is 8.3 million), Snir’s narrative is prejudiced by his own family’s story of loss of a beloved homeland and the war on Iraq, which left vast sections of the city in ruins.

The best way I know to counter the power of this broad, and deeply ingrained, urban narrative is with writing—and in the case of poetry, imagery—that’s specific, and particular to time, place, and circumstance. In this regard, I was somewhat (but only somewhat) disappointed by Snir’s collection. There is much metaphorical writing across the eras—“In the sky/The poles bow,/searching for what deserves illumination,/But the streets are overcrowded/With void.” (Sinan Antoon, 1989)—and not nearly enough visceral reality. I wanted to be taken onto an overcrowded street of the ancient city, of the modern city, of the city post-war to smell and hear and taste it. For that reason, one of my favorites in the collection is An Elegy for al-Sindibad Cinema, by the late Sargon Boulus, published in 2008. The movie house, a fixture of the cosmopolitan city of the mid-20th century, was bombed during the Iraq war. “Those evenings were destroyed…/Our white shirts, Baghdad summers…/How will we dream about traveling to any island?” he asks,

Al-Sindibad Cinema had been destroyed!
Heavy is the watered hair of the drowned person
Who returned to the party
After the lamps were turned off,
The chairs were piled up on the deserted beach,
And the Tigris’s waves were tied by chains.

Helmreich seems aware of this pitfall; his epic walk was meant to—and did—put him face-to-face with hundreds of New Yorkers on their own turf, to see them as individuals whose daily reality helps define the city of today, and who in turn are shaped by the city. And those New Yorkers are complex beings, as he writes, “a person’s identity can include, say, religion, community, race, language, and economic considerations all at once. Human beings are naturally free to pick and choose from these.”

In essence, he’s reporting out on the state of things. In Jamaica, Queens, he meets an immigrant from the small South American country of Guyana who has planted a garden. “It’s a small area,” writes Helmreich, “about four feet long and three feet wide, surrounded by a miniature white picket fence.”

“These flowers are beautiful,” I say by way of starting a conversation.

Small and wiry, with bright teeth framed in part by a neat mustache, he responds with a soft smile, “They are flowers from my country, Guyana, which I love. I planted them to remind me of home. This way, when I look outside I always remember the beautiful place I lived in before I came here.”

Foreign-born people now account for 40 percent of New Yorkers; with their American-born children, Helmreich points out, they are the city’s majority. He thus spends a great deal of time on ethnicity, devoting chapters on new immigrants, “the Future of Ethnic New York,” and on New York’s neighborhood-based communities, home to so much of the immigrant experience.

In the chapter, “Enjoying the City,” Helmreich finds himself in the northwest Bronx, at a concert of the Jamaican reggae singer Beres Hammond. Helmreich describes the scene, “people on their feet, dancing the entire time,” the make-up of the audience—99.9 percent West Indian, 65 percent women—“dressed about two steps above what you’d call casual.” This must have been a fascinating event as cultural tableau. The author might have described in detail food, dress, conversations, art, and even the neighborhood around the venue at CUNY Herbert Lehman College. But instead, Helmreich gives the reader a kind of quick analysis in language that feels too broad and too conjectural (and full of assumptions), hoping to categorize the scene rather than record it for its essence. “Each immigrant who comes to the United States,” he writes,

leaves behind ways of life that need to be adapted to fit in with their new circumstances. Yet they also wish to preserve their identity. Yes, they’re now in America and hearing American music, but also important is the music of the homeland, accompanied by lyrics that express yearning, memories, shared values, and forms of cultural expression—how the houses looked, how the foods tasted, and how the people lived and related to one another. And of course the lyrics speak of the challenges of making it in their new homes.

Helmreich goes on to reveal some of Hammond’s stage banter, but of course what the reader really wants is to read the lyrics that are about the struggle to live in two worlds, hear the conversations, and taste the food. The author has it all, we presume, in his notes, but this visceral, sensatory New York isn’t revealed here. Nor are buildings or streets described in any consistent way. This isn’t Joseph Mitchell; we can’t quite conjure Helmreich’s hidden New York.

Part of the issue here is that the author is too ambitious: he wants to give us the whole city, the city he’d lovingly discovered and rediscovered in his four year walk, but 468 square miles is too vast a territory for ethnography. And his sociologist’s instincts work against him: amidst the panorama, it’s extremely hard to categorize and label in ways that expand the reader’s interest and imagination. To try to make sense of complex things, he’s all too often forced to sweeping judgment and summary statements that feel inadequate. Calling some place a “bad neighborhood” or diverse people “gentrifiers” doesn’t help. Labels have a way of distancing us from the complicated reality.

Interestingly, the book improves vastly as it moves along. In the long chapter on gentrification, Helmreich is able to convincingly put analytic skills to work, and perhaps because the people he encountered in gentrifying neighborhoods are English speaking, the quotes from them are longer and more resonant. It also appears that the systems and values at work in these places feel more accessible to him, and therefore to the reader. But he is right focus so substantially on immigration and immigrant life. Nothing so much defines the process of urban change than the ways newcomers adapt, reject, assimilate, become inspired by the city they’re adopting, which is after all the collective product of the many millions of people who had come before.

Author Photo of Nathaniel PopkinsCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin reviewed by Colleen Davis

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MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience
by Eileen Cronin
W.W. Norton, 336 pages 

reviewed by Colleen Davis

When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump mine. It’s amusing—and sometimes shocking—to discover the great variety of messes humans can create with similar ingredients. Lives get twisted and re-shaped by crazy family members, creative impulses, and random events. But some people get a truly strange variable thrown into their stew. Eileen Cronin, for example, was born without legs.

You might think that if you’ve spent your earthly time in prime physical condition, her story will not connect with yours. But that’s not how Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, comes across. Sure the young Eileen is at a great disadvantage in her early years. She must “squiddle” from one place to another instead of walk. But once she’s old enough to get prosthetic legs, her challenges start to resemble those of typical teenagers.

In fact, it seems that the most complex feature of Cronin’s life is not her lack of legs. She has a much tougher time navigating the shifting emotional currents set off by members of her rambunctious family. Eileen has ten siblings to contend with as she evolves from child to adult. While the narrative makes it clear that these kids have deep bonds with each other, their behavior often bewilders Eileen who obviously has a different perspective on many of life’s great questions. A prominent scene in the book depicts a moment when Eileen’s leg flies off as a handsome dance partner twirls her in the air. The potential for this kind of ordeal is something she’s always got to look out for, so her path in life is truly unique.

Yet these moments just deal with the external Eileen. While the first half of the book hints at her inner confusion, they don’t fully expose it. The story’s middle chapters paint a picture of a fairly stable young woman who seems to be accepted by most people—including handsome, intelligent men. There is something about her easy transition into the arms of a college dean’s son that makes you wonder if life is really all that hard for Eileen. I mean there are plenty of two-legged teenage girls out there who never have such an easy time finding romance or social acceptance. Though she gets nervous about certain decisions, for some unexplained reason Eileen never seems overwrought until much later in the story when tragedy strikes a sibling.

This buoyancy of her tale made me wonder if Cronin was holding something back. Writing about family is always tricky business. Considering the sheer number of people who could object to her take on things (i.e., ten siblings, a mother who may have taken thalidomide, a squadron of Catholic school teachers who taught the Cronins, etc.), holding back is something she may have felt compelled to do. But her smooth evolution into a pretty girl with lots of opportunities makes you wonder what she did with her pain.

During my own adolescence, I had to deal with a physical disability that transformed my life in a purely negative way. Although I had all my limbs, I developed an extreme scoliosis that required plaster casts, a back brace, physical therapy, and endless doctoring. The person who became my high school best friend had an even more serious curvature requiring extensive surgery and long recuperation. These experiences left us steeped in self-loathing that took decades to shake off. We suffered in relationships, we lacked self-confidence, and too often we self-medicated to quell depression it took years to outgrow. As I read Cronin’s story I kept asking myself: How come Eileen never gets depressed? How come she doesn’t seem to hate herself for being so different? Did she have more resilience or character than we had? Or did the size and economic position of her family create some kind of firewall between herself and cruel social forces?

As a reader I was disappointed that the author didn’t provide answers to these questions—or at least give enough evidence on which to hazard a guess. The sheer number of Cronin’s siblings creates another narrative problem. It’s hard to keep each Cronin distinct as you read. Most memoirs don’t have this volume of characters and it’s tough to keep them vivid over a forty-year period of growth. The good news is that readers who hang in until the end will find some richer passages that make the problems of adult Eileen seem far more compelling than those of her post-college self.

The final chapters offer a more honest assessment of Cronin’s problems with alcohol, self-doubt, and trust. Chapters describing her foreign travels are also illuminating. They illustrate her personal courage as she moves unhindered across sketchy terrain. Ultimately, Cronin’s book shows how far you can go if you refuse to eat the crumbs the world offers and make life into a meal of your own.

Author Photo of Colleen-Davis

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S by Jeanne Murray Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S 
by Jeanne Murray Walker
Center Street, 384 pages

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“I worry about Mother, mostly,” writes Jeanne Murray Walker in her memoir, The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s (Center Street), “but I also worry about myself, because I am beginning to get myself mixed up with her. What does it mean that, in company with her, I ‘live’ in the past so much?” This question shapes Walker’s story of caring for her mother Erna Kelley, who lost her memory and life to the disease. Seeking answers, Walker offers insight into how memory works and what remembering means.

As she flies between Philadelphia and her mother’s home in Dallas, the author’s own 1950s childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, keeps flooding back. Her own life seems boxed up with her mother’s stories about driving her brothers and sisters to school in a Model A, teaching in a one-room school house, staffing the night shift alone as a hospital ER nurse—cargo that was once pulled by the “powerful locomotive” of her mother’s memory. As Erna becomes increasingly disoriented to time, place, and person, it’s as if her daughter has been uncoupled and left behind on the track, unable to move forward.

Readers who are part of what Walker reports as “more than twenty million adult children in America who take care of a parent who is drifting into dementia” will recognize this state of mind. Alzheimer’s, like grief, is unpredictable—not a steady march through discrete stages, but a zigzagging, back-and-forth passage through a series of checkpoint crises. Diagnosable only after death, its progress is approximated by questions that test how well distinct regions of the patient’s brain work together to perform tasks such as remembering a random list of words. More confusing, Walker observes in a series of “field notes,” is how the symptoms of Alzheimer’s highlight certain cognitive truths: memory isn’t a locked file drawer full of untouched records of our experience, but a dynamic depository where we reorganize and recast what’s there as we need to. Though our capacity to conceive of a past self allows us to recount a story with a past, present and future, we experience time as fluid, not as static segments on a time line. “Believing that, I began paying closer attention to what Mother said,” Walker writes, signaling her turning point and coping strategy. “I started accepting, as a matter of faith, that what she said could be made sense of as references not to the present but to the past….And what a relief, not to have to set Mother straight.”

Jeanne Murray Walker Photo

Jeanne Murray Walker

Walker’s done her research, but “Knowing fancy terms for the regions of the brain doesn’t help me remember better,” she reflects, doubtful that she could pass an Alzheimer’s test. Citing common mnemonic devices—acrostics, rhymes, lists, adages, and the blocking and “call and response” dialogue actors use to learn their lines—she concludes that memory depends on emotion. In order to remember the words ball, dog, car, she must trigger the amygdala that makes her feel by telling herself a story. Even playing music involves more than muscle memory, she observes as her son Jack memorizes the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. The melody is “the ongoing musical story you can remember and hum every day of the week. The orchestra has a different musical story…(which) gives you something to hang your own story on.” This is the ancient, enduring reason for telling stories as a means to preserve our collective history.

“What on earth is happening to all my things?” her mother laments after a life’s worth of objects is pared down for her final move to an assisted living facility. Walker speaks for all of us who’ve endured a similarly exhausting emotional task of dealing with “the sheer uncompromising weight of physical objects, at the awful truth that the body breaks down” when she writes, “There are times when the human condition can get a person down.” But from this darkness, she casts light.

“Eventually, even I started to relent,” she writes. “On the clothing front, for example, I thought, why shouldn’t Mother wear what she wants? … Even as (her outfits) became wilder, more outlandish, I didn’t try to stop her. I was right to let go of that. It became practice for more letting go later. I began to think of letting go as a discipline.” Later, she throws away the long packing list she’s made for a teaching stint in London, carrying only essentials to the city where the dreaded phone call finds her upon her mother’s death.

Remembering the journey is a journey in itself. Though heartbreakingly personal, The Geography of Memory is both memoir and a record of our shared human pilgrimage, a sacramental journey through a lifetime of memories to take in “the touch and taste and smell of spiritual truth.”

–October 7, 2013

Author Photo of Elizabeth MosierElizabeth Mosier teaches creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. Her essay on archaeology and Alzheimer’s, “The Pit and the Page,” appears in Issue 47 of Creative Nonfiction.

 

THE FARAWAY NEARBY by Rebecca Solnit reviewed by Colleen Davis

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THE FARAWAY NEARBY
by Rebecca Solnit
Viking, 272 Pages

Reviewed by Colleen Davis 

Once a month my Saturday morning yoga class swaps our beloved Iyengar teacher for a visiting Power yoga trainer from Manhattan. Captain Kate is not her real name, but that’s what I call the woman who drives us through 85 minutes of fast, challenging postures which are not all that different from our normal fare. What Kate changes is the pace of our effort and the time we spend holding each pose. Under her direction, my country classmates and I move at the speed she expects from students in her 105-degree New York studio. Our local practice site has no amped up heating system, but a class with Kate still leaves us drenched. This is her rigorous lead up to the final moment when we gratefully follow Kate’s instruction to “lower our head and bow our mind to the power of the heart.” After all the physical exertion we’ve just endured, this commandment becomes easier to follow and sweet to feel.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who also understands a thing or two about the power of rigor. Her writing displays a masterful command of language, imagery, and arcane knowledge of the most fascinating sort. Reading her book, The Faraway Nearby, is like getting into the car at an old-fashioned funhouse where you find yourself crashing through surprise encounters with Frankenstein, cannibalism, and leprosy. These topics and many others are held up to the spooky circus mirrors she creates through magnificent arrangements of detail and tangled story threads.

Her panoramic embrace of ideas is part of what makes Solnit an author worth reading. She manages to weave a baccalaureate’s worth of information into thirteen chapters that are nominally about three painful subjects: a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease, a cancer scare, and a bad romantic break-up. These serious life events are refracted through the lens of her dense and unrelenting prose. The result is both beautiful and somehow disappointing.

Solnit furnishes many explanations of her mother’s failure to become a nurturing presence during the early decades of the author’s life. The writer’s catalogue of wounds begins with a description of parental narcissism that is both plausible and disconcerting. It’s not hard to see that Solnit escaped from childhood pain by submerging herself in the cauldron of learning. This long and lonely metamorphic process must have fostered the development of her admirable intellect and substantial literary skill.

Despite these gifts, and the fact that The Faraway Nearby includes several passages exploring the concept of empathy, the reader is left feeling that Solnit’s experience of empathy is an arm’s length affair. Even as she recounts some sweeter shared moments near the end of her mother’s life, you get the impression that Solnit couldn’t really open herself to the expansion of heart that accompanies true compassion.

Late in the book she grumbles about editors’ frequent demands to wring happy endings from the overflowing cup of human despair. This is a reasonable complaint that most writers grapple with on many occasions. But I could easily envision the editor of this book begging such a talented author to try — please, please try! — to stop and reflect on the subterranean emotions propelling her agile mind. One can only imagine how the ideas Solnit explores intellectually might glisten if viewed through a more evolved emotional prism.

As someone who has shared Solnit’s plight of playing the simultaneous roles of writer and dementia caregiver, I can attest to the conflicts posed by the situation. But if I’ve learned anything from this challenge, it’s that a curious person can dramatically expand their understanding of the human experience by approaching these tasks with compassion and humility. There’s no book in the world, no tale more compelling, no journey more educational than the one that begins when your head really bows to the power of the heart.

–September 25, 2013

Author Photo of Colleen-Davis

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

 

ON GHOSTS by Elizabeth Robinson reviewed by Vanessa Martini

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ON GHOSTS
by Elizabeth Robinson
Solid Objects, 64 pages

reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Elizabeth Robinson’s On Ghosts is, in her own words, “an essay” that seeks to understand the idea of haunting. As many teachers—perhaps just many of my teachers—like to say, to “essay” means to try, and what Robinson tries to do is to create a haunting so slowly and carefully that at first a reader does not notice. The structure of the text is simple: many small sections compound upon one another in an attempt to understand “the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting.” What seems at first to be an Explanatory Note quickly proves itself rather similar to many sections that follow; we readers are suddenly sucked in, like hikers who swear the day was clear until fog rose all around.

Though it’s hard to say whether this is Robinson’s fault or my own, the first few sections seem awkward, too wordy, at once overly precise and not clear enough. Robinson describes apparition as “Rough erasure, but not real agency, not ‘power’…It is palimpsest, implicit disclosure.” Perhaps these attempts at definition rely too much on words that are already weighted, already haunted by meaning. Perhaps this means her definition is more successful than it initially appears.

Wandering on through the text—as an aside, the book itself is a pleasure to hold and read, so small and neatly contained—the format of words on the page continuously changes, never letting us rest in one shape for very long. “The Soul” looks like what most would call real poetry, all left-justified and line-broken; “Definitely Documentary” is composed of several short sentence clusters, not even paragraphs. Through the reading a few recurring forms appear, like refrains in a song. Robinson gives us “Incidents” and “Photographs,” each numbered, each paired together in describing a haunting. The photographs are not actual pictures; instead they describe what is shown in the supposed picture. In this way Robinson makes us haunters, too, ghosting the pages with our own imagined images, forcing our perceptions onto a paper that, as Robinson says, “is a page, and words may irritate its surface, dog-ear and crease it, but they will never truly impact the surface, they will never escape their page.”

The success of these sections makes a few of Robinson’s choices seem less assured, less graceful. She regularly inserts quotes from other writers—Jack Spicer, Kazim Ali, Simone Weil—into  the text, and while all relate to ghosts, and all are quite nice quotes on their own, they served mostly to distract my reading, to yank me out of the haunted headspace. Robinson also plays with font once or twice, including a very long James Longley passage in typical typewriter font, so lengthy and uniform the eyes simply glaze right over it to the unfortunately long italicized verses beneath it, not much better. When Robinson returns to more regular forms the writing itself takes precedence, and that writing is a pleasure to read.

The back half of On Ghosts is where the full effect of Robinson’s neat séance can be seen. “The Nature of Association” is perhaps the best section of the whole book; it describes the more mundane sort of haunting we experience when simple actions or objects recall people we know. Are our recollections of those people ghosts? They are not whole memories, just the idea of a personality, conjured up perhaps by “the smell of Pear Soap” or “putting lotion on after a shower.”

Robinson ends with a section called “Story,” paired with a photograph. The story recounts a simple sort of spooky tale; the photograph is, we are asked to imagine, the cover of a book in which this story was found. But for all the sparseness—in language, in content—and simplicity, the ending does not satisfy. The text is like a shaggy-dog joke, all beginning and middle with many discursive asides along the way, leading to a hollow echo of a punchline, a vacancy. But “On Ghosts” proves its point more, perhaps, after the book is closed. Recalling a person in the way Robinson so nicely describes then recalls the text. What started as a simple pleasant ghost becomes a double haunting. Initial frustration with so pointless an ending turns gradually into awe: Robinson has turned the text into a ghost itself, something not quite whole that insists upon recognition.

Author Photo of Vanessa MartiniVanessa Martini graduated from Bard College in 2012 with a degree in creative writing. She now works as a bookseller in San Francisco, where she eats a lot of avocados and walks everywhere. In the past she has interned for McSweeney’s Lucky Peach, where she milked a cow for an assignment, and for two sex writers, for whom she had to read 50 Shades of Grey.

HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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HANDLING THE TRUTH: ON THE WRITING OF MEMOIR
by Beth Kephart
Gotham Books, 254 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

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It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class.

Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details of its journey osmotically and greet it with as much euphoria as though it were a friend returning from a far off journey. But I suppose that’s exactly what Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir is: stories of both the familiar and strange, a chance to learn through another’s experiences, and an invitation to have our own unique adventures while meditating on the specialness of times we have already put to rest.

Handling the Truth is not a manual on how to write memoir. That would be like telling an over-eager high school student the secret to getting into the college of their dreams—there is no way other than to be honest and try. Kephart is a warm narrator, writing in an inviting tone that welcomes the reader to freely pose questions and make discoveries of their own through her detailed discussions on form and the importance of staying true to one’s own story line. As readers we are transported to Kephart’s class on the corner of 38th & Walnut, welcomed to sample the contemplations of countless students she has advised within this wood paneled classroom. “Try this,” she seems to say when presenting an exercise of listening to music and writing about a conjured memory. “Maybe this will work,” she offers as she suggests photographing something intriguing, only to zoom in and write about a detail previously unnoticed.

Headshot of Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart

Kephart speaks to the reader as though she were physically present, posting open-ended ideas of how to begin the act of writing memoir and concrete lessons on how to successfully approach the craft with the honesty and dedication it deserves. “Memoir is not a lecture, a lesson, a stew of information and facts,” she writes. “Memoirs illuminate and reveal, as opposed to justify and record. They connote and suggest but never insist.”

The reader is questioned, probed to find the meaningful in the mundane and the motive behind their own story. Perhaps the act of recalling memories through taste or smell will do the trick, or maybe a excavation into the deep dark crevices of messenger bag to determine the most meaningful item. These theories require the reader to be an active participant in their own experiences rather than simply a bystander. We as readers are asked to think and feel, and then to ruminate further on what makes us comfortable as well as discontent. We are pushed, not to our breaking point but rather to a heightened sense of personal awareness, one that is able to see and feel in a manner previously unattainable. We meet, with the help of Kephart, a new self.

Kephart presents an assortment of authors to the reader, much as a hostess shares a variety of delectable dishes, and the reader is asked to sample each before determining what it is we find inspiring. We are offered the ultimate movable feast, with the alternating memoirists Kephart cites serving as the structured courses meant to satiate our readerly palette:

Tastes are pathways, then. They lead us toward a story. But a meal—or a kitchen—can do even more than that for us…We eat, and we recall our past. We cook with others, and other stories percolate between the chopping and the stirring. We watch someone we love making a meal we hope we won’t forget, and something happens to us, connections are made.

As readers we devour words, sampling in search of satisfaction and finding bits of ourselves between the meaty morsels of this alphabet soup. From Geoffrey Wolff to Mary Karr to the wide eyed undergrads from around the country that have studied with Kephart, the reader is left upon concluding Handling the Truth with a comfortable fullness and a desire to create something of their own.

Before concluding with an annotated list of suggested reading, Kephart muses on one specific question her students often pose: “Aren’t you tired of memoir yet?” She assures us that no, she is not tired. That memoir itself is never vanquished so long as we continue having stories to tell. We are all teachers while still remaining students, holding the ability to maintain an openness to learn and a willingness to accept and encourage others to do the same.

And that is just what Beth Kephart does while taking us on this beautiful 254 page journey: she teaches while listening to the pages turn beneath the readers’ fingers, allowing us to find parts of our own stories between the margins, underneath the dog-ears, and deep within ourselves.

–August 19, 2013

Author Photo of Stephanie-TrottStephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

 

SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN by Blutch reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

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SO LONG, SILVER SCREEN
by Blutch
Picturebox, 88 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Every film is a ghost story. When we go to the theater, we see flickering images of things in the eternal past yet present which persistently haunt us. This observation cannot be avoided reading the French cartoonist Blutch’s new graphic essay/novel So Long, Silver Screen. With this book, Blutch summons the ghosts from his own filmgoing past to consider the film form. Death pervades the book from the very first panel in which a woman writes, “Adieu Paul Newman.” When the woman tells her lover Newman is dead, he reacts in disbelief: “it can’t be—I think about him every day” as if, by being captured onscreen, stars are immortal.

Blutch has decided to try his hand at film criticism. The book is largely comprised of discussions and arguments between a man and woman about film. We get all of the enduring debates—theater or film, how are women treated in film, and many more. In the discussion of why film is better than theater, the unnamed woman says that “movies give us something plays don’t…faces…and to top it off, dead people’s faces, too.” The book reminds us constantly of how films capture moments which will soon be past. In one chapter, the woman says that “film is a butterfly net for catching little girls.” One of the most gorgeous segments of the book is about Burt Lancaster. In one of the most powerful panels of the work, we see Lancaster as a trapeze artist finishing his act. In the next, a girl reads from A High Wind In Jamaica that “poor little Jako…fell plump on the deck and broke his neck. That was the end of him.”

We are reminded that these seemingly immortal and strong men or icons on the screen will one day fall. Even the living figures whom Blutch invokes seem practically ghostly. In the last segment of the book we see Michel Piccoli, the iconic French actor who has managed to work with directors from Carax to Hitchcock and most recently with Nanni Moretti in We Have a Pope. The woman tells the man to “forget the movies” only to have Piccoli appear from the shadows, a ghost drawing focus. Piccoli is not a man but rather his own imposing image projected. The idea of film itself is becoming something of the past as we move away from actual film to digital projection, losing the palpable feeling of light moving through film stock to create shadows in motion. In So Long, Silver Screen, Blutch shows us not the people behind the screen but instead the ghosts made alive by the flickering light of the projector.

–August 8, 2013

Author Photo of Gabriel Chazan

Gabriel Chazan

Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is currently studying film history, filmmaking and poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He writes on film at Home Movies: The Sarah Lawrence Film Journal.

DAVID LYNCH SWERVES by Martha P. Nochimson reviewed by Chris Ludovici

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DAVID LYNCH SWERVES: UNCERTAINTY THROUGH LOST HIGHWAY TO INLAND EMPIRE
by Martha P. Nochimson
University of Texas Press, 295 pages

reviewed by Chris Ludovici

In David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty Through Lost Highway to Inland Empire, Martha P. Nochimson presents a radical interpretation of David Lynch’s last four movies. She rejects the popular critical interpretations of his work, in favor of her own theory: a complicated mix of eastern philosophy and quantum physics. It’s fascinating, challenging, frustrating, and only intermittently persuasive.

Her ideas are compelling, especially when she’s addressing Lynch’s philosophy. As a devoted believer in Hinduism and tantric meditation, Lynch creates movies with strong spiritual components. They are intense stories, and his characters are often emotionally troubled. Nochimson clearly and thoughtfully explains Lynch’s repeating themes of the dangers of life lived in the service of greed and ambition, and his commitment to spiritual peace over material satisfaction.

But it’s her more radical, scientific ideas that are troublesome. Quantum physics isn’t exactly simple, and frankly, I don’t have enough knowledge on that subject to understand anything beyond her most superficial points. But here’s the part that’s tricky: the book is unclear as to whether or not Lynch does, either.

When Nochimson uses quantum physics to clear up some seemingly inexplicable plot development in one of Lynch’s films, the explanation makes sense. But the logic is all hers. She doesn’t offer much in the way of proof that it was what Lynch had in mind. All we have are her assurances that her interpretations are what he had in mind all along. Lynch’s work is deeply rooted in the subconscious; he famously dislikes offering explanations of his own work. But he does freely admit that he’s often not sure what he’s doing until it’s finished. It is difficult to accept the idea that Lynch was always aware of the very logical, scientific principles of quantum physics, while simultaneously free associating.

The index contains segments of Nochimson’s interview with Lynch. She doesn’t include the entire interview because Lynch felt it was too intimate and asked her to leave some out. Perhaps in those missing segments Lynch talks at great length about his interest and research in the field of quantum physics. But it’s nowhere in the book; Lynch doesn’t mention anything to the effect that he is particularly knowledgeable on the subject. In fact, when Nochimson occasionally asks him if he’s familiar with certain terms or concepts he says he is not.

But does any of this even matter? If art unintentionally overlaps with another philosophy or perspective, does that make it less valid than if the overlap was intentional? It’s a sure bet David Lynch doesn’t think so–if he did, he’d bend over backward to explain to everyone exactly what he meant by every choice he ever made. Art exists to be experienced, thought about, and discussed. Once it’s out of the artist’s hands, it belongs to the world to do with what it will.

None of this is to say that David Lynch Swerves isn’t an interesting book, or that Nochimson’s ideas don’t make sense. It is, and they do. And it gave me a clue of how to think about Lost Highway without wanting to slam my head into a wall until I passed out. Which is great, because that movie’s been driving me nuts for sixteen fucking years now. Too bad Nochimson didn’t present these ideas as her own, instead of insisting they were Lynch’s.

–July 31, 2013

Author Photo of christopher-ludoviciChris Ludovici has published articles in The Princeton Packet and online at Cinedelphia. His fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, and in 2009 he won the Judith Stark awards in fiction and drama. He has completed three novels, two on his own and one with his wife Desi whom he lives with along with their son Sam and too many cats in Drexel Hill.