Magill's Literary Annual 2008: Essay-reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2007

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the U...

Author: John D. Wilson | Steven G. Kellman

88 downloads 755 Views 5MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2007

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume One A-Lin Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Copyright ©2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 77-99209 ISBN (set): 978-1-58765-416-9 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-417-6 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-418-3

first printing

printed in canada

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Contributing Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxvii Author Photo Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xl The Abstinence Teacher—Tom Perrotta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 After Dark—Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Age of Huts (Compleat)—Ron Silliman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life—Hugh Brogan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution— Thomas McNamee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Angelica—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . 27 Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration— Sam Quinones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters—Arthur Conan Doyle . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Assistant—Robert Walser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Asylum in the Grasslands—Diane Glancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches—Susan Sontag . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Away—Amy Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 The Bad Girl—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears—Dinaw Mengestu. . . . . . . . . . . 64 Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself—Ann Wroe . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics—Jonathan Chait . . . . . . . . . . 72 The Big Girls—Susanna Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Biography: A Brief History—Nigel Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Biplane Houses—Les Murray. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Blackbird and Wolf—Henri Cole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army— Jeremy Scahill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary—Robert Alter . . . . . . 97 Boomsday—Christopher Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Bridge of Sighs—Richard Russo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 The Broken Shore—Peter Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Brother, I’m Dying—Edwidge Danticat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 v

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh—David Damrosch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 The Careful Use of Compliments—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . The Case for Literature— Gao Xingjian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Castle in the Forest—Norman Mailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us— Philip Rieff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cheating at Canasta—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Children of Húrin—J. R. R. Tolkien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Falls—Benjamin Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America—Allan M. Brandt. . . . . . . . . . . . Circling My Mother: A Memoir—Mary Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War—David Halberstam . . . The Collected Poems, 1956-1998—Zbigniew Herbert. . . . . . . . . . . . . Coltrane: The Story of a Sound—Ben Ratliff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition—César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . The Complete Stories—David Malouf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Considering Doris Day—Tom Santopietro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America— Jeff Wiltse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crossing the Sierra de Gredos—Peter Handke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts— Clive James. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts—Milan Kundera . . . . . . . . . . . . Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle— Janet Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future— BillMcKibben. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Devils and Islands—Turner Cassity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Diana Chronicles—Tina Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Divisadero—Michael Ondaatje . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade—William St. Clair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism—John Updike . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

Edith Wharton—Hermione Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . Einstein: His Life and Universe—Walter Isaacson . . . Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot—Viktor Shklovsky. Exit Ghost—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expectation Days—Sandra McPherson . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

vi

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. 122 . 127 . 131 . . . .

135 139 143 147

. . . . . . . .

151 156 160 165 169 173 178 182

. 186 . 190 . 195 . 199

. . 203 . . . .

208 212 216 220

. . 224 . . 228 . . . . .

232 236 241 245 249

CONTENTS

Falling Man—Don DeLillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World— Gregory Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family—Alexander Waugh. Finn—Jon Clinch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Five Skies—Ron Carlson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Free Life—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge—Adam Sisman . . . . . .

. . . . 253 . . . . . .

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon . . God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything— Christopher Hitchens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.—Scott W. Berg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gravedigger’s Daughter—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . Green and Gray—Geoffrey G. O’Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gum Thief—Douglas Coupland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

296 300 304 308

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—J. K. Rowling. . . . . . . . . . . Head and Heart: American Christianities—Garry Wills . . . . . . . . . . Heart-Shaped Box—Joe Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henry James Goes to Paris—Peter Brooks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . House of Meetings—Martin Amis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty—Wilfrid Sheed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Doctors Think—Jerome Groopman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

312 317 321 326 331

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

258 263 268 273 277 282

. . . . . . 287 . . . . . . 292 . . . .

. . . .

If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation—Janine Latus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007— X. J. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Country of Men—Hisham Matar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Indian Bride—Karin Fossum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Indian Clerk—David Leavitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Infidel—Ayaan Hirsi Ali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inventing Human Rights: A History—Lynn Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers— Harry Bernstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief, A Cultural History— Andrei Sinyavsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . 335 . . . 340

. . . 344 . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

348 352 357 361 366 371

. . . 376 . . . 380

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years—Wayne Franklin . . . . . . . . . . 384 Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran— Fatemeh Keshavarz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388 vii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

John Donne: The Reformed Soul—John Stubbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man—John Heilpern. . . 397 The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007— Albert Goldbarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402 Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America—Andrew Ferguson . . . . Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville—Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway— Witold Rybczynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857— William Dalrymple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Last Summer of the World—Emily Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—Tim Weiner. . . . . . . . . . . Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl—Steven Bach . . . . . . . . Letters to a Young Teacher—Jonathan Kozol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Life of Kingsley Amis—Zachary Leader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932—John Richardson . Linger Awhile—Russell Hoban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

viii

. . 406

. . 410 . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

415 420 424 429 434 438 442 447

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Magill’s Literary Annual, 2008, is the fifty-fourth publication in a series that began in 1954. Critical essays for the first twenty-two years were collected and published in the twelve-volume Survey of Contemporary Literature in 1977; since then, yearly sets have been published. Each year, Magill’s Literary Annual seeks to evaluate critically 200 major examples of serious literature, both fiction and nonfiction, published during the previous calendar year. The philosophy behind our selection process is to cover works that are likely to be of interest to general readers, that reflect publishing trends, that add to the careers of authors being taught and researched in literature programs, and that will stand the test of time. By filtering the thousands of books published every year down to 200 notable titles, the editors have provided the busy librarian with an excellent reader’s advisory tool and patrons with fodder for book discussion groups and a guide for choosing worthwhile reading material. The essayreviews in the Annual provide a more academic, “reference” review of a work than is typically found in newspapers and other periodical sources. The reviews in the two-volume Magill’s Literary Annual, 2008, are arranged alphabetically by title. At the beginning of both volumes is a complete alphabetical list, by category, of all covered books that provides readers with the title, author, and a brief description of each work. Every essay is approximately four pages in length. Each one begins with a block of reference information in a standard order: • Full book title, including any subtitle • Author: Name, with birth and death years • First published: Original foreign-language title, with year and country, when pertinent • Original language and translator name, when pertinent • Introduction, Foreword, etc., with writer’s name, when pertinent • Publisher: Company name and city, number of pages, retail price • Type of work: (chosen from standard categories) Anthropology Archaeology Autobiography Biography Current affairs Diary Drama Economics Education Environment

Essays Ethics Film Fine arts History History of science Language Law Letters Literary biography

ix

Literary criticism Literary history Literary theory Media Medicine Memoir Miscellaneous Music Natural history Nature

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Novel Novella Philosophy Poetry

Psychology Religion Science Short fiction

Sociology Technology Travel Women’s issues

Time: Period represented, when pertinent Locale: Location represented, when pertinent Capsule description of the work Principal characters [for novels, short fiction] or Principal personages [for biographies, history]: List of people, with brief descriptions The text of each essay-review analyzes and presents the focus, intent, and relative success of the author, as well as the makeup and point of view of the work under discussion. To assist the reader further, essays are supplemented by a list of additional “Review Sources” for further study in a bibliographic format. Every essay includes a sidebar offering a brief biography of the author or authors. Thumbnail photographs of the book covers and the authors are included as available. Four indexes can be found at the end of volume 2: • Biographical Works by Subject: Arranged by subject, rather than by author or title. Readers can locate easily reviews of biographical works—memoirs, diaries, and letters in addition to biographies and autobiographies—by looking up the name of the person covered. • Category Index: Groups all titles into subject areas such as current affairs and social issues, ethics and law, history, literary biography, philosophy and religion, psychology, and women’s issues. • Title Index: Lists all works reviewed in alphabetical order, with any relevant cross references. • Author Index: Lists books covered in the annual by each author’s name. A searchable cumulative index, listing all books reviewed in Magill’s Literary Annual between 1977 and 2008, as well as in Magill’s History Annual (1983) and Magill’s Literary Annual, History and Biography (1984 and 1985), can be found at our Web site, www.salempress.com, on the page for Magill’s Literary Annual, 2008. Our special thanks go to the editors for their expert and insightful selections: John Wilson is the editor of Books and Culture for Christianity Today, and Steven G. Kellman is a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. We also owe our gratitude to the outstanding writers who lend their time and knowledge to this project every year. The names of all contributing reviewers are listed in the front of volume 1, as well as at the end of their individual reviews. • • • •

x

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

VOLUME 1 The Abstinence Teacher—Tom Perrotta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 A divorced teacher and an ex-Deadhead Evangelical convert clash sharply when the culture wars invade their quiet suburban town in the guise of a demand for abstinence-only education After Dark—Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 A student and a young jazz musician are among those who lives overlap one night between midnight and dawn The Age of Huts (Compleat)—Ron Silliman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 A complex and mesmerizing collection that challenges the reader to make sense of what is presented Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life—Hugh Brogan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 This biography of Tocqueville amasses a great deal of information about the French political writer and presents it in accessible prose but especially in its second half becomes quite negative about its subject, turning into a series of criticisms of Tocqueville instead of an exposition of his achievements Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution— Thomas McNamee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The story of Alice Waters and her creation of the now legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, site of the invention of a new American cuisine and birthplace of the “Delicious Revolution” Angelica—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The story of a disintegrating Victorian family is explored from four competing perspectives: the overwrought mother who suspects her daughter is a victim of a sexual demon; the skeptical father, who concludes his wife is a madwoman; a spiritualist who doubles as a kind of psychologist; and, finally, the source of the family’s anxiety, the daughter Angelica herself, in whose memories all the novel’s voices exist

xi

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . 27 A family of four spends a year eating locally, opening up to new and wonderful tastes more than denying familiar ones, suggesting that the move toward industrial agriculture and convenience food—away from the family farm and the dining table— is more costly to society than people realize Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration— Sam Quinones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 In nine tales, plus an introduction and an epilogue, the author focuses on issues concerned with Mexican immigration to the United States and on the problems and accomplishments of Mexican immigrants, most of them undocumented, who leave Mexico to find a better life in the United States and to save enough money to set themselves up comfortably when they return to Mexico Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters—Arthur Conan Doyle . . . . . . . . . . 36 This generous collection of Doyle’s letters, most of them addressed to his mother, sheds light on many facets of his life, from his school days to his activities as a leading advocate of Spiritualism The Assistant—Robert Walser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 A previously untranslated novel from the highly influential modernist author of Jakob von Gunten Asylum in the Grasslands—Diane Glancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 In this collection, far from being marginal, the “Native American experience” as rendered in current times in all of its variousness is exemplary At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches—Susan Sontag . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 A posthumous collection that explores the full range of Sontag’s interests in world literature and politics as well as her view of contemporary culture, especially arts like photography Away—Amy Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Lillian Leyb fled to New York City’s Lower East Side after her parents and husband were murdered and her young daughter Sophie disappeared in a Russian pogrom; learning that Sophie may have survived, Lillian travels west to find her, to Seattle and through the Yukon wilderness toward Siberia The Bad Girl—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 A complex, intertwined story of love, politics, obsession, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement, ecstacy and despair, illusion and reality

xii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears—Dinaw Mengestu. . . . . . . . . . . 64 The experience of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, dramatizes the ambiguous experience of the exile who must reconcile his new country with the world he left behind Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself—Ann Wroe . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 An unconventional biography that forsakes chronological development of the poet’s life for an attempt to probe the way Percy Bysshe Shelley perfected his own personality, one that estranged him from his contemporaries even as it made his poetry possible The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics—Jonathan Chait . . . . . . . . . . 72 Supply-side economics generated a fixation on tax-rate reduction as an economic panacea, was influential in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and was the centerpiece of a general process in which the Republican Party became increasingly an instrument for raising the incomes of the rich The Big Girls—Susanna Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Four characters narrate an interwoven tale as they are brought together in the aftermath of a heinous crime Biography: A Brief History—Nigel Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 In this brief history of the art of biography, Hamilton traces its evolution, cites some of its renowned practitioners, and argues for its legitimacy as an interdisciplinary field of academic study The Biplane Houses—Les Murray. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Australia’s best-known poet returns to his characteristic strengths in a volume of short poems concerned with emotion and history, nature and society Blackbird and Wolf—Henri Cole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The poet continues to explore the regions of ice—death, separation, loneliness— with great beauty, courage, clarity, and formal control and in the closing section moves away from the self and into the social realm, forming his own response to the post-September 11 world Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army— Jeremy Scahill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 An exposé of the most successful private security firm of recent times, its farright founders, and their ties to “theoconservatives” and President George W. Bush’s administration xiii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary—Robert Alter . . . . . . 97 This translation of the Book of Psalms seeks to re-create for the Anglophone reader the experience of encountering the work in its original Hebrew, while accompanying notes place these poems in their philological, theological, and historical context Boomsday—Christopher Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 A young Internet blogger and a U.S. senator champion government-assisted suicide for baby boomers to save the nation’s Social Security system, but their initiative, originally meant to draw attention to the need to adequately fund the retirement system, takes on a life of its own Bridge of Sighs—Richard Russo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 A novel about childhood friends in a small factory town in upstate New York and the lives that spin forth from their early triumphs and tragedies The Broken Shore—Peter Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 A homicide detective who has returned to his hometown to recuperate from the incident that killed his partner is thrust into a murder investigation that is not nearly as straightforward as it initially seems Brother, I’m Dying—Edwidge Danticat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 A powerful and touching account of loyalty, separation and struggle, illness and ultimate survival of an extended Haitian family both in their native country and in the United States The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh—David Damrosch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Moving backward from the Victorian era, this book traces the deciphering, discovery, and composition of the epic of Gilgamesh, a work dating from the third millennium b.c.e. The Careful Use of Compliments—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . 122 Isabel Dalhousie is back in this fourth installment of a series that began in 2004 with The Sunday Philosophy Club The Case for Literature— Gao Xingjian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 A series of twelve essays (most originally delivered as speeches to a variety of audiences) address the functions of literature, the responsibilities of the author, and the forces opposing the free expression of writers in China and the West

xiv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Castle in the Forest—Norman Mailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 A well-researched fictional rendering of the childhood of the most brutal dictator in history, Adolf Hitler Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us— Philip Rieff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 A set of reflections on the concept of charisma and on how this concept is connected to religious faith and social order Cheating at Canasta—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Twelve new stories by the brilliant Irish master of the short-story form The Children of Húrin—J. R. R. Tolkien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 The tragic story of Túrin Turambar and his sister, Niënor, who were doomed by a curse placed on their father, Húrin, by the Dark Enemy, Morgoth Christine Falls—Benjamin Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 While investigating the suspicious death of an unwed mother and the disappearance of her infant, pathologist and amateur sleuth Dr. Garret Quirke discovers two converging conspiracies, one that involves the Roman Catholic Church and the other that involves members of his own family The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America—Allan M. Brandt. . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 This history of cigarettes examines the growth of a rogue industry that helped define important cultural changes in the United States even as it spreads disease and death Circling My Mother: A Memoir—Mary Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Gordon uncovers the layers of her mother’s complex person and story and the struggle of the writer to find her mother’s heart and soul beneath a multitude of surface-level details The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War—David Halberstam . . . . 160 Told from the perspectives of common soldiers, junior officers, commanders, and the leaders responsible for thrusting the country into its first “limited war,” this final effort by America’s premier journalist sheds light on acts of valor and hardships faced by those caught up in the least-known of America’s twentieth century armed conflicts

xv

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998—Zbigniew Herbert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Herbert is a major international prize-winning poet of the last century, often compared to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, whose lyrical and epigrammatic lines are studded with brilliant metaphors Coltrane: The Story of a Sound—Ben Ratliff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 An incisive and stunning study of the musical giant and his influence on jazz The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition—César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Vallejo broke new ground in his intensely personal poetry by eschewing the traditional features of the poetry of his time, such as rhyme, stanzaic regularity, and subject matter, in favor of verbal ingenuity, arrhythmic lines, and surreal imagery The Complete Stories—David Malouf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 In thirty-one short stories, written over the last two and a half decades, one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed writers focuses on the presence of the past in the lives of his characters, on their violent impulses, and on their fascination with death Considering Doris Day—Tom Santopietro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 A thorough analysis and reevaluation of Doris Day’s career in movies, music, and television Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America— Jeff Wiltse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 The author recounts why municipal swimming pools were first built in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and how pool use since then has been influenced by issues of class, sex, and race Crossing the Sierra de Gredos—Peter Handke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Handke’s visionary postmodernist work of fiction advocates the abandonment of traditional, media-manipulated ways of perception and the acquisition of new images to deal with a fragmented and confusing world Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts— Clive James. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 An encyclopedia of cultural enthusiasms and dislikes that aims to set the record straight as to who and what is worth preserving for future generations The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts—Milan Kundera . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Kundera offers ruminations on the art of fiction writing and the history of the novel

xvi

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle— Janet Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 This biography traces the life and death of Fanny Wollstonecraft, the first child of Mary Wollstonecraft, and those around her, especially her half sister Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future— Bill McKibben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 McKibben argues that, in order to have a sustainable future, societies must reject the notion that more is necessarily better, pursue locally based economies that protect the environment, and safeguard happiness by asking “How much is enough?” Devils and Islands—Turner Cassity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Using meter and often rhyme, this eccentric but entertaining poet continues his witty, satirical commentary on a variety of topics, especially political correctness, for whose shibboleths he shows little respect The Diana Chronicles—Tina Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the princess’s death, Brown’s glitzy biography uses previously published sources, more than 250 new interviews, and personal knowledge to present Diana, master and victim of the media, as a transformative force for the British Royal Family and an icon of her times Divisadero—Michael Ondaatje . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 One act of passion and violence haunts a family for years to come The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade—William St. Clair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 St. Clair chronicles from primary manuscripts the day-to-day activities at Britain’s main slave-trading post on the western coast of Africa, Cape Coast Castle, between 1664 and the end of the British slave trade in 1807 Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Updike collects more than a hundred essays, reviews, and brief notices published between 1998 and 2007, displaying both his wide range of interests and his insight into modern character and culture Edith Wharton—Hermione Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 A major study of one of the most important American writers of the early twentieth century

xvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Einstein: His Life and Universe—Walter Isaacson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Based on previously and recently released public and private papers, this comprehensive biography integrates the scientific, personal, and humanitarian life of Albert Einstein, a theoretical physicist who became one of the most important persons of the twentieth century Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot—Viktor Shklovsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 An expansive, leisurely, and factually grounded study of the literary techniques of such major Russian authors as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, presented in a format that connects the autobiographical experiences of Shklovsky’s subjects to their published work Exit Ghost—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 After eleven years of rural seclusion, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York and the ambitions and contentions of contemporary culture Expectation Days—Sandra McPherson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 McPherson’s collection once again shows her able melding of fact and emotion, the outer and the inner worlds Falling Man—Don DeLillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 The eagerly awaited 9/11 novel by the master of national trauma and postmodern angst A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World— Gregory Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 An effort to answer two central questions in economic history: why the economies of some nations began to undergo rapid industrialization about the year 1800 and why a large gap in economic development persists among nations Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family—Alexander Waugh. . . . . 263 A family chronicle of five generations of male Waughs, at least three of whom became internationally acclaimed authors, and an account of (and an accounting for) their intersecting roles as fathers and sons in relationships that often caused mutual incomprehension and dismay Finn—Jon Clinch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 This parallel text to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) unfolds the mystery of the villainous Pap Finn, exploring the sources of his malice, his indigent life on the Mississippi, his relationship with his son Huck and the boy’s mother, and finally Finn’s violent demise

xviii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Five Skies—Ron Carlson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Carlson’s novel about three men with lives in disarray who work together not only in building their project but also in rebuilding their broken lives A Free Life—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 The story of a Chinese American immigrant family whose father struggles between making ends meet and pursuing his dream of becoming a poet; the book is written with humor, honesty, and deep insight into the complex psyche of the protagonist The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge—Adam Sisman . . . . . . . . . . 282 The biographer maintains neutrality in describing the trajectory of a famous literary alliance from ardent friendship and shared ambition to eventual estrangement Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . 287 Two travelers through the Caucasus Mountains attempt to return the throne of the Khazar Empire to its rightful heir God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything— Christopher Hitchens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 A passionate antitheist argues that religion not only outrages reason and common sense but also poses a grave threat to society Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.—Scott W. Berg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 An account of the life and work of architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant and his vision to design and create the magnificent city that would become Washington, D.C. The Gravedigger’s Daughter—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 This novel follows the dark adventures of Rebecca Schwart, who, escaping her suicidal father and a brutal, wife-beating husband, changes her name and works at various menial jobs until she meets her true love Green and Gray—Geoffrey G. O’Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 A penetrating and provocative collection that examines the complexities of memory and experience The Gum Thief—Douglas Coupland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 In Coupland’s eleventh novel, two lonely employees at an office superstore form a tentative bond by communicating to each other through journal entries and letters

xix

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—J. K. Rowling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 In the seventh and concluding novel in Rowling’s popular series, the wizarding world is at war, and Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort prepare for their final showdown Head and Heart: American Christianities—Garry Wills . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 How the two great strains of American Christianity—Enlightenment and Evangelicalism—have played out in American history Heart-Shaped Box—Joe Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 This debut novel by Hill, the second son of Stephen King, focuses on the awakening of a middle-aged rock star who confronts supernatural horror and finds himself Henry James Goes to Paris—Peter Brooks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 A fascinating account of the American novelist’s time in Paris, where he meets influential French writers and encounters French art House of Meetings—Martin Amis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 A Russian man lives through World War II, the gulag, post-Stalinist Russia, and a time in the United States, suffering and doing much evil The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty—Wilfrid Sheed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 An entertaining, lively survey of the lives and works of the great American composers of the golden age of popular song from the 1920’s to the 1950’s How Doctors Think—Jerome Groopman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 A mature and sensitive physician offers an inside look into medical thinking and the influences that limit doctors in their practice of medicine If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation— Janine Latus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 The author recalls her family background and her father’s casual cruelty toward his children; her struggle to remain in, then end, her volatile marriage; and her sister Amy’s murder by an abusive boyfriend In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007— X. J. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348 A collection of poems spanning over fifty years by a master of wit and humor In the Country of Men—Hisham Matar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 An exiled Libyan recounts his traumatic family experiences as a nine-year-old living in the cruel and repressive regime of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi xx

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Indian Bride—Karin Fossum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 In a new volume in a popular series, Inspector Sejer has to solve the brutal murder of an Indian woman on her way to a new husband and a new home The Indian Clerk—David Leavitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 A historical narrative based on a true story but with certain character traits and plot elements fictionalized to offer the reader a crucible by which to judge the smug assumptions of a past society Infidel—Ayaan Hirsi Ali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 With remarkable skill, the author traces the immense personal and cultural changes in her life, which she has dedicated to freeing Muslim women (and men) from damaging, inflexible traditions Inventing Human Rights: A History—Lynn Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 The author seeks to explain why interest in human rights flourished in late eighteenth century Europe and North America, asserting that growth in feelings of empathy with other human beings, as much as logical arguments advanced by Enlightenment thinkers, led to active concern for the rights of all people The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers—Harry Bernstein . . . 376 A nonagenarian recalls his childhood in an English mill town on a street where Gentiles and Jews faced off in mutual mistrust Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief, A Cultural History— Andrei Sinyavsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380 A comprehensive survey of Russian fairy tales and folk wisdom from the Middle Ages to the modern era James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years—Wayne Franklin . . . . . . . . . . 384 A biography of the first major American novelist and his struggles to earn a living as an author in an age when America was not expected to produce its own cultural offerings Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran— Fatemeh Keshavarz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388 A response to Reading “Lolita” in Tehran by Azar Nafisi that attempts to refute what Keshavarz sees as Nafisi’s Westernized critique of culture in Iran and that introduces the reader to a number of Iranian writers who have influenced her

xxi

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

John Donne: The Reformed Soul—John Stubbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 In later Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a great London poet modulated from exuberant youth to husband and father, from Roman Catholic to Anglican, from gentleman poet to cathedral dean John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man—John Heilpern. . . 397 This authorized biography, which uses Osborne’s unpublished notebooks for the first time, attempts not only to present a balanced view of his life but also to reestablish his place as one of the most important English dramatists of the twentieth century The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007— Albert Goldbarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402 A remarkable and dazzling collection of old and new poetry that spans thirtyfive years Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America—Andrew Ferguson . . . . . . 406 The author observes the unusual ways in which Americans honor or recognize the significance of Abraham Lincoln Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville—Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway— Witold Rybczynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410 A professor of urbanism traces the construction of a traditional neighborhood development from the developer’s purchase of the land through the reactions of the purchasers of one of the houses The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857— William Dalrymple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Dalrymple tells two interrelated stories—one of the final years of Emperor Bah3dur Sh3h Zafar II and of Delhi, the city he “personified,” and another of the four-month siege of Delhi conducted to regain the city from the Indian troops of the East India Company The Last Summer of the World—Emily Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 Mitchell’s first novel weaves the story of American photographer Edward Steichen’s experiences as an aerial photographer during World War I with memories of his marriage and its dissolution Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—Tim Weiner. . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 Weiner’s history of the Central Intelligence Agency identifies far more failures than successes, leading the journalist to conclude that the United States is in grave danger xxii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl—Steven Bach . . . . . . . . . . 429 A biography of the Nazis’ most important filmmaker that includes critical analysis of her contributions to the fields of cinematography and photography Letters to a Young Teacher—Jonathan Kozol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434 In his twelfth book, structured as letters to a first-year teacher in one of Boston’s inner-city schools, veteran educator Kozol continues to speak out about “the joys and challenges and passionate rewards of a beautiful profession” The Life of Kingsley Amis—Zachary Leader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438 An authorized, thoroughly researched, and alarmingly frank account of the life of Amis, one of the best comic novelists of his time and a controversial figure in postWorld War II British literature and cultural politics A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932—John Richardson . . . 442 In this third volume in his projected four-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, Richardson focuses on the artist’s virtual invention of cubism, on his other artistic innovations, and on his romances Linger Awhile—Russell Hoban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 A lonely elderly man approaches a film technician and asks that he bring to life a B movie star who has been dead for more than forty years

VOLUME 2 Little Boat—Jean Valentine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Valentine uses her spare style and oblique images to take her readers into a world of dream and mystery where she considers love and death A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier—Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . 455 The author describes his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war, where he was driven to kill by hunger, fear, and drugs Lost City Radio—Daniel Alarcón . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 A narrative about a country torn apart by a civil war, told through the tragedies and hardships that its civilians have undergone

xxiii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil— Philip Zimbardo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 A research-based account of how larger forces influence human beings to choose evil, as well as some suggestions for resisting pernicious influences A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign—Edward J. Larson . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468 In the first contested election in U.S. history, and amid predictions of doom if the other won, Thomas Jefferson led radical Republicans to victory over Federalist incumbent president John Adams in a close contest decided in the House of Representatives The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life—José Maria Eça de Queirós . . . . 473 Eça de Queirós traces three generations of a wealthy Portuguese family, as they cease to hold on to their moral and principled roots and sink into idleness and decadence, to metaphorically illustrate a similar movement throughout Portugal and nineteenth century Europe Making Money—Terry Pratchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477 Moist von Lipwig is a former con artist and current postmaster of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork when he reluctantly becomes the city’s leading banker and head of the mint, where he revolutionizes the city’s economy by introducing the concept of paper money The Maytrees—Annie Dillard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482 The story of one couple’s lifelong relationship amid the artistic community of Provincetown, Massachusetts Miyazawa Kenji: Selections—Kenji Miyazawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 The Buddhist poems of Kenji Miyazawa capture the imagination of the reader with their moving promotion of mental tranquility in the face of personal suffering, their modern evocation of humanity’s place in the cosmos, often exemplified by the landscape of northeast Japan, and their reflections on human folly Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”—Mother Teresa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 This partial biography of Mother Teresa focuses on her interior life through her letters and other writings, as she labored to establish a new religious order while struggling with devastating spiritual doubt The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity— Sarah B. Pomeroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495 A classical scholar uses a wide range of evidence to piece together the circumstances surrounding the life and death of a Roman woman in the second century c.e. xxiv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense— Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 A collection of ten previously published stories of violence, gore, and horror featuring serial killers, other murderers and psychopaths, their family members, and their victims Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain—Oliver Sacks . . . . . . . . . . . 505 A collection of discussions of the many ways that music can affect the brain for good or for ill drawn primarily from cases and patients with whom the author has worked in his profession as a neurologist Nada—Carmen Laforet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509 A coming-of-age novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who travels to Barcelona to attend a university and live with her deceased mother’s relatives as she searches for her identity in her new family, school, and society, which mirror the emptiness and confusion that many Spaniards felt in the wake of the Spanish Civil War The Naming of the Dead—Ian Rankin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514 The sixteenth novel in the well-known series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus finds Rebus facing multiple challenging cases just when world leaders are gathered for the G8 summit near Edinburgh Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist—Lois Gordon . . . . . . . . . 519 The turbulent life of modernist poet and publisher Cunard, Jazz Age socialite turned journalist and political activist Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick—Jenny Uglow . . . . . . . . . 524 Uglow’s biography describes the life and work of Thomas Bewick, a gifted engraver whose charming but accurate wood engravings provided the ordinary people of his age with their first lessons in natural history New England White—Stephen L. Carter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528 Three murders, one thirty years old, draw a university president’s wife into a web of past and present secrets, scattered clues, and dangerous episodes that expose forces and fault lines in her own life as well as in race relations in America Nixon and Kissinger : Partners in Power—Robert Dallek . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 A brilliant examination of the relationship between Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger that explains their decisive impact on American foreign policy

xxv

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World— Margaret MacMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538 Nixon’s visit to China was a pivotal moment in world history and a step toward world peace, but the devil was in the details Notebooks—Tennessee Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543 In almost eight hundred entries written in thirty notebooks covering twenty-five years, Williams records the oftentimes agonizing process of writing his poetry, fiction, and plays while coming to terms with his homosexuality and dependence on drugs and alcohol Novels in Three Lines—Félix Fénéon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 548 A translation of 1,066 news items that were each condensed into three lines of text by the French anarchist and literary figure Nureyev: The Life—Julie Kavanagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 552 An in-depth and probing portrayal of Rudolf Nureyev as an exceptional ballet dancer, a star personality, an individual tormented by his otherness, and a volatile and charismatic individual Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding—Scott Weidensaul. . . . . 556 Traces bird watching in America from the Native Americans’ use and understanding of birds through the split of bird study into science (ornithology) and hobby (birding) to its reunification in the “citizen-scientist,” the birder who contributes to scientific studies of birds On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561 A young, sexually inexperienced British couple’s wedding night proves both upsetting and disappointing for each, effectively ending their brief marriage Other Colors: Essays and a Story—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 A compilation of mostly short essays about Turkish culture that includes literary criticism, autobiography, and a story by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature Out Stealing Horses—Per Petterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 In a poignant and personal novel, readers are allowed glimpses into the life of Trond Sander, as he reminisces about his childhood and family, and develop an understanding of the life those experiences and relationships created The Overlook—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 Harry Bosch solves a complicated murder case despite interference from his colleagues and federal authorities xxvi

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Peeling the Onion: A Memoir—Günter Grass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578 In this brilliant memoir, Grass tells the story of his life from his youthful exploits, his first love, and his military experiences up through the writing of his first novel and reveals his lifelong devotion to the power and beauty of art The Pentagon: A History, The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and to Restore It Sixty Years Later—Steve Vogel . . . . . 582 Describes the political and engineering challenges that faced the people who built the Pentagon during the 1940’s and the equally daunting challenges facing those tasked to rebuild the damaged structure after it was attacked on September 11, 2001 The Pesthouse—Jim Crace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587 Two strangers accidentally meet and begin a journey to embark on a voyage east to escape a ravaged America Poor People—William T. Vollmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592 Building on previous work from his seven-volume treatise on violence, Vollmann turns his attention to poverty throughout the world, interviewing people who seem poor in order to learn about their circumstances and report their views on poverty The Post-Birthday World—Lionel Shriver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596 Children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern’s life branches into two concurrent time lines based on her decision whether or not to act upon her physical attraction to Ramsey Acton, a charismatic professional snooker player Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present— Michael B. Oren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600 An account of America’s involvement in the Middle East from the earliest days of the republic to the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties—Robert Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 An evocation and assessment of a turbulent and frequently misconstrued era in American history from the personal perspective of one of the most admired and accomplished writers of that time Ralph Ellison: A Biography—Arnold Rampersad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610 A critically acclaimed biography of the author of Invisible Man (1952), the novel named as the most significant work of fiction by a twentieth century African American writer

xxvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Ravel—Jean Echenoz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615 A marvelously crafted yet carefully restrained picture of the triumph and the increasing decline of the aging composer Maurice Ravel during his final ten years of travel and travail The Reagan Diaries—Ronald Reagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619 The daily writings of President Ronald Reagan, skillfully edited by one of America’s foremost historians The Regensburg Lecture—James V. Schall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623 The complete text of Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial lecture on Islam, faith, and reason, delivered in September, 2006, accompanied by Schall’s commentary and exposition of the lecture The Religion—Tim Willocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 627 The story of an adventurer whose search for the lost son of a captivating noblewoman takes him to Malta, where he finds himself fighting with the Christians against the Turks besieging the island The Reluctant Fundamentalist—Mohsin Hamid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 A Pakistani man, torn between fundamentalist Islam and America, relates his story to his American guest Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss, and the Myths and Realities of Dieting—Gina Kolata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635 Billions of dollars are spent each year on the quest for thinness, while scientific evidence gained from repeated studies and data analysis indicates that all these dollars are being spent in vain Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639 Donald, close to death at age forty-five, dictates his life story to his wife so that family members will appreciate their part-Native American heritage; after his death, the people closest to him are forced to deal with the loss of an important influence on their lives Run—Ann Patchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643 This family saga tells the story of two adopted brothers whose birth mother suddenly reenters their lives through a car accident; the author portrays how bonds of love and affection develop in a family, whether its members are related by birth or by choice

xxviii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia—Anna Politkovskaya . . . . . . . . . . . . 647 A compelling account of recent Russian history, with special focus on terrorist activities in Chechnya and Russia and on political changes under Vladimir Putin The Savage Detectives—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 652 A multivoiced epic of two poets’ search for the vanished founder of visceral realism, and the consequences of their meeting, extending over two decades and five continents Second Diasporist Manifesto (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses)—R. B. Kitaj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 A famous modern figurative painter shares his strongly felt impressions on the correspondences between literature and art The Secret Servant—Daniel Silva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 Israeli spy Gabriel Allon tries to rescue the daughter of the American ambassador to the United Kingdom after she is kidnapped by terrorists The Shadow Catcher—Marianne Wiggins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 This dual narrative twines the character Wiggins’s trip to investigate the illness of a man professing to be her father with the story of photographer Edward Curtis’s life, marriage, training, and work documenting Native Americans by taking their photos in tribal dress and settings in the early twentieth century Shadow of the Silk Road—Colin Thubron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672 Thubron describes an eight-month journey along the fabled Silk Road, from China to Antioch in Turkey Shortcomings—Adrian Tomine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 In his first full-length graphic novel, the prolific Adrian Tomine combines gritty realism and subtle humor to create a memorable, sometimes painful exploration of Asian American identity The Slave Ship: A Human History—Marcus Rediker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681 A well-researched study that describes the physical structure of slave ships that transported slaves from West Africa to the New World during the eighteenth century The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology— Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685 Heinrich recounts his father’s life and scientific career, and his own, with emphasis on their interactions with each other and with the events and biology of their times xxix

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Snow Part—Paul Celan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 690 Tormented Holocaust survivor Celan’s last poems, including his unpublished ones, are ably translated Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation—Marc Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694 A scholarly yet readable account of changes that took place within America’s broadcast industry as rock-and-roll music came of age Souls of the Labadie Tract—Susan Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699 Howe explores historical episodes, including the foundation and dissolution of the Labadist utopian community (1684-1722) in Maryland, through the lens of her experimental poetry, employing both verbal and visual elements Spook Country—William Gibson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704 The second book in a trilogy started with Pattern Recognition in 2003, bringing a science-fiction sensibility to bear on the contemporary world Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer—Tim Jeal . . . . . 708 This biography of Henry Morton Stanley presents new information on the discoverer of David Livingstone and emphasizes his role as an explorer; though marred by excessive defensiveness about Stanley, the book raises important issues about European colonialism The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West—Mark Lilla . . . 713 An intellectual history of the separation of politics from religion during the early modern period of Western civilization and of efforts to bring the two together again The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe— Mayer Hillman, with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan . . . . . . . 718 Hillman argues that drastic, rapid measures must be taken immediately to reduce greenhouse gases in order to save humans and other species from the pernicious effects of global warming, and he and his colleagues recommend a practicable, albeit civilization-altering, program Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl— Craig Harline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723 A lively account of the rise and development of a day that has been both dreaded and beloved, focusing especially on England, Holland, France, Belgium, and the United States and showing that the way Sunday has evolved in these settings says much about what is unique to them

xxx

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables— Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729 Vargas Llosa explores Hugo’s endeavor to write a novel enveloping a complete fictional world and by so doing to change the real world Ten Days in the Hills—Jane Smiley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 733 In her latest novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Smiley uses Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1351) as a template for her tale of ten days in the Hollywood Hills, where ten characters try to make sense of things during the conflict in Iraq Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition—Mary Douglas . . . . . 738 A distinguished anthropologist explains a technique of composition widely used in oral societies but little understood in the modern print culture Thomas Hardy—Claire Tomalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 Tomalin examines the life of the renowned writer who began his career as a novelist at the end of the Victorian era but became one of the leading Modern poets A Thousand Splendid Suns—Khaled Hosseini. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 746 The second novel by this Afghan American author recounts the woes of two very different Afghan women in their homeland during a time of violent political upheaval, bloody civil war, and foreign invasions by Soviet as well as U.S. and NATO troops Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005—Robert Hass . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 In this long-awaited, award-winning collection of poetry from a celebrated California poet, Hass explores the subjects of art, nature, and social issues The Tin Roof Blowdown—James Lee Burke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 In his sixteenth Dave Robicheaux novel, Burke weaves a New Orleans tale of death and destruction wrought by small-time criminals with the horror of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath Touch and Go: A Memoir—Studs Terkel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759 Terkel looks back on the astonishing ninety-five years of his life Toussaint Louverture: A Biography—Madison Smartt Bell . . . . . . . . . . . 763 A scholarly and balanced account of Toussaint-Louverture’s life, with an emphasis on his struggle against slavery and for Haitian autonomy A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories—Primo Levi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 Light, darkness, and shadows permeate this collection of stories, echoing the Holocaust and exploring the beauty and ugliness of which humans are capable xxxi

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Travels with Herodotus—Ryszard Kapukci5ski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 772 A journalist parallels his early travels to Asia and Africa as a foreign correspondent to the life and times of Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian Tree of Smoke—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 777 An ambitious novel that chronicles a CIA intelligence operation gone awry during the Vietnam War The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction—Patrick Anderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 A breezy overview of contemporary thriller writers by an engaging thriller novelist and book reviewer that is nevertheless weak on the history of the genre and provides no guide to other studies Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints—Joan Acocella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 A collection of essays that are representative of Acocella’s literary, dance, and art criticism originally published primarily in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books Two Histories of England—Jane Austen and Charles Dickens . . . . . . . . . 790 Sixteen-year-old Austen’s highly subjective tongue-in-cheek history of England from Henry IV to Charles I parodies subjective eighteenth century histories for young ladies, while Dickens’s lively, dramatic children’s tale of England from Elizabeth I to the death of Charles I provides personal insights into how England acquired democratic freedoms Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice—Janet Malcolm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 795 Three essays, originally published in The New Yorker, explore Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s relationship, works, and lives Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939—Katie Roiphe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800 Roiphe examines seven couples in literary London in the opening decades of the twentieth century and reveals the difficulties they had in trying to redefine marriage for modern times The Unnatural History of the Sea—Callum Roberts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 By examining the thousand-year history of fishing and hunting of marine life, the author shows how increasingly sophisticated technologies have facilitated depleting once superabundant oceans of more than 90 percent of their fish and mammals, but marine reserves offer a hope for resurrecting these vanished ecosystems

xxxii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World—Rupert Smith . . . 809 A British general argues that the era of conventional interstate industrial war is over and that the world has entered a period in which wars will be limited, long, and fought among the people Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver— Arthur Allen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814 An account of the development and use of vaccination as a means to control disease; political, industrial, and medical controversies associated with vaccination have all played their respective roles in the subject Varieties of Disturbance—Lydia Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 A brilliant, opaque writer’s seventh collection, a gathering of fifty-seven stories that range from one-sentence jolts of recognition to forty-page faux case studies Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto—Niccolò Capponi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 823 Capponi presents a meticulously researched and brilliantly written account of the Battle of Lepanto, which saved the West from domination by the Ottoman Turkish Empire The Water Cure—Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 828 One man’s exploration of sanity, rationality, humanity, and justice as he transforms himself from victim to assailant after he captures the monster that brutally murdered his eleven-year-old daughter The Welsh Girl—Peter Ho Davies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832 A first novel by Davies chronicling the wartime convergence of three young people: a sheep farmer’s seventeen-year-old daughter who must live a devastating lie, a German POW who falls in love with her, and an Anglicized German Jew, an interrogator assigned to break through Rudolf Hess What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848— Daniel Walker Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 836 A comprehensive narrative account of the United States from the end of the War of 1812 until the end of the Mexican War, with a good balance among political, military, cultural, technological, and economic components What the Dead Know—Laura Lippman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 841 Thirty years after two adolescent sisters mysteriously disappeared from a Baltimore mall, a woman stopped by police following a hit-and-run accident on the Baltimore Beltway claims to be one of them xxxiii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa—Peter Godwin . . . . . 845 A poignant memoir of the African-born author’s return visits to Zimbabwe, where he strove to protect the welfare of his aging parents in the midst of deteriorating political and economic conditions; while looking after his parents, he made a startling discovery about the true origins of his father that moved him to see his own life from a radically new perspective The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia—Orlando Figes . . . . . . . . 851 An account of the private lives of ordinary Russians that focuses on the totalitarian Soviet Union from the Revolution of 1917 until Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 White Walls: Collected Stories—Tatyana Tolstaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856 A collection of twenty-four stories, including all those from the author’s first two books, as well as previously uncollected stories Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think)—John Leland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 860 Leland presents a compelling argument for the enduring value of Jack Kerouac’s novel as a guide to growing up and leading a responsible life The World Without Us—Alan Weisman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864 Weisman imagines an Earth from which all people suddenly vanish and traces what might then happen to the homes, factories, and farms left abandoned, as well as the natural world as it begins to regenerate and reshape itself for post-human existence A Worldly Country: New Poems—John Ashbery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868 The twenty-sixth collection by a prolific and preeminent American poet The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein—Martin Duberman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 872 Duberman’s monumental biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of the brilliant man responsible for bringing George Balanchine to America, for helping to create the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, and for founding the New York City Ballet The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945— Saul Friedländer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 876 A multifaceted account that includes analysis as lucid as it is complex, the second volume of Friedländer’s history of the Holocaust covers the years of World War II and achieves distinction by continuing the author’s insightful integration of narratives about the German perpetrators and their Jewish victims

xxxiv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881 In this alternate history, in which surviving European Jews settled in Alaska instead of Israel after World War II, Meyer Landsman is a detective who investigates a murder, discovers the victim was the estranged son of a local crime boss, and uncovers an international conspiracy to destroy an important religious shrine Young Stalin—Simon Sebag Montefiore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 886 New sources revise the understanding of Joseph Stalin’s early years and, hence, his personality

xxxv

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

Michael Adams

Pegge Bochynski

Mary Virginia Davis

City University of New York Graduate Center

Salem State College

University of California, Davis

Richard Adler University of MichiganDearborn

Kevin Boyle Elon University

Harold Branam

Frank Day Clemson University

Savannah State University (retired)

Paul Dellinger

C. K. Breckenridge

Francine A. Dempsey

University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley

Greenbelt, Maryland

College of Saint Rose

Peter Brier

M. Casey Diana

Emily Alward

California State University, Los Angeles

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jeffrey L. Buller

Robert P. Ellis

Florida Atlantic University

Worcester State College (retired)

Thomas P. Adler Purdue University

M. D. Allen

Henderson, Nevada, District Libraries

Karen L. Arnold Columbia, Maryland

Philip Bader Pasadena, California

Dean Baldwin

Thomas J. Campbell Pacific Lutheran University

Salisbury University University of Tennessee

Carl L. Bankston III

Northwestern University

Milton Berman University of Rochester

Thomas L. Erskine

Edmund J. Campion

Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Tulane University

Wytheville, Virginia

Thomas R. Feller Nashville, Tennessee

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. Dolores L. Christie Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) John Carroll University

Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan Francis Marion University

Roy C. Flannagan

Adrian College

C. L. Chua

South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics

Margaret Boe Birns New York University

California State University, Fresno

Raymond Frey

Nicholas Birns

John J. Conlon

Cynthia A. Bily

The New School

Centenary College

University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Jean C. Fulton

Richard Hauer Costa

Ann D. Garbett

Texas A&M University

Averett University

Landmark College

Franz G. Blaha University of NebraskaLincoln

xxxvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Janet E. Gardner

Howard A. Kerner

Michael R. Meyers

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Polk Community College

Pfeiffer University

Grove Koger

Robert A. Morace

Leslie E. Gerber

Boise, Idaho, Public Library

Daemen College

James B. Lane

Bernard E. Morris

Indiana University Northwest

Modesto, California

Appalachian State University

Sheldon Goldfarb University of British Columbia

Karen Gould Austin, Texas

Lewis L. Gould University of Texas, Austin

Hans G. Graetzer South Dakota State University

Jay L. Halio University of Delaware

Daniel P. Murphy Eugene Larson

Hanover College

Los Angeles Pierce College

William Laskowski Jamestown College

Leon Lewis

John Nizalowski Mesa State College

Lisa Paddock

Appalachian State University

Cape May Court House, New Jersey

Thomas Tandy Lewis

Robert J. Paradowski

St. Cloud State University

R. C. Lutz

Rochester Institute of Technology

Madison Advisors

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

David Peck

Janet McCann

Laguna Beach, California

Adrian College

Texas A&M University

Marjorie J. Podolsky

Arthur D. Hlavaty

Joanne McCarthy

Yonkers, New York

Tacoma, Washington

Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

Carl W. Hoagstrom

Gina Macdonald

Cliff Prewencki

Ohio Northern University (retired)

Nicholls State University

Delmar, New York

S. Thomas Mack

Joan Hope

University of South Carolina-Aiken

Maureen J. PufferRothenberg

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

David W. Madden

Valdosta State University

Thomas Rankin Concord, California

Chicago State University

California State University, Sacramento

Jeffry Jensen

Lois A. Marchino

Thousand Oaks, California

Glendale Community College

University of Texas at El Paso

Steven Kedrowski

Patricia Masserman

Los Angeles, California

Microsoft Learning

Charleston Southern University

Kyle Keefer

Charles E. May

Mark Rich

Converse College

California State University, Long Beach

Cashton, Wisconsin

Laurence W. Mazzeno

Simon’s Rock College of Bard

William L. Howard

Steven G. Kellman University of Texas, San Antonio

Alvernia College

xxxviii

R. Kent Rasmussen Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr.

CONTRIBUTING REVIEWERS

Carl Rollyson

Roger Smith

Paul B. Trescott

City University of New York, Baruch College

Portland, Oregon

Southern Illinois University

Jennifer H. Solomon

William L. Urban

Joseph Rosenblum

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Monmouth College

George Soule

Los Angeles, California

University of North Carolina, Greensboro

John K. Roth Claremont McKenna College

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Thomas J. Sienkewicz Monmouth College

Carleton College

Shawncey Webb

Maureen Kincaid Speller

Taylor University

University of Kent at Canterbury

Thomas Willard

August W. Staub University of Georgia

Paul Stuewe

Amy Sisson

Green Mountain College

University of HoustonClear Lake

Susan E. Thomas

R. T. Smith

Sara Vidar

Indiana University, South Bend

Washington and Lee University

xxxix

University of Arizona

John Wilson Editor, Christianity Today

Scott D. Yarbrough Charleston Southern University

Author Photo Credits

Joan Acocella: © Joyce Ravid; Martin Amis: Cheryl A. Koralik; John Ashbery: D.C. Public Library; Jane Austen: Library of Congress; Madison Smartt Bell: © Jérôme De Perlinghi; Scott W. Berg: © Mark Finkenstaedt; Christopher Buckley: Courtesy, Random House; Stephen L. Carter: Courtesy, Knopf; Michael Chabon: © Patricia Williams/Courtesy, Random House; Edwidge Danticat: © Arturo Patten; Don DeLillo: © Joyce Ravid; Annie Dillard: Courtesy, Harper & Row; Percival Everett: F. Everett; Marc Fisher: Bill O’Leary/Courtesy, Random House; Diane Glancy: Courtesy, University of Arizona Press; Albert Goldbarth: Michael Pointer/ Courtesy, Graywolf Press; Mary Gordon: Courtesy, Eileen Barroso/Columbia University; Günter Grass: D.C. Public Library; David Halberstam: Courtesy, Hyperion; Peter Handke: Peter Stojanovic; Khaled Hosseini: Courtesy, Penquin; Ha Jin: Courtesy, Kalman Zabarsky; Barbara Kingsolver: © Seth Kanter/Courtesy, HarperPerennial; Milan Kundera: © Vera Kundera; Carmen Laforet: Courtesy of the Estate of Carmen Laforet/Random House; Zachary Leader: © John Haynes/Courtesy, Pantheon Books; David Leavitt: © Marion Ettlinger; Mario Vargas Llosa: © Jerry Bauer; Norman Mailer: Library of Congress; David Malouf: Jane Bown/Courtesy, Pantheon Books; Dinaw Mengestu: Blair Fethers/Courtesy, Penquin Group; Joyce Carol Oates: © Norman Seeff; Michael Ondaatje: Courtesy, Picador Publicity Department, London; Michael B. Oren: Courtesy, W. W. Norton; Terry Pratchett: Courtesy, HarperCollins; Sam Quinones: Courtesy, University of New Mexico Press; Arnold Rampersad: Courtesy, Knopf; Philip Roth: © Nancy Crampton; J. K. Rowling: © Richard Young/Courtesy, Allen & Unwin; Richard Russo: © J. D.; James V. Schall: Courtesy, St. Augustine’s Press; Daniel Silva: Courtesy, Penquin; Jane Smiley: Stephen Mortensen/Courtesy, Knopf; Alexander McCall Smith: Chris Watt/ Library of Congress; Susan Sontag: Annie Leibowitz/Courtesy, Farrar Straus Giroux; J. R. R. Tolkien: Courtesy, Houghton Mifflin Company; Philip Zimbardo: Courtesy, Random House

xl

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

1

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER Author: Tom Perrotta (1961) Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (New York). 358 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Around 2005 Locale: Stonewood Heights, a suburban town in a northeastern state A divorced teacher and an ex-Deadhead Evangelical convert clash sharply when the culture wars invade their quiet suburban town in the guise of a demand for abstinenceonly education Principal characters: Ruth Ramsey, high school sex education teacher forced into the role of abstinence educator Tim Mason, former rock musician, current Tabernacle member, and a volunteer soccer coach Maggie Ramsey, Ruth’s younger daughter and a star player on Tim’s fifth-grade soccer team Eliza Ramsey, Ruth’s older daughter Carrie Mason, Tim’s current wife Abby Mason, Tim’s daughter, who is also a soccer player Randall, Ruth’s school librarian colleague Gregory, Randall’s partner, a designer of G.I. Joe dioramas Pastor Dennis, leader of the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth and a crusader for moral purity JoAnn Marlow, twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur of abstinence education and holder of an ABD in public health

Tom Perrotta has won acclaim and even some movie deals with his gently satirical novels of contemporary middle-class life. Typically, Perrotta throws together characters with divergent value systems and puts them into situations that are slightly askew variations of real-life dilemmas. The resulting stories are both funny and weirdly revelatory of American society. In The Abstinence Teacher, he does it again. The novel draws on some elements from his previous novels: a rock musician (The Wishbones, 1997), a high school setting (Election, 1998), and suburban angst and dalliance (Little Children, 2004). For this story’s catalyst, however, Perrotta takes on the “culture wars”: the conflict over divergent social values that simmers quietly in so many communities until some event brings it to the front and center of that community’s attention. In this case, the controversy flares over sex education. A sex educator’s job is seldom easy. Students approach the subject with a mixture of embarrassment, bravado, and feigned boredom, and community reactions can present hidden pitfalls. After

2

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

more than ten years of teaching the curriculum, however, Ruth Ramsey is reasonably sure she is doing a good job. She sees her mission as demystifying and “deguiltifying” the subject, arming her students with facts and a healthy attitude toward their inevitable, even if eventual, sexual experiences. However, on the edges of her well-ordered life lurks an entity eager to challenge these as sumptions. The new Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, led by ambitious Pastor Dennis, has already protested the school’s teaching of evolution and the presence of Judy Blume books in the school library. These efforts having failed, the believers’ next target becomes sex education. One morning, Ruth is summoned to a hastily called meeting of school administrators. It turns out that she has offended a student by answering the girl’s question about why people have oral sex. Her answer, “some people enjoy it,” has been recast by the student’s Tabernacle member parents into advocacy of premarital sex. They are planning to sue. Like many school districts, Stonewood Heights is paranoid about lawsuits. The administration has already gone into damage-control mode. Ruth is warned not to speak out in her own defense. The high school holds a giant sexual abstinence assembly led by “hot virgin” JoAnn Marlow. Over the summer, the school commits to an abstinence-only approach to sex education, which Ruth will be expected to teach. Ruth is appalled but feels trapped. A newly single mother faced with putting two daughters through college, she needs her job. To deal with her anger, she takes up running, hangs out with her friends Randall and Gregory, and contemplates a future that suddenly looms up bleak and lonely. In this mood, she reluctantly attends yet another of her daughter Maggie’s soccer games. There she meets Tim Mason, the team’s new coach. Having volunteered initially as a way of staying involved in his own daughter’s life, he has cared enough to teach himself soccer rules and tactics and now has the team well on its way to a championship. His self-introduction to Ruth is friendly enough, but she feels both a frisson of attraction and a certain wariness. For his part, the soccer coaching is almost the only part of Tim’s life that he is not conflicted about. His divorce from Abby’s mother was bitter but justified, coming after years of Tim’s bad behavior and drug use. He has since done a drastic turnaround, finding Jesus, joining the Tabernacle, and giving up his former vices. He has also remarried. His relationship with Carrie, his current wife, sprang more from Pastor Dennis’s urging and Tim’s own battles with lust than from genuine love or even common interests. Tim is trying to make this marriage work, but lacking the powerful engine of initial romantic love, this Deadhead ex-rock musician and Carrie, the bland, sheltered daughter of missionary parents, have little in common outside of their church connection. Tim’s job as a mortgage broker is also under siege from the downturn in the housing market. It does not help that his new life at the Tabernacle has kept him isolated from the wider web of contacts he might otherwise have. Coaching

Tom Perrotta studied in Syracuse University’s creative writing program and held jobs as an advertising copywriter and a writing tutor before starting to sell his novels of contemporary life. He has published six books of suburban life and has written several screenplays.

The Abstinence Teacher / perrotta

3

Abby’s soccer team seems a welcome respite from all his other troubles. Alas, even that is about to explode into complications. At Maggie’s urging, Ruth returns to watch more of the team’s games. After seeing them win a hard-fought victory, she starts walking over to congratulate her daughter. Suddenly she sees that the whole team is sitting in a circle, holding hands while Tim Mason leads them in a prayer of thanks. All her suppressed anger at the fundamentalists explodes at this point. Ruth yells at Tim, then orders Maggie to leave. This incident acts as a catalyst to all involved. Still fueled by her anger, Ruth writes a letter of complaint, then tries to enlist other parents to support her. The results are disappointing. Several parents agree with her, but none are willing to “rock the boat” by signing on to her complaint. Her plan to keep Maggie out of future soccer matches succumbs to the girl’s tearful pleas. Tim himself realizes he has overstepped. He apologizes to Ruth, saying he got carried away and that it will not happen again. Seemingly, a truce has been achieved in the local culture war. Nevertheless, currents continue to roil under the placid surface. Tim stops in at a bar on his way home from Ruth’s. Ruth is sent to an attitude-adjustment seminar because of her less-than-enthusiastic presentation of the abstinence-only program. She has another shock when both her daughters tell her they want to go with a friend to church, because they want to learn about Jesus. Shocked to the depths of her secular soul, she swallows hard and finally realizes she must say yes. Tim is invited to an allnight poker game. He misses such relatively innocent pastimes that are forbidden to Tabernacle members. Searching his Bible for guidance, he finds that Jesus said nothing about gambling. He tells himself that the socializing will widen his social circle and hence his business contacts, and he immediately falls into the spirit of the evening. Later that night, drunk and stoned, he wanders around outside, has a partial attack of conscience, and in an attempt to make amends, carves “JESUS” into the paint of another guest’s Hummer. Tim and Ruth manage to reach their respective breaking points at about the same time. Ruth’s lack of enthusiasm for the abstinence program results in her demotion to the teaching of remedial math. It’s almost a relief; she is tired of feeling under siege in the classroom and in her relationship with her daughters. She needs to “get it together” and start thinking about her own life, preferably finding someone to share it with. For Tim, a second after-soccer prayer has drawn the ire of several parents, including his own ex-wife. He may, in fact, lose his visitation rights if he insists on exposing his daughter to the Tabernacle’s belief system. Attending a Faith Keepers convention, he decides he cannot take it any more. In his own personal de-conversion crisis, he ducks out and drives to Ruth’s house. There, with Pastor Dennis ensconced outside, hoping to reclaim Tim for the Tabernacle’s flock, Tim and Ruth at last face the inconvenient attraction that zings between them. Regarding plot structure, The Abstinence Teacher resembles a nonstandard romance, but the novel is more a comedy of contemporary mores and manners. It is surely no coincidence that Gregory and Randall, Ruth’s gay friends, are the only stable couple in the story—and even they are having commitment issues. Nor are readers likely to assume that Tim and Ruth’s weekend encounter at book’s end will turn into a

4

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

happily-ever-after relationship. Tim, at least, seems poised to ping-pong back and forth some more between his various addictions. Ruth, the solid citizen, wants a man in her life but is no more prepared than Tim’s first wife to deal with his “flaky” behavior over the long run. In fact, despite the book’s title, the real message Tim and Ruth exemplify seems to be that loneliness, not sex, makes people do crazy things. Because of his inner demons and disreputable past, Tim Mason is easily the most interesting character in the novel. An especially poignant scene shows Tim, having taken his daughter back home after a soccer game, noticing that his ex-wife is playing some of the heavy metal music that he used to love. At first shocked, he then ruefully tells himself that not everyone has his problem. He cannot just enjoy the music without plunging full-force into the subculture of drugs, groupies, and other temptations that surround it. The Tabernacle attendees are also a more diverse group than outsiders might suspect. This is so partly because of Pastor Dennis’s penchant for befriending people at their down-and-out moments and involving them in his church. Whether this is a true attempt to imitate Jesus’ ministry to sinners or whether it is part of a campaign to build the Tabernacle’s membership figures is left for the reader to decide. Ruth Ramsey is a less complex character. Although she is the sort of competent, reasonable woman who makes a good neighbor—or teacher—she somehow lacks depth. Ruth herself thinks her problem is the lack of a man in her life. For superrational Ruth, the reappearance of Paul Caruso, her only partner in sexual experimentation during high school, would seem to be a stroke of luck. Paul is now divorced, has lost his teenaged tubbiness and become quite handsome, and he wants her, at least for occasional dates. She turns him down, because she cannot get the image of her daughter’s married soccer coach, Tim, out of her fantasies. This, of course, is the type of decision making that neither brand of sex education explores very well. Perrotta skewers all sides of the culture wars in this novel, scattering hilarious scenes throughout the book. Only occasionally does he tip his hand, as when abstinence educator JoAnn works her way through a catalog of the hazards of nonmarital sex, describing the risk of pubic lice with the same deadpan seriousness she gives to HIV. If The Abstinence Teacher appears in movie form, as have some of Perrotta’s other novels, such timely, comedic touches are likely to make it a big success. Emily Alward Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 8. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 10. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 72. New York 40, nos. 31/32 (September 3, 2007): 104. The New York Times 157 (October 16, 2007): E1-E9. People 68, no. 17 (October 22, 2007): 56. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 27 (July 9, 2007): 28.

5

AFTER DARK Author: Haruki Murakami (1949) First published: Afut3d3ku, 2004, in Japan Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 191 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Novel Time: A late autumn night in the early twenty-first century Locale: Tokyo A student and a young jazz musician are among those who lives overlap one night between midnight and dawn Principal characters: Mari Asai, a student Tetsuya Takahashi, a law student and jazz trombonist Eri Asai, Mari’s sister, a fashion model Kaoru, manager of a love hotel Guo Dongli, a Chinese prostitute Shirakawa, a businessman Korogi, a prostitute

Haruki Murakami writes two types of novels: expansive works, such as Nejimakidori kuronikuru (1994-1995; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997) and Umibe no Kafuka (2002; Kafka on the Shore, 2005), crammed with metaphors about contemporary life, and smaller-scale looks, such as Noruwei no mori (1987; Norwegian Wood, 2000) and Sup toniku no koibito (1999; Sputnik Sweetheart, 2001), at more mundane though quirky existences. After Dark falls into the latter category, presenting the interactions among a small group of people over seven hours of a Tokyo night. At 11:56 p.m., Mari Asai, a student in Chinese at the University of Foreign Studies, has sought refuge in a Denny’s restaurant, where she can be anonymous and read undisturbed, but she is recognized by Tetsuya Takahashi, who once had a crush on her more beautiful sister, Eri. After Dark follows Mari through the night, with occasional glimpses of Eri, a model, who has been sleeping in her room for two months for no known reason. Mari is forced to become engaged with the world around her when Kaoru, manager of a nearby “love hotel,” asks her to translate for Guo Dongli, a nineteen-year-old Chinese prostitute who has been beaten up by a customer. Tetsuya does odd jobs at the hotel and has told Kaoru that Mari speaks fluent Chinese and hopes to be a translator. Other chapters focus on Shirakawa, who works for a company called Veritech. Seemingly an ordinary middle-aged businessman, with a wife and children, he is the one who has inexplicably beaten Guo. Murakami is one of the most cinematic of writers, his novels and stories filled with references to mostly American and European films. The strange, slow-paced vision of American director David Lynch is an obvious influence on both Murakami’s themes

6

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and style. A key sequence in Sputnik Sweetheart recalls Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece, L’Avventura (1960), and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) is an obvious influence here. Kaoru’s brothel is ironically named Alphaville, after the 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard that depicts a futuristic world where emotions, including love, have been outlawed. (There are frequent references to Godard in Murakami’s fiction.) Kaoru has never heard of the film nor wondered about the name of her hotel. She associates science fiction only with the likes of Star Wars (1977), but after hearing Mari describe Alphaville (1965) and explain irony, she decides that it “may be the perfect name for a love hotel.” Tetsuya tells Mari, “Everybody’s got their own battlefields,” an echo of Jean Renoir’s famous “Everyone has their reasons” in La Règle du jeu (1939; The Rules of the Game). When Mari questions her occupation, Kaoru replies, “There are lots of different businesses in the world,” another reminder of Renoir’s comment. Arguably the world’s least judgmental writer, Murakami shares the live-and-let-live views of his characters. Despite her problems with men, Kaoru nevertheless describes Tetsuya as “kinda goofy, but . . . surprisingly solid underneath. Not bad at all.” With After Dark, Murakami offers his most blatant cinematic approach, using a camera’s point of view as it swoops down upon the characters, while creating emotional distance from them. This viewpoint comes into most significant play in the Eri chapters, with the camera hovering over her bed and examining the room. Unconscious for most of the novel, Eri remains an enigma, defined by the comments of Mari and Tetsuya and by what the camera sees. In Lynch’s films, the everyday and the fantastic become intertwined. This fantasy element appears in Eri’s room when her television set comes on even though it is unplugged. Then someone seems to be watching Eri from within the television. Later, the picture on the screen is of Eri in her bed, while the bed in the room is empty. Which is the reality, Murakami seems to ask, without suggesting any answer. Despite the superficial similarities to Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), with their evil televisions, Murakami is not overtly concerned with the supernatural here. The banalities of ordinary existence are horrifying enough. Before becoming a full-time writer, Murakami managed a jazz club with his wife, Yoko Takahashi (the source of Tetsuya’s surname), and jazz, rock, pop, and classical music play important roles in his fiction. This novel’s title comes from the jazz recording that encouraged Tetsuya to become a musician: “Five Spot After Dark,” featuring Curtis Fuller on trombone. “The first time I heard it,” he tells Mari, “I felt the scales fall from my eyes.” Murakami’s characters, sometimes called slackers by reviewers, are essentially passive, drifting through life, waiting for something, such as Tetsuya’s epiphany, to happen. He connects with Mari when she surprises him by

Haruki Murakami has published novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. His many awards include the Franz Kafka Society Franz Kafka Prize and the World Fantasy Award for Umibe no Kafuka (2002; Kafka on the Shore, 2005) and the Kiriyama Prize for his short fiction collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006).

After Dark / murakami

7

being familiar with this song. In Murakami’s world, culture is a gift, unifying peoples and generations. Mari tells Kaoru how she learned about jazz and Godard from a beloved uncle. The blandness of Denny’s is conveyed as the Percy Faith orchestration of “Go Away, Little Girl,” Burt Bacharach’s “The April Fools,” and Martin Denny’s “Ore” contribute to the numbing late-night emptiness. In contrast is the significance, at least for Tetsuya, of his music. When he is playing the trombone, “It’s the next-best thing to flying through the air.” This freedom, however, is illusory because he recognizes that he does not have the talent to be a professional musician and must abandon music eventually to study law: “Studying the law is not as much fun as making music, but what the hell, that’s life. That’s what it means to grow up.” Many of Murakami’s characters struggle slowly toward this acceptance of their fates. A clock face showing the time serves as the title of each chapter, and the restraints imposed by time are constant. Time gives the impression of slowing after midnight. Mari and Kaoru go to the Skylark, a mostly empty bar where the nameless bartender, obviously more at home with the past, plays music on LPs to entertain himself. Murakami presents a long, beautiful description of the bartender lovingly placing a recording of Duke Ellington performing the “languorous,” sensual “Sophisticated Lady” on his turntable: “The bartender’s unhurried movements give the place its own special time flow.” The first-person-plural narrator of the Eri chapters observes that the passage of time within her room and within the television is the same. This time is described as a river that carries “us along heedless of our separate reality.” Some reviewers had difficulty reconciling the realistic Mari episodes with the much stranger Eri chapters. Murakami is not, however, concerned only with experimenting with point of view but subtly links the Mari, Eri, and Shirakawa sections thematically. Murakami uses time to show how his characters have only an illusion of control over their lives: “Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,” says the bartender. “You can’t fight it.” Murakami writes in the present tense to convey the immediacy, the eternal present, of the events in his novel. Toward the end, the chapters become shorter as dawn grows closer and the languor of the night dissipates. With Eri returned from the television safely to her bed in her room, “a cycle has been completed, all disturbances have been resolved, perplexities have been concealed, and things have returned to their original state.” No sooner has she made this pronouncement than its validity is questioned: “But is this actually true? The never-ending complexities of daily existence do not disappear with the dawn.” After Dark is about communication and identity. Tetsuya could never really talk to Eri. “It was as if a sponge was soaking up their words before reaching each other’s ears.” He and Mari have little in common, as do Mari and Kaoru, but they know how to listen to each other. Always concerned with others’ expectations, Eri has never established a true identity. Mari, in contrast, identifies with Guo’s pain and feels as if the beaten young woman has become part of her. Mari accepts change; her sister retreats to her bed. Shirakawa can exercise to a cantata by Domenico Scarlatti, but his cultured, civilized veneer hides his brutal nature. He has stolen Guo’s clothing, yet sees it as “worthless garbage, stuff that has no business invading his life, as if it has

8

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

acted on its own.” A lengthy description of Tetsuya’s shopping for milk, apples, and fish cakes illustrates how people are defined by the banal details of everyday life. While he might not recognize it, Tetsuya’s life is centered more on such routines than even his music. Characters often talk about alienation and loneliness, though Murakami offers ennui almost as a comedy of manners. Korogi, one of the Alphaville prostitutes, tells Mari, “In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.” Murakami’s method includes constantly making connections between the strands of his story. Thus, both in Shirakawa’s apartment and the Hotel Alphaville, the same television program, Creatures of the Deep, is showing. Shirakawa leaves his cell phone on a shelf in a 7-Eleven only for Tetsuya to find and answer it and hear a threat against its unknown owner. As elsewhere in Murakami’s fiction, coincidences and entangled destinies are central. Tetsuya wonders if the phone call was no accident, if the threat was actually meant for him. He has committed no offenses he is aware of but feels more guilt, ironically, than does Shirakawa. “It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark,” Tetsuya tells Mari. “There’s a shadowy middle ground.” Not a novel for those unfamiliar with Murakami, After Dark is best appreciated within the context of his other looks at the small joys that erupt occasionally amid the loneliness and aimlessness of contemporary life. It is Murakami in a minor key, with less psychological depth than usual, a moody, bluesy, after-midnight tone poem: “Music for the middle of the night.” Michael Adams

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 39. The Economist 383 (May 19, 2007): 89. Elle 22, no. 9 (May, 2007): 174. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 6 (March 15, 2007): 248. Library Journal 132, no. 8 (May 1, 2007): 73. New Statesman 136 (June 4, 2007): 58. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 10, 2007): 22. The Spectator 304 (June 16, 2007): 51-52. The Times Literary Supplement, June 8, 2007, p. 21. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 104 (May 4, 2007): W3.

9

THE AGE OF HUTS (COMPLEAT) Author: Ron Silliman (1946) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 311 pp. $50.00; paperback $19.95 Type of work: Poetry A complex and mesmerizing collection that challenges the reader to make sense of what is presented Ron Silliman published his first poetry collection, Moon in the Seventh House, in 1968. During the mid-1960’s, he attended Merritt College, San Francisco State College, and the University of California at Berkeley without earning a degree from any. Silliman did not follow the traditional route of a poet and find himself a teaching position at an institution of higher learning. Over the years, he has worked as a lobbyist, an ethnographer, a lecturer, a writer-inresidence, and a political organizer. Since the mid-1990’s, he has worked in the computer industry as a market analyst. By the mid-1970’s, Silliman was recognized as one of the most exciting language poets of the West Coast. He has been grouped with such other language poets as Robert Grenier, Kit Robinson, and Bob Perelman. Silliman also has been considered as a poet who has followed in the tradition of such boldly adventurous poets as Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. Language poetry believes in blurring the lines between writing genres. It has been stated that it “seeks actively collaborative relationships between reader and writer.” In 1978, Silliman published Ketjak. For this volume, the poet experimented with prose poetry. He employed a radical form where he expanded paragraphs by repeating the sentence from the previous paragraph. The first paragraph consisted of one sentence, while the second paragraph would include that same sentence from the first paragraph in addition to a new sentence. The third paragraph would include the two sentences from the second paragraph along with two new sentences. Within this repetition, there would be relief through “Silliman’s creation and insertion of new sentences that place the repeated sentences in new contexts.” It has been observed that language poetry emphasizes how words can bend human reality as much if not more than humans have control over words. The Age of Huts can be described as a part of a greater whole that Silliman has been working on for many decades. Silliman named this massive poetic project “Ketjak.” When complete, it will include four parts; one of the parts will include The Age of Huts, as well as the long poem Tjanting (which was published on its own in 1981), and the poetry cycles “The Alphabet” and “Universe.” To make matters more confusing, the current collection includes a cycle of four poems (Ketjak, Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197) as well as what Silliman calls “Satellite Texts.” All of these various parts constitute a massive poetic architecture that Silliman continues to construct.

10

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

It may never be finished, and it may never have been intended to be complete. Indeed, the idea of “incompleteness” is at the heart of language poetry. Nothing can be complete on its own: Each sentence, paragraph, and poem needs both a writer and a reader. A reader’s interpretation of any of these parts goes a long way to making them whole, making them make sense. Silliman has no desire to play it safe, to play the traditional role of poet. He refuses to clarify life for any reader, to presume that that is his role. Unfortunately, many readers do want an easy way out, wanting poetry to be like a trail of bread crumbs to wisdom. In 1986, Silliman published his first version of The Age of Huts, which included Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197. Silliman has stated that “I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I’m not interested in ‘making things up.’” The prose poem has a long tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. For Silliman, it is necessary to expand the poetic genre. Over the years, he has made it a point to needle the world of mainstream poetry. Silliman has gone so far as to label mainstream poets as being part of the “School of Quietude.” Having worked as a political organizer, the poet has been more than willing to use his training in this field in order to shake up the world of poetry. On many occasions, Silliman has played the role of advocate for the poets who he believes deserve recognition and played the role of adversary to any poet who merely adheres to traditional forms. In addition to being a leading practitioner of the language style, Silliman is a “crusader for the cause.” While at first glance his poetry may seem too esoteric for the “common reader,” Silliman employs imagery that is very accessible. The questions he asks in Sunset Debris are ones that pop up in everyone’s head at one time or another. The poem opens with “Can you feel it?” and continues throughout with such universal questions as “Do you have to carry it far?” “Are they on their way to work?” “Will the fog burn off soon?” “Is that a bald spot?” There are forty pages of questions. Some of the more intriguing questions that are sprinkled throughout include “Is poetry simply another channel for one’s careerism?” “Whoever heard of giving someone a chicken for their birthday?” and “How is it with all this language there is still this thing so vast that we have no name for it, even if we sense it as a thing we have seen?” There is an obvious playfulness in Silliman’s poetry. There is meaning to be found if the attentive reader is willing to collaborate with the poet. Silliman refuses to do all the work himself. He wants a reader to revel in the adventure ahead, to bring his or her own questions to the table. He has stated, “My idea with Sunset Debris was to explore the social contract between writer and reader.” He understands that, as author, he “gets to do all the talking,” but the “reader can shut the book, or consciously reject the thesis.” Silliman sees a comparison between reading his poem and reading an ad-

Ron Silliman is the author of several important books of poetry, including Crow (1971), Mohawk (1973), Ketjak (1978), Tjanting (1981), and The Age of Huts (1986). He is considered one of the leading practitioners of language poetry and has written the seminal critical work The New Sentence (1987).

The Age of Huts (Compleat) / silliman

11

vertisement. The person who consumes information must submit to it. Once someone reads “these words,” he will “have had these thoughts, which were not your own.” There are approximately three thousand questions that make up Sunset Debris. “Can you feel it?” opens the poem and is the penultimate question, but otherwise there is no question repeated. In this tour de force experiment, Silliman has taken the everyday, the mundane, the quirky, and literally piled one question on another. It can be a jarring experience to be bombarded with so many questions in a row. There is an almost hallucinatory quality to what Silliman has done. At the end of the encounter with this poem, the reader may ask him- or herself, “Can you feel the words?” “Have you lost control?” “Can you walk away untouched?” While the 1986 version of The Age of Huts opens with Sunset Debris, for this new volume Silliman opens with the poem Ketjak, considered one of his most remarkable prose poems. Silliman begins Ketjak with “Revolving door.” These words constitute the first paragraph of the poem. The second paragraph also opens with “Revolving door,” but continues with a second sentence. The poem continues for a hundred pages, and each paragraph opens with “Revolving door.” The paragraphs keep expanding. What came before must be repeated in the next paragraph and built upon with new sentences. In 1987, Silliman published The New Sentence. He articulated in his poetic theory “The New Sentence” that the building of a paragraph with sentences can lead to “unity of quantity, not logic or argument.” The poet wished to break with the conventional idea that a logical conclusion is what a group of sentences within a paragraph should strive toward. The title essay of his 1987 book was first presented as a public talk in 1979. In Ketjak, Silliman makes the reader examine each sentence on its own terms. He wants the reader not to be consumed by what he calls “the tyranny of the whole.” The poem does not allow the reader to come to a “logical” conclusion at the end. Strange and bumpy as it may be, it is the journey through Ketjak that should be savored. For The Chinese Notebook, Silliman constructed a list of 223 journal entries, which seem to be a random list of thoughts, pronouncements, and questions. At number one, Silliman lists “Wayward, we weigh words. Nouns reward objects for meaning. The chair in the air is covered with hair. No part of touch with the planet.” The reader may want to mull this over for a while before heading for number two. Each entry can stand on its own. At number five, the reader finds “Language is, first of all, a political question.” This provocative statement could lead to a long debate between friends as well as academicians. Where is Silliman taking the reader?—Somewhere, possibly nowhere, wherever the reader wants to go. As in all of the poet’s work, there is a willingness to be playful. There is a serious point wrapped in a joke, or perhaps it is the other way around. For number seven of The Chinese Notebook, Silliman may be giving the reader a clue: “This is not philosophy, it’s poetry. And if I say so, then it becomes painting, music or sculpture, judged as such. If there are variables to consider, they are at least partly economic—the question of distribution, etc. Also differing critical traditions. Could this be good poetry, yet bad music? But yet I do not believe I would, except in jest, posit this as dance or urban planning.” The bottom line is that The Chinese Notebook is whatever the reader wants it to be.

12

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

While The Chinese Notebook is made up of strange and wonderful journal entries, the last poetic cycle of the collection, 2197, contains thirteen poems. At more than one hundred pages, this poetic cycle constitutes the largest section of The Age of Huts. It is also the most lyrical cycle. Silliman focuses more on the natural world here. In the poem “I Am Marion Delgado,” the poet begins with the question “How do we recognize the presence of/ a new season.” There is nothing too unusual in this opening, but by the end of this wildly adventurous poem the reader is presented with “The morning of the Q-tips deserves/ attention.” This is a fitting end to a Silliman poem. The loyal reader would be disappointed with anything less off-the-wall. In 2197, Silliman probes the natural world and how language functions within it. The two “Satellite Texts” that end the collection serve as a fitting coda to everything that has preceded them. The Age of Huts (Compleat) is an extraordinary tour de force for Ron Silliman. It will stand as a shining example of language poetry at its best, at its most cogent. For all of its postmodern trappings, though, the poet’s work remains supremely engaged with humanity. The collection is boldly avant-garde and yet weirdly accessible. It can only be hoped that Silliman continues to work on refining his craft and produces more brilliantly bizarre language poetry. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, July 5, 2007, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 16 (April 16, 2007): 34.

13

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE A Life Author: Hugh Brogan (1936) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 724 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1805-1859 Locale: France; United States; Canada; London; Algeria; Sicily and Sorrento, Italy This biography of Tocqueville amasses a great deal of information about the French political writer and presents it in accessible prose but especially in its second half becomes quite negative about its subject, turning into a series of criticisms of Tocqueville instead of an exposition of his achievements Principal personages: Alexis de Tocqueville, French political writer Marie Mottley, his wife Hervé de Tocqueville, his father Gustave de Beaumont, his friend and collaborator Louis de Kergorlay, his cousin Abbé Louis Le Sueur, his tutor Louis-Philippe, French king Napoleon III, French ruler François Guizot, French historian and politician

Arthur Balfour, the British prime minister at the beginning of the twentieth century, is said to have remarked that biographies are best written by an acute enemy. If this were so, Hugh Brogan’s new book, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, would be an excellent biography because, if not an enemy to Tocqueville, Brogan certainly comes across as at least an extremely critical friend. Brogan’s negative attitude to his subject does not emerge immediately, for the opening pages of the biography deal more with Tocqueville’s ancestors than with Tocqueville himself. Even when Brogan begins discussing Tocqueville, he seems at least neutral in his description of Tocqueville’s early days. Also, Brogan has an easy, perhaps too easy, prose style, veering into the colloquial at times and even sounding somewhat patronizing. Nevertheless, it is mostly a clear style, and Brogan brings forth a mountain of information, including some interesting anecdotes about Tocqueville’s youth. For instance, there is his tutor, the Abbé Louis Le Sueur, predicting that Tocqueville will become “an enlightened judge or a distinguished orator or a celebrated diplomat” and becoming very upset when Tocqueville, under the influence of

14

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

his cousin Louis de Kergorlay, talks of pursuing a military career: “What a shame it would be,” said the abbé, “to snuff out such a talent under a helmet.” Tocqueville did not go into the army, but he did become an orator of sorts, even a diplomat, and a lawyer if not a judge. He is best known for his writings, above all for his De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840; Democracy in America), in which he explored the notion of democratic government as practiced in the United States to see if it might be applicable to old, aristocratic societies like his own in France. As he leads the reader up to Tocqueville’s creation of Democracy in America, Brogan, in this first full-length biography of Tocqueville written originally in English, is able to create a fairly appealing impression of the famous French political writer. The young Tocqueville is shy and a bit anxious but clearly very bright and talented. He pursues a law degree and a career in the courts but is not really satisfied by it. When his career advancement seems blocked, he jumps at the chance for an adventure: a trip to America with his friend and fellow lawyer Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly to investigate the prison system there but really to get to understand the whole country, the new republic on the other side of the world. The year was 1831, and Tocqueville, who came from an aristocratic family that had suffered imprisonment and worse during the French Revolution of the previous century, had already moved away from the traditional conservative attitudes of his family and his class. First, his Catholic faith had been shaken by exposure to some of the books in his father’s library, and then the historical lectures of François Guizot made him question whether aristocratic rule had been as beneficial as his family had brought him up to believe. In short, the nobly born Tocqueville had become a liberal, dedicated to liberty and very much interested in the democratic experiment in America. For nine months, from May, 1831, through February, 1832, he and Beaumont explored America, from the salons of New York and Boston to the wilderness of Michigan, with a brief excursion into the South to visit Baltimore, and then an audience with President Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C., during which Tocqueville was amazed that Jackson spoke to them on equal terms and let them call him “sir” rather than “your majesty.” Tocqueville was struck in general by the lack of deference in American society, the easy equality, and the high level of popular education. At the same time, he saw an excess of commercialism and a lack of culture, except perhaps in Boston. Most of all, though, he was impressed by the fact that a society governed by the middle class, without an aristocracy, actually worked and that it worked in a quite decentralized way from the town up, with a minimal amount of government. Returning to France, Tocqueville set about writing up his discoveries and found that he had produced a best-selling masterpiece. It is at this stage, or just slightly be-

Hugh Brogan formerly held the R. A. Butler Chair in History at the University of Essex in England, where he now holds a research professorship. He has published articles on Tocqueville and, in 1973, a short volume on him. He has also published books on John F. Kennedy, in 1996, and Arthur Ransome, in 1984.

Alexis de Tocqueville / brogan

15

fore, that Brogan’s negativity gets the better of him. He concedes that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is dazzling on first reading but argues that subsequent readings reveal it to be a “ragbag” without proper organization. He has other criticisms as well: Tocqueville did not understand political parties or the power of the presidency. He says nothing about women’s rights, and above all he invents an imaginary tyranny of the majority to warn against. In describing Democracy in America, Brogan creates a strange effect by criticizing it at great length, then saying it is a masterpiece. What he does, in fact, is much like what he says Tocqueville does in regard to democracy; according to Brogan, Tocqueville spends a great deal of time criticizing democracy only to end by promoting it. This, however, is not how another major biographer of Tocqueville sees the work. In 1984, André Jardin produced a biography of Tocqueville in French that was translated into English in 1988. Jardin’s biography makes an interesting contrast to Brogan’s. Regarding Democracy in America, it is not that Jardin sees entirely different things from Brogan, but his emphasis is different. He notes Tocqueville’s feelings of distaste for American habits such as chewing tobacco and spitting, but he subordinates that to Tocqueville’s celebration of American civic spirit and dignity. For Brogan, Tocqueville seems to be saying that democracy is good but it has a great many flaws, whereas Jardin’s Tocqueville is saying that despite its flaws, democracy deserves to be supported. Beyond that, Jardin is much more positive about Tocqueville’s achievement, not criticizing him for things he left out of the book and not disagreeing with him on his basic views, such as the danger of the tyranny of the majority. Rather than argue with Tocqueville, he sees his job as a biographer as being to describe what Tocqueville says and to let the readers draw their own conclusions. This approach allows Jardin to explore points Brogan has no time for, such as the differences Tocqueville found between the North and the South and the existence of voluntary associations like the Temperance Society. Jardin also has room in his biography for issues that Brogan touches on only in passing, if at all, such as Tocqueville’s views on colonialism in relation to Algeria, his views on the British in India, his pamphlet on pauperism, and his views on the mingling of races. When Brogan discusses Algeria, it is mainly to denounce Tocqueville for accepting the idea of a French colonial presence there and to call him a “spoiled child” for wanting to go on a military expedition while on a visit to the African country. Indeed, in the last half of his biography Brogan more than once uses derogatory language to describe Tocqueville. He calls him childish two other times and neurotic five times. He accuses him of speaking “claptrap,” being self-righteous, and being a poseur. One begins to wonder after a while why Brogan has spent so much of his time (close to half a century) on a man he seems to dislike so much. One also begins to wonder after reading the biography why anyone would write a biography of such a man, a man whose works and character were both severely flawed (if one is to believe Brogan). Nevertheless, Tocqueville does attract a great deal of attention. The year 2006 saw a collection of essays on him appear, under the title The Cambridge Companion to

16

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Tocqueville. In her introduction to the Companion, Cheryl Welch quotes a commentator from 2000 as saying, “We’re all Tocquevilleans now,” adding that Tocqueville is sometimes seen as the greatest political thinker of the nineteenth century and as someone who is important for the disciplines of political science, sociology, philosophy, history, and even literature. None of this emerges clearly in the Brogan biography. One work that Brogan does seem to like almost, though of course not entirely, without reservation is Tocqueville’s last book and second masterpiece, L’Ancien Régime et la révolution (1856; The Old Régime and the Revolution), in which he set out to explain the causes of the French Revolution by exploring the society that gave rise to it. Brogan likes this book primarily because in it Tocqueville “wrote for once from the point of view of the disadvantaged, not that of the ‘enlightened classes.’” Here, to use one of Brogan’s own expressions, he “gives the game away.” For once the flaws do not matter. Brogan notes Tocqueville’s “presentism,” the vice of seeing the present in the past, of using the past as a commentary on the present, but he finds this acceptable because, at least in his reading, the commentary Tocqueville is making is in favor of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden. For a moment, it seems, one can imagine Tocqueville as a sort of socialist or revolutionary. In fact, Tocqueville was nothing of the sort. Although he read some socialist writing with sympathy and did speak out in favor of providing relief for the poor, he was very much against the radicals and socialists of his day. Tocqueville was a great defender of liberty but also of property and legality as buttresses of liberty. Thus, when the workers rose in revolt in the streets of Paris in 1848, he was against them and their socialist leaders. This upsets Brogan, who finds Tocqueville lacking in common sense and sincerity but full of “impudence,” and who sees Tocqueville’s “commitment to obsolescent economic theory, his obsessive cult of property and his fear of revolution” as making him part of the problem. André Jardin sees things differently, noting that the far left, which Tocqueville opposed, could be notably illiberal, and since liberty was for Tocqueville the chief good he was being consistent in his own terms by opposing the social revolution of 1848. This Brogan does not seem to accept, but he is happy to make the dubious suggestion that Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution, written several years after 1848, had finally come over to the side of the oppressed. Even if this were true, it is odd that the biographer should celebrate it, as if biography were a game in which the point is to see whether the subject has come around to the “correct” opinions, whatever they might be. Jardin has a different approach, focusing less on whether Tocqueville was “right” or “wrong” at various points in his career and instead trying to trace the arc of that career, a career that saw Tocqueville move from the political theory of Democracy in America to political practice as a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a brief tenure as foreign affairs minister. He then returned to writing, thinking it a better way to make a lasting impression, which raises the question of whether his decade in practical politics was in some way a wrong turn. This is an issue that Hugh Brogan does not raise. Nor does he provide a conclusion to sum up Tocqueville’s life and contribution. Instead, he provides an epilogue that

Alexis de Tocqueville / brogan

17

ends with an extended dialogue between Tocqueville’s friends about the theater and romance. The reader will close the book feeling baffled. Sheldon Goldfarb

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 7. The Economist 381 (November 25, 2006): 85-86. Globe and Mail, April 21, 2007, p. D9. London Review of Books 29, no. 6 (March 22, 2007): 29-30. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 18 (November 22, 2007): 53-56. The Times Literary Supplement, February 23, 2007, pp. 4-6. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 73 (March 29, 2007): D9. The Washington Post, April 1, 2007, p. BW02.

18

ALICE WATERS AND CHEZ PANISSE The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution Author: Thomas McNamee (1947) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 382 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1971-2002 Locale: Berkeley, California; France; New York; Washington, D.C. The story of Alice Waters and her creation of the now legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, site of the invention of a new American cuisine and birthplace of the “Delicious Revolution” Principal personages: Alice Waters, an unlikely restaurateur who, through emphasis on local, sustainable, seasonal food, changed the way America eats Stephen Singer, an artist and wine merchant who married Waters in 1985 Fanny Singer, Alice and Stephen’s daughter Jeremiah Tower, the eccentric, ambitious chef who put Chez Panisse on the culinary map Jean-Pierre Moullé, the disciplined, classically trained French chef who brought a new era of professionalism to Chez Panisse Lindsey Shere, longtime pastry chef at Chez Panisse

Although Penguin Press bills Alice Waters and Chez Panisse as an authorized biography of the famed restaurateur, in fact the book is—as its title indicates—more of a dual biography of Alice Waters and her singular creation, Chez Panisse, perhaps the most famous restaurant in the United States. Born in Chatham, New Jersey, Waters enjoyed “an ordinary American suburban childhood.” Readers are presented with a charming (and prescient) picture of the young Waters attending a Fourth of July costume contest dressed as the Queen of the Garden, “with a skirt of lettuce leaves, bracelets made from radishes, anklets of red and green peppers, a necklace woven of long-stemmed strawberries, and a crown of asparagus.” Aside from these few details, however, author Thomas McNamee spends little time on Waters’s early life, jumping quickly ahead to her immersion in the heady swirl of Berkeley in the mid-1960’s. This is as it should be, for Alice Waters and Chez Panisse are virtually indistinguishable, and both are creatures of the cultural revolution for which Berkeley served as the epicenter. However, McNamee, like Waters, moves quickly from Berkeley to France, where Waters’s personal transformation began over a bowl of soupe des légumes, the first meal she ate after arriving in Paris. It was not just the taste of the

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse / mc namee

19

soup—although Waters recalls feeling as if she had never eaten before; the whole experi- Thomas McNamee has published ence (“those big, old, thick curtains”) caused essays, poetry, journalism, and natural her to redefine herself in relation to her envi- history in Audubon, The New Yorker, ronment. Waters spent little of her semester Life, Natural History, High Country abroad studying at the Sorbonne. Most of her News, The New York Times, The time was devoted to tasting the fruits of the Washington Post, and Saveur. He wrote the Emmy Award-winning earth as presented by the French. documentary film Alexander Calder Waters returned to Berkeley in the autumn (1998) for PBS’s American Masters of 1965 a changed woman: “I wanted hot ba- series. McNamee has served as a guettes in the morning, and apricot jam, and member of the board of directors and café au lait in bowls, and I wanted a café to as president of the Greater Yellowstone hang out in . . . and I wanted to wear French Coalition and as a trustee of Rare clothes.” She did, for a time, occupy the mar- Conservation. gins of the Free Speech Movement and other manifestations of radical politics, but shortly after graduation Waters gravitated to restaurant work, and there—except for a brief and instructive sojourn as a Montessori instructor—she has remained. The improbable idea of Chez Panisse was born of Waters’s desire “to evoke the sunny good feelings of another world that contained so much that was missing or incomplete in our own” and named for a minor character in mid-twentieth century French filmmaker Marcel Pagnol’s classic trilogy, Marius (1931), Fanny (1933), and César (1936), set in a bar-café in old Marseille. Waters wanted to bring the easy familiarity and generous spirit of the films to life in her own place. It seemed an entirely impractical—and impracticable—dream. Although she was an accomplished cook, Waters had no formal culinary training, no business experience, and no capital. What she did have—her small stature and soft voice notwithstanding—was a will of iron. McNamee’s first chapter, an evocation of Chez Panisse’s opening night on August 28, 1971, is masterful. Like his subject, he has a gift for scene setting, and he manages to convey a powerful sense of the look and feel of the restaurant in the old two-story stucco house at 1517 Shattuck Avenue on that auspicious occasion. In many ways, the evening was a disaster: The line of waiting diners stretched out the door and down the block; a full hour passed between the first and second courses; and there simply was not enough food to feed everyone. Nonetheless, Waters and company pulled it off, largely owing to a combination of fresh food presented simply and gifted improvisation. These elements continue to be at the heart of Chez Panisse’s success, as does the custom of a set but ever-varying menu, a large container of freshly cut flowers, and an uncompromising commitment to excellence. When Waters’s employees wish to poke fun at her, they pick at a microscopic bit of green on a plated entrée, declaring, “Too much lettuce!”—but they do so with affection, respect, and the conviction that both her sense of proportion and her palate are faultless. From the beginning, Waters surrounded herself with others who thought as she thought, who were willing—and usually able—to help realize her ideals. In what

20

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

McNamee characterizes as the sometimes incestuous atmosphere of Chez Panisse, all of these individuals have been personally bound to Waters—some intimately. She long had a habit of falling in love with gay men, and she fell hard for the gay chef who helped bring Chez Panisse to national prominence, Jeremiah Tower, who reigned in the kitchen from 1973 to 1976. This was an intensely Francophile period for the restaurant—and perhaps a period of wandering in the wilderness. Eventually, local influences overcame haute cuisine, and Tower, himself overcome with a heady but self-destructive mix of cocaine and arrogance, surrendered control of the kitchen to Waters. Like almost everyone who left Chez Panisse, he could not extricate himself easily, and like almost everyone who left Chez Panisse, he parlayed his time there into career advancement. Unlike almost everyone else, Tower remained bitterly angry with Waters, publishing a memoir, California Dish (2003), which belittled her culinary contributions. Although Waters did cook from time to time at Chez Panisse, it is true that she always depended on the talent and dedication of others to realize what she imagined, people like pastry chef Lindsey Shere, who was there from the beginning, and chef Jean-Pierre Moullé, who steered the restaurant into a new age of professionalism and profitability. This transference became more evident after Waters gave birth to her first and only child, Fanny, in 1983. Her fraught—and ultimately failed—marriage to erstwhile artist and aspiring restaurateur Stephen Singer proved a distraction, but for Waters, “It all started with Fanny.” Waters’s preoccupation with Fanny directed her attention away from Chez Panisse, but instead of becoming insular with motherhood, Waters was inspired to dream bigger dreams. While Chez Panisse perfected the art of California cuisine, Waters began translating the restaurant’s relationships with local farmers and regional terroir into a vision of a future guided by what she called the ethics of food. The restaurant and its increasing fame became a mechanism for educating people, helping them to make a connection between the satisfying, joyful experience of eating there and a host of environmental, social, and health issues. She also began to formulate plans to foment what she called the “Delicious Revolution” by educating first schoolchildren, with the Edible Schoolyard project, then college students, with the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Waters was unsuccessful in her attempts to convince President Bill Clinton or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to back her fundamental insight that the way people eat can change the world. Nonetheless, Waters’s influence, fortified by her alliance with the Italian-born, politically progressive Slow Food movement, is now manifest everywhere. Before Chez Panisse, American restaurants did not serve mesclun salads prepared in open kitchens equipped with wood-burning pizza ovens. More important, before Alice Waters, organic food and sustainable agriculture were virtually unknown concepts in the restaurant business. As this book makes clear, her life, like her restaurant, has been a resounding success. Together, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse have indeed made a revolution. Thomas McNamee is better, perhaps, at bringing the restaurant to life on the page than he is at conveying the essence of its creator. Waters comes across as an elusive, if compelling, presence whose inner life remains largely a mystery. Focused on the fu-

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse / mc namee

21

ture, she seems to have little specific memory of the past that is not rooted in sensation. One does get a strong flavor of her in the “narrative recipes” interspersed throughout the book, which help to illuminate important times in her life, but all the freely granted interviews with the seemingly endless parade of individuals who have played significant roles in Waters’s life result in a somewhat hazy picture of this dynamic woman. Perhaps the problem is, as McNamee says in his author’s note, too much information. In contrast, the restaurant is presented in loving but telling detail. Although the book ends with a few pages devoted to Alice’s ambitions and activities, they seem an afterthought, coming in the wake of two brilliant chapters devoted to Chez Panisse. The first of these, “An Extraordinary Day in Italy,” pictures the restaurant as a moveable feast, with its many cooks and servers functioning brilliantly despite inferior fish and an improvised outdoor grill that has to be worked by flashlight. The second, “An Ordinary Afternoon and Evening at Chez Panisse,” a kind of bookend to McNamee’s first chapter, dwells on the well-oiled machinery of the then thirty-three-year-old restaurant, with its patina of grace and air of beneficence. Alice Waters, perhaps fittingly, is absent from the picture, having become a personage for the ages, a kind of secular saint abroad in the great world. Lisa Paddock

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 4. Entertainment Weekly, no. 926 (March 23, 2007): 64. Fortune 155, no. 11 (June 11, 2007): 54. The New York Times 156 (June 15, 2007): E35. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 32. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 42. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW08.

22

ANGELICA Author: Arthur Phillips (1969) Publisher: Random House (New York). 352 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1880’s Locale: London The story of a disintegrating Victorian family is explored from four competing perspectives: the overwrought mother who suspects her daughter is a victim of a sexual demon; the skeptical father, who concludes his wife is a madwoman; a spiritualist who doubles as a kind of psychologist; and, finally, the source of the family’s anxiety, the daughter Angelica herself, in whose memories all the novel’s voices exist Principal characters: Constance Barton, wife of Joseph Barton and mother of Angelica Joseph Barton, Angelica’s father and medical researcher Anne Montague, a former actress with a second career as a spiritualist Nora, the family housekeeper Angelica, four-year-old daughter of Constance and Joseph

The events of Angelica revolve around the title character, the young daughter of Constance and Joseph Barton. The truth of Angelica’s situation is confused by the novel’s narrative structure, which divides the telling of the tale into four different perspectives, each one convinced of its own veracity. The uncertain truth-claims of each narrative provide the delayed full disclosure essential for a suspenseful mysterythriller; but Arthur Phillips’s skillful division of the story into four narratives also allows the reader occasion for a more thoughtful psychological investigation into character and motive. The first section of the novel is narrated by Constance Barton. She is viewed as having “jumped the counter” by marrying one of the customers of the stationery shop where she worked as a clerk, but this social triumph has paled in the wake of two dangerous miscarriages and an increasingly distant relationship with her husband. She has managed to carry a third pregnancy to term, resulting in her daughter Angelica, but her doctor has told her that further pregnancies will likely terminate her life. Since Angelica’s birth, Constance has avoided any sexual relations with her husband and has become unusually anxious about the health and welfare of her only child. When Joseph banishes Angelica from the foot of their bed to her own room, Constance experiences both the anxiety of separation from Angelica and the anxiety involved in her expectation that Joseph will want to resume sexual activity that could easily result in a life-threatening pregnancy. When Joseph does indeed make advances, Constance’s overwhelming fear of resuming sexual rela-

Angelica / phillips

23

tions as well as an obsessive maternal anxi ety drives her to her daughter’s room, where Arthur Phillips is the best-selling she seems to witness a horrible demonic pres- author of The Egyptologist (2004) and ence hovering over her sleeping daughter. Prague (2002), which was a New York Terrified of both her husband and the strange Times Notable Book and winner of the shape hovering over Angelica, a shape that Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum at times seems to resemble Joseph, Constance Award for Best First Fiction. He lives begins to spend her nights watching over her in New York with his wife and two sons. daughter, sleeping in a nearby chair. With her fears made more intense by the ghost stories she reads at night, Constance begins to conclude that she and Angelica share a psychic space that is such that Angelica undergoes all of the sexual anxieties of her mother and that her mother’s fears may have also been incarnated in diabolical phenomena that are jeopardizing her daughter’s safety. This means that Joseph’s sexual demands on his wife are also somehow being visited on his daughter. In addition to her concern for Angelica, Constance finds her husband increasingly repellent; her revulsion is compounded by her visit to his medical laboratory, which leads her to conclude that his research is little more than license to torture helpless animals. Angelica herself becomes increasingly disturbed, possibly responding to her mother’s intensifying hysteria and apprehension, or possibly responding to the presence of a supernal demon. Seeing her mistress on the verge of a complete breakdown, the housekeeper Nora recommends a spiritualist, Anne Montague. The second section of the novel turns to Anne’s perspective. Her skills as a former actress and her need to earn a living as a medium may be factors in her agreeing that Constance is the victim of some malign spiritual manifestation. Privately concluding that the locus of the family’s difficulties is not so much a predatory ghost but Joseph himself, Anne counsels Constance to use various herbal remedies and other tactics to sedate her husband. She also suggests ways in which Constance can cleanse the room of its evil spirit, a procedure that results in a comedy of errors that rouses an infuriated Joseph out of his slumber to douse a small fire that Constance has set. Although a specialist in the occult, Anne at the same time introduces a psychological perspective. While she understands that she must continue to suggest a supernatural presence if she is to justify her employment as a spiritualist, Anne in fact works to protect Constance from Joseph’s own dark side. For Anne, the demon is a kind of convenient fiction that allows both husband and wife to be in denial about Joseph’s appetites and potential for violence. Anne ends by consulting an old friend from the theater, an actor who specialized in playing the minor role of the Third Murderer in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with a view to arrange the elimination of Joseph, thereby rescuing both Constance and Angelica from what she has concluded are Joseph’s sexual aggressions. The third voice is that of Joseph himself. He is a man of science and attempts to interpret Constance’s difficulties as medical in nature. He believes that Constance and Nora have worked themselves into a state of hysteria to which the female sex was particularly inclined, leading him to resolve to exert a strong masculine author-

24

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ity as a way to stabilize things. Calm and reasonable, Joseph pronounces himself baffled by his wife’s fixation on her daughter’s safety, her bizarre reaction to his medical research, and her attempts to energetically interfere with his well-meaning efforts to be a more attentive father to Angelica. It is Constance’s belief that Joseph is attempting to make of Angelica both the kind of wife he wants as well as the son he never had, suggesting to a modern reader that Joseph is somehow leading his daughter to develop a Freudian-style Electra complex. The incident of the fire in Angelica’s room, his realization that she has drugged his food to keep him inactive, and what he feels is her unreasoning estrangement from him leads Joseph to consult a physician, with a view to having Constance institutionalized. What appeared as evidence of evil from Constance’s perspective here becomes evidence of Constance’s own insanity. Joseph presents himself as a paragon of rationality who must suffer from the demands of a bevy of hysterical females who malign and misinterpret his actions and motives. At the same time, hints of his background, especially his experiences as a soldier and in his medical research, suggest that Joseph is not what he seems. When Constance comes upon Joseph shaving his beard, she seems to see two selves, one bearded and the other clean-shaven, suggesting that Joseph may have a split or JekyllHyde personality of which he himself is unaware. He himself admits that a man’s better self may at times mysteriously disappear. That Joseph has some deep connection to the bestial, blueish demonic apparition haunting Angelica and that he possesses a dark nature of which he is consciously unaware are notions that are never quite dispelled. It becomes clearer during Joseph’s chapter that his perspective is being re-created by an adult Angelica—as indeed was her mother’s and Mrs. Montague’s. Like his wife, Joseph does not reveal much that happened before his marriage—but it is learned that he had a nanny, also named Angelica, who he eventually discovers is his true mother. This means that both Joseph and his father married beneath their social class; additionally, Joseph’s mother had described his father as having a dual nature as both a great man and a monster. All this can be garnered as evidence for a subtler, more mysterious Joseph than the respectable medical man he appears to be. Although Joseph has used his medical connections to attempt to institutionalize Constance, it is Joseph himself who disappears, leading the reader to suspect that Anne Montague has successfully arranged for his murder. There is also a dreamlike episode that suggests that Constance has murdered the demonic creature, a creature who has come to resemble closely her husband. The fourth voice is that of Angelica herself. As this novel unfolds, the reader is told that her story is both a therapeutic assignment and a dinner party parlor game in which each guest is asked to tell a ghost story. As the reader has been led to suspect, it is gradually revealed that the storyteller is the adult Angelica reconstructing this crucial period of her life, but rather than providing a definitive explanation or conclusion, in the manner of a classic mystery novel, Angelica instead offers contradictory perspectives, so that no final truth is possible. Angelica herself questions her memories of

Angelica / phillips

25

events, which are confused with dreams and fantasies, and offers a variety of contradictory explanations for the disappearance of her father. Ultimately, there is no answer to the question of whether or not Constance was delusive, Joseph rapacious, or Angelica the victim of a demonic visitation. Angelica’s chapter, rather than providing the reader with a neat solution to the mystery, only develops the novel’s sense of uncertainty. The doctor with whom she is in analysis is someone she feels pressures her for an impossible clarity and for a perfectly rational explanation, when in fact Angelica is perfectly prepared to believe that there was a ghost, exonerating her father. She is also prepared to believe that her mother was acting out repressed memories of her own childhood: She discloses that her mother may have been a victim of her own father’s sexual aggression, resulting in her consequent hysterical concern for her daughter. Although Angelica herself has no dark memories of her father, she is also prepared to entertain the idea that her father was murdered to protect her from his unstable and violent sexual impulses. The mingled yarn that is this novel’s narrative interweaves two contending philosophical perspectives—that of the scientific way of knowing, here associated with the masculine, and a more intuitive approach that permits the possibility of spiritual entities, or at least the deployment of such entities as metaphor. This latter approach is associated with all the women in the novel in a kind of “he said/she said” pattern, but the juxtaposition of the paranormal and the psychological also reflects the late Victorian era in which this novel is set, a period that saw the creation of many stories of the uncanny, including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), to which this novel is somewhat indebted. This era also saw the introduction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great literary detective Sherlock Holmes, whose mission it was to deploy science as a way to demystify situations that suggested the presence of the supernatural. In this regard, Phillips has accurately depicted the atmosphere of this period in history, in which the practice of psychoanalysis by medical men developed side by side with a fascination with psychic phenomena, mediums, ghosthunters, and spiritualists of all kinds. The sexual politics of the novel seems ultimately to privilege the feminine, which in the view of this novel subverts masculine ideals of transparency and which instead in a postmodern way posits conflicting and often hidden forces and meanings that require ongoing interpretation. In this regard, Angelica is not simply this story’s subject—it is her perspective, which shatters into multiple ones, that provides the conceptual framework for this complex and fascinating novel. Margaret Boe Birns

26

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 23. Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, April 18, 2007, p. 1. Library Journal 132, no. 4 (March 1, 2007): 68. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 11. The New Yorker 83, no. 13 (May 21, 2007): 81. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 7 (February 12, 2007): 63-64. The Seattle Times, April 6, 2007, p. K8. The Washington Post, April 1, 2007, p. BW07.

27

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE A Year of Food Life Author: Barbara Kingsolver (1955), with Steven L. Hopp (1954) and Camille Kingsolver (1987) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). Illustrated. 370 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Memoir, environment, natural history Time: 2005-2006 Locale: A small farm in southwestern Virginia A family of four spends a year eating locally, opening up to new and wonderful tastes more than denying familiar ones, suggesting that the move toward industrial agriculture and convenience food—away from the family farm and the dining table—is more costly to society than people realize Principal personages: Barbara Kingsolver, fiction writer, with graduate training in biology Steven L. Hopp, professor of environmental studies, husband of Barbara Kingsolver Camille, their teenage daughter Lily, their fourth-grade daughter

For many people in the United States, food is relatively abundant. It comes from the supermarket, and additives keep items fresh. With elaborate transport systems, a variety of food is available year-round. However, it was not always this way. Over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, farming has been radically altered, transformed from small, often family-run enterprises into a commercial industry of gigantic proportions and profits. For some, this change means progress, and the attendant energy and other costs are simply part of the process. However, a growing number of Americans are paying attention to the effects of their food choices, not only on their own lives but also on their communities and the environment. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver chronicles the story of her family’s year of “deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.” The narrative begins in May, 2004, as Kingsolver, her husband, and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, are leaving Tucson, Arizona, for a road trip to their farm in Virginia. For some time, they had talked about setting down permanent roots there, and it was about to happen. They were also planning to live off the land for one year, eating locally grown rather than industrially produced foods. With characteristic wit, Kingsolver says, “We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel.” As they

28

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

check out at the convenience store, a cloud crosses the sun, and everyone notices. The bleached-blond cashier scowls at the window, then at Steven when he says that he hopes it will rain. The cashier retorts that she hopes it will not rain, because tomorrow will be her first day off in weeks and she intends to wash her car. In this book, as in Kingsolver’s fiction, details are not arbitrary. One page and six days later, the Arizona cashier is contrasted with a Barbara Kingsolver has published waitress in a small-town Virginia diner who twelve books of fiction, poetry, and tells the family that she is looking forward to creative nonfiction, and her work has the weekend. When the rain begins, she says been translated into nineteen that she hopes it will rain long because the languages. Her first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), is included in high school fields need it. This kind of connectedness resonates throughout the book. However, Kingand college curricula. Kingsolver has won many awards for her work, solver, knowing that it would be easy to fall including the National Humanities prey to clichés praising country life over the Medal. city, explains that she wants only to say that “children of farmers are likely to know where food comes from, and that the rest of us might do well to pay attention.” This book is an opportunity for urbanites, rural residents, and everyone living in between to do just that. The early vignettes set the stage for dichotomies to come, both optimistic and sobering, where considerable information is woven into a captivating storyline and where Kingsolver—a self-proclaimed polite firebrand—presents her views but does not preach. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was published at a time when other authors were also chronicling what Americans eat and investigating where food comes from. “Stunt books,” which detailed people spending a period of time (usually a year) doing something unusual, were also popular. It is inevitable that some might accuse Kingsolver of participating in a fad. However, she explains early on that the family had been talking for years about eating locally, before the term “locavore” was even coined. They were already familiar with gardening, eating healthfully, and preparing their own food. She says that they wanted to connect their food choices with their family values, honoring both those around them and the place they called home. In the book’s final chapter, Kingsolver acknowledges potential criticism. Although her family had undertaken a “life change” in part as a reaction to America’s “snappily-named-diet culture,” it did not take long before their lifestyle had its own snappy name: “The 100Mile Diet Challenge.” It was no surprise, she says, that they were trendy. The family’s farm is in southern Appalachia, very close to the Kentucky border where Kingsolver grew up. Prior to the couple’s marriage in the mid-1990’s, Steven lived there and had owned the land for twenty years. After they were married, the whole family commuted: academic years in Arizona, three-month-long summers in

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle / kingsolver

29

Virginia while living in a shack behind the farmhouse they rented out year-round. Now, they were moving into it. Allotting themselves time to get the one-hundredyear-old house in shape, to get to know local farmers, and to start their garden, the family intended to begin their locavore year, eating what they produced themselves and what was available in their county. January 1, 2005, a logical calendar date but not very hospitable for local eating, passed by, then February and March. The family finally decided to begin their year with the appearance of asparagus, which was sprouting by April. In one of the book’s many wonderful scenes, the family huddles around the kitchen table, creating their first local shopping list. It had always been simple to consolidate requests before, Kingsolver says, but this time she had to play the heavy. “Six eyes, all beloved to me, stared unblinking as I crossed the exotics off our shopping list, one by one.” Anything out of season, that had to be brought in from outside the region, was deleted. Something as seemingly innocent as salad dressing was rejected because its many ingredients had to be transported individually to the processing plant, even if the plant had been local (which it was not). “As fuel economy goes,” Kingsolver explains, “the refrigerated tropicals like bananas and pineapples are the Humvees of the food world, but multi-ingredient concoctions are sneaky sports cars.” A lot of food would be available in their county, but some essentials—like grains and olive oil—were not, so they decided to buy these from the least damaging sources they could find. After mental images of “Lily begging leftovers from somebody’s lunchbox at school, ” Kingsolver says, they also decided to allow themselves each one luxury item (fair trade), in small quantities. Steven chose coffee; Camille, dried fruit. Lily wanted hot chocolate; Barbara selected spices—turmeric, cinnamon, and cloves. Kingsolver’s engaging narrative, organized chronologically, is infused with information about growing crops and raising animals, about preserving and preparing food. Except for the sidebars contributed by Steven (well-referenced and more directly focused on what people can do to make a difference) and Camille’s recipes (part of her short, charming essays that conclude many chapters), this is not a how-to book. Although Kingsolver concedes that restraint is needed to swim against the mainstream food culture, this book is not about self-deprivation. The focus is squarely on local bounty and its value to society and the environment. In addition, despite the fact that Kingsolver clearly has strong views about food, her work is not a lecture from “Mr. Natural,” a health fiend stereotype that Kingsolver acknowledges: “dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, standing at the checkout with his bottle of Intestinal-Joy Brand wheatgrass juice, edging closer to peer into my cart, reeking faintly of garlic and a keenness to save me from some food-karma error.” As spring turns to summer, food is abundant. During zucchini month (July), such a “pyramid of excess vegetable biomass” floods the kitchen that Kingsolver says she took to “balancing them on their heads, on their sides: right here in the kitchen we had the beginnings of our own vegetable Stonehenge.” Some of the most riveting sections of the book involve Lily’s chickens, her egg business, and the turkey flock. Kingsolver stresses that eating plants is not morally superior to eating meat, distinguishing

30

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

between “killing” and “harvesting.” She and her family engage in the latter, harvesting six roosters and six turkeys. The September chapter is so graphic that some may find it hard to read. October brings pumpkins, root vegetables, and a lot of discussion about potatoes. November and December feature celebrations. At Christmas, the family splurges with a box of tangerines, with Lily hugging each one to her chest “before undressing it as gently as a doll.” Camille’s essay closing this chapter is especially wise, dealing with trusting food—something she sees Americans have a hard time doing. According to Kingsolver, feminism and the consumer culture pushed cooks out of the kitchen and away from the dining table, with negative effects on America’s eating habits and family dynamics. She explains how vegetables have lost their taste and nutrition and how societies have lost plant species: Of the more than eighty thousand species eaten by people throughout history, “three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola.” She quotes authorities such as Jack Harlan, plant geneticist and author of Crops and Man (1992), who said that genetic diversity is all that stands between abundance and “catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.” Despite these points, Kingsolver is hopeful. Her discussion of hybrid and bioengineered seeds, for example, is followed by a rousing discussion of heirloom plants, including networks through which farmers and gardeners are using each other’s open-pollinated seeds, passing thousands of varieties from generation to generation. Chapter 18 is titled “What Do You Eat in January?” The key is planning ahead, canning, and “getting over the frozen-foods snobbery,” according to Kingsolver, who names February and March the “hungry months.” Much of this raucous chapter involves turkey breeding and, eventually, mothering, instincts bred out of turkeys through industrial farming and which Kingsolver had to help hers learn, quoting lines of Shakespeare in the process. What happened on the day when the family’s calendar year of eating locally ended? Kingsolver says that she does not remember: They were not counting the days because they did not plan to stop, and they have not, though they do eat out more. Kingsolver reflects on changes she saw in her family during that year. She notices that, concurrently, food issues also became a topic of conversation in society at large, and the need to take action about climate change grew critical. For Kingsolver, the remedy involves “reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person.” Exactly how to do that is up to the individual and is not clear or easy, but she believes that “small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial.” Some critics have suggested that eating locally may be a privilege unavailable to most Americans because of time and/or financial constraints. Kingsolver and her husband maintained their careers during this year, and admittedly, as author and professor, respectively, their careers allow for more flexibility than many occupations. They also took two vacations, well chronicled in the narrative: the first, a family road trip, investigating local eating throughout New England, Montreal, and an Amish farm in Ohio; the second, without children, to Italy, a culture obsessed with food and where

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle / kingsolver

31

the “agri-vacation” business is booming. These vacations have their purposes in the story, and what Kingsolver states and demonstrates belie any charge of elitism. Rather than present a polemic or exhort readers to do what the Hoppsolvers (as she sometimes calls her family) did, Kingsolver encourages people to notice what they are eating and how it gets to their tables. She also offers insight into how food is viewed and managed in the United States. Whether readers are like Kingsolver’s urban friend who “never knew a potato had a plant part” or are already scrutinizing their food decisions, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle offers insights for all. Ultimately, this is a book about continuity, about cycles of seasons and family life, about people coming together to prepare the food of which they are, literally, made. Jean C. Fulton

Review Sources The Boston Globe, May 20, 2007, p. F1. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 208-209. Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2007, p. E18. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 27, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 13 (March 26, 2007): 75. San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 2007, p. F1. Science News 171, no. 26 (June 30, 2007): 408-409. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 29, 2007, p. F1. USA Today Magazine 136 (September, 2007): 80-81. Women’s Review of Books 24, no. 6 (November, 2007): 10-11.

32

ANTONIO’S GUN AND DELFINO’S DREAM True Tales of Mexican Migration Author: Sam Quinones (1958) Publisher: University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque). Illustrated. 318 pp. $24.95 Type of work: History, current affairs, sociology Time: The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Locale: Various venues throughout Mexico and in the United States, particularly in the border states In nine tales, plus an introduction and an epilogue, the author focuses on issues concerned with Mexican immigration to the United States and on the problems and accomplishments of Mexican immigrants, most of them undocumented, who leave Mexico to find a better life in the United States and to save enough money to set themselves up comfortably when they return to Mexico Principal personages: Delfino Juarez, the subject of three of Quinones’s tales Andrés Bermudez, a successful immigrant, a Latino farmer, dubbed “the Tomato King” Albert Robles, a corrupt Mexican American politician who steered South Gate, California, toward bankruptcy Chuy Moran, an artist who mass-produced black velvet paintings Doyle Harden, an entrepreneur who marketed paintings on velvet Diez, a sixteen-year-old coyote who shepherds immigrants across the Arizona desert Enrique Fuentes, founder of an opera café in Tijuana

Sam Quinones has a remarkable ability to put a human face on the controversial issue of immigration, particularly on the matter of undocumented Mexicans who have come to the United States to improve their lives and to help support the members of their families they have left behind. In Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, Quinones suggests that most of these immigrants have crossed the border to earn as much money as they can, often by working two or three jobs simultaneously, with the expectation of saving their money, building lavish homes in the places from which they emigrated, and returning to live in the towns from which they originally came. Quinones’s generalization that the expectation of most immigrants is to return eventually to Mexico may seem untenable to some readers. Indeed, some of Quinones’s tales demonstrate that it is virtually impossible for many Mexican immigrants to return home once they have established themselves in the United States. Despite this minor quibble, the tales are carefully observed and have an impressive impact. Quinones writes, “As a reporter, I’d grown used to seeing gray in every story. People have complicated motives for what they do; human beings aren’t characters in soap operas. Judging who was right and wrong was something I’d given up long before.”

Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream / quinones

33

In most of these tales, the readers are left to judge for themselves the rights and wrongs reflected in the actions of the principal characters. One exception to Quinones’s reportorial objectivity is found in “The Saga of South Gate,” unequivocally the most shocking tale in the collection. South Gate, California, is a workingclass community some twenty miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Many Latinos settled there in the 1980’s and 1990’s, including Joe Ruiz, a respected twenty-three-year resi- Sam Quinones is a journalist who spent dent. Ruiz, trained by Roto-Rooter, soon op- ten years in Mexico as a freelance writer. ened his own plumbing service, employing a Awarded the Alicia Patterson Fellowship dozen people. He was a model citizen and a in 1998, Quinones published a wellcoach to local young people’s athletic teams. received collection of short stories, True When Ruiz ran for a seat on the city coun- Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch cil, he sued Richard Mayer, who was also Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and running but who was not a South Gate resi- the Bronx (2001), concerned with dent. Mayer rented an apartment in South contemporary Mexico. Now residing in Gate and changed his name to Ricardo Mayér Southern California, Quinones is a in order to pass himself off as Latino to attract reporter for the Los Angeles Times. the Latino vote. When Ruiz’s suit was adjudicated, the court found in Ruiz’s favor. By this time, however, the ballots had been printed with Mayer’s name on them, and it was impossible to reprint them. Mayer launched a smear campaign against Ruiz, accusing him of molesting two young boys, a charge that was patently untrue. These ugly rumors, nevertheless, resulted in Ruiz’s losing the election. A similar smear campaign was launched against Mayor Henry Gonzalez, accusing him unjustly of growing rich through taking kickbacks and bribes. Gonzalez was shot in the head on his way home from a city council meeting shortly after the election but survived. The political situation in South Gate, to put it mildly, had become septic. Emerging amid this maelstrom was twenty-six-year-old Albert Robles, a Latino with U.S. citizenship who had recently earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Mayor Gonzalez did all he could to help Robles establish himself politically in South Gate. Before long, Robles became mayor. As mayor, Robles set about stacking the city council with members who could be counted on to vote consistently as he directed. Soon, with four of the council’s seven seats in his complete control, Robles emerged as a virtual dictator. As such, he robbed the city, entering into costly contracts that would obligate the city long after he had left office. In the process, he misdirected public funds to line his own pockets. Writing in detail about how Robles rose to power and how he ultimately was deposed, Quinones weaves a convoluted web so shocking that it reads like fiction, al-

34

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

though Quinones documents it fully. Although the citizens eventually took their town back, the long-term harm that Robles visited upon South Gate will be felt for years in the future. Quinones’s investigative reporting in piecing this story together is remarkably able and well presented. In “The Tomato King,” Quinones writes about another politician, Andrés Bermudez, who left his native village in the Mexican state of Zacatecas the day after his wedding in 1974. Hiding in the trunk of an automobile, Bermudez and his wife, Irma, were smuggled across the border, ending up in Winters, California, an agricultural center, where Bermudez became a farm laborer and eventually a foreman, a farm-labor contractor, and a grower of peaches and tomatoes. Bermudez prospered sufficiently that he was able to buy sixty-nine acres of farmland adjacent to the property on which he had first worked for Warren Tufts when he came to Winters. Thirty years after his arrival, he had become wealthy raising tomatoes and peaches. He had long since fulfilled his vow to build a house grander than Tufts’s on the adjacent property. Even though he could not swim, Bermudez made sure that his house had a swimming pool, a visible status symbol for him. Bermudez was clearly a model of the immigrant who had done well, who had overcome the limitations of his early life and had become a notable success. In 2000, the governor of Zacatecas came to Winters and visited Bermudez. In the course of this visit, the governor convinced Bermudez to enter Mexican politics and to run for the office of mayor in Jerez, which had a population of about fifty-four thousand. An equal number had left Jerez for employment in the United States. Bermudez, feeling an obligation to return to his roots, acceded to the governor’s request and ultimately was elected. His campaign and subsequent victory received considerable press attention. Warner Bros. planned to produce a feature film based on the story. The celebrity that accompanied his victory went to Bermudez’s head. He became so enamored of all the attention he received that he failed to establish himself before he officially assumed the office to which he had been elected. Two months after his election, a suit was lodged against Bermudez before the Mexican elections tribunal, which found that he had forfeited his Mexican citizenship when he became a citizen of the United States. He was, therefore, elected under false pretenses and could not serve in the office to which he had aspired. In his two tales that deal with Latinos who lived in the United States and served as mayors, Quinones presents interesting contrasts that reflect two substantial character flaws. Albert Robles was overly ambitious and self-serving. He had a Machiavellian view of life and was totally convinced that he was above the law. His aim was to serve his own interests rather than those of the electorate. His greed and dishonesty eventually destroyed him. Andrés Bermudez, on the other hand, had no political ambitions and did not seek office. Rather, even though he was basically unqualified to serve as mayor, he felt an obligation to run when it was suggested to him that he do so. His basic flaw was hubris, an overweening pride that his newfound celebrity fed so prodigiously that Bermudez ignored serving his constituency, causing him to be deposed. The psychological contrasts in these two stories are intriguing and insightful.

Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream / quinones

35

While “The Saga of South Gate” is the most shocking story in Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, “Delfino II: Diez in the Desert” is the most poignant. In this second of three Delfino stories, Quinones writes about Delfino Juarez’s arduous entry into the United States, led across the Arizona desert in the blistering heat of June 7, 2003, by Diez, a sixteen-year-old coyote who had not previously led such a migration. Diez was responsible for helping ten people to journey from Veracruz across the border into Arizona. He was not, however, up to the task: It is doubtful whether anyone would have been. One woman in this tragic band began to hallucinate and eventually died. Given the searing heat and the hostile terrain, it is miraculous that she was the only fatality. Dehydration took its toll on the other migrants, who struggled to survive by drinking their own urine to keep from dying of thirst. Juarez was so dehydrated that he could not urinate, but, by ingesting someone else’s urine, he clung to life. In this story, Quinones writes with an imposing veracity. His descriptions of the pitfalls the migrants face—not the least of which are the cactus needles that get embedded in their flesh and the heat that brings them to the brink of heatstroke—are among the most vivid accounts in print of the perils of the desert that many Mexican immigrants cross as they enter the United States illegally. The most developed character in Quinones’s tales is Juarez, to whom readers are introduced in three separate tales. In the first story, Juarez is a twelve-year-old forced by lack of opportunity to leave his impoverished and isolated village of Xocotla to earn money for the support of his mother and his siblings. He goes to Mexico City, where he picks up whatever jobs he can, working six-day weeks. Soon, however, as his conscientiousness is recognized and appreciated, his lot improves. After he marries and has a son, Juarez needs more money than he can earn in Mexico City, so he migrates to the United States, leaving his wife and child behind but sending money to them regularly. He works as an installer of flooring and soon is foreman of his flooring crew, earning enough money to have a house built in Xocotla, which is now a virtual ghost town because most of its able-bodied men have left to work in the United States. Ultimately, Juarez has the house he has fantasized about, but he cannot return to his roots. Of special interest are Quinones’s two stories relating to the arts. One is the story of how velvet painting became a widespread cottage industry in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and of how a North Carolina entrepreneur, Doyle Harden, turned it into a thriving enterprise nationally. Quinones tells of the growth of velvet painting and plaster figure making in Tijuana, but also tells about how one dedicated opera buff, Enrique Fuentes, brought opera to Tijuana and turned this border community into a cultural oasis. R. Baird Shuman Review Sources Library Journal 132, no. 9 (March 15, 2007): 84. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 10 (March 5, 2007): 54.

36

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE A Life in Letters Author: Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). Illustrated. 710 pp. $37.95 Type of work: Letters Time: 1867-1920 This generous collection of Doyle’s letters, most of them addressed to his mother, sheds light on many facets of his life, from his school days to his activities as a leading advocate of Spiritualism Principal personages: Arthur Conan Doyle, a physician and author Mary Foley Doyle, his mother Charles Altamont Doyle, his father Bryan Mary Julia Josephine “Dodo” Doyle, Caroline Mary Burton “Lottie” Doyle, Constance Amelia Monica “Connie” Doyle, Jane Adelaide Rose “Ida” Doyle, and Mary Helena Monica Harriet Doyle, his sisters John Francis Innes Hay Doyle, his brother Louisa Hawkins “Touie” Conan Doyle, his first wife Jean Elizabeth Leckie Conan Doyle, his second wife Mary Conan Doyle and Jean Conan Doyle, his daughters Kingsley Conan Doyle and Denis Stuart Percy Conan Doyle, his sons

The British Library owns nearly a thousand letters that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, Mary, from the time he went away to boarding school at the age of eight until her death more than fifty years later in 1920. This correspondence comprises the bulk of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, though editors Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley have included some letters that Doyle addressed to others and the occasional letter that others wrote to him. They have supplied links between the letters that, taken together with the correspondence, make the work in effect a biography. Lellenberg worked as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Author of The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1987), he is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and a frequent contributor to the latter’s Sherlock Holmes Journal. Stashower is a journalist and the author of Teller of Tales: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1999), which won an Edgar Award. Foley, Doyle’s great-nephew and executor of his estate, is a member

Arthur Conan Doyle / doyle

37

of the Baker Street Irregulars, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and the Arthur Arthur Conan Doyle is one of England’s best-known writers. He graduated from Conan Doyle Society. Even as a child, Doyle sought to shield his Edinburgh University’s school of mother from worry. His letters to her from medicine in 1884 and began practicing boarding school are universally cheery, even in England. Doyle then created the when he records the direst of events, a pattern character of Sherlock Holmes, featuring repeated throughout his life. Thus, on No- him in fifty-six short stories and four novellas between 1887 and 1927. vember 25, 1870, he reports that a classmate has nearly died of the croup, yet in the same sentence he assures his mother that he is enjoying himself immensely. Even Macbeth emerges as “jolly” in a letter to her. Although he was not a stellar student, his reports home detail only his successes and his expectations of improvement. Mathematics proved especially challenging to Doyle. The editors suggest that his difficulties with this subject may explain why Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Moriarty, was a professor of mathematics. In his letters, Doyle also lists books he has read and plays he has seen at school; these works may have influenced the future author. Doyle had not expected to become a writer but a physician. While attending medical school at Edinburgh University, he lived at home, so the letters included here do not discuss his medical education. When his assistantships took him to other places, he described his work with various physicians. He also wrote about life as a ship’s surgeon aboard the Arctic whaler the Hope, on which he served from February to August, 1880. Again his letters home omit anything worrisome. On April 7, 1880, he assures his mother that he is enjoying his shipboard experience, even though two days earlier he had nearly drowned when he fell off an ice floe while seal hunting. Doyle’s letters show his transformation from a doctor who wrote to an author who abandoned medicine. While still a medical student, he published his first short story, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” (1879) in Chambers’ Journal. Writing brought him much-needed income as a student and then as a fledgling physician. He briefly set up practice with a friend, Dr. George Budd, at Plymouth, but Doyle’s letters trace the rapid disintegration of their partnership. Doyle then established his own practice at Portsmouth, but it was not overly successful. He wrote to his mother that his first patient paid him one shilling and sixpence for a vaccination that has cost two shillings and sixpence. He added humorously that at that rate, if his practice grew very much, he would have to sell his furniture (much of which his mother supplied). In his first year, he earned £156, two shillings, fourpence, but £30 of that came from his mother, and another £42 from his stories. From July through November, 1883, he earned nearly as much from his pen and donations (£51) from his mother as he did from his patients (£59). In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins (known as “Touie”) and obtained his medical degree. He was also trying to publish a novel. The manuscript of one work was lost in the mail; a second failed to find a publisher. Doyle then decided to write a mystery with a detective modeled on Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Doyle’s medi-

38

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

cal school teacher Joseph Bell, a master diagnostician. The result was A Study in Scarlet (1887), for which Doyle received £25. He fared better with The White Company (1891), receiving £200 for the serial rights to this historical novel. Still, he hoped that his medical career would succeed. At the beginning of 1891, he spent two months in Vienna studying ophthalmology and then set up practice in London in Upper Wimpole Street, not far from medically fashionable Harley Street. After six months, he decided to devote himself entirely to literature. In July, 1891, The Strand carried “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of a long series of Sherlock Holmes stories. The magazine asked for more such pieces, offering £35 for each one. Doyle demanded and received £50. His letters show that he wrote quickly. In November, 1891, he told his mother that in two weeks he had produced four Holmes stories, though by then he was already tired of the detective and wanted to kill him off. When The Strand asked for still more Holmes tales, Doyle raised his price to £1000 for a dozen, hoping that the magazine would not pay to such a sum, but it did. In 1892, Doyle’s income, derived solely from his writing, came to about £3000. Other works besides the Holmes stories proved lucrative as well. The publishing firm Smith, Elder paid him £4000 for Rodney Stone (1896), and he received another £1500 for the serial rights to that novel, as well as royalties from the American edition. He was also writing for the stage, most famously a play with the American actor William Gillette about Holmes. That work paid for his country house, Undershaw. Through this correspondence, the reader can trace Doyle’s literary output. Though he was a prolific writer—a collected edition of his works published in 1899 already ran to sixteen volumes—he also engaged in a variety of other activities also treated in his letters. One subject about which he and his mother differed was the Second Boer War, which Mary Doyle opposed and he supported, going so far as to enlist as a surgeon. While Doyle felt he was fulfilling his patriotic duty, he also wanted to write a history of the conflict. The Great Boer War (1900) proved immensely popular not just in Britain but worldwide. He also wrote a pamphlet defending Britain’s conduct of the war, for which he was knighted in 1902. His service in the war had another result as well. On the ship that carried Doyle back to England from the front, he met the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who in March of 1901 shared with Doyle some folklore of his native Devon. Among the legends were tales of ghostly hounds. In August, 1901, The Strand began serializing The Hound of the Baskervilles. Upon returning to England, Doyle stood for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist candidate for his native Central Edinburgh. His letters trace this unsuccessful campaign and a second, equally futile attempt. As always in his letters to his mother, he never admits to fatigue or discouragement. Indeed, he nearly won the election, but he could not overcome strong anti-Catholic sentiment. More happily, though discreetly, Doyle’s correspondence traces his romance with Jean Elizabeth Leckie, whom he met and fell in love with in 1897, and whom he married in 1907 after his first wife died in 1906. Louisa suffered from tuberculosis and became increasingly debilitated. Doyle would take holidays with his mother or some other third party acting as chaperone, and Jean would join the group. In his letters home, Doyle claimed that Touie never suffered from this arrangement.

Arthur Conan Doyle / doyle

39

Doyle regarded his Sherlock Holmes tales as a distraction from his more serious historical fiction and revived the dead detective only when, in the spring of 1903, Norman Hapgood, editor of Collier’s Weekly, offered him $25,000 for six new Holmes stories, $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for a thirteen. Doyle enjoyed actual detective work. His correspondence discusses his long effort to free Oscar Slater, whom he correctly deduced had been wrongly accused of murder. Doyle began his campaign for Slater in 1912; Slater finally was exonerated in 1927. Earlier, Doyle had secured the freedom of George Edalji, wrongly accused of mutilating cattle. Julian Barnes fictionalized this episode in Doyle’s life in Arthur and George (2005). During World War I, Doyle defended naturalized Germans living in England, and he also worked to liberalize England’s divorce laws. Doyle’s major cause during the last decade of his life was Spiritualism, which looms large in his correspondence for this period. He traveled as far as Australia and New Zealand as well as the United States to speak on the subject. In 1921, he published The Wanderings of a Spiritualist describing his voyage to the antipodes. The editors present some dissent from his sister Ida, but Doyle insisted that the dead could communicate with the living. In a letter to Sir Oliver Dodge (September, 1919), he describes contacting his dead son, Kingsley. Because this volume ends in 1920, it does not document other Doyle accounts of similar experiences. This collection of letters will engage anyone interested in the creator of Sherlock Holmes. It offers fascinating insights into his thoughts and his domestic as well as his public life. For the most part, the editors have done a fine job identifying the people mentioned in the correspondence. They are less helpful in annotating other references. What is “Furgusson’s Edinburgh rock” that the schoolboy requests from his mother? When he lists books read or plays seen, the editors pass over them without identifying them. On March 24, 1916, Doyle writes that he has been able to keep current with his history of the war because no important engagements have occurred since Loos, again unglossed. On August 24 of that year, he thanks his mother for sending the “Stonyhurst letter”; the reference remains unexplained. Despite such aggravating omissions, the editors have made an important contribution to an understanding of Doyle. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources The Economist 385 (October 6, 2007): 98-99. Financial Times, October 6, 2007, p. 34. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 18 (September 15, 2007): 973. London Telegraph, October 20, 2007, p. 27. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 32 (August 13, 2007): 52. Sunday Times, August 26, 2007, p. 39.

40

THE ASSISTANT Author: Robert Walser (1878-1956) First published: Der Gehülfe, 1908, in Switzerland Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky Publisher: New Directions (New York). 301 pp. $16.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Unspecified, but presumably the early twentieth century Locale: Europe A previously untranslated novel from the highly influential modernist author of Jakob von Gunten Principal characters: Joseph Marti, Carl Tobler’s newly hired assistant Carl Tobler, an inventor Frau Tobler, his wife Wirsich, Tobler’s previous assistant

Robert Walser is one of the least-read great writers of twentieth century European literature. His influence on Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil alone should have been enough to make his stories and novels much better known and appreciated as well as much more widely available in English translations than they are. Translations did start appearing in 1957, one year after Walser’s death, but to little effect other than to lead the late Guy Davenport to write one of his most intriguing short stories—or “assemblages of fact and fiction” as he preferred to call them. “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” included in Da Vinci’s Bicycle (1979), takes place at the end of Walser’s life, the last three decades of which were spent in psychiatric hospitals. Publication of Walser’s Selected Stories (1982) and the novel Jakob von Gunten (1909), both ably translated by the poet Christopher Middleton and issued in attractive paperback editions by Vintage Books in 1983, should have made a greater impression and perhaps would have—had Magical Realism not begun to have gone out of fashion and been replaced by the minimalist, stripped-down, workingand middle-class fiction of Raymond Carver and others. All the more pity, for Walser wrote what may best be described as minimalist Magical Realism. It is no wonder that he influenced Kafka and anticipated Samuel Beckett. The main character of Jakob von Gunten, for example, arrives at the Benjamenta Institute (a school for butlers), where nothing is taught, where nothing happens, and where Jakob learns only “one thing . . . for certain: in later life, I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero.” The same is true of the similarly antiheroic protagonist of The Assistant, first published in 1908 and now translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, whose translations also include Walser’s Masquerade, and Other Stories (1996) and The Robber (2000). The Assistant is Walser’s longest work but hardly his most

The Assistant / walser

41

perfect. Walser was a miniaturist, and, as Middleton points out, he is most successful in Robert Walser was born in Biel, short stories or a short novel like Jakob von Switzerland, in 1878. He was a major Gunten. That The Assistant was written in influence on several of the major just six weeks (or so Walser claimed) and at a European writers of his time, including time when Walser badly needed money (but Franz Kafka. He spent the last thirty was also optimistic about his chances of mak- years of his life in mental institutions. ing a career as a writer) helps explain both the flaws and the muted brilliance of this curiously angled, semiautobiographical novel. The Assistant is, like all of Walser’s fiction, at once wondrously dreamlike and monotonously mundane, full of dialogue yet eerily similar to silent film comedy. Set in a place that is simultaneously both Switzerland and Germany, The Assistant is full of doppelgängers, doublings, and sudden swerves. Its main character is Joseph Marti, the titular assistant to the engineer turned inventor Carl Tobler. For all their differences in wealth, Joseph and Tobler—assistant and master, employee and employer—are strangely alike in many ways: for example, the doubts the townspeople have about Tobler and the doubts Joseph has about himself and above all their shared capacity for self-delusion and self-deception. “But what does any of this matter now that he is staying in the home of Herr Tobler?” Joseph asks early in the novel. “How could a few infelicitous business ventures harm such a house?” Joseph goes on to say as Tobler’s house of cards comes down around Joseph’s wellstopped ears. A person who still felt moved to join in heart-thrilling celebrations of gymnastics and song in the company of his wife and children must no doubt still have some secret source of credit flowing somewhere that he has not yet tapped only because he has not yet felt the need to avail himself of this last of all available resources. A person possessing such a stately wife who is politely greeted on all sides when she walks through the village— how could he be badly off. And things were indeed not so bad. Money might come raining into the technical office overnight, advertisements had been taken out, and for the moment all that was needed was patience, the profits would most certainly materialize soon.

Joseph continues on in this manner for three more pages, indeed for all three hundred of the novel’s pages. The worse things get, the more Joseph rationalizes, and the more he rationalizes, the more his doubts keep surfacing, in oddly angled ways. The same is true of Tobler. The more he fails, the more he invests in his villa, the Evening Star, which functions as actual residence and as dream house: part Gatsby mansion and part House of Usher. “There seemed to be something spectral lingering about the lovely Tobler residence, and the happiness and delicate charm of this home, indeed its very legitimacy, appeared to have been lost in a pallid, weary, lackluster and fathomless dream.” The villa is the facade that masks the absurdity and emptiness within and in this sense resembles Tobler’s wife, “a bourgeoise of highly authentic lineage” in whom Joseph takes an interest that is alternately childlike and erotic.

42

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In The Assistant, everything and everyone are double, even the Toblers’ children. There are two pairs of boys and girls, with opposites within each pair, and with the younger, fearful daughter, Silvi, the focus of Joseph’s and Walser’s attention. This dreamlike doubleness is especially noticeable in the way Joseph and Tobler treat each other: ingratiating one moment, aggrieved and belligerent the next. Joseph is, says Frau Tobler (whom he alternately idolizes and upbraids), “a curious mix of cowardice and boldness, a man whose prose style is both florid and pithy.” The doubleness also characterizes the house (which is one kind of place when Tobler, the ridiculous paterfamilias, is present and quite another when he is absent), and it characterizes the townspeople: The Barenswilers or Barensweilers are a good-natured but at the same time rather treacherous race—they might best be described as slyboots or tricksters. They are all more or less shifty and crafty, and every last one of them—the one more, the other less— has something secretive or hidden about him, and for this reason they all tend to look artful and wily. They are honest and moral and not without pride; for centuries they have enjoyed wholesome civil and political liberties. But they are wont to combine this honesty with worldly ways and a certain sense of cunning, and they like to give the impression of being sharp as tacks. They are all a little ashamed of their hearty, natural straightforwardness, and each one of them would rather be seen as a “scoundrelly dog” than as a blockhead and donkey who is easily duped.

So it continues, for another three hundred words—giving one moment, taking the next. The Assistant takes the form of a circular quest, a kind of frantic (yet low-key) running in place, which begins with Joseph’s arrival at Tobler’s villa and ends with Joseph’s leaving, his having come full circle, back where he started, not so much wiser as a little worse off, still very much the naïf. The twenty-four-year-old Joseph arrives “famished” and with great expectations, carrying “a brown suitcase, one of the very cheapest,” as well as a good deal of psychological baggage—guilt, self-doubt, and self-loathing—born of his previous failures as a son and an employee. His “irresolute demeanor” makes him seem not merely comical but often ridiculous. “Will I be good enough?” “Could I be lacking initiative, enthusiasm, flair?” the novel’s bland antihero absurdly wonders. Joseph is the fool of the world in a post-fairy-tale world. The more he perseveres, the more his prospects diminish. Tobler is differently absurd. He is an inventor whose sudden rise has nothing to do with ability and everything with the inheritance he is in the process of squandering on the inventions in which Walser places his own faith and future in this absurdist shaggy-dog story. The Advertising Clock, Marksman’s Vending Machine, Invalid Chair, and Deep Hole Drilling Machine (the capital letters add to the hype and the unreality) are not only the means by which Tobler hopes “to achieve something” but signs as well of a modern capitalist age mad with advertising, an era when, as Karl Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.” As each invention fails, Tobler blindly places his hopes on the next, so that eventually his entire business amounts to nothing more than keeping his numerous creditors at bay. As his prospects dim, so do the lights, when his electricity is shut off.

The Assistant / walser

43

“How strangely dedicated I am,” Joseph wonderingly points out to himself (for Joseph has no confidants, not even any real friends). Finally, not even devotion is enough to prevent him from leaving Tobler, who has never actually paid Joseph other than with a few marks and a good many baseless dreams of future success. As Walser and a little later Kafka and more recently and most trenchantly Don DeLillo have all made clear in their stories and novels, belief does not actually disappear in a postreligious age. Instead, it simply attaches itself to absurdly inadequate objects: consumer goods, media, and fashionable ideas in DeLillo; courts and castles in Kafka; Tobler’s inventions, advertising, and Joseph’s “work” more generally in Walser. “Do you wish to spend your entire life as a clerk” Frau Tobler asks her husband’s assistant. Joseph offers no answer other than his own actions, and those suggest that the answer is as double and as ambivalent as everything else in The Assistant. Although there is really nothing for him at Tobler’s “Technical Office,” there is not really anything for him anywhere else. Joseph finally does depart at the novel’s end and goes off, not alone as he came but in the company of Wirsich, Tobler’s former assistant and Joseph’s double (a character out of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 1853), by way of Fyodor Dostoevski en route to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (pr. 1953). Wirsich’s inconsistent, alternately self-destructive and selfabnegating behavior is the archetype of Joseph’s own once he replaces Wirsich, and the latter’s subsequent downward spiral into alcohol and unemployment is the forerunner of Joseph’s own dismal prospects. Near the novel’s end, in one of Walser’s most inspired and Chaplinesque passages, Joseph adamantly proclaims his right to spend New Year’s eve with Wirsich and to allow Wirsich to sleep in his room (Wirsich’s former room) in the villa. Frau Tobler not only readily agrees; she and the children welcome Wirsich with open arms, effectively, if not literally, leaving Joseph out in the cold, a mere onlooker to the little scene of hearth and home he has inadvertently arranged. Then, the next morning, Joseph leaves: She [Frau Tobler] pressed his hand and then turned to her children as if nothing had happened. He picked up his little suitcase from the floor and then the two of them, Marti and Wirsich, left the Evening Star. When they had reached the road down below, Joseph stopped, took one of Tobler’s cheroots out of his pocket, lit it, and then turned around to look at the house one last time. In his thoughts he saluted it and then the two of them walked on.

In the original manuscript, the concluding paragraph is much longer, the loss Joseph feels is more poignant, and Joseph’s situation more hopeless and perhaps more absurd. Joseph is Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, heading into the distance with the Gamin at the end of Modern Times (1936), this sentimental scene dissolving into the two tramps in Beckett’s existential tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. Robert Morace

44

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1-15, 2007): 33. Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2007, p. R8. The Nation 285, no. 7 (September 10, 2007): 38-41. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 10. The New Yorker 83, no. 22 (August 6, 2007): 68-71. Weekly Standard 13, no. 5 (October 15, 2007): 40-41.

45

ASYLUM IN THE GRASSLANDS Author: Diane Glancy (1941) Publisher: University of Arizona Press (Tucson). 97 pp. $15.95 Type of work: Poetry In this collection, far from being marginal, the “Native American experience” as rendered in current times in all of its variousness is exemplary Literary opinion-makers in the English-speaking world seem to prefer writers who can be comfortably slotted in this or that genre. John Updike is indulgently permitted to publish volumes of his book reviews and an occasional slim volume of poetry, but he is a writer of fiction. X is a poet, Y a playwright, Z a critic. Writers who move indiscriminately between poetry and fiction, not occasionally but habitually, who mix poetry and prose in a single book and then proceed to write plays: these shape-shifters do not fit the familiar categories. Diane Glancy is just such a writer. The daughter of a Cherokee father and a mother of European descent, she has published more than thirty books: poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and unclassifiable combinations thereof. She is a shape-shifter and a boundary-crosser. Many though not all of her books meditate in some way or another on the tragedy of the American Indian experience. She unsettles readers who would prefer to romanticize that history with patriotic clichés or simply to forget about it. She unsettles readers who sentimentalize the Christian “errand to the wilderness.” However, unlike many of her peers in Native American literature, who regard Christianity as an alien religion, symbolic of imperialism and exploitation and cultural genocide, Glancy sees the core claims of Christianity as good news for American Indians. She unsettles readers who are allergic to Jesus even in the confines of a poem. In a famous letter, the English Romantic poet John Keats extolled the quality of “Negative Capability, . . . when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Glancy possesses a quality something like that. She is a witness to contradictions, never neatly resolved, but she does not rotate these facets of the Real with a serene or playful detachment. Whatever she is writing, in whatever form, there is a restlessness, an edge, a yearning, sometimes laced with anger, sometimes with sardonic wit. Glancy’s own version of negative capability is exemplified in “They Came with a Bible,” a poem from an earlier volume, (Ado)ration (1999). The first line of the poem continues the sentence begun with the title: saying it was all right to take. Did not Jacob steal Esau’s birthright? Did not Israel enter Canaan?

46

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 Who was this God who allowed it? We sat at the campground and talked. We were supposed to say Jesus and know their God. They baptized us as a sign we’d been washed in the blood of the lamb. We looked at the wagons going by, wings folded over the wagon beds saying, holy, holy, to our death. Their sacred ground was a building. Didn’t they know it was the grass under our feet and the clouds above? All the earth was holy. A man could worship anywhere. He could talk to the ancestors and spirits. The animals—the grass eaters And those four-leggeds who first tore the flesh, drank the blood.

The hypocrisy of the Christian settlers and their self-serving piety are unmistakable, but there is also a hint, made explicit elsewhere, that the message they bore transcended their twisting of it, and a suggestion that the Indians who heard it, if they listened, could correct some of the distortions, for their own sense of the world was in some respects much closer to the strange world of the Bible than to the outlook of the European invaders. The title poem of Asylum in the Grasslands can be read as a companion to “They Came with a Bible.” The poem opens with an epigraph from the Gospel of Mark (“He commanded them to sit down on the grass”) and begins with a generalized account of an existential situation: When some adjustment occurs not in the actual circumstances no they seem to stay the same but in one’s attitude or way of viewing those circumstances that other way into acceptance or at least liveability so one is not assumed to be in a lock that can’t be stepped beyond it’s a fragile gate the opening of faith the letting of anotherness into your shadow-box

From here, as happens often in Glancy’s writing, there is a shift to the insistent particularity of the Native American experience, yet with a resonance that is universal:

Asylum in the Grasslands / glancy

47

. . . you meet someone in the prairie grass his face so full of light he’s milk-eyed you let his ideas roll over you you even forget the bitterness you learned all your life though you know there’s a loveliness in suffering but you let go of it a little you assume the air walk over what was supposed to be your grave you even feel it’s the way it’s supposed to be this Savior who sucks you into himself this man with his eyes in backwards.

Boundaries are permeable in Glancy’s poems: between humans and animals, flesh and spirit, present and past. There is a simple physicality always—dirt and dust and mud, grass and sun, wind and fire and rain—and always a rustling of spirits, ancestors, voices. Asylum in the Grasslands, like many of her books of poems, includes short interludes in prose, often with a dreamlike aspect. One called “The Great Divide” begins thus: “The spirits of the ancestors migrate. They drink the last lick of yellow light from the creek. I hear them like wind in the cornstalks. One ancestor always shakes his knee with restlessness.” She speaks to him: “I have the hollowness of this air. I have to live this life I don’t like. I have to go where he doesn’t count.” She reproaches the ancestors—“you only call me back”—but she looks forward to a reunion: “In the squeak of brakes I hear your ceremonial whistle. In the blink of neon I hear your fires. Wait for me in the back booth at the all-night café.” There are poems about Glancy’s father and mother, about last illnesses and death. These are not isolated episodes. They are personal but not narcissistic. The ancestors are present on the roads she drives—“the back roads of Diane Glancy is a poet, novelist, Kansas from Oklahoma to Missouri”—during playwright, and essayist. For many three years in which her mother is slowly dy- years, she taught Native American ing from cancer: “I drive the road sometimes literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, in sleep over and over, remembering how you Minnesota. Among her recent books taught me to fold my will like a quilt and stuff are Rooms: New and Selected Poems it in the hall closet.” (2005) and The Dance Partner (2005), Everything human is mixed. “Do not cry,” a sequence of prose texts inspired by concludes a prose interlude titled “I Hear a the history of the Ghost Dance. Medicine Man”: “We are another wave mi-

48

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

grating to the grasslands of the next world.” This hopefulness is not kitschy. The final poem of Asylum in the Grasslands, “Last of the Man Dog,” begins with a jaunty air: Man Dog reliable Man Dog heap Man Dog boogles w/ big chief You hear him at night, his firelights so mixed you hold a magnifying glass.

What is one to make of this shape-shifter? The “pilgrims—was it settlers—/ trying to figure/ still split beyond repair”: They do not have a clue: It was said to be a ghost or wholly in this world. A lot going on. What you choose as you intermix— Whew, this hard, this riveted box, the buckboard. Whoa, horse.

Without blurring the distinctions of being Indian, Glancy expresses how everyone is in the same boat (or buckboard). To be Native American is often to be in the most obvious sense “intermixed,” of mixed blood, as is true of Glancy herself, Louise Erdrich, and many other Native American writers. Ultimately, however, all people are of mixed blood. Without making a cheap attempt to co-opt the suffering of American Indians, one must equally resist the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between “ourselves”—whoever “we” may be—and an exotic Other. “Indian Summer” is one of the finest poems from Asylum in the Grasslands, and it reminds people that they are all in this in-between season: There’s a farm auction up the road. Wind has its bid in for the leaves. Already bugs flurry the headlights between cornfields at night. If this world were permanent, I could dance full as the squaw dress on the clothesline. I would not see winter in the square of white yard-light on the wall. But something tugs at me. The world is at a loss and I am part of it migrating daily. Everything is up for grabs like a box of farm tools broken open. I hear the spirits often in the garden

Asylum in the Grasslands / glancy

49

and along the shore of corn. I know this place is not mine. I hear them up the road again. This world is a horizon, an open sea. Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.

The effect of the last two lines is haiku-like, the image of the barn loaded by all that has come before—sadness, loss, yearning, and hopefulness, intermixed. John Wilson

Review Source North American Review 291, no. 6 (November/December, 2006): 49.

50

AT THE SAME TIME Essays and Speeches Author: Susan Sontag (1933-2004) Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump Foreword by David Rieff Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 235 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Literary criticism, essays Time: The twentieth and twenty-first centuries Locale: England, Germany, Israel, and the United States A posthumous collection that explores the full range of Sontag’s interests in world literature and politics as well as her view of contemporary culture, especially arts like photography When Susan Sontag died in 2004, she had nearly completed At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, which is divided into three parts: discussions of individual authors and Sontag’s arguments about aesthetics, her responses to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and how photography engages with traumatic events such as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War, and the role of literature in shaping public morality. The book also includes an informative foreword by her son, David Rieff, and a discussion of the book’s structure by its editors, Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. From the appearance of her first essay collection, Against Interpretation (1966), Sontag was regarded as a public intellectual defining cultural trends and boldly declaring views that often put her at odds with conventional, mainstream opinion. Her outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, the subject of essays in her second collection, Styles of Radical Will (1969), made her a political figure as well. Although Sontag later revised and, in some cases, repudiated part of her early publications— most notably recanting her enthusiasm for Marxist revolutionary movements and regimes like Fidel Castro’s in Cuba––At the Same Time articulates core values that she never modified. In particular, Sontag associates the writer with the dissenter. Indeed, the burden of this volume is a concern that the “ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies—is designed to render obsolete the novelist’s prophetic and critical, even subversive task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.” The ideology Sontag alludes to is inseparably bound up with American hegemony in the political and cultural realms. An acerbic foe of the George W. Bush administration, Sontag detects in its language an effort to equate criticism of America not only with lack of patriotism but with a failure to support the White House’s “war on terror,” a phrase she deplores because it fosters a fear that stifles free speech and reduces

At the Same Time / sontag

51

the world to a kind of binary, simplistic for mula. Thus, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the countries of “old Europe” that refused to join the coalition in the war against Iraq. How are countries like Spain or Poland, she counters, new Europe? They are so only because Rumsfeld says it is so, because they support U.S. policy. Included in this volume is Sontag’s controversial New Yorker article condemning the American government’s and the media’s response to the September 11 attacks as an al- Susan Sontag immediately became a most unanimous failure to address the reasons major figure of American culture with for the attacks. Instead, the media allowed the the publication of her essay collection Bush administration to cast the attack as a Against Interpretation (1966). She went “cowardly” blow at civilization, liberty, hu- on to write four novels, including In manity, and the free world. Why did almost America (2000), which won the no one point out that September 11 was the National Book Award for Fiction, as “consequence of specific American alliances well as a collection of stories, several and actions?” she asks. She is particularly plays, and seven subsequent works of contemptuous of attempts to allay public anx- nonfiction. iety by saying that “our country is strong.” Sontag responds: “Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.” Sontag’s harsh rhetoric and ridicule of those seeking to deal with the September 11 attacks exclusively as a psychological problem (how to grieve) resulted in fierce attacks on her—as she acknowledges in “A Few Weeks After,” an interview included in At the Same Time. Quite aside from the merits of Sontag’s position, her heated rhetoric is part of what makes her political writing problematic. For example, she calls President Bush “robotic.” This kind of name-calling does not serve her argument well, especially since other essays in this volume emphasize how careful the novelist has to be with language and with the expression of opinions. Then, too, there is Sontag’s habit of contradicting herself. In “A Few Weeks After,” for example, she argues, “To in any way excuse or condone this atrocity [September 11] by blaming the United States—even though there has been much American conduct abroad to blame—is morally obscene.” In The New Yorker article, she comes perilously close to blaming the victim, for in effect Sontag suggests that Americans should not be surprised that the twin towers tumbled. In the interview, she suggests that the September 11 attacks were an assault on civilization, liberty, and humanity. In the guise of nuance—her constant reinterpretations of her statements, especially in the form of interviews—Sontag appears to straddle rather than resolve the contradictions in her positions. Perhaps if Sontag had lived longer, she would have caught this contradiction in her politics. Rieff cautions that this volume should not be taken as his mother’s last words. He notes that even in the final stages of preparing her books for the press, she

52

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

made significant amendments. He also announces that there will be other editions of her uncollected essays as well as publications of her diaries and letters. Sontag’s best writing in this volume is as a critic—or, more properly speaking, as an introducer and enthusiast for the literature she considers great, including work that has been, in her estimation, unduly ignored. Thus, she praises the work of a writer like Victor Serge (a much earlier critic of Stalin and the gulag than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and in Sontag’s view a greater writer). Why is Serge not better known? Sontag provides several reasons, favoring the fact that he had no real country. He was Russian but wrote in French, and neither nation has considered him one of its own. Because he was an early supporter of the Russian Revolution turned apostate, Serge was shunned by many literary critics and readers on the left, Sontag supposes. Other writers such as Halldór Laxness, an Icelandic author of one of the great twentieth century novels, Kristnihald undir Jökli (1968; Christianity at Glacier, 1972), have been ignored because they come from countries that have not made a huge mark in world history. In Laxness’s case, there is also the fact that his novel—at once despairing and deeply comic—is hard to categorize. It does not fit neatly into a literary niche. The style of the literary essays in At the Same Time is reminiscent of Sontag’s earlier collection, Under the Sign of Saturn (1980). She includes telling biographical details and brief vignettes of history in order to re-create the writer’s ethos and the conditions in which he or she created literature. Occasionally Sontag will dwell on particular passages, but usually she does so only to make broader points about the writer—not to analyze the passages themselves. It is curious, indeed, that although she mentions many times how important it is to craft beautiful sentences, she never examines any of those sentences in detail. The result is a critic whose enthusiasms are expressed in the loftiest terms rather than in the delight other critics take in the local felicities of a sentence or passage. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump note in their preface that Sontag did not have the opportunity to write a planned essay on “aphoristic thinking,” and this is to be regretted since her own style tends toward employing the epithet, the maxim, and the dictum. Like Oscar Wilde (a major influence on Sontag), she throws out offhand statements that startle with their aptness and provocation. Thus she claims, “Opera is the only medium now in which it is still acceptable to rhapsodize.” That may be true. Writers of rhapsodic—sometimes called polyphonic—prose, like Amy Lowell or Thomas Wolfe have gone out of fashion, but did Sontag ever consider that her own essays in worship of literature reflect the kind of effusiveness she claims to find only in opera? Moreover, how is what she terms rhapsody different from the “ecstatic prose” of Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke that she extols? The point about aphorisms, however, is that they are prods to thinking—even to challenging the gist of the aphorism, so it is a special loss that Sontag never gave the subject the full treatment it deserves. Instead, as Rieff points out in his foreword, the reader can only glimpse aspects of Sontag herself in her enthusiasms. A curious case in point is her exploration of Serge’s rejection of Soviet communism at the very time that many other writers were championing it. Underneath their support, Sontag ar-

At the Same Time / sontag

53

gues, there was an anxiety that dare not be expressed—or when it was, as in Serge’s case, then the writer had to be shunned. In effect, this is exactly what happened to Sontag: Even as she supported revolutionary communism, she had to overcome her doubts, not wishing to dash the hopes of a better world that so many writers sought in this ideology. Sontag’s most revealing writing appears in “Literature Is Freedom,” a speech she gave in Germany in 2003, accepting the Friedenspreis prize, an award given by the German Book Trade. It is one of her few autobiographical essays. She begins by noting that Daniel Coats, American ambassador to Germany, immediately refused an invitation to attend the award ceremony. Sontag remarks that his absence “shows that he is more interested in affirming the ideological stance and the rancorous reactiveness of the Bush administration than he is, by fulfilling a normal diplomatic duty, in representing the interests and reputation of his—and my—country.” Sontag acknowledges that the prize calls her an “intellectual ambassador” between two continents (America and Europe), cunningly situating herself in such a way as to make Coats’s absence seem not only petty but ignorant. Describing the complicated relationship between Europe and America—how America has been viewed as both a land of promise and a wasteland devoid of culture—Sontag shows how she grew up in southern Arizona reading the great European authors, especially Thomas Mann and other German writers introduced to her by an elementary schoolteacher. These books provided a mental stimulation lacking in her own environment. At the same time, however, she tells the story of her German publisher, a man interned in a prisoner-ofwar camp in northern Arizona, who spent three years there reading the classics of American literature. That the two of them should eventually work together so closely is, Sontag implies, what she means by the kind of freedom from narrow ideological focus that literature can provide. She mentions Coats only once at the beginning of the essay, but her rebuke to his reductive way of viewing the world is devastating. Sontag underlines the irony of her remarks by noting that as a young Jewish girl she had a nightmare that Nazis would break out of their Arizona camp and invade her southern Arizona bungalow and kill her. What saved her from such fears and what buoyed the German prisoner of war was literature. “Literature was freedom,” Sontag concludes. “Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” It is a pity that this rousing and profound speech does not conclude At the Same Time. What follows is a rather tedious public lecture Sontag gave while accepting the honor of delivering the first Nadine Gordimer Lecture. This was Sontag’s last public appearance before her final illness, and it does not show her at her best. It is to be wondered whether she would not have wanted to excise this last piece or at least place it elsewhere, even though it is situated in the right chronological order. In general, the uneven quality of this collection makes it a lesser achievement than Sontag’s signature work. Nevertheless, certain pieces, especially “Regarding the Torture of Others” and “Literature Is Freedom,” rank with her best prose. Carl Rollyson

54

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Harper’s Magazine 314 (February, 2007): 87-92. London Review of Books 29, no. 6 (March 22, 2007): 11-12. The Nation 284, no. 12 (March 26, 2007): 31-36. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 11, 2007): 14. Newsweek 149, no. 11 (March 12, 2007): 58-59. The Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 2007, p. 13.

55

AWAY Author: Amy Bloom (1953) Publisher: Random House (New York). 240 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: July, 1924-July, 1926 Locale: New York City’s Lower East Side; Canada; Alaskan wilderness Lillian Leyb fled to New York City’s Lower East Side after her parents and husband were murdered and her young daughter Sophie disappeared in a Russian pogrom; learning that Sophie may have survived, Lillian travels west to find her, to Seattle and through the Yukon wilderness toward Siberia Principal characters: Lillian Leyb, a twenty-two-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant to America Meyer Burstein, an actor in New York City’s Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre and Lillian’s lover Reuben Burstein, owner of the Goldfadn, Meyer’s father, and Lillian’s lover Yaakov Shimmelman, a tailor, Lillian’s friend Sophie Leyb, Lillian’s three-year-old daughter

Amy Bloom’s Away opens with Lillian Leyb standing in line among hundreds of young women, waiting to apply for a seamstress job at the Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre in New York City’s Lower East Side. An immigrant from a small Russian village, Lillian fled to America after her parents and husband were murdered and her toddler daughter Sophie went missing in a pogrom. In New York, Lillian lives with her cousin Frieda, sharing a bed with her cousin Judith. Lillian also works for Frieda’s kitchen-table business, sewing and picking apart fabric flowers. Although Frieda employs Lillian, she makes it clear that while America is full of opportunity, one’s fortunes can suddenly change. Lillian could easily be turned out on the street. In the pogrom, Gentiles murdered their Jewish neighbors, families they had known all their lives, while local police declined to intervene. Lillian relives the terror of the attack in her nightmares, again and again finding her parents and husband dismembered in their home. In the chaos, Lillian pushed her three-year-old daughter Sophie out a window and told her to run and hide in the chicken coop, but the next morning Sophie was gone. Lillian wanders and searches for weeks, until her aunt Mariam says she saw Sophie’s hair ribbons floating in the river, and the child must have drowned. In America, Lillian seizes any opportunity to support herself, not only working hard but also stealing pennies and other small items from her fellow roommates at Frieda’s apartment. When Judith tells Lillian that the Goldfadn is hiring seamstresses,

56

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Lillian goes with her to apply for a job and captures the attention of Reuben Burstein, the Goldfadn’s owner. In doing so, Lillian disregards Judith’s need for the job, but soon she is able to leave the bed she shares with her resentful cousin, becoming not only a seamstress at the Goldfadn but also mistress to both Reuben Burstein and his son Meyer, the Goldfadn’s handsome leading man. Meyer Burstein takes Lillian on a few chaste dates, then rents a small apartment where they occasionally have perfunctory sex, although Meyer’s taste runs more toward men. Reuben also visits the apartment and has sex with Lillian in his son’s bed. Soon an affection develops between Lillian and Reuben, although neither admits to caring for the other. Lillian arrived in America speaking Yiddish and Russian; Reuben’s friend Yaakov Shimmelman (whose business card reads “Tailor, Actor, Playwright. Author of The Eyes of Love. Pants pressed and altered.”) kindly suggests she find a dictionary and thesaurus to help her learn English. Lillian spends hours paging through them and begins to think in synonyms; when Meyer is late to their first assignation, Lillian finds him “rude (crass, inelegant, uncouth, and also lacking social refinement).” Yaakov Shimmelman, having lost his entire family to tuberculosis and attempted suicide, says he and Lillian are two of the walking dead; everything they cared for has been taken from them. Lillian prefers to think she is not past caring, not “corpsy,” but sensible. Raisele Perlmutter, another of Lillian’s cousins, arrives unexpectedly from Russia with news that after the pogrom, Sophie was rescued by the Pinskys, forwardthinking neighbors who escaped to Siberia; Sophie may still be alive. In an instant, Lillian’s world is changed; although Raisele is an opportunist, angling for Lillian’s place in Meyer’s apartment and probably lying, Lillian must return to Russia on the chance that her daughter is still alive. Meyer and Reuben insist that she will die in Siberia if not on the journey. Neither will give Lillian money for passage across the ocean. Yaakov understands her desperation and, studying maps in the public library, plans the trip for her, to Siberia by way of Alaska. He arranges for Lillian to be smuggled on trains from New York to Seattle and explains that she must take a steamship from Seattle to Canada, walk overland to the Yukon River, then find a boat to take her to Siberia. On arriving in Seattle, Lillian is immediately mugged, robbed, and saved from imminent death on the street by Gumdrop Brown, a prostitute who suspects her pimp Snooky Salt has been skimming her profits. To refill her purse, Lillian works briefly for Gumdrop and tries to help when Gumdrop decides to get Snooky drunk and steal back the money he owes her. Gumdrop’s scheme goes awry and the two women murder the man. Although remorseful, they quickly divide his cash and jewelry between them, and Lillian heads for the Alaska Steamship Company. A ship carries Lillian to

A practicing psychotherapist, Amy Bloom is the author of the novel Love Invents Us (1998) and the nonfiction book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude (2002). She has published two critically acclaimed short-story collections, Come to Me (1993) and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000).

Away / bloom

57

Prince Rupert, where she is taken in by Arthur Gilpin, a widower and constable who prevents Lillian from continuing on her journey and freezing to death by having her incarcerated until spring at the Hazelton Agrarian Work Center for Women. There she meets Fat Patty, who tattoos seven stars on Lillian’s hip; Mrs. Mortimer the librarian, who pursues the women one by one but finds Lillian not to her taste; and Chinky Chang, a grifter of Chinese descent. Upon her release, Lillian returns to Prince Rupert, where the newly married Constable Gilpin and his new wife (who, Lillian is surprised to discover, is quite a cardsharp) prepare her for her journey. Lillian rides with a mule train into the wilderness, then walks through the woods along the Telegraph Trail, tormented by blisters and mosquitoes, and on into Alaska. There, she comes upon a lone cabin where three trapper’s children await their father’s return, their mother having unexpectedly died on her way to the privy. Lillian cares for the children until their father comes home, then hikes on. She stays briefly in telegraph operators’ cabins along the trail. Resident at Refuge Cabin Number Nine is John Bishop, who has heard about a woman moving along the Telegraph Trail. Lillian arrives in a state far removed from the pretty, fashionably dressed lady whom Bishop imagined; she is covered with bruises, infected blisters, and bites, and her hair is crawling with lice. Bishop delouses Lillian, prepares for her a warm herbal bath, a change of clothing, and a rabbit stew and settles down to tell the story of how he once murdered a man in a bar fight and consequently exiled himself to the Yukon and Cabin Number Nine. Lillian imagines herself a weary Jewish Ceres, a goddess of maternal love, finding her long-lost daughter, only to discover Proserpine has no wish to return to her. Leaving John Bishop’s cabin in the clothes he has carefully laundered for her, Lillian walks only twenty minutes before turning back. Lillian and Bishop realize that they are in love, and when Lillian tells Bishop about her daughter, he offers to come with her to Russia. Shortly thereafter, Bishop disappears while searching for Lillian in a snowstorm, and she continues alone to Dawson City on the Yukon River, where she arranges to buy a boat. Unknown to Lillian, John Bishop fell and broke both his legs in the snowstorm but was rescued by two men of the native Han people and is recuperating in a Han village. When Lillian’s boat is ready, she heads up the Yukon River, but after a difficult five miles her boat capsizes and she struggles to shore—where she finds Bishop hiking through the woods in search of her. In Away’s final pages, the two rejoin civilization, John as a policeman and Lillian as an English teacher, try twice more to sail to Siberia (failing each time), and raise two daughters of their own. Lillian keeps from her daughters the pain of her past and of losing Sophie, and she finds an end to her journey in John, whom she cannot lose. Bloom quickly but elegantly tells the lives of the people Lillian meets along the way, sometimes revealing their fates to the reader just before Lillian takes her leave. Yaakov successfully commits suicide; Reuben’s health deteriorates, and he dies soon after (poignantly, Lillian wonders months later if they think of her). Meyer becomes a Hollywood matinee idol, cousin Raisele a film ingenue. Gumdrop becomes a schoolteacher in Minneapolis, marries a nice Jewish man, and spends the rest of her life as a

58

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

pillar of St. Paul’s Jewish community. In the whirlwind manner typical of Away, within five pages of her release from Hazelton, Chinky Chang (whose family poses as Godfearing Christians who sell—with pretended reluctance—traditional Chinese medicine and psychic readings on the side) meets a young Mormon missionary and runs away with him to Alaska, where they spend their lives happily raising a family of their own. Lillian begins her journey wearing a coat and trousers stolen from Meyer. In mythical fashion, minor characters give her useful items to carry: maps (torn from atlases at the library) and stainless-steel safety pins from Yaakov; Snooky’s gold watch (a gift from Gumdrop); fine boots and a knife from Arthur Gilpin; a crowbar from the widowed trapper; a sack of flour and a life preserver from the Dawson City man who first sells her a boat. Away was critically praised as a masterpiece of American literature. The novel was noted for its use of language, mixing Yiddish axioms with literary references and myths of exile, and the device of Lillian’s devotion to the thesaurus. Bloom won praise for Away’s attention to detail and its fast pace. Minor characters are sharply and completely drawn and fully formed; their lives are skillfully summed up without interrupting the flow of the story. As a female protagonist without a family, Lillian is unusual in immigration literature. After the devastation of the pogrom, she pursues life in America simply because it is human nature to persevere. Lillian initially lacks the foundation of either faith or living family that would direct her actions in America. In John Bishop’s cabin, she falters, wondering if Sophie would know or welcome her, and toward the end of her journey she thinks that she does not believe in God, but “in luck and hunger . . . in fear as a motivator and she believes in curiosity (hers should have shrunk to nothing by now . . .) and she believes in will,” noting that her own will seems renewed every day. As Lillian travels, Away becomes a portrait of lesser-known America at the turn of the century, through characters found less often, and drawn with less humor, in typical immigrant tales: Yaakov the tailor, Gumdrop and Snooky, Arthur Gilpin and his practical second wife; Chinky and her family; even Sophie and the Pinskys. Near the end of Lillian’s quest, Bloom reveals that Sophie did survive, was adopted by the Pinskys, and lived a full, happy life. Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 31. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 567-568. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 77. Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2007, p. R1. New Statesman 137 (September 24, 2007): 78. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 38 (September 24, 2007): 67.

59

THE BAD GIRL Author: Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) First published: Travesuras de la niña mala, 2006, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 276 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1950-1990 Locale: Primarily Paris; also Lima, London, Tokyo, and Madrid A complex, intertwined story of love, politics, obsession, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement, ecstacy and despair, illusion and reality Principal characters: Ricardo Somocurcio, the first-person narrator, the good boy, lover of the bad girl, and interpreter-translator The bad girl, a woman known in the novel as Lily the Chilean girl, Comrade Arlette, Mme Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, and Otilita Paúl Escobar, Ricardo’s first friend in Paris, a Peruvian revolutionary called Comrade Jean Juan Barreto, a bohemian Peruvian school friend of Ricardo who lives in England Salomón Toledano, an interpreter-translator who scorns love but falls in love disastrously Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel, Ricardo’s attorney uncle and link to Peru and its politics M. Robert Arnoux, the bad girl’s French husband, a UNESCO functionary Fukuda, a sadistic lover of the bad girl, a Japanese businessman and yakuza Simon Gravoski, a Belgian physicist, neighbor, and friend of Ricardo in Paris Elena Gravoski, the wife of Simon, nurse, and friend of Ricardo Yilal Gravoski, a mute Vietnamese boy adopted by the Gravoskis

Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel The Bad Girl, a first-person narrative, recounts a love affair that alternates between periods of ecstacy and deep despair for the narrator. The novel is divided into three parts, a structure reminiscent of a play. The first chapter, “The Chilean Girls,” introduces the two main characters, Ricardo Somocurcio (the good boy) and Lily, the Chilean Girl (the bad girl), who will become his lifelong love and obsession. Chapters 2 through 6 recount the details of their love affair, which is a series of abandonments and reconciliations. The final chapter, “Marcella in Lavapiés,” concludes the love affair with the death of the bad girl.

60

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The novel can also be viewed as three stories in one. Vargas Llosa creates this impression by making no transition from chapter 1 to 2, as well as chapter 6 to 7. Chapter 1 ends with the narrator stating that the summer of the Chilean girls was the most fabulous one he ever experienced. Chapter 2 begins with an account of his waiting outside a Mexican restaurant in Paris for a handout of food. Chapter 6, still set in Paris, ends with the bad girl giving money to a tramp in appreciation of his having prevented Ricardo from comMario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian mitting suicide and with the happy couple novelist, essayist, and literary critic. embracing. Chapter 7 begins with a descripHis first novel was La ciudad y los tion of the Lavapiés neighborhood in Madrid perros (1962; The Time of the Hero, and reveals that the narrator is living there. 1966). He won the Rómulo Gallegos However, chapters 1 and 7 remain an integral International Novel Prize for La casa verde (1965; The Green House, 1968) part of the larger novel, as the Chilean girl reand the National Book Critics Circle appears in chapter 2 through 6, disappears for Award for Making Waves (1996). a time in chapter 7, and then reappears. The novel begins in the summer of 1950 in Lima, Peru, where the teenage Ricardo is a member of the affluent Miraflores social group. Two mysterious “Chilean” sisters suddenly appear at the social functions, only to be proven imposters before the end of the summer. Humiliated by their exposure as poor Peruvians, the girls disappear and are soon forgotten by the Miraflores crowd, except for Ricardo, who always remembers the mysterious, beautiful girl named Lily. The story then jumps to Paris in the 1960’s. Here, Ricardo fortuitously encounters Lily again. Using chance and coincidence, Vargas Llosa unfolds their love story. Although this technique could easily be seen as unrealistic manipulation of the novel, it impresses the reader as entirely believable, since Vargas Llosa has imbued his tale with a sense of destiny. Ricardo and Lily are fated to be together, so naturally their lives will play out such that they are repeatedly brought together: in Paris, in England, in Japan, again in Paris, and finally in Spain. Ricardo has gone to live in Paris, fulfilling the one ambition of his life. There, he meets Paúl Escobar, a Peruvian communist involved in organizing a revolution to liberate Peru after the fashion of the Cuban Revolution. Helping Paúl transport and house the new recruits who are on their way to Cuba via Paris for guerrilla training, Ricardo meets Comrade Arlette, who is in fact the “Chilean” girl. A period of ecstatic happiness follows for Ricardo when Comrade Arlette moves into his room, becomes his lover, and is willing to forsake the revolutionary cause and live with him in Paris. Unfortunately, it is impossible to obtain her release from her commitment to go to Cuba. Thus, the bad girl, promising to return in three months, again disappears from Ricardo’s life. Before long, Paúl informs Ricardo that Comrade Arlette has become

The Bad Girl / vargas llosa

61

the mistress of Comandante Chacón. Crushed and depressed, Ricardo loses himself in his work as an interpreter at UNESCO and in a fanatical study of Russian. Then, one day in the lobby of UNESCO, he encounters the bad girl, who is now the elegant Mme Arnoux and addresses him as “good boy.” Their relationship resumes, and Ricardo again enjoys a period of ecstatic happiness. Then, upon returning from an interpreting assignment in Vienna, he is unable to contact the bad girl. Soon he learns from her husband that she has disappeared, along with all the funds of his Swiss bank account. Ricardo, emotionally overwrought and depressed, once again buries himself in work. Toward the end of the 1960’s, Ricardo’s work takes him to England, where he meets an old school friend, Juan Barreto. Barreto has a very lucrative career painting the racehorses of affluent owners. Looking at photos of Barreto and his patrons, Ricardo sees a woman who resembles the bad girl. Barreto tells him she is Mrs. David Richardson. Ricardo manages to meet her, and the relationship resumes. However, the bad girl disappears again when her husband has discovered that she is still married to M. Robert Arnoux. Their next serendipitous meeting takes place in Tokyo. Ricardo’s colleague Salomón Toledano sends him a letter with a postscript in which he mentions “the bad girl,” who is now Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman, Fukuda. Ricardo goes to Japan, sees her, and is victimized as she uses him to satisfy her voyeur lover. Ricardo vows never to see her again; however, fate once again intervenes. Ricardo’s Parisian neighbors Simon and Elena Gravoski insist that he talk to her. Their adopted Vietnamese son Yilal, who is mute because of emotional trauma, may have spoken to her on the phone, and they must know if he did. Also, when Ricardo tells Elena the story of his love affair with the bad girl, she is adamant that he not let it end in his silence. Thus, Ricardo not only accepts the bad girl’s subsequent phone call but also agrees to meet her. Physically and mentally ill as a result of the abuse she suffered from Fukuda, the bad girl is nothing more than a skeleton, aged ten years and poorly dressed. Eventually, Ricardo takes her to his apartment and with the help of Elena arranges for her hospitalization in a private sanatorium where she regains her health. A period of happiness ensues for Ricardo. The bad girl stays with him and they marry. Then, one day, he finds her waiting for him with her bags packed. She explains that she can no longer stand the dull, suffocating life she has with him. Admonishing him not to kill himself, she leaves. He later learns that she has seduced the wealthy husband of her employer and has estranged him from his family. Convinced she will not return because this time she has explained her reason for leaving, Ricardo eventually becomes involved with Marcella, an Italian theatrical set designer twenty years his junior, and moves to Madrid with her. Abandoned by Marcella, who has fallen in love with a young choreographer, Ricardo is working in the Café Barberi when the bad girl appears. This is her final return to him. She is dying of cancer. Thus, this time she is also going away for the final time; Ricardo will be left with only his memories.

62

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Vargas Llosa presents a series of dichotomies in the novel, most notably the characters of the good boy and the bad girl. Ricardo has little ambition; he simply wants to live in Paris. He pursues a career in translating and interpreting that enables him to become merely a voice linking other human beings. His work becomes a means of escaping his unhappiness each time the bad girl leaves him. Ricardo is totally capable of self-effacement, in which he finds solace. By contrast, from an early age, the bad girl has sought recognition, money, social prestige, and excitement in life. The author reveals these facts about the bad girl when Ricardo, visiting in Peru, by chance meets an old man named Arquímedes, who is mysteriously endowed with a knowledge of where to build breakwaters and who turns out to be the bad girl’s father. As the child Otilita, she was never satisfied and was always wanting more. Although she is drawn to the good boy, her fascination with wealth and power prevent her from ever being satisfied with the safe, secure, bourgeois life that the good boy offers her. This explains her pattern of abandoning and returning. The unfolding of the bad girl’s life is also a motif of contrast. The more she ascends in terms of social status, wealth, and power, the more she descends in terms of human dignity, personal freedom, and both physical and mental health. The political subplot of the novel further develops the structure of contrasts. Paúl Escobar and his communist comrades idealistically believe that they can successfully bring about a revolution in Peru and thus improve the life of their fellow countrymen. This belief is an illusion, as they are brutally killed and the revolution fails. Ricardo’s uncle, Dr. Ataúlfo Lamiel, though not a revolutionary, has had hopes that political change would improve his country, but he lives to realize that this is only an illusion, that in reality Peru’s economic and political situation has worsened. Vargas Llosa’s depiction of the characters Juan Barreto and Salomón Toledano adds an ironic twist to the theme of opposites. Barreto lives a double life. In New Market in the presence of his wealthy clients for whom he paints horses, he is a model of propriety. He makes every effort to protect his source of income. In contrast, when he is at his pied-à-terre in London, he leads a dissolute life of polyamorous bisexual activity that results in his death from AIDS. Toledano has always admonished Ricardo for falling in love and insisted that romantic love only brings unhappiness. He even introduces Ricardo to his world of sex with no emotional attachments and sex for hire. Then, while in Tokyo on an assignment, Toledano falls madly in love with Muriko, a Japanese lawyer. The relationship becomes suffocating for her, and she tells him she no longer loves him. Devastated, Toledano commits suicide. Throughout the novel, Ricardo’s relationships, along with the other important characters in his life, mirror his love affair with the bad girl. Each one of them leaves him. Paúl Escobar, his first friend in Paris, returns to Peru and dies for the cause. Juan Barreto, his former school friend and fellow Peruvian, dies. Salomón Toledano commits suicide. Uncle Ataúlfo, who became his primary family tie upon the death of his Aunt Alberta, who reared him, dies. The Gravoskis, who had become his closest friends, leave for Princeton University, where Simon has received a research grant, and only rarely return to Paris for short periods of time. Marcella, with whom he has moved to Spain, leaves him.

The Bad Girl / vargas llosa

63

The bad girl’s death at the end of the novel is a traditional ending for such a story, but Vargas Llosa innovatively recasts the ending, as the bad girl’s final words are that she has provided Ricardo with the novel he wanted to write. He can relive their love affair by writing the novel, and this is just what he has done. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 4 (October 15, 2007): 4. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 18 (September 15, 2007): 954. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 14, 2007): 1-9. San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 2007, p. M1. Times Literary Supplement, August 18, 2006, p. 23.

64

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS Author: Dinaw Mengestu (1978) Publisher: Riverhead Books (New York). 228 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Around May, 1993 Locale: Washington, D.C. The experience of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, dramatizes the ambiguous experience of the exile who must reconcile his new country with the world he left behind Principal characters: Sepha Stephanos, an immigrant to the United States who fled Ethiopia’s “Red Terror” but, now in his thirties, finds himself unable to reconcile his new life with his past Judith McMasterson, a white academic who has restored a town house on Logan Circle, next door to Sepha Naomi, Judith’s biracial eleven-year-old daughter who becomes Sepha’s friend Kenneth, a friend of Sepha, an engineer, who emigrated from Kenya Joseph Kahangi, Sepha’s friend, a waiter and secret poet, who emigrated from the Democratic Republic of the Congo Uncle Berhane, Sepha’s uncle, also an immigrant, who helped his nephew in his first years in the United States

In the debut novel by Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Sepha Stephanos and his friends Joseph Kahangi and Kenneth have a long-standing game they play when they get together for an evening of drinking. One names an African dictator; the others must name the year he took power and the current name of his country—Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, Idi Amin in Uganda, Laurent-Désiré Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Valentine Strasser in Sierra Leone. The list of countries and dictators seems endless. Sepha notes the relevant locations on a twenty-year-old map of Africa, a map so old that the names of many countries and places have changed, the map itself looking like a woman’s shawl-wrapped head. Sepha keeps it for nostalgic reasons, he says, but the reader understands that no map of Africa can ever be accurate as long as the continent remains victim to its violent rulers. The three friends came to the United States around the same time and met while working as valets in a Washington, D.C., hotel. Their paths have diverged over their seventeen years, but they continue to meet, drink, and in a desultory way play the game. The relationship among the three men and their game becomes a metaphor for their lives in the United States, where they are haunted by their countries’ blood-soaked

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears / mengestu

65

pasts so that the men are never quite at home in the multicultural U.S. capital. Kenneth, the most successful of the three, still experiences his alien identity at his engineering firm. Joseph is a waiter at an upscale restaurant and spends his free time getting drunk and writing an endless epic poem about his homeland. Sepha, the novel’s narrator, lives in a decaying neighborhood called Logan Circle, where he moves the few yards between his house and his failing grocery store, unable to feel a Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis real connection to anything in his life. The Ababa, Ethiopia; he and his family fled shadow of the Capitol and other monuments the Red Terror and immigrated to the of American freedom seem supremely irrele- United States in 1980. Mengestu vant to Sepha’s life; he lives in slow motion in graduated from Georgetown University his crumbling neighborhood, surrounded by and received an M.F.A. from Columbia Washington’s black poor, his market patron- University. He was awarded a 2006 ized mostly by schoolchildren, drunks, and fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. The Beautiful prostitutes. However, change is as inevitable for Wash- Things That Heaven Bears is his first ington as it is for Africa. Logan Circle—once novel. the site of prosperous city homes—is again becoming gentrified. The first house to undergo an elaborate rehabilitation is the project of Judith McMasterson, Sepha’s new neighbor, a single white woman with a mixed-race daughter, Naomi. The two offer Sepha the sort of friendly human connection that might allow him to break out of his torpor and give his life the sense of direction it so desperately needs. Sepha tells the story of his friendship with the two in a series of flashbacks; the chapters alternate between the present spring and the previous winter, and the narrative proceeds in a series of patient steps, like the rehab of Judith’s once-grand house, a project that is closely observed by the whole neighborhood. Rumors circulate about the wealthy white woman who is paying for such an expensive project. When Judith and Naomi move in, Naomi is the one who first makes contact with Sepha, who is charmed by her vivid self-possession and precocity. Soon she is coming to his shop every day after school, a freedom Judith allows her in an effort to help her cope with her parents’ recent divorce, and Naomi becomes the link between the two adults. Judith herself, a historian on sabbatical, seems as detached as Sepha, drifting without any clear work except her care for her daughter. Their tentative friendship develops. A dinner at Judith’s house ends with a brief kiss, but when Sepha sees Judith the next day, he is unable to speak to her, pressed perhaps by his consciousness of the difference of their lives and by the way his romance with her flourishes in his imagination. The relationship withers at Christmastime when Sepha sees the mountain of gifts Naomi’s Mauritanian father has sent her from Germany, where he teaches economics.

66

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The sight makes Sepha leave the house abruptly. Aware that he has been rude, he buys Christmas gifts for Judith and Naomi, and even for his mother and brother in Ethiopia, people he has often neglected. He spends a frustrating evening wrapping the presents, including a journal for Naomi and an early edition of poems by Emily Dickinson for Judith, only to discover that they have left the city for the holiday. Angry with himself, Sepha picks up a neighborhood prostitute and ends the evening by letting her choose one of the sloppily wrapped gifts for herself. Ironically, when she discovers that she has chosen perfume intended for Sepha’s mother, she says that she never wears it; perfume gives her headaches. Throughout the story of Judith and Naomi’s time on Logan Circle, Sepha relates a series of memories of his father and their life in Addis Ababa. He recalls walking with his father through a small park near his father’s law office and seeing bodies of political opponents lying there, part of the work of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s “Red Terror” campaign of 1977-1978. Gradually, the story of his father’s death emerges. He was beaten and arrested, accused of possessing antigovernment flyers, which in fact Sepha had brought home. When military thugs led him from the house (he insisted on walking out on his own), the family never saw him again. Sepha left home a few days later, using his parents’ jewelry to finance his escape to Kenya and eventually to America. Now Sepha maintains only the thinnest contact with his mother and brother in Addis Ababa. Instead of Sepha playing the traditional immigrant’s role of sending money to his family at home, Sepha’s mother sends money to him. On his first arrival in the United States, Sepha lived with his Uncle Berhane in an apartment building mostly inhabited by Ethiopian immigrants. Like many immigrants, Berhane left behind a comfortable life to escape his country’s political turmoil; he walked for a month through scorching countryside to the Sudan, finally arriving to the United States to work as a taxi driver. When Sepha realizes that his market is on the verge of bankruptcy, he makes one of his rare visits to Berhane’s apartment. As he waits for his uncle to return from work, Sepha rereads a copy of the first of many letters Berhane sent to U.S. presidents. The first one was to President Jimmy Carter; in it, Berhane tried to explain the perilous state of government in Ethiopia and the need for the United States to help its longtime ally. Sepha smiles at the naïve words of the recent immigrant who at first believed in America’s promises. Berhane’s later letters became more pessimistic. Sepha’s friendship with Judith and his life on Logan Circle seem just as tenuous as America’s other promises. After Christmas, Judith puts Naomi in boarding school, and Sepha does not see her again. A rash of evictions of area tenants results in the formation of a neighborhood committee to protest the effects of redevelopment on the poor who have been longtime residents of the neighborhood. When Judith attends the meeting, her naïve comments are shouted down. Later, a brick is thrown through her car’s window, and when Sepha goes to her door to tell her, an elegant man in a bathrobe answers the door. He seems to be the product of many ancestries, from African to Arab to French; Judith has been rejoined by her Mauritanian husband. Still later, Sepha hears them arguing violently. At last, the house is burned in a fire of mysterious origin and Judith leaves forever. Her presence had been only temporary.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears / mengestu

67

At their last meeting, Sepha quotes to Judith a line from the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840; Democracy in America), in which Tocqueville notes that in democracies, no families are really permanent; instead they are in constant flux. In reflecting, Sepha joins that notion with an idea of his own—that no man stuck between two worlds can truly possess either one. Instead, he is condemned to a solitary death. That solitude is a central theme of the novel. Like Dante who leaves Hell for only a brief glimpse of the “beautiful things that heaven bears” (the line is quoted by Joseph in his African epic), Sepha has had a glimpse of America’s promises, but he cannot claim them, perhaps because they are always insubstantial. The colonial nations of Europe used Africa much as the developers used Logan Circle, taking what they wanted and leaving when possession became difficult. At the end of this novel, Sepha is left with his failing business and his poverty-stricken neighborhood and his bonds to Ethiopia, which, however much he ignores them, are an essential part of him. The result is that, like his friends Kenneth and Joseph, he finds it impossible to be truly at home in America. Reviewers have praised Mengestu’s debut novel for its portrayal of the position of immigrants as they try to make a new life in the political heart of America—Washington, D.C., a city with a very large foreign-born population. This somber narrative suggests that their longed-for new lives are impossible because immigrants are always in bondage to the past, trying to fit themselves into the new world while the map of their old one hangs in the back of their minds. Nor can they make the new world hear them when they talk about what they have left behind, especially when what they left was terror. Sepha, Kenneth, Joseph, and Berhane all left various hells behind them in Africa, but America can offer them only a blind, aimless solitude informed by the brief glimpse of heaven. Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 7 (December 1, 2006): 22-23. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 22 (November 15, 2006): 1150. Library Journal 131, no. 19 (November 15, 2006): 58. The Nation 284, no. 19 (May 14, 2007): 46. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 25, 2007): 20. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 34.

68

BEING SHELLEY The Poet’s Search for Himself Author: Ann Wroe Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 452 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1792-1822 Locale: England and Italy An unconventional biography that forsakes chronological development of the poet’s life for an attempt to probe the way Percy Bysshe Shelley perfected his own personality, one that estranged him from his contemporaries even as it made his poetry possible Principal personages: Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet Lord Byron, George Gordon, Shelley’s friend and fellow poet Claire Clairmont, one of Shelley’s lovers William Godwin, political philosopher and father of Shelley’s second wife, Mary Thomas Love Peacock, satirical novelist and Shelley’s friend Harriet Westbrook, Shelley’s first wife Mary Godwin, Shelley’s second wife Sir Timothy Shelley, Shelley’s father Edward Trelawny, Shelley’s friend and writer of memoirs about the poet

During nearly the whole of his brief adult life span, Percy Bysshe Shelley was an outcast. Like Lord Byron, he scoffed at conventional society. He not only rejected the established Church but also proclaimed in a pamphlet his atheism, delivering his denunciation of Christianity to the authorities at Oxford University, an act of rebellion that resulted in his dismissal. Although other Romantic poets like William Wordsworth had been accused of impiety, Shelley went much further than any other poet of his age in positively rejecting organized and established religions. Shelley refused to apologize to his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, for his disobedient actions. Indeed, the poet called his father a hypocrite and refused to accept the responsibilities of a man of his class and period. Family tradition meant nothing to the young poet. Indeed, Shelley refused to think of himself as part of a hereditary line. He wanted to create himself—as the subtitle of Ann Wroe’s biography, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself, suggests. Shelley is very modern in the sense that he is on a quest to find himself. This was the rather typical story of early nineteenth century Romantic poets, who sought the truths of the universe in their own selves. The experiencing self would discover the way to universal truths. Thus, Shelley rejected the status quo and the very idea that he was the

Being Shelley / wroe

69

product of his ancestors or of his contemporary age. He believed in radicalism and revolution. Ann Wroe is a senior editor at The Wroe believes that Shelley’s life and art Economist and the author of Pontius can be best illuminated not by the conven- Pilate (2001), which was a finalist for tional restraints of biographical narrative but the Samuel Johnson Prize. She is also rather through a Shelleyan structure: “Rather the author of A Fool and His Money than writing the life of a man into which po- (1995) and The Perfect Prince (2003). etry erupts occasionally, my hope is to reconstruct the world of a poet into which earthly life keeps intruding. This, I believe is how things were for Shelley.” Shelley, in Wroe’s view, is only an extreme instance of what is true for all great writers: Their meaningful lives are not diurnal: “They live, and often move, elsewhere.” Wroe’s book is divided in four parts: Earth, Water, Air, Fire. Her Shelley is forever plunging himself into the elements, dousing himself with water, for example, and shouting in ecstasy. He is tuning himself to the rhythms of nature, not of society, and he is exploring his capacity to absorb the world directly without the mediating factors of institutions and hierarchies. Wroe’s Shelley lives inside his poetry, which creates an alternative to the corporeal existence he must perforce endure. He falls in love with Harriet Westbrook, but he soon tires of her when she cannot partake of his transcendent feelings. Why must she be so possessive? In the end, she is not worthy of the poet’s attention, and he abandons her. Not even her suicide occasions much distress in Shelley—although Wroe quotes a friend who unconvincingly insists that Harriet’s desperate act did disturb the poet. This shocking behavior appears less so in Wroe’s narrative because her own language so closely tracks the poet’s own. That Shelley enacts a similar disaster with his second wife, Mary Godwin, hardly matters insofar as Wroe shows that it could not be otherwise with Shelley. He was seeking soulmates, female and male, who yearned for a world beyond the proprieties of nineteenth century society. His second wife understood him—after all, she went on to create Frankenstein (1818), a searing study of the Romantic sensibility—but she still could not stifle her jealousy and possessiveness, especially when she had to endure her husband’s infatuation with Claire Clairmont that was carried on in Mary’s own household. Shelley is the least palpable of the Romantic poets—as is apparent by reading Wroe’s index references to “Death as lover,” “Dreams,” “Earth,” “Eternity,” “Life,” “Love,” “Mind,” “Self,” “Spirit,” “Truth,” “Will.” These abstract categories engross Shelley and his biographer precisely because they reflect his effort not only to reject the mundane and the jejune but also to create a new metaphysics of the self that would result, ultimately, in revolutionizing society and the way others think. If Shelley often seems self-absorbed and cruel to others, in part that is because the society of his times seems to him an imposture—its laws and customs no more than a false set of standards that will sooner or later lapse in desuetude. This was, in fact, what his father-inlaw, William Godwin, argued. Wroe achieves some nice effects that demonstrate how the poet’s equipment, so to speak, became one with the world he was evoking in words:

70

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 Other notebooks fell into the water with him. He smeared the wet away and went on writing, gouging the soft paper, making the letters run. Sea water gnawed at his drafts of A Defence of Poetry [1840] and Adonais [1821]; it corroded the pages and stuck them together with its silty, animal glue. Salt saturated his thoughts.

Here, Wroe’s prose captures the intensity and immediacy of a Shelleyan world. Unlike conventional biographies, Wroe’s allows for a persistent page-by-page exploration of her subject’s writing. Eschewing chronology, she jumps back and forth in the poet’s life, tracing ideas that develop at various stages in Shelley’s career. Thus, she can produce his poetic fragments—lines that break off, are struck out, and replaced with others—portraying a poet restlessly racking his own mind and the universe for a proper orientation toward existence. Wroe never has to interrupt her narrative because Shelley’s poetic development, not the chronology of his life, determines the structure of her work. Richard Holmes, author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Shelley, observes in The Guardian that Wroe writes a prose almost as ecstatic as the poet’s own, making him once again an icon of liberation. Wroe’s overwrought language verges on a fictional transformation of the poet, Holmes suggests, even though he pays tribute to Wroe’s painstaking research. To achieve some of her effects, she has to rely on Shelley’s friend Edward Trelawny, a notoriously unreliable source, Holmes points out. Even for Holmes, Wroe’s Shelley can become rather befuddling since he is so little anchored in time and place. Without a chronological structure, the reader is confounded in a sort of constant present tense. What is missed is the steady accumulation of detail and insight built up over the biographer’s tracking a subject over several different periods in chronological order. Readers steeped in Shelley will notice that a good deal of Wroe’s language is suffused with Shelley’s own vocabulary and with allusions to his poetry even when she is not directly discussing a poem. Writing in The New Yorker, poet-critic Adam Kirsch notes that Wroe often writes as though she has embedded the whole corpus of Shelley’s work in her sentences. Also, because Shelley is so concerned with primal scenes and images, Wroe’s own concatenation of same results is an act of what Kirsch calls “mediumship,” as though she is channeling the poet. While this feat is impressive, it leads, as well, to a lack of perspective. Wroe’s method, Kirsch concludes, provides no way to assess Shelley except by his own standards. Like Shelley, Wroe provides little sense of history or historical context. This inward Shelley, as biographer Peter Ackroyd deems Wroe’s poet in The Times of London, is a fine way to honor the poet and to diminish biographers’ customary concern with the frail and flawed man. While Ackroyd praises Wroe for writing precisely the sort of book that makes Shelley’s imagination come alive, he recognizes that there is an attendant danger: The life of the man who abandoned his first wife and lived in such an irresponsible way that his contemporaries shunned him becomes invisible, and thus his life, in a sense, also evaporates in the ether of his verses. The poet becomes, in a word, all atmosphere. Shelley is an acquired taste, writes critic Richard King, who suggests that responses to Wroe’s biography will depend very much on readers’ reactions to the poet.

Being Shelley / wroe

71

Shelley’s abstractions leave some readers cold, although Wroe warms them up, so to speak, by immersing readers in the actual scenes where Shelley penned his verse. She is able to do so not only because of memoirists like Trelawny but also because of Shelley’s surviving notebooks, now housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Selections from Shelley’s notebooks and drawings (reproduced in Being Shelley) lend an air of authenticity to the biographer’s prose. Even in scenes that seem fictionalized there is warrant in the notebooks for the biographer’s wording. However, King raises an important issue: While Wroe may be faithful to Shelley’s texts, to what he witnessed as his life, that is not the same as saying she has reproduced the life—that is, what actually happened to Shelley. King calls this the biographical fallacy: taking the text for the life itself. What Shelley wrote—as far as biography is concerned—is only his choice of many alternative ways of describing his experience. In effect, this hewing so closely to the Shelleyan text is a species of imagined autobiography rather than biography. As other critics have noted, there is a tiresome circularity in Shelley’s thought— relieved, however, by brilliance of language and imagery. Much the same can be said for Wroe’s biography. The basic outlines of her argument are apparent almost from the first page, and so in the hands of a less accomplished writer such a book would surely seem redundant and too long by half. Even though Wroe writes well, except for all but the most devoted Shelleyan, it is likely that at several moments in Being Shelley the reader will revolt: Only so much ecstatic verse is absorbable, and thus for the less committed the high-toned language is likely to pall. Like Byron, the reader becomes wary. After a good deal of Shelley’s highfalutin talk, Byron rejected words that were all about utopia, an unreal realm that had to be viewed with much caution. Then, this is exactly what Ann Wroe has meant to produce: an incautious biography that sweeps the reader up in the vortex of a Shelleyan world. If vertigo results, that— from Shelley’s and Wroe’s perspectives—says as much about those who never wish to leave the ground as it does about those who want to fly. Carl Rollyson

Review Sources The Daily Telegraph, June 30, 2007, p. 24. Evening Standard, June 25, 2007, p. 36. The Guardian, July 21, 2007, p. 6. Irish Times, September 1, 2007, p. 10. The New Yorker 83, no. 25 (August 27, 2007): 85-89. The Observer, July 1, 2007, p. 23. Sunday Telegraph, July 15, 2007, p. 38. Sunday Times, July 8, 2007, p. 40. The Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 2007, p. 39. The Times Literary Supplement, July 20, 2007, p. 10.

72

THE BIG CON The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics Author: Jonathan Chait (1972) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 294 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Current affairs, economics, history Supply-side economics generated a fixation on tax-rate reduction as an economic panacea, was influential in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and was the centerpiece of a general process in which the Republican Party became increasingly an instrument for raising the incomes of the rich The title of Jonathan Chait’s book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, tells more about its style than its content. Americans live in an age of multiple big cons: ethanol, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (the failure of the organization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), and the countless mediacreated “crises” in health care, housing, globalization, and the environment. Chait focuses on “crackpot economics,” specifically targeting supply-side economics (SSE), with special emphasis on the tax-cutting preoccupation of the administration of President George W. Bush. Chait provides a chilling description of such SSE fanatics as Jude Wanniski, Arthur Laffer, and George Gilder, aided and abetted by Dick Cheney and by only-slightly-less-dubious authorities such as Larry Lindsey, Jack Kemp, Grover Norquist, and Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal. A central feature is the “Laffer curve,” which shows that a tax rate may be so high that it reduces revenue, in which case a rate reduction could actually generate more income for the government, as well as stimulate the economy. The idea is not absurd, but its applications frequently were. In Chait’s view, “the basic supply-side view [has been] that tax rates, more or less alone, determine the fate of the economy.” SSE gives great attention to incentives to work, save, and invest. Tax reductions would improve the incentives for these worthy activities and stimulate production and employment. A booming economy could generate increased tax revenues, even at lower rates. SSE had its first policy incarnation in the administration of Ronald Reagan, where it provided the rationale for reducing tax rates on incomes and profits. However, the oft-promised surge of tax revenues did not occur. The federal deficit ballooned, rising from $74 billion in fiscal 1981 to $128 billion in 1982 and $208 billion in 1983. Chait appears to blame most of this on the tax cuts. However, federal spending increased from 21.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1980 to 23.6 percent in 1983 and appears to account for more than half of the deficit increase.

The Big Con / chait

73

The deficit increase was sufficiently al arming to persuade President Reagan to ac- Jonathan Chait is a senior editor for cept what Chait calls the largest tax increase The New Republic and a frequent in American history in 1982, followed by columnist for the Los Angeles Times. another major increase in 1983. These state- He has written for numerous other ments seem exaggerated. Federal revenues as newspapers and magazines, ranging a percent of GDP fell from 19.2 in 1982 to from The New York Times to Reason 17.6 in 1983 and were at that same level in magazine. 1986. The obsession with tax cuts came to the fore again in the presidency of George W. Bush. The Bush tax cuts reduced federal revenues to 16.3 percent of GDP in 2004—the lowest in forty years. Government surpluses gave way to large deficits, but again, rapid expenditure growth was a major contributor. However, the SSE claim that lower tax rates could increase tax revenues was borne out by the response to the cut in capital gains and dividend tax rates. Federal revenues rose to 17.6 percent of GDP in fiscal 2005 and 18.4 percent in 2006. As a result, the share of high-income taxpayers in income tax payments increased. The top ten percent of earners paid 68 percent of income tax revenue in 2004, compared with only 49 percent in 1980. Chait has fixed his attention on the ten percent of SSE that is, indeed, a big con, and neglected the other 90 percent. SSE has become a powerful influence for prosperity and growth in many countries. Former Soviet dependencies have found that adopting low tax rates on high incomes and corporate profits has helped them attract capital, enterprise, and talented individuals in the international economy. Individual states in the United States are making the same discovery. However, despite the title, most of Chait’s book is not about SSE. The other parts are far more important and worthy of attention. The two sections of the book are headed “The Transformation of the Republican Party” and “The Corruption of American Politics.” The main thesis is that “over the last thirty-five years . . . American business has grown both vastly more politically powerful and vastly more rapacious in the way it wields that power. The rise of the business lobby has distorted—and finally, corrupted—the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” Chait traces these trends to the early 1970’s, as businesses began to feel the pinch from globalization and from the extensions of federal regulatory authority in such areas as product safety, discrimination, and workplace safety. The number of business lobbyists (many headquartered on K Street in Washington) expanded rapidly. After 1994, Republican leadership undertook to tighten its alliance with K Street, in part by bringing business lobbyists more intimately into policy determination and policy administration. Chait, who is after all a political journalist, not an economist, is able to provide detailed documentation of these developments. He contrasts this with the earlier situation in which lobbyists tried to cultivate both parties. When free market conservatism has collided with the special interests of the K Street lobbyists, the latter have prevailed. The proliferation of congressional “earmarks” is an illustration. Chait also cites the 2003 legislation creating prescription

74

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

drug benefits under Medicare. The law was loaded with vast subsidies to health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other players. One wishes Chait had examined this case in more detail. The entire issue of medical-expense insurance has certainly merited being designated as a big con. It is an issue that cannot be understood without giving attention to the constructive element of supply-side economics. Federal policy has fixated on giving subsidies to the demand side of the market for medical goods and services without any real attention to increasing the supply. Naturally this has driven up medical costs. The higher costs have seriously harmed those people who do not have insurance and have made insurance premiums higher. Much of the response of policy is toward expanding price controls on the medical sector, with the prospect of impairing supply. Chait argues that, aside from the tax cuts, Bush’s policies reflect special-interest politics rather than any consistent ideological or analytical perspective. “Policy analysts of liberal, conservative, and moderate persuasion alike have uniformly denounced his Medicare expansion, his energy bill, his tariffs, his farm subsidies, and the like.” In Chait’s view, Republican leadership has been responsible for degrading the tone of American politics. The Bush administration largely discontinued accepting or generating policy analysis. In the absence of expertise, lobbyists have run wild. The examples of Jack Abramoff, Steven Griles, Billy Tauzin, and Joe Barton are instructive. Tauzin’s case is particularly distressing. As a member of the House of Representatives, he managed the passage of the pork-laden Medicare drug benefit. Then he was hired as president of a pharmaceutical trade association for $2 million per year. Chait deals effectively with the posthumous sanctification of Ronald Reagan, noting how Reagan’s actual record and recorded views are often misrepresented. Chait is sympathetic to the fate of President George H. W. Bush, who was pilloried for accepting tax rate increases in 1990 in exchange for greater restraint on expenditures. Chait could have bolstered his case here by referring to the fact that federal revenues in fiscal 1993 were 17.8 percent of GDP, in contrast to 1989 when they were 18.5 percent. Chait cites numerous opinion polls indicating that neither the public in general nor the committed Republicans in particular have shared the enthusiasm for tax reduction. Many would have preferred actions to reduce the federal deficit. An element of the tax-cut fixation has been the view that, even if tax-rate reduction does not increase tax revenue, it will “starve the beast”—that is, tighten restraints on federal spending. Chait cites research showing that this has not happened. He notes with regret how Senator John McCain shifted from giving priority to reducing the national debt (around 2000) to cutting tax rates (as he geared up for the presidential campaign of 2008). In Chait’s view, this was a shift from a position that enjoyed widespread popular support to one that placated the powerful ideologists. Although the newly elected George W. Bush endorsed debt reduction and support for schools and medical care, he immediately focused attention on tax reduction as a response to the supposed enormity of the prospective federal surplus. Again, Chait shows this prioritizing did not conform to public opinion. Additional impetus for taxrate reduction came from the mild economic recession. Chait feels that most of the re-

The Big Con / chait

75

ductions were not of the sort that would stimulate consumer spending. However, he does not mention the inelegant but effective across-the-board “tax bonus” that most income taxpayers received in 2001. In Chait’s view, the national Republican Party has directed policy toward tax and other benefits for “the rich,” even when many elements of this are not supported by the rank and file of voters. How can they get away with it? He blames the ineffectiveness of media scrutiny. Coverage of national politics resembles coverage of professional sports, mostly about who is winning and on personalities, rather than on understanding policy issues. Chait illustrates how gullible journalists were easy prey for clever spinners in Bush’s 1999 presidential campaign and ensuing budget discussions. Note how often the media refer to policies as involving “health care” when in fact they involve medical-expense insurance. The media have been particularly remiss in going along with Republican character assassination directed at such notables as Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry. (However, Dan Quayle and Robert H. Bork might offer some perspective from the other side.) Bills before Congress are often long and intricate, and knowledgeable legislators may support one version and oppose another on details. Sloppy media reporting, however, allows for unfair allegations: that, for instance, congressman X “voted against health care for children.” Chait has performed a public service in assembling the details behind his generalizations. Not all readers will be persuaded by the generalizations—he acknowledges that in many respects the country has returned to a slash-and-burn style of politics that prevailed at times past. The world he describes is a world in which the federal government has run out of magic in its bag of tricks. There are few policy initiatives that offer benefits significantly exceeding their costs. An open question left by his exposition is the degree to which the country’s political system will continue to display the self-correcting tendencies that have operated in the past. Even if SSE contains elements of a big con, this has not prevented the U.S. economy from achieving full employment with price stability over the time span of his study. Paul B. Trescott

Review Sources The Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2007, p. 15. The Nation 285, no. 19 (December 20, 2007): 11-17. New Statesman 137 (November 19, 2007): 54-55. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 23, 2007): 13. The Washington Times, September 18, 2007, p. A14.

76

THE BIG GIRLS Author: Susanna Moore (1947) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 224 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Around 2005 Locale: Sloatsburg prison, New York City; Los Angeles Four characters narrate an interwoven tale as they are brought together in the aftermath of a heinous crime Principal characters: Helen, inmate at Sloatsburg’s women’s prison Dr. Louise Forrest, chief psychiatrist at Sloatsburg Ike Bradshaw, corrections officer at Sloatsburg Angie, Hollywood actress

Susanna Moore’s most recent novel The Big Girls follows the aftermath of a tragic crime by tracing the interconnected lives of Helen, Dr. Louise Forrest, Angie, and Ike Bradshaw. These four characters take turns telling their own stories, through firstperson narration, adding details and secrets to unravel the complexities of the situation that binds them together. The Big Girls looks unabashedly at the inner workings of prisons and the lives of inmates, revealing a harrowing and fresh story of human nature. Louise is the first character the reader meets, as she opens the novel with a tightly constructed description of the Sloatsburg prison. It is her sixth month as the chief psychiatrist at Sloatsburg, where she treats women inmates for an array of psychological disorders and manages their medications. Louise is also the mother of an eight-yearold son, Ransom, and recently divorced from her husband, Rafael. Though her tone is even-keeled, she carefully hints that she also sees a therapist, has concerns about her sexuality, and self-medicates for her anxiety. She is highly analytical of everything she encounters, particularly her own behaviors and actions. As a result, the reader deems her trustworthy and forthright; she has things to hide, but instead confronts her fears openly. Helen is introduced next, but without a warning that the point of view is shifting. Louise’s section ends, and Helen takes up with her own self-introduction. She is currently an inmate on death row, and she recalls the night she was taken to prison. Her voice is soft and almost naïve after Louise’s. Although Helen speaks to the reader as though the reader must already know her story, she is not direct or clear about the nature of her situation, revealing only her feelings and moods and even the details of her crime as she begins to trust the reader. Like the majority of the women in the prison, Helen is medicated for psychological disorders and is a survivor of many years of sexual abuse; she was victimized by Un-

The Big Girls / moore

77

cle Dad, her stepfather. Even after she was married to her husband, Jimmy, her stepfather Susanna Moore lives in New York City continued to abuse her. Helen’s ability to re- and is the author of several novels, port her own life shifts with her medications including The Whiteness of Bones and moods. She does not willfully contort the (1989), and Sleeping Beauties (1993), One Last Look (2003), as well as the truth, but she is an unreliable narrator. Ike is one of the security guards at Sloats- memoir I Myself Have Seen It (2003). burg and a retired New York police officer. Her novel In the Cut (1995) was adapted for film by Jane Campion in He treats the inmates better than most of his 2003. fellow officers, taking care that some of the women do not fall to abuse by other prisoners or guards. His attitude of superiority comes through often, particularly in his musings on Louise. As he has worked at Sloatsburg longer than her and comes from a more street-smart background, he assumes that he can predict her reactions. He is aware of Louise’s attraction to him and responds subtly by walking her to the train station at night. As their relationship becomes sexual, he tries to remain casual about his feelings for her. In turn, she attempts to prevent Ike from meeting her son Ransom. The final narrator of the novel is Angie, a Hollywood actress. Though her particular story is the least important to the plot, she occupies a very important position relative to the other characters in the novel. First, Helen writes to Angie on numerous occasions, at first appearing to be a loyal fan and later presenting a more complex story. Over the months that Helen writes to Angie, she sends Angie photographs of her two children and perhaps confesses her crime. Helen also believes that Angie is the sister that her mother gave up for adoption. Second, Angie is connected to the plot because she is now dating and living with Rafael, Louise’s ex-husband. She does not pretend to be in love with him, or even faithful to him, but she does care about Rafael and wants to make their relationship work. When Ransom comes to visit, Angie is left in charge of him. She grants him a lot of freedom for an eight-year-old child in order to allow herself her own freedom. After the night that Ransom walks into Louise’s bedroom and sees Ike in her bed naked, he calls Rafael and tells him that Ike has been sexually abusing him. Rafael immediately believes his son and insists that Ransom come to California to live with him and Angie. This decision throws all the characters into a great deal of crisis, though ultimately, when Angie confronts Ransom with the truth, everyone is able to reconcile. Throughout the novel, the characters are joined together by the notion of family. Louise lost her mother as a girl and felt that she was always trying to impress her father, never getting it quite right. She met Rafael and married him in a matter of weeks because she claimed that she wanted a child. When Ransom was born, she suffered a complete breakdown, but when she recovered she found that she loved her son so intensely that she could not make her marriage work any longer. Ike is in the process of divorcing his wife, who shot him once when he came home, though she claimed it was because she thought it was an intruder. He does not speak of this to anyone, only musing on his home life occasionally. Angie, who was adopted, was married to a drug

78

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

dealer before she came to Los Angeles. She thinks of family in terms of business deals. Helen’s story causes all the other characters to reflect on their own relationships and lives because, even though her tale is the most brutal, her actions resonate for the others. Helen was married to Jimmy right after high school, in part to get away from her stepfather. She had already tried to commit suicide as a teenager but was saved by having her stomach pumped. The reader gathers that she was depressed and psychotic for nearly her whole life, and it is evident that she never fully recovers. Helen admits that she orchestrated her release from the hospital after her first suicide attempt so that she could try to kill herself again. In her sessions with Louise, Helen discusses her longtime imaginary friend or personality and the voices in her head. Her new medications do alleviate some of these symptoms, and through psychotherapy Louise is able to help Helen to remember what happened to her throughout her life and to claim that it happened to her and not her other identity. Helen quickly had children after she married, and her firstborn son was developmentally challenged. She suffered from postpartum depression and continued to be sexually abused by her stepfather. Helen’s love for her children far surpasses any connection she has had to other people and certainly eclipsed her love for herself. In her desire to keep her children safe from the harm of other people, she was driven to kill them both herself. It is Louise’s job, according to the state of New York, to ensure that Helen is psychologically well enough to be executed for her crimes. For months, this seems unlikely as Helen experiences many psychotic episodes and is kept under suicide watch. Gradually, Louise sees Helen’s mental health progressing, but the reader knows from Helen’s revelations that she is purposefully trying to appear more well than she believes herself to be. After an incident with another inmate, Helen is put in intensive care, where she is to be protected from further harm. However, Louise senses that there is greater danger at this point and is constantly worried about Helen. When Louise is informed that Helen has committed suicide, she is not surprised, but she is very distraught. She knows she will lose her position at the prison and that there will be a serious investigation. Mostly, she is deeply saddened that she was not able to save Helen from her inevitable death. Beyond the scale of the four main characters, The Big Girls takes on critical issues of prison work today: Inmates’ myriad health concerns, including HIV/AIDS; social organizations within prisons; inmate and guard relationships; the subject of the death penalty; and the ultimate effectiveness of incarceration. Susanna Moore handles the multiple viewpoints gracefully to take on the sensitive subject matter and challenges readers to fully examine their own positions on the prison system. Jennifer H. Solomon

The Big Girls / moore

79

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 23. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 6 (March 15, 2007): 248. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 75. The New York Times 156 (June 12, 2007): E9. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 7. The New Yorker 83, no. 14 (May 28, 2007): 77. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 12 (March 19, 2007): 37.

80

BIOGRAPHY A Brief History Author: Nigel Hamilton (1944) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 343 pp. Illustrated. $21.95 Type of work: History In this brief history of the art of biography, Hamilton traces its evolution, cites some of its renowned practitioners, and argues for its legitimacy as an interdisciplinary field of academic study Principal personages: Xenophon, ancient Greek biographer of Socrates Suetonius, Roman biographer of the Twelve Caesars Plutarch, biographer of the Romans Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Evangelists, biographers of Jesus of Nazareth Saint Augustine of Hippo, author of the autobiographical Confessiones (397-400) Benvenuto Cellini, Renaissance autobiographer Sir Walter Raleigh, biography’s first martyr Samuel Johnson, philosopher-father of modern literary biography Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst who expropriated biography Lytton Strachey, creator of a new form of literary biography in the twentieth century Roland Barthes, postmodernist theoretician who proclaimed the death of the author Michael Holroyd, British revisionist biographer Janet Malcolm, feminist biographer

In Biography: A Brief History, Nigel Hamilton takes the reader from the ancient world of the Middle East with the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present state of biographical writing and the varied practices of biography in varied media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A historian and award-winning practicing biographer, Hamilton marshals this history in a clear, readable, and popularly accessible style that both informs and, at times, entertains. Throughout the work, he also makes a compelling case that biography transcends its usual definition as a written account of an individual life and encompasses many human endeavors such as painting, sculpture, film, video, poetry, and drama as they render individual lives. Beginning with a notion of “evolutionary biography,” Hamilton deftly traces such disparate phenomena as the cave paintings at Lascaux in France and the clay tablets

Biography / hamilton

81

containing the Epic of Gilgamesh to buttress his claim that the commemorative instinct Nigel Hamilton has written biographies from which biography springs has many man- of John F. Kennedy (1992), Field ifestations in storytelling. Tying these works Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1981to the classic biographies of Xenophon, Sue- 1994, 4 volumes), and Bill Clinton tonius, Plutarch, and others, he demonstrates (2003). He is a visiting fellow of the that their accounts give the modern reader a John W. McCormack Graduate School series of firsthand accounts of the ancient of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. world while highlighting the deeds of individ uals. That these deeds are selective, sometimes the subjects of encomium and sometimes the reverse, illustrates his point that even in the ancient world the biographer had an agenda in taking up the stylus. The encomiastic branch of ancient biography gave birth to hagiography (literally, holy writing), which found its most popular expression in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as they chronicled events in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. As elsewhere in the history of the biographical form, the authorized versions of the Evangelists prevailed over other Gospels (the Gnostic Gospels of Thomas and others), which were declared heretical and concealed for nearly all of the past two millennia. From Saint Augustine’s Confessiones (397-400; Confessions, 1620) to the varied “lives of the saints” in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (1265-1266; Golden Legend), the triumph of Christianity that proceeded from the biographies written by the Evangelists pervaded every segment of society in the Dark Ages, informing the conversion of pagans throughout Europe and their subsequent literary output commemorating their great men as embodiments of Christian virtue. With the coming of the Renaissance and the spirit of humanistic inquiry, the monopoly of saintly biography began to shift, Hamilton explains, back to its classical models, then newly discovered and translated, and to the treatment of contemporary and historical “lives” with a freer hand. So, for example, Hamilton adduces the worldly autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (wr. 1558-1562), including an excerpt from his account of the plague years relating one of his sexual exploits with a frankness hitherto reserved for the fictional fabliaux of medieval European literature. Hamilton also includes the example of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose History of the World (1614), though it ended well before his own era, was accounted dangerous in that it presented frank portraits of monarchs and other elite persons as less than ideal. For his frankness, Raleigh was condemned to death, reprieved, and then ultimately executed, becoming biography’s first martyr, in Hamilton’s phrase. Hamilton also places William Shakespeare among his pantheon of biographers, adding that since playwrights blend history and fiction and since the Bard’s work was subject to official scrutiny and censorship, he escaped Raleigh’s fate. Censorship was not the only legal impediment to writing truthful biographies of living persons, at least in England, where various iterations of laws prohibiting libel and slander prompted biographers to wait until the deaths of the prospective subjects. The biographies of the great men of the Age of the Enlightenment, then, served as ex-

82

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tended obituaries, in Hamilton’s view. While Samuel Johnson did much to examine the Lives of the Poets (1781), therein setting forth admirable examples of sound biographical practice, it was Johnson’s disciple and biographer, James Boswell, who published the sometimes gritty The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in 1791, ushering in a new era in biographical writing. The confessional strain of Romanticism, with its particular emphasis on one’s shortcomings in Rousseauian autobiographies that came into fashion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was quickly replaced with what Hamilton calls Victorian pseudobiography, in which the proprieties were strictly observed, often to the detriment of biographical truth. Despite compelling evidence of social deviance compiled by the “other Victorians” themselves, the predominance of “official biographies,” usually in two volumes, which glossed over or eliminated entirely any indiscretions of their subjects, ensured that Victorian respectability would, in its public face, prevail. Even in unofficial biographies, unreliable at best, of somewhat lesser figures of the era, certain failings of their subjects were handled in code words by writers out to cloak the truth while capitalizing on the mania for biography that gripped the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hamilton’s references to John Forster’s biography of Charles Dickens (1872-1874), for example, illustrate how far a friend would go in concealing social indiscretions and familial conflicts in his account of a popular novelist. The case of Lytton Strachey’s ironic portraits of eminent Victorians serves as a model for Hamilton’s treatment of biography’s evolution in the early twentieth century. Strachey’s unabashed criticism of his subjects and their odd behavior sounded a new and honest note in revealing their lives. Yet, Hamilton argues, while biography was experiencing growing pains it was still struggling with issues of sexuality in portraying its subjects, even more when the subject was oneself in an autobiographical piece. He gives the issue of censorship, and self-censorship, in the early twentieth century a sound and extensive treatment. The historical interest of the early attempts at biography and its slow evolution receive concise treatment in a book that stands as a guide to a scholarly but popular approach to the genre over the past two thousand years. The twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century are the burden of the majority of the book, much of which is given over to examining the role of film in Nazi propaganda, the quintessential biographical model Orson Welles provides in the film Citizen Kane (1941), the incursion of largely unknown Hollywood “standards” upon the honest biographical impulse in filmmaking, and the pivotal importance of World War II in the public consciousness as biographers and historians sort out the details of the most documented century ever. One lengthy examination of the role of criticism, called “Death of the Author,” explores the varied vogues of deconstructive thinking in which the critic supplants the author and attempts to direct the reader to agree. In several apt phrases and telling examples, Hamilton treats the evanescent theories-du-jour for what they have been, noting that while they may have spawned countless books and articles, the biographer has, in the main, remained unaffected by them.

Biography / hamilton

83

In Hamilton’s judgment, biography finally came of age in the late twentieth century, but not without its growing pains and not without prodding from other “media” that interest themselves in the lives of the great, the famous, and the ordinary. Journalism changed forever in America with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the relentless pursuit of all the president’s men in subsequent years. With a change in journalism, Hamilton contends, came a change in biography as it becomes not the record of the past but the record of the present day. From a treatment of the Monty Python phenomenon Life of Brian (1979), to Nigel Nicolson’s biography of his parents in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Hamilton explores biography at the edges rather than the mainstream and concludes that decades after those pathbreaking works every aspect of human life was fair game for the biographer’s microscope. This is not surprising since that is indeed Hamilton’s own method as a biographer, one that has earned him mixed reviews from the more traditional biographical and critical establishment and great interest from the public. Indeed, he likens some biographies from the contemporary world to the “miner’s canary,” sent to test the atmosphere, adducing the many examples of the work of Michael Holroyd, particularly in works dealing with the sexuality of his subjects. One striking case of another direction is Hamilton’s highlighting of Janet Malcolm’s defense of the right of privacy against biographical pillagers of reputation as she worked on the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Later, of course, Hamilton does point out that Malcolm had not, like thousands of others, spent many years of research to write a scholarly biography. So the controversy over biography continues. Finally, Hamilton’s depiction of biography in the age of the Internet and burgeoning television programming offers incisive comments on reality shows and virtual reality, on blogs and docudramas, and on life writing as therapy brings his historical survey up to date. For students and general readers who would welcome a short course in the history of biography, Hamilton’s volume is a good place to start. John J. Conlon

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 21. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 18, 2007): 14-15. The New Yorker 83, no. 22 (August 6, 2007): 64-66. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 3 (January 15, 2007): 39. The Times Literary Supplement, August 17, 2007, p. 29.

84

THE BIPLANE HOUSES Author: Les Murray (1938) First published: 2006, in Australia and Great Britain Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 99 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Poetry Time: The present, with flashbacks to the World War I era and other historical eras Australia’s best-known poet returns to his characteristic strengths in a volume of short poems concerned with emotion and history, nature and society Les Murray, by far today’s most famous Australian poet worldwide, has produced a volume replete with many of his characteristic strengths. Indeed, it is remarkable that, in a relatively short volume, so many of Murray’s favored modes are sampled. The volume takes its title from a poem in the middle of the book. This poem shows the vernacular architect as craftsman. Unstoried, using local forms, the local architect nonetheless produces a house that can provide solid shelter as well as incarnate the soaring aspirations of art and hope. “The Kitchen Grammars” is similar in emphasizing the jerry-built yet adhesive durability of cultural forms that are conceived locally and lived out bodily. Parts of speech are compared to ingredients in a recipe; a sentence with noun and verb is like a meat loaf with meat centered by an egg. “The Nostril Songs” also braids together language and physicality, a point fortified at the level of enunciation by the often ingenious puns that stud the volume. Many reviewers have remarked on the relative difficulty of the book. Indeed, The Biplane Houses may mark the point where the genuine demands this poet makes on the reader are foregrounded, instead of being buried by a focus on Murray’s equally genuine empathy for the common man. The reality that even committed students of contemporary poetry find Murray’s poetry at times difficult yields a more complex and ramified sense of his poetry. The volume is about equally divided between poems that can be understood at first glance and those which require far more scrutiny and study. Murray is surely saying something about the multidimensionality of his own response to experience here. “The Cool Green” whimsically if also savagely looks at the role money plays in American society. It has no intrinsic value, does not call forth any of the great human aspirations, but—especially, Murray implies, in the current socioeconomic order—has attained an unseemly position in the collective psyche. Murray writes with polemicism here, but also with panache; he is never merely a crusader, but a scintillating one. “The Domain of the Octopus” both describes the octopus as a physical creature and as a figurative trope of resistance to straightforward acts of construction and clearance, epitomized in the poem by the figure of the ax. In its squishiness and sheer, insensate

The Biplane Houses / murray

85

physicality, the octopus represents the flexi bility and resilience of nature, which may be Les Murray is the author of twelve altered by human settlement but never en- books of poetry. His collection Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) tirely displaced by it. “The Newcastle Rounds” is set in the in- received the T. S. Eliot Prize, and in dustrial city of Newcastle, which in Murray’s 1998 Queen Elizabeth II presented him youth was the de facto metropolitan reference with the Queen’s Gold Medal for point for his region of northern New South Poetry. He lives on a farm on the north coast of New South Wales, Australia. Wales, although it was hundreds of miles away. Murray gives a compelling tribute to Novocastrians, as the citizens of the city are called, and their unique history, from early settlement to its prime as a steel-manufacturing town to its present prominence as a postindustrial city that is the outlet for much of the Hunter Valley wine industry and has a premier surfing site on its famed beach, Nobby’s. For any other poet, this would be a slight occasional poem; Murray’s sense of felt, durable loyalty to his place adds to his unfettered delight in the panoply of human diversity. Murray also shows here that, although he is most often associated with rural settings, he can also write convincingly about cities. “The Newcastle Rounds” in fact is reminiscent of the Australian poet Judith Wright, who, though similarly specializing in nature poetry, wrote several compelling late poems about Australia’s capital, Canberra. Yet Murray celebrates the common man on a more individual level with “Barker Unchained,” about a rural postman who faithfully delivers the mail in the most unadvantageous of circumstances. After a career of performing his duty, he retires, in a way free from a regimen as confining to him as making the mailbags has been for the prisoners who have done so; but the postman can take credit for getting mail to scores upon scores of people. The poem’s dedication to a professor of English implies that the poem concerns any kind of work, even more overtly mental work. A very different model of work is solicited in “Lifestyle,” in which Murray addresses people who work in large cities in coffeehouse chains such as Starbucks. Murray, who has continually satirized the pretensions of the urban intelligentsia to be up-to-date, sees the sort of work performed in such an establishment as transient and based on no enduring source or value. In this poem, Murray evidences his dislike of gentrification, an animadversion corroborated in “Gentrifical Force.” Murray is set equally and squarely against both the 1970’s-style leftist poseur and the millennial-era smirking Yuppie. The postmodern lifestyle revolution has clearly left Murray unmoved. “Death from Exposure” presents a more tragic situation, yet one whose lineaments are far closer to Murray’s values. A woman who lives a solitary life—characterized, it is implied, by unfulfilled love—dies of exposure, undiscovered for days. Murray sees her endurance through the neglect the community showed her in life as virtually sanctifying her, giving her experience the integrity of the honorably unrealized. “For an Eightieth Birthday” presents a happier and more consolatory portrait of a long life well lived, which has stood for joy and positive values. “Church” indicates that religious believers, marginalized in modern society, are possessed of a similar integrity—they refuse to swim with the tide, they believe in a God whom they have never

86

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

seen out of, in a sense, the courage to risk possibly being wrong, as opposed to the certainty in their rightness possessed by the secular elite. This trendiness-obscurity dynamic also informs “Me and Je Reviens,” where Murray jokingly reflects that since one of his ancestors was named Worth and had visited Paris on leave from fighting in World War I, his rural, working-class family was as much a part of the trendy international scene as anyone. Murray at once makes a claim to a privilege to membership in such a scene—indeed, insisting that such is his birthright—yet mockingly disdains actual inclusion in such a scene. “Pressure” brings Murray’s championship of the oppressed into the contemporary world, dealing with issues of immigration and asylum in contemporary Australia in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the incident involving the attempted landing of the refugee ship Tampa in Australian waters in that same year. A man whose suitcase is opened by security guards turns out to have nothing in the suitcase, suggesting that he not only does not pose a threat but also is too poor even to have any possessions. The Biplane Houses has many poems without a point of view, which delight in a kind of uninvested appreciation of nature. “Pastoral Sketches” observes a landscape from spring to winter and the yearning for a past and future spring, registering the eternal and cyclical yet with the thrill of a particular landscape being observed in a particular year by a particular poet. “Japanese Swordblades in the British Museum” registers the same delight in well-wrought craft; this poem is reminiscent of previous Murray poems such as “Roman Cage-cups.” “The Move out on the Road” depicts a far more active scene, as a near-accident on a country road reveals assumptions of class privilege and deference. “The Blueprint” and its shorter, more epigrammatic sequel, “Blueprint II,” return to the theme of religion and skepticism, proclaiming that the human need for an afterlife will triumph over science’s silence on the subject. The second poem, which transmutes bureaucratic language into joyful speech, is one of Murray’s winning achievements in short forms, also seen in “The Test,” where Murray suggests that a culture needs both spectacular achievements and a general sense of overall, diffused quality in order to flourish. Murray returns to another idiom he has mastered in the past—the medium-length history poem that reasserts an often obscure past incident in order to prompt the reader to new reflection. “Norfolk Island” describes the transplantation of the heirs of the late eighteenth century mutineers on the ship HMS Bounty, for many generations living on Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific, to Norfolk Island, an Australian island hundreds of miles east of the continent, famous for its pine trees. Murray contrasts the oppression and poverty of the Pitcairn refugees with the island’s current status as a haven for the wealthy jet set, but he does so less out of resentment than a kind of quizzical, bemused wonder. Murray is critical of the contemporary world, but not dead-set against modernity; he is no Luddite. Several of the poems in the volume concern train journeys. These poems not only give a conspectus of the various railway lines and areas traversed but also convey the thrill of being on a journey, hurtling through different areas and gaining the exposure to scenic and cultural diversity such a trip entails; in his way, Murray’s transportation poems are worthy successors to the twentieth century Australian poet Kenneth Slessor’s great “South Country.”

The Biplane Houses / murray

87

Murray does not restrict himself to Australian settings; indeed, several poems in The Biplane Houses are about Britain, where Murray has toured frequently in recent years as he has become one of the few poets read by the generally educated layperson in that country. “The Physical Diaspora of William Wallace” celebrates the contributions and the perseverance of Scottish immigrants worldwide. “The Succession” captures this inheritance in a more complex way, as Murray mentions Hanover, where the British dynasty defeated the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and Culloden, where the last of these rebellions was defeated. However, Murray, who in the past had called for an Australian republic, seems to be sympathetic to the current British royal family, descendants of the Hanoverians, as they are embroiled in tabloid media publicity. Murray practices here a sort of ambient historical lived reasoning, where his implied historical judgment manifests a deft, empirical, responsive applicability to different circumstances, where, the poet indicates, his immediate judgment may be different from general opinions he otherwise holds. Yet there are poems, such as “A Stampede of the Sacrifice,” in which Murray is unambiguously on one side: He shows empathy for Australian soldiers in World War I who riot in Britain, acting out the trauma of their battlefield ordeal, and who are subsequently unnoticed and passively discriminated against by elites who begrudge them even a pint of beer at the local pub. Murray’s poems are dense with historical signifiers and contentions and other very concrete references, but he can distill abstract linguistic patterns from these references, such as in “A Dialect History of Australia,” which tells the country’s history through a series of capitalized proper nouns reflecting various stages in Australia’s history, from early Aboriginal habitation to relatively recent incidents, such as Australia’s intervention in East Timor in 1999. That “Timor” means “fear” in Latin closes the poem on an up-to-date but ominous note. To return to the issues about the collection’s difficulty noted by reviewers and mentioned earlier, it might be said that The Biplane Houses is an accessible volume, but not an easy one. Murray opens the door to explore linguistic, historical, and perceptual questions whose difficulty, for the poet, is part of their richness and wonder. On many people’s lists of likely Nobel Prize candidates, Murray is a poet who deserves—and increasingly possesses—a world readership. Nicholas Birns

Review Sources The Antioch Review 65, no. 4 (Fall, 2007): 768-769. The Guardian, October 21, 2006, p. 18. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 91-92. San Francisco Chronicle, July 15, 2007, p. M3. Sunday Times, November 12, 2006, p. 54. The Times, September 18, 2006, p. 6. The Times Literary Supplement, August 11, 2006, p. 24.

88

BLACKBIRD AND WOLF Author: Henri Cole (1956) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 61 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Poetry The poet continues to explore the regions of ice—death, separation, loneliness—with great beauty, courage, clarity, and formal control and in the closing section moves away from the self and into the social realm, forming his own response to the post-September 11 world First glancing at Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole’s first book after he received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2004, a reader might be interested mainly in his formal structures and constraints. As in his previous collections, Cole demonstrates his affinity for the closed world of the fourteen-line poem. Of the thirty-eight poems in the collection, thirty-one are shapely, beautifully constructed unrhymed sonnetlike poems, and three are longer poems formed by joining together between two and six fourteen-line stanzas. The book, divided into three sections, has two sections made up of fourteen poems and a final section of ten poems, but a reader would quickly notice that this mathematical precision, this formal attention, is joined with an emotional, sensitive counterweight to the rigors of patterned numbers: These are poems that show the emotional response of a man to the world of love, loss, and the trap of reason. The book opens with fourteen poems that cover some familiar territory for readers aware of Cole’s earlier work: poems about his parents, about solitude, about love and its distances. The moment of birth begins the book, with a less-than-sentimental opening: “I came from a place with a hole in it,/ my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.” This moment of bonding between mother and son is given a typical twist by Cole: The link between mother and child allows for touching, for intimacy, but it is described as “touching/ across some new barrier of touchability.” The link is also a barrier, and so love becomes inscribed, from the earliest moment, as a joining and a breaking, a bridge and an absence. The poem “Oil and Steel” describes the bonds between father and son: The father—who lived in “a dirty-dish mausoleum” with schnauzers who died of liver disease, “except the one that guarded” the father’s corpse found “holding a tumbler of Bushmills”—leaves three things to his son. The first two, described by Cole as his inheritance, are a plaid shirt and some motor oil; a less tangible gift from this man who “never showed/ me much affection” was a “knack/ for solitude, which has been mostly useful.” In an interview, Cole used this exact phrase to explain how being gay and “experiencing a special alienation from the mainstream” is a gift to writers; “it gives us a knack for solitude, which strengthens the self and makes us aware of our

Blackbird and Wolf / cole

89

own authentic interests.” This solitude is re ally the focus of the book; the poems are Henri Cole has written five previous beautifully rendered accounts of separation, books of poems, including The Look of distance, and selfhood. As he says in the title Things (1995), The Visible Man poem of this first section, “Birthday,” the (1998), and Middle Earth (2003), for which he won the 2004 Kingsley Tufts “possibility of home . . . remains illusory.” While some writers, like Pablo Neruda or Poetry Award. From 1982 to 1988, he James Wright, might find an escape from this was executive director of the Academy of American Poets. He has held many seclusion through identification with others, teaching positions and been the artistCole is not one to offer many palliatives. in-residence at various institutions, When he sees workers in trees sawing limbs, including Brandeis, Columbia, and they become interesting metaphors more than Harvard. humans: They are like “bear cubs in the tree tops working for man,” or their work with ropes and pulleys becomes the “clearest possible metaphor/ for bright feelings vs. dark feelings.” In this fourteen-line poem, “The Tree Cutters,” the poem divides at the halfway mark; unlike a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet that has its break at the twelfth or eighth line, Cole often breaks in the middle. For example, in this poem he moves from the world of the tree cutters in the first seven lines to a specific memory of a time in his life when the dark feelings of which the workers reminded him were paramount: “I saw a blood-stained toad,/ instead of my white kitten; I saw shadows and misprision/ instead of my milk and pancakes.” Cole courageously explores the “thick, dirty, bad-smelling sorrow” that covered him “like old meat.” He does not shy away from recollections of pain; like Philip Larkin, he could say that deprivation is for him what daffodils were for William Wordsworth. In the title poem of the second section of the book, “Gravity and Center,” Cole beautifully describes the difficulty, the impossibility of achieving what he really longs for, which is an entrance into the world of pure feeling without the encumbrance of words. For a poet, this is a scary proposition. As he says, “I don’t want words to sever me from reality.” As a lover, perhaps it is even more frightening because he is unable to say he loves someone when the beloved says he loves him. The words “I love you” just “run away/ to a narrow black room that is always dark” and end up “devouring the thing I feel.” When Cole speaks about the death of a lover in this section, again the emotion is displaced or placed where it will not overwhelm the speaker or the poem. In “Poppies,” he speaks about wanting to kiss, but the lips of the beloved have been filled with “embalming compound.” He is unable to say that he loves this man, but twice he lets the reader know that he loves the poppies for their “wide-open faces” and their “effortless existence.” The world of nature, for Cole, is something to be devoutly wished for: There, loons mate for life, bears are free of passion, and poppies beckon to the speaker instead of pushing him away. Because of language, reason, and selfconsciousness, people are unable to enter that world completely, so Cole chronicles the inevitable failure of that longing to be stripped down into the realm of the senses or the realm of pure feeling.

90

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In the adjoining poem, “Bowl of Lilacs,” Cole moves gracefully through space and time and emotional registers as he deals with the death of his lover. Again the emotion is deflected somewhat toward the lilacs that seem as if they too are “secretly embalmed,” but Cole moves away from the literal lilacs and toward a recollection of a moment of fleeting intimacy with his lover. As in other poems, he moves from a present moment toward the past through the simplest of transitions: once. Once, in a light-bathed kitchen, naked and blissfully myself, I scrambled us eggs and felt the act of looking and perceiving was no longer something understood from the exterior. It was pure being: saturated and raw as a bowl of lilacs.

In this poem and in “Self-Portrait with Red Eyes,” Cole highlights the possibility of love and intimacy, albeit through the absence of the lover. He is able to see that “even the white spit on your sharp teeth/ was the foam of love, saying to me: It is not true,/ after all, that you were never loved.” In the past when the lover was alive, he may not have sensed the truth, but now he realizes that love did exist, and even the spit showed it. The third and final section of the book, “Dune,” moves outward from the concerns of the first two sections, shifting from poems strictly about family, love, and solitude to poems that also include the historical moment. His poem “To the Forty-third President” is addressed to George W. Bush, and in the three fourteen-line stanzas, Cole asks, “When you place your hand on the Bible,/ do you think about eternal questions:/ Why are we here instead of nothing?/ Does love make us who we are?/ Do we survive death?” He later writes, “can you see/ time battering the surface of Earth.” This is perhaps not Cole at his most lyrical, most captivating, but it is a welcome shift in the book away from the self’s concerns. The poem ends with an arresting image, letting the reader see the poet and the president linked in some way, rather than the poet looking from a distance at the flawed man who leads the United States: He admits that part of him “hates something vaguely too,/ and is frightened, staring out at the night grass/ where . . . steam rises from the ropes of excrement/ extruded by some unbroken animal/ circling in the dark wood.” Rather than playing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unacknowledged legislator of the world for Bush, trying to teach him that “sorrow is egalitarian,” Cole finishes with an ambiguous, powerful image of human fear, human loathing. In “The Lost Bee,” again the focus is not on the self but on nameless victims. In this elegy for those lost in an attack that left fifty-eight dead, Cole makes no mention of the nationality or identity of either the victims or the “attacking militants,” and rather than focusing on the victims only, he looks closely at the lost bee, describing it beautifully as a “blood-sticky little almsman.” In the ending lines, he wends away from the bees and toward the victims, whose souls “had fled or were fermenting,” and he wonders why God must “always side with the brave,” implying that the victims who bravely met their end, although they may have been God’s loyal followers, were

Blackbird and Wolf / cole

91

slaughtered nonetheless. Again, the poem tackles indirectly the new world order of terror and its offspring without becoming didactic or sentimental. In a time when many poets are writing, perhaps inadvertently, incomprehensible poems, and others are simply getting an amusing rise out of the reader with humor, Henri Cole is one of the strongest poets writing today because of his blending of clarity of image, emotional honesty, and technical control. As he said in an interview, he believes that a poem “is not just a response to the external world. It should also present the reader with a mind in action, a self in dialog with itself.” For those readers looking for a glimpse into the inner life of a writer, Blackbird and Wolf offers everything that lovers of poetry admire: a poet with a sensitive ear, discipline, and passion. As he mentions in the last poem in the book, he has written “something highly controlled/ that is the opposite, like a dizzy/ honeycomb gleaming with amber light.” Kevin Boyle

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, nos. 931/932 (April 27, 2007): 145. Lambda Book Report 15, no. 1 (Spring, 2007): 31. Library Journal 132, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 112-113. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 60.

92

BLACKWATER The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army Author: Jeremy Scahill Publisher: Nation Books/Avalon (New York). 452 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Current affairs Time: 1997-2007 Locale: The United States and Iraq An exposé of the most successful private security firm of recent times, its far-right founders, and their ties to “theoconservatives” and President George W. Bush’s administration Principal personages: Erik Prince, heir to an auto-parts fortune, former Navy SEAL, convert from fundamentalist Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, and right-wing zealot Al Clark, Navy SEAL instructor who saw the potential for a private military-training firm Gary Jackson, retired SEAL officer and Blackwater president since 2001, who has doubled the firm’s income every year L. Paul Bremer III, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, 1999-2003, and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, 2003-2004 John Negroponte, ambassador to Honduras, 1981-1985, ambassador to the United Nations, 2001-2004, and ambassador to Iraq, 2004-2005 Joseph Schmitz, Department of Defense inspector general, responsible for Iraq’s reconstruction, and a Blackwater executive since 2005

In Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Jeremy Scahill examines the rise of the powerful private military company, whose presence during the Iraq War would become a source of international controversy. The appearance of Blackwater and other security firms resulted from efforts under President George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) to cut military expenses and increase efficiency. The driving figures were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney (then secretary of defense), who applied the principle of privatization to the armed forces. The first outsourcing was in food services and other areas that were awkwardly large for peacetime military needs, then in the elimination of redundant bases and facilities. President George W. Bush would resume this outsourcing in order to increase the number of personnel in the fighting forces and to reduce the number in supply and services. Blackwater was established in 1997 to train police and military personnel on reallife security problems. Traditional firing ranges provided little beyond targets at standard distances, with none of the confusion and surprise that policemen, soldiers, and

Blackwater / scahill

93

Marines would actually encounter—as, for example, at the 1999 school shooting at Col- Jeremy Scahill is an investigative umbine High School near Littleton, Colo- reporter and a regular contributor to rado. Erik Prince provided the money to buy a The Nation and the radio and television seven-thousand-acre training area in North news program Democracy Now! He Carolina near the Great Dismal Swamp and was a featured speaker at the Socialism to construct an impressive site for visitors, 2007 conference in Chicago and is including housing, classrooms, and training currently a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. facilities. By September 11, 2001, Blackwa ter had a good reputation for training security personnel, a niche service that the military was not well prepared to provide: The armed forces trained to fight against similarly armed enemies in the field, not to be bodyguards or to secure strategic sites. L. Paul Bremer III, the second American viceroy in Iraq, hired Blackwater to provide his bodyguards. Scahill describes Bremer as a terrorism expert, religious zealot, neoconservative activist, and egoist. Hiding in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad, venturing out only when surrounded by bodyguards, with Blackhawk helicopters overhead, Bremer’s policies reminded many Iraqis of Saddam Hussein and, in effect, created a wider insurgency. The result was an even greater need for mercenaries. As the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tried to increase its number of operatives, the competition for qualified personnel became intense. Because Blackwater could offer high salaries, it attracted superbly trained men; some were from countries where guerrillas, drug lords, and terrorists abounded, but most were Americans with experience in the Navy Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) forces or Special Forces. Some were frustrated by the lack of action in the 1990’s, some were intensely patriotic, many were motivated by Christian beliefs, and all liked the prospect of good pay: $600 per day was a commonly mentioned figure. The risks were high, because Blackwater’s personnel operated in places that the U.S. military considered too dangerous. Blackwater’s employees, however, were experienced, confident, and not bound by the usual rules of engagement: If they felt they were in danger, they were empowered to defend themselves. Such were the four men ambushed in Fallujah on March 31, 2004. Their deaths in a common resupply operation were a result of poor planning and poor judgment: There were only four of them instead of the minimum six; they were new in the country; they were driving unarmored sport utility vehicles through the most dangerous town in the country; and the insurgents had been tipped off when and where they were going. The American public was told that the four contractors had been ambushed, their bodies torn apart and burned, then two corpses hung from a bridge, to sway over the Euphrates River for hours. Fallujah had never been under control but had become a refuge for Hussein loyalists, Sunni insurgents, and foreign jihadists. The incident would change American policy profoundly. The subsequent assault on Fallujah was unnecessary and poorly handled. Mosques were bombed and the hospital was captured, making it impossible for injured Iraqis to receive treatment. The Marines tried new tactics, such as using loudspeakers to bom-

94

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

bard Iraqis with obscene words until, in one case, resistance fighters stormed out of a mosque, AK-47s in hand, to be shot down. The Arabic television network Al Jazeera broadcast pictures of corpses at the hospital, suggesting that the Marines were killing people indiscriminately. The next week, there was a Shiite uprising in Najif that grew out of a demonstration called by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. About twelve hundred men, women, and children converged on a minor post defended by a handful of troops from El Salvador, a few Marines, and eight Blackwater mercenaries. How this turned into a bloody gun battle is not clear. Certainly the mob was well-armed, and, after one Salvadoran soldier who accidentally drove into the mob was murdered and others taken prisoner, the defenders understood that they had to fight for their lives. In fact, it was not much of a fight. For the Blackwater specialists it was more like a shooting gallery: As soon as Iraqis appeared, the mercenaries picked them off. The result was a new insurrection spreading across previously quiet parts of Iraq. This incident created an increased demand for security services. More than sixty companies were ultimately involved, some quite large, such as the British firm Aegis. While the profits were welcome, the competition for men became intense and expensive. The answer was more outsourcing—which, in Blackwater’s case, was associated with José Miguel Pizarro, an American-born officer trained in the army of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a former Marine with vast contacts among the military attachés in Latin American embassies, and a skilled recruiter of Latin American mercenaries. Pizarro provided well-trained commandos at a cost much less than Americans, Britons, and South Africans expected, and they did well in Iraq. Pizarro lost his contract with Blackwater when he began supplying other firms with secondtier mercenaries (common soldiers with no specialized training or language skills) and when Blackwater began recruiting qualified men from smaller countries who would work for even less. Simultaneously, Blackwater began training commando forces in Azerbaijan. This, Scahill says, was part of a long-term plan by the U.S. government and corporate interests to conquer the oil resources of the Middle East and to put pressure on both Russia and Iran. The newly trained forces were to protect British Petroleum’s oil pipeline to the Black Sea, where tankers could take on crude oil at the Russian port of Novorossiysk. In any military operation there are losses. This was especially true for mercenaries operating in very dangerous situations. Not surprisingly, families of slain men filed lawsuits. Blackwater defended its practices, even claiming a quasi-military legal status that exempted it from legal oversight. This was argued at the same time that Blackwater said that it was not restricted by American rules of engagement—in effect granting the firm a license to kill. There were, in fact, members of the Bush administration who agreed with both premises. When John Negroponte became ambassador to Iraq in 2004, he implemented a policy that he had employed in Central America during the Ronald Reagan era. This “Salvador option” was similar to the Vietnam-era Phoenix program in that it involved the assassinations of real and supposed enemies. As Iraqi military units were trained in torture and murder, an increased number of bodies began to appear in Baghdad.

Blackwater / scahill

95

Some assassinations were conducted by Shiite militias, but it was increasingly difficult to tell the difference between militias and the new Iraqi army. What began as a program intended to decapitate the insurrection became an additional reason for Sunni resistance. American policy was leading to civil war, which, to some, was not necessarily a bad outcome: It would be easier to dominate a divided Iraq than a unified nation. Supervision of the occupation had been the responsibility of Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, a member of one of the most reactionary and scandal-ridden families in American history. A Christian supremacist and an administration loyalist, he was supposedly in charge of investigating fraud, waste, and inefficiency in Iraq. Instead, he admired the corporations that were looting the country and the U.S. Treasury; he tried to whitewash the Abu Ghraib scandal and prisoner abuse elsewhere while comparing the modern mercenaries to heroes who had served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. One means of avoiding criticism of CIA abuses was to outsource the capture of alQaeda members and their “rendition” to countries that used torture to obtain information. The Blackwater air fleet became involved in this program. After Hurricane Katrina struck the United States in August, 2005, 250 Blackwater security men were deployed in New Orleans and other coastal communities after allegedly exaggerated racist and inflammatory news stories described waves of anarchy and looting in the city. After Hurricane Rita struck in September, the number of contractors rose to 600, but paramilitary gear gave way to police-type uniforms. Another controversial program involved training Jordanian commandos in helicopter assault techniques; this was part of Jordan’s antiterrorism effort, promoted by King Abdullah II, who had himself been a special operations commander. Blackwater offered to undertake new missions. It proposed recruiting a brigadesized force (six hundred men) for Darfur, Sudan, where genocide continued despite U.N. concerns, American accusations that the Sudanese government was aiding the murderers, and the presence of African Union forces. Much as the South African security firm Executive Outcomes had dealt swiftly with insurgencies in Angola and Sierra Leone, Blackwater claimed that it could end the crisis in the Sudan quickly. This suggestion had support from both the American Left as well as the Right, but the United Nations was firmly opposed. Genocide was less problematic than employing mercenaries. Blackwater also offered to take over the U.N. operations in Haiti, to close the American border with Mexico, and to defend Nigerian oil fields. By 2006, the firm had 2,300 private soldiers in nine countries. Most were in Iraq, protecting some of the 100,000 private contractors there; its base in North Carolina expanded to train federal, state, and local police forces, and plans were made for a Blackwater North in Illinois and Blackwater West in California. The expansive power of the security firm provoked consternation in liberal quarters. Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich investigated the relationship of private contractors to the successive puppet governments in Iraq, exclaiming at one point that contractors could literally get away with murder.

96

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

That statement summarizes the author’s fears for the future. In a book bearing endorsements from Joseph Wilson, Michael Moore, and other representatives of the American Left, readers may not be surprised to find Scahill peppering his pages with the adjectives “right-wing” and “conservative,” or that he warns about the dangers that a private mercenary army represents to the American government and people. However, readers might wonder if the reappearance of this traditional niche occupation is more a response to budgetary and political restraints on the military organizations of the world powers than a neoconservative conspiracy. William L. Urban

Review Sources Globe and Mail, March 24, 2007, p. D3. Middle East Journal 61, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 371-372. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 8, 2007): 26. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 75. The Virginian-Pilot, April 22, 2007, p. E3.

97

THE BOOK OF PSALMS A Translation with Commentary Author: Robert Alter (1935) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 518 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Poetry This translation of the Book of Psalms seeks to re-create for the Anglophone reader the experience of encountering the work in its original Hebrew, while accompanying notes place these poems in their philological, theological, and historical context The poems that make up the Book of Psalms were composed by many hands over a period of half a millennium, from the tenth to the fifth centuries b.c.e. By the third century b.c.e., when the Hebrew Bible was translated in Alexandria, Egypt, into Greek as the Septuagint, the Book of Psalms was virtually complete: Only one psalm was added thereafter. More precise dating of these poems often is difficult. Psalm 137, which refers to the rivers of Babylon, reflects the exile of the Jews of Judea by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 b.c.e. Psalm 80 mentions the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh and calls on God to restore them. This prayer thus suggests a date of composition after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 b.c.e. The introductions to some psalms offer a specific historical context. Psalm 3, for example, states that it was composed when David fled from his son Absalom, who attempted to seize the throne of Israel from his father. Psalm 18 is supposedly David’s prayer of thanksgiving after escaping from his enemies, including King Saul; the same poem appears in 2 Samuel 22 with the same etiology offered. The opening of Psalm 34 alludes to the account in 1 Samuel 21:4 of David’s feigning madness to escape the Philistines. Robert Alter, author of The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, denies the historical validity of such statements. He regards the claims as editorial interpolations attempting to link the poems to David, the supposed author of all 150 psalms. References to the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles reveal that this claim of Davidic authorship cannot be true, even if David is a historical rather than a mythical figure. The Book of Psalms is divided into five parts: Psalms 1-41, 42-72, 73-89, 90-106, and 107-150, each section ending with praise to God. Because Psalms 14 and 53, as well as Psalms 40:14-18 and 70, are virtually identical, Alter argues that each of the five units began as an independent anthology. Indeed, the second section concludes with the statement that the prayers of David, son of Jesse, are now complete (Psalm 70:20), indicating that this poem was the last of the collection. Alter suggests that the five books of the Psalms were assembled to mirror the five books of Moses and so enhance the poems’ canonical standing. Within each unit, Alter notes smaller group-

98

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ings, such as those beginning with “Hallelujah” (praise God); these psalms appear only in sections four and five. Another group of psalms in part four is attributed to Asaph. Psalms 120-134 are songs of ascent, whatever that may mean. As Alter explains, these psalms may have been recited by pilgrims as they ascended to Jerusalem, but the ascent might be musical rather than physical. The songs of praise that make up the Book of Psalms are written in Hebrew verse. As Alter writes in his highly informative introduction, Hebrew prosody ignores rhyme and meter. Rather, lines divide in half, or occasionally in thirds, with parallel syntax, meaning, and, at times, number of stressed syllables. For example, Psalm 6:2 reads, in Alter’s translation, “Lord, do not chastise me in Your wrath,/ do not punish me in Your fury.” Here, the half-lines exhibit similarity of structure and express the same idea. The next verse repeats this pattern: “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am wretched./ Heal me, for my limbs are stricken.” For some reason, Alter’s translation omits “Lord” from the original second half-line, even though including it would heighten the parallelism. In the Hebrew, verse 6:2 divides into half-lines of eleven and ten syllables; Alter is able to balance them at nine syllables each. Verse 6:3 in Hebrew contains half-lines of eleven and thirteen syllables (assuming that “Jehovah” is a fair rendition of the Hebrew “Tetragrammaton”), while Alter’s have eleven and eight. Alter comments that the second half-line in a verse does not merely repeat the first. Rather, the language in the second verset tends to be more vivid, more concrete, or more unusual. Alternatively, the second verset may advance the action, as in Psalm 92:10—“For, look, Your enemies, O Lord,/ for look, Your enemies perish.” In Psalm 24:3, the pilgrim is climbing God’s mountain in the first verset and has arrived at the shrine in the second. In translating the Psalms, Alter has sought to capture as much as possible the rhythms and structure of the original. He writes that his aim “is to represent Psalms in a kind of English verse that is readable as poetry yet sounds something like the Hebrew—emulating its rhythms wherever feasible, reproducing many of the effects of its expressive poetic syntax, seeking equivalents for the combination of homespun directness and archaizing in the original, hewing to the lexical concreteness of the Hebrew, and making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry.” As with any other translation, such a task poses challenges, especially since Hebrew can be compact, and word order is not fixed. Psalm 23:1 contains six words in Hebrew. To translate them, the 1611 King James Bible requires thirteen words, which Alter reduces by one by changing “A Psalme [sic] of David” to “A David psalm.” Though Alter’s locution sounds less natural than the King James Bible, Alter defends his choice, and not only for compression. He maintains that “A Psalme of David” implies that David actually wrote the poem, whereas his rendition

Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has previously translated the Pentateuch and 1 and 2 Samuel. In addition to his books about ancient and modern Hebrew literature, he has published much about the novel and has written a biography of Stendhal.

The Book of Psalms / alter

99

is more faithful to the ambiguous Hebrew, which may mean that the poem is by, for, or in the style of the Hebrew ruler. Alter seeks to recapture not only the linguistic elements of the original but also its worldview. Where the King James translation uses “iniquity” or “transgression,” Alter prefers “wrongdoing” or “crime.” In part this choice avoids what he calls “ponderous Latinate terms.” However, he also argues that the original Hebrew word “het” indicates rebellion against a ruler. He therefore prefers a less theologically charged term. Similarly, he rejects the common practice of translating “nefesh” as soul, which, as Alter points out, implies both a Cartesian dualism and an afterlife, both ideas foreign to ancient Hebrew thought. Where the King James Version uses “salvation” for “yeshu’ah,” Alter prefers “victory” or “rescue” because those two words imply aid that is physical and immediate rather than spiritual and in the future. Also, they lack the burden of messianic expectation. Protestant and Catholic Bibles translate “sheol” as hell. Alter usually transliterates just the word because the concept of hell postdates the Hebrew Bible. Alter’s notes further contextualize the psalms. He shows that Christians tried to convert these poems. In Psalm 2:7, God calls Zion’s king his son. Alter observes that throughout the ancient Near East, rulers were so described. The King James Bible translates “nashku bar” (2:12) as “Kiss the Son,” an obvious Christianization of an obscure passage that Alter renders as “With purity be armed.” As Alter demonstrates, Psalms belongs to the pre-Christian Near East, not to the Christian West. He comments that “Elyon” (most high), a term used for God in some of the psalms, was also used by the Canaanites to refer to a deity. “Rehavim,” mentioned in Psalm 40:5, is a sea-beast in Canaanite mythology. The polytheism surrounding ancient Israel suggests itself in Psalm 80, in which the Hebrew deity rebukes lesser gods. Alter’s note to Psalm 92:10 points out that this verse closely resembles an Ugaritic passage addressed to Baal. Other notes link verses of Psalms with other biblical passages. Sometimes Alter leaves a word in Hebrew not for religious reasons but rather because the word’s meaning cannot be recovered. The King James Bible made similar decisions, as with “mahalath” (Psalm 53:1), which from the context probably is some sort of musical instrument but cannot be more specifically identified. In addition to such obscure terms, a translator confronts a sometimes uncertain text, as in the case of Psalm 2:12 cited above. Alter points out that the text of the Hebrew Bible was not fixed until the early Middle Ages, some thousand years after the Book of Psalms was composed. There was much opportunity for scribal error during this millennium. The end of Psalm 9 and beginning of Psalm 10 seem garbled, for example. The Dead Sea Scrolls and early translations of the Bible contain readings that vary from those established by Jewish scholars at Tiberias in the sixth through ninth centuries c.e. Alter has exercised editorial restraint, accepting the incoherence of the original rather than offering conjectural readings. This new version of Psalms thus allows readers to see the work anew. It is excellent for anyone wishing to study the poems, for reading it may prove less attractive. To take but one example, Psalm 1 begins, in Alter’s translation, “Happy the man who has not walked in the wicked’s counsel,/ nor in the way of offenders has stood,/ nor in

100

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the session of scoffers has sat.” Despite some alliteration, there is little music in this verse, and while on the page it appears as poetry, to the ear it sounds like prose. Moreover, the translation is not as literal as the syntax suggests. The second verset in the original reads, “and in the offenders’ path has not stood.” In the third line, Alter uses “session” for “moshav.” The Latin Vulgate chose “cathedra,” seat, a more concrete term. Is it preferable to contrast “path” and “seat” or to link “counsel” and “session”? Like Alter’s other biblical translations, this one will provide new insights even as it provokes controversy. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life 179 (January, 2008): 45-48. Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 30, 2007, p. 8. The New Republic 237, no. 11 (December 10, 2007): 52-55. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 18 (November 22, 2007): 20-22. The New Yorker 83, no. 29 (October 1, 2007): 94-97.

101

BOOMSDAY Author: Christopher Buckley (1952) Publisher: Twelve/Warner Books (New York). 318 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Novel Time: Not specified, but apparently around 2020, with brief flashbacks to previous decades Locale: Mainly but not limited to Washington, D.C.; New York; Bosnia; and Harvard University A young Internet blogger and a U.S. senator champion government-assisted suicide for baby boomers to save the nation’s Social Security system, but their initiative, originally meant to draw attention to the need to adequately fund the retirement system, takes on a life of its own Principal characters: Cassandra Devine, a twenty-nine-year-old public relations spin doctor and Internet blogger Randy Jepperson, a rich politician with presidential aspirations Terry Tucker, Cassandra’s boss and mentor Gideon Payne, an evangelist and politically influential right-to-life advocate President Riley Peacham, the incumbent chief executive facing a tough reelection Bucky Trumble, Peacham’s chief political adviser Frank Cohane, Cassandra’s father, who has become a multimillionaire Monsignor Massimo Montefeltro, number two Roman Catholic Church official in Washington, D.C. Lisa, Cohane’s hard-bodied tennis pro second wife

The “modest proposal” in Christopher Buckley’s comic satire, Boomsday, is a direct descendant of the famous “suggestion” made in a 1729 treatise by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) that the Irish take care of their starvation problem by selling their children as food. Swift, of course, did not mean it to be taken seriously (although some critics did), and neither does Buckley’s central character, Cassandra Devine, when she proposes that retirees from the baby-boom generation be offered government incentives in return for voluntarily undergoing suicide (she calls it “transitioning”) at age seventy or earlier. Although treated with sometimes-angry humor, the topic at the center of the novel is quite real: What happens to Social Security and Medicare when the baby boomers (those born between the years 1946 and 1964) reach retirement age and beyond and begin collecting benefits generated by a less populous workforce? As a whole, baby boomers make up one of the largest and most prosperous generations in the history of

102

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the nation. Still, future pressures on government benefit funds when the boomers leave the workforce is already a serious concern, and Congress has done little to prepare for it. According to a March 18, 2004, brief by the Congressional Budget Office, “The population of retirees will grow much more quickly than the taxpaying workforce, at a time when average benefits per retiree are expected to continue rising.” Such developments will result in severe budgetary pressures on the federal government; moreover, some researchers Christopher Buckley has written twelve have questioned whether many baby boomers books, including Thank You for Smoking (1994) and No Way to Treat a will have saved enough money for an adequate retirement. First Lady (2002), winner of the Buckley draws on the government’s conThurber Prize for American Humor. In tinuing refusal to confront the inexorable math 2002, he received the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. of Social Security for most of the novel’s He is editor of ForbesLife. driving force. His challenge is to make the is sue funny, and through a combination of fizzy dialogue, a clashing mix of characters, and making the most far-fetched situations seem uncomfortably possible, he does. In Buckley’s near-future scenario, unchecked current trends have indeed led to the worst possible version of what has been projected. While boomers live longer (thanks to better health care) in relative luxury in retirement communities, the smaller generation now working faces ever increasing taxes to support the lifestyle of the retirees. “Americans are living longer. Okay, but why should my generation spend our lives in hock subsidizing their longevity? They want to live forever—we’re saying, let them pay for it,” Cassandra rails on her Internet blog, just before she comes up with her plan for the government to eliminate estate taxes for anyone who “transitions” at age seventy or at age sixty-five, which brings a bonus of a two-week farewell honeymoon. “Our grandparents grew up in the Depression and fought in World War Two. They were the so-called Greatest Generation. Our parents, the Baby Boomers, dodged the draft, snorted cocaine, made self-indulgence a virtue. I call them the Ungreatest Generation. Here’s their chance, finally, to give something back,” she concludes. At age seventeen, Cassandra seemed to have it all—beauty, brains, and acceptance to Yale University. Her father, Frank Cohane, left a comfortable systems engineering job to form his own dot-com Internet company. Unknown to Cass, he has taken her college fund and invested it in the company. He suggests to her that she consider joining the military for a few years. The Army sends her to Bosnia, one of a number of countries where the United States is conducting a war at this point. Enter Congressman Randy Jepperson on a fact-finding visit, and Cass, a corporal, is assigned as his escort and driver. Unfortunately, the playful Jepperson gets the keys

Boomsday / buckley

103

to the Humvee while Cass worries that his flashing of his cash in public places will get them mugged or worse. He promptly drives into a minefield. The result is that he loses a leg, and Cass is quietly discharged from the service for not keeping him in hand. Given the congressman’s rich playboy reputation, there are also those who speculate that he and the attractive corporal were doing more than driving carelessly into the minefield. He comes home to a hero’s welcome that he parlays into a U.S. Senate bid; she returns to recover from injuries both physical and mental. Jepperson tracks her down to hire her for his staff, but she ends up working instead for Terry Tucker, his public relations person. She changes her name from Cohane to Devine, works her way up to partner in the firm over the next decade, and spends her nonworking earlymorning hours as an Internet blogger railing against what she sees as various governmental wrongs. Her blog is titled CASSANDRA, standing for Concerned Americans for Social Security Amendment Now, Debt Reduction and Accountability. The name is also supposed to represent that of the daughter of the king of Troy, who predicted that the city would fall to the Greeks and has since been associated with the idea of dire prophecy. One prediction comes when the Senate raises payroll taxes by 30 percent to support increasing numbers getting government benefits. Her mood is not helped when she learns that her now-successful father is donating $10 million to Yale apparently to help get his second wife’s son admitted there. Cass suggests demonstrations against retired boomers in their gated golf-course communities, and they happen—to the point of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail into one in Florida. Her subsequent arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation hurls her into the national spotlight. Out on bail, she urges via the Internet a tax boycott by those under age thirty. Terry, her boss, notices polling data showing unprecedented support for her ideas by young voters and persuades now Senator Jepperson to take up the cause as a possible boost toward the presidency. Their campaign to cure Social Security eventually bogs down from inertia and public boredom. Cass suggests a shot in the arm with her “voluntary transitioning” for seniors idea. When Jepperson laughs it off, she throws it out at a press conference: The government should offer incentives for retiring boomers to kill themselves. This is the central idea of the novel and emerges about a third of the way into it. Then the story spreads its focus onto a wider panorama of characters: Gideon Payne, the politically influential right-to-life evangelist who, naturally, is appalled by Cass’s proposal; Monsignor Massimo Montefeltro, an influential Catholic official with whom Gideon makes common cause; Cass’s father, who has moved to California with his now-successful software company; and President Riley Peacham and his adviser, Bucky Trumble, trying desperately to salvage a failing reelection campaign. The conversations between the president and his chief adviser are reminiscent of the Nixon White House tapes, with all their profanities. (At one point, Cass advises Randy to use one particularly offensive four-letter word in a presidential debate as a way of attracting young voters to his campaign. Randy does so, and, in the context of the story, it works.) The politicians recruit Cass’s father as part of their attempts to discredit her, dangling before him the carrot of a possible ambassadorship, which he

104

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

covets mainly to placate his younger second wife. Gideon Payne also joins forces with the White House, the bribe in his case being a national monument to all the potential babies who have been aborted. However, Payne carries psychological baggage that involves both him and his monsignor ally with, of all things, Russian prostitutes. The White House bribery even extends to Randy Jepperson, who by now actually is having an affair with Cass but blows her bid to use her “transitioning” ploy to force government action on boomer benefits. Seduced by a White House hint that he might have a shot at the vice presidency, Randy so loads his transitioning bill with perquisites for boomers that, even if they did commit suicide, Social Security would still go broke from all the payoffs. Of course, the president is not sincere about any of these offers, as everyone eventually learns the hard way. Buckley wraps everything up in a three-page epilogue, describing the increasingly funny situations in which each major character ends up. Although set in a vague near-future, Buckley’s story is full of contemporary bits and pieces. Katie Couric and Larry King are very much on television, Paris Hilton is still an item, and there is a reference to the vice president shooting another lawyer (Dick Cheney, the current vice president, had wounded a lawyer in a hunting accident in 2006), among other cultural references that seem to exist as they would at the time the book was written rather than in the future. On the other hand, the United States is involved in more wars in more countries, and there are some other minor changes (the news show Meet the Press, for example, becomes Greet the Press). The novel is very much in the same style as the author’s earlier Thank You for Smoking (1994; it was made into a movie in 2006 that was nominated for a Golden Globe Award). Buckley tips his hat to the earlier novel by having Terry Tucker telling her “war stories” of his working with Thank You for Smoking protagonist Nick Naylor, who was a chief spokesman for the tobacco industry. Buckley’s challenge in that book was to make a tobacco flack into a sympathetic character; in Boomsday, it was to make a dry issue such as Social Security reform funny. The author managed to do both. Boomsday was Buckley’s twelfth novel, and it was brought out by a new publishing house Twelve, at Warner Books. As its name suggests, Twelve brings out no more than one book each month. It was established in August, 2005, by Jonathan Karp after Karp resigned after sixteen years as editor in chief at Random House, where he edited a number of best sellers. His idea of one book per month was to give each work a massive amount of attention and publicity. Buckley lists Karp in the acknowledgments in Boomsday as a collaborator on the book as well as its editor. Karp had collaborated with Buckley on five previous books, and Boomsday was the first book to be published under the Twelve imprint. Paul Dellinger

Boomsday / buckley

105

Review Sources Business Week, April 9, 2007, p. 102. The Economist 383 (April 28, 2007): 95-96. Entertainment Weekly, no. 928 (April 6, 2007): 80. Library Journal 132, no. 5 (March 15, 2007): 56. New Statesman 137 (October 15, 2007): 56. The New York Times 156 (March 19, 2007): E1-E6. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 54. The Washington Post, April 22, 2007, p. BW06.

106

BRIDGE OF SIGHS Author: Richard Russo (1949) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 528 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1950’s, 1960’s, and early twenty-first century Locale: Thomaston, upstate New York A novel about childhood friends in a small factory town in upstate New York and the lives that spin forth from their early triumphs and tragedies Principal characters: Lou C. “Lucy” Lynch, a sixty-year-old owner of convenience stores Bobby Marconi, Lou’s childhood friend, who eventually leaves Thomaston and becomes a renowned artist by the name of Robert Noonan Sarah Berg Lynch, Lou’s high school girlfriend and wife “Big Lou” Lynch, Lou’s father Tessa Lynch, Lou’s mother Dec Lynch, Big Lou’s brother

Beginning with his novels Mohawk (1986) and The Risk Pool (1988), Richard Russo has ever been interested in chronicling the lives of quiet desperation and small triumphs that make up small blue-collar towns in upper New York state; Bridge of Sighs follows in the footsteps of such novels as Nobody’s Fool (1993) and Empire Falls (2001) in chronicling the complex lives of working-class characters and their dreams and ambitions. The protagonist for much of the novel, Lou C. “Lucy” Lynch, is the owner of a few convenience stores and a small apartment building in the small town of Thomaston, where his father had once been a milkman and then became the owner of a small grocery store, Ikey Lubin’s, which Lou has inherited. The majority of the novel is narrated by Lou; in his sixtieth year, he has begun a memoir about his youth, even as he and his wife Sarah prepare to visit their school friend Bobby Marconi, now the renowned painter Robert Noonan, in his home city of Venice. Both Bobby and Sarah serve as centers of other sections of the novel; although Lou is at the center of the book, Bridge of Sighs tells the story of all three of them. Initially the novel alternates between long sections about Lou’s childhood with Bobby and shorter sections about the adult Robert Noonan’s painting career in Venice; later the novel focuses on the trio’s senior year in high school. In Lou’s narrative, readers meet his father, who is also named Lou (and called alternately either Lou-Lou or Big Lou), a convivial, optimistic, genuinely kind man, incapable of sensing the dark side of humanity. Lou’s mother, on the other hand, is cynical, shrewd, and intelligent, and the driving ambition in their lives: “To her,” Lou writes, “a sunny day was a rarity. Tomorrow it would rain, and the only question was how hard.”

Bridge of Sighs / russo

107

Nicknamed Lucy as a boy, Lou is affable like his father, if smarter and quieter, and is often the target of bullies. His friendship with Bobby Marconi largely occurs because the two are neighbors, but there is another side to it: Bobby is unafraid of bullies and fully willing to fight. In a sense, he serves the passive Lou as a courageous and angry extension of Lou’s secret self. Lou’s fascination with Bobby at Richard Russo attended the University times approaches adoration, perhaps in part of Arizona and earned his Ph.D. in because at some level young Lou wishes to be literature. Realizing that he was more Bobby. Bobby, on the other hand, is the oldest interested in writing fiction than son of a troubled family; his continually preg- criticism, however, he published his nant mother tries again and again to leave first novel, Mohawk, in 1986. His novel Bobby’s dark, violent father, who again and Nobody’s Fool (1993) gained acclaim again returns her to their home, throwing away and was made into a successful feature her suitcase. film; Empire Falls (2001) won the Lou’s torment at the hands of bullies reaches Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. its peak in his preadolescence when they take him to an old shed by a river, close him up in a trunk, and pretend that they are going to saw the trunk in half. Lou suffers a kind of spell; he loses control of where and when he is, only emerging from his stupor many hours later at the sounds of a man and woman having a liaison in the shed. He walks back home in the dark to find his father waiting for him at 2 a.m. on the small footbridge that traverses the river and to discover that half the police in the municipality were looking for him. The title Bridge of Sighs refers not only to the famous bridge over the Rio di Palazzo in Venice but also this small bridge where Lou must confront his tormentors daily and where his father stands vigil for him. In a sense, the bridge, and Lou’s experience in the trunk, signify the loss of his childhood; he is called to leave behind innocence and perhaps even goodness in order to cross the bridge into adulthood with its corruptions. The “spells,” as they are called in the novel, will haunt Lou for the rest of his life. They will in some ways cause people to underrate Lou throughout much of his youth. Furthermore, Lou and Bobby have crossed other bridges: Bobby moves to a different part of town, and after getting in a fight that soon becomes legendary, is sent off to a military academy by his father. Lou is left alone to sort out his feelings about hard-luck cases like Karen Cirillo, whose mother rents the apartment above their store. Karen’s boyfriend is Bobby’s enemy Jerzey Quinn, and Lou is bewildered at the attention she shows him. His eventual realization that she is simply using him for cigarettes filched from his parents’ store serves as another educational experience for Lou, a crash course in the coming compromises and disappointments of adulthood. Lou explains this transition, saying: “In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we’re faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we’ll do, but who we’ll be.”

108

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Things change for both boys when Lou meets Sarah Berg, the daughter of an alcoholic artist mother and a brilliant and addicted father who is both an exceptional (if unorthodox) teacher and an aspiring novelist. A gifted artist herself, Sarah quickly becomes an important member of the extended Lynch family; the optimism of Lou and his father (even when tempered by the cynicism of Lou’s uncle, Dec, and his mother Tessa’s pragmatism) counterbalance the disillusionment she feels about her own parents’ separation and their attempts to manipulate each other through her. When Bobby returns from his years at a military academy to spend his senior year of high school in Thomaston, he is surprised to find that Lou has a girlfriend; moreover, he is startled to find that, despite her plain looks, Sarah’s wit and insight attract him. Bobby initially does not intend to renew his relationship with Lou, but between the care shown him by the entire Lynch family and his developing feelings for Sarah, he instead spends most of his free time with them at Ikey Lubin’s. The triangle formed by the three of them is further complicated when Lou and Bobby are recruited to the Honors English course taught by Sarah’s father, despite the fact that neither seems to have the test grades or the scores to attend the class. Berg runs a demanding class, favoring Socratic challenges levied against every assumption the seventeen-year-old students make. Even as the two friends realize how much they have both grown and changed, they form a new relationship with Sarah as the centerpiece. Bobby soon takes up with the attractive and rich Nan Beverly, recognizing that Nan is a distraction to keep him diverted from Sarah. At the same time that his friendship with Lou is being compromised by his growing interest in Sarah, however, Bobby and his father begin to make peace; Bobby comes to realize that, although he and his father may never become close, he may benefit from understanding his father’s perspective. In fact, parental relationships serve as reoccurring nexus points in the novel. On the one hand, Lou adores his father while understanding that his father’s cheery kindness is perhaps blind to reality; he loves his mother yet resents her need to present the more realistic if sordid side of life. Sarah, however, leaves her father behind in summers to live with her mother in New York and is confronted by both her mother’s alcoholism and her strings of lovers; returning to Thomaston, she finds at each summer’s end that her father has made himself over into the cliché of a serious novelist who has no time for anything save his novel. Her father is addicted to heroin (although Sarah is largely ignorant of his addiction) and is sure that he is too smart and gifted to teach in the small town of Thomaston; also, he deludes himself into thinking it is only a matter of time before her mother returns to him. For his part, Bobby has always defended his mother from his emotionally abusive father, and he has told his father that he will kill him if he endangers his mother’s life by getting her pregnant again. Now that Bobby is no longer physically frightened of his father, though, their relationship has shifted. He comes to realize that perhaps his father is not to blame for all their family’s problems. Nevertheless, as winter settles over Thomaston, things heat up for Lou, Bobby, and Sarah. As a blizzard descends upon the town, Nan Beverly strikes a blow at her divorcing parents by sleeping with Bobby. Bobby acquiesces to her plans, knowing

Bridge of Sighs / russo

109

the whole time that he is taking advantage of her and in some ways betraying his feelings for Sarah. It is soon after that Bobby finds that his father, despite his promises not to jeopardize his wife’s life again, has impregnated her. Bobby does his best to make good on his promise to kill his father. In doing so, he knows that in some ways he has become exactly like his father and that in his actions he is outlining the kind of man he will become: “He was too honest to tell himself he was doing this for his mother, who didn’t want it any more than she wanted another pregnancy. He was simply doing it because he said he would, and so his father, who could never quite bring himself to throw that punch he was forever threatening, would understand, once and for all, that his son was a different sort of man entirely.” At the same time, he believes that if Sarah had “chosen him, . . . it might have been different, but she hadn’t. And now the time had come to show her just how wise she’d been.” In the aftermath that follows, Bobby will leave Thomaston forever, taking his mother’s name of Noonan. Eventually he will turn to painting, spurred on by Sarah’s great talents, and someday achieve great success. The novel, ultimately, is about the paths that lives take, and about loyalties and small betrayals; in different ways, each of the three primary characters betray their friends and themselves. The story of Sarah’s return to her mother’s old apartment serves as a coda to help close the novel. In laying to rest the ghosts of her past—as Lou has through writing his story and Bobby has through painting his father and Sarah—Sarah learns how to move into the future. She and Lou plan to adopt an orphan, Kayla, and further cement the foundations of family that have held them together since they were young. Bobby Marconi/Robert Noonan’s great blunder is his failure to realize how much he, too, needs a foundation. Scott Yarbrough

Review Sources The New York Times 157 (September 24, 2007): B1-B6. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 4, 2007): 24. The New Yorker 83, no. 31 (October 15, 2007): 100-101. People 68, no. 15 (October 8, 2007): 54. The Spectator 305 (September 22, 2007): 62. The Washington Post, September 30, 2007, p. BW07.

110

THE BROKEN SHORE Author: Peter Temple (1946) First published: 2005, in Australia Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 357 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Around 2006 Locale: Port Monro, Victoria, and Cromarty, Melbourne, Australia A homicide detective who has returned to his hometown to recuperate from the incident that killed his partner is thrust into a murder investigation that is not nearly as straightforward as it initially seems Principal characters: Joe Cashin, a homicide detective recovering both physically and psychologically from a violent incident that left his partner dead Charles Bourgoyne, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist who is the victim of an apparent robbery-related assault Erica Bourgoyne, his stepdaughter, who stands to inherit his substantial estate Jamie Bourgoyne, his stepson, who is believed to have drowned over a decade prior to the attack on Bourgoyne Dave Rebb, an itinerant befriended by Cashin who may or may not have prior ties to Port Monro Paul Dove, a detective sergeant transferred from the federal authorities in order to serve as the token Aboriginal officer assigned to the Bourgoyne attack Rick Hopgood, a senior detective in Cromarty, whose dedication to completing the Bourgoyne investigation is questionable Donny Coulter, an Aboriginal youth accused of the Bourgoyne attack who survives a bungled police shoot-out only to die from apparent suicide Helen Castleman, the lawyer representing Donny, and Cashin’s new neighbor Bobby Walshe, an Aboriginal politician and uncle to one of the boys killed in the police shoot-out Michael Cashin, Joe’s brother

In Peter Temple’s eighth novel, The Broken Shore, Joe Cashin, a homicide detective who has been temporarily reassigned to his hometown of Port Monro while he recovers from a violent incident in Melbourne that left his partner dead, hopes to lead a quiet life while using painkillers and alcohol to dull his physical and emotional pain. He is completely unprepared for the furor that ensues when Charles Bourgoyne, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist, is attacked in his own home and left for

The Broken Shore / temple

111

dead. The only notable item missing from Bourgoyne’s house is his expensive wrist- Peter Temple has won the Ned Kelly watch, and when three teenaged Aboriginal Award for crime fiction for five of his boys try to pawn a similar watch in Sydney, novels, including The Broken Shore, the authorities consider the incident to be an which also earned the Colin Roderick Prize for best Australian book and the open-and-shut case. Cashin soon realizes that the case is any- Australian Book Publishers’ Award for thing but routine, however. When the police best general fiction. The Broken Shore is his eighth novel. in Cromarty, the town nearest to Port Monro, attempt to apprehend the suspects, the vehicle driven by Cashin and an Aboriginal detective named Paul Dove develops mysterious engine trouble. Cashin’s subsequent orders to abort the mission are either not heard or ignored by Rick Hopgood, a Cromarty detective who seems quite hostile to Cashin, especially when he learns that Cashin’s cousins are part Aborigine. A deadly shoot-out results, leaving two of the three boys dead, including the nephew of Bobby Walshe, an up-and-coming Aboriginal politician who immediately begins to portray the boys as innocent minority victims of a corrupt police force. The surviving boy, Donny Coulter, jumps bail after alleged police harassment and apparently commits suicide; his body turns up in the Rip, or the rough waters off the Broken Shore, a jagged and dangerous stretch of Victoria coastline. Because the victim and the alleged perpetrators are now dead, Cashin is ordered to back off the investigation, but small details, seemingly unrelated to the case, make him uneasy. He learns, for instance, that a real estate developer had been dealing with Bourgoyne in order to purchase the land that provides the only access to some waterfront property under consideration. In addition, Bourgoyne’s stretch of land had been home to the Companions Camp, a nonprofit organization that provided camping opportunities for troubled city youth before it mysteriously burned down in the early 1980’s, killing three young boys. The details of the case, revealed at a careful pace, are skillfully interwoven with Cashin’s ongoing struggles with his own personal demons. When his brother Michael, a successful businessman in Melbourne, tries to commit suicide, Cashin tries to show his brother the kind of familial support that Michael was unable to muster when Cashin himself was in the hospital. Now vulnerable, Michael reveals to his brother that he is gay. Although Cashin is surprised by this news, he is far more distressed to learn that their own father’s death years before was suicide, which everybody else apparently knew. Michael believes that his suicidal tendencies are a legacy from their father, causing Cashin to question his own mental health as well. Cashin is also uncomfortable in his attraction to Helen Castleman, the attorney who represented Donny Coulter until the boy died. Helen and Cashin had shared a kiss in their high school days, and Cashin has always thought of her as the unattainable ideal woman. In spite of a border dispute over their neighboring properties, Helen now seems to be open to a possible relationship, and Cashin is uncertain how to proceed, particularly because Helen believes that the police knowingly killed all three

112

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Aboriginal boys. She urges Cashin to investigate further, and Cashin, angry because he knows Helen may be right, argues with her in spite of himself. Ironically, the most stable influence in Cashin’s life during this tumultuous period is an itinerant who goes by the name Dave Rebb. Cashin meets Rebb in the first few pages of the book, when Cashin is called to investigate an intruder in a local woman’s shed. Although the man carries no identification except for a ten-year-old handwritten character reference from a former employer, Cashin follows his instincts and offers the man work rather than dragging him into the station to be fingerprinted. Rebb politely refuses to talk about himself, but Cashin somehow trusts him and ultimately asks Rebb’s help in restoring the old Cashin family ruin in which he has been living rather sparsely. In many ways, Cashin’s project is not so much about fixing up the old place as it is about fixing himself. The work he does with Rebb, who is surprisingly accomplished, reaps benefits that are as tangible as they are gradual; by the end of the book, hours of physical labor leave Cashin merely tired rather than in pain, and for the first time in years he is able to take pride in something he has done. When Rebb indicates he will be moving on soon, Cashin is genuinely regretful and does his best to talk his friend into staying, but Rebb does not know how to stay in one place. Meanwhile, further details in the Bourgoyne murder case reveal themselves. Similar attacks have taken place in Melbourne, with victims who can all be traced back to the Companions Camp, and Cashin discovers that Bourgoyne had been making unspecified payments for years to various people. In addition, a woman who briefly fostered Charles Bourgoyne’s stepson, Jamie, has reported seeing him alive as little as six weeks prior to Charles’s murder, in spite of the fact that Jamie has been believed dead for many years. Delving deeper into Charles’s past, Cashin discovers that the camp may have been a cover for systematic sexual abuse, facilitated and covered up by many who were employed and controlled by Charles in a disturbing, almost puppetlike manner. The past, in the form of a vengeful Jamie who now believes that God wants him to make the perpetrators of the abuse suffer, has finally caught up with Charles and his conspirators, and it is only Cashin’s persistence that allows the mystery to be solved. Events are brought full circle when Rebb returns to Port Monro at the end of the book, apparently drawn back by the tentative connections he had forged with Cashin and another local resident for whom he had done some odd jobs. Cashin reveals that he now knows Rebb had been at the Companions Camp as a boy. Although Rebb does not deny his presence at the camp, he does deny that anything bad ever happened to him during his short time there. Nonetheless, the reader is encouraged to conclude that Rebb’s itinerant existence has been his own way of dealing with the same trauma and tragedy that drove Jamie Bourgoyne to sadistic revenge. While some might feel that Rebb’s life as a drifter was hardly a successful solution to his problems, it is clear that Rebb has made peace with himself and whatever happened to him, to the point that he is finally able to resist the urge to keep moving in order to avoid personal relationships. In addition, the contrast between Jamie and Rebb is a powerful one, suggesting that the reader should not be judgmental about Rebb’s coping mechanisms.

The Broken Shore / temple

113

Because of the combination of frequently unfamiliar Australian slang, for which a helpful glossary is provided, and the sheer number of characters in the book, many of whom are introduced rather late in the novel, readers may find The Broken Shore a somewhat difficult read. In the end, however, these elements do not obscure the novel’s genuine suspense, which persists past the point when the mystery’s main questions have been answered. More important, in the character of Joe Cashin, Peter Temple has created a sympathetic reluctant hero, a man who does not give up on humanity even when he discovers that his own family is more troubled than he had realized and that corruption may have touched even some of the few people he trusted. The reader can infer that Cashin will at least always try to recover from what life throws at him and that he has learned from Rebb the value of taking pleasure in simple things and small accomplishments. In addition, in spite of the somewhat exotic Australian setting, American readers will find much in The Broken Shore that corresponds directly to their own experience. The racial tension between Port Monro’s Caucasians and Aborigines is similar not only to that between Caucasians and Native Americans in the United States and Canada but also between Caucasians and African Americans. Similarly, the political pressures related to coastal land development are a universal concern. The reader does not feel lectured on these issues, however, because Temple’s prose, although sparse, is at times poetic, as when he makes the only reference to the novel’s title by describing the Broken Shore, the dramatic and violent stretch of coastline where Donny Coulter either committed suicide or was murdered. Ultimately, The Broken Shore is successful not because of its mystery element but because it paints a subtle yet moving portrait of broken and healing people, who deal (with varying degrees of success) with the repercussions of the damage they have suffered at the hands of those they trust. The novel also drives home the point that quick and erroneous judgments are often made in the face of racial tension, with overly ambitious parties on both sides trying to twist situations to suit their own purposes. However, Temple’s greatest achievement in this novel is the creation of Joe Cashin and Dave Rebb, whose quiet dignity makes them everyday heroes to whom readers can relate. Amy Sisson

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 8 (December 15, 2007): 56. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 8 (April 15, 2007): 363. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 85. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 24, 2007): 23. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 38.

114

BROTHER, I’M DYING Author: Edwidge Danticat (1969) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 272 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Haiti, New York, and Miami A powerful and touching account of loyalty, separation and struggle, illness and ultimate survival of an extended Haitian family both in their native country and in the United States Principal personages: Edwidge Danticat, Haitian-born American author Uncle Joseph, Baptist pastor who raises Edwidge Mira, her ill father Bob, her younger brother Aunt Denise, Joseph’s wife

Edwidge Danticat is well known for a prolific body of both fiction and nonfiction that has drawn critical acclaim. In Brother, I’m Dying, she recounts an acutely personal story of her family’s struggles both with the politically challenging and povertyridden context of modern Haiti and with the land of immigrant promise in the United States. This is a story of pain and passion, of family devotion and government oppression. Ultimately, it is a story of hope. The book opens with the dual disclosure that Edwidge is pregnant with her first child and that her father, Mira, is suffering from a well-advanced pulmonary fibrosis. His cough and weight loss signal a bleak prognosis. Two years before, her father had urged her not to leave New York for Miami. His rationale was that Edwidge should not move away from her family, an important support system. Mira knows the absence of family support only too well. As a young man, he had traveled alone to the United States to start a new life, leaving his wife and two small children in Haiti to be cared for by family members. It is only later that the young writer realizes that Mira’s concern is less about her need for family than about his as yet unshared knowledge that he is dying. When she is four and still living in Haiti, Edwidge is placed in the care of her Uncle Joseph and Aunt Denise. Her mother had finally been allowed to join her father in New York. Sadly, because of restrictive immigration rules, the young couple is unable to take their two small children with them. In the manner of many cultures, Edwidge and her baby brother, Bob, are welcomed into the household of relatives. Joseph is the pastor of a small Baptist church, built in part with his own hands. Denise is his lifelong love. The extended family lives in a modest salmon-colored house—the

Brother, I’m Dying / danticat

115

color ubiquitous inside and out—built on the site of an ancient battle for independence between the indigenous people and the occupying French. It is a home of family syncretism and political ferment. Bedrooms, family tribulations, and modest celebrations are shared by anyone sheltered there at any one time. Food prepared by Aunt Denise and homemade liquor are offered to political activists who are forced to bring their own chairs to crowded meetings in this welcoming home. Only in his mid-fifties, Joseph is diag- A published author at fourteen, nosed with throat cancer. He finds it difficult Edwidge Danticat has written to preach to his congregation. With a tumor- extensively. She has received critical impaired voice, he announces to Mira, “Bro- acclaim and awards for many of her ther, I’m dying.”After a difficult journey to works. One of her novels, The Farming consult doctors in Haiti who can do little for of Bones (1998), received the American him, Joseph travels to the United States to Book Award. have the tumor removed. A radical laryngectomy is necessary, leaving him dependent on an artificial voice box in order to speak. Rather than take the easier and perhaps more sensible road and remain in the United States close to family and good medical care, he returns to Haiti to continue his ministry. Young Edwidge, at this time still part of Joseph’s household, becomes his interpreter. On one of her trips with him to a local bank, the teller asks Joseph if the young girl with him is his daughter: “Ta fille?” (“Your daughter?”) Uncle Joseph realizes that she is indeed his daughter. He responds to the teller with “the same blissful nod he used to indicate agreement when something was suddenly clear to him. He smiled broadly, while patting [Edwidge’s] tightly plaited hair.” Eventually, Edwidge and Bob are able to join their parents in America. It is an awkward transition, since neither know their biological parents nearly as well as they know their custodial parents. To make matters more complicated, two siblings whom Edwidge and Bob did not even know existed have joined the family. Food and humor smooth the transition as the older children from Haiti take up residence in New York. While the story of Mira’s illness and anticipated death is the first to be introduced in the queue of tragic tales, it is Joseph’s story that most grips the reader. Still, even the account of the suffering connected with the pastor’s journey while seeking treatment for his throat tumor pales in contrast to what happens to him on his final trip to the United States. His beloved city of Bel Air is overrun with uncontrolled thugs, in a long line of political oppressors who disrupt the lives of the ordinary Haitian populace. People are slaughtered, Joseph’s church is destroyed, and even his clothing and family possessions are looted. It is made clear that his life is in jeopardy. Friends smuggle him away from the danger.

116

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

With only his Bible, his papers, and some money, he takes the advice of friends and travels to the United States. When he arrives in Florida, still shaken from all that he has just experienced in Haiti, he meets immigration authorities. A fund-raising trip to America had already been planned, but given the conditions in Haiti he concludes reluctantly that it is time to leave the country permanently. He is eighty-one, his wife is dead, and many of his relatives live in New York. There is little left for him in his native land. The reader is reduced to a sense of horror and impotent anger as the author describes what happens to this vulnerable old man as he enters the United States. He has lost nearly everything but his dignity. As he moves through the immigration process, his hands grasp only hope and his passport and visa. It is too late for fundraising for a destroyed church; he asks for asylum. Unbelievably, the authorities do not immediately allow him to pass. Joseph is detained, awaiting determination of his status and the efficacy of his request for sanctuary. His medicines are taken from him; his son, Maxo, who has traveled with him and who at one time had lived in the United States, is likewise detained and separated from the elderly man. Joseph, who has worked a lifetime for peace, who has brought dignity to anyone who needed him, is treated with less care than a stray dog. At the hearing to determine whether he should be granted asylum, deprived of his medicines and of adequate food, he turns violently ill, vomits in the court, and becomes unconscious. The medic who comes to examine him accuses him of faking the condition. Joseph is placed in the prison ward of a hospital, likely shackled, and soon dies. Using official documents, Danticat, who has been prevented from being at his side during the ordeal, describes in horrible detail the lacunae in his medical care and the perfidy in the records of the immigration interviews. The reader is spellbound, if profoundly offended and grieved, by the account of treatment Joseph receives in the United States. Mira’s final days are much more humane. He is cared for at home. As death knocks gently at the sickroom door, the dying man asks for some food. His deteriorating body is well beyond hunger, but unexpectedly he says he would like some rice. He eats a small amount and then passes the plate to his daughter. “You have some,” he insists. The concerned daughter urges that he eat more. Then it becomes clear that nourishment of the body is not the issue. What the dying Mira craves is the companionship: someone to share food with him. While he is well cared for, during his illness family members have brought meals to him in his sickroom. Inadvertently, he has been denied the pleasure of eating with others, and Mira soon dies. The author describes the paramedics’ attempts to resuscitate the frail body. Danticat tells of the police officer standing by, whose job it was to determine that this death was natural and not caused by foul play. Such is the ironic contrast to the final hours of Uncle Joseph. Edwidge Danticat is both the author and the anchor of the book. The story of the two brothers, their fraternal bond, and the parallels of their medical decline are held together by the common thread of the observing but never detached daughter of them both. Young Edwidge accompanies Uncle Joseph as he learns to deal with the loss of his voice. At the end, the adult Edwidge is the vocal witness to the ignominious story

Brother, I’m Dying / danticat

117

of his tragic death. With her father, she is caregiver and family support. Eventually, both slip from her life. The theme of dying permeates the text. The atrocities of power that infest the changing governments in Haiti become real not only in the suffering of her uncle but also in the violent death of Edwidge’s cousin Madeline, a clinic nurse. Madeline has been a consistent member of the family in the salmon-colored house, the “adopted” daughter of Joseph and Denise. Her extended story is one of the many poignant narratives that the author sprinkles throughout the text. The book’s ending leaves the faint odor of hope in the reader’s nostrils. The baby announced in the first chapter, a girl named Mira, is brought to the bedside of her dying grandfather. He is so weak that he can barely hold her, yet he rallies briefly to get out of bed to have a photograph taken of the two Miras. The frail man clutches this tiny promise of hope. It is unfortunate that this photograph, which embodies the pain and the possibility that the book narrates, is not included in the family pictures that decorate the book’s cover. Danticat’s style is compelling. The fact that English is not her first language does not intrude in the well-written text. While this is her story as well, the spotlight focuses largely on other family members. Nowhere does the book descend into selfpity or self-absorption. Although one can find some moments of hope and genuine joy, this is not a happy story. Its vivid descriptions of injustice and personal tragedy will haunt the reader long after the book has been closed. The powerful descriptions leap from the pages of the book to insert themselves into the fiber of the reader. How can such inhumanity linger in a modern world, not only in the scarred primitive hills of Haiti but also in the enlightened state singularly founded in freedom? Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 20. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 13 (July 1, 2007): 644. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 86-87. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 9, 2007): 1-10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 28 (July 16, 2007): 155-156. World Literature Today 82, no. 1 (January/February, 2007): 74.

118

THE BURIED BOOK The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh Author: David Damrosch (1953) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). Illustrated. 315 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Literary history Time: c. 3000 b.c.e.-2004 c.e. Locale: Iraq, Ethiopia, and London Moving backward from the Victorian era, this book traces the deciphering, discovery, and composition of the epic of Gilgamesh, a work dating from the third millennium b.c.e. Principal personages: Austen Henry Layard, nineteenth century British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam, Layard’s Iraqi assistant George Smith, assistant curator at the British Museum and Assyrian scholar Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, ambassador, member of Parliament, and translator of cuneiform Ashurbanipal, seventh century b.c.e. ruler of Assyria Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal’s father Sin-leqe-unninni, twelfth century b.c.e. Babylonian priest and redactor of the epic of Gilgamesh Gilgamesh, third millennium b.c.e. quasi-mythical ruler of Uruk in Mesopotamia

Sometime around 1200 b.c.e., the Babylonian priest Sin-leqe-unninni edited and incised on clay tablets a story that first had been written down more than half a millennium earlier. This story told of a quasi-legendary king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, who, according to Sumerian king lists, had reigned in Uruk for 126 years in the early third millennium b.c.e. David Damrosch notes in The Buried Book that inscriptions from as early as 2600 b.c.e. invoke Gilgamesh’s aid in the afterlife, revealing that by that date he had already assumed mythic qualities. In the story that Sin-leqe-unninni recorded, Gilgamesh initially rules badly. Among his outrages, he sleeps with every bride before he allows her husband to do so. Uruk’s violated women appeal to the gods; in response to their pleas, the goddess Aruru creates a wild man, Enkidu, who will reform the king. As Damrosch retells the epic, he glosses the text. He observes that the gods’ indirect response to the women’s pleas reflects the poem’s realism, since in the poem a deity could simply have ordered Gilgamesh to repent. Enkidu grows up among the wild animals, a condition that Damrosch likens to Adam and Eve’s in their innocence. To protect the animals, Enkidu destroys hunters’ traps. The hunters seek Gilgamesh’s help, and he sends a temple prostitute, Shamhat, to seduce and tame Enkidu.

The Buried Book / damrosch

119

She succeeds, thus alienating Enkidu from the beasts who were his former companions. David Damrosch received his B.A. and Damrosch comments that, whereas in the Bi- Ph.D. (comparative literature) from ble Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden is Yale University. A resident of New York presented as a loss, Enkidu’s transformation City and professor at Columbia is regarded as a beneficial step toward civili- University, he edited The Longman zation. He does not move to the city, though, Anthology of British Literature (1998). until he hears from a passing wedding guest He has also published books on the Bible and on comparative literature. about Gilgamesh’s habit of deflowering vir gins on their wedding day. Enraged, Enkidu travels to Uruk, where he confronts Gilgamesh as the king is about to ravish a bride. The two men fight to a draw. Recognizing that he has met his equal, Gilgamesh befriends Enkidu and abandons his wicked ways. Subsequently, Enkidu proves a less satisfactory adviser; Damrosch comments that the issue of good and bad counsel emerges as a theme in the epic. Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest to secure trees for a temple. Damrosch notes that in early versions of the story, the cedars grow in western Persia, but after this region was deforested, accounts relocate the adventure to Lebanon. Guarding the forest is the ogre Hum-baba, placed there by the god Enlil. With the aid of the sun-god, Shamash, the two men capture Hum-baba. Gilgamesh wishes to spare the ogre, but Enkidu unwisely convinces the king to slay him. The dying Hum-baba curses the two: “May the pair of them not grow old together!/ None shall bury Enkidu beside Gilgamesh his friend!” The curse is fulfilled after Gilgamesh spurns the advances of the goddess Ishtar, who has fallen in love with him. Enraged, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill him; then Enkidu taunts Ishtar by throwing a haunch of the slain bull at her. The gods condemn Enkidu to a lingering death that occupies two of the poem’s twelve tablets. Mourning his friend, Gilgamesh flees the city to find his ancestor Uta-napishtim, a mortal who survived a great flood and who has attained immortality. Gilgamesh wants to learn the secret of eternal life. In early versions of the poem, Uta-napishtim teaches his descendant various lost rituals; in the redacted version, Uta-napishtim tells about the flood in a version much like that found in the biblical book of Genesis, which may well have been influenced by Gilgamesh. Finally, Uta-napishtim tells the king that all men must die. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, and the poem ends with praise of the city. Damrosch does not discuss the poem until chapter six, two hundred pages into his book. His intent is to imitate archaeology, which works from the present downward into the past. This strategy does not prove altogether successful. Damrosch’s retelling of the epic is more gripping than much that precedes it. Moreover, some readers are likely to be unfamiliar with the story of Gilgamesh and would benefit from an initial explanation of its significance. Yet while the scholars whose lives Damrosch traces in the early chapters are not as filled with adventure as those of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, they have their fascination. Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson began studying inscriptions at Behistan in western Persia in 1835 while he was stationed in the region.

120

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Learning of a trilingual inscription on a monument of Darius the Great, he risked his life to read the text while standing on a ledge no more than two feet wide. In 1860, he published the first volume of Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, which decoded the wedge cuneiform markings that Assyrian, Sumerian, and Akkadian scribes had used. The publication of this book coincided with the initial visits of George Smith to the British Museum. Trained as an engraver, Smith became fascinated with the new field of Assyriology. He taught himself to read cuneiform, and he showed great ability at reassembling broken cuneiform tablets in the museum’s collection. Rawlinson persuaded the museum to hire Smith and engaged his assistance for the second volume of Cuneiform Inscriptions. Smith began publishing his findings in 1866. In 1872, he addressed the Biblical Archaeology Society, and in 1875 he published The Chaldean Account of Genesis, based on his reading of Gilgamesh. The museum had the tablets of Gilgamesh because of Smith, Austen Henry Layard, and Hormuzd Rassam. Layard had excavated Greek and Roman ruins. In 1840, he shifted his attention to Mesopotamia, where, with the help of Rassam, he unearthed the palace of Sennacherib. When Layard abandoned archaeology for a career in Parliament, Rassam assumed control of the digging around Mosul and discovered the palace of Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the greatest book collector of antiquity. Layard and Rassam sent back to England some hundred thousand clay tablets from their discoveries, though these were broken and initially illegible. Smith, too, went to Iraq, where he found additional tablets, including part of the flood narrative from Gilgamesh that had been previously missing. Damrosch notes that even in 2007 only about two-thirds of the poem is extant; scholars often must surmise missing words and lines. Smith died in Syria in 1876 while returning from his third expedition to Mesopotamia. From these events in the nineteenth century, Damrosch in chapter 5 leaps back some twenty-five hundred years to the reigns of Esarhaddon and his son Ashurbanipal in the seventh century b.c.e. Much of this chapter, like the discussion of Rassam’s diplomatic career, has no relevance to the creation or discovery of the epic, though the account is not without interest. Damrosch discusses the significance of augury and hence of omen tablets in the Assyrian court, and he suggests that Esarhaddon’s paranoia and illiteracy may have prompted the king to have his son taught to read so that the prince would not be forced to rely, as he himself was, on scribes to read letters and omen tablets to him. Whatever the motivation, Ashurbanipal became a lover of literature, assembling a great library of cuneiform tablets and even writing poetry himself. One way he expanded his library was through conquest. For example, in 647 b.c.e., a year after he had subdued Babylon, he brought from there a copy of Gilgamesh. He ordered his scribes to inventory the libraries of Mesopotamia and to secure or make copies of any texts they thought useful. After Ashurbanipal’s death (c. 627 b.c.e.), his kingdom rapidly declined. In 612, Nineveh fell to an invading force of Babylonians, Medes, and Persians, who seized the city’s riches and sacked Ashurbanipal’s palace. They had no use for clay tablets, which were buried in the palace’s ruins when the building collapsed, to remain untouched for over two thousand years.

The Buried Book / damrosch

121

In an epilogue, Damrosch touches on some of the twentieth century avatars of Gilgamesh, such as the pitcher Gil Gamesh in Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) and Saddam Hussein’s Zabibah wal-Malik (2000; Zubibah and the king). Damrosch regards the king’s lover Zabibah as an Enkidu figure and the ruler as a version of Gilgamesh. Damrosch here might also have considered Gilgamesh’s influence on other works, including ancient literature of the Near East, such as the Bible and the Homeric epics. The book’s nineteenth century typography is more quaint than effective, and some of the black-and-white illustrations lack sufficient contrast (for example, Gustave Doré’s Ludgate Hill, 1872, and the portrait of George Smith). Still, both Gilgamesh and the story of its recovery will fascinate the reader willing to sift through this work for its treasures. Joseph Rosenblum

Review Sources American Scholar 76, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 129. Library Journal 132, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 108-110. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 25, 2007): 25. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 47-48. The Washington Post, March 4, 2007, p. BW10.

122

THE CAREFUL USE OF COMPLIMENTS Author: Alexander McCall Smith (1948) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 247 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twentieth-first century Locale: Edinburgh, Scotland Isabel Dalhousie is back in this fourth installment of a series that began in 2004 with The Sunday Philosophy Club Principal characters: Isabel Dalhousie, amateur philosopher Jamie, her lover Charlie, their three-month-old child Cat, Isabel’s niece Grace, Charlie’s caregiver Andrew McInnes, a painter Christopher Dove, professor of philosophy

Over the past decade, Alexander McCall Smith—known familiarly as “Sandy”—has become one of the most prolific, best-known, and best-loved Scottish writers of his time. That is quite a feat, given the accomplishments of two of his near neighbors in their leafy suburb in the south of Edinburgh: Ian Rankin, author of the long-running tartan noir crime series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus and, of course, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame. Contemporary Edinburgh writers began capturing the world’s attention with the publication of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting in 1993, which deals with no-hopers from Edinburgh’s least touristy parts. McCall Smith shot to fame five years later, with the publication of the whimsically titled The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, set in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia, where McCall Smith was born). Its success has resulted in a series that now comprises eight volumes, with more expected and a film currently in production. Success begetting success, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series spawned the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series (three volumes, 2003) and The Sunday Philosophy Club series (currently four volumes, 2004-2007)—a prim and proper title reminiscent of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)—set this time in Edinburgh’s upscale southern suburbs, close to the author’s own neighborhood. Inspired by San Francisco writer Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978), McCall Smith penned a serial novel, 44 Scotland Street (2005), published in the Scotsman newspaper and set on the northern fringes of Edinburgh’s Enlightenment-inspired New Town, close to Trainspotting’s Leith Walk, but a world away nonetheless. Its inevitable success resulted in a new series, now three novels long. With a collection of short stories, several children’s books, and numerous academic texts on medical law also to his credit, McCall Smith has recently retired from

The Careful Use of Compliments / mc call smith

123

his professorship at the University of Edin burgh in order to devote himself full time to his writing: a daunting if delightful prospect for his many devoted readers. The Careful Use of Compliments is the latest installment in the series that began with the hugely popular The Sunday Philosophy Club. Isabel Dalhousie is now a little older but—formula fiction being what it is—is just as beset by a succession of philosophical problems, or more specifically, ethical dilemmas, which pile up in the novel the way dead bod- Alexander McCall Smith was born in ies do in a crime novel or sexual situations in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in a porn film. Isabel is McCall Smith’s varia- 1948. He rocketed to fame with the tion on a well-worn type. She is the amateur publication of The No. 1 Ladies’ philosopher turned armchair sleuth trying to Detective Agency, set in Zimbabwe, in solve a mystery involving a painting’s au- 1998. Much of the rest of this prolific thenticity. That, however, may be the least of and wildly popular writer’s fiction is Isabel’s many problems. Isabel is a single set in Edinburgh, where he resides and mother trying to juggle a part-time career and where he was, until his retirement, parenting; well-heeled enough not to have to professor of medical law at the work, Isabel can also afford a reliable full- University of Edinburgh. time caregiver for her child. The presence of the caregiver, Grace, makes the juggling easier while also raising additional ethical dilemmas, about parenting, for Isabel, who is as addicted to ethics as Trainspotting’s characters are to heroin. The guilt Isabel feels as a result of her ethical questioning is less a burden to be carried than a gentle but unrelenting prod to thinking about right action. Should Isabel take on more parenting duties? Should she accept the marriage proposal from Jamie, the baby’s father, a struggling musician (like McCall Smith, a bassoonist) much younger than herself? Should she (and Jamie) accept a dinner invitation from her niece Cat, Jamie’s former lover (and contemporary)? Should she buy a painting that costs more than what Jamie makes in a year and is a larger version of the one her father bought and that still hangs in her home, which she inherited, along with the rest of the estate, from her parents (Scottish father, American mother), which is her source of income? Should she accept being deposed as editor of the Review of Ethical Philosophy—a low-paid part-time position—or fight in order to save not just her own position but the journal from those who would use it to advance their careers and the postmodern views that she and apparently her author find distasteful? That Isabel is a decidedly decent person is the worst that can be said of her—and the best. She is conservatism’s version of the bien-pensant liberal, what George W. Bush would call “compassionate conservative,” holding forth, while holding the ethical high ground, on SUVs, immigration, even the executions of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaulescu and his wife Elena. When Jamie—who is nice but not well in-

124

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

formed—asks whether Elena Ceaulescu has been shot, Isabel replies: “I’m afraid so. . . . And nobody deserves that. Not even the most appalling tyrant, or tyrant’s wife. She pleaded for her life, as did her husband, in his long winter coat, standing there in front of those young soldiers. He said that they should not shoot his wife, as she was a great scientist. At least he tried to do something gentlemanly at the very end.” At times, Isabel does seem faintly ridiculous: “Would Immanuel Kant have known how to hold a baby?” Probably not, Isabel realizes, but Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume would have, she believes. Overall, McCall Smith wants readers not only to like Isabel but also to admire a person who can ponder ethical questions as she “stirs the roux” and for whom the good life is no less a moral imperative than a material condition. Making her seem slightly comical—“Now she stood at the cutting board and asked herself: Is this complete happiness?”—is the author’s way of humanizing her, making Isabel appear a little more three-dimensional and her reactionary views more palatable. The problem with conceiving Isabel as exemplary semi-lay ethicist is simple. If everything poses an ethical dilemma, then, in a way, nothing does because no ethical dilemma is more important than any other. In either case, ethical philosophy as Isabel practices it and as McCall Smith presents it is the way that this somewhat affluent person chooses to indulge herself, challenging everything (from her narrow corner of the world) but—neither a Dietrich Bonhoeffer nor a Henry David Thoreau—changing nothing. It is just a way of passing the time, not unlike reading one of McCall Smith’s entertaining and weightless novels. Isabel is, after all, little more than a machine for raising questions of the ethical philosophy-lite kind, including (perhaps especially) those about wealth, her own and, one assumes, her author’s. Her own inherited wealth insulates her from most realworld problems and causes her to become something of a moral snob who prefers the privately raised eyebrow of disdain to the open sneer of well-earned contempt. Her disdain is especially evident in her treatment of those who would depose her as editor. There is “the oddly named Professor Lettuce, professor of moral philosophy at one of the smaller universities in London, and chairman of the Review’s editorial board,” and the man who will replace her, Christopher Dove, who “was ambitious and the editorship of an established journal would help him on his climb up the pole of academic success. He was currently at an obscure university, one so low in the pecking order that it appeared in no tables at all.” Fifteen pages later, Isabel realizes that she has been unfair to Dove because she has been vindictive, but that realization, instead of challenging the reader’s judgment of, and appreciation of, Isabel as a morally superior person, only confirms it, while leaving the likes of Lettuce and Dove slogging away at their obscure universities, still very much Isabel’s moral inferiors. In Shakespeare’s Othello, “a man may smile and smile and be a villain”; in The Careful Use of Compliments, McCall Smith may smile and smile at Isabel’s occasionally pompous selfevaluations and still endorse Isabel and more especially her bourgeois values. Near the novel’s end, Isabel will use the money she did not spend on the painting to buy the review: not because she chooses to punish Lettuce and especially Dove (although that will of course be an effect of her decision) but instead “to set right an injustice.” The injustice in not only the one to herself but to the kind of ethical philosophy she prefers,

The Careful Use of Compliments / mc call smith

125

but accomplishing the latter entails denying a space to the kind of postmodern philosophy she abhors. McCall Smith’s parody of trendy academic writing on the topic of identity politics may be wickedly funny, but it manifests the fearful conservatism lurking just beneath the surface of his genial prose. The problem is not merely that the novel is filled with conservative pieties from what in the United States would be the culture wars. It is that the writing is as pedestrian and quaint as the thinking. Indeed, much of it reads like filler: proficient, certainly, but for all its philosophical pretensions, weightless nonetheless: They were going for lunch in the restaurant at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was on Queen Street, a short walk from the auction house. Outside, in spite of the fact that it was June, the wind had a note of chill in it, a wind from the east, off the North Sea. Isabel looked up at the sky, which was clear but for a few scudding clouds, wispy, high-level streaks of white. “It’s so bright,” she said, shivering as a gust of wind swept up Broughton Street and penetrated the thin layer of her jersey. “Look at that sky. Look up there.” Jamie stared up into the blue. He saw a vapour trail, higher than the clouds, on the very edge of space, it seemed, heading westwards towards America or Canada. He thought of the shiny thin tube suspended, against gravity, in that cold near-void; he thought of the people inside. “What do you think of when you see those jets?” he asked Isabel, pointing up at the tiny glint of metal with its white wisp of cotton wool trailing behind it. Isabel glanced up. “Trust,” she said. “I think of trust.”

The American writer John Cheever liked to say that life in the suburbs can be just as rich and rewarding as anywhere else, but Cheever invariably brought to his suburban tales a sense of the absurd and the tragic utterly lacking in Alexander McCall Smith’s work. Cheever’s genial, smiling style was the mask behind which Cheever’s personal demons ran riot in stories that, as Cheever’s biographer Scott Donaldson claims, “tell us more about people in the American middle class during that half century than any other writer’s work has done or can do.” McCall Smith’s fiction, on the other hand, tells readers only how he prefers to view a city he cherishes and that “vast swathe of people [who] are living normal lives,” as he said in August, 2007, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Isabel has no interest in “ephemera,” preferring the eternal verities and the harmony of the golden mean, but her values are terribly skewed and her vision far more narrow than that of the Scottish fiction of the 1980’s and 1990’s, with its immediacy and sense of purpose, which McCall Smith has sought to offset and correct, even erase. Isabel is “old-fashioned Edinburgh’s” spitting image: “reserved, proud perhaps, but upright.” Made in the city’s and her maker’s image, Isabel is like the out-of-scale map in 44 Scotland Street, in which McCall Smith’s unrepresentative slice of Edinburgh life is given disproportionate importance. Hers is clearly a world and a view that have undeniable appeal right now, around the globe and especially in Scotland, where McCall Smith’s success is seen as a sign of postdevolution Scotland’s newfound confidence and prosperity. Robert Morace

126

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 6-7. Chicago Tribune, September 5, 2007, p. 7. Financial Times, September 29, 2007, p. 40. Globe and Mail, August 11, 2007, p. D3. Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2007, p. R8. Publishers Weekly 254 (June 25, 2007): 29. The Times, October 6, 2007, p. 13.

127

THE CASE FOR LITERATURE Author: Gao Xingjian (1940) Translated from the Chinese and with an introduction by Mabel Lee Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 181 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Essays Time: 1915 to 2006 Locale: China and Paris A series of twelve essays (most originally delivered as speeches to a variety of audiences) address the functions of literature, the responsibilities of the author, and the forces opposing the free expression of writers in China and the West There is a curious paradox in the history of literary production and criticism over the past fifty years or so. On one hand, literary critics have increasingly bound themselves to a specific school—Marxism, structuralism, feminism, deconstruction, new historicism, postcolonialism—to name a few. Conversely, writers continue to insist on the autonomy and individuality of the author, on their independence from any program, school, or movement—what Gao Xingjian would call “isms.” To some extent, this tension is understandable, perhaps even unavoidable: Critics must read from some perspective; no one can be entirely “theory free.” Authors, on the other hand, battle the demons of classification and in many countries the political or religious forces that dictate what a writer may or may not say, and how it may or may not be said. In the first chapter of The Case for Literature, “Author’s Preface to Without Isms,” Gao attempts to defend his insistence on the author’s need to write without subservience to any “authority,” “trend,” “fashion,” or “ideology.” By the same token, he is not arguing for a brand of radical individualism, for “the judgments and experiences of the individual are only of relative significance and do not possess absolute value.” Summarizing Gao’s argument is not possible because the idea involves balancing a host of antithetical qualities; he comes closest to a succinct definition when he asserts: “ . . . without isms is neither nihilism nor eclecticism; nor is it egotism or solipsism. It opposes totalitarian dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to the status of God or superman.” The importance of this idea to Gao’s philosophy is clarified by Mabel Lee’s helpful “Introduction: Contextualizing 2000 Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian.” Born in 1940, Gao grew up under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong, graduating from Beijing Foreign Studies University with a major in French literature in 1962. During the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, he worked in the fields as a peasant, burning everything he had written to avoid prosecution. By 1975, he was back in Beijing working at the Foreign Languages Press, and in the 1980’s he published a number of novellas, stories, and essays, but his refusal to write to the dictates of the Communist Party eventu-

128

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ally caused him to flee again to the countryside and from there to France in 1987. There he witnessed the brutal events of Tiananmen Square (1989), in response to which he wrote a play entitled Taowang (pr. 1989; Fugitives, pr. 1993), which pleased neither the Americans who commissioned it, the Chinese students who read it, or, of course, the Chinese authorities. Gao has since become a French citizen. Given these experiences, it is easy to see why he opposes any “ism” that would dictate form, content, or style, and why Lee sum marizes his outlook by saying, “Gao posits that literature is the most important of human intellectual endeavours because it is capable of revealing many truths about human thinking and behaviour.” It may not be unfair to summarize his position, then, as that of a traditional humanist. Eight of the eleven essays that follow the author’s preface and Lee’s introduction were delivered as speeches to various audiences between 1991 and 2002. As a result, there is no single thread of argument running through the book, though many ideas are repeatedly discussed. These ideas form the core of Gao’s thinking about literature and its place in today’s world. The title essay, delivered as his Nobel Prize lecture to the Swedish Academy, lays down several of these themes—that literature is the voice of a solitary individual, that as a consequence it and its creators wither and die when writers are silenced or forced to adhere to a party line, that language transcends national boundaries and the limits of time, and that through literature, writer and reader can develop a spiritual bond. These characteristics come together in what he calls “cold literature,” which exists “simply because humankind seeks an entirely spiritual activity beyond the gratification of material desires.” Another of his principles is that the writer is not some kind of superman or god, a rejection of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas strongly influenced Chinese writers of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and in Gao’s eyes perverted the role of the author. “Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth” emphasizes that literature “testifies to human existence” and is “subservient to nothing but truth.” This is an elaboration on his point that literature must be without “isms”; not that it cannot speak to political issues but that it must not be written for propagandistic purposes. Moreover, Gao sees an equal threat to the integrity of literature in the tyranny of market forces: “This market-driven literature no longer has truth as its main object.” Having staked a claim to truth, Gao attempts to define what he means. He rightly distinguishes truth from fact and locates it somewhere in the vision and expression of the individual writer who testifies “to the existential predicament of human life.” However, he later claims, “While thus focused on truth, the writer ceases to be concerned with values.” Of course, truth is itself a value. Gao may have been better served to discuss the kinds of truth literature can convey rather than to attempt to define truth abstractly.

Gao Xingjian began his battle with the Chinese Communist authorities during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Despite official opposition, he published works and was able to privately produce his plays until fleeing China in 1987. His plays are now performed throughout the world, and his ink drawings have been exhibited internationally. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000.

The Case for Literature / gao

129

“Without Isms” expands on the idea discussed above—namely, the need for writers to be free of ideological restraints and requirements. The essay recounts some of Gao’s own battles with authorities and goes on to consider the problem of literary language and the tensions in China between those who insist on traditional literary Chinese and those who import Western ideas, conventions, and even grammatical structures. Gao himself attempts a middle course, neither rejecting Western influences nor adopting novelties for their own sake. His ideas regarding language are expounded further in “The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation,” the most relevant part being his revelation that, as he writes, he listens for the music in what he has written, going so far as to tape record his prose as a test of its musicality. This point, together with his assertion that culture is deeply embedded in language, opens the question of whether translation is possible—a question he does not address. In the end, he admits that language is capable of expressing only part of an author’s feelings but asserts that even this partial expression of the truth provides hope for both writer and reader. The long essay “Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain” recounts Gao’s struggles to have his work published in China and again returns to the question of literary language. He abhors what he calls “Europeanised Chinese” as a thoughtless importation of linguistic features unsuited to Chinese grammar, but at the same time he rejects ancient Chinese because it cannot express modern ideas and conditions. He searches instead for a living language, true to the nature of Chinese but unburdened by either classical restraints or non-Chinese importations. These observations on language, like those in “Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation,” are fully comprehensible only to someone fluent in the language and conversant with the debates about language within China. Of more interest to the general reader are Gao’s accounts of his struggles to express himself in the face of official opposition, and his comments on writing Ling shan (1990; Soul Mountain, 2000). Inspired in part by Western stream-of-consciousness techniques, Gao used pronouns rather than characters to probe the depths of a single psyche. The pronoun “I” represents the thoughts and observations of a traveler in the real world; “you” conveys the imaginative musings of this traveler. “She” derives from “you,” while “he” comes out of “she” as a transformed version of “I.” Chinese readers of Soul Mountain claim that Gao’s novel reveals Chinese culture, and this observation leads to a brief overview of the development of Chinese culture and the need for new research into its origins and history unfettered by either traditional constraints or modern political considerations. One of the most insightful and valuable essays, “The Voice of the Individual,” is not merely an amplification of “Without Isms” but an analysis of the predicament faced by modern Chinese intellectuals. According to Gao, the problem for Chinese intellectuals since the May Fourth Movement has been to assert the rights of the individual against the claims of collective ideologies and responsibilities, specifically loyalty to China itself. Gao goes on to say “that it is this deeply entrenched patriotism that is the greatest psychological obstacle to any unwavering affirmation of the individual’s worth by Chinese intellectuals.” The result of this predicament is that Chinese intellectuals tend either to capitulate to political pressure or to martyr themselves. Gao interestingly connects this tendency toward martyrdom with the perverse influence of

130

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Nietzsche, whose concept of the Übermensch, or superman, leads intellectuals to acts of self-destruction. If Gao’s analysis is accurate, it offers a valuable insight for those in the West who expect Chinese intellectuals to democratize China, suggesting that Western leaders and intellectuals should help Chinese artists, writers, and thinkers to find strategies that will enable them to support civil rights without feeling unpatriotic. “Wilted Chrysanthemums” affords insights into the bizarre machinations of China’s literary censors. In 1981, Gao published Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan (explorations into the art of modern fiction), advocating nonrealist approaches to writing fiction. During the following years, his experimental plays Juedui xinhao (pr. 1982; Alarm Signal, pr. 1996), Chezhan (pr. 1983; The Bus Stop, pr. 1996), and Yeren (pr. 1985; Wild Man, pr. 1990) were performed in Beijing but only before select audiences of writers, journalists, and critics, with whom the plays were a success. However, the authorities were closing in, and once again Gao fled, ultimately to France late in 1987. It is important to note that these plays did not attack the political status quo but merely employed modernist, nonrealistic techniques; however, when political authorities perceive any deviation from the prescribed norm as a threat, the result is “wilted chrysanthemums,” art produced in response to contemporary fads. The following essay, “Another Kind of Theatre,” outlines Gao’s dramatic goals and ideas, one of which is that reality and absurdity are not opposites but aspects of individual psychology. The book concludes with the brief essay “The Necessity of Loneliness,” in which he argues for loneliness as essential to an individual’s maturity, independence, and freedom. The lonely individual, it might be said, is the only person capable of not being absorbed into a collective, whether that is encouraged by political repression or the continual blandishments of mass media. With this short concluding chapter, The Case for Literature has essentially come full circle, back to the declaration that the writer must not subscribe to any “ism” but must remain true to him or herself, cultivating a unique voice and vision. The argument is not, unfortunately, systematic and closely reasoned; there are some gaps and much repetition. However, the book is a pertinent reminder and a potent statement of the necessity of artistic freedom, without which genuine literature cannot be written or read. It is, therefore, an effective argument for restoring the author to a central place in literary criticism as well as creative expression. Gao is not without strong opinions on important subjects, but he does insist upon the writer’s independence from any force that would limit a writer’s freedom to say what he or she must say to remain fully alive. At a time when collectivist thought of many varieties attempts to suppress creativity or to channel one’s reading into a narrow stream, Gao’s forthright declaration of independence is a timely reminder of the importance of the individual. Dean Baldwin Review Sources The Washington Post, November 3, 2007, p. BW10. The Wilson Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 94-95.

131

THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST Author: Norman Mailer (1923-2007) Publisher: Random House (New York). 477 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1837-1905 Locale: Austria A well-researched fictional rendering of the childhood of the most brutal dictator in history, Adolf Hitler Principal characters: Dieter (D.T.), one of Satan’s operatives and the narrator of the story Adolf Hitler, future chancellor of Nazi Germany Alois (Schicklgruber) Hitler, his father Klara Hitler, his mother Alois Hitler, Jr., his older brother Edmund Hitler, his younger brother

One of the most daunting questions regarding the human condition is the nature of evil. It implies more than a simple transgression of the law of a particular society. Beyond what it implies within the context of religion, the word “evil” suggests a violation of a fundamental concept of what it means to live as a civilized human being. When one considers evil in the context of the twentieth century, the subject of mass murder is invariably at the center of the discussion. By far the greatest number of atrocities is associated with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, who ruled Germany as chancellor from 1933 to 1945. His acts of aggression against other nations and his systematic extermination of minority groups have come to embody the very notion of evil in the modern era. In a very real sense, his actions as a world leader redefined the Christian concept of original sin, transforming it from Adam and Eve’s mythical expulsion from Eden to the realization of the endemic nature of human depravity. Ever since the revelation of the death camps to the world, philosophers and artists of every ilk have labored to come to terms with this knowledge. It is against this backdrop that American writer Norman Mailer created his novel about Hitler’s childhood, The Castle in the Forest. Given the appalling nature of his subject, Mailer could easily have adopted the voice of a traditional omniscient narrator, one who focused solely on the nascent Adolf’s quest for glory. Instead, Mailer attacks his subject from a more oblique angle by employing one of Satan’s servants, a fictional demon named Dieter. If one is to understand evil, Mailer seems to say, one must listen to someone who serves the master himself. D.T., as he styles himself, does not propose to merely describe the actions of the future führer. He claims to possess knowledge available to no one else: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to

132

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

bottom.” Far from being offensive, Mailer’s chatty narrator is out to inveigle his way into his readers’ good graces. He makes lewd jokes about his subject, sneers at God and his servants, and charmingly describes how he and his operatives set out to create history’s greatest monster. In Mailer’s confrontation between good and evil, there are no celestial armies of white in pitched battle against the Prince of Darkness; rather, it is a matter of one intelligence organization laboring quietly A cofounder of The Village Voice, and persistently against the aims of another— Norman Mailer wrote more than thirty planting suggestions at opportune moments, books and was the recipient of influencing events, and of course, winning new numerous awards. His works include converts to the cause. More than once, Mailer The Naked and the Dead (1948), employs this espionage metaphor in characHarlot’s Ghost (1991), Oswald’s Tale terizing the narrator and his activities. Like a (1995), and The Gospel According to the Son (1997). He won the Pulitzer spy, the narrator has limited knowledge of the Prize and a National Book Award for ultimate goals of his superiors and has only The Armies of the Night (1968) and assumed the identity of Dieter’s character for another Pulitzer Prize for The the duration of what might be called the Hitler Executioner’s Song (1979). project. In a kind of timeless Cold War, the forces of good and evil are arrayed in a perpetual standoff, with each side making occasional gains without achieving a lasting victory. Mailer also dealt with espionage in Harlot’s Ghost (1991), his novel about the Central Intelligence Agency. Employing this espionage model is a clever solution, for it allows Mailer to delve into the early life of Hitler in an entertaining manner without resorting to the kind of pontificating that is anathema to good storytelling. As with any good operative in an intelligence organization, D.T.’s fealty to his commander, whom he calls the “Maestro,” is as intense as his contempt for his chief opponent, God, whom he labels the “Dummkopf.” For D.T., the angels in God’s employ are a persistent annoyance; he terms them “Cudgels.” Those readers who might object to Mailer’s approach to his subject will have to contend with the effectiveness with which he carries it out. Even when examining the early life of Hitler, it is immensely difficult to separate the child from the man: One is tempted to view every small event in his childhood as a pattern for the twisted ideology of the adult. By creating D.T., Mailer apparently displaces the evil of the adult Hitler upon an outside agent. The text suggests that Dieter plays a crucial role in Hitler’s formative years. Mailer is treading a very dangerous line here. If evil were merely viewed as a matter of intervention from a third party at opportune moments, then individuals such as Hitler would be bereft of free will. Perpetrators would be seen as passive victims of circumstances rather than as active participants. What ultimately allows Mailer’s approach to work is the fact that he is not trying to explain the evil deeds of the real man.

The Castle in the Forest / mailer

133

Rather, the medium of fiction allows Mailer the freedom to explore what is ultimately a mystery. Mailer, moreover, takes pains to highlight the fictional nature of his text. If one can fault him for the device of an outside agency in the incubation of evil, a close reading suggests that Dieter’s might not be the most reliable account of Hitler’s life. When D.T. begins his narrative of the Hitler family, he likens himself to “a conventional novelist of the old school.” Mailer, of course, is indulging in a sly wink to the reader regarding the author’s relationship to his character, but his more serious purpose is to put the reader on notice regarding Dieter’s reliability. If one is forced to rely upon a narrator who prides himself upon deception and whose master is the very embodiment of deceit, then the story itself must be called into question. The reliability of the narrator also calls into question the very premise of this fictional account of Hitler. That premise is concerned with the role of incest in the generation of the Hitler family tree. Dieter clearly states that it was Heinrich Himmler, his superior in the SS, who was obsessed with proving that Hitler’s strength as a leader sprang from the incest in his family lineage. The narrator never bothers to articulate the difference—if any—between the stories he creates for his military superior and the tale he ultimately weaves for the reader. It is a masterpiece of obfuscation, a wry and subtle means of deconstructing the very tale it purports to tell. That tale begins with the birth of Hitler’s father, Alois Schicklgruber, in 1838 into a life of wretched rural poverty in Austria. By the standards of the time, it was an outwardly successful life, for Alois manages to find his way into the imperial customs service and gradually works his way into a position of great power and high rank without the benefit of patronage. On the surface, this typical nineteenth century rags-to-riches story embodies what is surely the most enduring economic myth of the Western consciousness. It is a tale that charts the population shift from farms to cities at the inception of the industrial revolution. However, Mailer’s tale performs a reversal of this classic success story, for D.T. constructs a Hitler family tree that is undermined by the taint of incest. Alois has sexual relations with his sisters, and his third and final marriage— the one that produces Adolf—is to Klara, who could be his niece or his daughter. Again, one must keep in mind that Dieter is an unreliable narrator and that this incestuous history is invented. Mailer, ever the master storyteller, blurs the historical record in order to exploit the warped Nazi mind-set to which Dieter himself is pandering. If the classic pose of a novelist is to lie in order to tell a more fundamental truth, then Mailer complicates the process by having the presumptive liar, Dieter, affirm the truth to the reader by lying to his superiors. The net effect at the immediate level of Alois’s character is a profusion of deceits, both great and small, in a bitterly ironic life: While he conceals his incestuous relationships, he nevertheless excels in his career in the customs service, a career that rests upon his ability to detect deceit as practiced by smugglers. If one can quibble with Mailer regarding some of the invented details in his tale, one can only admire the skill with which the deception he invests in Alois becomes a pattern for the young Adolf and the adult führer. The immoral and criminal behavior of this minor government official, who consistently places Emperor Franz Joseph above God, foreshadows the depraved son who will be responsible for the Holocaust.

134

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Then there is Mailer’s vision of the young Hitler himself, a portrait that captures the essence of the future dictator. The violent, childish outbursts of the adult chancellor are suggested in the arrested infantile behavior of Mailer’s Adolf, with his insatiable desire for sweets and his fascination with his own excrement. When Hitler feels that his parents pay too much attention to his younger brother Edmund, Mailer has him dispatching the little boy by infecting him with measles. It is an invented detail, but this crucial insight into Adolf’s character harkens back to the biblical tale of Cain’s slaying of Abel. In Hitler’s case, this fictitious murder cleverly anticipates the criminal actions of the adult. The implications are obvious: If one is willing to kill one’s brother, then one has no scruples regarding the annihilation of others. It is an act that goes to the core of Mailer’s book, which has to do with the nature of power in general and how Adolf Hitler came to acquire it. Mailer reinforces this idea by portraying young Adolf as a budding military strategist in his scraps with local urchins. The fact that Adolf realizes that he caused his brother’s demise functions as a fundamental shift in his zeal for power. If Alois could claim that the emperor was more important than God, Mailer’s young Hitler creates a psyche that views itself as a god. With chilling effectiveness, The Castle in the Forest presents a monster in the making. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 6. Commentary 123, no. 3 (March, 2007): 59-63. Commonweal 134, no. 9 (May 4, 2007): 24-26. The Economist 382 (January 20, 2007): 92. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 112. The New Republic 236, nos. 8/9 (February 19, 2007): 26-29. New Statesman 136 (February 19, 2007): 54-55. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 21, 2007): 1-15. The Spectator 303 (February 17, 2007): 42-43. The Times Literary Supplement, February 16, 2007, pp. 21-22.

135

CHARISMA The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us Author: Philip Rieff (1922-2006) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 271 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Sociology, psychology, religion A set of reflections on the concept of charisma and on how this concept is connected to religious faith and social order Religion has occupied a central place in the history of social theory. According to the most common telling of the history of sociology, the discipline began with the idea that religion as a source of order is about to be displaced from human life. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), generally credited with coining the Greco-Latin name “sociology,” argued in the six volumes of Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842; The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 1853) that the time of religion was passing and that this time should pass for the sake of the human race. The idea that the scientific and the secular were replacing the sacred echoed through social thought, philosophy, and literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated the death of God, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud saw the end of religion as the passing of an illusion. Writers such as Matthew Arnold mourned the loss of religious certitude but agreed that the time of faith was yielding to a time of reason. The primary early sociologists of religion carried on this assumption of the unavoidable secularization of modern society. French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) believed that the kind of social bond found in religious faith and ritual was giving way to other bonds, such as those of economic interdependence. German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) saw modernity as a matter of movement from tradition and belief to rationality and bureaucratic organization. In his writings on political authority, Weber revived the Greek term “charisma,” usually defined as “divine gift” or “divine favor,” to describe one source of authority. According to Weber, some people are to exercise control over others because of personal qualities that seem divine in origin. While charisma never disappears from the political relations of any social order, over time it tends to become routinized in bureaucratic organization. With the rationalization of society through modernity, divine sources of authority such as charisma tend to give way to acceptance of world legal procedures. Like Matthew Arnold, Weber viewed this rationalization with some regret, arguing that it led to a disenchanted perspective on life, but Weber tended to see the mundane and rational ordering of human existence as the way of the future and as ultimately desirable. Philip Rieff’s intellectual career was a debate with the sociological and psychological orientation of his predecessors. By the time he wrote Charisma, the debate had

136

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

turned to outright rejection of many of their premises and of the premises of modernity. Rieff began in the 1950’s, writing about the work of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He saw a revolutionary kind of morality in Freud, the morality of the “therapeutic,” which involves the effort to enable human beings to live with their instinctual conflicts. The “therapeutic ethos,” Rieff argued by the middle of the 1960’s, had become the predominant attitude of modern culture and had given rise to Psychological Man, a model of humanity that saw everything as relative to individual wellbeing and that understood public order as the promotion of individual well-being. By the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Rieff had decided that the therapeutic ethos could not offer a sound foundation for a culture and that authority and social order could be established only by a return to the sacred. Rieff wrote the chapters of Charisma during those years when he had ceased analyzing the therapeutic ethos and begun arguing against it. Taking up the Weberian term, he maintained that a charisma without religious basis was only a political fraud, akin to false prophecy. However, he became frustrated with this project, believing that his ideas were so utterly inconsistent with the times that there was no audience for this argument. He set his writings on charisma aside, and he was largely silent for the last decades of the twentieth century. Rieff started speaking out again at the end of his life. As he returned to writing, he agreed to work with collaborators in assembling the manuscript of Charisma. Published after the author’s death in 2006, the book is often uneven in its quality. The style is complex and allusive, as it is in most of Rieff’s later work, with theoretical terms he had developed over the course of his career. Many readers will find it helpful to familiarize themselves with Rieff’s first two books, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), before plunging into Charisma. Some knowledge of Max Weber and of the Bible will also come in handy, since Rieff does not make concessions to the intellectually unprepared. Rieff sees charisma, the special gift of authority, as deriving from participation in established faith rather than as an ecstatic quality of an individual in the Weberian sense. Rieff distinguishes two conceptions of social order. The “social contract,” the type of social order associated with most modern social theory, is human in origin and binding only because it is an agreement among members of a group that serves the interests of each member. The contract is the cultural model of the therapeutic Psychological Man, since it has no deeper foundation than the needs of each person and seeks to set each person free as much as possible to satisfy those needs. The “covenant,” by contrast, has its basis in belief in the divine. Rieff takes the Israel of the Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old Testament, as the exemplar of a society founded on covenant and as the vanguard of the inherited culture of Western civilization.

Philip Rieff was an American social theorist and professor of sociology. His third book, Fellow Teachers (1973), marked his disillusionment with the culture and teaching of his own day. He returned to the public scene shortly before his death with My Life Among the Deathworks (2006). Rieff was married to the writer Susan Sontag during the 1950’s and was the father of journalist David Rieff.

Charisma / rieff

137

One of the reasons that Rieff regards the social contract as inadequate is that he regards culture as a matter of direction through prohibition (“interdiction,” in his special terminology) rather than as a matter of liberation. Culture operates by limiting the freedom of the instincts through internalized prohibitions that are oriented toward some common end or understanding. A covenant, a social order derived from common belief, is therefore what Rieff calls a faith/guilt complex, since it requires both faith in some ultimate state of existence and guilt that directs human thoughts and actions away from those things outside the faith and toward those things that are inside the faith. Another reason that Rieff believes that the social contract is unstable is that people have a need for authority based in some creed. Therapy, as a process of liberation, releases people from adherence to an original authority, but this is replaced by a secondary authority, a charismatic individual such as Stalin, the successor of Lenin, whose false charisma can be linked to a self-defeating faith. Although Rieff credits Weber with bringing the term “charisma” into common theoretical usage, he believes that Weber misunderstood the nature of charisma and helped put it in service to the anticulture of therapy. This anticulture, according to Rieff, had its historical roots in Protestantism, which began the trend of internalizing faith. The subversion of culture reached its final stage with the nineteenth century criticism of religion. Weber was heir to nineteenth century post-Protestantism, leading him to take the idea of charisma out of its Christian setting, making charisma a matter of subjective recognition of purely personal and political qualities. Unconnected to anything outside of itself, Weber’s concept of charisma appeared as something indefinable that could become a label for any notable set of publicly recognized characteristics. Without the gift of grace located in a faith that prescribes prohibitions, relations between leaders and followers take place in a world without discipline and therefore without disciples. Between the charismatic, authority based on belief and renunciation, and the therapeutic, a social contract based on individual well-being, leadership is political theater, or gestures and poses that convey the outward appearance of authority but really emerge out of nihilism. Rieff sees Marshall McLuhan’s (19111980) slogan that “the medium is the message” as the expression of a nihilistic anticulture, in which all true content has disappeared so that there is nothing to be expressed except the means of expression itself. The therapeutic society, in Rieff’s view, cultivates the mystique of a break with the past and a break with all rules. It is a cult of transgression, and Rieff sees American society as constantly seeking transgressions. Without the prohibitions that Rieff calls interdictions, behavior becomes orgiastic. People are always trying to break out of any situations in which they find themselves and to plunge into new experiences, despite the costs these experiences often have for themselves and for others. Clearly, Rieff is gloomy about a society in which charisma, the divine gift of authority, has been replaced by therapy, the catering to the individual sense of well-being. Modern society is losing the ability to establish true relations of authority, and evil, the absence of moral prohibitions, is establishing its reign. Without moral prohibition, modern society has become a new form of barbarism, and it has become self-destructive in its urge to transgress all boundaries.

138

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Philip Rieff was a fascinating, if frequently irritating, maverick in social theory. Charisma may not be his most polished work, but it poses an important challenge to contemporary, secular social thought. Does a human culture need some kind of sacred foundation? Is it true that without God anything is possible, so that there is an inherent inclination for societies without divine order to shatter into individual self-seeking? The book also offers a valuable consideration of Max Weber’s idea of charisma, which often seems tautological in Weber’s original formulation, since one knows that someone has charisma because others recognize the quality, but charisma itself is defined as a quality that is recognized by others. Rieff’s utter rejection of modern therapeutic society may be open to question. It implies that at some time in the past there was a golden age of faith from which the present has degenerated. Golden ages do not usually look very shiny in the eye of historical inquiry, and the present does not look notably more horrific than most other eras. Rieff is also never completely clear whether the gift of grace might be possible in any social order other than the prenineteenth century Christian or whether charisma would necessarily be an illusion for those who do not find Christianity to represent objective truth. The rise of violent radical religious movements in recent years raises the issue of whether faith directing behavior through prohibition is necessarily a good thing, and seeing such movements may cause one to wonder if there may not be something positively virtuous about the individualistic, therapeutic orientation. These questions, though, may be more reasons for readers to wrestle with the arguments of this original thinker. Carl L. Bankston III

Review Sources International Herald Tribune, March 3, 2007, p. 10. The New York Sun, May 7, 2007, p. 11. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 4, 2007): 25. The Washington Times, April 1, 2007, p. B8.

139

CHEATING AT CANASTA Author: William Trevor (1928) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 232 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Short fiction Twelve new stories by the brilliant Irish master of the short-story form William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve new stories in Cheating at Canasta, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy. As in all great short stories, from those of Anton Chekhov to Raymond Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story’s close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force. A classic example is Trevor’s “The Dressmaker’s Child,” in which Cahill, a nineteen-year-old Irish man, takes a couple of young Spanish tourists, seeking a blessing on their marriage, to a statue that was once thought to shed miraculous tears. However, the miracle of the statue has since been discredited, and the Dublin man who told them about it was only lying to get them to buy him drinks. Cahill knows all this, but wants the fifty euros he charges to drive the couple to the statue. On the way back, a young female child, who has a habit of doing such things, runs out in the road and into his car. Cahill does not stop. When the child’s body is found in a quarry half a mile from her home, the mother, a dressmaker, who has borne the child out of wedlock, begins to stalk Cahill, hinting that she saw him hit the girl. Cahill imagines that he walked back to the site of the accident and carried the body of the child to the quarry, but he knows that it was the mother who has done this. The mother urges Cahill to leave his girlfriend and invites him to come home with her. Cahill, afraid, without knowing what he fears, cannot dismiss the connection between him and the dressmaker. When he tries to understand this, he is bewildered, but he knows that one day he will go to her. The story suggests that it is possible that death and guilt, as well as birth and love, can unite two people.

140

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Guilt, secrets, and obsession also dominate “Folie à Deux.” Wilby, a divorced man in his forties, is in Paris, indulging in his interest in rare stamps. At a café, he sees an employee who looks like a man named Anthony who Wilby knew as a boy, a man who disappeared years before and who everyone assumed was dead. Wilby recalls a significant event that has bound them together in guilt. Once the two boys, out of curiosity, put Anthony’s old dog Jerico in a small boat and pushed him out to sea, just to find out what he would do. They hear the dog howling and later see its body when it is washed up on shore. Although this does not seem to affect Wilby so much, it profoundly changes Anthony, who becomes quieter and more withdrawn. Later, when Wilby runs into Anthony again at school, he discovers that Anthony is even more remote and strange; Wilby does not befriend him again, even though he feels guilty about this. Like Cahill in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” Wilby’s guilt is muddled by bewilderment. When he goes back to the café and realizes that it is Anthony, Wilby knows that he will return to his own safe, tidy world, but this morning he likes himself less than he likes his childhood friend. The mystery of motivation and secrets of the past also energize “The Room.” A forty-seven-year-old woman named Katherine is engaged in an affair, perhaps in revenge for her husband’s involvement with a prostitute, who was murdered and for whom he was a suspect, nine years before. Katherine lied for her husband then, in partial repayment for her inability to have children, providing him with an alibi, although it seems quite clear that he did not kill the woman. When Katherine’s lover asks her why she loves her husband, she says that no one can answer that question and, in a statement central to Trevor’s success with the short story, asserts that most often, people do not know why they do things. For the nine years since the murder, she has not asked her husband about the girl, but she knows that her alibi for him has given her release from any restraint. The story ends with her knowledge that the best that love can do is not enough, for what holds people together is often guilt, debt, secrets. What makes people do what they do and the mysteries of what holds them together or tears them apart is also central to “Bravado.” Five young people are on the way home late at night—the leader, Manning, his cohorts Donovan and Kilroy, Aisling, his girlfriend, and a second girl named Francie. When Dalgety, a boy they scorn as a geek, urinates in someone’s yard, Manning, who always likes to play the big fellow, knocks him down and kicks him. The next morning the boy is discovered dead. Donovan and Kilroy are sent to jail for eleven years, getting off easy, for they did not know that Dalgety had a weak heart. Manning disappears, but writes to Aisling several years later, telling her that he has changed. Aisling finishes school and gets a job but never marries. At Dalgety’s grave, she begs for forgiveness, for she knows that the beating was done to impress her, to deserve her love, and watching it she had felt a momentary pleasure. She sometimes thinks that she will run away from the shadow of

William Trevor, author of thirteen novels and twelve collections of short stories, is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cheating at Canasta / trevor

141

bravado that hangs over her, but she is also now a different person and feels that she belongs to where the act took place. Guilt and the mysteries of the past have a wider compass in “Men of Ireland.” A fifty-two-year-old man, Donal Prunty, returns to the small village in Ireland where he was born after having spent several years in England “on the street.” Prunty goes to the parish priest, Father Meade, for whom he served Mass when he was a child, and tells him about hearing the old stories of priest abuse with other men—the “hidden Ireland.” When he accuses Father Meade of abusing him, the priest knows that he is lying and wonders if he is confusing him with another priest, his brain addled because of methylated spirits. Although Father Meade insists that no finger has ever been pointed at a priest in this village, still he goes to a drawer and takes money that he gives to him. After Prunty leaves, the priest does not blame him, because one cannot blame a hopeless case, and he feels guilty for not being able to reach him as a boy as his mother had asked of him. He knows that no honorable guilt and no generous intent have made him give Prunty the money, but rather that he has paid for silence. He accepts that the petty offense of Prunty is minor beside the betrayal by the Church and the shamming of Ireland’s priesthood. The inexplicable nature of love and human need dominate such stories as “An Afternoon,” in which a young girl meets a man in an Internet chat room and then arranges to meet him in person. She obviously needs the attention of the man and seems to trust him, although the reader is suspicious of his thoughts, discovering gradually that he has met young women like this before. He is solicitous of the girl, winning a necklace for her in a carnival-type game and giving her drinks. However, his plans, whatever they are, are foiled when his aunt, with whom he lives, drives up, telling him to remember that he is on probation. The girl goes home and hears her mother and the man she lives with having a fight. In face of this, the girl, even though she now knows that the man planned to take advantage of her, still thinks of him tenderly. She kisses the necklace he gave her and promises that she will always keep it with her. “The Children” begins with the perspective of Connie, a child of eleven, whose mother has just died. It then shifts to a woman named Teresa, forty-one, whose husband left her several years before. Two years later, Robert, Connie’s father, asks Teresa to marry him. Connie takes her mother’s books up on the roof to read them, although it is really pretense, for she is too young to understand them. She worries that all her mother’s books will be sold, so she wants to know what every single one of them is about. Five days away from the wedding, Teresa comes to see Robert, and they decide to cancel the wedding. Realizing that nothing is as tidy as they had thought, and that no rights cancel other rights, they both know that they have been hasty and careless. Robert accepts that time will gather up the ends and that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also. The title story opens with a man named Mallory, a middle-aged Englishman, at Harry’s Bar in Venice, famous as a hangout of Ernest Hemingway. It has been four years since he was last here with his wife, Julia, who is now afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. As a last request, she has made him promise to go back to Harry’s, but he is not sure if this trip is really meaningful. However, when he hears an American

142

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

man ask his younger wife why she is crying, he becomes interested in their quarrel. When they leave, he tells them the reason for his trip, feeling ashamed that he has come close to deploring this tiresome, futile journey. He recalls letting his wife win at canasta, even though she was not sure why she was happy when she won. As the couple leaves, the man smiles, hearing his wife’s voice say that shame is not bad, nor is humility, which is shame’s gift. These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor. Charles E. May

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 6. The Boston Globe, October 21, 2007, p. F4. The Christian Science Monitor, October 23, 2007, p. 13. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 17 (September 1, 2007): 887-888. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 78. Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2007, p. R2. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 21, 2007): 10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 24 (June 11, 2007): 34. USA Today, October 23, 2007, p. D7.

143

THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN Author: J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) Edited by Christopher Tolkien Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). Illustrated. 313 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: First Age of Middle-earth Locale: Mythical land of Beleriand The tragic story of Túrin Turambar and his sister, Niënor, who were doomed by a curse placed on their father, Húrin, by the Dark Enemy, Morgoth Principal characters: Húrin, lord of Dor-lómin, husband of Morwen and father of Túrin and Niënor Morwen, wife of Húrin and mother of Túrin and Niënor Túrin, a mighty warrior, son of Húrin Niënor, Túrin’s sister and wife Morgoth, also called “The Enemy,” a rebellious Vala, or great spirit Thingol, king of the Grey-elves, lord of Doriath, and foster father to Túrin Saeros, counselor to Thingol and enemy to Túrin Glaurung, the first of the dragons of Morgoth Orodreth, king of Nargothrond Mîm, a Petty-dwarf, dwelling on Amon Rûdh

Long before Bilbo Baggins and his cousin, Frodo, set out on their heroic journeys to break Sauron’s hold on Middle-earth, others fought to end evil’s reign personified by Morgoth, the Dark Lord. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin, a prequel to The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1955), focuses on a portion of Tolkien’s massive legendarium, which tells the story of the epic battle between good and evil that gripped Middle-earth for thousands of years. The saga of Túrin Turambar, Húrin’s son, appeared in abridged form in the Silmarillion (1977) and Unfinished Tales (1980), both compiled by Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son and literary executor, and published after the elder Tolkien’s death. Tolkien first began Túrin’s story in 1918 and worked on it off and on over the succeeding years but never organized it into publishable form. Christopher has restructured the tale from Tolkien’s notes, creating a coherent narrative about the trials and tribulations of Túrin and his sister Niënor, the doomed offspring of a cursed warrior. Set during the First Age of Middle-earth, sixty-five hundred years before the events in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings occurred, the story of The Children of Húrin takes place in the lost world of Beleriand. Morgoth, the fallen Vala, along with Sauron, his second lieutenant, wage war against Men and Elves for control of the country. Húrin, a descendant of the House of Hador, rules the human kingdom of Dor-

144

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

lómin. Fearful of Morgoth’s growing power, he joins forces with the Eldar, or Elves, in order to curb Morgoth’s rampages into human and elven territory. Eventually Morgoth captures Húrin and demands that he reveal the location of the hidden elven stronghold Gondolin. When Húrin mockingly refuses, Morgoth curses him and his descendants. While Húrin suffers in Morgoth’s dungeons, his wife, Morwen, pregnant with their second child, fears for the life of Túrin, their J. R. R. Tolkien was a distinguished firstborn. She sends him to be fostered by medieval scholar and world-renowned Thingol, king of the Grey-elves in Doriath in philologist who taught at Oxford the forests of Neldoreth. The Eldar tutor Túrin University for thirty-four years. He is in the ways of war, and he becomes a skilled best known as the creator of Middlecommander and formidable warrior. After he earth and the author of The Hobbit proves himself in battle, Thingol awards him (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), and the Silmarillion (1977), which have Húrin’s golden Dragon-Helm. Saeros, one of been translated into more than forty Thingol’s most trusted counselors, becomes languages. jealous of Túrin and attempts to undermine Túrin’s influence with Thingol. Túrin and Saeros fight one another in the forest, and Saeros is accidentally killed when he tries to run from Túrin. Because he fears punishment at the hands of Thingol, Túrin flees Doriath and joins a band of outlaws. His association with the bandits launches him on an eventful journey that includes hiding in the caves occupied by a deceitful Petty-dwarf named Mîm and traveling to the elvish realm of Nargothrond, where he becomes the commander of King Orodreth’s army. Finally Túrin makes his way to the forests of Brethil, where he takes the name Turambar, or “Master of Doom.” There he saves the land from Morgoth’s wily servant, Glaurung, a fire-breathing beast and father of all the dragons in Middle-earth. He also meets and marries Níniel, a beautiful woman suffering from amnesia, who is cared for by the people of Brethil after she is found naked in the woods. Neither Túrin or Níniel suspect that their passion for one another will lead to their deaths and the fulfillment of Morgoth’s curse. Tolkien, an Oxford don and medievalist, was a master mythmaker who often drew on various Scandinavian legends and folktales to weave his spellbinding stories. The events depicted in The Children of Húrin are modeled on the Finnish epic poem, the Kalevala, and also echo Greek tragedy. Túrin and Kullervo, the protagonist of the poem, are taciturn, doleful antiheroes who are courageous, rash, and blinded by pride. Like Oedipus, they unknowingly commit incest, in this case with their sisters, who then commit suicide by drowning themselves in a river. The men kill themselves by falling on their swords after discovering the truth about the identity of their wives. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will also recognize similarities between Túrin and another Tolkien creation, Boromir, a member of the original Fellowship of the Ring.

The Children of Húrin / tolkien

145

Both are skilled warriors who are deeply committed to defending their people against the dark powers that threaten to overtake their beloved homelands. Their passionate commitment, however, is flawed by hubris, which proves to be their undoing. Similar to the elegiac language of the Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin is told in an archaic style that transports readers to a fairy-tale world of magic and adventure. Tolkien’s love of philology is as legendary as the mythic stories he created, and he actually wrote his tales around the languages he invented. The Sindarin of the Elves, Black Speech of the Orcs, and Khuzdul of the Dwarves had their origins in the ancient oral tales of Finland and Old England. Tongue-twisters such as Barad Eithel (a fortress of the Elves), Eldalië (a variant of “Eldar” for Elven-folk), Lúthien (daughter of Thingol and Melian), and Tumladen (a valley west of Beleriand) enhance the romance and otherworldliness of the tales but can also be a stumbling block for those who are new to Tolkien’s work. Fortunately Christopher has included a comprehensive glossary that helps the uninitiated keep track of the foreign-sounding characters and locations, as well as a pronunciation guide that gives readers an idea of the beautiful rhythmic cadences of the speech of Tolkien’s characters. Tolkien’s rich text is enhanced by Alan Lee’s evocative color and black-and-white illustrations. Lee has illustrated other Tolkien projects, including The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook (2005) and various editions of The Lord of the Rings. He is perhaps best known, however, as the Oscar-winning conceptual designer for director Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. In contrast to the meticulous detail that is required for cinematic design, Lee’s illustrations for The Children of Húrin are more suggestive than literal and are meant to spark the reader’s imagination. Color plates of Húrin sitting in a stone chair, staring at an unidentified horror in Morgoth’s fortress; elven smiths shaping Túrin’s sword, Gurthang, in a white-hot forge in the underground, stalactite-roofed smithy of Nargothrond; and the bleak image of Túrin falling on his sword atop rocky cliffs by the roaring waters of Cabed-en-Aras convey the mystery, magic, and tragedy of the narrative. Other illustrations, however, seem to be more of a gloss than a direct commentary on the text. The image of a river of flame blighting a dark landscape placed opposite a passage about Glaurung’s fiery destruction of the forest by Nargothrond is more impressionistic than graphic, leaving it to the reader to make the connection between the picture and the narrative. A listing of what each plate is depicting would have been helpful. New readers of Tolkien’s work, as well as those who have read only The Lord of the Rings, will especially appreciate Christopher’s preface and introduction. He gives a brief history of how his father came to write the saga of Túrin and Niënor, places the story within the larger context of Middle-earth history, and shows the impact the events of the First Age had on the later era of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and Aragorn. A fold-out map of Beleriand at the back of the book offers an opportunity to plot Túrin’s odyssey as one reads the story. In addition to the above-mentioned glossary of names and the map, helpful appendixes include easy-to-follow genealogical charts of the human descendants of the House of Beor and the elvish princes of the Noldor. A section entitled “The Evolution of the Great Tales” is a brief but detailed study written by Christopher on the relationship between the finished novel and the various writings

146

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

from which it was derived. His comments provide a fascinating glimpse into his father’s fecund imagination and creative process. Finally, “The Composition of the Text” is Christopher’s account of how he structured the narrative from his father’s scattered notes, as well as his rationale for making certain editorial decisions. The publication of one more posthumous Tolkien work raises some intriguing questions concerning the author’s original intent. For example, why did Tolkien put the novel aside? Was he so dissatisfied with it that he deemed it unworthy of publication? Sensitive to criticism that his restorations of previously unpublished works reflected more of his vision than his father’s, the younger Tolkien admits in “The Composition of the Text” that he may have allowed himself “more editorial freedom than was necessary” when he compiled previous editions. As he pulled together the materials for The Children of Húrin, however, he claims that he “attempted in this book, after long study of the manuscripts, to form a text that provides a continuous narrative from start to finish without the introduction of any elements that are not authentic in conception.” Casual readers will take him at his word, but no doubt scholars will want to test his assertion. The Children of Húrin demands more from readers than either The Hobbit, frequently classified as a children’s book, or The Lord of the Rings, popular among teenagers and young adults. Tragedy trumps heroism, evil overtakes good, and fate plays bitter tricks on the unfortunate Túrin and Niënor. In contrast to Tolkien’s betterknown works that exude an air of innocence, The Children of Húrin portrays harsh realities, including incest and murder, which make it a more appropriate read for adults than children. Yet in spite of the gloomy plot and unhappy ending, Tolkien aficionados will appreciate this look back to the era that laid the foundation for Frodo and Sam’s heroic mission to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom— a mission that eventually brings peace to Middle-earth. Pegge Bochynski

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, nos. 931/932 (April 27, 2007): 142. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 13 (July 1, 2007): 8. The New York Times 156 (April 14, 2007): B8. The Washington Post, April 22, 2007, p. BW07.

147

CHRISTINE FALLS Author: Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville, 1945) Publisher: Henry Holt (New York). 340 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1950’s Locale: Dublin; Boston While investigating the suspicious death of an unwed mother and the disappearance of her infant, pathologist and amateur sleuth Dr. Garret Quirke discovers two converging conspiracies, one that involves the Roman Catholic Church and the other that involves members of his own family Principal characters: Dr. Garret Quirke, an emotionally isolated pathologist at Dublin’s Holy Family Hospital Christine Falls, a young unwed mother who died during childbirth Delia Quirke, Quirke’s wife, who died during childbirth Sarah Griffin, Quirke’s sister-in-law, with whom he is in love Mal Griffin, Quirke’s adopted brother Phoebe Griffin, Quirke’s much-loved niece Judge Garret Griffin, highly respected family patriarch who adopted Quirke Claire Stafford, a young Boston woman who cares for Falls’s infant girl Andy Stafford, her pathological petty criminal husband

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for Irish author John Banville. In addition to receiving high critical acclaim for his complex metaphors and intricate literary allusions, Banville, who has been compared to such illustrious Irish authors as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, is highly regarded for his experimental prose style that oftentimes presents a series of interwoven narratives to unravel an intricate plot instead of the more traditional chronological linear form. For instance, his The Sea (2005), which deals with an aging man’s attempt to forget his present unpleasant circumstances by escaping into the past, simultaneously and seamlessly interweaves the protagonist Max’s childhood, midlife, and old age. In Christine Falls, Banville successfully tries his hand at murder and similarly manages to interweave his characters’ past behavior and the subsequent problems that have presently come to fruition. The author plans future noir fiction titles featuring Dr. Garret Quirke under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, a name particularly appropriate for an author of noir fiction. Noir fiction has increased dramatically in Ireland thanks to the country’s changing social landscape since joining the European Union. Referred to as the Celtic Tiger,

148

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Ireland’s new prosperity accompanies a correlating increase in crime and violence, and this intersection of wealth, crime, and subsequent fear has given rise to a new literary genre called Irish noir, a blending of American-style hard-boiled mystery crime fiction from the early twentieth century school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but set within twenty-first century Irish locales such as dark and shadowy Dublin. (The Gaelic dubh linn means “dark pool.”) Set in the dreary Roman Catholic Dublin of the 1950’s, Christine Falls, a classic hardboiled detective novel, is, as the title suggests, a tale of a fallen women who dies from complications after giving birth to an illegitimate child and ends up in the morgue of antihero pathologist Garret Quirke. Quirke, whose name when sounded gives insight into the physician’s basic personality, examines Christine Falls’s corpse at the ironically named Holy Family Hospital, but before he can determine the cause of her death, he passes out drunk and wakes to find that the young woman’s body has disappeared. Even more disturbing, Quirke remembers the night before seeing his adopted brother Mal Griffin, a popular obstetrician, altering the death certificate of Falls, who used to work in the Griffin household. After he manages to reclaim the corpse, Quirke learns that the death resulted from complications associated with childbirth, instead of Mal’s claim of a pulmonary embolism. He also wonders what has happened to the unwed mother’s baby. Readers should keep in mind that while the idea of a woman giving birth out of wedlock today brings nothing more than a shrug in many social circles, in 1950’s Ireland giving birth to an illegitimate baby was considered deplorable and resulted in condemnation by the Church and the social ostracizing of both mother and child. At this point, Quirke, who at 6 feet 5 inches stands very tall and thin among Dublin’s dark denizens, takes on the role of sleuth and begins investigating the mysterious life of Falls. An orphan himself, Quirke was adopted by the prestigious Judge Garret Griffin and feels a personal need to find Falls’s baby and to discover the identity of the child’s father. In this attempt, he investigates the dark underlayers of the city, its pubs and brothels and less-than-savory neighborhoods, where he hopes to gain the assurance that her child is still alive. McGonagle’s pub produces a particularly vile line of characters—drunken, toothless, and unwashed—but who are more than willing to provide information for the right price and, in a particularly Kafkaesque scene, to serve up a brutal beating when Quirke gets too close to the truth, which he figures must involve a man of authority and great power who was the lover of Falls and the father of her baby. Banville fits the mystery of the brooding Quirke’s background between the layers of mystery surrounding the death of Christine Falls. Almost twenty years earlier, he lost his wife, Delia, to a difficult childbirth, and his grief has led him to alcohol abuse

Honored with the Man Booker Prize for The Sea (2005), John Banville is one of Ireland’s best living writers. His awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his historical novel Doctor Copernicus (1976), the Guinness Peat Aviation Award for The Book of Evidence (1989), and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year for The Sea.

Christine Falls / black

149

and a lingering sense of despair and isolation. Although this antihero initially seems distasteful—drinking to inebriation and sleeping it off in the basement morgue, for starters—readers soon come to feel sorry for Quirke and ultimately, while not particularly liking him, come to accept him. After all, Quirke drinks not only to forget his dead wife but also to forget the despairing love he feels for her sister Sarah, who is married to his adopted brother Mal. He also drinks to forget his terrifying childhood in Carricklea Industrial School, where he was abused at the hands of the Christian Brothers. At the end, readers feel even more sympathy for Quirke when he learns that the lovely young woman Phoebe, whom he thought was his niece, is in fact his daughter kept from him by Sarah and his brother after the death of his wife. While Quirke is digging away for clues in Dublin, in Boston a young woman named Claire Stafford and her petty criminal, sometimes-chauffeur husband, Andy, have taken into their care Falls’s baby girl, who was brought from Ireland by a nurse after the death of her mother. In America, the Church will oversee the child’s upbringing as a proper Roman Catholic and will subsequently step in at the appropriate moment in the future to ensure that the child, in turn, will serve the needs of the Church. However, Andy is narcissistic, selfish, and violently jealous of the baby girl who has won the heart of his wife. In a fit of rage, he kills the baby and shatters the remaining mental health of his wife, who had, ironically, been covering up Andy’s sterility by claiming that she was infertile. Ultimately, Quirke’s relentless digging leads him in a circle back to his own family and the ultimate discovery of the father of Falls’s child. While he had suspected his adopted brother Mal was having an affair with Falls, in time he learns that Mal is covering for their own father, Garret Griffin. This discovery converges with another conspiracy involving the transatlantic smuggling by the Catholic Church of the babies of unwed Irish mothers to Boston orphanages like St. Mary’s, which is run by the stern but obsequious Sister Stephanus and the highly unpalatable Father Harkins. At times, the characters in Christine Falls seem more like cardboard cutouts than flesh-and-blood men and women, but then, the noir genre is concerned more with plot and setting than with character development. Indeed, the characters must, to some extent, be formulaic if they are to fit within the genre’s parameters, which call for emotionally detached tough guys and cold and elusive femme fatales. In this regard, Quirke is the quintessential hard-boiled noir detective. Like other noir protagonists, despite his physical ungainliness, his deep propensity for drink, and his love of brooding and emotional isolation, women find Quirke very attractive. His first name is particularly sinister when one considers that a garrote is a weapon used to execute by strangulation. Like Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Quirke is an orphan taken into a well-to-do household, loved by the father, at odds with the brother, in love with an unattainable woman, and forced to settle instead for the lesser-loved sister-in-law. He also has the air of the traditional literary Byronic hero: depressed, dark, and brooding for the wrong woman. He even sports a limp, like Lord Byron, after a beating from two Dublin hoodlums. Noir fiction also needs an unattainable femme fatale. Sarah, the sister of Quirke’s late wife, for whom Quirke carries an everlasting torch, fits this bill perfectly. In one

150

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

particular scene near the end of the novel, Sarah appears pale and trembling in the foggy snow-clad mountain dreamscape and tells him that for years she has lied to him. His niece Phoebe is actually his own daughter, who was in effect kidnapped by Sarah and Mal after his wife died. This setting is particularly apropos for a noir novel. Indeed, proper setting remains essential to the noir genre. The dark Dublin underworld settings are particularly appropriate, as most of the novel’s action occurs after midnight in shadowy rooms, dingy pubs, foggy waterways, shadowy doorways in run-down, ill-lit neighborhoods, and coal-black lakes under cold, gray skies. One might consider the novel’s opening scene: What could be darker than a morgue after midnight? Thematically, Banville’s novels deal with deep personal loss, destructive love, and the excruciating psychic pain that accompanies freedom. Quirke has suffered not only the loss of his wife but also the loss of her sister Sarah, with whom he has remained in love for more than twenty years. Sarah’s marriage to his brother Mal keeps him in a constant state of emotional limbo and ongoing isolation, but the blinding love he feels for Sarah is indeed destructive. In fact, he cannot see the real woman beneath her perfect ghostly exterior. After all, despite her protestations of love and her desire to have something of him, she kidnapped his child and kept Phoebe for her own, leaving Quirke to lonely desperation. It has been said that “the truth shall set you free,” and in this regard Banville masterfully creates the emotional turmoil that Quirke endures in getting to the bottom of the Christine Falls case, both in exposing the Catholic Church’s involvement in what can rightfully be called a baby-smuggling ring and in bringing closure to years of personal, misplaced misery. One critic praised the author as an exceptionally talented writer with a most unusual imagination and the uncommon ability to sustain the reader’s interest, and one is inclined to agree. M. Casey Diana

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 102-105. Entertainment Weekly, no. 924 (March 9, 2007): 112. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 99-100. The New York Times 156 (March 1, 2007): E1.

151

THE CIGARETTE CENTURY The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America Author: Allan M. Brandt (1953) Publisher: Basic Books (New York). 600 pp. $36.00 Type of work: History Time: 1560-2006, but mostly focusing on the twentieth century Locale: The United States This history of cigarettes examines the growth of a rogue industry that helped define important cultural changes in the United States even as it spreads disease and death Allan M. Brandt, professor of the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School, spent twenty years working on The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America, largely drawing on tobacco industry internal documents that have become available on the Internet. The cigarette companies have managed to confuse the American people about the hazards of cigarettes for much of the twentieth century, and Brandt’s history clarifies much of what has been going on. His study can be dry and technical in places, but it benefits from the intrigues of a thoroughly wily and unethical industry that often manages to turn challenges to its advantage. Brandt does not show much interest in pursuing the case for cigarettes, such as the pleasures they might bring, but readers can understand his angle once they know more about the way that manufacturers have manipulated the meaning of cigarettes throughout the twentieth century. Aside from undermining its propaganda, Brandt’s study also explores the way the industry has had a broad impact on American culture, corporate practices, regulatory policies, and law, in some ways anticipating major shifts in modern life, what Brandt calls “the historical interplay of culture, biology, and disease.” Brandt begins his book by discussing America’s long relationship with tobacco that goes back to Native American use predating the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Once colonization began, Europeans quickly adopted the habit of pipe or cigar smoking, so that the crop of the New World eventually had worldwide impact. King James I wrote one of the earliest warning treatises against tobacco, yet demand continued to grow. By the nineteenth century, cigarettes were still a marginal curiosity compared to cigars or chewing or pipe tobacco, but industry pioneer James Buchanan Duke figured out how to profit from mass-produced cigarettes using the Bonsack machine. Duke also helped invent modern advertising techniques by including collectors’ cards in each pack. By 1887, he had figured out how to buy out American competitors to keep monopoly control over his growing industry, and he did the same thing in Europe. Even though he was enormously successful, Duke never fully understood

152

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the lucrative potential of cigarettes, since he continued to heavily invest in other tobacco products, but his rapaciously effective business techniques set the standard for the industry in the century following. When the U.S. government tried to break up Duke’s monopoly with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the government, as Brandt puts it, “merely put an oligopoly in its place,” consisting of the American Tobacco Company, R. J. Reynolds, and others. By the twentieth century, various historical and cultural changes boosted American interest in cigarettes in ways that the tobacco companies were happy to capitalize on. For instance, during the two world wars, people saw cigarettes as one way to give soldiers a pleasant break on the battlefield, with the dangers of getting killed dwarfing any health concerns. Women, meanwhile, associated cigarette smoking with women’s liberation. Also, young people related cigarette consumption to adult status, so smoking started to reach record levels in the United States by the 1930’s and 1940’s. Through the use of advertising and good product placement in movies, the cigarette industry managed to get people to associate smoking with glamour, beauty, freedom, leisure, and modernity. Since the negative effects of usage often take about twenty years to manifest in a smoker, it was not until the 1950’s that medical studies came out that associated cigarettes with cancer. In the meantime, cigarette manufacturers promoted brand awareness, since there were few real differences between cigarette brands. By the late 1940’s, scientists determined that lung cancer had vastly increased in accordance with the number of smokers. Using epidemiological studies, they began to establish a clear link between smoking and cancer, but it was difficult to prove the connection using laboratory techniques since such techniques would entail keeping humans in controlled conditions for much of their lives. Scientists also found increased cancer rates for mice exposed to smoke. When the scientific studies were translated to a Reader’s Digest article entitled “Cancer by the Carton,” the tobacco industry had to react, and it did so by engineering a brilliant public relations campaign. The industry allayed public anxieties about smoking hazards by including many doctors in advertisements. Also, by employing the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, tobacco executives started a “collaborative research entity,” the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which would sponsor its own scientific research in order to give the appearance of responding responsibly to the health threat that their product imposed. By hiring noted biologist Clarence Cook Little to head the TIRC, the tobacco industry found a public spokesman-scientist who would spend much of the rest of his career casting doubt on the supposed health risks of cigarettes. Little believed that the major cause of cancer was genetic, and because of the limitations of epidemiological research techniques, he could legitimately cast doubt on these studies, although naturally his credibility diminished over time as other medical studies found further links to lung cancer. Thus, while the industry could not exactly Allan M. Brandt is a professor of the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has also written No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (1985).

The Cigarette Century / brandt

153

deny the scientific research, it could manufacture scientific controversy, creating enough doubt in the smokers’ minds to keep them smoking, an activity helped along by addiction to nicotine. By the early 1960’s, Surgeon General Luther Terry set up an Advisory Committee with the express purpose of releasing a consensus report establishing a definitive causal link between cigarettes and lung disease. When the report came out in 1964, the tobacco companies responded by promoting new filtered cigarettes, giving the illusion of cleaner smoke. When the U.S. Congress started looking into some sort of regulatory control over the cigarette industry, the tobacco lobbyists proved very effective in watering down any legislation. Thanks to their influence, the warning on cigarette packaging became “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” Since the use of the word “may” cast any health concerns in doubt, the warning was not so effective, and the industry ultimately benefited later when the warnings helped with their defense in court. By 1966, as Brandt says, “cigarette sales had reached all time highs,” and smoking would decline in the United States from that point on, although predictions that the industry would fold under scientific or government pressure proved premature. In fact, tobacco companies frequently found ways to turn legislation to their advantage. When people called for the end of television advertising for cigarettes in 1969, the companies complied when they realized that the antismoking public service messages would stop as well. Companies could continue to advertise in magazines and other media. Finally, by the 1970’s, anticigarette forces found some traction in persuading people to prevent passive smoke from harming nonsmokers. When scientific studies found that flight attendants, for instance, could get lung disease from secondhand smoke, the American public started supporting smoke-free public spaces. As the proportion of smokers dropped below 50 percent, Brandt says, “the very notion of smoking as a normative behavior was now in decline.” Smoking was increasingly eliminated from restaurants, theaters, and major forms of public transportation. While the industry’s public relations managed to keep smoking largely a matter of individual responsibility and risk, the rights of nonsmokers became increasingly important to the public. As a result of new antismoking legislation, the meaning of cigarettes became more negative. Toward the end of the century, the tobacco industry still prided itself on not giving away a penny in any court cases, but several dramatic developments eventually changed that. One lawyer, Marc Edell, tried at length to win a product liability suit for Rose Cipollone, a victim of lung disease whose history of smoking showed that she switched brands depending on the health claims of the brands of the time. Edell was not successful, but his attempt paved the way for future legal victories. Moreover, legal challenges to the tobacco industry brought to light secret cigarette company memorandums and other files that showed the extent to which the industry knew about the health concerns of its product and its strategies to circumvent any attempts to block the industry. Simply by walking out of his workplace with papers stashed on his person, Merrell Williams stole a massive cache of secret files from a law firm working for the industry. When the cigarette companies attempted to have him ar-

154

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

rested for theft, the judge agreed that the information was too important and should be disclosed. This information hurt the companies’ defense, in which they claimed that they lacked information about the harmfulness or addictiveness of their product. As a result of these findings, people started to win claims against the tobacco industry in the 1990’s. While Brandt does include interesting stories about people standing up to the combined legal might of the industry, he could have done more to detail their heroism. For instance, Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist, was fired by Brown and Williamson’s research division of the tobacco industry. When he sought to go public with what he knew about industry manipulation of nicotine levels in cigarettes, the tobacco companies sent him death threats. His dramatic story eventually was turned into a popular movie called The Insider (1999), even though both the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) refused at first to release the news stories because of the financial risk of the tobacco industry’s reprisals. Brandt neatly itemizes how cigarette advertising has changed now that the hazards are better known. For one thing, marketing copy has largely disappeared, and images predominate, especially in the case of the cartoon Camel campaign and the Marlboro cowboy. By associating cigarettes with autonomy and the Wild West, the Marlboro brand has endured without making any verbal claims at all. In the case of the Camel campaign, while the industry denied it, the urbane Joe Camel was clearly oriented toward children to help offset the disadvantages of an aging clientele. When surveys showed that children knew Joe Camel almost as well as Mickey Mouse, public outcries finally obliged R. J. Reynolds to shut down the campaign. By 1994, seven tobacco executives testified before a Congress subcommittee that, in Brandt’s words, “tobacco was not addictive and that their companies had taken no action to manipulate the levels of nicotine in cigarettes.” A public relations disaster, the testimony exposed how much the industry was still relying on outdated defensive tactics. Within a year, all of the chief executive officers had been replaced, but the industry still enjoyed robust sales well into the twenty-first century. As U.S. smoking consumption declined, the industry turned its marketing attention to exporting the cigarettes to Third World markets. In the early twenty-first century, there are more cigarettes sold across the world than ever, which Brandt finds will lead to a massive international pandemic. Conveniently for the advertisers, developing countries can respond to various advertising tactics used in the United States long ago. Moreover, the U.S. government often defends the industry’s interest in free trade. While Brandt thoroughly maps out the history of the cigarette industry, more remains to be written about the personal battles with the industry. As a history of medicine professor at Harvard University, Brandt tends to look at the larger forces at work, but often the smaller, more individual acts of resistance betray the ferocity with which the industry will protect its interests. For instance, in his epilogue, Brandt mentions how he testified in a trial against the tobacco conglomerate. When he spoke to the main attorney for the tobacco litigation team, she asked him if he knew what he was getting himself involved in. He told her that he “realized that the industry lawyers would try to make [him] look as bad as possible.” She replied, “That’s not it. They

The Cigarette Century / brandt

155

want to destroy you and leave you in a pool of blood.” With many such examples, Brandt paints a compelling portrait of an industry that still fiercely wants to protect its profits regardless of the many people who have or will die from tobacco-related illnesses. Roy C. Flannagan

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 47. The Economist 382 (March 17, 2007): 89. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 202. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 6, 2007): 10. Science 316 (May 4, 2007): 692-693. The Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2007, pp. 7-9. The Washington Post, March 18, 2007, p. BW03.

156

CIRCLING MY MOTHER A Memoir Author: Mary Gordon (1949) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 254 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1908-2002 Locale: New York City Gordon uncovers the layers of her mother’s complex person and story and the struggle of the writer to find her mother’s heart and soul beneath a multitude of surfacelevel details Mary Gordon has since 1978 published eight works of fiction. Circling My Mother is her second memoir. Her first, The Shadow Man (1996), chronicled her father, David Gordon’s, life story. He had died when she was seven years old. In researching and writing that book, Gordon found and came to terms with a father different, in negative ways, from the one she had loved deeply. Gordon’s mother, Anna Gordon, the subject of Circling My Mother, died in 2002 at the age of ninety-four. Mary Gordon writes, “I write about her because I am a writer and it’s the only way that I can mourn her.” For ten years before her death, Anna suffered from dementia and lived in a nursing home. In a sense, then, Gordon lost her mother ten years earlier than her final day. In reading this memoir, one gets a sense that Gordon felt that she never understood her subject and that as she writes she is not only mourning her mother but also searching for an understanding of and intimacy with her mother that eluded her all her life. The reader interacts with Anna in the way that the writer, in the first and last chapters, perceives the art of French Impressionist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). In the first chapter, Gordon intertwines her insights into Bonnard’s paintings and her mother at ninety. Her mother is physically, emotionally, and mentally almost totally lost. Leaving a Bonnard exhibit to visit her mother at the nursing home, Gordon writes that she leaves behind what in art sustains her: the knowledge that “a fully realized painterly vision . . . testifies in its fullness to the goodness of life.” After her mother dies, Gordon sets herself the task of collecting the pieces of Anna’s life into her own presentation of her mother that will, the writer hopes, show that her life, despite Gordon’s inability to see it while her mother lived, was full and good. At the book’s conclusion, as she writes about Bonnard’s art and her mother’s death, Gordon says: “I am trying to speak of my love for my mother. Of her charm.” Through writing Circling My Mother, making her mother “become my words,” Mary Gordon, a true artist, creates the intimacy with her mother’s full and good life, for herself and for the reader. Gordon, as her title announces, employs a nonlinear structure that lacks the chronological structure more common for a memoir. She circles her mother as if she might

Circling My Mother / gordon

157

by this technique capture her mother and hold her close. Within each chapter, segments of prose are visually separated by white space, like the disparate pieces of narrative Gordon compiles from facts and images, story after story, some discovered by accident, some researched, some pulled from memory, some uttered by her mother in her drunken rages. Although there is some sense of chronology as a chapter topic is developed, connections between these segments are minimal. Gordon’s Mary Gordon has published eight relationship with her mother had no coherent works of fiction and a memoir, The flow; neither does a page of narrative. Shadow Man (1996). Among her Between the first and last chapters of her literary awards are the Story Prize, a book, in which she intertwines Bonnard’s art Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and the final years of her mother’s life, Gordon and a 1997 O. Henry Award. chooses to see her mother in relationships grouped by categories. Thus, five chapters focus on her mother’s employers, sisters, friends, church, and husband. The subjects of these five chapters are clearly named in grammatically parallel titles: for example, “My Mother and Her Bosses” and “My Mother and Her Sisters.” However, the titles of the chapters in which Gordon looks at her own relationship with her mother during Gordon’s childhood—“My Mother: Words and Music, “My Mother and the Great World,” “My Mother’s Body”—omit a word that connects mother and daughter. In the first of the relationship chapters, “My Mother and Her Bosses,” the reader learns that Anna Gordon worked in an office when she was a single woman, a wife and mother, and, after her husband’s death, a single parent, most of the time as a secretary in one lawyer’s office. She did not marry until she was thirty-nine years old; she did not bear a child until she was forty-one, and was soon widowed. She was a working woman. As seen by her young daughter, her mother put working for this employer as greater in importance than her child. At the same time, the child took pride in the fact that her mother, unlike her friends’ mothers, drove herself to work every day. Struggling to understand her mother’s devotion to and pride in her employment, Gordon uses the power of imagery that is her gift as a writer to probe her childhood feelings. Her friends’ lives had a maternal comfort that Gordon’s life lacked, but her life had a radiance theirs lacked. Her mother, dressed smartly for work, wearing no apron, having money of her own in her pocketbook, communicated an image of work as a “cool stone, the same cool stone of the monarch’s ring . . . hidden from light in a box lined with silk or velvet.” Though Gordon puts these words in quotes, “You see, you must see, all of you, my worth in the great world,” they are not words her mother actually spoke, but rather the meaning the child felt whenever her mother said “my boss.”

158

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Gordon is as cruelly tough as she is lyrically rich as a writer; what she writes is deadly honest, as two scenes from this chapter testify. First, she confesses a selfish act of adolescent righteousness, which, it turns out, almost caused her mother to be fired from her long-time employment. Gordon feels ashamed as she recognized clearly that her mother’s work provided what sustained both mother and daughter. In the same section, Gordon narrates a story in which her mother brought shame to the writer. Anna, in her seventies, continued to work but now suffered from alcoholism. Gordon drove her mother to the home of her original employer’s son, who was hosting a memorial service for his dead child. In the time before the service, Anna became drunk and verbally abused her employer for not having a Catholic priest for the service. Leaving in a state of haughty righteousness, she tripped and crashed to the ground, helpless to get up but still venting her anger at the host. Finally, she had to be carried to Gordon’s car. A few years later, her mother retired, and, Gordon writes, no one to whom her original employer had said what a “treasure” she was “would recognize the woman she had become.” The gem of the monarch seemed mere dust. Gordon places her mother’s employer first among her relationships perhaps because the lawyer she admired as well as worked for affirmed her abilities and never in any way abused her. In the next section, “My Mother and Her Sisters,” other more painful relationships in Anna Gordon’s life come to light. Her father was an Italian immigrant, her mother an Irish mother, both Catholic. She had four brothers and four sisters. Of these immediate family members, only her mother gave her affirming love. Until she married, because her two older brothers took no responsibility for their family, Anna gave her entire paycheck to her family, paying off the mortgage on the family home, supporting her siblings’ two college educations and two nursing school educations. She did all this despite her infirmity, a leg crippled by polio when she was three. The portraits the writer draws of the Gagliano family members show them as ungrateful, unkind—more than that, mean. In her alcoholic state, Anna let out some of this pain. When the last of Anna’s four sisters dies before her, Gordon almost cheers: “My mother is still alive—in a stupor in her nursing home but not a scandal like her sister. And at least alive. Victorious in that. . . . I have kept her alive; my love, my care, has been stronger than their darkness.” The book, too, keeps the mother alive. Anna Gordon’s relationships with single-women friends were her best relationships. She kept these friendships during her short marriage to a disappointing husband and continued them after his death, often in company with her young daughter. In observing her mother’s women friends, the writer discerned that they “enjoyed one another,” “talked about the world . . . outside their families,” and “made for each other a place where they could find themselves and become larger than what they were born into.” Together they traveled, went to the theater, and treated themselves to quality restaurant meals. Gordon, always brought along, felt their love for her. She valued their helping her find the world of literature, recognizing her intellectual gifts, and encouraging her to pursue a college education. Most of all, they taught her the riches of women friends. It was with some of these friends that Anna began attending weekend Catholic retreats for single working women. The priests her mother became friends with on these

Circling My Mother / gordon

159

retreats, two in particular, became significant parts of her, albeit with the attitude about priests common among Catholic women of her time: “My mother loved Father Bertrand, but she adored Father Dermot.” Gordon’s recounting of her mother’s interaction with these priests reveals much about the Catholic single woman’s and widow’s ability to develop beyond society’s and their own expectations of their spiritual and intellectual potential. In a time when Catholics named three vocations in hierarchical order—religious life, marriage, and, last and least, single life—Anna and her friends, not limited to the Catholic parish life that in its own way sustained married women at home raising children and providing for their husbands, lived fully. Her mother, Gordon writes, “did not have conversations; to her they were a ‘waste’ of time.” The pain in Gordon’s relationship with her mother came from her mother’s disinterest in more than surface-level conversation with her. She lived with her mother when she was a child, she sang with her mother then and right up until her mother’s dementia broke this connection between them, and she traveled with her mother to Ireland, Italy, and France. She was intimate with her mother’s physical beauty and her crippled body. In all this time, Gordon experienced no real intimacy. This memoir has a double subject, a double purpose, the woman Gordon writes about and Gordon herself. Circling My Mother is a conversation, one that Gordon has about her mother with herself. She begins the text using the word “circling” in a way that means looking at but keeping a distance while trying to capture. Somewhere within the text, the circle turns into a spiral that moves the writer closer to the deeper meaning of her mother’s story. Without this circle turned spiral narrative, Gordon would perhaps truly have lost both her mother and some crucial self-understanding. What emerges in the end product is not just the details, beautiful and ugly, of Anna Gordon’s life, but a masterpiece, a portrait of a woman of great worth, for the reader and for the writer. Francine A. Dempsey

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 4. Commonweal 134, no. 19 (November 9, 2007): 27-29. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 590-591. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 26, 2007): 1-10. The New Yorker 83, no. 26 (September 3, 2007): 133. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 49.

160

THE COLDEST WINTER America and the Korean War Author: David Halberstam (1964-2007) Publisher: Hyperion (New York). 719 pp. $35.00 Type of Work: History Time: 1950-1953 Locale: Korea and the United States Told from the perspectives of common soldiers, junior officers, commanders, and the leaders responsible for thrusting the country into its first “limited war,” this final effort by America’s premier journalist sheds light on acts of valor and hardships faced by those caught up in the least-known of America’s twentieth century armed conflicts Principal personages: Harry S. Truman, thirty-third president of the United States, 1945-1953 Douglas MacArthur, commander of the U.N. forces in Korea, 1950-1951 Matthew Ridgway, general who succeeded MacArthur after Truman fired him Dean Acheson, Truman’s wartime secretary of state Paul McGee, platoon leader who fought at Chipyongni Paul Freeman, colonel whose regiment defended Chipyongni

“No one wanted to hear about the war when they had first come home, and so they never talked about it, not to their families or to their oldest friends. Or when they did, no one understood—or, worse, wanted to understand.” These lines could have easily been written about the Vietnam or Iraq Wars. Indeed, David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War points out parallels among the three wars and warns against basing foreign policy decisions on rigid ideological truisms. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur’s military staff distorted intelligence reports to the nation’s great detriment; later, in the case of claims that the Tonkin Gulf incident off the coast of North Vietnam was unprovoked or that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the culprits were high-level civilians. Soldiers stationed in Korea thought that the country smelled like human excrement, had little faith in the native “friendlies,” and commonly called them “gooks” (an ethnic slur first used during the Philippine-American War, the United States’ first imperialistic venture in Asia). Colonel Paul Freeman confided to his wife that “to ‘liberate’ South Korea we’re destroying it and its people” and that “all Koreans hate us. Everyone here is an enemy. We can’t trust anyone.” In a 2007 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, cartoonist David Rees has one character say, “I still get pissed thinkin’ about kids dying for squat in a land with unpronounceable names.” To which comes the reply,

The Coldest Winter / halberstam

161

“Oh, they’re not dying for nothing: Vietnam’s gonna make one hell of an analogy someday.” The same could be said about the Korean War, which military historian S. L. A. Marshall has termed “the century’s nastiest war.” A “black hole” (Halberstam’s words) in the public memory, it has been the subject of few novels or movies (exceptions being the 1972 black comedy M*A*S*H* and 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate). Even so, for twenty years the Korean War has been a fertile schol- A Harvard graduate, social historian, arly field, and making the author’s task easier and dean of American journalists, were Clay Blair’s The Forgotten War (1987), David Halberstam authored fifteen best Max Hastings’s The Korean War (1987), Mar- sellers, including The Powers That Be shall’s The River and the Gauntlet (1987), (1979), about the press, The Reckoning Stanley Weintraub’s MacArthur’s War (2000), (1986), covering the auto industry, and William Stueck’s Rethinking the Korean Summer of ’49 (1989), about a baseball pennant race, and The War (2002), as well as numerous memoirs. Halberstam, the consummate journalist, Children (1998), dealing with the Civil conducted more than 150 oral histories, and Rights movement. He died in an auto the revelations gleaned from them are what accident. give The Coldest Winter, despite minor organizational flaws, its power, as well as its originality. As Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor concluded, it “stands as a coda to his enduringly famous The Best and the Brightest (1972),” a work also noteworthy for its investigative research. Clearly, after fifty-two years the author still relished unearthing interesting anecdotes and telling insights. Surprisingly, for one who labored so long in a profession whose second nature is cynicism, he retained, in his words, “a respect for the nobility of ordinary people.” Through one interview, for instance, Halberstam learned that Lieutenant Lee Beahler, a World War II veteran, reenlisted because he missed the camaraderie of Army life. His leadership during the battle of Yongsan helped save the Eighth Army from possible annihilation. He came down with encephalitis from a mosquito bite and was still recuperating several months later when his outfit, the Second Engineers, was almost wiped out at Kunari. That mosquito probably saved his life, he realized with feelings of guilt. In his author’s note, Halberstam recalled almost canceling a meeting with former sergeant Paul McGee because of inclement weather, a grueling schedule, and the subject’s initial misgivings. He drove through a snowstorm to McGee’s home and experienced, in his words, “a thrilling moment for me, nothing less than a reminder of why I do what I do”: For four hours it all poured out, what had happened in those three days at Chipyongni when [McGee] was a young platoon leader. It was as if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as if it had been yesterday.

162

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

He was modest, thoughtful, and had total recall. The story of how his platoon had held out for so long came out in exceptional detail, along with the names and phone numbers of a few men who had made it out with him and could confirm all the details.

The Coldest Winter book cover is a wrap-around, black-and-white photograph facsimile of shadowy figures trudging down a remote road. Set against a frigid landscape, the scene is hardly heroic but encompasses the author’s goal: to bring to life the experiences of American soldiers who suddenly found themselves in desperate straits. Some never received winter uniforms, even though temperatures approached − 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and frostbite injuries were common. (A half-century later, a veteran asked an old comrade if he had thawed out yet.) Tank treads froze, airplane observation windows cracked, and bodies became frozen the instant after the victims had died, some in firing positions, making difficult the task of stacking the casualties in the deuce-and-a-half trucks sent out to collect them. “Fitting them in, [Sergeant Ed] Hendricks remembered, was like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle.” The opening section of The Coldest Winter, entitled “A Warning at Unsan,” describes an unexpected American military defeat that occurred four and a half months into the conflict. The defeat represented a lost opportunity to avert South Korea from disintegrating into an openended quagmire. The trouble stemmed from civilian leaders having surrendered strategic decision-making power to seventy-year-old General Douglas MacArthur, who parleyed mythmaking posturing during World War II into becoming supreme commander of postwar Japan. After establishing a defense perimeter at Pusan and then repelling the enemy back beyond the thirty-eighth parallel following an amphibious landing at the port of Inchon, American-led U.N. forces captured the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang. (Bob Hope even flew in to put on a show.) Mocking his adversary Kim Il Sung as “Kim Buck Tooth,” MacArthur, who never spent a single night in Korea, then ordered American troops to advance to within fifty miles of the Yalu River bordering China and predicted that the mission would be accomplished by Christmas. Two weeks earlier, he had personally assured President Harry S. Truman that the Chinese would not enter the conflict. (Upon meeting the president at Wake Island, the general chose not to salute.) His willful ignorance belied a latent racism and a dangerous hubris, Halberstam concludes. On October 25, Chinese units punished U.N. forces near Unsan. Heedless of what this augured, MacArthur expressed surprise when on November 1 Red Army regulars attacked the American Eighth Cavalry, inflicting more than six hundred casualties. Still oblivious to the risk, MacArthur claimed that no more than thirty thousand Chinese had crossed into North Korea when the actual number was ten times that. The next three hundred pages backtrack to describe the U.S. policies that put the nation on a road to war less than five years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Postwar tensions with the Soviet Union had flared in Eastern Europe and Iran, but suddenly in 1949 attention focused on Asia when a communist insurgency led by Mao Zedong forced American ally Chiang Kai-shek to flee to the island of Formosa, which he renamed Taiwan. Rightwing Republicans saw the so-called loss of China as a golden opportunity to charge

The Coldest Winter / halberstam

163

Democrats in Truman’s administration with being soft on communism. South Korean president Syngman Rhee having proved so obstreperous, Secretary of State Dean Acheson omitted mentioning his country in a speech delineating America’s Asian defense perimeter. Like his communist counterpart, Rhee dreamed of unifying Korea. Border clashes were commonplace. In 1950, the North Korean dictator convinced Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the time was propitious to “liberate” South Korea. With Mao Zedong in power, Stalin was anxious to showcase his revolutionary credentials and gave the green light. When South Korea seemed about to fall to communist forces, Truman applied the containment strategy, designed to stop Soviet expansion into Western Europe, to the emergency situation, which was less an invasion than an intensification of an ongoing civil war. Truman avoided seeking a congressional declaration of war, instead employing the euphemism “United Nations peacekeeping action.” This ploy was made possible by the Soviet boycott of the United Nations over that body’s refusal to seat “Red China” on its Security Council. MacArthur’s bold success at Inchon, combined with the partisan political climate, made it difficult for Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resist the general’s wish to “liberate” North Korea. By giving erroneous assurances that Chinese intervention would be suicidal, MacArthur was perhaps hoping for a scenario, Halberstam speculates, in which he would eventually restore Chiang Kai-shek to power and emerge an “American Caesar” (the title of William Manchester’s 1978 biography of MacArthur). Equally culpable were MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, and General Edward M. Arnold, an incompetent toady. Finally, on page 395, more than halfway through the narrative, the scene shifts back to Unsan, where Chinese marshal Peng Dehuai’s forces struck with devastating effectiveness and then disappeared. MacArthur dismissed this “final warning” as a token gesture, a bluff. On November 26, the Chinese launched a deadly counteroffensive against overextended American units. Documenting the heroism displayed in places such as Kunari and the Chosin Reservoir is what makes The Coldest Winter so impressive. Despite poor overall command leadership during what was basically a two-month retreat, junior officers more often than not performed admirably. Many died or were taken prisoner. Others were threatened with court-martial for questioning dubious orders and in one case even assigned a virtual suicide mission by a jealous superior. U.N. forces were pushed back beyond the thirty-eighth parallel, but the war eventually stalemated near that previous dividing line. Still, bloody battles took place at such locations as Wonju and Chipyongni, the enemy sometimes using bugles and whistles to signal an attack. Just as Truman became resigned to a cease-fire, MacArthur tried to provoke a wider war. Truman rightly relieved him of command for insubordination, prompting calls for the president’s impeachment. In the end, most Americans agreed with Omar Bradley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that taking on China would have been the wrong war at the wrong place with the wrong enemy. For two more years, in places with nicknames such as Heartbreak Ridge, Massacre Valley, and Pork Chop Hill, troops were ordered, as the saying went, to “die for a tie.” MacArthur’s successor, the able Matthew Ridgway, demanded verifiable intelligence and by studying enemy tactics discerned weaknesses to exploit, such as their rigid

164

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

top-down command structure, or the situation might have worsened. MacArthur hoped to win nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 1952, but the party preferred a less contentious war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Was the war worth it? America’s leaders, Halberstam believes, failed those on the battlefield. Surprised first by the North Korean drive toward the Pusan peninsula and then by Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River, they never enunciated compelling reasons for asking America’s men in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice. More than 50,000 American soldiers died, and another 100,000 suffered debilitating injuries, fighting an unnecessarily drawn-out war. No vital security or economic interests were at stake; nor was the United States defending democracy. If the original intent was to demonstrate American seriousness about containing communism worldwide, Truman upped the ante by authorizing the drive north and then was too unimaginative to bring the carnage to an end. Had Truman established diplomatic relations with Mao Zedong’s regime, much of the bloodshed might have been averted, but the rancid state of domestic politics made such a course unlikely. Those China Hand “realists” who had advocated such a policy earlier had been purged during the so-called Red Scare. An ideologically based commitment to containment became frozen in place, embraced by Truman’s White House successors for forty years, sometimes with calamitous results. James B. Lane

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 5. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 13 (July 1, 2007): 646-647. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 101. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 23, 2007): 15. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 29 (July 23, 2007): 52. USA Today, September 20, 2007, p. D5. The Washington Post, September 23, 2007, p. BW04.

165

THE COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1998 Author: Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) Translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles Publisher: Ecco Press (New York). 600 pp. $34.95 Type of work: Poetry Locale: Poland, Western Europe, Greece, and the United States Herbert is a major international prize-winning poet of the last century, often compared to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, whose lyrical and epigrammatic lines are studded with brilliant metaphors Alissa Valles, the translator of most of the poems in The Collected Poems, 1956-1998, included the nine collections of poetry that Zbigniew Herbert published during his lifetime. At least five of these have been published by Ecco Press previously. Despite these and other translations, Herbert is one of those literary giants who almost slips through the cracks because he writes in a language not widely spoken in the Western world. Other famous Polish writers like Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and Czesuaw Miuosz (1911-2004)—the latter befriended Herbert in postwar Paris and translated many of the poems in this collection—wrote in English or, as in Miuosz’s case, entered the mainstream of Western cultural and intellectual life. Herbert, on the other hand, despite extensive travel in Europe and the United States, wrote exclusively in Polish and lived a profoundly Polish life. He was born during the time of the Second Republic, a democratic interlude in the troubled history of Poland’s political servitude. It was in his early youth, he said in an interview, when he learned “that to debate meant invoking proofs, to search for truth. For the Marxists dialectic meant everything was relative.” In 1939, when Germany and Russia invaded Poland and split the country between them, Herbert was only fourteen years old. His hometown of Lwów fell to the Russians, who promptly arrested thousands of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. In 1941, the Nazis turned on Russia and replaced the communist secret police. The tyranny and oppression surrounding Herbert in his early years had a profound impact on his life and his poetry. During the war, he was active in the Resistance to German occupation. After World War II, the Polish authorities, controlled by Moscow, persecuted those who had fought the Germans, based on the assumption that motivation for fighting the Nazis sprang from loyalties to the prewar Polish republic and its democratic principles, which were unacceptable to the Marxist regime. Until 1956, when Russian control became less oppressive, Herbert led a precarious resistance. He was able to publish a few poems, despite moving from job to job and being desperately short of funds. His friendship with Henryk Elzenberg, a learned and independent professor of philosophy and also a poet, introduced Herbert to a dialectic

166

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

free of political relativism, a rich way of thinking derived from the overlapping worlds of philosophy, art, and poetry that fed Herbert’s quest for truth. Although he struggled with the notion that he should concentrate on philosophy as such, his deeply felt inclination that he was a poet by nature held him on course. He never, however, entirely separated philosophy and poetry, a frame of mind captured in the droll persona of “Mr. Cogito,” who pervades Herbert’s mature poetry, a Zbigniew Herbert was a spiritual speaker based on Descartes’ famous injuncleader of the anticommunist movement tion, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I in Poland during World War II. Widely am). The intricacy of ideas and the emotions translated, he won numerous of feeling keep strong company in Herbert’s international literary prizes, including work. the Nikolaus Lenau Prize, the T. S. With the thaw of 1956, Herbert published Eliot Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize. his first book of poems, Struna kwiatua (chord of light). It was a late debut, but an impressive one. Professor Elzenberg’s influence was apparent in the many poems with classical allusions (“To Apollo,” “To Athena,” “On Troy,” “To Marcus Aurelius”), while the young poet’s fascination with beauty in nature and art is conveyed in brilliantly forged images and metaphors. A rose is a “source of heaven and earth/ O constellations of petals” (“On a Rose”), and the stained glass window of a Gothic church has “tears of glass” (“Architecture”). Hermes, pies i gwiazda (Hermes, dog and star) appeared the following year. Herbert continues to explore the legacy of antiquity (“Akhenaton,” “Nefertiti”), but he also begins to mine personal memory. In a lovely poem, “Biology Teacher,” a fondly remembered teacher is praised for kindling the poet’s capacity for wonder: “He led us/ through golden binoculars/ into the intimate life/ of our ancestor/ the paramecium.” Once memory is tapped, Herbert cannot suppress his bitter recollections of the political nightmare that hovered over his youth and would permeate, even if in a less horrific manner, the bulk of his life in Poland. In “Ornament Makers,” he celebrates artists, musicians, and poets—the “decorators” of the world—but ends on a note of bitter irony. Art becomes an instrument of dehumanization in a totalitarian society: “they painted the prisons/ pink even the backs of the men inside.” This volume closes with a string of prose poems, a form that Herbert made all his own. They seem to take their cue from Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), whose idiosyncratic observations of the dark side of Parisian life found a powerful vehicle in this form. Herbert also observes the unseemly, but there is nothing of the voyeur in him; nor is he a searcher for the “beauty of ugliness,” the negative aestheticism associated with Baudelaire. What intrigues Herbert is the telling detail that tempts poetic expression but has to settle for the cool and analytical perspective of prose. The effect is summed up in the following lines from a prose poem titled “Episode in a Library.”

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 / herbert

167

The speaker-poet sees a young girl trying to compose a poem “with a pencil sharp as a lance.” He cannot tolerate the mayhem of her enterprise: “Now I see words dying, I know that there is no limit to decay. What will remain after us are fragments of words scattered on the black earth. Accent signs over nothingness and ash.” Herbert continued to write prose poems until his death, but it was in the writing of poems—poems brought to life by articulated vision and words crafted to abide, not decay, that he found his highest calling. His third volume, Studium przedmiotu (study of the object), appeared in 1964. The title says it all. To “study” the object meant to create something with words that would transcend the fleeting or transient experience of the object. “The pebble/ is a perfect creature/ equal to itself/ mindful of its limits.” What Herbert says in “Pebble” is reminiscent of Archibald MacLeish’s famous lines: “A poem should not mean, but be.” A poem must have the self-command of a pebble. To achieve such divine simplicity, says Herbert in the signature poem of this volume, “Study of the Object,” “let it [the poem] be/ quieter than the angels/ prouder than kings/ more substantial than a whale/ let it have the face of the last things.” With Napis (inscription) in 1969, Herbert’s poetics is defined and focused. He is now sufficiently empowered to take bold flights. In “Preliminary Investigation of an Angel,” a political prisoner is subjected to a series of tortures that conflate the suffering of forced political confession under communism with Christ’s passion: “with an iron ferrule/ a slow fire/ the limits of his body/ are defined.” In an earlier prose poem, “The Hygiene of the Soul,” Herbert maintains, “We live in the narrow bed of our flesh. Only the inexperienced twist in it without interruption.” Poetry must liberate the soul from all forces, within and without, that presume to crush it with borders. False hope, proffered by formal religion and imposed by repressive political forces, inhibits the mind and body from enjoying the transformations imagination and free movement make possible. Herbert often cited the Polish proverb “Hope is the mother of the stupid.” He insisted, “I write . . . to teach soberness, to be awake.” Fortunately, as he writes in an untitled poem, “We fall asleep on words/ and wake up with words.” Herbert’s “words,” his poetry, liberated him spiritually and politically. His rising reputation brought him invitations from the free world. He traveled extensively in Europe, particularly Greece, which was important to him on several counts. It was the cultural home of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the great modern Greek poet, and the source of the ancient mythology and literature that he had admired from his school days and that had inspired so many of his poems. He also came to America in 1971 to teach for a year in the English Department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He improved his English and graded student papers scrupulously. Henri Coulette, an American poet with an epigrammatic wit similar to Herbert’s, was a colleague and friend. Herbert returned to Poland with a strengthened sense of the poet’s ability to analyze without escaping into abstraction, to observe and think concretely. “Mr. Cogito” was born three years later in the book of poems Pan Cogito (1974; Mr. Cogito, 1993). Poem after poem has Mr. Cogito in the title, such as “Mr. Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror,” “On Mr. Cogito’s Two Legs,” and “ Mr. Cogito and the Pearl.” In “Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering,” the

168

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

philosopher-poet offers the following tough-minded wisdom: “accept it/ but at the same time/ isolate it in yourself/ and if it is possible/ make from the stuff of suffering/ a thing or a person,” and after two lines of white space, “play/ with it.” In “Mr. Cogito on Magic,” Herbert provides a judgment call on the excesses of the drug culture in Berkeley of the 1970’s: “panting alchemists of hallucination/ manufacture/ new thrills/ new colors/ new moans/ and an art of aggressive epilepsy is born.” Mr. Cogito can pinpoint the excesses of American life with the same cold eye he trains on communist oppression. In his sixties, Herbert was no longer a healthy man. The hardships and suffering of the early years had taken their toll. In the collection Raport z obl-/onego miasta i inne wiersze (1983; Report from the Besieged City, and Other Poems, 1985), the ghosts are no longer clearly political: “Mr. Cogito’s monster/ lacks all dimensions.” “It poisons the wells/ destroys a mind’s constructs/ covers the bread with mold/ proof the monster exists/ is offered by its victims/ indirect proof/ but sufficient.” The metaphors seem political, but the subject is the self, the beleaguered self of modern Western culture— the same self that haunts the minds of European writers from Fyodor Dostoevski to Jean-Paul Sartre. Nevertheless, Herbert refuses to wallow in any kind of self-pity. In his later poetry, he returns to the tragedies of the war and its aftermath (for example, September 17, 1939, when the Russians invaded Poland from the east as part of an agreement with Nazi Germany) and is tragically reconciled to an inability to escape the trauma of the past. In one of his last collections, Elegia na odejkcie (1990; Elegy for the Departure, and Other Poems, 1999), in a poignant poet entitled “A Small Heart,” he opens with the following stanza: “the bullet I fired/ during the great war/ went around the globe/ and hit me in the back.” Nothing in life managed to erase the violence of his youth. “So now I sit in solitude/ on a sawed-off tree trunk/ in the exact center point/ of the forgotten battle/ gray spider I spin/ bitter meditations.” He cannot forget, but Herbert the poet manages to give Herbert the ethicist, the philosopher of love, the last word: “on memory too large/ and a heart too small.” Peter Brier

Review Sources The New Republic 237, no. 4 (August 27, 2007): 37-43. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 7 (April 26, 2007): 35-37. Poetry 190, no. 2 (May, 2007): 117-129. Weekly Standard 12, no. 34 (May 21, 2007): 32-33. World Literature Today 81, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 70-71.

169

COLTRANE The Story of a Sound Author: Ben Ratliff (1968) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 250 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Music, biography An incisive and stunning study of the musical giant and his influence on jazz Principal personage: John Coltrane (1926-1967), American jazz saxophonist

Although John Coltrane tragically died in 1967 of liver cancer at the age of forty, he left a body of work that transformed jazz. Ben Ratliff resolved that he did not wish to write a traditional biography about John Coltrane. As jazz critic of The New York Times, the author believed that he should write a full analysis of Coltrane’s musical journey. Over the years, there have been several biographies of Coltrane, but Ratliff believed that none of them have critically dissected Coltrane’s creative process or investigated the true impact his sound has had on generations of jazz musicians. While Ratliff cites many sources at the end of the book, he gives special acknowledgment to Lewis Porter’s 1998 incisive biography John Coltrane: His Life and Music and the 1995 book John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography, written by Yasuhiro Fujioka, Yoh-Ichi Hamada, and Porter. Both of these sources were invaluable to Ratliff in the writing of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Ratliff also mentions that through the general editorship of Porter a new authoritative discography and chronology of Coltrane was published by Routledge in 2008 under the title The John Coltrane Reference. In addition to the titles already mentioned and many others, Ratliff drew from the many interviews that he has conducted over the years with important musicians to complete this study, including Michael Brecker, George Coleman, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane’s son Ravi Coltrane, Benny Golson, Roy Haynes, Jimmy Heath, Branford Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and McCoy Tyner. The author also relied on interviews that Coltrane gave during his lifetime. One of the reasons why this study is so successful as a portrait of Coltrane’s sound is because Ratliff was willing to do his homework, to pull together disparate sources in order to get to the heart of what Coltrane the musician was all about. Never one to make snap judgments, the author presents the reader a very measured assessment of Coltrane’s musical maturation and the large shadow that he still casts into the twenty-first century. Ratliff most emphatically believes in remaining objective in his presentation of Coltrane. For the many who love and admire Coltrane, it is not always easy to keep the necessary objectivity as they proceed in their assessment of his musical prowess.

170

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

At his best, Ratliff finds the appropriate balance as he delineates the power of Coltrane’s music. This study is not for the casual jazz listener. It was written for anyone who is fascinated by the history of jazz in general and the place that Coltrane’s holds in that history specifically. While there is a fair amount of musical theory presented by the author, it is not so daunting as to be cracked or under stood only by other musicians. In his introduction, Ratliff states that the purpose of this book is to attempt to “track the connections of his work—how and why he proceeded from A to B to Z—and then, later, to ask why Coltrane has weighed so heavily in the basic identity of jazz for the last half century.” For the author, Coltrane is a massive musical force because of the work he produced. Ratliff has divided his book into two parts. The first part includes seven chapters and focuses on Coltrane’s evolution as a musician. He was not born a fully formed jazz giant. Coltrane had to work very hard to achieve his stature, to discover his sound. It took time for him to establish his own unique musical signature. It was only during the last ten years of his life that Coltrane reached the astounding musical heights that he is remembered for today. The second part includes five chapters and primarily delves into the impact that Coltrane has had on the musicians who came after him. Coltrane definitely has cast a giant shadow. At 250 pages, this study does not spend time taking apart Coltrane’s life piece by piece. As a jazz critic, Ratliff is intimately acquainted with Coltrane’s influence on jazz. He states in his introduction that he has written this book “through the sensibility of the critic, rather than the biographer.” Before the author was ready to write this study, he had to wrestle with his own hesitancy to become “immersed” in certain Coltrane recordings. He had to work out his own misconceptions and become open to what Coltrane had to offer the attentive listener and close, critical observation. Since 1996, Ratliff has served as the jazz critic for The New York Times. He also is the author of the highly acclaimed volume Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the One Hundred Most Important Recordings (2002) that is part of The New York Times Essential Library series. Even with these stellar credentials, it still remained a daunting undertaking for Ratliff to do justice to the subject at hand. He brings a vitality and enthusiasm for jazz without being a mere cheerleader. Without hesitation, Ratliff is more than willing to take issue with various conclusions that have been perpetuated over time about Coltrane as a spiritual force. As evidenced by his thorough knowledge of jazz in general and jazz recordings specifically, Ratliff is at his most incisive with his analysis of Coltrane’s impact on other musicians. It must be remembered that Coltrane had a relatively short career. His career as a solo artist began only when he was thirty-three, and sadly he would be dead at forty. Prior to the 1960’s, Coltrane worked as a sideman for various jazz bands. His first introduction to the alto saxophone came when he was in high school. It was not until the

Since 1996, Ben Ratliff has served as the jazz critic for The New York Times. In addition to Coltrane: The Study of a Sound, he is the author of Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the One Hundred Most Important Recordings (2002), which is part of The New York Times Essential Library series.

Coltrane / ratliff

171

late 1940’s that Coltrane switched from the alto to the tenor saxophone. Ratliff opens chapter 1, “Who’s Willie Mays?” with Coltrane stationed in Hawaii. In 1946, he was a seaman second class and anxious to play music whenever possible. Bands were segregated at the time, so it was not always easy to make arrangements to play with white musicians. On July 13, 1946, Coltrane recorded with four members from the Melody Masters. He was not quite twenty when he was invited to “jam” with the white musicians. The Melody Masters was an all-white Navy band, and black musicians were not “officially” allowed to play with white musicians, so when Coltrane and four members of the Melody Masters recorded eight songs on July 13, it was necessary for them to keep the session private. At this point in time, Coltrane was learning his instrument, finding his way to his own style. Having been greatly influenced by the great alto saxophone player Charlie Parker, Coltrane was still an amateur who was copying the master. There were merely four 78 rpm records pressed from the 1946 “amateur” session. While Coltrane at this stage in his development had not distinguished himself, there was something taking shape internally. In his own quiet way, Coltrane was absorbing everything he heard. After Coltrane was discharged from the Navy in 1946, he settled in Philadelphia. He admired Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Dexter Gordon. In the first part of the book, Ratliff focuses on how Coltrane became the great Coltrane, how he had to go beyond his influences and become his own man, his own musician. During the big band era in America, saxophonists were supporting players. They needed to be cooperative and to collaborate with the other musicians. Out of this environment, a new breed of jazz musician had to carve out solos for themselves. It took time for Coltrane to feel secure enough as a musician to take a solo. Ratliff paints a vivid portrait of how the creative process worked for Coltrane. It is fascinating to discover how Coltrane made his creative choices, what inspired him and what he left behind. During the 1950’s, he played with a number of bands. Unfortunately, Coltrane struggled with alcohol abuse and became addicted to heroin. Drugs seemed to be part of the jazz world. His hero Charlie Parker was an addict, as were many other notable jazz musicians. One of the most important turning points in Coltrane’s life was when he was hired by Miles Davis in 1955 to play in his quintet. While Coltrane had been growing as a jazz musician during the early 1950’s, it was difficult for him to find steady work because of his addiction to heroin. In 1957, though, Coltrane became a new man, a man who had a “spiritual awakening.” He found a way to use his energy totally for his music. The self-destructive elements that had plagued him were stripped away from his soul. His work with Davis and with Thelonius Monk was instrumental in his musical growth. By 1960, Coltrane was ready to launch his solo career. In the next seven years, he would become one of the most influential, most misunderstood, and most controversial jazz musicians in American culture. From 1959 until his death in 1967, he released some of the most important jazz albums ever recorded, including Giant Steps (1959), My Favorite Things (1960), A Love Supreme (1964), and Expression (1967). Ratliff makes the point that Coltrane pushed himself very hard. He was a tireless worker and musical explorer all the way until his death.

172

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

While part 1 of the biography ends with Coltrane’s death in Huntington Hospital on Long Island, Ratliff opens part 2 with an explanation of the many ways that Coltrane is viewed. In chapter 8, “The Style of,” the author states that “John Coltrane tends to be understood in either one of two ways: as the one-man academy of jazz— the king student, the exhaustively precise teacher—or as the great psychic liberator of jazz who rendered the academy obsolete.” The point is made that it always seemed that Coltrane was asking others “to alter” their lives. He was still growing, experimenting, making demands on himself and the larger world of jazz when he died. In part 2, Ratliff reexamines Coltrane’s influence without deflating it. There have been numerous imitators of Coltrane, which obviously discomforts Ratliff. Coltrane was not about imitation. He worked tirelessly to create what was true for himself. During the 1980’s, the noted trumpeter and jazz historian Wynton Marsalis began to move jazz in a more traditional direction and questioned various aspects of the Coltrane legacy. Ratliff assures the reader that Coltrane’s impact is not dead by a long shot. The influence may have shifted, but it remains strong. Although Lewis Porter’s biography of Coltrane remains a must-read for Coltrane scholars and fans alike, Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound is a worthy addition to the literature on one of the giants of jazz music. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 2 (September, 2007): 131. The Boston Globe, October 7, 2007, p. E6. The Economist 385 (November 10, 2007): 104. Esquire 148, no. 3 (September, 2007): 86. The Guardian, October 13, 2007, p. 7. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 94. Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 16, 2007, p. 3. Newsweek 150, no. 18 (October 29, 2007): 58. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 40. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 14, 2007, p. F8.

173

THE COMPLETE POETRY A Bilingual Edition Author: César Vallejo (1892-1938) First published: Obras completas, vol. 1, Obra poética, 1991, in Peru Translated from the Spanish and with notes by Clayton Eshleman Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa Introduction by Efraín Kristal Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 732 pp. $49.95 Type of work: Poetry Time: 1915-1938 Locale: Peru, Paris, Spain Vallejo broke new ground in his intensely personal poetry by eschewing the traditional features of the poetry of his time, such as rhyme, stanzaic regularity, and subject matter, in favor of verbal ingenuity, arrhythmic lines, and surreal imagery In his poetry, César Vallejo keeps an intense, passionate focus on the world around him and on his personal feelings in response to that world. His subjects include love affairs with several women, his family in Peru, his Catholicism, and his experiences in France, where he spent the last eighteen years of his life. For him, poetry was not only the medium of personal expression and ideas but also a refuge that offered a measure of relief from pent-up suffering as well as an opportunity to speak to the world. He began publishing his poetry in his early twenties while in Peru. His first collection, Los heraldos negros (The Black Heralds, 1990), appeared in 1918 and commences on a note of darkness and suffering that seldom abates. The title itself expresses the fateful outlook that Vallejo carried with him to his last days. The poetry focuses on gloom, suffering, and black foreboding, which are woven into the subjects of his personal life. Having worked in the mineral mines of Peru, he had experienced the hardships of life, and the deaths of his brother in 1915 and of his mother three years later further scarred his psyche. His justly famous poem “The Black Heralds” epitomizes Vallejo’s bleak outlook: There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know! Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them, the undertow of everything suffered welled up in the soul . . . I don’t know!

The absence of rhyme and the two ellipses echo the poet’s natural voice and vocal rhythms, and the repetition of the pause before the phrase “I don’t know!” as well as the phrase itself, expresses hopelessness bordering on despair, made heavier by the poet’s associating the powerful blows with God’s hatred. The untraditional fea-

174

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tures of the poem, the lack of rhyme and regular rhythm in the lines, and the unusual pauses within the lines give the impression that the poet is speaking with naturalness and candor, making the poem all the more intensely felt. The apparent lack of artfulness (although the effect is one of naturalness, a considerable art is required) saves the poem from being merely a sentimental expression of depressed youth, a romantic angst from a young man who almost enjoys his “doom.” César Vallejo’s first poetry collection, Underlying the dark thoughts in the early Los heraldos negros (1918), grew out poems is Vallejo’s preoccupation with Catholof his early life in Peru. His final icism; it informs his visions of and feelings collections, Poemas humanos (1939; for the women in his life, real or imagined, Human Poems, 1968) and España, as one sees in “Communion,” in which the aparta de mí este cáliz (1939; Spain, woman’s body is seen in terms of Vallejo’s Take This Cup from Me, 1974), reflect his life of poverty in Paris and political religious devotion: Her hair is “the strand activism, which included trips to the from a miter/ of fantasy that I lost!”; her body Soviet Union and Spain. He died before is “the bubbly skirmish/ of a pink Jordan.” being fully recognized as one of the From this vision of a woman, the poet shifts most important twentieth century poets from reality into a world of surreal images, from South America. as when the woman’s arms “create a thirst for the infinite” and “they are molded in the unconquered blood of/ my impossible blue!” Vallejo’s private life was thrown into turmoil more than once by his passionate affairs with women. His love affair with a fifteen-year-old girl led to his attempted suicide, and a later affair with another woman caused him to be expelled from his teaching position at the prestigious Colegio Barrós. These tumultuous experiences combine with the death of his mother to inform some of his most famous early poems, in which he seeks to come to terms with his view of women in general and with his private feelings regarding some of them. At the same time, he turned his eyes inward, describing his feelings not only for women but also for his entire existence, which includes a profound consciousness of death. Perhaps the dominant theme in his first collection is his own suffering, generalized but no less intensely felt. The final poem of The Black Heralds (“Epexegesis”), begins with the line “I was born on a day/ when God was sick,” which is repeated four times, reinforced by the word “gravely” at the end. Although his thesis for his bachelor of arts degree was a study of romanticism in the Castellan poetry, and his first published poem was a sonnet, Vallejo abandoned traditional forms for poems of radical form and linguistic dexterity, evident even in his early sonnet, which contains the neologism soledumbre, a word that, like his later forays into verbal ingenuity, have given his translators daunting challenges. As the number of his poems accumulated, Vallejo’s imagery also became increas-

The Complete Poetry / vallejo

175

ingly surreal. Critics have described his later poetry as avant-garde, so divergent is it from traditional poetry and so thorough is its exploration of new forms and modes of expression. One dominant theme in Vallejo’s poetry is that experience is a complex of contradictions. Sometimes he sees that life is horrible, but in the horror lies a glorious triumph over horror. His pain and suffering, which were both real and imaginary, his preoccupation with death, and his consciousness of the Spanish Civil War, social injustice, poverty and disease—none of it seems to have dampened his fundamental faith that life is a worthwhile struggle. In the early poems especially, Vallejo finds contradictions in the women he loves, women who embody heaven and earth, religious experiences—or experiences expressed in religious imagery—joy and pain, consciousness of death and celebration of life. “Impious Woman,” for example, conveys the contradictory vision, the holy worship and pagan celebration that the woman brings to him. The woman, as the title says, is not pious (she is “impious”), but the poem commences with the emphatic contradiction: “Lord! You were behind the window.” The word “Lord” is both an exclamation and an address to the woman herself, opposites fused by one well-chosen word. She is at once the embodiment of holiness, suffering, sacrifice, and fulfillment: Her eyes were Holy Thursday, two black grains of embittered light! With stony drops of blood and tears she nailed your cross!

The final stanza of the poem demonstrates, as well, Vallejo’s characteristic use of repetition to underscore and modify his meaning and to knit the parts of his poem together: “Impious woman! Since you departed,/ Lord, she has never returned to the Jordan.” In this final statement, the woman is separate from the “Lord,” but she has not entirely lost her religious significance for the poet. After his move to Paris in 1923, his poetry continued to express his suffering, but now it included a broader social consciousness, leading to his political activism. He was never free of poverty. He often lived on the street or on the charity of friends. The government grants he sometimes received were barely enough for him to live on. In Paris, Vallejo would publish short stories and articles for newspapers on political and cultural topics. More than a hundred articles were published in Peru while he lived in Paris, but his primary and most memorable mode of expression was his poetry. In Trilce (1922), Vallejo’s second collection, the focus broadens, and what Vallejo experiences in the streets of Paris as a poor, struggling poet finds its way into many of his poems, which continue his exploration of the limits of language and experience. The imagery remains surreal, as well, giving further expression to Vallejo’s complex vision of human existence. He still gropes “in the dark,” as he says in one of the poems, “III,” and the groping includes his attempt to find adequate expression. He begins also to manipulate how words are spelled in an apparent effort to expand expression and further express his vision and experience, as shown in “IV”:

176

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 I stretched out as a third part, but the evening—nuthin to ddo about it rings around in my head, furiously not wanting to dose itself into a mother. . . .

Elsewhere, the vocabulary reminds one of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse (which makes, of course, divine sense). Poem “XXV,” for example, begins, “Thrips uprear to adhere,” and farther down the page, the reader encounters a “sopraneity” that “ennazzals toward icicles/ of infinite pity.” His suffering, which ended with his death at the age of thirty-eight, gave Vallejo a sense of brotherhood with fellow sufferers, both in Paris and Spain, where a civil war raged. At first, his brotherhood is marked by contradictory feelings, as is all of his other experiences. Contemplating a fellow sufferer (in “The Hungry Man’s Rack”), Vallejo is conscious of his poverty: “give me,/ please, a piece of bread to sit down on,// . . . my shirt is/ filthy and in shreds/ and now I have nothing, this is hideous.” The two share an understanding, but Vallejo’s feelings are mixed: “that man is truly an animal/ and, nevertheless, upon turning, hits my head with his sadness . . .” Vallejo’s sense of brotherhood is not free of contradictory feelings, however: “he knows I love him,/ that I hate him with affection and, in short, am indifferent to him . . .” Still, he is not entirely indifferent, for something in his nature is immutable: “I make a gesture to him,/ he approaches,/ I hug him, and it moves me./ What’s the difference! It moves me . . . moves me . . .” For Vallejo, contradictory experiences fuse into a vision of a unified reality as he grows away from women and religion to social experiences and a broader vision of the human condition. Vallejo’s significance as a poet stems, in part at least, from his unrelenting exploration of the bounds between the world of the senses and his own vision of the ideal, the “truth” that lies beyond the sensory world. He is bound, however, to the sensory world, and he is ever reaching beyond, as if to capture the essence of truth itself, as he perceives it—hence his unusual, inventive vocabulary. Just as his imagery fuses opposites into a strange and arresting new unity, so he often molds a new vocabulary and places words on the page to reflect the sense of his poem, as when he strings the word “a/ t/ f/ u/ l/ m/ a/ s/ T” down the page to represent visually the hanging of a black coat. Vallejo’s last poem, Spain, Take This Cup from Me, is a lengthy address to the victims and participants of the Spanish Civil War. It represents the final stage in Vallejo’s growth from a self-absorbed youthful poet to one whose vision has expanded beyond his own experiences to include the suffering of thousands, whom he regards as fellow sufferers, martyrs even. The title of the first poem in the series encapsulates Vallejo’s subject and sentiment: “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic.” The “cup” that he proffers the Spanish, who symbolize humanity in general—the poem commences with the line “Children of the world”—is, in a sense, his own poetry, which contains within it the voice of all humanity. His final lines are filled with the prediction that the voice of the social warrior will continue, for it continues from “the faint murmur of the pyramids” and impels all people forward: “if mother/ Spain falls—I mean, it’s just a thought—/ go out, children of the world, go look for her! . . .” Bernard E. Morris

The Complete Poetry / vallejo

177

Review Sources The American Poetry Review 36, no. 1 (January/February, 2007): 49. The Chronicle of Higher Education 53, no. 24 (February 16, 2007): A20. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 39.

178

THE COMPLETE STORIES Author: David Malouf (1934) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 511 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries Locale: Brisbane, Sydney, and rural areas in Australia; Korea; Italy; Belgium; the Alps In thirty-one short stories, written over the last two and a half decades, one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed writers focuses on the presence of the past in the lives of his characters, on their violent impulses, and on their fascination with death Principal characters: Angus, the sixteen-year-old narrator in “The Valley of Lagoons” Braden McGowan, Angus’s friend Stuart McGowan, Braden’s older brother, who is in love with Angus’s sister Katie Harry Larcombe, a resident of a small Australian town and the stepfather in “Elsewhere” Colin Lattimer, a writer and a native of Brisbane in “Dream Stuff” Jordan McGivern, a twelve-year-old boy and the victim of his father’s prejudice in “Blacksoil Country” Audley Tyler, the head of the Tyler clan in “Great Day” Charlie Down, the army inductee in “War Baby” Luke, a fourteen-year-old boy and the central character in “Out of the Stream” Jane, a young girl in boarding school and the runaway in “Eustace”

David Malouf’s The Complete Stories is made up of a total of thirty-one stories, several of them long enough to be called novellas. The book is divided into four segments, arranged according to the date of publication in book form. Thus, the seven works of short fiction in the first section, which is titled “Every Move You Make,” came from the book of that name, which appeared in 2006 and was written in anticipation of this volume. The second section, “Dream Stuff,” was published as a book in 2000; the third, “Antipodes,” came out in 1985; and the fourth and final section, “Child’s Play,” contains just two stories, “Eustace” and “The Prowler,” which were published in 1982 along with a novella, “Child’s Play.” The novella, which had also appeared in an earlier volume, was not included in this collection. Whether his novels are set in his native Queensland, Australia, like the autobiographical Johnno (1975) and Remembering Babylon (1993), or at a distance, like An Imaginary Life (1978), which follows the Roman poet Ovid into his exile in a Black Sea village, Malouf always includes as one of his themes the presence of the past. In

The Complete Stories / malouf

179

the works of short fiction that appear in his Complete Stories, Malouf again emphasizes this theme. In fact, like the short fiction of the Irish writer James Joyce and the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield, a typical story by Malouf builds toward an epiphany, or revelation, which casts new light on past events and provides a basis for the protagonist’s future thoughts and actions. This pattern is illustrated in “The Valley of Lagoons.” For years, the narrator Angus has watched as his neighbors, the McGowans, David Malouf has published poetry, set off on their annual hunting trips into the drama, and fiction. His short-story swampy wilderness known as the Lagoons; collection Antipodes (1985) won the for years, his father has made him refuse their Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, invitation to come along. Finally, when he while The Great World (1990) won the is sixteen, Angus is allowed to go. One of Commonwealth Prize for Fiction and the boys in the party is his friend Braden the Prix Femina Étranger. Another McGowan. Another is Braden’s older brother award-winning novel, Remembering Stuart, who is desperately in love with An- Babylon (1993), was short-listed for gus’s sister Katie. Though Angus would far the Man Booker Prize. rather be with Braden, who has the same intellectual interests as he does, he cannot get away from Stuart, who has evidently decided that by becoming Angus’s friend, he can get closer to Katie. In Angus’s presence, Stuart deliberately shoots himself in the thigh, hoping that Angus will report his manliness to Katie, along with the fact that he is willing to endure pain or even to risk death for her sake. On the way home, Angus realizes that he does not really know Stuart or Katie or even Braden. However, he does suspect that Katie will not be impressed by Stuart’s sacrifice. He also realizes that, in one way, he resembles Stuart more than the other two. Once they leave the area, neither Katie nor Braden will return. By contrast, though he, too, will leave, Angus will always be drawn back to the wilderness and its simple values. Such revelations do not come only to children. In “Elsewhere,” a widower, Harry Larcombe, plans to represent the family at the funeral of his stepdaughter Debbie, which will be held in Sydney, where she lived. Since Debbie’s younger sister Helen feels that she should not leave her young children for an all-day trip, her husband, Andy Mayo, who is a fellow miner and longtime friend of Harry, offers to go with him. From that point on, the story is really Andy’s. At thirty-three, Andy has been to Sydney only once, and that was for a rugby match. Though he had met Debbie only twice, he gathered that her world was much more exciting than his. Now he has his chance to enter that world. However, at the wake after the funeral, when a strange woman makes a move on him, Andy realizes that he is not the free spirit he had believed himself to be; in fact, though he cannot help responding to her, he is put off by her aggressiveness. With a new knowledge of who he is and where he belongs, he

180

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

drives Harry home. However, though he has had enough of Sydney, he now realizes that even in the familiar world to which he is returning, and despite the fact that he has a wife and children, essentially he will always be alone. In the title story of his collection Dream Stuff, Malouf takes a well-known writer, Colin Lattimer, back to his native Brisbane, which he had not seen for some three decades, and also into his memories of childhood and the ever-changing world of dreams. The story begins with a memory: As a very young child, Colin found the body of his mother’s dog, Maxie, under the house and crawled in to be with him. For hours, he held Maxie tight, refusing to come out despite the pleas of the adults. He does not know how his father finally got him out, but he also remembers that soon after that episode, when his father was trying to teach him how to swim, Colin thought he was about to drown. Later, when he heard that his father had drowned while attempting to escape from Crete during World War II, in his imagination Colin merged the two incidents and imagined that he had witnessed the death of his father. Later, his yearning to recapture something of his father took Colin to Athens, but that effort was a failure. His mother’s coldness toward him during his childhood and youth intensified his sense of isolation, and though an exchange of letters finally brought them closer, she kept putting off a visit from him until it was too late. Colin’s ex-wife and his two daughters loathe him, and when he looks up his cousin Coralie, who lives in Brisbane, he finds that she no longer loves him. On his way home from her house, he is attacked by a stranger who is convinced that Colin has harmed him, and after turning the knife on his assailant, Colin ends up in jail. Though he is released the next morning, when officialdom finds out who he is, he now has to accept the fact that there is no one left who could explain his past life to him. All that he has left of that lost reality is his fragmentary memories and his dreams of an escape from life. Though “Dream Stuff” appears to be a simple story, in fact, like most of Malouf’s short fiction, it has an extremely complex structure. The author moves at will from one place to another, at one moment re-creating the Brisbane of Colin’s childhood and youth, at another setting the action in present-day Brisbane or Athens or London. Since his narrative is governed by the protagonist’s thought processes, it ignores chronology. Episodes from childhood are juxtaposed with more recent events, and real threats move easily into the dream world, where they are transmuted into new impressions that in the morning become as real as memories of actual events. “Dream Stuff” is also typical of the stories in this collection in that it involves violence. As Malouf pointed out in a Publishers Weekly interview, Australia has always been a violent place. In “Blacksoil Country,” after his father, who hates blacks, shoots a man who was bringing him a lamb as a gift, young Jordan McGivern disappears, obviously killed in an act of vengeance, and the blacks are then hunted down by the white settlers. Malouf’s lifelong commitment to pacifism is evident in Jordan’s comment that as long as they got along, black and whites were both protected; when they turned on each other, neither group was safe. In “Great Day,” Audley Tyler, the head of a long-established family, sees the museum in which he took such pride go up in flames. The arsonist’s deed, he muses, is a reflection of the eternal human conflict be-

The Complete Stories / malouf

181

tween the desire for order and the demonic impulse, the love of destruction and death. That satanic impulse is what drives the young hoodlum to murder a pair of campers in “Lone Pine.” Malouf also sees that impulse reflected in the eagerness of young men to go to war. In “War Baby,” Charlie Down can hardly wait for his induction; his service in Vietnam, he is certain, will provide him with the direction he lacks. However, when he comes back, he finds that he has not changed for the better. In fact, because he cannot share his experiences with the other members of his community, he is more isolated than ever. At the end of the story, he realizes that his only hope for healing lies in his responding to the natural beauty surrounding him. Malouf admits that his fiction may seem preoccupied with death. Sometimes, as in “Elsewhere,” a death serves primarily to inspire a revelation. In other stories, it is a temptation to be resisted; thus, in “Out of the Stream,” fourteen-year-old Luke puts away his dagger and goes to tea with his grandfather. At other times, as in “Mrs. Porter and the Rock,” death is the result of a process in which one is freed from life’s obligations. In “Sorrows and Secrets,” it marks surrender; having given up hope of reclaiming his wife, a middle-aged foreman commits suicide. One of the final stories in the volume shows death at its most seductive. In “Eustace,” a boy finds his way into a dormitory at a girls’ boarding school, selects as his target a susceptible child called Jane, and entices her into running away with him. Though the other children go on with their lives, the memory of Jane’s disappearance and their recognition of the terror she must have felt come to all of them when they find themselves confronted with death. David Malouf has referred to his Complete Stories as a single work. Certainly the stories in the volume are similar in theme and structure. However, every plot is satisfyingly unpredictable, and every character is a unique creation. Malouf’s gift for language and his storytelling talent make this collection a work that readers will not soon forget. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 35. Chicago Tribune, July 28, 2007, p. 8. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 414. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 87. Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 22, 2007, p. 1. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 18 (April 30, 2007): 134-135.

182

CONSIDERING DORIS DAY Author: Tom Santopietro Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press (New York). 388 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Biography Time: 1924 to the present Locale: Hollywood, California A thorough analysis and reevaluation of Doris Day’s career in movies, music, and television Principal personages: Doris Day, popular movie actress and singer of the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s Marty Melcher, her third husband and manager Terry Melcher, her son Al Jordan, her abusive first husband George Weidler, her second husband

Considering Doris Day is a meticulous examination of the career of the biggest female box-office attraction in Hollywood history. Fantastically popular for the better part of three decades, Doris Day was a triple threat as a successful movie and television actress and recording artist; no one since has come close to duplicating this achievement. As Tom Santopietro asserts, “She was an astonishingly talented woman who could do it all, and do it brilliantly.” However, Day has become an anachronism, even something of a joke in the decades following her phenomenal success, and Santopietro believes that a reevaluation of her career is definitely overdue. “Having carved out one of the truly great careers in show business history Doris Day received very little respect for her remarkable achievements. In fact, beginning in the late 1960’s, she began to be derided for the very talent that had made her beloved in the first place. In that most American of fashions, the public turned its back on one of its own authentic heroines.” The author undertakes the task of reestablishing Day as the American icon he clearly believes that she is by thoroughly analyzing every film and nearly every recording and television appearance on her résumé. While not a biography in the traditional sense—the author is much more concerned with Day’s career than with her personal life—Considering Doris Day does contain just enough biographical material to provide a context for her career. Doris Day was born Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff to German Catholic parents in Cincinnati, Ohio. The child of divorce, Doris studied dance and by the age of twelve was well on her way to a successful dancing career when a serious car accident ended those ambitions. She then began taking voice lessons and soon was singing with various local bands and touring with the Les Brown band by the time she was

Considering Doris Day / santopietro

183

sixteen. In 1945, she had a big hit with Les Brown, “Sentimental Journey,” which became Tom Santopietro is a New York theater the emblematic song for the troops returning manager and author. He has managed Broadway shows for twenty-five years. from World War II. After reluctantly traveling to Hollywood He also worked as a tennis pro before for a screen test, she signed a contract with beginning his writing career. His first Warner Bros. and appeared in her first film, book, The Importance of Being Barbra Romance on the High Seas (1948). From that (2006), is a detailed review of Streisand’s career and attempts to time through the early 1950’s, she made sevplace her in the context of twentieth eral fairly forgettable movies, but this string century America. Considering Doris of mediocre films ended with Calamity Jane Day is his second book. in 1953 and was followed by such critical and popular successes as Love Me or Leave Me (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Pajama Game (1957). In the 1960’s, she starred in a string of very successful romantic comedies, including Lover Come Back (1961) and The Thrill of It All (1963). Unfortunately, Day’s professional success was not matched in her personal life, which was often tumultuous. At the age of seventeen, she married trombonist Al Jordan, who she later revealed was physically abusive toward her. The marriage lasted only two years, but produced a son, Terry. This was followed in 1946 by another short, unsuccessful marriage, to saxophonist George Weidler. In 1951, she married Marty Melcher, to whom she remained married, although often unhappily, until his death from a heart attack in 1968. Melcher became Day’s agent, and she unquestioningly turned over complete control of her career to him. Santopietro blames him for many of the truly awful movies she made, particularly later in her career. After his death, Day discovered that her husband had horribly mismanaged her money, and she was deeply in debt. She also learned that, unbeknownst to her, he had committed her to star in a television series, something she had never wanted to do. She honored the commitment, regaining her financial security in the process. The show ran for five years and essentially marked the end of her show business career. Since her retirement, Day has become well known for her activism in animal welfare issues, founding the Doris Day Pet Foundation in 1977 and the Doris Day Animal League in 1987. In 2006, the Animal League combined with the Humane Society of the United States. Day has invested as much, if not more, energy into her animal rescue activities than she ever invested in her career. Santopietro makes a convincing case for a reassessment of Day’s acting career. Equally adept at comedy, drama, and musicals, Day shone when she was given the proper material. Limited early in her career by Warner Bros.’ mediocre fare, Day often rose only to the lackluster quality of her roles, mugging for the camera and dreadfully overacting. However, when finally challenged by quality roles, Day rose to the occasion and proved to be one of America’s most engaging and natural screen actresses. Finally free of her Warner Bros. contract, she immediately tackled the challenging role of Ruth Etting in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM) biographical musical

184

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

drama Love Me or Leave Me (1955), followed just a year later by a brilliant performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. In 1957, she produced the best musical performance of her career in the movie version of The Pajama Game. Perhaps because she made it look so easy, she did not receive an Academy Award nomination for any of these remarkable performances. Perhaps significantly, Day is not primarily remembered for this trio of noteworthy performances but instead for her roles in the sex comedies of the late 1950’s and 1960’s, receiving her only Academy Award nomination for her performance in Pillow Talk (1959), which, while engaging, was not up to the caliber of her earlier, more notable roles. For better or worse, Day has become associated with these very dated and often embarrassing comedies, to the detriment of her reputation as an actress. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book is its reassessment of Day’s recording career, which has been eclipsed over the years by her movie stardom. While Day’s acting career has stayed alive through DVDs and cable movies, her singing career has been almost forgotten, except for the ubiquitous “Que Sera Sera.” From 1948 to 1967, she recorded more than six hundred songs, and although she was often forced to sing “novelty” numbers and weak songs from her movie sound tracks, the bulk of her career is stellar. Santopietro scrutinizes her output at great length, focusing particularly on her brilliant series of concept albums for Columbia Records, including Day by Day (1956), Day by Night (1957), and Cuttin’ Capers (1959). After reading a description of these performances, the reader is tempted to rush out to purchase the albums. An unabashed fan of Day’s, Santopietro may be guilty of overrating the star, ranking her second only to Ella Fitzgerald as a singer, believing that “Day’s sublime artistry . . . results from the fact that the effort to create a musical or emotional statement never shows, yet both occur.” Although Day may not be in Fitzgerald’s league, the author makes a convincing argument for her place as one of America’s great vocalists. In addition to revisiting Day’s reputation as a singer and actress, Santopietro also reevaluates her popular image as “America’s virgin.” Since the 1970’s, Day has come to be emblematic of the “unliberated” woman of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, subservient to her man and in thrall to unfashionable sexual mores. “She became the person most closely associated with the way it used to be for women.” In fact, she came to be emblematic of the shift in social mores that took place during the 1960’s and 1970’s. As Santopietro contends, “It’s almost as if Doris Day’s career symbolizes the schism between the generations in the tumultuous 1960’s. If the rockmusic-loving baby boomers derided Day as passé . . . their parents, the ‘greatest generation,’ who had grown up with Day as the big-band singer who codified their youth and young adulthood with songs like ‘Sentimental Journey,’ never turned their back on her.” In investigating Day’s film roles, Santopietro argues that, contrary to the popular conception, she often played an independent career woman in films such as Pillow Talk, Bill Rose’s Jumbo (1962), and With Six You Get Eggroll (1968). Paradoxically, although she was passive and uninvolved in her own career, she exuded an air of capability, confidence, and self-assurance on screen. The author points out that although

Considering Doris Day / santopietro

185

the sexual ethics of several of her “romantic comedies” of the 1960’s are sadly out of date, Day’s characters were not always “perpetual virgins” but were in fact often quite liberated and in charge of their own sexuality. There can be little doubt that Considering Doris Day will stand as the definitive work on Day’s career. This thoroughly researched work includes a complete filmography, a selected discography, a selected list of television appearances, and many pictures. It also contains a “career scorecard” on which Santopietro grades Day on her major films, records, and television appearances, along with a list of all the awards she earned in her lifetime and an extensive bibliography, notes, and index. Although the tantalizing glimpse of Day’s personal life offered by Santopietro leaves the reader wanting more, that is not the task the author has set for himself, so the reader must look to other sources to fill in gaps. Unfortunately, because of its encyclopedic approach to Day’s career, Considering Doris Day will likely not attract a wide audience. Only the most avid fan will be interested in the minutiae of Day’s oeuvre. However, the book is a valuable addition to the study of American popular culture, because, in Santopietro’s words, “Doris became nothing short of a mass-media symbol of twentieth-century America, the flesh-and-blood personification of what came to be known as ‘the American Century.’” Mary Virginia Davis

Review Sources Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 421. Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 32. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 23 (December 1, 2006): 1213. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 50-51. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 47 (November 27, 2006): 39.

186

CONTESTED WATERS A Social History of Swimming Pools in America Author: Jeff Wiltse (1970) Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill). Illustrated. 276 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History, sociology Time: The 1850’s to 2000 Locale: Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, New York, and other American cities The author recounts why municipal swimming pools were first built in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and how pool use since then has been influenced by issues of class, sex, and race Principal personages: J. Frank Foster, superintendent of the Chicago South Park play and recreation system in the first decade of the twentieth century Thurgood Marshall, attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1934-1961 Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston, 1896-1899 Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States, 1933-1945

Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America is that rare book that answers questions so interesting and so important that one is surprised they have not been asked before. Most readers, one suspects, have never wondered how public swimming pools came to be, or how their functions have changed over time, and yet the tale that Wiltse has pulled together makes so much sense—and fits so well with what Americans already know about their own history— that it seems like a well-known story. In this way, Contested Waters is somewhat like another book published the same year, Howard Chudacoff’s Children at Play: An American History, which shows parallels between broad social trends and the ways adults did and did not supervise their children’s play. Since at least 1830, when the British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) used the term in his novel Paul Clifford, lower-class and working-class people have been frequently referred to by the more privileged as “the great unwashed,” and for a simple reason: Poor people, especially those living in crowded conditions in large cities, had no easy means to bathe. Tenement apartments were crowded and basic and lacked both hot water and the space for a shower or tub. One of the first revelations in Contested Waters is that the earliest public swimming pools could be more accurately described as “large community bath tubs,” designed to address Victorian concerns with cleanliness and public health. As urban areas became increasingly crowded and, with increasing industrialization and immigration, more divided

Contested Waters / wiltse

187

along class lines, the bathing habits of the lower classes came to seem more trouble- Jeff Wiltse is assistant professor of some to those in power, particularly to the history at the University of Montana. middle class. Wiltse describes large groups This book, his first, grew out of his of poor men and boys—many of them na- Brandeis University doctoral ked and unruly—swimming and bathing along dissertation. He grew up in Seattle, the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Philadel- Washington, where he swam frequently phia and Lake Michigan in Milwaukee and in a local pool. Chicago, or in the Charles River in Boston or the Hudson in New York City. (He has focused his research on Northern cities, in part to avoid having to deal with regional variations in manners and mores.) Although for many people these waters offered the best hope of bathing, the waters were fouled with sewage and were too cold for at least part of the year. More important to some middle-class scolds, the sight of frolicking naked boys was offensive to them as they partook of their own Sunday strolls along the waterfronts. Further, the crowded inner cities of most major cities were filthy, and disease was rampant. During the 1850’s and 1860’s, cities including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia opened public baths. Boston was first, with “river baths” and a “beach bath,” wooden structures submerged in the Charles River or in the Atlantic Ocean. In this first chapter, Wiltse shows the rewards of solid research: He presents statistical information highlighting the population trends in major cities, the number of public baths taken by Bostonians during the summer of 1866, and the percentage of bathers in Philadelphia in 1891 who were boys. The greater pleasure, however, comes from quotations Wiltse has dug up from newspapers and government documents. He reports, for example, that according to the Boston Joint Special Committee on Public Bathing Houses, the city hoped that providing baths would be, for the poor, not only a means to cleanliness and health but also “an inducement to self-respect and refinement, and consequent elevation in the scale of society.” Every number, every quotation, is documented, adding up to ninety-five endnotes in the first chapter, which runs twenty-two pages. By the end of the nineteenth century, indoor swimming pools had largely replaced bathing areas outside. Municipal swimming pools were built in locations that served mostly lower-class and working-class residents, assuring that the pools would generally be segregated by class. Although there were no rules segregating the pools by sex, women tended to have different work schedules than men and swam at different times. During the same years, middle-class and upper-class people began to build and operate private pools, whose membership fees effectively excluded the lower classes. As Wiltse describes it, the municipal pools had a “play and pleasure-centered culture,” while the private pools “had developed a more serious and orderly culture . . . that reflected the competitive and directed character of Victorian culture.” In other words, swimmers in the private pools were encouraged to get into the water, swim a determined number of laps for fitness, and get out. Swimming was, in the minds of middle-class people, for exercise, not for fun.

188

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The idea of fun was problematic for some municipal governments. While politicians and bureaucrats were firm believers in spending public money for swimming pools when they were intended to contribute to citizens’ physical and moral development, these same men had doubts about whether providing recreation was an appropriate use for public funds. Boston mayor Josiah Quincy was an early champion of the idea that poor children needed amusement, and he opened two pools in 1898 within Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Throughout his tenure as mayor, Quincy worked to provide enhanced opportunities for the “average citizen.” Himself a member of one of Boston’s oldest and wealthiest families, he drew down the anger of the upper classes upon himself when he attempted to introduce a public pool, to be open to all the social classes, in Boston Common, near the homes of the elite. Although he did not win support for this project, his success at opening other pools for poor children’s recreational use “transcended the limits of nineteenth-century municipal function” and began a new era. Quincy’s example made it easier, for example, for J. Frank Foster, a park superintendent in South Chicago, to advocate for swimming pools near the city’s stockyards and steel mills. As Wiltse traces the history of municipal pools, other broad social trends are revealed. The earliest pools, as already shown, demonstrated de facto segregation along class lines, although men and women were able (but unlikely) to swim together, and poor whites and African Americans swam together without incident. By the beginning of the twentieth century, males and females were required to swim separately, typically on different days, as public officials came to fear that the increasing familiarity with which men and women behaved toward each other in public might lead to disastrous consequences in the water. This gender segregation did not last. Between the two world wars, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) built huge and elaborate “resort pools” with expansive lawns and decks and even sandy beaches. Men and women—wearing considerably less than the ten yards of fabric that previously had been required for a woman’s swimming costume—swam together, and families spent entire days lounging, splashing, picnicking, and sunbathing. Ironically, the opening up of swimming pool culture to accepting nearly naked men and women in the same space led to the exclusion of African Americans. For white America, the idea of an African American male being in such an intimate space with white women was unthinkable. The most compelling chapters of Contested Waters deal with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and the 1960’s and efforts to integrate public pools. Thurgood Marshall, who would later argue the landmark school integration case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and then become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, appears here as a legal consultant in cases involving segregated swimming. As local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued their cities for the rights of African American citizens to swim in public pools, they found that for many whites, integrating swimming pools was actually “more sensitive than schools.” Wiltse describes in chilling detail the taunts and the violence that African American children endured before finally winning the right to swim in taxpayer-supported facilities. Sadly, as the closing chapters reveal, once public pools

Contested Waters / wiltse

189

were integrated, whites largely stopped using them and began to build backyard or private neighborhood pools. Through the next decades, fewer people used the municipal pools, and many fell into disrepair and were closed. Some of the most revelatory offerings in the books are the photographs, nearly two dozen, reaching back to the nineteenth century. These images not only illustrate the different ways the pools themselves have looked throughout their history but also enhance the emotional weight of the most poignant social moments: One boy looks over a brick wall to spy on girls in their short-sleeved knee-length swimming dresses; bathing beauties in one-piece suits and sashes pose on a diving board; two African American teenagers watch through a chain-link fence as white children play in a segregated pool. While much of the material in the book addresses broad trends and large groups of people, the photographs help the reader remember that the groups are made up of individuals with personal reasons for wanting to swim. In his acknowledgments, Wiltse thanks his advisers and financial supporters at Brandeis University for aiding him in the dissertation research that led ultimately to Contested Waters. Although this book has received attention in the popular press, its publication by the scholarly University of North Carolina Press is no accident. Wiltse’s research is thorough, and thoroughly documented, and his prose style is only steps away from dissertation-speak. Most chapters begin with an abstract and end with a summary, so points and people and anecdotes are frequently brought up three or more times. Describing people relaxing and having fun, Wiltse tends to use language that reflects the library more than the pool, as when he explains that people enjoyed going to municipal pools during the interwar years because, “unlike at most public spaces, the social contact was sustained and interactive,” or when he describes the changes in bathing attire after women and men started swimming together as “the subsequent downsizing of swimsuits,” which led to swimmers “visually consuming” each other’s bodies. Nevertheless, Wiltse has done a remarkable job of finding and synthesizing a large body of material, most of it never considered seriously before, and the narrative he presents is fresh and important—so much so that Contested Waters has been awarded the 2007 William F. “Buck” Dawson Author’s Award by the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 2 (September, 2007): 130. Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2007, p. 8. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 18. The New Yorker 83, no. 18 (July 2, 2007): 73. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 175. The Wilson Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 93.

190

CROSSING THE SIERRA DE GREDOS Author: Peter Handke (1942) First published: Der Bildverlust: Oder, Durch die Sierra de Gredos, 2002, in Germany Translated from the German by Krishna Winston Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 472 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The near future Locale: An unnamed European port city and the Sierra de Gredos mountain range in central Spain Handke’s visionary postmodernist work of fiction advocates the abandonment of traditional, media-manipulated ways of perception and the acquisition of new images to deal with a fragmented and confusing world Principal characters: The nameless female protagonist, a powerful banker from a northwestern European riverport city An anonymous Spanish author, a writer from La Mancha hired by the protagonist to write her biography An anonymous observer, a reporter who shadows her on parts of her journey

Peter Handke’s reputation as the eccentric genius and enfant terrible of Austrian literature began with the publication of his 1968 play Kaspar, in which he shows the legendary nineteenth century foundling Kaspar Hauser as being manipulated by “prompters” who profess to teach him language skills as a path to becoming an individual. In reality, however, they turn him into a conformist puppet, indistinguishable from the Kaspar clones who populate the stage as the curtain closes. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, nearly forty years later, picks up the theme of manipulation and de-individualization, but focuses on images rather than on language as the tools of manipulation. The role of the villainous prompters and insinuators in Kaspar is assumed by the contemporary media in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, a switch that stems from the attacks on Handke by scholars, politicians, and journalists for the past decade, prompted by Handke’s defense of former Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševi6 (19412006), who was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for Serbian atrocities committed in Kosovo. Handke, who has Slavic roots himself, still insists that the media selectively demonized the Serbian president while at the same time making light of similar atrocities committed by Croats and other ethnic groups of the disintegrating former Yugoslavia. His high-profile participation in Miloševi6’s funeral did nothing to alleviate the media attacks, seriously damaging his reputation as

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos / handke

191

an author and causing German politicians to revoke the award of the prestigious Heinrich Heine Prize in 2006 after the decision by the awarding committee created a storm of controversy in the European media. Handke, perennially rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize, has resigned himself to not being a viable candidate for this honor any longer because of the media-fueled controversy about his pro-Serbian and anti-NATO sentiments. While the Serbian war and the subsequent A native Austrian, Peter Handke is one controversy are not directly addressed in Cross- of the most prolific and most ing the Sierra de Gredos, the main thematic controversial post-World War II focus of the novel, the central importance of writers of fiction and drama in images for human existence, is already indi- German. Winner of most prestigious cated in the German title, Der Bildverlust: European literary prizes and perennial Oder, Durch die Sierra de Gredos. Bildverlust candidate for the Nobel Prize, he is means “loss of images,” and the publisher has widely condemned in the media for his done the readers no service by leaving out the pro-Serbian stance following the NATO main title and reducing it to the more adven- intervention in the Kosovo conflict. turous-sounding subtitle. Indeed, the novel does not deal primarily with the journey of the protagonist across the Spanish mountain range but with her loss and potential reconstruction of autonomous individual images that she had been using as a defense against her enemies and the vicissitudes of her personal life. The American reader will expect a travel-adventure plot—the subtitle of the novel is a thinly disguised allusion to the popular Western and Near Eastern novels of Karl May (1842-1912), such as Durch die Wüste (1892; through the desert) and Durchs wilde Kurdistan (1892; through wild Kurdistan)—and will be disappointed, although it is possible to extract such a travel-adventure story from the 472 pages of this complex postmodernist work. Such a reduction reveals the story of a nameless, highly successful female banker of Slavic descent, who finds her emotional life in tatters, quite in contrast to her public image as it is portrayed in the media. She is alone, her daughter having run away; her brother has just been released from prison for alleged (as yet nonviolent, as she asserts) terrorist activities; and the father of her child has left her some time ago during or after an earlier walking tour across the Sierra de Gredos. To set the story right, she has hired a well-known Spanish writer, who lives in the La Mancha region in Spain, to write her autobiography and has made an appointment to meet him at his home, after retracing her earlier walking tour from Valladolid to La Mancha across the Sierra de Gredos. After flying to Valladolid from her present domicile in northwestern Europe— walking to the airport—she then proceeds first by SUV, then by bus, and finally on foot to her destination, which she reaches after stopping in several places, most of which

192

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

cannot be found on a map of Spain but are characterized by a decreasing attachment to contemporary Western material/commercial values and an increasing appreciation for the world of the imagination. At the climax of the novel, she suffers a complete breakdown and subsequent break with her former life. When she arrives at the home of the author, she finds that her biography is already finished, and she dedicates her future to recovery of the images and the world of imagination that had been destroyed by the artificial, manipulative, commercial images propagated by the media. This restores and revitalizes her; when she calls home to find out if all is well there, the telephone is answered by her runaway daughter, who has decided to come home. Far from being a travel adventure, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a novel about the Bildverlust, the loss of images, in the modern world and an ambitious attempt by Handke at creating his magnum opus, a summing up of his formal and thematic principles, as well a settling of accounts with his bitter enemies, the media. The protagonist, who, like Handke, has Slavic roots, finds herself split into two persons: one defined by her official biographical blurbs in the media that focus completely on external physical and material features, the other defined by her more complex and problematic inner life, supported by images she has been able to conjure up to defend her against her enemies and the slings and arrows of her professional life. This rich and protective inner storehouse of autonomous images is under constant threat of being manipulated, destroyed, and replaced by the artificial, commercial, and selfserving images created by the media who are in the paid service of forces interested in turning individuals into consumers and willing political puppets. The protagonist, the hired author, and the author of the novel—who frequently intrudes into the narration—are personas of Handke, who also associates himself with Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) and his hero Don Quixote of La Mancha, who also lived in a world of lost romantic images. As the protagonist walks away from her ruined life, she uses increasingly old-fashioned means of transportation, finally hiking alone and on foot through the wilderness, trying to re-create herself by fleeing from the bombardment of false images—significantly, her trip is frequently accompanied by war planes flying overhead. Her real journey to recovery begins after the road to the shrine of St. Teresa of Avila is blocked by road construction. Her forced detour leads her to Nueva Bazaar, a place that has completely bought into the modern world of commercial images as the name would indicate; there she meets the Stone Mason, a medieval figure who first appears in Handke’s earlier autobiographical novel Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht: Ein Märchen aus den neuen Zeiten (1994, My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, 1998). Like the inhabitants of Pedrada, her next stop, he is a refugee from a lost time, trying to find another era in which to survive, and appears to accompany her on her quest. Pedrada is a place for people who feel out of touch with their time, accept no credit cards, and whose only occupation is the collecting of dew, which, they hope, will lead to their taking over the world cosmetics market. Handke considers himself very much a citizen of Pedrada, a community of idiots savants and eccentrics out of touch with modern life. The protagonist has been protected so far from the hostile world, beginning at her hometown and extending to Pedrada, by her personal storehouse of images. Next she

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos / handke

193

reaches Hondareda, a community that has stubbornly resisted the intrusion of the media-created images. This makes it an ideal target for the “observer,” a Western journalist who has shadowed the protagonist’s journey and who announces that the community will be bombarded by batteries of media cannons that will insert their artificial images against all resistance. As she climbs down from the summit of the Sierra de Gredos, the protagonist is no longer able to control the pace of her descent and collapses. After lying unconscious in the forest for two days, she awakens to the realization that she has lost her repository of personal images; however, her story has already been completed when she arrives at the house of “her author” and will serve as the beginning of a new collection of images and possibly the starting deposit in a World Bank of Images she considers establishing in the future. Rather than a travel adventure à la Karl May, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a complex work of cultural criticism and narratological theory. Restating themes that first appeared in his first plays, Handke in this novel sees the current era as a transitory period, characterized by superficiality, lack of imagination, commercialization, and the insinuation of images and the accompanying false values that lead to loss of autonomous images and ideas in the individual. This loss that began in the late Middle Ages, the time of Cervantes, will eventually lead to a total collapse of Western civilization and, hopefully, a renaissance on the basis of some remembered or imagined fragments of a richer past that we will be able to “shore against our ruins,” as T. S. Eliot would have it. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is thus a “Wasteland” novel that promises possible redemption and restoration if we will be able to realize where we have gone wrong. In the meantime, our civilization will be fragmented into consumer societies like Nueva Bazaar, into isolated communities of artists and thinkers, labeled eccentric and out of touch by the media who are toadies of the power structure, and some primitive enclaves who will not be able to hold out long against this onslaught. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos deals exclusively with travels and adventures of the mind. It depicts an imaginary journey whose plot writes itself as the protagonist travels through her own past and into an uncertain though not entirely hopeless future. Declarative sentences diminish and are replaced by sentences that end in questions or alternative statements and outcomes from which readers are invited to choose, thus becoming part of the authoring process. The only evident themes of this demanding work are Handke’s hostile attitude toward the media, his critique of contemporary Western society combined with his nostalgia for a better past, and his hope for a better future. It is also the self-portrait of a complex, isolated human being, whose public, media-created image has been intentionally distorted to make him appear out of touch and shallow. It is a novel that requires much patience and thought from the reader, but it is unquestionably Handke’s richest novel up to now. Franz G. Blaha

194

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Harper’s Magazine 315 (August, 2007): 81-82. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 412. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 72. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 8. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 31. The Village Voice 52, no. 27 (July 4, 2007): 45. World Literature Today 77, no. 1 (April/June 2003): 77-78.

195

CULTURAL AMNESIA Necessary Memories from History and the Arts Author: Clive James (1939) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 876 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Essays An encyclopedia of cultural enthusiasms and dislikes that aims to set the record straight as to who and what is worth preserving for future generations Clive James is one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent, as well as most controversial, cultural critics, never afraid to report that the emperor is in fact unclothed and the latest media fad is bereft of either meaning or value. After several decades of waging this good fight in a variety of journalistic venues, James has in Cultural Amnesia chosen to put together a catalog of those “necessary memories from history and the arts” that are in danger of being forgotten in a society obsessed with the latest rather than the greatest. Unlike such previous gatherings of essays and reviews as Snakecharmers in Texas (1988) and The Metropolitan Critic (1994), which were composed of occasional journalistic pieces that had nothing in common except their author, Cultural Amnesia stakes out a major claim for the significance of its content. It is always risky for critics to become creators, not least because in the course of their careers they will have made enemies who eagerly await the opportunity to revenge themselves with a scathing review of their own. In undertaking a project as ambitious as Cultural Amnesia, then, which intends to redress the collective failure of memory by reaffirming the worth of unjustly neglected or even forgotten figures from the recent (and in some cases not all that recent) past, James is also venturing into territory zealously defended by some of the most powerful social shibboleths: “Those who can’t do, teach,” as one piece of conventional wisdom has it, from which it is but a small step to the corollary that those who cannot create, criticize. How does Cultural Amnesia stand up to the more rigorous criteria of meaning and coherence that it has taken upon itself? An opening browse through the 106 names in its table of contents is both intriguing and disconcerting. Alongside those eminences who would likely receive consideration in any roundup of intellectual contributions worth preserving—Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein—there are groupings of European, and particularly Viennese, figures for whom the basis for inclusion is not immediately self-evident. This catholicity of reference is, to a significant degree, a notable strength of Cultural Amnesia, which reflects both James’s impressively wide learning and his willingness to go against the grain in focusing on individuals who will be unfamiliar to many of his readers. In this case, he makes a convincing argument for the need to

196

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

remember and respect the legacy of those such as Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, and Stefan Zweig, who made pre-World War II Vienna one of Western civilization’s most generative and stimulating atmospheres, and he is also good on the merits of French (Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry), Italian (Gianfranco Contini, Benedetto Croce, Eu genio Montale), Russian (Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Aleksandr Zinoviev), and many other representatives of European national traditions whose work is always in danger of being forgotten by English-language readers. On the other hand, many of James’s selections seem not just problematic, but actually perverse. The names of Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, for example, have gone into history’s memory book only because of their prominence on the list of those French intellectuals who willingly collaborated with their country’s German occupiers during World War II, and nothing James says regarding their respective careers indicates why they deserve memorialization. On the other side of this particular coin, the inclusion of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels among Cultural Amnesia’s subjects also strikes a discordant note in a book that claims to have a “new humanism” as its ultimate goal, and in different contexts the attention paid to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin—the latter not given a separate essay, but more frequently cited in the index than either Goebbels or Mao—is similarly indicative of an antitotalitarian agenda that does not always blend well with James’s redemptive treatment of figures of primarily cultural significance. If the disparity between humanistic artists and totalitarian political leaders is an often awkward aspect of Cultural Amnesia’s overview of world history, it is nonetheless understandable on the grounds that tyranny must be remembered so as to be avoided in the future; in a world where it is possible for some to deny the Nazi Holocaust, society may well require frequent reminders of what people have done to one another in the name of ideology. A more puzzling aspect of James’s selection of individuals to be singled out for special attention is his inclusion of the likes of Coco Chanel, Dick Cavett, Tony Curtis, Michael Mann, John McCloy, and Isoroku Yamamoto, to name only the most eccentric among his choices. His treatment of Curtis’s career is indicative of his approach to individuals who, although more or less well known, are not usually found among the names of those who have made significant contributions to humanity’s cultural record. After an introduction that asserts, not particularly convincingly, the actor’s status as a representative Hollywood film icon, James cites his own adolescent memory of going to see The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) and hearing Curtis mangle the line “Yonder lies the castle of my father” (it came out as “Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah”) in what has become a movie-buff legend. So far, so amusing, but the remainder of the essay founders on the evidence of Curtis’s largely unremarkable career thereafter; Curtis’s one undeniably

Born in Sydney, Australia, Clive James was educated at the University of Sydney and Cambridge University. Beginning his career as a television critic, James subsequently published well-received fiction, memoirs, poetry, and essays, and has become one of his country's most respected cultural commentators.

Cultural Amnesia / james

197

powerful performance, in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), is notable precisely because it is the lone triumph in a generally undistinguished filmography that even a consistently witty prose style—describing Curtis’s ability to mimic other actors, James observes that “like the character in the epigraphs to The Waste Land, he did the police in different voices”—cannot rescue from its thoroughgoing mediocrity. This urge to inflate the accomplishments of minor figures carries over into James’s appreciations of his worthier subjects, who are often characterized in language that reminds readers that “hype” is the short form of “hyperbole.” It is not enough to praise Evelyn Waugh’s literary excellence; James insists that he is “the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century.” Unsatisfied with merely celebrating Louis Armstrong’s wonderful musicianship, James describes him as someone who did “as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States.” An appreciation of John Keats, similarly, opines, “Every modern poet is obliged to have a view on Keats.” After a while, readers assailed by these all-too-frequent rhetorical excesses will likely feel the need to pose some sharply unrhetorical questions of their own: Has James read every writer of twentieth century English prose, studied all post-Lincoln Americans, and surveyed all modern poets regarding their supposed need to formulate an attitude about Keats? This passion to exalt what is very good or excellent into the status of the ideal or perfect is a serious flaw in James’s treatment of many of his subjects, not least because he usually fails to provide either evidence or argument for the validity of these assertions. Such verbal overkill is the dark side of a stylistic exuberance that on many other occasions produces phrases that brilliantly epitomize their topics. One of James’s least favorite intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, is dismissed as one in whose “style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.” The essential loneliness of Albert Camus is vividly conveyed by “The Gods poured success on him but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.” Miles Davis’s music is characterized as “deliberately parsimonious and oblique, like the soundtrack of a Noh play that had closed out of town.” The periodic appearance of these and many similar revelatory moments serves as a kind of unpredictable but delightful reward that enables readers to excuse the more problematic aspects of Cultural Amnesia, as James demonstrates why reviews of his work often acknowledge his mastery of the telling phrase and the epiphanic insight. If James seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, he is all too prone to the sort of rhetorical fireworks that amuse on first reading but pall when given more serious consideration. These often surface in discursive ramblings that seem to have little to do with his ostensible subject: When assessing the work of the French historian Marc Bloch, for example, James wanders off into musings on Ezra Pound’s poetry that are certainly striking—“the Cantos have their beautiful moments, but those moments are willfully beautiful, as if to admit that the dust heap needs decorating”—but seem to have no evident relevance to Bloch and, after reflection, do not seem all that revelatory concerning Pound, either. Although in the context of a brief review a reader would accept such flashy aperçus as the sparks struck by a keen mind making quick

198

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and not necessarily profound associations, when the reader encounters them in what is supposed to be a weightier work of cultural criticism they impress as examples of superficial cleverness rather than penetrating discernment. Cultural polymath though he most certainly is, familiar with a daunting range of languages and literatures and also an acute analyst of the visual arts, there are a few chinks in James’s intellectual armor. His deficiencies as a commentator on jazz are all too painfully evident in his misapprehensions regarding the recording history of extended compositions, his blithe dismissal of the work of Duke Ellington’s sidemen outside the confines of the latter’s not-always-so-benign control, and his blanket dismissal of John Coltrane’s music. These ill-considered judgments connote lack of knowledge rather than acuity and add nothing other than a reminder of its author’s fallibility to the impact of Cultural Amnesia. If often problematic in its presentation of its author’s enthusiasms, on balance Cultural Amnesia impresses as an often interesting and always readable collection of mini-essays on figures of varying importance. It is by no means the illuminating synthesis of recent cultural history that it aspires to be, and it is probably best read a few entries at a time rather than in large doses. However, the book does demonstrate that Clive James has many illuminating things to say about where humanity has been and where it should be going, and that he is a critic whose observations are always worth considering, if not necessarily providing the last word on their subject. Paul Stuewe

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 299, no. 3 (April, 2007): 113-115. Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 56. Commonweal 134, no. 20 (November 23, 2007): 32-33. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 24 (December 15, 2006): 1257. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 72. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 8, 2007): 14-15. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 179. San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2007, p. M1. The Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 2007, pp. 3-5.

199

THE CURTAIN An Essay in Seven Parts Author: Milan Kundera (1929) First published: Le Rideau, 2005, in France Translated from the French by Linda Asher Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 168 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Essays, literary history, literary criticism Kundera offers ruminations on the art of fiction writing and the history of the novel The Curtain is a collection of essays by Czech novelist Milan Kundera, author of L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984). The seven essays have a stream-of-consciousness quality. For instance, Kundera may begin with an observation, find a parallel between that and some incident from his past, consider how that incident reminds him of a moment in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), draw a connection between Flaubert and Miguel de Cervantes, and so on. The Curtain reads less like a textbook than a lecture on such a book, taking ideas and then expounding and digressing. A familiarity with the subject matter at hand (François Rabelais, Gabriel García Márquez, and others) is recommended. In the first essay, titled “The Consciousness of Continuity,” readers are asked to consider a living composer and to imagine that that composer writes a symphony that sounds precisely like one of Beethoven’s. If Beethoven had composed it, it would have been considered one of the master’s greatest works; but a work like that would be laughable in the present day because it would be mocked as hopelessly derivative. Whereas scientific breakthroughs create change whenever they occur, making earlier theories obsolete, art progresses in a different way. An innovation in art is like the discovery of a new land: Discovering Antarctica did not make America obsolete; likewise, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) does not make Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615) obsolete. The second essay contrasts a national literature approach with a world literature view. Literature is normally studied within the context of the writer’s nationality, which people consider to be even more important than the language in which the author writes. Franz Kafka, for example, is considered a Czech writer because he was ethnically Czech, even though he wrote in German. According to Kundera, it makes more sense to look at literature from an international perspective, because that is where all of its major developments have occurred. Flaubert was a major influence on Joyce. Kafka was an influence on García Márquez. Kundera himself is an author of Czech ethnicity who writes in French, so he has deep insight into these questions. The third essay relates how Flaubert was criticized by one of his contemporaries for not writing a more uplifting story. Painters or musicians can be commissioned by

200

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the Church or wealthy patrons to produce a work of art that furthers some particular agenda, and they can still produce something of genuine artistic value, but literature does not work that way. A novel must be an honest portrayal of the way people act and think, whether that shows them to be moral or not. This exploration of the human condition occurred in literature decades before existentialism took hold Milan Kundera was born in in philosophy and in fact laid the groundwork Czechoslovakia and moved to France for that strand of philosophy. in 1975. His books include ert (1967; In the fourth essay, titled “To Understand, The Joke, 1969), Livre du rire et de We Must Compare,” Kundera mentions how, l’oubli (1979; The Book of Laughter in Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler (1931and Forgetting, 1980), and L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (1984; 1932; The Sleepwalkers, 1932), readers understand a rebel by comparing him to a criminal, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then asks rhetorically how readers are to un1984). His collections of essays include L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the derstand a novelist: by comparing the novelist Novel, 1988) and Les Testaments trahis to a lyrical poet. Lyrical poetry is about the (1993; Testaments Betrayed, 1995). author, regardless of the subject matter. A novel, Kundera reminds, is prose; it is about everyday life. Flaubert was bored by his own character, Madame Bovary, because he had matured into a novelist. He had stopped writing about himself and started writing about life. The purpose of a novel is to show the readers themselves. Kundera was disappointed in his youth to learn that Marcel Proust’s character Albertine—the perfect woman—was inspired by a man; but this fact illustrates that Proust’s work, so famously a chronicle of every minute detail of his life, was not an autobiography but a novel. Albertine is her own being, not the man who inspired her. Á la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; In Search of Lost Time, 1922-1931) was not about Proust but about humanity. In the fifth essay, the reader learns that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel contrasted the ancient world with the modern world: The former was one of action, the latter was one of bureaucracy. It is the latter, says Kundera, from which the novel is born. It shows not epic struggles but the minutiae of everyday life. Joyce and Kafka have given readers Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad for modern life. Rabelais coined the term “agelast” to describe those incapable of laughter, and thus those who show the true nature of a joke. To joke is to take a risk, it is an “affront to the sacred nature of life.” One sees this in the way the modern novel views war, which tends to be critical of the causes for which people kill and die, critical of those on both sides of the struggle. For Homer, war was epic and noble; for the modern novelist, it is a tragic joke. The sixth essay begins with a recounting of three significant scenes in Don Quixote. First, Alonzo Quijada decides to rename himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. Does this become his new identity, simply because he says it is? Next, he puts a basin

The Curtain / kundera

201

on his head and calls it a helmet. He takes a poll of onlookers who (in having fun at his expense) concur that it is in fact a helmet. Does this make it a helmet? Finally, he proclaims his love for Dulcinea, a woman he may in fact never have even met. He proclaims his love because he decides that a knight-errant ought to be in love. In this first novel, in the modern sense of the word, questions have been laid out that future novels will ponder for centuries: What is identity? What is truth? What is love? The final essay is a speculation on the future of the novel. Kundera recounts a visit to an Antillean island where the black population had lost all ties to the African tribes they descended from. The island inhabitants were cut off from their identity, and they looked to their poets to tell them who they were. Kundera contrasts this culture with Europe, which used to see its epochs in the context of its great artists but now sees them in the context of scientific or political developments. He considers Alejo Carpentier’s novel El arpa y la sombra (1979; The Harp and the Shadow, 1990), which skips about through different eras of time, and wonders if that is the future of the novel. Kundera also considers the similarities between Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Liaisons, 1784) and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930); he discusses how characters break free of the stories, following their own digressions. Perhaps that is the future of the novel. Kundera also points out how a novel cannot be understood without considering the works that came before it. At one point in the twelfth century, someone took the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and added a counterpoint to the melody. Then others refined it further, until an art that had remained unchanged for centuries became something new. It was no longer just music, it was the history of music, which could be looked at in terms of its development. The Curtain elaborates on themes laid out in two previous volumes of the author’s essays: L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel, 1988) and Les Testaments trahis (1993; Testaments Betrayed, 1995). This collection gets its title from Kundera’s notion that people approach life with certain preconceptions that prevent them from being able to see things as they are. A novelist’s ambition is to tear through that curtain—not to improve on something his predecessors have done, but to see something new. That is the ambition of the “true” novelists, whom Kundera contrasts with those who seek merely to entertain. He has little use for the latter; a mediocre plumber may still provide a valuable service, but a mediocre novelist is worthless. Those writers who have inspired Kundera receive the most attention in these essays: Laurence Sterne, Cervantes, Rabelais, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka, Broch, and García Márquez. A theme recurring through several of these essays is that of the joke told seriously. Kafka’s stories, stripped down to their essence, sound like the setup to a punch line. A man wakes up to find that he has transformed into an insect. The stories, however, are not told as jokes. They are told slowly, deliberately, and with empathy for the characters. There is something inherently comical in even the most mundane aspects of life, such as a man buried beneath the weight of a bureaucracy. This is a worldview that Kundera shares with Kafka. A quick glance at Kundera’s book titles reveals as much: Mert (1967; The Joke, 1969); Sm0šne lásky (1963; Laughable Loves, 1974); Livre du rire et de l’oubli (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980).

202

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Kundera left Czechoslovakia many years ago and watched his homeland lose itself in a long history of oppressive regimes. He lives in France, writes in the language of his adopted country, and analyzes literature (his chosen field) as the means of questioning and coming to terms with identity. Steven Kedrowski

Review Sources The Economist 382 (March 10, 2007): 83. Harper’s Magazine 314 (March, 2007): 88-94. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 4, 2007): 1-10. San Francisco Chronicle, February 11, 2007, p. M4. The Times Literary Supplement, July 20, 2007, p. 11. The Washington Post, February 4, 2007, p. BW10.

203

DEATH AND THE MAIDENS Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle Author: Janet Todd (1942) Publisher: Counterpoint (Berkeley, Calif.). 297 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1794-1816 Locale: Primarily in London, England This biography traces the life and death of Fanny Wollstonecraft, the first child of Mary Wollstonecraft, and those around her, especially her half sister Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley Principal personages: Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of the well-known writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her lover Gilbert Imlay Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Fanny’s half sister, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, wife of the poet Shelley, and author of Frankenstein Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, who married Harriet Westbrook and later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley William Godwin, writer, philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s father, who raised her, Fanny, and Charles and Claire Clairmont with his second wife Mary Jane Vial, Godwin’s second wife, strongly disliked by both Fanny and Mary, who had two children of her own, Charles and Claire Clairmont, and a son with Godwin, William Godwin, Jr. Claire Clairmont, daughter of Mary Jane Vial and stepdaughter of William Godwin; grew up in the Godwin household with Fanny and Mary

Fanny Wollstonecraft had a short and difficult life. She was the outsider in the household in which she grew up, alternately neglected and abused. Relatively little is known about her in relation to all the others around her, but the biographical details Janet Todd provides in Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle suggest that perhaps the only wonder is that she did not commit suicide even before she did at age twenty-two. Even in death, she was rejected and abandoned, and her body was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave somewhere in Wales. Fanny Wollstonecraft was born in France in 1794, the daughter of the well-known English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, most famous for what is considered the first book-length exploration of feminist issues, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft named her baby after her closest friend, Fanny Blood, whom Wollstonecraft had been with when she died in childbirth. Fanny’s father was Gilbert

204

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Imlay, and although Fanny’s birth registration listed her as Françoise Imlay, her parents were never married. Wollstonecraft generally considered marriage a form of slavery for women, but the man she had fallen in love with, the unscrupulous American Imlay, was not interested in marrying her anyway, and he provided no support for her or their child despite her many pleas for his affection and responsibility. Twice, in 1795 and again in 1796, Wollstonecraft tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in despondence over Imlay’s unfaithfulness and desertion. It was an inauspicious beginning for little Fanny, and her future life proved equally ill-fated. Fanny contracted smallpox as a young child and was badly scarred. Unlike her mother’s close relationship with Fanny’s namesake, Fanny would never have the opportunity or time to have a friend at all. She would be destined to be surrounded by those who did not consider her worthy of their attention unless they wanted her to do something for them; they did not include Fanny in their activities, though she longed to be included. In an effort to make money to provide for herself and her baby, Wollstonecraft turned the letters she had written about her travels to Scandinavia when Fanny was an infant into a published work. Todd considers this book, the last one completed before Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, to be Wollstonecraft’s most appealing work. Ironically, however, the popular book created a romanticized life that later no one, including Fanny herself, felt that Fanny could live up to. One of the most poignant aspects of Fanny’s biography is her repeated readings of Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Fanny was presumably desperate to find her mother and to believe she was loved, yet with all of these rereadings of the book that included her, Fanny was simultaneously internalizing the belief, augmented by those who knew her, that she was not only incapable of living up to her mother’s talent and fame but also incapable of living up to the image of that little baby Fanny in the book. Todd provides a genealogical table of the main characters in the drama that surrounded Fanny, and it is well that she does, because the connections are not simple. After Gilbert Imlay was finally out of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, Mary thought she had found someone who shared her liberal view in the philosopher William Godwin, who at the time was the well-known writer of the novel Things as They Are: Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and a radical treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), although in a second edition of the book two years later Godwin recanted many of his previous radical beliefs. Mary became pregnant before she married Godwin, but they were married March 29, 1797, before their daughter, named Mary, was born on August 30. Mary Wollstonecraft died on September 10 as a result of complications during childbirth. At the time, Fanny was three years old. Welsh-born Janet Todd is a professor of English literature at University of Aberdeen. She is the noted author of numerous books on early women writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn, and is the general editor of the Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen.

Death and the Maidens / todd

205

William Godwin hastened to find someone to marry and raise the new baby and her half sister Fanny. The first woman who agreed was Mary Jane Vial (also known as Clairmont), who brought to the household a son, Charles Clairmont, born in 1795, and a daughter, Claire Clairmont, born in 1798. Later, in 1803, Godwin and the new Mrs. Mary Godwin had a child, William Godwin, Jr. Thus, Fanny was the oldest of three girls, with her half sister Mary three years younger, her stepsister Claire four years younger, plus a stepbrother Charles, a year younger than she was (a portrait of Charles Clairmont in Todd’s book incorrectly identifies him as Fanny’s half brother), and a stepbrother, William Godwin, Jr., nine years younger. It seems established from the start that Fanny should be the hard-working servant in the household. From all accounts, Mary Godwin was harsh and demanding, never happy with her new situation. She vastly preferred her own daughter, Claire, over the other two, especially the less attractive and less clever older girl, Fanny. She especially resented the fact that she was given the name Fanny Godwin, courtesy of her stepfather. Both the stepmother and her stepfather Godwin loaded Fanny with age-inappropriate work and responsibilities and gave her little appreciation in return. As the three girls in the household became teenagers, the same pattern of making demands on Fanny without return was evinced by her stepsister Claire and her half sister Mary. This was made patently clear when Mary became involved with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of all the famous poets of the Romantic period in British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, none had a more tumultuous life than Shelley. Shelley’s father was wealthy, but stringent with his wayward son; in turn, young Shelley constantly borrowed money on the basis of one day inheriting, and then was unable to pay the debts, constantly moving from place to place to avoid the collectors. Shelley knew the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and even more admired the early radical works of William Godwin, and he went to London to endear himself to Godwin and to promise him financial support since Godwin always seemed to need money. Meeting the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two famous writers, he was determined to have her, although he was already married to Harriet Westbrook, whom he had lured away from her parents when she was sixteen, just as he was to do with Mary at age seventeen. Fanny found Shelley fascinating, but when he stole away with Mary, they took Claire with them, but not Fanny. In the complicated years that followed for Shelley, Mary, and Claire, Fanny’s only role was to be called upon to secretly deliver messages and serve as a go-between from them and Godwin, from whom Shelley was now estranged but felt obliged to send money, even though it was money that Shelley borrowed. During the time Mary and Shelley lived in Switzerland near Lord Byron, Claire had a child, Allegra, whose father was presumably Lord Byron, though it may have been Shelley. Mary and Shelley married shortly after his wife Harriet committed suicide in 1816. It was during this time that Mary wrote the novel Frankenstein (1818), which Todd suggests has several connections to Mary’s own life, including her tenuous relationship with Fanny. In the preface to Death and the Maidens, Janet Todd writes that there was never a group of people more documented than the circle of the households of the Godwins

206

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and the Shelleys in 1814-1816. Todd says that biographers of that group have sometimes mentioned Fanny, concluding that Fanny was melancholy, morbidly anxious, a minor figure in the margins. Todd says she wanted to come at Fanny’s life as it was recorded in Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel book, rather than assuming Fanny was almost inevitably destined for an early death. Todd adds that she has always been haunted by the lack of knowledge about Fanny. Letters have been altered, destroyed, or written over. There is no extant portrait of her. Her story must be a group story. The time line of events is sometimes difficult to follow since the biography is not arranged chronologically but rather in chapters that are more frequently named for the others in the group than for Fanny. Todd has re-created more of Fanny’s life than anyone else has, but she is the first to acknowledge the speculative. Given the lack of records, the book remains more about the famous others. The most haunting and lasting impression from the book that directly relates to Fanny is her death, and that is how the work begins, with a chapter titled “Death.” No one knows exactly why or when Fanny made her decision to commit suicide, but she arranged it carefully. She traveled from the London household alone, purportedly to visit her aunts in Ireland. Instead, she went to Swansea, Wales, to an inn called the Mackworth Arms. The following morning, a maid found her dead in her room. Part of a suicide note was next to the body. The October 12, 1816, issue of the Cambrian newspaper printed what there was of the note, which broke off in mid-sentence. The rest had been torn off and burned. Of the various guesses about the remainder of the note, Todd’s conclusion is the most convincing and the most shocking. Fanny had written two despairing letters to Mary and Shelley, the second one from Bristol, where Fanny had stayed on her journey to Swansea, and Shelley soon tracked her to Swansea. Although Todd considers it unlikely that Shelley managed to get to Fanny’s room and tear the note, she thinks it almost certain that he managed to bribe the coroner and/or the reporter. Shelley stayed long enough to check the newspaper account, but he did not acknowledge any connection with the victim or claim the body. It would be too much of a scandal, presumably, although precisely why one more scandal would matter is less clear. When Shelley sent Godwin news of Fanny’s suicide, Godwin insisted that Shelley not tell anyone about her death. For months, Godwin’s story was that Fanny was visiting her aunts, and then presumably that she had died there. Fanny Wollstonecraft gained no more respect in her death than she had in her life, or at least since age three, when her mother died. Janet Todd’s account of Fanny’s death, shrouded in mystery, is heart-rending, and the entire book is an outstanding portrayal of Fanny and the famous circle that excluded her. Lois A. Marchino

Death and the Maidens / todd

207

Review Sources The Christian Science Monitor, October 23, 2007, p. 14. Entertainment Weekly, nos. 959/960 (October 19, 2007): 133. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 779. Library Journal 132, no. 17 (October 15, 2007): 68. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 30 (July 30, 2007): 68. The Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2007, p. 27.

208

DEEP ECONOMY The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future Author: Bill McKibben (1960) Publisher: Times Books (New York). 262 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Current affairs, economics, sociology McKibben argues that, in order to have a sustainable future, societies must reject the notion that more is necessarily better, pursue locally based economies that protect the environment, and safeguard happiness by asking “How much is enough?” Although the United States continues to be among the wealthiest nations on Earth, a new hint of unease can be detected in the fact that many people are becoming aware of economics and economic theory. From the nightly news and talk radio, nonspecialists have learned something of the language of the specialist and are able to argue at the watercooler about “downsizing” and “outsourcing” and “competing in the global marketplace.” Most of the debate over globalization, informed by the ideas crystallized in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), assumes that globalization is inevitable and good; the points of contention have to do with who benefits from globalization. Coupled with unease over the future, however, is the fact that Americans, following a “more is better” philosophy, continue to accumulate things. Average consumers, it is frequently said, are not interested in where a product comes from; they care only about the lower prices that globalization brings. A recent trend in nonfiction writing has been the exploration of the complexities and the consequences of the global economy, presenting detailed studies of where products come from, products that consumers often take for granted in their daily lives. Amy Stewart’s Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers (2006) looks at the increasingly globalized cut flower industry, which gathers roses grown in Ecuador, tulips from Oregon, gerbera daisies from Kenya, and lilies from California into a bouquet for a dining room table in New York or London. Stewart reveals the surprising distances flowers travel and explores the economic issues that inform the balance between wages and shipping costs. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) looks at the foods Americans typically eat and the industrial farms that produce them under conditions that most consumers cannot imagine. These two books, and several others, show that there is a market—a desire—for information about where products come from. Through that doorway of opportunity steps Bill McKibben with Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It is not until consumers develop a curiosity about where things come from, he realizes, that they can begin to wonder

Deep Economy / mc kibben

209

where things should come from, and then be gin to wonder whether they need more things Bill McKibben, a former staff writer for at all. McKibben pulls together ideas also The New Yorker, is the author of ten expressed in several of the new books about books, including The End of Nature the new global economy, but rather than em- (1989), a classic work on the phasizing exposition, as Stewart and Pollan environment. A scholar-in-residence at can be said to do, McKibben emphasizes ar- Middlebury College, McKibben is gument. What is needed is a new economy married to the writer Sue Halpern. They live with their daughter in built on living and consuming locally rather Vermont. than globally. McKibben assumes his readers have a basic understanding of the theories of the Scottish economist Adam Smith (17231790), who believed that free markets would ultimately work for the good of all if they were left alone, and that security would arise from consistent growth. McKibben states that Smith’s ideas worked well for two centuries but that “we in the rich countries no longer inhabit a planet where straight-ahead . . . economics, useful as it has been, can help us.” His thesis can be stated simply: While in the past it may have made sense to pursue a better life through the acquisition of more material goods and the consumption of more fossil fuels, that path no longer makes sense. McKibben calls his new economy a “deep economy,” echoing the idea of “deep ecology,” coined by Arne Naess in 1973 and explored in the seminal book Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered (1985) by Bill Devall and George Sessions. An ecological philosophy is “deep” if it moves beyond and beneath superficial scientific understandings of nature and reaches to deeper spiritual and intuitive questions. Similarly, a deep economy rejects some commonly asked questions (Is this process efficient? Does it yield the highest return for investors? Will it give consumers more?) in favor of questions that speak to meaningfulness and the greater good. As McKibben writes, “We need a . . . shift in our thinking about economics—we need it to take human satisfaction and societal durability more seriously; we need economics to mature as a discipline.” In his first chapter, “After Growth,” the author raises three central reasons for moving the world toward a deep economy and discusses two of them at some length. The first reason is that the current global economy based on perpetual need for growth is not working for most people: “Growth, at least as we now create it, is producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress.” This ground has been worked over thoroughly by others, as McKibben acknowledges, and he devotes only a few pages to this idea. Second, the author argues, there is no longer enough fossil fuel for the world’s people to continue in the direction they are headed. McKibben cites differing estimates about when the Earth will reach the point at which half its supply of fossil fuel is gone; by some estimates, that point has already been reached, or will be reached in a matter of a few years. However well growth economies have succeeded at raising the standard of living up to now—and there is no doubt that the standard of living of the average human being in the twenty-first century far exceeds that of a person in the eighteenth—continued growth will soon become physically im-

210

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

possible because there will not be enough fuel to sustain it. This is not a matter of politics, he explains, but of physics and chemistry. Third, people should move beyond global growth economy because “growth is no longer making us happy,” a point made by study after study demonstrating that beyond a modest amount necessary for basic health and security, people’s self-reported levels of happiness do not increase— and in many cases actually decrease—as their wealth increases. While a growth economy demands that people acquire more and more things, overall these acquisitions do not contribute to the well-being of people who already have enough. With these three central arguments as underpinnings, McKibben explores the potential rewards of turning one’s attention to building smaller, stronger communities. In his second chapter, “The Year of Eating Locally,” the author recounts his family’s experiment in eating only food produced in the valley around Lake Champlain for one year. (This experiment will remind many readers of a similar undertaking by Barbara Kingsolver and her family, described in the 2007 work Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, written by Kingsolver, her husband, and her daughter.) McKibben and his family haunted the local farmers’ market, canned vegetables, bought beef and dairy products from grass-fed cattle, and went without salmon and California produce. McKibben offers the startling fact that the average bite of food that an American eats has traveled fifteen hundred miles to arrive on the fork. The fuel costs alone, not to mention the displaced farmworkers, the cost of producing packaging, the loss of biodiversity, and the loss of awareness of where food comes from, make the American expectation that all varieties of foods will be available all the time unsustainable. During his family’s experiment, McKibben found that they could eat a variety of tasty and nutritious food and that the monetary cost was equal or less than the amount spent on processed food, but that gathering and preparing fresh unprocessed food took more time than zapping frozen dinners. Still, he concludes, “The time I spent getting the food and preparing it was not, in the end, a cost at all. . . . In my role as eater, I was part of something larger than myself that made sense to me— a community. I felt grounded, connected.” McKibben uses food as an example of how people could change their lives to consume less, consume locally, and build community. Food works well as a symbol because it is so central to the way people live and yet taken for granted by those who have enough of it. In later chapters, McKibben addresses the ideology of individualism, the human need for community, local independent radio, small wind- and solarelectricity producers, and the remarkable growth of the Chinese economy. At every step, he examines the ways things are produced, the social and environmental costs, and the small-scale alternatives that already exist in various parts of the world. McKibben takes pains to establish his position as being outside and above partisan politics. As he explains, the shifts he proposes are “neither ‘liberal’ nor ‘conservative.’” Indeed, McKibben’s ideas grow out of his traditional Christianity and his progressive worldview, and he is equally critical of President Bill Clinton’s support of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other international trade policies as he is of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Whatever their motives, McKibben believes, politicians who move the country toward more globalization,

Deep Economy / mc kibben

211

more centralization, and more “efficiency” in the marketplace are doing real damage to individuals’ lives. He also recognizes and addresses some of the objections that might be raised to his arguments. McKibben acknowledges that what is possible in Vermont, with its progressive independent politics and many small farms, may not be possible in other parts of the country. After all, not much food is grown in New York City. He also realizes that the question “How much is enough?” is a very different question for those who already have a lot, and he asks his readers to try to imagine a world in which everyone has what most Americans take for granted, rather than simply considering their own needs and wants. He gives the example of an impoverished girl he met on a reporting trip and her delight when he presented her with a stuffed animal. McKibben’s own daughter, he realizes, would also have been pleased to receive it, but her pleasure would have been smaller and more fleeting because to her it would have been just one more animal in a large collection of animals. If the goal is to let every child have a teddy bear—or medicine, or access to a car, or air-conditioning—those who have plenty will have to stop pursuing more. Ultimately, McKibben calls for a middle approach. Poor nations must continue to develop enough for decent standards of living, he says, but “we in the rich nations need to change, not just for environmental reasons but because our way has stopped producing as much human happiness as it should.” Deep Economy was released at the beginning of 2007, just as McKibben was initiating Step It Up 2007, a campaign that sponsored Earth Day rallies to call for congressional action to halt global warming. McKibben provided a title, a logo, and an umbrella Web site but then encouraged people to design and hold programs in locations and formats that represented their own communities. More than thirteen hundred rallies were held across the country, many promoting local farmers’ markets and walkable cities as means to reduce consumption and build community. The thousands who attended these rallies demonstrated on a large scale that people are eager for information and for ways to work together. If McKibben is right about the direction the world is headed, the emerging movement toward sustainable local communities is desperately needed now. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 21. The Christian Science Monitor, May 29, 2007, p. 17. Harvard Business Review 85 (April, 2007): 30. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 64. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 22, 2007): 28. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 41-42. Time 169, no. 16 (April 16, 2007): 68-69. U.S. Catholic 72 (July, 2007): 46-47.

212

DEVILS AND ISLANDS Author: Turner Cassity (1929) Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press (Athens). 57 pp. $24.95; paperback $12.95 Type of work: Poetry Using meter and often rhyme, this eccentric but entertaining poet continues his witty, satirical commentary on a variety of topics, especially political correctness, for whose shibboleths he shows little respect Poet Turner Cassity is not only out of tune with the prosy autobiographical poetry of the past fifty years or so but also out of tune with the past couple of centuries. He is like a throwback to the eighteenth century, or rather, with his leanings toward rhymed couplets, satire, and waspish wit, he could be a reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in the contemporary world. How would such a spirit of the Enlightenment adapt to the media-dominated postmodern world? The answer is “easily,” like an antediluvian alligator to the swimming pool—and with an entertainment value of four stars. Naturally, there are some big differences between Cassity and Pope. Cassity’s rhymed couplets do not display Pope’s balance, order, and decorum; instead, they reflect the shifts, disconnects, and idioms of the popular media. His memorable oneliners are an answer to the sound bite. Reading his poetry is sometimes like channel surfing, with the same issues popping up (obviously he finds the media fascinating, though not in the way intended). Also, while Pope, a Deist, felt that God had at least given the right order to things, Cassity seems to feel that the Devil has taken over and the world is a mess. The Universal Chaos feared by Pope has come about in Cassity’s postmodern Waste Land. Although appearing frequently, rhymed couplets are not the only verse form Cassity utilizes in Devils and Islands. Some poems are in triplets or quatrains, rhymed or unrhymed, while others are in blank verse or some other unrhymed iambic line. In any event, all of the poems draw on iambic meter and traditional form. While his poems contain some instances of awkward word order, ellipses, or fill-ins for rhymes, these are probably no more frequent than in most traditional poetry and do not seriously hinder understanding. In reading Cassity, it helps to slow down, reread, or read aloud (thereby capturing musical qualities missing from much contemporary poetry). Just as Cassity looks to the past for his poetic forms, so too does he look back for his subjects, themes, attitudes, and comments, especially when he is addressing the hottest issues in the media. The poem “Energy Crises” is a good example. Here a news report of bats that “divebomb the windmill farm” raises suspicions: “Against a nonpolluting power source/ A kamikaze strike to reinforce// Suspicion fossil fuels may be best.” Going on to mock “the newest trend/ In solar heating” and “Meth-

Devils and Islands / cassity

213

ane from cows or ethanol from corn,” the poem opts for a return to “Strip mine and Turner Cassity worked as a catalog drills,” wood, and whale oil: “Once the mount- librarian at Emory University from ing fears,// Threats, economic ups and downs 1962 until his retirement in 1991. In grow thick/ It’s back to Ahab and to Moby addition to poetry, he has written verse Dick.” The poem concludes by asking whether plays and short stories. Devils and the kamikaze bats will “biodegrade?// Or as Islands is his tenth poetry collection; the trust fund cases hug the trees/ Hang in un- other collections include Steeplejacks in Babel (1973), Hurricane Lamp til the global warming-freeze?” (1986), The Destructive Element: New Similarly outrageous is the poem “Eclogue and Selected Poems (1998), and No against Ecology,” whose mocking title pro- Second Eden (2002). vides the key to interpretation. The poem re fers to the garden of Eden—“Fool’s Paradise? And is there any other kind?”—as the original ecologically balanced environment. Perverse humanity, in the form of Adam and Eve, “that nude pair so bored they took up with a snake,” finds prohibitions more attractive than preservation. They also find hunting the animals more exciting than naming them, so, outside the gate guarded by “Checkpoint Angel” with a flaming sword, “From food to sport to murder is a seamless scale.” The contemporary world also gets the Cassity treatment in “After the Fall,” where city planners take “a backward glance/ Toward Babylon” and “The future takes on, more and more/ A look of follies gone before”; in “Amazonas.com,” where the natives dress up (or down) as headhunters for the tourists; in “Hitting the Silk,” which comments on severance packages given to big executives; in “Where Is Gutzon Borglum Now That We Need Him?” which proposes rebuilding New Hampshire’s fallen Great Stone Face as a generic Yankee, Jackie Kennedy, or favorite rock star; in “Edith and Woody and Nancy and Ronnie,” about loyal widows of great men who jealously guard the reputations of their husbands; and “Guidelines for a Cover Illustration,” which defines the old-fashioned hero-adventurer before the age of political correctness. A number of poems look back nostalgically on a bygone era, but with similarly comic effect. Such is “The Last Newsboy,” which destroys the myth of the newsboy as role model but still laments his passing “As now newspapers are. As AP, UP ebb,/ Ex-buyer on my corner, see you on the Web.” In “The Last Elevator Operator, or, Mr. Otis Regrets,” the lament is for the spiffily dressed figure who put “a human face on ups/ And downs, the accidental stops.” In “The Last Cigarette Girl,” the skimpily dressed but unsuccessful entrepreneur considers selling drugs but decides she will have to settle for hitting the “talk show circuit” as a “Transgendered . . . dwarf.” Then there is the “duenna” in “The Last Chaperon” who not only “could have held down AIDS, and overpopulation” but also could have arranged many a marriage on favorable terms. These sad characters from a bygone time symbolize the extent to which the sleazy contemporary world has fallen. Other poems look all the way back to classical or biblical times, but with a contemporary application. While Adam and Eve’s perversity has already been noted above,

214

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

“The Devil and Daedalus” depicts Daedalus and Icarus as their classical counterparts. “Inventing the Subdivision” reinterprets the landing of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat as a developer’s dream, though fighting among the animals aboard might have caused a few extinctions. “Fishers of Men” ends on a grace note to the hookers in Mexico’s Atlantic resorts. “Administrating” presents Pontius Pilate as a typical harried executive, “The Passion of 1934” describes the Oberammergau Passion play as produced and acted by the Nazis, and “Afterward” examines the disbelief after Jesus left the tomb. Cassity draws on his travels in a few poems, which are at least reassuring that folly exists all over the world. However, in Europe the follies have been somewhat more somber, taking the form of a violent history of regime changes: “Free Trade in Mitteleuropa” comments ironically on the changing fortunes and names of Trieste; “Models” describes St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg as resembling many U.S. state capital buildings, but one where democracy has taken a beating; and “Update for Francis Joseph” describes restorations of ruins in Vienna and Budapest as resembling a Japanese movie set for Godzilla, though “Centuries/ Of occupation by the Ottomans/ Have left at least a Turkish bath, intact/ And functioning, a crescent on its dome./ Or is it sickle without hammer, Marx/ As emblem put to rout? Crusades and creeds/ Come each apart. The Double Eagle split.” In “Self-Guided Tour, 1987,” Cassity finds “diversity” as lacking in South Africa as back home, “Though we do not admit it.” Cassity saves some of his unkindest cuts for the arts. In the collection’s opening poem, “Fantasia on Dummy Keys,” about a practice keyboard without sound, Cassity opines that “Lacking sound,/ It will forgive wrong notes, not know an exercise/ From Bach, if there indeed is some distinction. Mute,/ It is the ideal medium for twelve-tone works,/ If not the Chopin repertoire.” In “Erich Wolfgang Korngold,” Cassity favors the famous composer for the movies who, as a Jew escaping the Nazis, fled his native Vienna for Hollywood (where his classical critics accused him of selling out), but in “Dance” he slams the famous dancer and choreographer Martha Graham: “A dance is footwork or is nothing, as the tango knows,/ And hoofing. Get real, Martha. Ancient Greeks in brilliantine/ Or Appalachians in taps each mock the origin.” While Cassity speaks up for an underappreciated instrument in “A Course in Sax Education,” he also proposes, in “Report of the Monuments Commission,” a monument to slavery on the Washington Mall. Cassity could be accused of being outrageous just to get attention, much like the media whose influence he consistently shows (in “Soldiers Three in the Big Easy,” he admits to channel surfing). Otherwise, it is hard to say what he really believes. Perhaps what he personally believes does not matter so much as the point he makes with his outrageousness: In a free country, there should be no limits on belief, thought, or speech. He does not seem to have a political agenda, since his wit cuts several ways: It implies opposition to religious fundamentalism as much as it does to political correctness, both of which are forms of mind control. Cassity comes closest to stating his point in the poem that gives the collection its title, “Robinson Crusoe to Capt. Dreyfus.” Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was

Devils and Islands / cassity

215

the French military officer of Jewish descent who was wrongly accused of treason, tried and convicted, and imprisoned on French Guiana’s infamous Devil’s Island. In Cassity’s poem, Robinson Crusoe tells Dreyfus: “All islands are the Devil’s in a sense:/ The forcing ground of idleness, their threat/ Of limits, of the inescapable.” Islands seem to symbolize not only physical confines, prisons, but also limitations of thought, prisons of the mind. Victims of shipwreck and anti-Semitism are equally circumscribed by the Devil. With heroes like Korngold, Crusoe, and Dreyfus, it is not surprising that Cassity sounds like a voice in the wilderness. Still, it is a voice worth listening to—for its skepticism, scorn of fashion and hypocrisy, and humor. Harold Branam

216

THE DIANA CHRONICLES Author: Tina Brown (1953) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 542 pp. $27.50 Type of Work: Biography Time: From the 1950’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Althorp, Northamptonshire; London; various royal residences in England and Scotland Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the princess’s death, Brown’s glitzy biography uses previously published sources, more than 250 new interviews, and personal knowledge to present Diana, master and victim of the media, as a transformative force for the British Royal Family and an icon of her times Principal personages: Diana, Princess of Wales, born Diana Frances Spencer, later Lady Diana Spencer, humanitarian who uplifted the public image of British royalty Edward John Spencer, the eighth earl Spencer, her father Charles, Prince of Wales, Diana’s husband from 1981 to 1996 Elizabeth II, the reigning British monarch since 1952 Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II Camilla Parker Bowles, mistress of Prince Charles and later his second wife Sarah Ferguson, duchess of York and the princess of Wales’ sister-in-law James Hewitt, officer in the Life Guards and Diana’s lover James Gilbey, Diana’s lover Dodi Fayed, Diana’s lover

In 1979, the Prince of Wales, then thirty years old and under pressure to find a bride, and soon, proposed marriage to Amanda Knatchbull, granddaughter of his revered mentor and great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. She declined the offer. In the present age, a young woman can turn down a proposal of marriage from the next king of England, preferring the tranquillity of a private life. Few could blame her. One of the main themes of Tina Brown’s carefully pitched biography of Diana (who needs only one name for immediate identification), The Diana Chronicles, is the extraordinarily intrusive ubiquity of the media in the lives of the British Royal Family. Today no secret can be kept. The financial and cultural power of newspapers and television has increased; the old sense of deference, or perhaps even loyalty, in some of royalty’s servants and subjects has diminished. Nobody can be relied on to turn away in disgust from the public revelation of humiliating personal details. Diana, initially deemed a well-born but malleable virgin by the court, was so brilliantly successful with the mass of the British people in part because

The Diana Chronicles / brown

217

she rapidly came to understand and success fully manipulate the media, transmitting an A native of England and now an image with which ordinary people could sym- American citizen, Tina Brown has been editor of Tattler, editor in chief of pathize and identify. In the early stages of her engagement to Vanity Fair, and the first female editor Prince Charles and after, the Royal Family of The New Yorker. In 2000, she was suspected that Diana was not very bright but, appointed Commander of the British not generally intellectual themselves, did not Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. see that as a problem. However, one of Diana’s difficulties as princess of Wales was her lack of personal resources when marooned in Balmoral Castle, the Royal Family’s Scottish estate, for the annual holiday. She did not hunt or shoot or fish. Bored, she sat and “glowered,” to the anger of Her Majesty. Although Charles took pleasure in country pursuits, he could sit and read too. Diana read nothing except the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, her stepmother’s mother, incidentally. Indeed, one of Diana’s more extraordinary characteristics was her intellectual vacuity. Biographies usually, and necessarily, spend some time recording the intellectual life of their subjects. Diana did not have one. She had “an aversion to books,” writes Brown. Diana could take no intelligent part in a discussion between Charles and the editor of the Sunday Times, she had “no intellectual resources to fall back on” after her divorce, and she patronized “astrologers, psychics, palm readers and graphologists.” In committee meetings, “she had the attention of a fruit fly.” It is true that she once considered embracing Islam, but this was because she had fallen in love with a handsome Pakistani doctor. This is the woman who has caused more trouble for the British monarchy than anybody since the Abdication Crisis of 1936. Tina Brown knows about the media with which she and her subject have been so familiar. Brown was twenty-five when she became editor of Tattler, which she describes as “the house magazine for the upper classes”; she later became editor in chief of Vanity Fair and the first female editor of The New Yorker. She takes the more superficial levels of the media, clothes, and flash and dazzle as seriously as Diana did. Readers learn that in the six weeks of Diana’s relationship with Dodi Fayed— her last lover, who died in the same car crash in 1997—he gave her “a multistranded seed pearl bracelet fastened with jewel-encrusted dragons’ heads, a rectangular Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch studded with diamonds . . . and a gold dress ring with pavé diamonds.” Brown can gauge the heft and cultural implications of these presumably expensive status-markers, but she is under the impression that what she calls the Royal Standard, which flies from the flagpole of Buckingham Palace when the queen is in residence, bears “lyres and lions rampant.” She makes a number of other errors about precedence and nomenclature. In other words, she is very much a consumer, high-life Di rather than a traditionalist Charles. Indeed, when the Daily Mail (London) started publishing extracts from Brown’s book, transposed on the front page were remarkably similar photographs of biographer and subject (October 1, 2007), both with short blond hair, both wearing a black dress. Here, then, is the portrait of one media-savvy icon by another. “An aristocrat herself,” observes Brown,

218

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

“Diana knew that the aristocracy of birth was now irrelevant. All that counted now was the aristocracy of exposure.” Thus, the strength of this book lies in its understanding of the centrality of celebrity in today’s world. Lady Diana Spencer, a deeply wounded product of divorce, thought that a prince could provide unconditional healing love and security, as happens in the novels she read. When this adolescent dream seemed to be coming true, when Diana first began to appear in the newspapers, she read omnivorously what was written about her. She learned to know individual journalists and even found out where they lived. She was, as Brown acutely points out, in intellect and in emotional need at one with the audience of the British tabloid press. Brown understands Diana’s needs as Diana understood those of the tabloid readers. Later, when Charles’s jealousy of her crowd-pleasing power and her jealousy of his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, began to create a toxic mixture, Diana would use her celebrity rank as a weapon against her husband and his family. Her beauty and genuine compassion for the unfortunate and the suffering, a compassion she knew how to project, conquered all. What did it matter that the queen had stoically done what she saw as her duty for forty years? What did it matter that the radically imperfect Prince of Wales yet did his best in his difficult position? Diana looked good on the front page of The Sun. Apparently without irony, Brown reports that “the Princess ran her schedule of public appearances like a brisk CEO whose distinctive marketing concept is the personal touch.” She “paved the way for . . . big-tent humanitarians like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and George Clooney,” who also want to be taken as sincere even if they are pretty. She came to understand the power of the combination of old-fashioned “royal bounty” and “the new electronic system of worldwide media” in a world in which the monarchy’s political power is effectively defunct. When during Diana’s campaign against land mines some journalists had not got the shots they wanted after her first walk through a partly cleared minefield, she did the walk a second time. For Brown, “This second walk was Diana’s purest synthesis of courage, calculation, and brilliantly directed media power.” Brown has no problem with the world she describes, in which glamorous appearance, even if backed up with occasional courage, triumphs over dull worth. In fact, she seems rather pleased about the change. According to her, “Diana instinctively seemed to know that the only power royalty has left is the power to disappoint, and she never did, either in her physical presence or in her responsiveness to human detail.” Gone is the Windsors’ idea that public appearances are acts of state to which any incidental televisual charisma the actor may possess is irrelevant. After Diana’s death, the Royal Family catastrophically misjudged the British public’s need, or at least desire, for public grief, a grief that must visibly include the queen, her husband, and her children in its public expression. “Diana had schooled them to expect inclusion,” and “the British people were no longer willing to be excluded from the zone of privacy claimed by a family whose purpose, after all, was to symbolize the nation.” Most lamentably of all, according to Brown, “The Queen did not grasp that in the media era communication is at least as much a core value as stoicism.” When Brown asked British prime minister Tony Blair what Diana’s life had meant, his response

The Diana Chronicles / brown

219

was that “Diana taught us a new way to be British.” Whether the new way is a better way is debatable. Brown’s style is well suited to her subject. Here is women’s magazine prose (“Diana’s craving to make something pure out of the tarnishing was the essence of her mystery and the source of her inspiration”); hollowly resounding popular psychology (“In a bloodless world, perhaps she wanted to see the color of her own blood”—regarding her cutting herself); knowing, if opaque, journalese (“The social atmosphere in fashionable circles was a more mercantile, gayer, harder-edged edition of swinging London with a more aggressively high-low affect [and a drug regimen that favored cocaine over cannabis]”); and inevitably here are self-indulgent references to allimportant popular culture (“The Dynasty Di construct reflected the exact opposite of Diana’s self-view at the time. . . . All she knew was that the Grand Sloane act had to go. It just encouraged acts of repression from a royal machine that took her comme il faut outfits to mean capitulation.”). To the eventual fatigue of one reader, this relentless perkiness is kept up for nearly five hundred pages. The book was widely and mostly favorably reviewed. A. N. Wilson, writing in the Sunday Times, was rhapsodic: “Not a book on Diana. It is the book. Not only does it put the story of Diana in its proper historical context of British politics, journalism and the changing mores of the past quarter century, but it is a perfect example of the nosy-parker’s art. . . . It is a masterpiece.” Sarah Vine of The Times (London) now understood “the torrent of hysteria that followed the Princess’s sad death.” Caroline Weber in The New York Times praised “an insightful, absorbing account of the pas de deux into which, to her eventual peril, Diana joined with the paparazzi.” Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal lauded Brown as a writer: “In her hands, a trashy (if delicious) tale is rendered vividly mordant. . . . [She has] an uncommonly good way with characterization.” M. D. Allen

Review Sources The American Spectator 40, no. 9 (November, 2007): 68-71. The Guardian, June 23, 2007, p. 10. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 10, 2007): 1-11. The New Yorker, June 25, 2007, pp. 88-92. The Observer, June 10, 2007, p. 15. Sunday Times, June 17, 2007, p. 39. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 134 (June 9, 2007): P1-P8. The Washington Post, June 10, 2007, p. BW11.

220

DIVISADERO Author: Michael Ondaatje (1943) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 273 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1970’s and early twentieth and twenty-first centuries Locale: Northern California and France One act of passion and violence haunts a family for years to come Principal characters: Anna, a rancher’s daughter who eventually becomes a scholar and writer Claire, her adopted sister, who becomes an assistant to a San Francisco public defender Coop, Anna’s onetime lover, also raised by her father, who becomes a professional gambler in Nevada Rafael, Anna’s lover in France Lucien Segura, a famed poet and novelist from early twentieth century France Marie-Neige, Lucien’s neighbor and lover

Michael Ondaatje’s fame skyrocketed from cult favorite to international literary celebrity after his 1992 novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize (for best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel in English) and was subsequently made into a critically and financially successful Academy Award-winning film by director Anthony Minghella. While his novel Divisadero is not as experimental as early works such as Coming Through Slaughter (1976), it does somewhat mark a return to Ondaatje’s mature modernist form, taking more experimental risks than Anil’s Ghost (2000). Divisadero tells the story of a rancher’s daughter, his adopted daughter, and the boy he takes in to raise, whose small (and to some of them, idyllic) lives together are shattered by one moment of unreasoning violence. The reader is told by the rancher’s daughter, Anna, the central character in the narrative, that she comes from “Divisadero Street.” “Divisadero,” the reader is told, possibly derives from the Spanish word for “division”; if nothing else, this is a novel about the division of a family. Anna’s mother died giving birth to her daughter. When Anna’s rancher father found that another woman had died in childbirth, leaving a daughter without a home, he decided to adopt the infant as his daughter Claire. A few years later, a nearby family was killed, except for the small son, Coop, who hid beneath the floorboards of the house. Four years older than the girls, he too was brought to the ranch to be raised. Coop never quite fits in, and for much of their lives, Anna and Claire are fascinated with him almost to the point of obsession.

Divisadero / ondaatje

221

Divisadero makes use of varying points of view. Some sections are written in the firstperson from Anna’s perspective, and others are told in the third person from Coop and Claire’s points of view, while the last section is a third-person rendering of the life of writer Lucien Segura. Just as the point of view shifts, so does the novel’s structure. The novel begins in the shared past of Anna, Claire, and Coop and then moves forward in time eighteen years for Anna and Claire; Coop’s journey is shown in fragments depicting life from Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri both a few years after his departure and then Lanka and attended college in Canada, years later. The novel, in fact, is so frag- where he remained. He has published mented that some critics have described the nine books of poetry, two books of book as a collection of novellas, but in truth criticism, a memoir, four novels, and the novel is much more tightly woven than a two books that may be classified as collection could be. Motifs and themes return “fiction and poetry,” The Collected and develop so that later narratives help read- Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and ers understand the arc of earlier ones. Anna is Coming Through Slaughter (1976). His the character at the eye of the narrative storm; 1992 novel The English Patient won the the stories all revolve around her presence— Booker Prize and was made into an award-winning film. or her absence. Anna implies, in her opening narrative, that a romantic relationship between her and Coop is almost fated; however, it is also doomed from the moment it begins. Coop, at twenty, has moved to a cabin separated from the main house by more than a mile; sixteen-year-old Anna visits him there, and before long they are entangled. When Anna’s father discovers them having sex, he brutally attacks Coop. Coop’s life is saved only when Anna stabs her father in the back with a sliver of broken glass. Anna’s father leaves Coop half-dead in the middle of a horrific storm to carry Anna back to the house. Anna runs away that very night with her father in pursuit, and Claire must save Coop’s life. Within the day Coop, too, has fled. Neither he nor Anna ever returns. The narrative then shifts to the future, where thirty-four-year-old Anna is a scholar and writer researching the life of early twentieth century French poet and popular novelist Lucien Segura. She moves into the very house that Segura grew up in, and there she meets Rafael, the son of a gypsy woman and a professional thief who had befriended Segura. Like Coop, Rafael is aloof and quiet in his love, more ephemeral than possessive. In her affair with Rafael and her research into Segura, Anna seems to be trying to recapture both her lover and her father—indeed, her entire family. Coop’s story picks up only a few years after the incident at the ranch. In a chapter titled “The Red and the Black,” the reader finds that Coop has become a professional gambler, a poker player. The title is lifted from a nineteenth century novel by

222

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Stendhal about a young man’s initiation into the dangerous and manipulative world about him. Second, the title seems to suggest the alternating colors of the roulette wheel and all that it entails: luck, chance, karma, and fate. As Coop moves into maturity, he seems to be obsessed with luck and fate; he has escaped death twice and seems determined to push his luck as far as he can. With the aid of a small cadre of experienced friends, he determines to dupe a corrupt gambler and his entourage. He succeeds, but his victory will eventually return to haunt him. Claire is the only one of the three who is still connected to the father, visiting him most weekends. Her life, even more than Anna’s and Coop’s, seems to endure a void in their absence. She works for the public defender’s office in San Francisco, and her life, just as in the case of each of her quasi siblings, has not led her to a family of her own. Just as she helped Coop after his beating by her foster father, she attempts to help the accused that turn to the defender’s office. By luck alone she will eventually locate Coop again; however, not long after they are first reunited, he is savagely beaten for refusing to join another scheme and, again, needs to be nursed by her. The last 102 pages of the 273-page novel deal with the life of Lucien Segura. The reader learns how, as an elderly man, Lucien met Rafael’s parents and traveled with them to his old home to reclaim the house, eventually giving them a parcel of his land. Then the narrative unravels the days of Lucien’s life: his birth as the result of a brief affair between his mother and a visiting Spaniard; his partial raising by a clockmaker, who died when Lucien was very young; and finally the arrival of a wrathful working man, Roman, and his new bride, Marie-Neige, to a neighboring farmhouse. Only a year older than Lucien, Marie-Neige is unsure how to manage a household. Before long, Lucien’s mother has almost adopted Marie-Neige as a younger sister, or elder daughter, or as a project; even as Lucien’s mother teaches her how to run her house and how to read and write, she also teaches Marie-Neige about the world beyond. It is Marie-Neige who nurses Lucien when he is struck in the face by broken glass and loses one eye. Lucien eventually leaves home and becomes renowned as a poet, entering into a lackluster marriage that will grant him two daughters. He enters World War I initially as a correspondent, and later as a medical attendant, only to catch and almost die of diphtheria. It is not his wife but instead Marie-Neige—whom Lucien has been half in love with for years—who shows up to nurse and save him. It is also during the war when Lucien and Marie-Neige finally become lovers, helped by the absence of her husband, now in prison for having killed a man while gripped by a jealous rage. The story of Lucien’s youth and eventual reconciliation with Marie-Neige is juxtaposed with the story of his disappointments in middle age: his lack of passion for his wife, her contempt for him, and his daughter’s infidelity with another daughter’s husband. Initially the reader may feel sidetracked by Lucien’s story. Although Anna speaks of her interest in the poet, his story seems tangential and inessential to the story being told over the first sixty percent of the novel. However, by the end of the book the reader realizes that the tale of Lucien Segura has been written by Anna herself, and that the seemingly digressive discourse in some way or another is explained by the other meaning of the word divisadero, which, as she tells us, is to “gaze at something

Divisadero / ondaatje

223

from a distance.” She goes on to say, “It is what I do with my work, I suppose. I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere.” Anna’s statement, tied with her narrative intrusion into Lucien’s story, brings to light the fact that Anna’s rendering of Lucien’s story in many ways reflects the events of her, Claire, and Coop’s lives. Lucien’s narrative section, rather than being told by a third-person omniscient narrator who can peer into Lucien’s consciousness, is told by Anna acting as a third-person narrator. Thoughts and feelings ascribed to Lucien must therefore, in some way, be ascribed to Anna, or at least her idea of Lucien. The sliver of glass in Lucien’s eye conjures the glass that Anna used to attack her father. Like Anna’s love for Coop, Lucien has a long and abiding love for MarieNeige before the romance is consummated; in each case, the love is cut short by circumstances. There are many forces that serve to separate the lovers; in Coop and Anna’s case, they have been raised as siblings, and she is young and in some way or another feels that she is betraying Claire, who has similar feelings for Coop, and her father, who would (and obviously does) disapprove. In Lucien’s case, Marie-Neige is married, he is married, and they are separated by years and miles and for most of their lives. Their love act is an epilogue rather than a departure, but the resonances are the same. Similarly, the illicit love affair between one grown daughter and her sister’s husband replicates the vague incestuousness present in Anna and Coop’s romance. The beating that Coop endures stoically at the hands of crooked gamblers mirrors the one he had received from his guardian so many years before. In its lyrical passages, sweep of years, loose construction, and divergent narratives, the novel takes on a haunting tone that seems to suggest that, as William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Requiem for a Nun, 1951). Perhaps Anna, Claire, and Coop will never be free of that one defining violent moment. In Anna’s view of Lucien’s peaceful latter days, and in Claire’s reunion with Coop, and in Coop’s damaged brain beginning to heal, there are perhaps some grains of hope that these three will either embrace their pasts or learn to live with them. Scott Yarbrough

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 73. The Nation 285, no. 22 (December 31, 2007): 34-36. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 17, 2007): 13. The Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 2007, p. 19. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW03. Weekly Standard 12, no. 39 (June 25, 2007): 40-41.

224

THE DOOR OF NO RETURN The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade Author: William St. Clair First published: The Grand Slave Emporium, 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: BlueBridge (New York). 281 pp. $24.95 Type of work: History Time: 1650-1807 Locale: Cape Coast Castle, West African coast St. Clair chronicles from primary manuscripts the dayto-day activities at Britain’s main slave-trading post on the western coast of Africa, Cape Coast Castle, between 1664 and the end of the British slave trade in 1807 During the Atlantic slave trade era, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain maintained trade-related buildings on the western African coast, where slaves were held until they were sold to slave ships that would transport them to North and South America and the lands of the Caribbean. On the coast of Ghana were many such buildings, among which Cape Coast Castle was the center of England’s slave trade from its capture by the British in 1664 until 1807, when English law abolished the slave trade industry. William St. Clair in The Door of No Return, originally published in 2006 as The Grand Slave Emporium, perhaps a more fitting title, accesses previously unresearched primary documents, mainly slave trade business records from the years of British occupation of the Castle, but also letters to close relatives and trading associates and short messages to and from the Castle and the slave ships anchored in the nearby seawaters. The British slave trade was declared illegal in 1807, and in 1820 these documents were transported directly from the Cape Coast Castle to London. From these materials and a few secondary sources, St. Clair creates a well-crafted, very readable, and, in many parts, original perspective on the Atlantic slave trade: “The story of just one building, and of some of the men, women, and children who spent part of their lives” there reveals “an immense panorama of history which, in its entirety, is [otherwise] almost impossible to comprehend.” St. Clair presents first the immediate setting from which the materials he studies emerged. Moored beyond the dangerous breakers and rock-strewn coastal waters were the slave-trading vessels from Europe and America. These ships arrived carrying much precious cargo: European goods to be traded for the slaves held in the Castle and that the Castle personnel would trade with Africans for their captured slaves; household and maintenance goods for the Castle itself; and, on ships from England, newly recruited personnel for the Castle. To carry these goods and personnel to the shore, both ship and Castle relied on and paid skillful Africans paddlers of native-made canoes. These same hired trans-

The Door of No Return / st. clair

225

porters brought the slaves purchased by the ship captains from the shore to the ships. William St. Clair has been a research From his source materials, St. Clair docu- fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge, ments the many fatalities among those who, England, and has worked for the for business purposes, made what they knew British government. His earlier publications include The Godwins and to be a perilous, often fatal journey. Cape Coast Castle sat a short distance from the Shelleys (1989), Lord Elgin and the the shoreline. Although it gave the appear- Marbles (1998), and The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004). ance of a military fortress, the Castle was principally an industrial-age “defended warehouse” with living quarters for the company employees. In the lowest level, the Castle governor stored the main items of trade, the slaves bought by the Castle governor from native traders. Crowded in quarters similar to those in the hold of a slave ship, they waited; when sold, they would cross the coastal waters by canoe to even more crowded quarters on the slave ship and begin a journey across the seas to be sold once again. Also living in the Castle, on the lowest level, were the Castle’s own household slaves. The next levels housed the British clerks, soldiers, and officers who helped run the business of the Castle. The British governor in charge of the Castle lived at the top in the best-appointed quarters, with a good view of the activities on the sea and on shore. Beyond the Castle was the forest where the local Africans lived and from whom the British rented their spot of territory on the coast. In the deeper forest lived the Africans who regularly brought to the coast captured slaves to trade to the British at Cape Coast Castle. St. Clair is an intellectual historian who pushes beyond the data to find the values inherent in his materials. Thus, he describes this business setup in and around the Castle with care, because both the idea and the fact that the British were engaged in a business seems to answer a question he asks throughout his narrative: How did the Castle personnel and the British nation over two centuries reconcile their buying and selling of human beings and their Christian and national moral standards? The earliest seventeenth century British ventures in the purchase of African slaves were privately funded projects. When England took over the Castle, the government formed the Royal African Company of England to be its only trading company. This company was replaced in 1750 by the part-public, part-private Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. Public funds supported these companies and the forts or warehouses they maintained on the coast of Africa. Perhaps this idea of business helped the people who lived and worked in the Castle and in some cases worked very closely with astute African businessmen to assuage their consciences. St. Clair finds interesting material in the Castle papers on the topic. For example, he points to a Scottish recruit who in 1763 wrote home this ambiguous statement: “I have at last, come into the Spirit of the Slave trade, and must own (perhaps it ought to be to my Shame) that I can now traffick [sic] in that way without remorse.”

226

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Chaplains were assigned to the Castle beginning in 1697. If they took this flock on, these religious leaders would certainly help assure the employees of the Castle that there was no inconsistency between their business and their religion. One minister assigned to the Castle, Thomas Thompson, published The African Trade for Negro Slaves Shown to Be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and with the Laws of Revealed Religion (1772). This text attempted to prove that both English tradition and the Bible supported slavery. Despite the chaplains’ presence and counsel, St. Clair finds evidence that traditional Christian values remained strong in the unordained who were engaged in the slave trade business of the Castle. In the records of the forty-two-year chaplaincy of one minister, no officer received Holy Communion. Some would conclude the cause was racism, since the chaplain was part African, but he did perform other sacraments in the Castle, such as baptism and the last rites. That the Christian congregants did not participate in Communion because in some part of themselves they felt that their complicity in the slave trade was a sin is acknowledged by one minister: “The only plea they offer is that while they are here acting against Light & Conscience they dare not come to that holy Table.” He notes, also, an exception that proves him right: One man finally accepts the Eucharist on his deathbed, when he knows his days of trafficking are over and can, thus, truly repent. St. Clair notes that in the homeland, the slave trade was considered a significant business enterprise supported by a general ignorance of or blindness to its reality. The ports of London, Bristol, and Liverpool were the business centers of the slave trade in England. There, writes St. Clair, “the leaders of the industry were closely integrated into the structures of political, ecclesiastical, and commercial power.” Such authorities, sharers in the slave trade profits, would not criticize the trade. Also, says St. Clair, before the abolition movement the reality of slaves packed in warehouse basements and ships’ holds was not in the English mind. Rather, there was a cultural belief that those who worked in the African trade were heroes enduring great hardship for the country’s financial well-being. Thus, romanticism, too, helped blind both those directly involved in the slave trade and those watching it from afar. Romantic ignorance was deliberately encouraged in the public face of the British companies running the trade, who, for example, “described themselves as ‘adventurers’ in the ‘African’ or the ‘Guinea’ trade.” The romantic period turned slave traders into adventurers. Also, although most British African business was slave trade business, the public was told more about the more romantic sideline products from Africa, like gold and ivory. The African Company of Merchants had “minted over half a million gold ‘guineas,’ each stamped with an elephant and castle.” The official company motto was Free Trade to Africa. Personnel from England working at Cape Castle had imbibed these attitudes before they went to their place of employment. What happened next surely drove romanticism from some. The majority of British personnel who signed up for service in the Castle and the African trade, St. Clair learns from the Castle records, died either on the sailing ship on the way, during the canoe ride from slave ship to the coast, or during their first weeks at the Castle. Those British immune systems that survived

The Door of No Return / st. clair

227

both sea crossings still faced the deadly tropical climate. Why then did so many sign up? During its prime, the slave trade was Britain’s most prosperous business. Improving or making fortunes meant signing onto some part of the slave trade. This fact and the image of embarking on a dangerous but romantic adventure created a constant pool of recruits for Cape Coast Castle. St. Clair finds records of the Castle libraries filled with enlightenment philosophical texts and contemporary romantic novels. He is not surprised that Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a prominent text in the Castle. Defoe’s romantic classic was a widely read, rags-to-riches adventure: Industry, courage, and virtue lead to financial fortune. Early in the book, the hero twice sets out to sea in a slave-trading sailing ship and ends up alive and wealthy. The famous island adventure begins when the hero is shipwrecked on yet a third slave trade voyage. Of course, he survives and remains wealthy. A man of God, he never criticizes the practice of enslaving human beings from which his great fortune flows. Concludes St. Clair, Defoe’s book was “the imaginative embodiment of that fantasy, the ethical slave trader.” St. Clair looks to seventeenth and eighteenth century Castle documents to learn the level of racism in the attitudes and behaviors of the British personnel. The British involved in the Castle business had quite natural interaction with the Africans they met. To conduct business, a few had to learn Fante, the language of the coastal African people. Though the Africans did not keep written records as the British did, the visiting traders recognized the Africans’ extraordinary powers of memory and mastery of the arithmetic necessary to run a complex business. The British saw their business counterparts of African descent as shrewd businessmen who acted on principles consistent with their own religious and social beliefs. St. Clair finds that, although the visitors saw their hosts as not yet up to the level of civilization of Europe, the English did not have the racist attitude that their African business partners were inherently inferior. Thus, having made a fine addition to the literature of the African slave trade, St. Clair closes by pointing out the contrast in attitude between the earliest visitors to the shore of Africa, the slave traders, and the nineteenth century British invaders of Africa who brought by force the gifts of civilization, Christianity, and domination to Ghana. Francine A. Dempsey

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 28. The Economist 380 (July 29, 2006): 75. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 20, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 6 (February 5, 2007): 50-51. The Times Literary Supplement, September 22, 2006, p. 24.

228

DUE CONSIDERATIONS Essays and Criticism Author: John Updike (1932) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 703 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Essays Updike collects more than a hundred essays, reviews, and brief notices published between 1998 and 2007, displaying both his wide range of interests and his insight into modern character and culture John Updike is the kind of author who takes great care in preserving even his most ephemeral publications for posterity. During his long career, he has periodically brought out collections of short stories that originally appeared in some of America’s most noted periodicals and assembled his essays and reviews in bulky volumes to which he has given clever titles such as Picked-Up Pieces (1975) and Odd Jobs (1991). Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, his sixth collection of nonfiction, is an assemblage of book reviews, personal essays, and occasional pieces written during the eight years since the appearance of his previous anthology, More Matter, in 1999. Although Updike has had the good fortune to publish much of his work in The New Yorker, quite a few of the essays he includes in Due Considerations made their first appearance in journals with much smaller circulation or in odd places that could have eluded Updike’s many fans. Consisting of two distinct forms of writing, the personal essay and the review, the volume is clearly intended for the thousands of people who enjoy Updike’s witty, conversational style and his somewhat self-deprecating humor. It is the kind of book admirers of his nonfiction might keep on their bedside tables, dipping into it for a pleasant diversion, a little bit of intellectual stimulation offered without the cloying self-importance of so much postmodern commentary. It is also the kind of collection that allows Updike to demonstrate again that, in addition to being one of America’s finest novelists, he is something of a polymath when it comes to critiquing not only literature but also other aspects of the American experience. Just how wide his gaze can range is made clear in the first major section of the book, which he titles “Everything Considered.” Twenty-seven essays and short notices provide assessments of literary giants like Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty, tributes to baseball great Ted Williams and former New Yorker editor William Shawn, comments on his trip to China, and—as one has come to expect from Updike—musings on the future of faith. The scope of his intellect and the subtlety of his insight are equally evident in the long middle segment of the volume, “Considering Books.” In more than seventy reviews, he offers critiques of the work of individual novelists, poets, and essayists and also shares his opinions on the state of

Due Considerations / updike

229

literature throughout the world. Not all of these reviews cover literary works, however. John Updike is the author of more than In fact, some reviews seem at first to be far fifty works of fiction, nonfiction, and out of what would be considered the normal poetry. Twice the recipient of the range for someone with Updike’s professional Pulitzer Prize, he has received credentials. Fortunately, Updike’s editors at numerous other honors, including the The New Yorker have allowed him great lati- National Book Award, the National tude, not only in the length of his reviews but Book Critics Circle Award, the Howells Medal, and both the National Medal of also in the subjects about which he writes. Arts and the National Medal for the Hence, alongside observations on novels and Humanities. volumes of poetry, one finds Updike evaluat ing books on the sinking of the Lusitania, the fate of Gypsies in France, and the sexual revolution in America (though admittedly this is a topic on which he has written extensively in his fiction). Quite a few of the literary reviews are of books by less well-known novelists, but Updike gives them the same care and attention he devotes to his critiques of work by writers with greater reputation. Further, the reviews in Due Considerations provide further evidence for Updike’s reputation as an exceptionally kind reviewer, always looking for what makes another writer’s work worth reading. In critiquing fiction, he often dwells on the author’s use of language and construction of the plot. His commentaries on poetry tend to focus on the poet’s ability to employ language in new and unusual ways. While he frequently measures writers against accepted standards for the genre in which they are working, he is generous in praising those willing to break conventional boundaries and try something new. When examining nonfiction, he zeroes in on the author’s ability to craft an argument and present it cogently and clearly. Updike is not shy to criticize when he finds harsh judgment necessary, but he seems willing to grant fellow writers a great deal of leeway in practicing their craft— perhaps because he knows how hard one must work to appear at ease in print. On the other hand, he is not especially kind to academic critics who seem to have divorced literature from its social context and write of “texts” as if they were not somehow the products of authorial intention. Good writers, he argues in a number of essays, are present in their works and are passionately concerned about communicating with readers about matters great and small. Also included in this volume are six reviews of art exhibits and books on art. These apparently did not make it into Updike’s 2005 collection of art criticism, Still Looking. Updike’s publisher has been gracious in granting him ample space to reproduce a number of drawings and prints that allow readers of Due Considerations an opportunity to see at first hand what Updike is talking about in his commentary on artists and cartoonists. In fact, some of the more intriguing essays are those in which Updike analyzes the work of a number of cartoonists who worked for The New Yorker and other American periodicals. Having intended to be a cartoonist himself at one time, Updike seems to feel a special fondness for those who are able to convey so much meaning in simple line drawings supported by the barest amount of text.

230

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The final section in the collection, “Personal Considerations”—barely ten percent of the volume—is an interesting potpourri of brief notices and reminiscences, prefaces to editions of Updike’s novels, and pieces written in response to queries for his observations on various literary and social issues. More than three dozen individual entries occupy barely sixty pages. Some appear to be no more than clever snippets dashed off to correspondents who were badgering him to contribute something to their publications. Items such as “A Response to a Request for a Memory of Harvard Dorm Life” or “A Response to a Request from a Miss Gordon” seem to fall into that category. Other pieces, though prompted in a similar fashion, contain some of the most thoughtful and self-revelatory material in the book. “A Response to GQ’s Request for My Favorite Year of the Century” is a nostalgic look at 1946. It was the first full year after World War II had ended, Updike explains. The baby boom had begun, and virtually everyone in the country—certainly everyone living near the fourteen-year-old John Updike in southeastern Pennsylvania—was genuinely grateful for the return of peace and exceptionally optimistic about America’s bright future. His contribution to National Public Radio’s This I Believe series, printed as the final entry in the volume, reaffirms his admiration for what he calls “the American political experiment” and confirms his belief in the supernatural. As he has done throughout his writing life, Updike acknowledges with admiration the advances of science in explaining the natural world, but he insists that “to renounce all and any supernature” simply “leaves in the dust too much of our humanity.” Whether one agrees with or disputes Updike’s position regarding the supernatural and his benign, even loving accounts of faith and religion, it is hard to quibble over his abilities as a stylist. Once again he demonstrates his mastery at turning a phrase, bringing an object, action, or idea to life with a vivid, unusual simile or a few wellchosen words. For instance, in describing the propensity of artists to explore religious issues long dismissed by science, he says art “probes the God-shaped hole in the universe like a tongue seeking the soft-rimmed crater of an extraction.” His memory of the John F. Kennedy assassination is recorded in a graphic comparison that captures something of the horror the entire country experienced—and the feeling of senselessness Updike himself felt when he first heard the news. It was “a pretty stupid country” that would allow such a dashing, charismatic president to be “exterminated like a rat at the dump.” He captures the feel of the prose style of British novelist William Trevor’s Death in Summer (1998) by describing it as “dry and crabbed, detail after detail set down with the obligatory tight fit of tile-setting.” Similarly, the visual imagery employed to describe Jed Perl’s attempts at explaining the power of art in New Art City is perhaps better than anything in Perl’s book: “In his commendable desire to stretch the language of visual perception and philosophical understanding,” Updike observes, “Perl coins compound adjectives as if hyphens were snowing upon his word processor.” Like most similar collections, the individual pieces in Due Considerations were written to stand alone and hence can be read in any order. In some sense, then, perusing the volume is akin to examining a Cabinet of Curiosities in which the only common connection is that the items were written by the same person. Hence, it is some-

Due Considerations / updike

231

times hard to find a theme running through works such as this one. If there is a unifying thread in Due Considerations, it might be Updike’s continuing interest in the writer’s role in society. Hints of that topic abound in the first entry in the collection, a reprint of a speech Updike delivered at the University of South Carolina in 1998. Titled “On Literary Biography,” it provides his answer to the question, why is literary biography important? Although he offers some rationale for the continuing spate of books about authors, he ends up by reminding readers that, with few exceptions, authors want to be remembered for their work, not their lives. As a literary presence in America, Updike has always stood midway between the late Norman Mailer, who relished the notoriety he achieved by his sometimes outrageous public behavior and pronouncements on literature and American culture, and the reclusive Thomas Pynchon, who has gone so far as to keep his whereabouts secret and disguise his identity. Living in New England rather than New York, Updike communicates with the world in the way he finds most comfortable: through his writings. Nevertheless, a careful reading of Updike’s nonfiction offers a window into his life that can explain the sources of many incidents described in his creative works, give hints into his character, reveal something of his values, and provide significant insight into the complex and subtle ways his mind seems to work. It would be easy to construct from disparate comments scattered throughout the essays and reviews a reasonable summation of Updike’s own theory of fiction. Furthermore, although Updike announces in the opening essay of this collection that a writer’s life is not as important as his or her work, one of the wonderful ironies an alert reader will notice by reading Due Considerations from cover to cover is the way Updike injects details of his own life into many of the essays and reviews that have nothing to do with him directly. Frequently his personal experiences become a touchstone for evaluating the authenticity of other writers’ work. At other places they merely provide an engaging lead-in to discerning commentaries on fiction, art, or matters of faith. In every instance, however, one comes away with the impression that Updike has enjoyed the life he has chosen to live and has thought about it constantly. Using his exceptional talent as a writer, he calls on his readers to give due consideration to the wonderful gift they, too, have received, and to approach their own lives with joy. Laurence W. Mazzeno Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 5. Harper’s Magazine 315 (December, 2007): 97-101. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 17 (September 1, 2007): 916-917. Library Journal 132, no. 14 (September 1, 2007): 137. Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2007, p. R6. New Statesman 137 (November 12, 2007): 55. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 4, 2007): 16. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 29 (July 23, 2007): 51.

232

EDITH WHARTON Author: Hermione Lee (1948) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 880 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1862-1937 Locale: New York City; Lenox, Massachusetts; London; Paris and Hyeres, France A major study of one of the most important American writers of the early twentieth century Principal personages: Edith Wharton, the American writer who published four dozen books over her long and distinguished career Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton, her husband for almost three decades Henry James, an American novelist living in Europe and Wharton’s early mentor and peer Bernard Berenson, an American art critic living in Italy Morton Fullerton, an American journalist who was briefly Wharton’s lover Walter Berry, an American lawyer living in Paris, one of a number of good friends Wharton maintained through her lifetime

It is revealing that major American writers often go through a period of exile in some readerless wilderness before emerging to achieve their final and lasting status. In 1946, when Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner, all of that novelist’s works—with the exception of his sensational 1931 Sanctuary—were out of print, but William Faulkner has since become the preeminent novelist of twentieth century American modernism. Likewise, in the 1940’s and 1950’s, Edith Wharton was viewed as a minor imitator of her friend and “master” Henry James (1843-1916), but in the past forty years or so her reputation has been steadily climbing, and the author of The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920), among many other works, is now seen as the equal to James and, in some cases, the more popular (and readable) of the two literary giants, as well as one of the most important novelists of the first decades of the twentieth century. Hermione Lee’s massive biography—762 pages, plus an additional 100 pages of family tree, notes, bibliography, and index—matches the status Edith Wharton has achieved by the twentyfirst century and proves why it is so well deserved. Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, and grew up in one of the most prominent families in New York City. (The expression “keeping up with the Joneses” was first coined about her great-aunts.) She was largely self-educated and read widely in science, philosophy, and anthropology throughout her life, but, like

Edith Wharton / lee

233

most women of her social class and back ground at the end of the nineteenth century, Hermione Lee is the first female she was trained for little besides marriage, Goldsmiths’ Professor of English which she entered in 1885 at the age of twenty- Literature at Oxford University. Her three. Her husband, Edward “Teddy” Rob- books include biographies of Virginia bins Wharton, was a fitting match in terms of Woolf and Willa Cather and critical social position but had a family history of studies of Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and mental illness. He proved to be a deeply un- Philip Roth. She is a well-known critic in England, where she has broadcast stable person, and the marriage was not happy. cultural and literary criticism on BBC Wharton suffered from a series of (probably radio and Channel 4, and she served as psychosomatic) illnesses in her twenties; her chair of the judges for the Man Booker marriage was childless (and probably sex- Prize for Fiction in 2006. less), but these “subjects of sexual privation and wretched marriages” would become some of the most important material for her fiction. She had made up stories beginning when she was a little girl, but it took her decades to become, in her late thirties, a professional writer, for she had to break free of society’s expectations for women of her rank. She achieved her independence, in part, by becoming European. Her first collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination, appeared in 1899, and her first long novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902, but she became famous for her nonfiction travel books, like Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and Italian Backgrounds (1905). Wharton had grown up in a New York City “defined by its architecture, interior design, clothes, fixtures and fittings,” and she maintained a lifelong interest in those subjects. Her first book—written with the designer Ogden Codman in 1897—was The Decoration of Houses, which “sold well, was reprinted, and had a marked influence on house design in America.” Wharton built or remodeled half a dozen houses during her lifetime, in both the United States and France, including The Mount, wonderfully preserved and now open to the public in Lenox, Massachusetts. Even when Wharton was writing about houses and design, however, she was dealing at the same time with social behavior and beliefs, and this ability to translate social history into literature would carry over into her fiction. In 1905, The House of Mirth—the story of the descent of Lily Bart from the New York upper classes with whom she cannot keep up and her inevitable death—made Wharton a household name and a best-selling author at the age of forty-three, and for the next three decades she would be one of the most prolific American writers. In 1911, she published Ethan Frome, the novella about a poor farmer trapped in his nineteenth century New England life, and in 1913 The Custom of the Country (her greatest novel, Lee believes), the story of the greedy and ambitious Undine Spragg. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920 (certainly her most famous novel, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize), returned to the social setting of The House of Mirth. She spent at least half of her professional life in Europe—first in Italy and then in England and finally in France—yet she wrote tellingly about American life at the turn of the twentieth century until her death on August 11, 1937.

234

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

One of the main strengths of Lee’s long study is that she has the room to lay out the social background that was so effectively translated into Wharton’s fiction. In fact, the biography’s twenty chapters (in three parts) are organized only roughly in chronological order and are often self-contained essays dealing with the major themes and subjects of Wharton’s life. This leisure allows Lee to describe in great depth and detail the “Gilded Age” Wharton knew growing up, for example, and the Faubourg section of Paris, where she settled for a dozen years after 1906. Part 2 begins with chapter 10, “Mme. Wharton,” a detailed history of Wharton’s “French adventure.” Chapter 11, “L’Âme Close,” is a fifty-page analysis of Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton, which began in 1907 when she was forty-six, ran for only two years, but was the great passion of her life. Chapter 12 details Teddy’s decline into depression and mental breakdown and their divorce in 1913. (She would write the naturalistic Ethan Frome in the darkest ebb of this period.) Chapter 13 includes her relationship with the art critic Bernard Berenson and her visits to his famous Tuscan house, I Tatti, outside Florence. Chapters 14 and 15, “Fighting France” and “Une Seconde Patrie,” detail the efforts Wharton made setting up hospitals and helping homeless children for her adopted country during World War I. (In 1916, she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government.) Nearly every one of these chapters includes incisive analyses of the novels Wharton was turning out year after year. Chapter 12 includes a marvelous analysis of Ethan Frome; chapter 13 presents a fifteen-page treatment of The Custom of the Country; chapter 17 is titled “The Age of Innocence” and dissects the themes of that famous novel. The volume is also lavishly illustrated, with photographs and illustrations of the people Wharton knew, the houses she lived in, and the books she wrote. Wharton grew up in the Gilded Age, but she entered her professional life as the United States was going through a powerful period of transition from the late nineteenth century into the economic power it would become in the twentieth. The society she was born into would be gone by the time she died, but her books capture that earlier world and place it into a set of amber jewels that are her novels. The House of Mirth takes place in New York City at the time of its writing, in the early 1900’s; The Custom of the Country looked back at that world from the early 1910’s; The Age of Innocence returned from a postwar world to the early 1870’s. The themes of Wharton’s fiction, however, remained the same in her most important fiction. Resistance was one issue, for all her great novels, as Lee writes, “dramatise a struggle against confinement and reach towards . . . the possibility of tearing down barriers.” Throughout her career, “marital bondage, attempts to escape it, divorce and the illusions of freedom are some of her main subjects.” Even Ethan Frome, set in an isolated farmhouse in an impoverished area of western Massachusetts, shares—like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), as Lee points out, or Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895)—those themes. Her short fiction, similarly, deals with these issues; her famous “Roman Fever” (1934), for example, a short story that has been anthologized countless times, captures the restrictions of women’s lives and “the imprisonment of secrecy, social conventions which continue to bind individuals even as they pass away.”

Edith Wharton / lee

235

The story of Edith Wharton is the story of a woman and writer who had to move to Europe to find her true self and voice. She felt like an exile growing up in America, bound by the very social conventions and class restrictions she would later pour into her fiction. In Europe, however, she was able to re-create herself. She lived there as a child, and she and Teddy sailed to Europe nearly every year of their marriage, but for the last thirty years of her life she made Europe her home. For the last two decades, she maintained two houses in France, one half an hour outside Paris in Saint-Brice, and the other in Hyeres near the French Riviera. Her houses gave her the opportunity to continue her interests in design and gardening, but Europe also gave her unlimited chances for further travel and self-creation. In Europe, she could escape the materialism and pretentiousness that confined her life in the United States. Her friend Henry James, who took British citizenship in 1915 just before his death, lived in Europe and made the clash between American innocence and European sophistication one of his major subjects. Wharton explored this theme in The Custom of the Country, among other books, but overall she was more interested in her native land itself, and her best novels re-create the rich social tapestry she knew and had escaped. It is noteworthy that James, when he and Wharton first became correspondents, after the publication of The Valley of Decision—a novel incidentally set in eighteenth century Italy— wrote Wharton urging her to take up “the American Subject” and “DO NEW YORK.” By following her mentor’s advice, as well as her own natural inclinations and background, she carved out a place for herself in American literature from which she will probably never be removed. Lee’s biography matches its subject in wealth of detail, fine writing, and the breadth and depth of its analyses. Wharton is not easy to write about, for her own memoirs sanitized her life (there is no mention of Morton Fullerton, for example) and she and her friends destroyed much of her correspondence. In spite of these difficulties, Edith Wharton comes alive in Lee’s biography as a creative person of inexhaustible energy and talent, and, while she may still be the slightly starchy matriarch of earlier studies, she is compellingly human for readers here. David Peck

Review Sources Foreign Affairs 86, no. 6 (November/December, 2007): 191-192. The New Republic 237, no. 2 (July 23, 2007): 43-47. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 7 (April 26, 2007): 38-40. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 29, 2007): 1-11. The New Yorker 83, no. 8 (April 16, 2007): 154-157. The Times Literary Supplement, February 9, 2007, pp. 3-4.

236

EINSTEIN His Life and Universe Author: Walter Isaacson (1952) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 680 pp. $32.00 Type of work: Biography, history of science Time: March 14, 1879, to April 18, 1955 Locale: Munich and Berlin, Germany; Zurich and Bern, Switzerland; Princeton, New Jersey Based on previously and recently released public and private papers, this comprehensive biography integrates the scientific, personal, and humanitarian life of Albert Einstein, a theoretical physicist who became one of the most important persons of the twentieth century Principal personages: Albert Einstein (1875-1955), German-born Swiss American theoretical physicist Mileva Mari (1875-1948), Serbian physics student who became Einstein’s first wife Elsa Löwenthal Einstein (1876-1936), Einstein’s first cousin who became his second wife Michele Angelo Besso (1873-1955), Swiss-born Italian engineer who became Einstein’s closest friend Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936), Swiss mathematician whose friendship facilitated Einstein’s career Max Planck (1858-1947), German theoretical physicist, the father of the quantum theory, and an early supporter of Einstein’s theories

Near the onset of the twenty-first century, the editors of Time magazine, which then included Walter Isaacson, spent considerable time, energy, and money in selecting the twentieth century’s most important person. Passing over a list of highly influential political, military, and religious leaders, they chose Albert Einstein, who had founded relativity theory and modern cosmology but had not led a great nation through crises and a world war, the way that Franklin D. Roosevelt had. Nevertheless, this choice was surprisingly well received. Indeed, Einstein’s status as a superstar scientist has continued, and, in 2005—fifty years after his death and a hundred years after his “miracle year,” when he published a series of revolutionary papers—an outpouring of books, articles, conferences, television programs, and other observances occurred, reminiscent of the 1959 celebrations of the centennial of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Like Darwin, whose life and work have generated a prodigious number of scholarly and popular studies, Einstein is the source of an “Einstein industry,” whose workers have created multitudes of products ranging from bi-

Einstein / isaacson

237

ographies for children through motion pic tures to multivolume studies on specialized Walter Isaacson was educated at topics related to his life, ideas, and humanitar- Harvard University and at Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he ian contributions. With this immense number of Einstein was a Rhodes Scholar. Highlights in books, including many biographies, the ques- his journalism career include tion naturally arises: Does the public need an- managing editor of Time, chair and other Einstein biography? Isaacson justifies CEO of CNN, and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. His most his book by his study of an abundance of new important publications have been papers that became available in 2006 and by biographies of Henry Kissinger, his skills as a biographer, exemplified in his Benjamin Franklin, and Albert 2003 work on Benjamin Franklin, who was a Einstein. scientist, inventor, and statesman and who, like Einstein, was a highly creative individual. Since Isaacson is a journalist and not a scientist, he has wisely relied on the expertise of many physicists, historians of science, and other scholars and archivists to guide him through the complexities of Einstein’s scientific achievements. Those who vetted Isaacson’s technical sections have done an excellent job, for errors have been kept to a minimum. Because of the control that Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan, Einstein’s literary executors, exercised over his private papers, they were able, for several decades after his death, to help create an idealized portrait of a “saintly scientist,” complete with halo of white hair. Biographies published during this time tended to be hagiographical, and it was not until well after these executors’ deaths that discomfiting personal papers began to appear. All of Einstein’s public and private papers will eventually be published in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (1987-2006), of which ten volumes (of a projected twenty-five) have been issued. Scholars have also been able to study unpublished original materials in Israel or their copies in the United States. This has led to several de-idealized biographies, some of which have tended to the pathographical, in which Einstein’s flaws have been overemphasized. While not condoning his subject’s failings, Isaacson strives to understand them in the context of Einstein’s disregard for convention in both his scientific and personal life. Like previous biographers, he sees Einstein as a creator and a rebel, a loner and a humanitarian, a warmhearted individual with compassion for those suffering injustice who could be extremely coldhearted toward his wife and children. Apparent contradictions surface even in his scientific life. This rebel against traditional physics refused to embrace the foundational ideas of the quantum mechanical revolution against causality and determinism, believing until his dying day that “God does not play dice” with the universe. Beneath these seeming contradictions, Isaacson discovers in Einstein a deep need to believe in a harmonious world of scientific laws, whose most incomprehensible attribute is their comprehensibility, particularly in the form of beautiful mathematical equations. This quest for harmony underlying the apparent disharmonies of the physical world can be seen in the five radically innovative papers he wrote in his annus

238

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

mirabilis (“wonderful year”) of 1905. Even though there is nothing new in Isaacson’s rendering of this oft-told tale, and even though some reviewers found fault with his dispensing with diagrams in his explanations (devices that had been used by Einstein himself and many others), he does manage to get across to the lay reader the gist of these classic papers, written while Einstein was employed, through the help of his friend Marcel Grossmann, at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In his paper on the photoelectric effect, Einstein used Max Planck’s quantum idea to explain what happens when light causes electrons to be ejected from a metal, and he also interpreted light as consisting of particles (later called photons), an idea that the conservative Planck resisted for many years. In his paper on the size of molecules, Einstein was willing, unlike many traditional physicists, to accept the atomic theory. Furthermore, in his third paper he was able to show how the thermal motion of molecules could influence microscopically visible particles. According to Max Born, Einstein’s molecular investigations did more than anything else to convert physicists to the reality of atoms. The fourth and fifth papers are so important that Isaacson devotes an entire chapter to them. By using insightful postulates and thought experiments that he had developed through helpful conversations with his friend Michele Angelo Besso, and his own wife, Mileva, Einstein formulated what Planck later named the “relativity theory,” which overturned the well-established views of the great natural philosopher Isaac Newton. For example, in place of Newton’s ideas of absolute space, time, and simultaneity, Einstein substituted his relativization of these concepts—that is, motion is relative to each observer, and no single “now” exists for all observers. In the fifth paper, which Isaacson treats as a coda to the first four, Einstein proved, in only three pages, that energy equals mass times the square of light’s speed, establishing the momentous conclusions that an object’s mass is a measure of its energy and that energy possesses inertia. Two things troubled Einstein about this first, or “special,” theory of relativity: It was restricted to uniformly moving systems, and it did not include gravity. For the next decade, he worked tirelessly to extend his ideas to accelerating systems, thereby making it a “general” theory. By using his “luckiest” idea of the indistinguishability between a system experiencing acceleration and one experiencing a gravitational field, Einstein was eventually able, by mastering some abstruse mathematical formalisms, to explain such puzzling phenomena as aberrations in the planet Mercury’s orbit and to predict such marvelous phenomena as the bending of starlight in the gravitational field of the Sun. What is even more amazing is that he was able to do all this amid the emotional turmoil of the breakup of his first marriage and while he was often desperately ill. He was also involved in changing his venue from Zurich to Berlin, where he was forming a new relationship with his cousin Elsa, who would become his second wife. Some scholars have seen Einstein’s behavior toward Mileva and the children during this period as unacceptably callous. However, in the midst of tragedy there was triumph, when, in 1919, his prediction of the bending of starlight by the Sun was verified. A war-weary world quickly made Einstein into a preeminent celebrity. Scientists, too, praised his achievement, calling the general theory “the great-

Einstein / isaacson

239

est scientific discovery ever made.” In the decades that followed, in Germany and the United States, his fame kept growing while his actual scientific attainments, which centered on his abortive attempts to join together gravity and electromagnetism into a unified field theory, diminished. Most of the second half of Isaacson’s book concentrates on Einstein’s humanitarian ideas and activities. From his youth, he expressed his distaste for nationalism, militarism, and dogmatism. Though he expressed sympathy for social democratic ideas, he avoided commitment to any organized political movement or party. His pacifism led him to oppose World War I, but his hatred of Nazism led him to support the Allied cause in World War II, prompting him to write his famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was the provenance of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. In religion, he was a theist who did not believe in a personal God, and in philosophy he was a determinist who did not believe in free will. Nevertheless, despite his inability to lead a monogamous life, he insisted that he was a deeply religious and moral human being, and Isaacson concurs with this judgment. Einstein: His Life and Universe has a roughly chronological structure, but the author interrupts his narrative with thematic chapters that explore the historical and biographical background of such topics as “Einstein’s God” and “Quantum Entanglement.” This leads to repetitions that may bother some readers. His account also contains minor flaws. For example, he consistently misspells “Winterthur,” the locale of a technical college where Einstein taught while waiting to assume his patent-office position. His treatment of Einstein’s contributions to quantum theory could have been more perspicacious by a study of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978), whose thesis is that the revolutionary idea of quantized energy originated in studies by Einstein and others rather than in the work of Planck. Isaacson’s book attracted many reviewers, from journalists, scientists, and mathematicians to such surprising expositors as novelist John Updike. Some reviewers questioned Isaacson’s interpretive acumen. For example, Ilse Einstein, Elsa’s daughter from her first marriage, wrote a letter to a potential lover in which she claimed that Albert Einstein was prepared to marry her rather than her mother, which these critics see as a young girl’s attempt to enhance her sexual attractiveness by her association with a famous scientist. Some journalists found Isaacson’s handling of Einstein’s science admirably lucid, while others confessed that these explanations left them baffled and confused. One reviewer combined his discussion of Isaacson’s book with an Einstein biography published by science journalist Jürgen Neffe, which has been recently translated from German into English. Neffe’s book was a best seller in Germany, and it has been praised as more original, personal, and exhilarating than Isaacson’s. Einstein himself would have been appalled by many of these biographies, because, in his autobiography, he expressed his strong feeling that people have no right to the private lives of scientists, which reveals another of his contradictions: a belief in free inquiry, but not for biographers. Thousands of books and articles have been and will continue to be written about Einstein and his work, and it is doubtful that Isaacson’s biography, admirable though it is, will become definitive. Neverthe-

240

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

less, Einstein would have appreciated Isaacson’s emphasis on his subject’s search for the hidden harmonies of the universe, particularly between relativity and quantum mechanics, an elusive unification that seems to need a new Einstein. Robert J. Paradowski

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 10. The Boston Globe, April 15, 2007, p. D5. The Christian Science Monitor, April 10, 2007, p. 13. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 8-14. Library Journal 132, no. 3 (February 15, 2007): 127. New Scientist 193 (April 14, 2007): 15. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 10 (June 14, 2007): 76-83. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 20, 2007): 16. The New Yorker 83, no. 6 (April 2, 2007): 74-78. Scientific American 297, no. 1 (July, 2007): 98.

241

ENERGY OF DELUSION A Book on Plot Author: Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) First published: Energiia zabluzhdeniia: Kniga o siuzhete, 1981, in the Soviet Union Translated from the Russian by Shushan Avagyan Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (Champaign, Ill.). 428 pp. $14.95 paperback Type of work: Literary criticism An expansive, leisurely, and factually grounded study of the literary techniques of such major Russian authors as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, presented in a format that connects the autobiographical experiences of Shklovsky’s subjects to their published work The work of Viktor Shklovsky has slowly but steadily been appearing in Englishlanguage translations from the Dalkey Archive Press, and Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot is a particularly interesting addition to the canon. Unlike such fellow members of the Russian Formalists as Roman Jakobson, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Yuri Tynianov, who utilized complex linguistic models in their analyses of the differences between creative and everyday writing, Shklovsky had a more direct set of questions that he wanted to pose to the literary work. What, for example, distinguishes the “literary” writer’s methods from other forms of authorship? How does experience, that everyday fund of material available to all sentient humans, become transformed into the distinctive and enthralling narratives of a Tolstoy, a Chekhov, or a Gogol? How do such gifted intelligences build upon the achievements of their forebearers, as they steal, borrow, and at their best reinvigorate the fundamental patterns of storytelling that have held attention in such diverse forums as the campfire, the court, and the coffeehouse? Energy of Delusion displays Shklovsky examining these questions from the classic formalist position that before one can tell what something is, one must first figure out how it has been put together and how it works, and with the corollary that to answer these questions for a text one must approach it in a spirit of humility and openmindedness. All the circumstances of the text’s coming into being are potentially significant, so readers familiar with Shklovsky’s methods will not be surprised to learn that he begins his consideration of Tolstoy’s fiction with a description of the author’s house in the rural village of Yasnaya Polyana. (Those unfamiliar with Shklovsky’s modus operandi will need to master their surprise and will also have to check any elitist assumptions regarding the theoretical basis of literary analysis at the door of Tolstoy’s modest, albeit comfortable, dwelling.) As Shklovsky meditates upon the situation of Tolstoy’s residence, he observes that life is in motion both within and without its walls, as the road on which it sits flows with traffic, and the rooms in-

242

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

side harbor the work of the writer and the activities of his family. If there is a social reality to be captured here, it can only be one that is what Shklovsky calls “stepped,” a series of happenings that unfolds in a linear, causeand-effect way that seems to be suggestively parallel to the manner in which stories develop in the consciousness of their author. Tolstoy fascinates Shklovsky, and more than half of Energy of Delusion is devoted to his work, with Anna Karenina (1875-1877) and three less well-known novels, Kazaki (1863; The Cossacks, 1872), Voskreseniye (1899; Resurrection), and Khadzi-Murat (1911; Hadji Murad), receiving the bulk of his attention. Shklovsky’s discussion of The Cossacks is a notably successful example of his critical practice in which he places particular emphasis on the autobiographical aspects of Tolstoy’s tale of the encounter between an expanding Russian empire and the fiercely independent nomads living on its frontier. Unsure of his own place in the Russia of his time, Tolstoy could not help but admire the Cossacks’ refusal to submit to any authority other than that of their freely chosen leaders. His protagonist in The Cossacks, Olenin, is a Russian youth whose indecisive behavior mirrors Tolstoy’s simultaneous attraction and repulsion to an alternative way of life that seems as desirable as it is unattainable: Even though mistrusted by many of its inhabitants, Olenin goes to live in a Cossack village, is strongly attracted to one of its women, realizes that the relationship cannot last, and with his lover’s help escapes and returns to his homeland. Shklovsky’s commentary establishes the connections between literary text and author’s experience in a suggestive rather than an assertive manner, noting that Tolstoy’s different drafts of the novel reflect an inability to settle on a definitive version of the narrative, as he gives the first example of what will become the book’s most prominent thematic thread: “the energy of delusion” that in Shklovsky’s view supplies the impetus for an author’s successive attempts at crafting a viable narrative. In keeping with the discursive character of his ideas about literary inquiry, Shklovsky offers several different definitions of what “the energy of delusion” means. Early on, in the same section of the book as his discussion of The Cossacks, it is described as “the search for truth in a novel,” the sense that there is some experiential kernel or essence that resides in the core of events and can be retrieved by diligent effort. As alternative interpretations multiply and successive formulations of “what really happened” prove unsatisfactory, however, Shklovsky reconfigures his definition and settles on “the search” rather than “truth” as the most important element in the novelist’s pursuit of his or her craft. Subsequent representations of “the energy of delusion” envision it as a passing “along the paths of possibility,” consisting of “the multiplicity of analysis” and “the multiplicity of phenomena” that are revealed by such analysis: There is no end to the process of scanning the text for what it contains Viktor Shklovsky was a prominent member of the Russian Formalists. His works, which combine autobiography with literary analysis, include Sentimentalnoe puteshestvie (1923; A Sentimental Journey, 1970), Zoo: Ili, Pisma ne o liubvi (1923; Zoo: Or, Letters Not About Love, 1971), Khod konia (1923; Knight’s Move, 2005), and O teorii prozy (1925; Theory of Prose, 1990).

Energy of Delusion / shklovsky

243

and what it means but rather an endlessly branching series of possibilities that make it both possible and necessary to reinvigorate the materials of literature. The peculiar power of Shklovsky’s method of textual exploration resides precisely in this commitment to remaking, reimagining, and ultimately rewriting already existing literary texts. This is imagined not as a literal process of plundering old works for reusable parts but rather as the re-creation of what is unquestionably new as the result of a profound and meaningful encounter with the already existing old. Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina is the site upon which much of Energy of Delusion’s exemplification of this process takes place, and even readers who consider themselves familiar with the novel will likely be surprised by some of Shklovsky’s revelations concerning its genesis. The Anna Karenina of the first drafts, for example, although a practiced coquette, was not a physically attractive woman; the knowledge that she would become an adulterer seems to have affected Tolstoy’s original conception of her appearance in a negative way. As he continued to write and revise, however, Anna gradually became the beautiful, appealing heroine of the finished novel, a transformation that also had important consequences for the portrayal of the man for whom she leaves her husband, Baron Vronsky, who becomes a more knowing and less sympathetic seducer in contrast to his more innocent eroticism in earlier versions. Shklovsky notes a plethora of similar alterations in the depiction of character and associated plot points that firmly ground his analysis of the novel’s experimentation with a wide range of occurrences and outcomes. It is not the change in the conception of the novel’s dramatis personae in itself that makes Shklovsky’s analysis of Anna Karenina so groundbreaking—the existence of variant drafts of the novel has long been known, as has the alteration in the representation of its major characters—but rather the way that he connects it to the ebb and flow of Tolstoy’s life and to basic issues of literary creation. Judicious selections from Tolstoy’s letters enable readers to follow his wanderings along the “path of possibilities” that Energy of Delusion posits as integral to the fashioning of serious literature: Conventional discriminations between “life” and “art” vanish as one sees how periods of intense effort are interspersed with days wracked by anxiety, second thoughts, unfavorable opinions from readers, and even seasonal fluctuations in Tolstoy’s mood. Perhaps the most surprising, and yet remarkably appropriate, fact brought out by Shklovsky’s analysis of the making of Anna Karenina is that the novel began to appear as a magazine serial years before it was completely finished; given this circumstance, it seems clear that there is no “final” or “perfect” version of Tolstoy’s text, but rather simply one on which the author chose to suspend the “energy of delusion” that sustained all preceding efforts. If Shklovsky had limited his analysis to Tolstoy’s work, it would have been open to the caveat that perhaps some eccentric or idiosyncratic quality of his writing is responsible for its particular characteristics. Energy of Delusion also devotes substantial space, however, to Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, and the book also pays significant attention to the work of Fyodor Dostoevski and Alexander Pushkin. Shklovsky makes a well-supported case regarding how these writers dealt with what they discovered along the “path of possibilities” as they crafted their work. Chekhov, for example,

244

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

was so wary of having the plots of his fiction mechanically determined by their introductory elements that when he had completed a story he would rip up its first five pages to ensure that he had not been merely working out the obvious implications of its starting point. Gogol, who spent his final years struggling to conclude Myortvye dushi (part 1, 1842; Dead Souls, 1887), destroyed most of the second half of his manuscript because he could find no satisfying way to end it, even though he was well aware that novels are supposed to have endings as well as beginnings and middles. Dostoevski, deeply depressed by the Russia that was and not able to see how it could become the Russia of his hopes and dreams, fashioned fiction in which events that happen “suddenly” enable him to ignore cause and effect and substitute what is magically real for what is materially repulsive. Pushkin, working under severe state censorship, took six drafts of his novel Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain’s Daughter, 1846) to achieve a satisfactory portrait of an anticzarist rebel, finally discovering that the poetic epigrams prefacing each chapter could be used to imply what he did not dare suggest in prose. These and many other copiously documented examples of Shklovsky’s methodology establish that following an author’s “energy of delusion” along the “path of possibilities” is an extremely fruitful approach to literary criticism. Shklovsky’s emphasis upon the analysis of process, which in significant respects often seems to have more in common with the techniques of inductive inquiry associated with scientific experimentation than it does with the essential originality one attributes to artistic endeavor, may be difficult to accept for those who imagine the latter as consisting of sudden, unpredictable bursts of creativity that the artist transcribes as though they had been dictated by supernatural sources. The writing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (wr. 1797), for example, has acquired the reputation of having been produced in a single sustained bout of writing that took place in a trance- or dreamlike state, one that was irrevocably shattered by the chance intrusion of an unsuspected visitor; when one engages in the kind of literary inquiry that Shklovsky champions in Energy of Delusion, however, it turns out that Coleridge himself acknowledged that it was not until almost twenty years later that he put this experience into its final published form (1816), with the concomitant implications that the words of the poem may—and it is tempting to say “must”—have changed during this period. Although one would obviously not want to completely dismiss the role of sudden inspiration in the genesis of literary works, Shklovsky’s analyses alert readers to the effects that time, thought, and revision are likely to have on the materials that the writer begins to mold into the work that will eventually be valued as literature. Energy of Delusion is a wonderful example of how diligent research, close reading, and informed speculation can be combined to illuminate one’s understanding of what authors and texts do. Paul Stuewe Review Source The Spectator 305 (September 22, 2007): 67.

245

EXIT GHOST Author: Philip Roth (1933) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 304 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: November, 2004 Locale: New York City and western Massachusetts After eleven years of rural seclusion, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York and the ambitions and contentions of contemporary culture Principal characters: Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, a seventy-one-year-old novelist, now impotent and incontinent Richard Kliman, a twenty-eight-year-old would-be biographer Amy Bellette, the late E. I. Lonoff’s mistress Jamie Logan, a beautiful young writer for whose West Side apartment Zuckerman wants to swap his cabin Billy Davidoff, her doting husband, also a writer

Since 1974, when he surfaced in a short story within My Life as a Man, the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman has served Philip Roth as a supple instrument to explore the ambitions, anxieties, and constraints of the writing life. In The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth makes Zuckerman the protagonist, a young, determined writer who seeks a mentor in the aging literary lion E. I. Lonoff. Readers of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Counterlife (1986) were able to follow Zuckerman’s erotic tribulations and his successful publishing career. By the time Roth created his “American trilogy” of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), age and infirmity had subdued Zuckerman, who serves as self-effacing witness to the extraordinary lives of others. Exit Ghost, which derives its title from a stage direction in Hamlet (pr. c. 16001601), is the ninth and, according to Roth, final Zuckerman novel. Zuckerman is the narrator, and, mindful of evidence that his mind is deteriorating, that his ability to remember basic information is eroding, he observes: “Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs of a book.” He now dominates the story, but at its outset the seventy-one-year-old character whose author is giving up on him has already given up on the world. For the past eleven years, Zuckerman has lived in seclusion in a two-room cabin on twelve acres in rural western Massachusetts. Prostate cancer has rendered the former sexual athlete impotent and incontinent, and he has deliberately lost touch with contemporary culture. Abjuring the clamorous, contentious urban world that he had inhabited for most of his adult life, he no longer reads newspapers and mag-

246

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

azines and, lacking a computer, is sublimely innocent of the Internet. When he returns to New York for a medical procedure, Zuckerman, astonished that during his absence pedestrians have sprouted cell phones on their ears, feels like Rip Van Winkle. In the opening pages of Exit Ghost, Zuckerman has in effect become a ghost of his former self. While in New York, he catches a glimpse of Amy Bellette, who was E. I. Lonoff’s muse and mistress in The Ghost Writer. She is now Philip Roth is one of the most old and terminally ill, dying of brain cancer, accomplished and honored of and, while curious about what has become of contemporary writers. He emerged as her, Zuckerman is reluctant to intrude on her an important force in American Jewish privacy. However, their acquaintance is reliterature with the publication of his newed through the intervention of an ambifirst book, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959. Exit Ghost is the ninth and last of tious young pest. He is Richard Kliman, a Roth’s novels to feature the fictional twenty-eight-year-old literary novice intent author Nathan Zuckerman. Roth has on making his mark in the publishing world published more than two dozen other by writing the biography of E. I. Lonoff. He is books, including novels, stories, and a total stranger to Zuckerman, but when an inessays. formant in a bookstore alerts Kliman that Zuckerman is back in town and still reading Lonoff, the would-be biographer immediately calls the famous novelist in his hotel room. When he tries to pry information about Lonoff, Zuckerman, who knew and admired the late master of short fiction, hangs up on him. It is a reaction that biography, the vocation that empowers snoops, inspires. Lonoff aspired to disappear into his texts, and Zuckerman is appalled by Kliman’s scheme to restore Lonoff’s reputation—and promote his own—by exposing the writer’s guilty secrets, specifically the incest that the author had allegedly committed with his half sister. (While readers of The Ghost Writer have recognized that Lonoff, a master of the short story, is generally modeled on Bernard Malamud, the incest theme suggests an additional link to Henry Roth, the troubled author of Call It Sleep, 1934, who likewise indulged in adolescent sex with his sister.) Declaring himself “the biographer’s enemy,” Zuckerman, trying to make common cause with the embittered and unbalanced Bellette, sets out to sabotage Kliman’s project. Like Lonoff, Zuckerman is resolutely devoted to his craft, and he has kept himself aloof from the distracting chatter of the city’s literati. Throughout his rural exile, he has not even glanced at a copy of the influential New York Review of Books. However, once back in Manhattan, he buys the latest issue, and, despite his indignation over Kliman’s prurient inquisitiveness, he immediately turns to the paper’s notorious personal ads. One listing, which offers to swap a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side for a house in the country, catches his eye and excites his imagination. A

Exit Ghost / roth

247

meeting with the young couple—Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff, both writers— who own the apartment confirms him in his impulse to return to vibrant urban life. Despite his physical impotence, Zuckerman becomes infatuated with the thirty-yearold Logan and fantasizes a relationship with her. The fact that Logan happens to be a former lover of Kliman exacerbates the novelist’s resentment of the biographer. Zuckerman’s visit to New York is played out against the background of the November, 2004, presidential election. Logan and Davidoff, like Zuckerman, are keenly opposed to the reelection of George W. Bush, and their shared despondency over his victory reinforces the novel’s atmosphere of social and personal decline. Yet, despite preoccupation with his own mortality, Zuckerman retains his literary powers and his lifelong eagerness to transmute experience into art. Not only is the entire text of Exit Ghost presented as the handiwork of Nathan Zuckerman, but within it are sections in which the fictional author explicitly writes down invented scenes between other characters and himself. It concludes with the transcript of a telephone conversation between Zuckerman and Logan that the older writer has invented and cast in the form of a he/she exchange. The complex relations between life and art, which have always been a source of confusion and an object of contemplation in the Zuckerman novels, are central to this, the final one. Zuckerman doth protest too much when he pretends to renounce curiosity and denounce biography. Though he claims to despise Kliman as a self-serving scoundrel who would “redeem Lonoff’s reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man,” he also recognizes that the younger man is another version of himself. Biographer and novelist are doppelgängers, equally devoted to the archaeology of private experience. Repulsed by “the insane rapaciousness of the biographical drive,” Zuckerman would like to dismiss Kliman as an obnoxious opportunist, yet he acknowledges kinship with a man he calls “a literary lunatic. Another one. Like me, like Lonoff, like all whose most violent passion is for a book.” Zuckerman, too, preys on others’ lives as raw material for his books, even as he covets his own privacy. Roth, as always, is attentive to the tensions between the urge to reveal and the urge to conceal. Out of the ambiguous ambitions and interactions of both biography and fiction, he has created another compelling novel. In a letter she writes to The New York Times, Amy Bellette lashes out at “the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism,” the tendency of commentary on the arts to descend into gossip about the artist’s life. Though Bellette claims that the spirit of E. I. Lonoff dictates her angry letter, Exit Ghost is less a ghost story than a vampire fable or, more precisely, the parable of a parasite; Kliman draws sustenance for his own fledgling career from Lonoff’s rotting carcass. Zuckerman the would-be vampire slayer trusts the tale, not the teller, and he condemns “the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research.” However, Kliman points out that Zuckerman the writer is himself a snoop; he feeds off his experiences as fuel for his art. The biographer and the novelist are, like Shakespeare’s lunatic, lover, and poet, of imagination all compact. While affirming Stéphane Mallarmé’s conviction that everything in the world exists in order to be turned into a book, both attempt to pierce beyond the public veil to expose discomfiting secrets about particular individuals and the human experience in general. “I’m not doing anything other than what you do,”

248

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Kliman tells Zuckerman. “What any thinking person does.” Before meeting them and inspecting their Upper West Side apartment, Zuckerman fantasizes about Logan and Davidoff; he later discovers that his fantasies were widely inaccurate, that it is Logan, not Davidoff, who comes from a wealthy, privileged background. However, in conjuring up versions of Logan and Davidoff, Zuckerman is in effect indulging in biography, as he is when he interrupts his narrative to reminisce about George Plimpton, the prominent, exuberant man of letters who inserted his own life into his writing and who died about a year before the novel begins. Zuckerman rightfully mistrusts Kliman’s “vitality and ambition and tenacity and anger,” all the more so because he recognizes them as engines of his own art. He rejects Kliman’s theory that an unfinished, unpublished Lonoff manuscript depicting incest “is a tormented confession disguised as a novel,” claiming that it might instead be “a novel disguised as a tormented confession.” He is appalled that Kliman would presume to reduce Lonoff’s life and work to a sordid liaison that lasted only three years. Moreover, instead of drawing on his own guilty sexual experiences, Lonoff might, suggests Zuckerman, have appropriated elements from the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. To compound the confusion over fictionalized incest, Zuckerman himself dreams of making love to his own mother. Throughout the Nathan Zuckerman cycle, Philip Roth has used his fictional alter ego to portray the plight of a successful novelist whose depiction of Jews has incurred the wrath of some prominent Jews. It would, however, be a mistake to identify Nathan Zuckerman (or even the “Philip Roth” who appears in five other Roth novels) with Philip Roth, the public figure wary of public appearances who nevertheless anointed Ross Miller, a professor at the University of Connecticut, as his biographer. Yet it would also be unnatural not to muse about the identity of the novelist. “Curiosity is nurtured by life,” insists Kliman. People must accept responsibility for the lives they conjure up, even as they are haunted by the ghosts of unimagined lives. In a valedictory book haunted by the first full Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth’s fictional alter ego makes a spirited exit. Steven G. Kellman Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 3 (October, 2007): 133-137. Chicago Tribune, September 15, 2007, p. 4. The Christian Science Monitor, October 30, 2007, p. 16. Harper’s Magazine 315 (October, 2007): 105-110. Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2007, p. R1. The New Republic 237, no. 7 (October 8, 2007): 53-57. New Statesman 137 (October 8, 2007): 52-55. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 7, 2007): 14-34. The Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2007, pp. 21-22. The Washington Post, September 30, 2007, p. BW10.

249

EXPECTATION DAYS Author: Sandra McPherson (1943) Publisher: University of Illinois Press (Urbana). 82 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Poetry McPherson’s collection once again shows her able melding of fact and emotion, the outer and the inner worlds Sandra McPherson is a California poet known for the versatility and the challenge of her poetry. Once a technical writer, she has always had a strain of the scientific or the technical in her work, producing complex and vibrant metaphors. Her first book, Radiation (1973), astounded critics and readers with its precision, its hard-edged exploration of nature and human nature. Poems in it rapidly found their way into anthologies and classrooms. McPherson’s work tends to veer away from the hard-edged scientific approach of other poets, like Marianne Moore, and to move into an area where science and humanity blend and touch. Often, the scientific and the human appear as double visions of the same truth—reading such a work is like looking through a telescope that has two different lenses. Science is a constant presence in her books, whether it is botany, theory of black holes, archaeology, or geology; there is a bedrock of science to McPherson’s vision of the world. However, the emphasis on science and on the technical is only one element of her approach. Her poems often speak directly of motherhood, loss, relationships, or family. With McPherson the reader never knows what will come next: a love poem, or a poem on a natural theory of science, or both. Two books that were published in 1996 suggest her range: Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals and The Spaces Between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems, 1967/1995. Edge Effect explores the relationship between quilting and jazz and the way “outsider art” expresses human nature at its most complex; it is filled with precise information about these practices. The Spaces Between Birds is a direct, emotion-filled exploration of the mother and daughter relationship. Taken together, the two books represent the sides of Sandra McPherson. Both share a sense of the metaphysical—a transcendence that is not affiliated with any religious ideology but that comes as hard-won glimpses into the heart of nature itself. Born in San Jose, California, in 1943, McPherson has spent much of her life in her home state, and California scenes appear in her work. This new collection, though, often uses natural imagery in a way divorced from place, so that the reader does not think of specific beaches or towns but rather of specific elements—an ouzel, a coyote, a kind of wind, faintly carrying some allegoric or emblematic traces. The places named are sometimes exotic, sometimes local. Nevertheless, these poems have a sense of place, a home landscape.

250

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Expectation Days is McPherson’s fifteenth collection, following the poet’s life into widowhood and the experience of the newly single life. This book is divided into five numbered sections that are very different from each other. The first includes mostly poems of place, though their geography is largely internal. The second, beginning with “Containers,” includes poems of bereavement. The third section contains some magical prose poems, sometimes sparked by places far from and near to home. The fourth is a series of “virtue studies” that are narratives of human connections and of admirable influences, some human, some natural. The last section includes poems with political undertones and projects a sense of reconciliation with the world and acceptance of loss and grief as part of it. The first poem is startlingly lovely and sets the tone for the book. Its apparent subject is nature—a late season, an unidentified scene of alder, coyotes, the last blackberries—but its end is a rupture of the peace, a despoilment: “Bottomland—/ the foolhen/ waits there for// the fool gun,/ gray throat-down free in a burst,/ the pose, the afterslump.// Carcass beside spirit./ O come to my hand, unkillable;// whatever continues, continue to approach.” The staggered tercet form enhances the luminous effect of this poem, which becomes both resignation and a kind of prayer that loss and grief not close off communication, communion with the physical world. This theme appears in other poems, together with the notion that the natural in its passing affords the occasional glimpse of the eternal—a glimpse that cannot be analyzed or even kept. In “On Being Transparent: Cedar Rapids Airport,” the speaker describes the human failure to be able to “sort/ transcendence from the gross ungodly.” She speaks of “my preemie-diaphanous-hair’s-breadth/ Mysticism—uninspected/ But true-to-soul: the one-time visitation/ I cling to of a presence glowing . . . like a/ Golden mayfly.” The natural and transcendent merge neatly in the last image. Landscape, seascape, memories—all revised by grief—form the basis of this first section. The second part is not unlike it, except that the poems seem to be more explicitly about specific loss. Instead of relating to nature or place, these poems have titles like “Bereavement: Leaving the Radio on All Night for Company” and “Living with an Urn.” These more direct poems communicate the feel of being a widow, the accommodations one must make with life to keep on living it. The poems project a sense of aloneness, with its two directions—solitude and loneliness—of which the latter predominates in this sequence; yet the poems suggest the reawakening of the spirit after such a great loss. The reawakening is pain-filled but necessary if the soul is to grope toward healing. Especially appealing are the prose poems of the next part, which begin in places but connect with persons. “Cawaguni Scarecrow, Dang Region, Nepal” ends:

Sandra McPherson is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She has taught at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and the University of California, Berkeley. She has won many awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Expectation Days / mc pherson

251

The sky is full of crows’ brains twice a day; like morning and evening newspapers, they talk to dazzle and frazzle the page. Please don’t shoot them. They add up to much intelligence. Communal body—we drink milk, trough water, bug juice. We should bounce this happy flock flesh. At night, on the corner, in the cold of a distant month, a frostitute, lowly and a thing of dreams, forms as language crystallizes in my waking. Taut jewel that won’t melt when hot. One sequin that all the crows’ eyes can spot.

The melding of language and perception in a semi-surreal description delights mind and senses. “Expectation Days,” the title poem, also among the prose poems, is also filled with telling specifics that combine into an observation. The poet blends Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, war, and shopping in a fast-moving sequence of emotions and images that ends: Doc’s rough tongue keeps his hair alphabetized. The paint-mixing man at Wal-Mart used the word “miracly” today, refreshing, by concentrating, the time of amazement as he pushed many samples of black-eyed loud yellow around and around.

The prose poems carry one image into the next in a realistic jumble of perceptions and observations. They are high-energy poems that communicate rediscovery of purpose and immersion in the present. They tend to crowd the mind-space with particulars. Their effect is one of the refreshment provided by close observation of daily life. This section is followed by the “virtue studies,” which have a slightly different voice; some of them are tinged with grief, but they present mostly good memories, positive experiences. They also mull over issues concerning art and morality and the genesis of art. In “Virtue Study: Happy Hour,” the speaker remembers reading of “blossoms and/ besottedness of great/ haiku poets” and plays with the attachment to them and their happy poetic world, their “gazes rolled/ up like pear blossoms/ in March.” The poem ends lightly: “They did write it pretty// once, those poets/ before car keys.” While such a playful poem as this one is rare in this book, others have moments of delight. The final section blends past and present in a series that connects one human grief with all loss, animals, wars, cataclysms. Some of the poems are enlivened by humor, like “The Bat by Porch Light,” which presents the persona of a dead bat, killed by a cat apparently belonging to the poet. Others adopt words from other contexts, such as “How to Read an Aerial Map,” which begins with a quotation from the August, 1944, War Department Field Manual: “Shadows must fall toward you.” And they have, with the approaching faint of the staggerer, with the wail of the broken hipped, with a childlike trust in my direction. Shadows must fall toward me and I accept their imposition, I am composed, I am there for them.

The poem blends the grief of personal loss with the devastation of the war and ends with an antiwar statement:

252

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 Did the courage that held them ever ask to be paid in light? Gossamer, cameras, and tears have more of that than governments.

Alan Williamson commented, “Sandra McPherson was one of the first poets to transpose the core—the freshness of seeing—into a sensibility that was younger, more raffish, more political.” These are poems of mature observation, but their effect is still of a freshness, of a vision stripped of tired interpretations that makes primary the perception itself. Sandra M. Gilbert sums up the book neatly: “Balanced between grief and affirmation, the beautifully crafted, fearlessly honest poems of Expectation Days shimmer with delight in the things of this world even while they brood on the losses to which all things must succumb.” Critics in the past have tended to focus on McPherson’s cleverness and her particular way of associating fact and experience, but with this book more attention is paid to its message and its emotional veracity. The styles are varied in this collection, but clearly McPherson favors free forms; free verse and prose poetry dominate. A few poems are in somewhat formal patterns, like “Gospel Disinclined,” which has some rhyme and a flexible blank verse, but for the most part McPherson allows the content to dictate the form in organic poems that use repetition, consonance, assonance, and spacing to achieve their effects. Sometimes she uses uniform stanzas of free verse, couplets, tercets, and quatrains, but her way of achieving cohesion is more in the linking of images than in traditional patterns. Expectation Days centers on bereavement, widowhood, medical experiences, and loss, but the poems are not downbeat or sentimental. Rather, the sense of loss is balanced by the celebration of life well and fully lived. The metaphysical element is complemented by the skeptical in this collection, but it is nevertheless present. The collection is accessible without being obvious, and it is hopeful without deceit. Satisfying on many levels, Expectation Days is a book to return to. Janet McCann

Review Source Library Journal 132, no. 19 (November 15, 2007): 62.

253

FALLING MAN Author: Don DeLillo (1936) Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York). 246 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2001-2004 Locale: New York City The eagerly awaited 9/11 novel by the master of national trauma and postmodern angst Principal characters: Keith Neudecker, a lawyer Lianne Glenn, his estranged wife, a freelance editor Justin, their son Nina Bartos, her mother, a retired professor of art history Martin Ridnour, an art dealer, Nina’s lover Florence Givens, a survivor with whom Keith has an affair Hammad, a terrorist David Janiak, a performance artist

Falling Man was published with little fanfare and very little advance notice other than an appetite-whetting excerpt in the The New Yorker. Advance publicity may have been surprisingly sparse, but expectations were high, for who is better qualifiedto write the definitive 9/11 novel than Don DeLillo? Other writers have tried, from various angles and with varying degrees of success: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), John Updike’s The Terrorist (2006), Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Writing on the Wall (2005), and Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Films have also fallen well short: Oliver Stone’s flag-waving soap opera World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass’s much better, much more narrowly focused—indeed chillingly claustrophobic—United 93 (2006), which recalls the “five miles of primetime terror” scene from DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), minus the irony. The question worth asking was never whether DeLillo could write the great 9/11 novel but whether he needed to at all, having in effect already written it piecemeal over the past three decades. The Players (1977) features the World Trade Centerand a terrorist plot to bomb Wall Street. The Names (1982) deals with an obscure fundamentalist terrorist group in Greece. White Noise, DeLillo’s finest novel, is all about terror—the fear of dying in an age of hypercapitalism, airborne toxic events, and pharmaceutical solutions to personal and spiritual problems. Libra (1988) brilliantly and obsessively chronicles the postmodern response—paranoia—to national trauma

254

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

(the Kennedy assassination). Mao II’s (1991) reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, finds himself in a brave new world in which “the future belongs to crowds,” where the televised image trumps the written word and where the novelist has been supplanted by the terrorist. In Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s most ambitious novel about “the American century” of profligate waste and constant low-grade anxiety, the twin towers appear twice, glimpsed from an artist’s window during their construction and on the dust jacket in André Kertész’s disSince the publication of his first novel, quieting photograph, church steeple in the Americana, in 1971, Don DeLillo has foreground, towers looming ominously beemerged as a leading American writer hind, their tops lost in the clouds like some of his generation. He is the author of postmodern version of Kafka’s castle. fifteen novels, several plays, one Exhaustively summing up the entire Cold screenplay, and a number of influential essays. His novel White Noise is War period and its aftermath in cut-up, intergenerally regarded as the major secting narratives, recurring images, personal American novel of the 1980’s. His rituals, and national obsessions appears to many honors include the Jerusalem have exhausted DeLillo—at least that is what Prize (1999). the extreme brevity of his next three works suggests: the play Valparaiso (pb. 1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003). Surely, as a subject, 9/11 would get DeLillo back on track and readers thinking about (rather than passively consuming) the iconic images that had silenced writers and public alike: First, the endless replays of the planes hitting the towers and the towers falling, later Joel Meyerowitz’s overly solemn, ultimately sentimental photos of ground zero, leading the way to Stone’s maudlin exercise in flag-waving and family values. In 9/11’s wake, solemnity ruled, until a Saturday Night Live sketch finally (if briefly) broke the tension. Novelists were themselves part of the problem, complicit with the national chorus, as in Martin Amis’s wildly exaggerated but dismayingly representative claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” Shocking as it may seem, the problem was never that 9/11 was too large for fiction but that it was too small to bear the enormous weight heaped upon it. When he took up residence in California, the Polish poet Czesuaw Miuosz was grateful for all America offered but dismayed by American naïveté and ignorance of history. The 9/11 attacks were America’s spectacular awakening to history and to the tragic sensibility long known to the rest of the world. Although condemned at the time, Susan Sontag’s remarks in the The New Yorker, shortly after 9/11, now seem commonsensical: Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us to understand what has just happened. And what may

Falling Man / de lillo

255

continue to happen. . . . The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.

Even when most accessible, DeLillo has always challenged his readers, never infantilized them; more observant and prophetic than any other contemporary American novelist, he has always led, never followed, and always been the most cogent chronicler and commentator on the way we live now. Yet in 9/11’s immediate aftermath, even he came to accept and parrot the conventional wisdom rather than to challenge it: “This time we are trying to name the future, not in our normally hopeful way, but guided by dread” (“In the Ruins of the Future,” Harper’s Magazine, December, 2001). This is a rather astonishing claim to come from a writer who has been writing the American book of dread at least since White Noise. Six years after “In the Ruins of the Future,” the 9/11 novel Americans sorely need is the kind of historiographic metafiction—DeLillo’s Libra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977)—that critically examines “history” and historical pieties. Although better by far than other 9/11 fictions, Falling Man is not quite the DeLillo novel that people expected or needed. Nevertheless, Falling Man’s first half, its opening pages in particular, does not disappoint. Here DeLillo is in top form, defamiliarizing 9/11 and reproducing the brittle, truncated dialogue that reveals personal relationships as fragile structures. Occasionally, Falling Man has a Law & Order “ripped from the headlines” feel. More worrisome, the writing seems canned, recycled from DeLillo’s earlier works but without the edginess, the irony, the insight. Old Man Treadwell (White Noise) reappears as a writing group made up of Alzheimer’s patients; the official Central Intelligence Agency history of the Kennedy assassination that Nicholas Branch struggles to write in Libra becomes the “book . . . webbed in obsessive detail” that Lianne Glenn will edit; Jack Gladney’s wonderfully absurd medical tests reappear as Lianne’s more pedestrian ones. Although DeLillo has been especially adept at creating characters in a decidedly postmodern mode, Falling Man’s characters are abstract in a different way than in the earlier work, their dread much less convincing. This may be deliberate: the postmodern self further reduced to the kind of missing person featured on posters in lower Manhattan in the days after 9/11. Keith Neudecker is a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who survives the attacks; although his name links him with New York’s Dutch past, he is a shallow man who gives the impression of depth. Lianne Glenn is his thirty-eight-year-old estranged wife to whose apartment he returns on 9/11; she works as a freelance book editor and directs a writing group of Alzheimer’s patients. Justin is their seven-year-old son. Nina Bartos, Lianne’s mother, is a retired professor of art history. Martin Ridnour, Nina’s long-distance lover of twenty years—a man who flies in and then flies out—is an art dealer with a mysterious past, including vague ties to a German terrorist group in the 1960’s. Along with the novel’s title character, the performance artist whose real name is David Janiak, Martin is Falling Man’s most intriguing character because he is the one about whom the reader wants to learn more

256

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

(because there seems to be a lot more to learn, as there does not with Keith and Lianne, the novel’s main characters). However, more is not what Falling Man is about, as another survivor, Florence Givens, suggests. She is the light-skinned, slightly heavy black woman whose briefcase Keith by chance takes with him from the tower, then returns, and with whom he has an affair. (Unable to save his friend and colleague Rumsey, he saves the briefcase.) “‘You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,’ she said.” Keith’s arrival at Lianne’s even before going to the hospital is an early sign of the need for contact, for belonging, which runs throughout Falling Man. The need precedes the attacks; following their separation, there is “the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group,” he to his weekly poker game, she to her Alzheimer’s group. Like her morning run and his workouts at the gym, these personal rituals are postmodern versions of the terrorists’ commitment to their fundamentalist beliefs, including jihad. While the latter results in massive carnage, the former seem not just benign but absurdly inadequate: the hidey-holes where belief goes in a postreligious age of self-indulgence and hypercapitalism. That “people were reading the Koran” post-9/11 is less a sign of Americans wanting to understand Islam than a faddish consumer choice occasioned by intense but nonetheless passing interest. Lianne’s need for her Alzheimer’s group and Keith’s commitment to poker work serve much the same purpose. The inadequacy of these gestures of commitment and belief makes one wonder whether the novel’s “spindly” structure (as Michiko Kakutani calls it), like the thinness of characterization mentioned earlier, may be intentional. If so, instead of being one of DeLillo’s weakest novels, Falling Man may be one of his riskiest, the aesthetic weaknesses pointing to larger cultural and political failures. If so, then Falling Man is made in the image of its title character: not its protagonist, Keith Neudecker, the ultimate man without qualities who has fallen into history, but the performance artist who repeatedly, and with no apparent interest in fame or monetary gain, reenacts one of 9/11’s best-known and most surreal images, Richard Drew’s photograph of a man falling, as if gracefully, to his death, one of the many who either jumped from or were blown out of the twin towers. Never announced in advance, the performances are Brechtian assaults on the public, alternately revered (the Guggenheim Museum tries to commission three weeks’ worth of jumps) and reviled (termed “moronic” by an unnamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) and certainly risky, his free fall arrested by a simple safety harness, which badly damaged his spine and which he would have abandoned for his final jump had he not died, ironically enough, of natural causes, five hundred miles from New York City. Drew’s photograph and Falling Man’s performances are strangely linked to the still lifes by Giorgio Morandi mentioned several times in the novel. “These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she [Lianne] could not name, or in the irregular edges of the vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even.” Falling Man exists somewhere between performance art and still life, a high-wire

Falling Man / de lillo

257

act in a deceptively low-key mode that for almost its entire second half seems to lose its way, to repeat (rather like Morandi’s still lifes or Falling Man’s reenactments) rather than advance, arriving at novel’s end at the moment just before the novel’s opening, as two worlds meet, when plane and tower become one, when the terrorist Hammad’s life enters the lawyer Keith Neudeker’s, and “before” becomes “after.” “The attack on the World Trade Center,” Salman Rushdie wrote a few months after 9/11, “was essentially a monstrous act of the imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations, to shape our own imaginings of the future. . . . The terrorists of September 11, and the planners of that day’s events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists, hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to strike at the very heart of our high-tech world.” Falling Man is another low-tech attack, but one that does little to alter the perception and understanding of a spectacular, supposedly iconic event that has already begun to recede into forgetfulness, kept alive chiefly by self-serving politicians in and for a society of metaphoric Alzheimer’s sufferers. Falling Man may not be the 9/11 novel that people need, but the author of The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld remains the best guide to how America got to where it is now. Robert Morace

Review Sources The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 13, 2007, p. K8. Financial Times, May 12, 2007, p. 30. The Guardian, May 19, 2007, p. 4. Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007, p. R1. The Nation 284, no. 21 (May 28, 2007): 18-22. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 27, 2007): 1-9. Newsweek 149, no. 20 (May 14, 2007): 7. USA Today, May 15, 2007, p. D7. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 117 (May 19, 2007): 8. The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, p. BW15.

258

A FAREWELL TO ALMS A Brief Economic History of the World Author: Gregory Clark (1957) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 420 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Economics, history An effort to answer two central questions in economic history: why the economies of some nations began to undergo rapid industrialization about the year 1800 and why a large gap in economic development persists among nations The title of Gregory Clark’s ambitious work of economic history, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, may be a little misleading for its potential readers. Those seeking a short chronological account of the world economy will not find it here. Instead, Clark’s goal is to account for the transformation of economies that began about the year 1800 and to explain how this transformation resulted in contemporary inequalities in development among the nations of the world. Before 1800, according to Clark, incomes and standards of living varied across historical periods, geographic locations, and social classes, but there was no general upward movement. Greater social differentiation may have made lives better for the rich and worse for the poor. Sometimes, a relatively more equal distribution of income may have led to better situations for the least advantaged. The average standard of living, though, remained the same from prehistory to the beginning of the modern era. Clark argues that the reason for this long economic stagnation was the Malthusian trap. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus published a book on population in which he argued that human populations have a tendency to expand to the point at which their environments will no longer support them. When more food becomes available, the population will simply increase to consume the surplus. Under such a situation, there is no improvement of the overall economic situation because any expansion of the amount of food or other goods produced creates more people. When the population reaches the maximum that an environment will support, the population begins to decline again and cut back production. This account is basically a classical economist’s view of population, in which population obeys the laws of supply and demand. The account of Malthus was also an influence, some decades later, on the biological thinking of one of his relatives, Charles Darwin, who saw the supply of food in environments as shaping the characteristics, as well as the sizes, of living populations. The Darwin connection is also important to Clark’s book, because Clark suggests that population change, through a type of Darwinian selection, may have been the way out of the Malthusian trap.

A Farewell to Alms / clark

259

In part 1 of the book, Clark provides an examination of life during the period of the Gregory Clark is professor of Malthusian trap before 1800. Using an impres- economics at the University of sive amount and variety of historical statisti- California, Davis, where he has taught cal information, he sketches out an image of since 1984. He became chair of the living standards, fertility, and life expectancy Economics Department in 2007. His around the world during the long preindus- primary interest is in the economic trial stage of human life. One of his targets for history of England and India. A Farewell to Alms is his first book. accounting for the long economic standstill is the institutional argument. According to the institutional view, the modern market economies that create industrialization developed only after institutions such as stable governments and financial arrangements came into existence to make working, saving, and investing worthwhile. Clark offers evidence that European societies, most notably England, had all of the institutions considered necessary for a market economy by the year 1200. So why did it take so long for markets to spur investments and innovations? Clark maintains that in the millennia following the creation of settled agrarian society with the Neolithic Revolution, humanity gradually changed its culture and its genetic composition in response to a new environment that required steady work at daily routines. This created habits of industriousness that Clark suggests may have been rooted in biology. The Industrial Revolution began in Europe, and more specifically in England, as a result of a social environment that promoted the spread of a particular kind of industriousness. Clark gives data that show that higher-income men in England on the eve of modernity had more children than lower-income men. Since wealth predicted reproductive success, the environment selected those with the disposition to accumulate wealth. Even as the relatively numerous children of successful men moved downward on the social scale, they carried this disposition with them into the lower social classes. As a result, more of the population at all levels became thrifty, hardworking, and prudent. Essentially, Clark maintains, modern human beings emerged when the traits often identified as bourgeois or middle class became common traits among large portions of the population. With the emergence of these modern human beings, interest rates began to go down. It was not the availability of banks or political stability that lowered the preference for immediate enjoyment (which keeps interest rates high). Rather, it was the spread of personalities who were willing to delay gratification. These same middleclass personalities took the time to cultivate skills that would yield long-term benefits. Thus, literacy and numeracy increased rapidly in the years following 1800. Similarly, work hours grew longer as people aimed more at earning benefits and less at enjoying leisure. Part 2 turns to the life after the escape from the Malthusian trap, to the Industrial Revolution and its results. Clark maintains, from statistical evidence on the historical growth of economic efficiency, that the economic benefits that began around 1800 came from production enhanced by knowledge. The problem, as he sees it, is why in-

260

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

vestments in expanding the useful stock of knowledge came when they did and why the advances came first in England. Clark indicates that the underlying source of the Industrial Revolution, the improvement of the efficiency of labor, was actually slow and gradual. The change appeared to be sudden, though, because of population growth beginning about 1750, providing more of the workers who had been becoming more efficient. It did not happen in nations such as China or Japan, which also had trends of population growth, because the growth had not occurred with the suddenness found in England. Perhaps even more importantly, from the perspective of Clark’s argument, population growth in Asia was not as closely linked to wealth as it was in England. Thus, it was specifically in England that the economically successful had the greatest reproductive advantage, selecting for the middle-class traits that would drive economic development. The events in England, and later in continental Europe and in America, had farreaching social consequences. Clark offers data that contradict the Marxist view that early capitalism primarily benefited owners while creating an impoverished working class. Instead, according to Clark’s data, real hourly wages and standards of living of workers went up steadily from 1800 to the present, after centuries of remaining essentially the same. This presents a real break with the old Malthusian rule in human society, since levels of consumption grew greater as the number of people grew greater. In traditional economic terms, this is as if an increasing supply of a good (people) paradoxically led to a greater price for it, rather than a lower price. This seemingly contradictory trend occurred because each person became more valuable as productivity, the amount produced by each individual worker, increased. While standards of living have improved at a remarkable rate in some parts of the world, though, they remain stagnant in others. The gap between rich and poor has not occurred within the advanced capitalist countries, but between those countries and the poorer parts of the world. Following his earlier line of thinking, Clark rejects the idea that this gap is a result of inadequate development of economic institutions or of exploitation of the poorer nations by the richer nations. He sees it as the consequence of a gap in worker efficiency between geographic and cultural areas. Relying mainly on textile and railway data from India, England, and the United States, he offers evidence that suggests the technological capacity and the management for high productivity were available in all three countries. India dropped behind because of the low efficiency of its workers. Clark does not see prosperity as an unqualified boon, even for the rich nations. Using widely accepted current social scientific data, he suggests that general levels of happiness do not go up with rising standards of living. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but as people become richer the average level of contentment remains the same. Apparently, it is being better off than other people that produces satisfaction, not simply being better off. This is a particularly gloomy finding for the lowerincome nations, as they enter a world economy in which they will be comparing themselves to the prosperous. In the end, a wealthier world may make no one more cheerful and many people more miserable.

A Farewell to Alms / clark

261

Clark provides a fresh and stimulating account of the central event in human history: the break from the relatively static, agriculturally based societies that predominated in humankind’s adaptation to the environment for most of the period of civilization and the beginning of a society of high production and high consumption. He challenges many of the older explanations of this event. He gives good reasons to question whether it was chiefly the consequence of more productive technologies or of social institutions that stimulated investments in new areas and means of production. He effectively challenges old notions such as the progressive worsening of conditions of life for workers under classical capitalism. He leads readers to think in new ways about the continuing gap between the more developed and less developed nations of the contemporary world. Still, many readers may have questions about his own answers to the questions he so ably raises. Ultimately, Clark’s speculation that the escape from the Malthusian trap was due to the Darwinian selection of productive characteristics in individuals never becomes more than speculation. His statistics on fertility and survival rates of higher-income people are consistent with his argument that traits of industriousness and high productivity spread downward through the population, but the statistics are insufficient to do more than establish the argument’s theoretical plausibility. Clark suggests that the spread of characteristics may be genetic or cultural, but there is no evidence that work habits or attitudes toward production are genetic in nature. Geneticists have not identified a productivity gene, and there is no basis for concluding that biologically based personality traits cluster according to social class. The downward spread of cultural characteristics is similarly troublesome. Why would the downwardly mobile children of successful parents pass on cultural characteristics to their own children, rather than see their own children assimilate to the dominant lower-class cultures in which they live? In looking across nations, whether readers accept either a genetic or a cultural explanation, they face difficulties in accounting for the sudden rise of some nations and societies that were historically slow to develop modern economies. For example, why did Japan suddenly begin to create a highly efficient economy in the late nineteenth century? Why has China, virtually a symbol of economic backwardness until the middle of the twentieth century, begun to become one of the world’s most powerful economies in the early twenty-first century? Did the “little tigers” of Southeast Asia experience demographic change before their rapid advances in the 1980’s? Indeed, if the genetic version that Clark seems to prefer were true, then it is hard to see how the non-European nations that have become economically efficient and advanced recently could have done so with populations that did not experience the Darwinian pressures to produce middle-class genetic traits. Clark raises interesting questions about the rise of modern economies and he gives a provocative answer, but the support for the answer remains weak in spite of his wide erudition and ingenious use of data. Carl L. Bankston III

262

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Business Economics 42, no. 4 (October, 2007): 74-75. The Economist 384 (August 18, 2007): 74-75. Library Journal 132, no. 14 (September 1, 2007): 145. The Nation 285, no. 18 (December 3, 2007): 28-32. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 18 (November 22, 2007): 38-41. The New York Times Book Review 157 (December 9, 2007): 21.

263

FATHERS AND SONS The Autobiography of a Family Author: Alexander Waugh (1963) First published: 2004, in Great Britain Publisher: Nan A. Talese (New York). 472 pp. $27.50 Type of work: Literary biography Time: Mainly 1860-1966 Locale: The various manor houses and estates occupied by the Waughs for 150 years; Sherborne School and Lancing College, public schools, and Oxford; World War I sites; Ethiopia and Cyprus A family chronicle of five generations of male Waughs, at least three of whom became internationally acclaimed authors, and an account of (and an accounting for) their intersecting roles as fathers and sons in relationships that often caused mutual incomprehension and dismay Principal personages: Alexander Waugh (1963), author, opera critic, and son and grandson of Auberon and Evelyn, respectively Dr. Alexander Waugh (1840-1906), nicknamed “the Brute,” a surgeon and a paragon of Victorian masculinity Arthur Waugh (1866-1943), Alexander’s son, a literary biographer and managing director of Chapman & Hall, a London publishing house Alec Waugh (1898-1981), Arthur’s son, author of lesser books, and, significantly, the decided favorite of his father Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Arthur’s son, one of the finest comic novelists of the twentieth century, and a convert to Catholicism Auberon “Bron” Waugh (1939-2001), Evelyn’s son, novelist turned journalist who became one of England’s most notorious newspaper columnists, much loved and hated

Near the end of his mother’s life, Evelyn Waugh, “the funniest man of his generation,” expresses self-loathing for his inability to attend to her more charitably: “Damn, damn, damn. Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?” Compared to his treatment of his sons, Evelyn’s regard for his mother was benevolent. His most terrifying disapproval was reserved for Auberon (Bron), his eldest and the father of the author of this superb chronicle of probably England’s preeminent literary dynasty. He tormented Bron for real faults, particularly his tendency to stretch truth for partisan effect, a standard practice for the political columnist he became. Even when Bron was critically maimed in a freak accident during his army service in Cyprus and thought to be dying, Evelyn excused himself from accompanying his wife to their son’s bedside because they had guests coming and it would be rude to put

264

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

them off. Late in his life, when the once dapper Evelyn was rude even to guests and who, in his own words, had become “toothless, deaf, melancholic, shaky on my pins, unable to eat, and full of dope,” he was asked by his friend Nancy Mitford how it was possible for him to be so gratuitously cruel when he was supposed to be a believing Christian. “You have no idea how much nastier I could be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh told her. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” Rudeness lives a life of its own in Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. “British rudeness” is “their form of good manners,” Edmund Wilson notes in Europe Without Baedeker (1947). In England, “good breeding is something you exhibit by snubbing and scoring off people.” Wilson should have known. His well-known Anglophobia may have been fueled by Waugh at their London introduction just after the war. Knowing that Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946) had been censored in England, a disingenuous Waugh asked when Wilson’s English readers might expect to read his new book. Told of its fate, Evelyn cracked: “In cases like yours I advise publication in Cairo.” Wilson had earlier savaged Brideshead Revisited (1945). This anecdote does not appear in the American edition of Fathers and Sons, which took three years to reach the United States after it was published in the United Kingdom in 2004, but the wait was worth it. Alexander Waugh, son of Auberon and grandson of Evelyn, has inherited from his forebears the biting humor with which the clan of Waugh was endowed. His aim is to tell the story of five generations of the family beginning with his great-greatgrandfather Dr. Alexander Waugh, otherwise known as the Brute. He traces the complicated relations between the Brute’s son, Arthur, and Arthur’s two sons, Alec and Evelyn. For most readers, including this one, Evelyn merits superstar billing in his grandson’s dramatis personae. If he had written only A Handful of Dust (1934) and his trilogy of World War II, collectively titled Sword of Honour (1965), Evelyn Waugh would merit comparison with Jonathan Swift. Second billing might well be accorded Auberon, whom A. N. Wilson and V. S. Naipaul—not alone among serious writers— believe to have been greater in stature than his father. Third billing goes to Alec, whose novels, even Island in the Sun (1955) and the film version that made Alec a rich man, go unread today. As a son, Alec remained a model of devotion. As a father, he was not so much a failure as a washout: Failure implies effort, which he never made. Critic Christopher Hitchens was most taken by the first half of Fathers and Sons, “an extraordinary depiction of the true paterfamilias, Arthur Waugh, whose position in London publishing helped launch his two sons . . . on their careers.” Arthur’s largess—as publisher and parent—especially favored Alec, the firstborn (by five years). He made Alec famous at nineteen by publishing his Loom of Youth, a memoir of

Alexander Waugh is the grandson of Evelyn Waugh and the son of columnist Auberon Waugh and novelist Teresa Waugh. He has been the opera critic at the Mail on Sunday and The Evening Standard and has written several books on music, as well as Time (1999) and God (2002). He is at work on a book about the Wittgenstein family centering on Paul, the world-famous one-handed pianist.

Fathers and Sons / waugh

265

Alec’s public school, Sherborne, so scathing that Evelyn could not be admitted there and had to attend the inferior Lancing College. “Son of my soul,” Arthur called the teenage Alec, in one of the letters he sent him daily, “who has walked so many miles, his arm in mine, and poured out to me a heart that the rest of the world will never know, but which I treasure as a golden gift from God.” Arthur continued to lavish incense on his “dear boy” even when Alec had to leave school in disgrace after a homosexual dido: “The nails that pierce the Son’s hands pierce the Father’s also. . . . And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul.” Evelyn was palpably ruled off any such roost, but Arthur knew that his younger “was different, unlovable perhaps, not the sweet daughter he had always wanted, but a distant and brilliant boy. He did not like Evelyn’s manner; he detested his sharp tongue, his cynical wit and satirical humour. He felt more comfortable with the flirtatious, confidence-boosting Alec than he did with brittle, complex Evelyn.” The eyes of art see everywhere. They penetrate deeply in retribution for the slights that life doles out. Alexander Waugh points out how relentlessly Evelyn pursued his father in his novels, suggesting for example that Arthur’s love of Dickens and of reading aloud to his children was the inspiration for Mr. Todd, who, in A Handful of Dust, imprisons the hero, Tony Last, and forces him endlessly to read and reread aloud Dickens’s novels. In Decline and Fall (1928), his first and perhaps most Swiftian novel, there is a saturnine character named Prendergast, a former clergyman turned skeptic wondering not so much about God as why a Supreme Being would have made the world at all. The biographer finds in Waugh’s first fictional protagonist some of the characteristics he deplored in his father, including greed at the dinner table, sentimentality out of control, such as weeping when kindness is shown him, and a tendency to refer to male friends as “capital fellows.” The tidal wave of five Wavian generations (the aforementioned Hitchens merits gratitude for taking the lead of disciples of George Bernard Shaw who call themselves Shavians and coining “Wavian” as a useful cognate for all that is apropos of the writing Waughs), as presented in Evelyn’s grandson’s lively history, is a deluge of the complicated feelings that sons can have for their fathers—rivalry, fear, rage, the desire to win their fathers’ approval on one hand and to rebel against them on the other—that were acted out in the pages of their books. Their relationships with their fathers seem to have been memorialized in the traits of their characters and even in the loom of language. In the psychological warfare between Arthur and Evelyn, the father gave the son more than mere grist for the novelist’s mill. Alec, in an essay he wrote after his brother’s death, claimed that the rectitude of the father produced the malcontent tone of Evelyn’s novels. Evelyn, Alec insists, was a warm, gentle man who made himself seem cold for fear of being like his father. It is not for nothing, Alec contends, that Evelyn’s most sentimental book, Brideshead Revisited, was written a year after Arthur’s death: The warning example was now removed. Also removed was the danger of pleasing his father by seeming downhearted. Christopher Ricks puts the matter well. To get to the essence of Evelyn Waugh, one has to “triumph over . . . [his] rou-

266

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tine disgruntlement and sour grapeshot which he deployed to protect himself against the recognition that at heart and at soul he was not disgruntled but anguished.” It is difficult to say whether any of the biographies—the author lists eight in his bibliography—answer the question, what ailed Evelyn Waugh? Clearly, there was something horrendously wrong with a man who suffered as Waugh did through his self-hatred and his “fits of devastating gloom”; his lifelong deadly drinking; his violent irascibility and bullying; his madness that became the disturbing serenity of his last book, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). The last third of Fathers and Sons’s 472 pages is mostly devoted to Bron and Evelyn and includes a forty-page book-ending profile by the author exclusively on “my father.” These pages, often brutal, miss the leavening presence of Arthur Waugh. Auberon, as the senior sibling and hence the child held to the highest standard, seemed to Evelyn a prime disappointment—not without reason. By the time Auberon entered puberty, he was, by his own account, “something approaching a professional criminal.” He appears to have set fire to his preparatory school Downside, run by Benedictine monks, although Alexander thinks it was an accident. Bron’s disappointments in his father were legion, but one incident will suffice. During World War II, bananas were not available in England. When the fighting stopped and the first shipments resumed, the government decreed that every child should get a banana coupon exchangeable for a free sample at his local greengrocer. Teresa, Bron, and Meg had been apprised of the tastiness of this tropical fruit. “All three bananas were put on my father’s plate,” Bron recalled a half-century later, “and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. . . . From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.” Auberon also wrote that his father was sometimes capable of great kindness. However much tension ruled when they were living under the same roof, they wrote each other wonderful, entertaining, affectionate letters when they were apart, which was most of the time. People who knew Auberon only from his savage columns were always surprised, when they met him, to discover what a genial man he was. He also turns out to have been the best father of them all—huge fun, lover of games, singer of ribaldry with a glass of port balanced on his head, according to Bron’s autobiography, Will This Do?, in which he is loving of, and kind to, his mother Laura, who deplored the whole circus surrounding her husband’s fame. Although she came from an old and wealthy family, she hated ostentation, preferring her cows. Excessive letters can be a fatal indulgence for the biographer, but without the Waugh family’s private papers—not only the judiciously selected, often excerpted, personal letters that slapdash e-mail has rendered anachronistic, but entries from diaries and anecdotal memoirs—there could have been no book. For 450 pages, it is the seasoned voice of Alexander Waugh, one of the family, that combines thrust and restraint and conveys an intimacy that most literary biographies invariably miss. Richard Hauer Costa

Fathers and Sons / waugh

267

Review Sources The Boston Globe, June 10, 2007, p. E6. Commonweal 134, no. 20 (November 23, 2007): 30-31. Harper’s Magazine 315 (August, 2007): 89-94. Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2007, p. E1. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 11 (June 28, 2007): 20-21. The New York Times 156 (June 19, 2007): E1-E6. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 30. The New Yorker 83, no. 18 (July 2, 2007): 66-72.

268

FINN Author: Jon Clinch (1954) Publisher: Random House (New York). 286 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1840’s Locale: Towns along the Missouri and Illinois banks of the Mississippi River This parallel text to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) unfolds the mystery of the villainous Pap Finn, exploring the sources of his malice, his indigent life on the Mississippi, his relationship with his son Huck and the boy’s mother, and finally Finn’s violent demise Principal characters: Pap Finn, an alcoholic river rat and drunken wastrel Mary, his African American female companion and the mother of his son Huck, a child torn between the scavenging ways of his father and the tender civility of his mother Judge Finn, the oppressive and self-satisfied father of the protagonist Bliss, a blind moonshiner, Finn’s drinking companion and confidante The Widow Douglas, benefactor of Huck William Finn, the protagonist’s industrious and upstanding brother

In Mark Twain’s great Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Pap is less a fullfledged character than the antic personification of menace. As Twain’s Huck says, “He was just all mud,” but from the opening appearance of his cross-marked boot print to the runaway Jim’s concluding revelation of Pap’s demise in the floating murder house, this pariah casts a shadow that chills the reader almost as much as it threatens Huck. At the same time, the focal character almost seems impotent, too whiskey-weakened and self-defeating to exact his vengeance upon anyone who is not completely powerless. Still, Pap has always provided readers with alluring mysteries: “How did this man become such a lowdown cur? How did he come to his end in that house and amid those peculiar props (cards, black masks, straw hat, women’s lingerie)? Why did the apple Huck fall so far from the tree? And how could such a mangy river rat even manage to sire a son?” Jon Clinch’s premier novel, Finn, sets out to provide a credible and compelling answer to these questions, and it succeeds splendidly because its gritty lyricism is at once authentic and original and because its engagement with the dark forces shaping both the wily Pap and the country that spawned him extends and even deepens the ways Americans ponder both the scoundrel of a classic book and the threads of villainy woven so intricately into the national fabric. As tempting as it might be to content oneself with such an exercise, Clinch has

Finn / clinch

269

challenged himself further: He has created a world that is not quite Twain’s long-ago bor- A native of upstate New York, Jon derland and not quite a parallel one, but some- Clinch has been an illustrator, typeface how, miraculously and dangerously, the ele- designer, advertising executive, and mental one humankind always struggles to Pennsylvania high school teacher. His short stories have appeared in John understand. Sena Jeter Nasland’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), Gardner’s now defunct MSS. He lives Geraldine Brooks’s prize-winning March in Vermont. Finn is his first book. (2005), and Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People (2007), among others, have reinvigorated the project famously launched by the likes of John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (pr. 1966): reminding readers that fascinating stories may be waiting to be summoned from the penumbral subtexts of canonical works. They have also demonstrated that being the second witness on the scene does not obligate a writer to give complete fealty to his antecedents. Clinch has taken the bold step of reimagining the antebellum conflicts along the banks of the Mississippi River to explore the heart of darkness that haunted Twain and troubles the world still, but unlike Twain, he is more concerned with those who fall prey to darkness than to those who ultimately elude it. A deep darkness it is, for Finn is no mere entertainment for the faint of spirit. The title character is a resourceful felon, a racist, a shrewd brute, and an incorrigible addict, and his story is not recounted in euphemisms or evasions. Amid the lies, lethal violence, and drinking bouts, the raw cunning of the tale—reminiscent at times of Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic territories—may invite some to avert their gaze, for as Jim says in the earlier book, “It’s too gashly.” Nevertheless, the eloquence and vivid poetry of the telling will never make the courageous reader wish for a gentler touch. Clinch has conjured a case resembling possession, and he has the gumption to let its madness reign. In a nonlinear narrative that focuses on a central horrific act but encompasses a lifetime, the omniscient and eloquent narrator exposes Finn’s stealth, theft, pillage, gouging, arson, rape, and swilling of liquor as he strives to both escape and come to terms with the woman who enchants him and the father who spurns him. Along the way, Finn fishes, trades, scuffles, prevents a piracy, watches a steamboat explosion, assists a child molester, sulks in jail, taunts a distinguished free African American, and taints everything he touches. Slinking from crime to crime and woman to woman, always returning to the home he was cast out of and the river that heals him, Finn might almost be a member of William Faulkner’s rapacious Snopes clan, but his malice is more explicit, his meanderings less human and as full of twists and crosscurrents as the mighty river itself. Any great novel achieves the force of a dream and casts its spell through fascinating actions, indelible characters, spellbinding language, and knotty concepts. This is the kind of book Clinch has wrought, as is evident in the opening passage when a clutch of boys idling along the “stands of willow and thick brushy embankments” discover a floating body “pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud lan-

270

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

guid swarm of bluebottle flies.” Clinch is not inebriated by the potential for the Grand Guignol of means and opportunity such an image might invite, for he is instead in pursuit of the buried secrets even beyond motive, the secrets of self and community. He understands Finn’s compulsion toward the forbidden: “Concealed things of this order are to him like fish lurking just beneath the surface of a placid river pool, endlessly fascinating and deeply desirable and capable of being read only by one who knows how to attend to their signs.” The identity of the gruesome floater is just one of the questions that cry out for answers as the tale spirals toward lust and revenge, and Clinch skillfully balances recognition and suspense, enticing as he horrifies and seduces. As the narrative unfolds like “the river that in its infinite wisdom carries all things,” the ruthless scavenger who is neither stupid nor ignorant exhibits his snarl of bitterness and ambition. Running his trotlines, cadging drinks and favors, practicing random acts of terror—Finn is relentlessly selfish and frequently monstrous, but he has craft and, when necessary, an appalling charm. If his motives are seldom noble, his methods are impressive, and his self-loathing almost—almost—wins him sympathy now and then. Clinch is careful to reveal his less feral side: As he lies and blinks and breathes, he lets the music wash over him as if in a dream, as if he is making it up himself or at least imagining it, as if some secret door to the shared consciousness and tradition and history of the river and its men white and black and mingled has opened itself to him and this is what has emerged.

Tormented with paternity, Finn strives to rebel against his own racist and merciless father (who “drags a divisive trail of misery behind him as a mule drags a plow”) as obsessively as he turns about and abuses Huck. Beyond the tyrannies of family, the novel is also about the horrors of slavery, devious sexuality, and the sources of identity, but more than anything else it is about how one unredeemed man damages everyone else, from his own kin to the women unlucky enough to cross his path, on his inexorable journey to self-punishment and destruction. Perhaps the most compelling invention in the novel is not that Huck (named “Huckleberry” for his skin color) is a mixed-race child or that the protagonist has murdered the mother, but that Finn is obsessed with the woman whose very identity is abhorrent to him but whose generous nature compels Finn to think she is “an astonishment and a mystery and a strange miracle.” If the novel’s first big surprise concerns the identity of Finn’s “wife,” the second is a lie to his son that “rendered him [Huck] both cursed and cured,” the lie that he is white. Though that belief serves Huck in strange ways, one doubts that it is offered wholly in the spirit of blessing, as Finn is steadily revealed as “by nature crossgrained and rebellious.” In fact, one benefactor says of Finn, “The only way you’ll ever improve him . . . is with a pistol.” Although vibrantly suspenseful, Clinch’s narrative is always headed—through reconciliations and retaliations, feral couplings and unholy alliances—toward that gunshot man whom Huck and Jim in Twain’s book find on the river surrounded by calico, whiskey bottles, and walls covered with “the ignorantest kind of words

Finn / clinch

271

and pictures,” an autobiographical outsider art in which he scrawls his confession. His alternating needs to confess, to expiate, to escape, and to experience pleasure lead reflective readers to consider, “There but for fortune go I,” as Finn (whose name suggests humankind’s primitive origin) often seems an embodiment of everyone’s dark impulses. Even a great novel will have flaws, and readers determined to correlate the original story and this new version may wonder why the early events of Huck’s life as presented in Clinch’s book have so little impact on the boy’s crucial moral decisions in Twain’s novel. While explanations are imaginable, there is a point at which, because of the intensity of character and plot, Finn becomes its own autonomous narrative, related to but not dependent on its predecessor or the questionable candor of the original’s adolescent narrator. If there are occasional unsuccessful scenes and flourishes of excess amid the usually brilliant rendering of earthy vernacular and the amphibious life of a river scavenger, they are forgivable, as Clinch seeks new and riveting ways to chronicle one man’s inadequate resistance to depravity. In his New York Times Book Review assessment of the novel, the exemplary Twain scholar Ron Powers takes the book to task for replacing the garrulous original with an interiorizing and metaphor-gnashing demon. He further derides Clinch’s notions of nineteenth century diction and his debt to McCarthy, and no doubt this novel will continue to attract adversaries as well as partisans. In fact, while The Washington Post Book World named it one of the best five novels of 2007, The New York Times Book Review omitted Finn from its list of one hundred notable books from that year. While Powers’s ridicule of Clinch’s overuse of the phrase, especially on Finn’s tongue, “I know” is not without warrant, it is important not to overlook the epistemological inquiry and skepticism Clinch is coding into the book: What Finn does and does not know—his confusion of knowing, suspecting, wanting, ignoring, denying, and desperately trying to “unknow”—lies at the heart of his being. This novel will stimulate and satisfy many Twain devotees and readers little acquainted with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though the latter pleasure may be somewhat diminished, as Finn is a slantwise meridian meant to augment and question the axis of Huck’s frontier world. In fact, what the two books together present is a marvelous study of the house of story and its many mansions. Despite their explicit and implicit differences, their varying trajectories and promises, the two novels offer similar views of the repulsive and the redemptive in the human enterprise. In both Twain’s and Clinch’s versions, mercy is precious, freedom evasive, temptation rife, and “outlaws” in skiffs trying to avoid the “civilized” world might be either heroic boys or rapacious villains. Readers will find some kinship, whether welcome or not, with all. If Clinch’s richly imagined realm is less culturally symphonic and varied than Twain’s, less satiric and downright humorous, this is a matter more of scope and focus than of depth. Finn is, by itself, a challenging and rewarding exploration of the human heart suffering essential conflicts. Consequently, many readers may find themselves returning to Twain not for the final word but simply to hear once again another side of the tale that Clinch has now transformed into an exciting conversation. From the ominous shadow that was Pap Finn, Clinch has fashioned a cursed, twisted

272

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

man, and despite its harrowing attention to the local and particular, a beguiling tale of unforgettably rough beauty with universal implications and appeal. R. T. Smith

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 49. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 5-6. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 11, 2007): 24. Newsweek 149, no. 8 (February 19, 2007): 72. The Washington Post, February 18, 2007, p. BW03.

273

FIVE SKIES Author: Ron Carlson (1947) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 244 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 2001 Locale: Southern Idaho Carlson’s novel about three men with lives in disarray who work together not only in building their project but also in rebuilding their broken lives Principal characters: Darwin Gallegos, a former ranch foreman in his sixties who has spent the year as a widower Arthur Key, a construction engineer with experience in Hollywood, a man trying to leave his past behind in hard work Ronnie Panelli, a nineteen-year-old product of juvenile detention centers Curtis Diff, the owner of the Rio Difficulto ranch and former employer of Darwin Traci, Ronnie’s girlfriend, a girl from the small town of Mercy

After twenty-five years of mostly focusing on mastering the short-story genre (with the exception of his extraordinary 2003 young adult novel, The Speed of Light), Ron Carlson has returned to the novel form in Five Skies, a beautifully written, simply plotted novel about three men from three different backgrounds who have one thing in common: They are all emotionally wounded and in pain. They are brought together at a construction site far from town where they have nothing to do but work and no company to keep save that of each other. All the men are at the end of their collective ropes, and each of them is seeking to avoid both what he has left behind and whatever lies in wait in the future. The novel begins with the three awakening at their building site (and home, since they actually camp at the site for the duration of the job). The reader meets each of the three protagonists: Darwin Gallegos, the former foreman of the nearby Rio Difficulto ranch, is in charge of the job at the bequest of his former employer. In his mid-sixties, Darwin is the eldest of the three. Arthur Key is a large, strong man moving toward middle age, a successful engineer for Hollywood stunts requiring elaborate sets. The third and youngest is nineteen-year-old Ronnie Panelli, a runaway and former petty thief and juvenile detention inmate. In straightforward prose and careful, sparse, beautifully drawn descriptions, Carlson slowly paints in the portraits of these three, structuring the novel so that little about them is revealed outright. Each of the men is, in various ways, a mystery. In a sense, their lack of willingness to reveal themselves to each other—and to the reader—is indicative of the truth that all three are in flight from the realities of their lives.

274

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The construction and work site shared by the three men is on the edge of a huge canyon in southern Idaho. Just as Carlson initially avoids explaining the particular emotional chains being dragged behind the men, he also delays explaining what the construction site is. When Arthur Key first examines the plans, he is irritated by them, having wished for a more important project. “I was really hoping this would be a bridge,” he tells Darwin. “That would have been more than I could chew, but I was hoping.” The reader eventually realizes that the pro ject is for a gigantic motorcycle ramp and spectator bleachers. A reality show plans to have one of television wrestling’s star women jump a motorcycle over the canyon and land on the other side. Despite the work and care that the men put into the construction of the ramp, it is a doomed project. When Ronnie expresses optimism that the woman might leap the gap because of her small size, Arthur tells him, “Her bones are small, but she’ll break them all.” It takes the three men from May through the summer to build first their campsite, and then the bleachers, the road to the ramp, a fence along the canyon’s lip, and the ramp itself. Even as they work with tools and their hands to construct the site, they are, at the same time, rebuilding themselves and attempting to salvage their lives from whatever ruin has befallen them. All three prolong their pain with their isolation, and, although they are not building the bridge that Arthur Key hoped for, they are in a sense building bridges to each other. The novel makes much of tools, of the value of hard work, and of how the pride in a job well done can sustain a man. Slowly their stories emerge. Darwin is a recent widower who has lost his wife after a freak accident and who is unable to forgive God and the universe for robbing him of his spouse after forty years of marriage. He is unable to return to the ranch where he has spent his entire adult life; the pain is too much for him. Arthur has lost someone, too—a younger, less responsible, less cautious brother. As readers are told in small flashbacks throughout the narrative, Arthur had become very successful in Hollywood as a construction engineer. Careful, responsible, and reliable, he could build elaborate sets constructed to give life to sensational stunt sequences. Arthur would always turn down any job that was too dangerous or where he would not be allowed to fulfill his own ideas of precision and safety. Arthur’s guilt for his brother’s death is magnified because, as the reader discovers, he was having an affair with his brother Gary’s wife, Alicia, and was in fact with her when he was informed about Gary’s death. For the past two months before meeting Darwin, Arthur has moved from hotel to hotel, and from a succession of jobs, attempting to avoid the pain of what happened. Ronnie, the youngest of the three men, will in some ways find it easiest to leave his past behind. Caught stealing, he spent time in ju-

Ron Carlson is known primarily for his award-winning and widely anthologized short stories, collected in such books as News of the World (1987), Plan B for the Middle Class (1992), The Hotel Eden (1997), At the Jim Bridger (2002), and A Kind of Flying (2003). Carlson taught in the creative writing program at Arizona State University for almost twenty years. He directs the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine.

Five Skies / carlson

275

venile detention and, after being released, ran away from home, looking for day work in various places. As he learns skills from the older men and how to work hard, with focus and intensity, he slowly begins to become sure of himself and to become a man rather than an adolescent who has reached the age of maturity. Of the three of them, he is the first to reach out in order to embrace the future. He meets Traci in the closest town, Mercy, when he is hurt on the campsite and has to have medical care; before long, they fall in love. Many of the novel’s themes are implied through the use of names and setting. The name Darwin, of course, is synonymous with evolution (after naturalist Charles Darwin, 1809-1882). These are all men frozen in the evolution of their own lives. They have to decide whether they will wander on the brink, forever, or whether they will plunge ahead with their lives. Similarly, Charles Darwin’s theories upset the longstanding beliefs of certain religious faiths; Darwin Gallegos, too, has been shaken entirely free of faith by his loss. Both of Arthur Key’s names have meaning. On one hand, he falls in love with and sleeps with his brother’s wife, reminiscent of how Lancelot betrayed his best friend King Arthur with Guinevere. At the same time, Arthur’s guilt has trapped him, boxed him in; he has to find the “key” that will show him his way out, just as he needs to find the key to resuming his life. The name of the ranch, Rio Difficulto, a pun on ranch owner Curtis Diff’s name by Darwin’s wife Corrina, serves to explain what life is like. Literally, the ranch is named in Spanish “the difficult river.” Life is not easy, Carlson implies; nor is it supposed to be easy; nor did anyone ever promise it would be easy. If bad things happen, if people die, it is a fact of life; the only way to deal with such blows is to keep on. Also, one of the answers for the difficulties served up by life may be indicated by the name of the closest town to the men’s building site, Mercy. Mercy should be shown not only to other people—as each of the three characters does at times in the novel— but also to oneself. The first key to finding one’s way out of the labyrinths of pain and guilt of the past and to making one’s way toward the future is to extend mercy to oneself through self-forgiveness. For hardworking men of integrity and strength like Darwin and Arthur, it is often far easier to forgive others than themselves. In many ways, Arthur is the strongest of the three men. A large, powerful man, early in the novel he is able to lift the back end of their truck and allow them to make their way out of a snow-filled ditch. Also, he is by far the most knowledgeable about engineering, construction, architecture, and plans, and he redrafts Darwin’s plans for the ramp and bleachers to fit his own strict requirements for safety. He is the person to whom Darwin and Ronnie turn the most; Arthur—true to his namesake—is a natural leader. Nevertheless, the glue that truly unites the three men is Ronnie. It is through teaching and mentoring Ronnie that Arthur and Darwin are able to start loosening the vise grips around their hearts. They do not teach Ronnie about carpentry, welding, road grading, and hard work only; they also teach the fatherless young man about integrity, respect, discipline, and the importance of standing by one’s word. These are lessons Ronnie takes to heart; when, as an outsider, he is met with challenges by angry young rivals, he is ready to take them on without glorifying in violence or hunting trouble. In a way, the three

276

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

men form three generations of a family—grandfather patriarch, son, and grandson— and each learns from the other. Similarly, the precipice that forms the backdrop for the whole novel serves as a useful symbol for the conundrum that presents itself to the two older men. Darwin has lived his life as a foreman: always in charge, always able to gauge men, situations, and tasks, and to make sure that all possibilities are foreseen. Similarly, Arthur’s reputation as an engineer for Hollywood spectaculars is based on not only his precision and excellence but also his extreme caution and care. All the planning and care in the world, however, cannot provide for the unfair and perplexing twists that come one’s way: A brother may fall off a stage, or a wife may be struck a glancing blow in the head that causes brain damage and then death. This point is struck home late in the novel when, despite all their care, tragedy strikes again. It is through the wrenching catharsis of the last blow, however, that each man can let go of the grief that has isolated him from the world and return to life. Scott Yarbrough

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 73. Esquire 148, no. 1 (July, 2007): 32. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 4 (February 15, 2007): 137. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 17. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 10 (March 5, 2007): 36-37. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW10.

277

A FREE LIFE Author: Ha Jin (Xuefei Jin, 1956) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 661 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1989-1998 Locale: Boston; New York City; Atlanta; Beijing and Harbin, China The story of a Chinese American immigrant family whose father struggles between making ends meet and pursuing his dream of becoming a poet; the book is written with humor, honesty, and deep insight into the complex psyche of the protagonist Principal characters: Nan Wu, a Chinese American who ultimately rejects his restaurant business to become a poet Pingping Wu, the supportive wife of Nan, whose love for her husband is finally appreciated Taotao Wu, Nan and Pingping’s son, who comes to America at age six and often rebels against his father Dick Harrison, a poet and professor at Emory University, friend and mentor of Nan Beina Su, Nan’s first love, whose rejection hurts Nan for years to come Janet and Dave Mitchell, European American friends of the Wu family in Atlanta who adopt a Chinese orphan girl, Hailee Heidi Masefield, a rich widow in whose house in a Boston suburb the Wu family get a start on their life in America Danning Meng, a fellow exchange student of Nan who decides to return to China for his literary career Shubo and Niyan Gao, a Chinese couple who work for the Wu family and take over their restaurant when Nan changes his life

With A Free Life, celebrated and major award-winning Chinese American writer Ha Jin offers a new novel set primarily in the United States, as opposed to his previous works taking place in mainland China or Korea. A Free Life features an honest, perceptive look at a Chinese American immigrant family struggling to make it in their new country. The story begins when Nan and Pingping Wu are finally reunited with their sixyear-old son Taotao, who is permitted to leave the People’s Republic of China to join his parents in America. In the aftermath of the historic Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, when troops of the People’s Liberation Army violently crushed student dissents in Beijing, Nan Wu has decided not to return to his native country after his Ph.D. studies are finished at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Instead, he drops out of college and seeks to pursue the American Dream as an alternative to earning an

278

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

American degree and returning to a Communist Party-approved position in China. Throughout the novel, A Free Life raises the issue of what to do with one’s life. Nan Wu deliberately breaks with his past life that would have offered some stability, modest privileges, and material security at the price of political acquiescence and subjugation to an often capricious, arbitrary communist government that subjects its citizens to the petty harassment of its officials. Instead, Nan wants Ha Jin has published three books of to live in freedom, even though this means poetry, three volumes of short stories, initial social demotion and cultural alienation and five novels since 1990. He has won and years of financial hardship and struggle. numerous literary awards, including With the Wus, Jin creates a Chinese Amerthe PEN/Hemingway Award for Ocean ican immigrant family that needs to cope as of Words (1996), the Flannery much with survival in their new country of O’Connor Award for Under the Red Flag (1997), the National Book Award choice as with personal ghosts and hardships and the PEN/Faulkner Award for that threaten to destroy their fragile union. Waiting (1999), and the PEN/Faulkner When Nan decides to become editor of a Award for War Trash (2004). Since struggling Chinese-language literary maga2002, Jin has been professor of zine in New York City and takes on a restaucreative writing at Boston University. rant job to pay living expenses, Pingping and Taotao are left at the mercy of their landlord and Pingping’s employer, the rich Bostonian widow Heidi Masefield. Behind the facade of Heidi’s friendliness lurks the ugly reality that she considers her Chinese household help a foreign burden, despite all that they do for her and her two teenage children. Pingping realizes that, despite drinking wine with them at Thanksgiving, Heidi will never consider the Wus as true equals. She even unjustly accuses Taotao of stealing her son’s new calculator. Escape from this form of mental and economic bondage occurs when Nan buys a Chinese restaurant in a suburb of Atlanta. Suddenly, the Wus are on their own and ready to pursue the material aspects of the American Dream. Jin perceptively describes the various struggles they go through as they try to establish themselves in America, and he offers a clear view on what it takes to succeed in the free, capitalist economy. The deepest problems of the Wu family do not center on material issues. Nan is still in the thrall of his lost first love, Beina Su, who coldly rejected him back in Beijing. He cannot bring himself to fully love his wife Pingping, who has completely overcome her own callous betrayal by a young naval officer. With an emotional brutality mindful of many of Jin’s earlier works set in China, for example his short stories collected in Under the Red Flag (1997), Nan tells Pingping repeatedly that he does not really love her. In a similarly brutal vein, their son Taotao often talks back at and rejects his father when Nan openly scolds and even once strikes

A Free Life / jin

279

his son. Pingping serves as a mediator holding together the fragile family at moments of utter mental stress. As Nan gradually succeeds with his restaurant, the Golden Wok, in the middle of the 1992 recession and beyond, emotional issues begin to loom even larger. There is the question of his ambition to be a poet, not a businessman, and his unresolved issues with Pingping. Whenever his friend Dick Harrison, who has moved from New York City to Atlanta as an associate professor at Emory University, visits his restaurant, Nan is reminded of his unfulfilled literary aspirations. Dick is a good friend but is also caught in the web of academic vicissitudes. Through him, Nan learns that a poet’s life in America can be full of political and professional pitfalls. Eventually Nan hires the Chinese American couple Shubo and Niyan Gao, who serve as literary foils to the Wus. Like Nan, Shubo quits academia, but only after obtaining a Ph.D. in sociology and finding no academic job. The Gaos appear just one step behind the Wus, forsaking parenthood for money issues. A Free Life continues to chronicle the Wu family’s struggles in achieving the American Dream. Jin does so in a quiet, humane way that refuses the literary ploys of big drama and sudden catastrophes. The Wus are portrayed with a humane gentleness that focuses on their realistic struggles as new citizens in a foreign land that is not always free of racist prejudices and squabbles within the immigrant community. While European American characters like Janet and Dave Mitchell befriend the Wu family and, to a certain aspect, prove more genuine than many of their Chinese and Chinese American compatriots, there are some racist Caucasian home owners in the subdivision where the Wus purchase a home. Then there are conflicts with fellow Chinese who are torn between loyalties to a country in the grip of a communist government but still representing the ancestral home. Mei Hong is a Chinese American activist violently denouncing America and trying to solicit support for Chinese flood victims and the athletes of the Chinese Olympic team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Nan stands up to her anti-American diatribes at one of the few meetings of the Chinese diaspora he attends. Their enmity remains deep despite the help she raised when Hailee, the Mitchells’ adopted Chinese daughter, needs a bone marrow donor to treat her acute leukemia. Jin always portrays his characters in a multidimensional fashion, pointing at both their moral strengths and weaknesses. Severe personal tragedy strikes the Wus when Pingping’s new baby girl dies in her womb. Jin describes the event unflinchingly, and an international reader may wonder at the speed at which Pingping is dismissed from an American hospital on the afternoon after the dead fetus is removed from her womb, causing her severe loss of blood. The hospital machinery runs its course, and the Wu family is unable to obtain the aborted fetus to bury it in a Chinese jewelry chest in their garden, causing mental trauma to Pingping, who is denied this form of closure. Nan is finally able to go back to China when he wins a raffle drawing. This plot twist allows Jin to describe the changes in China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, adding yet another dimension to A Free Life. With Nan’s trip, the novel also explores an immigrant’s ambiguous feelings when visiting the native land.

280

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Back in Beijing, Nan meets his friend Danning Meng, who made the opposite choice of Nan. Returning from America and accommodating himself with the communist authorities, he has become a minor writer who counts as his friends privileged army writers. Danning is able to enjoy part of the late 1990’s economic boom of mainland China, dining at fancy restaurants and being chauffeured by a friend’s armyowned import car, whose driver runs red lights unmolested by the intimidated police. Reuniting with his parents proves traumatic for Nan, for he realizes that even his mother is out to gain materially from her son’s new prosperity in America. The passages of Nan’s return to China in A Free Life stand out for their bitterness in their portrayal of Nan’s home country. This is reminiscent of Jin’s earlier short stories and novels set in China that expose the pettiness of common people, their envy and selfishness. Meeting his long-lost first love Beina Su back in America, Nan is finally freed from this ghost of his past. Now he can recognize Beina for who she is—not his muse in the style of Petrarch’s Laura, for example, but a selfish, middle-aged woman out for herself. The novel achieves closure when Nan decides to give up his restaurant to devote himself to poetry. In his only major breakdown in A Free Life, Nan defiantly burns some money at the altar of the money god in his restaurant, throwing Pingping into a fit. Soon after, she suffers from a prolapsed disk, temporarily disabling her, and Nan sells the Golden Wok to Shubo and Niyan and takes a job as night watchman at a Korean-owned motel. This frees him to read and to write his poetry. Even as the Gaos disappoint Nan when they put their new business interests above friendship, refusing to hire Pingping, Nan finds fulfillment as a poet. It is through his poem “Belated Love” that he finally acknowledges his love for Pingping, who stood by him all the years. If a reader may object to her portrayal as a longsuffering and patient wife as a stereotype, the truth is that Jin drew her character from real people. Stylistically, A Free Life closes with homage to Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957), a book the author and his character Nan admire very much. As in the Russian novel, A Free Life ends with the poems supposedly written by Nan that capture his life in America in a nutshell. Another successful literary device employed by Jin is to render all the Chinese spoken by characters in italics and their often rudimentary English in regular roman type. This technique works beautifully to show the difference in their ability to express themselves in the two languages, a common problem for recent immigrants. Overall, A Free Life offers a fascinating, heartfelt account of a Chinese American family’s struggle to make it in America. This unique novel touches on some common issues, such as the question of family, love, sacrifice, and the decision to adopt a new home country. Even though Jin dedicated his novel to his wife, Lisha, and his son, Wen, both of whom “lived this book,” A Free Life is by no means an autobiography or a memoir. Jin’s life in America has differed considerably from that of Nan Wu. Ironically, for example, the author never worked in the restaurant business at a position higher than that of a waiter and even was demoted to busboy. Jin also finished his

A Free Life / jin

281

Ph.D. in English literature and found academic employment in 1993, one year after his graduation. In sum, the internal and external struggles of the Wu family ring true. While the Wus are based on slivers of stories collected from many contemporary Chinese American immigrant lives, they are also given their own specific and genuine character and life circumstances. A Free Life is a captivating book that can hold its readers’ attention throughout. With its quiet, loving portrayal of personal and family struggle, it is one of Ha Jin’s finest achievements by 2007. R. C. Lutz

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 5 (December, 2007): 114. Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 9. Elle 23, no. 3 (November, 2007): 250. Entertainment Weekly, no. 982 (November 2, 2007): 66. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 16 (August 15, 2007): 815. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 67. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 29 (July 23, 2007): 40.

282

THE FRIENDSHIP Wordsworth and Coleridge Author: Adam Sisman Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 480 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1792-1834 Locale: France, England, and Germany The biographer maintains neutrality in describing the trajectory of a famous literary alliance from ardent friendship and shared ambition to eventual estrangement Principal personages: William Wordsworth (1770-1850), major English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), major English Romantic poet

The brief, passionate friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge led to an enormously fruitful literary collaboration. Their Lyrical Ballads (1798) was not merely a work of original poetry; its appearance launched the English Romantic movement in literature. That their paths later diverged was perhaps inevitable, as was the pain of this rupture. Although many biographers have chosen sides, Adam Sisman describes his book as “an attempt to escape from this biographical impasse, by concentrating on the friendship itself, at its most intense when both men were young and full of hope.” Their history offers abundant material for exploration. Sisman draws extensively on letters from Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as letters and journal entries from Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, for detail about the life of their era and the strong attachment between the two poets. Rounding out the book are selected paintings, drawings, and photographs, along with an appendix detailing Coleridge’s plan for the completion of Wordsworth’s The Recluse, and extensive notes. Occasionally, when primary sources of fact can take him no further, Sisman offers intelligently imagined scenarios, their proposed outcomes made credible by his deep familiarity with the poets and their milieu. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Strangers,” about the period before the poets met, emphasizes the many parallels in their lives and thinking. Part 2, “Friends,” describes the most fertile period of their friendship, when Coleridge supported and collaborated with Wordsworth on many of his major poems. Part 3, “Acquaintances,” tells of their estrangement and periodic attempts at reconciliation. While detailing the separate backgrounds of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Part 1 also sets out the political and cultural milieu in which they came together. Some reviewers have complained that Sisman takes too long—176 pages—to get to the poets’ first meeting. Indeed, Sisman could have summarized the often-told story of the French

The Friendship / sisman

283

Revolution, and the English reaction to it, but two factors make Sisman’s treatment worth Adam Sisman, a former publisher, has reading: his engaging, conversational style authored several books, including A. J. and his revelation of the difference between P. Taylor: A Biography (1994), which seeming and being. For example, he shows was short-listed for several literary the similarities between two poets who seem awards, and Boswell’s Presumptuous to be temperamental and intellectual oppo- Task (2000), about the writing of The sites. Both poets had lost their fathers during Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). Boswell’s Presumptuous Task was boyhood, and their family fortunes had sufnamed book of the year by several fered as a result. Both had attended Cambridge leading reviewers and short-listed for University, showing great promise but failing many awards. In 2002, it received the to live up to it. Both were political radicals National Book Critics Circle Award for and were published poets who believed that biography. verse could have a positive influence on their national culture. Sisman describes qualities one or the other poet was not perceived as having, as when Coleridge skillfully negotiated publication of Lyrical Ballads although “the notion of Coleridge as a man of business might have seemed comical to those who knew him.” Wordsworth had direct experience of revolutionary France, whereas Coleridge read about it in pamphlets while attending Cambridge University. Wordsworth had left Cambridge temporarily for a three-month, one-thousand-mile walking tour (recounted in the autobiographical poem The Prelude, 1850) of France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, just as the French Revolution had begun. Wordsworth became sympathetic, willing to die for the cause. He had reason to resent wealthy and powerful people such as those overthrown by the Revolution. His late father had been in business with the earl of Lonsdale and had expended several thousand pounds from his own funds on his employer’s behalf. After the father’s death, the earl refused to honor the loan, leaving William and his siblings impoverished. Revolutionary France was a dangerous place for English people. Returning to London, Wordsworth met Joseph Johnson, a bookseller-publisher and radical dissenter, who had published Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791-1792). In January, 1793, Johnson became Wordsworth’s first publisher, bringing out Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in two volumes. They did not review or sell well, probably because of their timing: Descriptive Sketches ends with praise for the new French Republic, which, three days after publication, had declared war on Britain. Though Wordsworth loved his native Britain, he was disgusted by his country’s reactionary conduct toward the French Republic, which he sincerely believed would bring “a fairer order of things.” Meanwhile, Coleridge, at the university, read his pamphlets and other radical writings, including those of the poet Robert Southey. Just twenty at the time, Coleridge was considered a prodigy but began to show the traits that would mark his adult life. During a severe illness, he was regularly dosed with laudanum, which relieved his pain but fogged his mind. Thereafter, he would turn to opium when feeling ill or pressured. Moreover, lacking skill in money matters despite an annual income of almost

284

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

100 pounds, he continually ran up debts he could not repay. In desperation, he enlisted in the army’s Fifteenth Light Dragoons, later to be discharged on grounds of insanity. In 1795, he married Sara Fricker, while his friend Southey married Sara’s sister, Edith. To Sara, Coleridge addressed “The Eolian Harp,” the first of his “conversation poems.” In these blank-verse poems, the contemplation of nature helps the poet resolve an emotional or psychological issue. By 1795, the already influential Coleridge had read and admired Wordsworth’s poetry and considered him “unrivaled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring.” However—as related in Part 2, “Friends”—the two did not meet until August or September of that year. Sisman relates how the financially desperate Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy received an offer to live rent-free at Racedown, Dorset. It was while making the arrangements in Bristol that he met Coleridge in person. The specific circumstances may never be known; Sisman reports three contradictory accounts, each posing some factual difficulties. Nevertheless, clearly each poet made an immediate and profound impression on the other. In March of 1796, Wordsworth sent his group of poems “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” to Coleridge’s publisher, Joseph Cottle, requesting that Coleridge inspect it and comment. Coleridge judged it very fine and suggested printing five hundred copies. Cottle did not publish it, and the poems remained in manuscript for almost two centuries, though the poem “Guilt and Sorrow,” adapted from the manuscript, was published in 1842. Despite Coleridge’s praise, Wordsworth began to question the value of his work. Though he felt destined to be a great poet, his poems were unread. Still, not surrendering to despair, Wordsworth began writing a play, The Borderers. In late 1796, his poem “Address to the Ocean” appeared in print, acknowledging that the first line was borrowed from Coleridge. The men quoted from each other’s verse as they grew closer. With respect to artistic morale, their positions were soon reversed. Out of funds, Coleridge moved his family into a tiny, damp, and gloomy but inexpensive building in Nether Stowey. Under pressure and suffering from stress, he fell into a deep depression. Wordsworth, in contrast, was full of energy and working in earnest. On his way home from a trip to Bristol, he had what is believed to be his second encounter with Coleridge. In June, his spirits revived, Coleridge visited Wordsworth at Racedown, bounding through a cornfield to reach the house. This image of restless energy would long remain a happy memory for Dorothy. She gives her first impression of Coleridge: “A wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. . . . His eye is large and full . . . it speaks every emotion of his animated mind.” Coleridge saw Dorothy as the sister he always wanted. At once, the two poets began discussing their work and reading to each other, offering constructive criticism and encouragement. In some ways, each provided the other with an emotional balm, the long-isolated Wordsworth welcoming Coleridge’s enthusiasm, the ebullient Coleridge admiring Wordsworth’s ambition and strength of purpose. Most important, they were keen for each other’s writings. Soon William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden, closer to Coleridge’s family. For the next year, Coleridge and Wordsworth were inseparable; both talents grew under

The Friendship / sisman

285

mutual encouragement. Together—frequently joined by Dorothy—they sought new poetic forms to express their ideas. Sisman reports that almost anything either man wrote during this time was composed under the other’s critical eye. They took turns contributing hundreds of lines to “The Three Graves” before abandoning that poem. They conceived their most famous collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, as a volume by both poets, published anonymously as if by a single poet. They even began The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (wr. 1797-1799) as a joint effort, but here their styles would not mesh, and Wordsworth withdrew, leaving Coleridge as the sole author. Years later, Coleridge would conclude that it was not feasible “for a mind so eminently original to compose another man’s thoughts and fancies”—an observation that could apply equally well to himself or Wordsworth. When Lyrical Ballads was poorly received, Wordsworth blamed the inclusion of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner because it was such a strange poem. In 1800, a new edition of Lyrical Ballads was published under Wordsworth’s name alone. Though many biographers suppose that Coleridge became increasingly deferential toward Wordsworth, Sisman points out that Coleridge—himself ready to abandon poetry after the failure of Christabel (wr. 1797-1800)—began to see himself as the “director” of Wordsworth’s poetic development. As Sisman writes, “Coleridge was struggling to articulate a philosophy that was to inspire much of Wordsworth’s work.” Coleridge came under the influence of Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy he summed up as follows: “each thing has a life of its own, and we are all one life.” Sisman notes, “This concept formed a persistent part of Coleridge’s thinking, despite many changes in the decades that followed.” Coleridge envisioned a long philosophical poem, to be called The Recluse, expounding this concept, and “surely Wordsworth was the man to write this masterwork? . . . Under Coleridge’s guidance, there was no limit to what Wordsworth might achieve. Coleridge would be the brains, Wordsworth would be the hands.” Sisman describes Wordsworth as quite willing to accept his friend’s poetic guidance. Of The Recluse, two parts—The Prelude and The Excursion (1814)—were actually produced by Wordsworth. Thus, in Part 2, Sisman dispels many common notions: that Coleridge assumed he was inferior to Wordsworth, that his ideas were always ephemeral, that Wordsworth was entirely self-willed, and that Wordsworth had the better head for business. Sisman does not subscribe to the view of Wordsworth as a self-serving careerist who suppressed and exploited Coleridge, as is charged, for example, in the vituperative film Pandaemonium (2000). It is difficult to say how or why such close friends and allies drifted apart. In Part 3 of the book, Sisman cites many factors but is unable to identify any one of them as decisive. Certainly, there was Coleridge’s addiction to opium and alcohol. Little was known in the nineteenth century about these substances as agents of paranoia and suspicion, and they could have fueled Coleridge’s eventual notion that his friend was slighting him. Belatedly, Coleridge began to wonder if opium itself was not the cause of his afflictions. Another factor in the rift was Coleridge’s infatuation with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s wife, Mary. Of his own unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker,

286

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Coleridge said, “If any woman wanted an exact and copious Recipe, How to make a Husband completely miserable, I could furnish her with one.” Coleridge’s headlong pursuit of Sara Hutchinson was deemed an affront to his wife and a violation of social propriety. The Wordsworths could not countenance it; indeed, some of Coleridge’s own relatives were severely critical of him on this point. On the other side, Coleridge was extremely hurt when a mutual friend repeated to him Wordsworth’s confidential remark that Coleridge was “a rotten drunkard,” and, in later years, by what he perceived as Wordsworth’s remote coldness on the rare occasions when the two met. On both sides there was pain when one seemed to be damning the other’s later work with faint praise. Ultimately, Sisman’s book seems a commentary on friendship itself: Was it Wordsworth’s rebuffs and not opium that doomed Coleridge? Did Coleridge’s unrealistic expectations of his friend make Wordsworth a disappointed man? The value of this book lies in its impartiality. Sisman does not side with either party, but simply reports the available facts—a record of perceived slights, misinterpretations, envy and suspicion, and too many cold silences. Touchingly, he ends the book with the two poets’ final tributes to each other: Wordsworth said after Coleridge’s death, “his mind has been habitually present with me,” and in Christabel Coleridge acknowledged the indestructible strength of the friendship with these lines: “But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,/ Shall wholly do away, I ween,/ The marks of that which once had been.” Thomas Rankin

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 17. The Economist 380 (September 30, 2006): 94-95. Harper’s Magazine 314 (June, 2007): 88-94. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 73. New Criterion 25, no. 8 (April, 2007): 88-90. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 48.

287

GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD A Tale of Adventure Author: Michael Chabon (1963) Publisher: Del Ray/Ballantine Books (New York). Illustrated. 204 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 950 c.e. Locale: The Kingdom of Arran and Khazaria Two travelers through the Caucasus Mountains attempt to return the throne of the Khazar Empire to its rightful heir Principal characters: Zelikman, a physician and confidence man Amram, his traveling companion, a soldier of fortune Filaq, claimant to the throne of the Khazars Buljan, a warlord who murders Filaq’s father Hanukkah, an assassin

After beginning his career with two impressive literary novels, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) and Wonder Boys (1995), Michael Chabon grew restless and began exploring various corners of popular culture. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) won a Pulitzer Prize for its look at two young men who create a popular comic book about a superhero battling World War II enemies. An admirer of Philip Pullman, Chabon followed this huge success with Summerland (2002), a children’s fantasy built around the mythical qualities of baseball. Next came The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004), in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes solves aWorld War II mystery involving a missing parrot against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Then, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon paid homage to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald with an intricate tale of two police detectives in an imaginary Jewish enclave in Alaska. Chabon’s growing interest in pulp literature can also be seen in his editing McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003); contributing to Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist (2004), a comic book based on the superhero of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; and cowriting the screen story for Spider-Man 2 (2004). This background is necessary for appreciating what Chabon is trying to accomplish in Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure, a tribute to escapist literature as well as a consideration of Jewish culture of the tenth century. In the tradition of writers of the past, Chabon first published Gentlemen of the Road as a fifteen-part serial in The New York Times Magazine, and his adventure yarn recalls the works of Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as more recent works such as Fritz Leiber’s “sword and sorcery” series that began with

288

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Two Sought Adventure: Exploits of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser (1957). It also resembles the fiction once seen in such pulp magazines as Argosy (1882-1978), though written in a more literary style, with echoes of Voltaire’s Candide (1759). An elephant is named Cunegunde in honor of the heroine of Candide. Around 950 c.e., Chabon’s protagonists travel from the Kingdom of Arran north to Khazaria, “the fabled kingdom of wild redhaired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea.” (This region is now Ukraine.) A native of Washington, D.C., Michael Though Zelikman, a scarecrow-thin Frankish Chabon has a B.A. from the University Jew, is a physician, he is handy with the thin of Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. from the sword he calls Lancet, despite the Frankish University of California, Irvine. In law forbidding Jews to bear arms, even in addition to his novels, he has published self-defense. Zelikman is descended from a two collections of short stories: A Model World, and Other Stories (1991) family of rabbis and physicians, but circumand Werewolves in Their Youth stances have led him to become a hired killer. (1999). He is married to the novelist His longtime friend Amram, a huge AbysAyelet Waldman. sinian Jew, carries a Viking battle-ax called Mother-Defiler and claims to be descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Eager to steal anything but women, Amram is a student “of men’s corruptions,” while his cynical comrade’s only principle is to kill only one man at a time. The two are content to travel about, practicing a little medicine and pulling confidence tricks. The novel opens with their staging a bloody sword fight and then absconding with the wagers placed by unwary suckers. Things begin to change when they meet Filaq, whose family has recently lost the throne of the Khazars, the Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism and established an empire in the Caucasus Mountains, to the warlord Buljan. Whoever controls this region holds the balance of power in the struggles between the Byzantine Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the Caliphate of Baghdad, the Rus (medieval Russians), and Northern plunderers, among others. Chabon has obviously done considerable research into early medieval history, with his portrait of Khazaria seeming half factual and half imaginary. He cannot resist drawing parallels with the conflict in Iraq: “In Baghdad during the Days of Awe this year, the Muhammadans burned Jewish prayer houses and put to the sword any who would not profess Islam.” Having Jews and Muslims trying to work together to restore a fallen kingdom suggests the way the world should be. Amram and Zelikman care little about such struggles but find themselves, after being robbed, helping Filaq’s insurgency nevertheless, backed by an army of Arsiyah mercenaries. Chabon takes the trio from one cliff-hanging adventure to another in the manner of the film serials of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Coincidences abound; the three

Gentlemen of the Road / chabon

289

protagonists, as the genre dictates, are constantly separated only to be unexpectedly reunited; and a few characters are not what they seem to be. Chabon also intends a tribute to the road novel, with his heroes encountering all manner of interesting folk on their journey, including a family of Radanite traders who do not see war as an obstacle to business as usual. As with The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon is not merely writing imitations of such writers as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (the novel is dedicated to Michael Moorcock, author of “sword and sorcery” books in the Burroughs manner), nor is he parodying the buddy films of the late twentieth century. While many writers might treat such an outdated, disparaged genre as the adventure yarn with ironic, postmodern disdain, Chabon is more affectionate. His characters may not be as fully realized as those in his other works, but they are believably individualistic, full of personality quirks that bring them to life. Zelikman likes to contemplate his circumstances by smoking a pipe of hemp, in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, trying to forget his tortured past, especially the murder of his mother and sister back in Regensburg. He attempts to keep emotionally remote from everything yet harbors great affection for his wizard’s hat and his beloved horse, Hillel, possessor of “a demonic intelligence that lay somewhere between perversity and fire.” Amram is also scarred by a family tragedy: the disappearance of his daughter. Chabon has considerable fun playing with literary conventions, especially the relationship between his black and white heroes. Having a black or Native American sidekick has been a staple of American fiction since Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841), though Chabon alters this tradition by making his heroes of equal stature. In his highly influential Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Leslie Fiedler first called attention to the homoerotic implications of such relationships, especially in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Amram and Zelikman bicker like an old married couple and share an unusual closeness: “As far as Amram knew, his partner had never lain with a woman or a man, and if he had in hard times, on cold nights, shared a companionable bed with Amram, it was a mark of how much the state of their relations resembled those between his partner and Hillel.” Each of the fifteen chapters features a black-and-white illustration by Garry Gianni reminiscent of the N. C. Wyeth illustrations for books by Cooper and Stevenson, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s medieval adventure The White Company (1891) and Gianni’s own style in the Prince Valiant comic strip. Gianni’s drawings perfectly capture the characters and scenes described by Chabon and heighten the nostalgia for the adventure genre. Chabon’s use of dry humor includes a minor, decidedly unfestive character, Hanukkah, and Zelikman’s naming his horse for the famous Jewish religious leader Hillel. There is also a mynah who speaks “excellent Greek,” and heroic deeds are performed by Hillel and an elephant. Chabon’s whimsical approach can be seen in this description of an elephant: “A steady rattle issued from the mysterious machinery of

290

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

its interior like wind in the branches of a locust tree, over a deeper rumbling, an unmistakable continuo of pleasure as the stripling rubbed at the piebald patch between its phlegmatic little eyes, gummed with a milky effluence of tears.” Most seriously, Gentlemen of the Road is a meditation on the quest for Jewish identity. Of Amram, Chabon writes, “There was nowhere new for him to wander, no corner where he had not sought the shadow of his home and family.” Chabon’s Jews survive only through cunning, stealth, and violence. Gentlemen of the Road received mostly glowing reviews, with Alastair Sooke in London’s Sunday Telegraph calling it “a riotous, raucous jeu d’esprit. It’s been a while since I had such fun reading a book.” As a throwback to the adventure yarns of the past, however, it is less consistently entertaining than the best of George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. In addition to complaints that the action was not as dramatic as might be expected, some reviewers described Gentlemen of the Road as disjointed because the chapters do not flow smoothly from one to the next, and others considered it more a literary exercise than a fully realized novel. The novel’s self-consciously mannered prose is the main element elevating the novel above being an adventure pastiche. The Boston Globe’s Steve Almond compared it to “Kipling on steroids.” Chabon writes in a mock-epic style full of arcane words and clauses within clauses: All that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.

In an afterword, Chabon describes how he was inspired to write what he imagined calling Jews with Swords, as a break from writing about domestic issues. He argues that because Jews seem “less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms,” it is all the more appropriate to hand his fictional Jews swords and let them rip. Although some reviewers interpreted this coda as a bit defensive, it is a charming way for Chabon to round off his tale. At its heart, Gentlemen of the Road is a celebration of the transforming magic of literature, as when Chabon, in one of the book’s loveliest passages, describes a character’s memory of “the giant illuminated Ibn Khordadbeh that had so enchanted her as a child, with its maps and preposterous anatomies and flat-foot descriptions of miracles and wonders, page after page of cities to visit and peoples to live among and selves to invent.” One of Chabon’s goals may be to demonstrate that literature need not conform to the standards of the day, especially the naturalism so dominant in the American fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chabon’s books indicate his desire to restore a sense of fun to the American novel. Michael Adams

Gentlemen of the Road / chabon

291

Review Sources The Boston Globe, November 17, 2007, p. C1. The Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 2007, p. 13. Entertainment Weekly, no. 982 (November 2, 2007): 68. The Guardian, November 3, 2007, p. 16. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 17 (September 1, 2007): 877. Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2007, p. E1. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 28, 2007): 15. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 35 (September 3, 2007): 43. Time 170 (November 5, 2007): 74. USA Today, November 21, 2007, p. B11.

292

GOD IS NOT GREAT How Religion Poisons Everything Author: Christopher Hitchens (1949) Publisher: Twelve (New York). 361 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Religion A passionate antitheist argues that religion not only outrages reason and common sense but also poses a grave threat to society The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge, says the Old Testament book of Proverbs, and the fool despises wisdom and instruction. According to Christopher Hitchens, Solomon got things wrong side round. More often than not, it has been the god-fearers who have stifled knowledge and persecuted those seeking wisdom and instruction. In God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he attempts to set the record straight. A British-born author and journalist, recently naturalized as a U.S. citizen, Hitchens made his name in America as a fiercely independent and controversial columnist for the politically left newspaper The Nation. His biweekly column, “Minority Report,” ran from 1982 until 2002, when he publicly and acrimoniously split with the newspaper in part because of his support for the then-forthcoming invasion of Iraq and his growing concern with what he called Islamic fascism and theocratic nihilism. Hitchens is both revered and reviled as a polemicist whose command of language and breadth of literary and historical knowledge make him a formidable opponent. In the past, he has leveled withering polemics at respected and even revered icons. He criticized the health practices and political liaisons of Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995). He argued that Henry Kissinger should be charged with war crimes for past foreign policy decisions in The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001). He has also written a book-length condemnation of the alleged treacheries of former president Bill Clinton and shorter critical pieces on Ronald Reagan and Princess Diana. Hitchens’s basic case against religion in God Is Not Great is largely conventional. First, religion is a human construct. “It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).” Its teachings and sacred texts reveal this human origin. “Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.” While religion’s claims about the origins and purpose of life might have inspired conviction in the past, they can no longer contend with what we know about the world now. “Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think . . . that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”

God Is Not Great / hitchens

293

While religion held sway over science and reason by virtue of the auto-da-fé and a spec- A prolific journalist, essayist, and tacular assortment of other tools with which author, Christopher Hitchens publishes to correct the misguided, no effective oppo- regularly in magazines and newspapers sition could be made to its authority. Not in the United States, where in 2007 he for many centuries were the silent cadres of officially became a citizen, and in the unbelievers able to make their case for secu- United Kingdom. His recent book larism. “The decay and collapse and discredit publications include The Portable Atheist (2007, as editor), Thomas of god-worship does not begin at any draPaine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography matic moment. . . . Rather the end of god-wor- (2006), Thomas Jefferson: Author of ship discloses itself at the moment, which is America (2005), and Why Orwell somewhat more gradually revealed, when it Matters (2002). becomes optional, or only one among many possible beliefs.” For Hitchens, that moment began with the Enlightenment—a lesson to be remembered, and the note on which his case against religion ends. In his opening chapter, Hitchens provides a brief summary of the origins of his secularism. As a nine-year-old grade school student, Hitchens listened indignantly as one of his teachers, in a moment of religious fervor, confused photosynthesis with chromotherapy by suggesting that God had made the Earth’s vegetation green because of that color’s calming effect on human eyes. This epiphany of unbelief soon blossomed into a more sophisticated opposition toward the claims of religion, which he soon determined faced four irreducible objections: They misrepresent the origins of humanity and the cosmos, they are servile and solipsistic, they are the cause and result of dangerous sexual repression, and they rely ultimately on wishthinking. The various scriptures of religion come under fire in separate chapters on the Old and New Testaments and on the Qur$3n. Again, Hitchens covers mostly familiar ground. He argues that by any reasonable accounting, these scriptures must have been the work of human beings rather than divine inspiration. They contain a multitude of inconsistencies and contradictions, and they show little agreement with other faiths, requiring us to determine that at least some of them must be false. “A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.” Hitchens’s knowledge of the Bible is well above average for an atheist—even one who identifies himself as a Protestant atheist of the King James Version and the Cranmer prayer book. He questions how the people of Moses could have needed explicit prohibitions against murder, adultery, theft, and perjury prior to receiving the Ten Commandments. He recoils from the moral subversion of God’s command to Abraham first to sacrifice his son Isaac and then to stay his hand. Given what he calls the “horrors and cruelties and madnesses of the Old Testament,” Hitchens asks the question: “Who—except for an ancient priest seeking to exert power by the tried and

294

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tested means of fear—could possibly wish that this hopelessly knotted skein of fable had any veracity?” The New Testament fares no better. “The contradictions and illiteracies . . . have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of ‘metaphor’ and ‘a Christ of faith.’” While he shows considerable contempt for the much-beloved Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, Hitchens adopts a version of Lewis’s argument about Jesus (he was either a lunatic, a demon, or God) to scripture. “Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that.” Unlike the other two scriptures from which it shares common ancestry, the Qur$3n has remained largely unscrutinized by scholars. “No serious attempt has been made to catalog the discrepancies between its various editions and manuscripts, and even the most tentative efforts to do so have been met with almost Inquisitional rage.” When it has been examined, it reveals itself to be “not much more than a rather obvious and illarranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.” God Is Not Great offers equal measures of antireligious polemic and secularist apology. While the bulk of his case against religion focuses particularly on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Hitchens gives ample space to other faiths such as Mormonism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and a few unusual faiths (the cargo cult, for one) of which many people will never have heard. What emerges, however, is less a proof of the poison of all religion than a savage and compelling dismantling of fundamentalist religion in all its many guises. Hitchens is a literalist in that he believes much more strongly than most religious people do that adherents follow the letter of their respective laws, or at least understand the spirit of them. The jihadist and the country parson may vary widely in the methods of their religious practice, but they work from similar user manuals. Hitchens makes this point more explicitly in The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007), which was published a few months after God Is Not Great and comprises selections from centuries of secularist writers. In his introduction, he likens fanatical religious violence to the plague in Albert Camus’s novel of the same name, whose bacillus “never dies or disappears for good,” but rather “can lie dormant for years and years.” Hitchens concludes: “No, the fact is that the bacilli are always lurking in the old texts and are latent in the theory and practice of religion.” It is the issue of fundamentalism to which Hitchens invariably returns when arguing the poisonous nature of religion. God Is Not Great is largely a study of contrasts between the values of secularism and those of religion. In the book’s first chapter—a functional blueprint for all the arguments that follow—Hitchens outlines the essential aspects of secularism. Atheism is neither a religion nor a belief requiring faith. It relies on science and reason as a matter of necessity and not of sufficiency. It shuns dogmatism and embraces free inquiry and disagreement. Atheism does not eliminate wonder, mystery, or awe in the face of a complex universe, and it does not preclude morality, particularly because

God Is Not Great / hitchens

295

“the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.” Religion, then, cannot claim scientific or moral superiority to atheism. It cannot even claim equivalence. Hitchens ends this chapter on an ominous note. “As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won attainments that I have touched upon.” The battle with religion, for Hitchens, is a battle for civilization, and this battle is intensely personal. In 1989, fellow author and friend Salman Rushdie was the object of a fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran that called for his execution and offered a bounty to anyone who succeeded in killing him. Hitchens puts it this way. “To be more precise, the theocratic head of a foreign state—the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran—publicly offered money, in his own name, to suborn the murder of a novelist who was a citizen of another country.” Rushdie’s crime was to publish a novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), which the ayatollah, and much of the Muslim world, deemed offensive to Islam and insulting to Muhammad. While Rushdie remained unharmed, though under constant protection, his Japanese translator was stabbed to death and several other translators were savagely assaulted. The fatwa remains in effect. Lest anyone should think the only enemies of civilization are Muslim, Hitchens notes that the attacks on September 11, 2001, occurred at a time when America was struggling with its own theocratic challenges. “At the time, the United States had an attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had ‘no king but Jesus.’ . . . It had a president who wanted to hand over the care of the poor to ‘faithbased’ institutions. Might this not be a moment where the light of reason, and the defense of a society that separated church and state and valued free expression and free inquiry, be granted a point or two?” Hitchens concludes with a call for a new Enlightenment, in which the fear and superstition perpetuated by religion gives way to a renewed interest in the proper study of humanity. This course holds the promise of, among other things, undreamed of advances in medicine, technology, and peaceful coexistence among nations. More important for Hitchens, it offers a potentially permanent escape from those who still prefer “the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.” Philip Bader

Review Sources The Boston Globe, May 13, 2007, p. E5. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 1-9. The New Yorker 83, no. 13 (May 21, 2007): 77-80. The Observer, June 3, 2007, p. 24. The Times Literary Supplement, September 7, 2007, pp. 3-5. The Washington Post, May 6, 2007, p. BW05.

296

GRAND AVENUES The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. Author: Scott W. Berg Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 352 pp. $25.00 Type of Work: Biography, history Time: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Locale: Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. An account of the life and work of architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant and his vision to design and create the magnificent city that would become Washington, D.C. Principal personages: Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), French-born American architect George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), polymath, architect, and third president of the United States

Anyone who has ever visited the National Mall in Washington, D.C., can attest to the magnificent beauty of the “grand avenue” that stretches between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. The diagonal grid of streets in Washington can be confusing to visitors driving there, but their design directs visitors’ sights to the two buildings—the White House and the Capitol—that serve as the perfect geometric anchors of the city. Set atop a gently sloping hill at one end of the avenue, the Capitol resembles one of the great achievements of republican Rome, and its setting reminds one of the streets and monuments of Paris. Fittingly, the spectacular architectural wonders of modern-day Washington, D.C., grew from the vision and will of one man—a Parisian—Pierre Charles L’Enfant. In a superb chronicle of L’Enfant’s life and work, Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C., acclaimed architectural journalist Scott W. Berg re-creates the exciting world of a newly independent colonial America striving to build its own memorable cities and institutions. Prior to Berg’s lively and widely praised historical biography, L’Enfant’s story had been a little-known chapter in American history. Berg’s engaging portrait reveals for the first time the genius behind the streets and buildings of the nation’s capital. Using journals, letters, and other archival material, Berg brings to life L’Enfant and the strong-willed desires to create a city for his patron, George Washington, the difficulties he faced along the way, and the social history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America. On a rainy morning in early March, 1791, L’Enfant rode out from Georgetown to survey a district of 106 square miles along the Potomac River somewhere between the Eastern Branch and Conococheague Creek. Just eight months earlier, the Residence

Grand Avenues / berg

297

Act of 1790 had set aside this land as the loca tion of the new federal capital. By 1800, according to this act, no state would have any jurisdiction in this territory, and the transfer of the federal government from Philadelphia to this territory would be complete. Was it possible to accomplish such a feat in just ten years? George Washington and others agreed that if anyone could undertake and complete such a task, it would be Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Born in Paris in 1754, L’Enfant was the third child of Pierre L’Enfant, a well-known Scott W. Berg teaches nonfiction and well-respected painter in the service of writing and literature at George Mason the king descended from a line of artists with University. He holds a bachelor’s royal patronages. The elder L’Enfant so ex- degree in architecture from the celled in his training at the Royal Academy of University of Minnesota and a master Painting and Sculpture that he was eventually of fine arts in creative writing from awarded a faculty post there. He gained fame George Mason University. Berg’s primarily as a painter of battleground panora- writing appears frequently in The Washington Post. This is his first book. mas, urban landscapes, and city sketches. The young L’Enfant lived in modest apartments in Paris and benefited from his father’s production of famous and magnificent works of art for wealthy, royal patrons. The son learned well from watching his father at work, and many of the images imprinted on his young mind provided him the visions on which he based his future designs. He also developed a hunger for individual recognition from highly placed patrons that would haunt him for the rest of his life and underlie his triumphs and disappointments. L’Enfant studied under his father at the Royal Academy, and such close study of his father’s panoramas, urban designs, and natural landscapes prepared him for his future as the designer of the newly formed nation’s capital. In addition to his study, though, the architecture of Paris influenced him immensely. As he stepped out of the academy to walk home, he encountered the great public spaces in Paris that would so guide his later visions: the Tuileries Garden, Versailles, and the Champs-Élysées, a grand public road that rose into infinity and on which L’Enfant would later base the design of the National Mall. The young L’Enfant’s life soon took a turn that thrust him into the position that would change the shape of the territory along the Potomac. In 1776, excited by and deeply supportive of the American quest for independence, he shipped off to the colonies—along with many of his countrymen—to join the Continental Army in its battles against the British. Although L’Enfant had no military experience and could not be counted on to fight, he did possess extraordinary architectural and engineering skills gained from his years of study with his father. L’Enfant thus came under the command of Philippe Charles Jean Baptiste Tronson Du Coudray and became an engineer, a position that would help establish his legacy in the young nation.

298

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

L’Enfant’s skills quickly drew the attention of his superiors. At Valley Forge, Baron von Steuben recognized L’Enfant’s artistic talents, asking him to illustrate a field manual. His work with Steuben eventually catapulted him into a new position, and he found himself being invited to perform numerous artistic tasks for a variety of patrons. The first French minister to America, Chevalier de La Luzerne, invited him to design an elaborate setting for an international celebration of the victory at Yorktown. Later, Steuben asked him to design a badge, a medal, and a certificate of membership for the newly formed Society of the Cincinnati. This society embraced L’Enfant and recognized his talent, satisfying momentarily, at least, his continuing thirst for recognition of his talents and work. In 1784, L’Enfant caught George Washington’s attention when he suggested a peacetime corps of engineers (the foundation of the later Army Corps of Engineers). He maintained his relationship with Washington through correspondence, and five years later Washington would ask L’Enfant to submit designs for the land set aside by the Residence Act to be the new federal capital. Although L’Enfant did not know that Washington had also asked Thomas Jefferson for similar sets of design plans—a situation that would not only cause jealousy and mistrust but eventually result in L’Enfant’s plans being co-opted by one of Jefferson’s friends—L’Enfant launched himself into the work of designing the new territory and completed his plans in three months. By 1789, L’Enfant had risen to the rank of major in the Continental Army and with Washington’s support designed Federal Hall (City Hall) in New York City. The site of Washington’s inauguration and the home of the first Congress, Federal Hall stood as a grand architectural wonder, reminiscent of old Europe and old Paris. Crowds at the inauguration proclaimed the beauty and the grandeur of the building, and reporters waxed glowingly about the building. However, in their effusive praise of the building, the reporters neglected to mention the architect, one of L’Enfant’s many disappointments over the years. As much as he was pleased that the building was praised, he still hungered for recognition. Two years later, L’Enfant set out on what would be his grandest accomplishment: designing the new national capital. That rainy morning in Georgetown was only the beginning of his work. He set out later with surveyors and others who would help him clear the territory and begin to divide it into the city it would become. President Washington approved L’Enfant’s design for the city: a grid overlaid with a system of public squares linked by radiating diagonal avenues; the house of the president and the building occupied by Congress would sit on the two highest points in the territory, providing anchors on the city’s map. L’Enfant’s plan encountered a variety of challenges, including the encroachment on private property and the rush to sell lots that would result in a shortfall of money for the project. Although L’Enfant warned businessmen that the rush to sell lots might fail, they ignored his advice and reaped the results, slowing the process of building the city. L’Enfant also jeopardized his own project through his strong will and his desire for recognition, angering not only Jefferson but eventually Washington, who relieved L’Enfant of his job.

Grand Avenues / berg

299

The most crushing blow to L’Enfant, however, came when he viewed the reproductions of his design plans. One of his surveyors, Andrew Ellicott, had been drawing up two reproductions of L’Enfant’s plans for archival purposes. When L’Enfant looked over these plans, he discovered that his name was not on them. Apparently, Jefferson and Ellicott were complicit in robbing L’Enfant of the recognition for which he so hungered because L’Enfant’s name remains erased from the original archival designs. Although he continued to live in Virginia, L’Enfant never again achieved the brief glory that his work on Federal Hall and his visions of a national capital city had brought him. Berg’s lively tale does not end with L’Enfant’s death, however. In the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., restored L’Enfant’s plans—and resurrected L’Enfant at several architectural meetings as the real designer of Washington, D.C.— while designing a plan for the public buildings of Washington. Olmsted and others restored L’Enfant to his rightful place as the visionary who created the new capital. Berg’s dynamic and energetic prose offers a compelling tale of an architectural genius who sometimes was his own worst enemy. L’Enfant’s overarching thirst for recognition sometimes blinded him to the political realities around him, and he oftenalienated the people whose recognition he most sought. Berg’s magnificent historical biography introduces a range of characters whose avarice and political ambition often clouded their responsibilities to the emerging nation. In the end, Washington, D.C., became the new seat of the federal government because it was so close to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, and L’Enfant’s plans were temporarily abandoned and then revised to suit the needs of a new political administration. Deftly guiding readers on a journey through the ups and downs of L’Enfant’s life and the political intrigues of the time, Berg offers insightful glimpses into a chapter of American history that has been all but forgotten. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 432. Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 36. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 19. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2006): 61. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 39 (February 16, 2007): W5.

300

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER Author: Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 582 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1936-1999 Locale: Various locations in upstate New York This novel follows the dark adventures of Rebecca Schwart, who, escaping her suicidal father and a brutal, wife-beating husband, changes her name and works at various menial jobs until she meets her true love Principal characters: Rebecca Schwart, also known as Rebecca Tignor, Hazel Jones, and Hazel Gallagher, the gravedigger’s daughter who finally manages after considerable tribulations to rise above her station to become a well-to-do woman Jacob Schwart, her father, an educated Jewish refugee who flees the Nazis but can find work only as a gravedigger in America Anna Schwart, her mother Herschel Schwart, her brother August Schwart, her brother Dr. Byron Hendricks, a serial murderer Niles Tignor, Rebecca’s first husband, a vicious drunkard Niley Tignor, their son, also known as Zacharias Jones and Zacharias Gallagher Chester “Chet” Gallagher, Rebecca’s final lover and second husband, a kind and well-to-do man Thaddeus Gallagher, Chester’s multimillionaire father

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific writer with a special facility for language and the ability to use it masterfully to tell a compelling story. In this respect, her thirty-sixth novel is much like those that preceded it. Like her earlier works, The Gravedigger’s Daughter is compounded of dark and sometimes brutal adventures, which the heroine cannot seem entirely to evade. However, the courage, endurance, and ingenuity of the heroine finally pays off in that she lives to triumph over her somber and dangerous past. Oates begins her story with Rebecca Tignor walking home from her factory job along a deserted path and noticing that a well-dressed man is walking behind her. The man seems benign enough, but it becomes clear that he is obviously intent on following her. She wishes that the love of her life, her husband Niles Tignor, were present to protect her from any danger. Finally, the man talks to her, and it seems that he has mistaken her for another person, a woman named Hazel Jones. Rebecca protests that she is not Hazel Jones, but the gentleman, Dr. Byron Hendricks, gives her his business card and asks that if she knows Hazel Jones, would she please be in touch with him. It seems that Rebecca Tignor has eluded what had seemed to be a dangerous situation.

The Gravedigger’s Daughter / oates

301

An even more dangerous situation will occur not much later when her brutal husband, in a drunken rage, accuses her of infidelity, beats his small son, Niley, into unconsciousness, and almost kills Rebecca. When Tignor falls asleep in a drunken stupor, Rebecca takes her son and her husband’s car and sets off on a long journey from small town to small town, hoping to elude Niles. This lonely journey is not the first for Rebecca. Her Jewish parents were fleeing the Nazis when Rebecca was born, without medi- Joyce Carol Oates published her first cal help, on a refugee ship docked in New novel when she was twenty-six years York harbor. She was thus the only one in her old. Since then, she has published family born an American citizen. Rebecca’s thirty-five novels, collections of short father, Jacob Schwart, an educated and suc- stories, poems, plays, and numerous cessful teacher in Germany, could get work in books under pseudonyms. In 1970, she America only as a gravedigger and cemetery won the National Book Award for her caretaker in the small town of Milburn in novel them. Oates, a three-time upstate New York. He sets his family up in Pulitzer Prize nominee, is the Roger S. the tiny gravedigger’s cottage located in the Berlind Distinguished Professor of cemetery. His job and his tiny home in the Humanities at Princeton University. cemetery lead him to grow increasingly bitter and withdrawn from his wife and family. In response to her husband’s bitterness, Rebecca’s mother, Anna, virtually ceases to exist as a sentient person. Despite the problems at home, Rebecca proves a very bright child and actually wins a spelling contest in grade school. The dictionary, engraved with her name, that she wins as a prize remains with her throughout her life, reminding her of her intelligence and aptitude for hard work. Rebecca’s two older brothers, Herschel and August, do not do as well in school as Rebecca, and they finally leave home in their teens. Herschel leaves, fleeing police, after a terrible Halloween night when swastikas were painted all over the cemetery and the Schwart cottage. The emotional blow caused Herschel to seek out the young men he considered perpetrators, severely beating two of them. The third he knocked unconscious and cut a swastika into his forehead, mutilating him for life. Herschel then disappeared from town and never contacted his family again. Not long after, August left also, and only the thirteen-year-old Rebecca remained. She quit school to help her father, but Jacob Schwart could never recover from the awful Halloween. He grew more and more distraught and dark-minded, and, indeed, even his family name, Schwart, suggests the German word swartz, black, which sums up his final emotional state. Ultimately Jacob’s despair leads him to kill his wife and attempt to kill Rebecca. Failing in that, he turns the rifle upon himself, blowing his head into pieces all over his terrified daughter. The distraught Rebecca flees the cemetery and the catastrophic demise of her parents.

302

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

As a ward of the state, Rebecca is taken in by her former teacher, Miss Lutter, and for several years she becomes more and more dominated by the very pious and very Christian old maid. At seventeen, Rebecca can no longer endure the constraints of Miss Lutter’s house, and she moves in with two of her former schoolmates. She obtains a job as a chambermaid at the General Washington Hotel in Milburn. A bright and industrious young woman, she is now becoming quite attractive, so attractive that the male guests are taking notice of the hardworking young chambermaid. One day, a male guest, pretending to be very ill and dying, lures her into his room, where he attempts to rape her. Another male guest hears her cries for help, ferociously attacks the rapist, and rescues the distressed Rebecca. The rescuer’s name is Niles Tignor, and it is he who will ultimately introduce her into adulthood, not long after his gallant rescue, with an evening of powerful physical sex. She is not happy, however, being Tignor’s mistress and does not wish to continue the affair without being married. Finally, Niles gives in to her wishes and drives her to Niagara Falls, where they are married by a man whom Niles claims is a justice of the peace. Rebecca never sees the wedding certificate and years later assumes the whole matter to be a fraud. When Rebecca is eighteen, she becomes pregnant and delivers a son, Niley. At the time, the Tignors live in a ramshackle old house outside Chautauqua Falls. Rebecca is happy to be a mother but not exactly happy with her marriage. Niles is gone for long periods at a time, and, when he returns, he is withdrawn and often physically brutal, sometimes beating her unmercifully. He does not support his family, and Rebecca must take a job on the assembly line at the Niagara Rubber Plant. Her only joy is Niley, who stays with a neighbor during the day but at night listens to the radio with his mother and plays the music he hears on an imitation piano on the kitchen table. After the severe beating Niles Tignor delivers to her and her son, Rebecca realizes she must once again flee. Rebecca is nothing if not resourceful. She drives Tignor’s car many miles until it is virtually out of gas. Then she abandons it with the keys in the ignition. She buys two tickets on a Greyhound bus but is very careful to buy two adult tickets so that a woman and a child cannot be traced. For additional cover, Rebecca changes her name to Hazel Jones, the one told to her by the kind stranger. Indeed, she goes in search of the stranger, Dr. Byron Hendricks, but finds his office closed permanently because he has died. Only years later does she make the chilling discovery that Byron Hendricks was a serial killer of young women, and there is no telling what might have happened to her and her son had Hendricks still been alive. By accident, she has eluded yet one more terrifying adventure. Continuing her new life, Rebecca—now Hazel—renames her son Zacharias Jones. She even pays to have a false birth certificate created for herself and her son. But Hazel and Zach are constantly fleeing for safety. Several times they move from one town to another in upstate New York, and Hazel is bright enough to know that they must not move in any constant direction. The mother and her son, who now finds the fleeing an interesting game, spend a great deal of time on Greyhound buses, finally settling in Malin Head Bay. Here Hazel, now maturing into a smart and beautiful woman, obtains a job as an usher in a movie theater.

The Gravedigger’s Daughter / oates

303

Gradually things improve. Hazel is promoted to ticket seller at the theater. Zach enters elementary school and there is able to continue to develop his love for music. On Fridays, he takes music lessons from a private teacher. His mother sometimes has a drink after work at a piano bar where a Chet Gallagher plays jazz piano. Gallagher recognizes her as the ticket agent at the movie theater and introduces himself. A life of torment is now about to become one of achievement, happiness, and pleasure. Gallagher begins to date Hazel. He is a man of considerable intelligence and recognizes the same in Hazel. He writes columns for the newspaper and reviews music on the radio. He wishes to be Hazel’s lover, but she is hesitant, after the dreadful adventures with Niles Tignor. Chet is also taken with Hazel’s son, and, as a pianist himself, he frequently comes to Hazel’s home to visit with Zach. Chet teaches him piano jazz technique and encourages him in his desire to become a professional pianist, even buying the boy a piano to practice with at home. Chet is a man of means, and he has now convinced Hazel of his good intentions so that he becomes her live-in lover. Ultimately, he officially adopts Zach as his own son and will also marry Hazel and take her to meet his multimillionaire father, who becomes a great admirer of Hazel. Life is good, and the last great adventure is a trip to San Francisco to hear her seventeen-year-old son in a national piano competition against performers twice his age. Hazel Gallagher will never completely escape Rebecca Schwart, but at least she does not have to live her life anymore. The Gravedigger’s Daughter is a rather long novel, but it is worth the investment in time, for it is compelling reading. Oates is a writer of such fine gifts and such intense discipline that there is no moment in the story in which the reader is not likely to be completely absorbed. Indeed, Oates is not without some knowledge of the vicissitudes in the life of a gravedigger’s daughter, for the novel is dedicated to her grandmother, Blanche Morgenstern, who was a gravedigger’s daughter. Interestingly enough, though much of the novel is filled with brutality and angst, there is a nonsentimental but nevertheless warm conclusion. Oates’s point that life is always a struggle, but that determination, resourcefulness, and intelligence well applied will ultimately deliver us, is powerfully argued in a work that clearly presents a superior writer at her best. August W. Staub Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 5. Kirkus Reviews 79, no. 6 (March 15, 2007): 249. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 75-76. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 17, 2007): 18. People 67, no. 22 (June 4, 2007): 48. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 10 (March 5, 2007): 38. The Times Literary Supplement, August 17, 2007, p. 21. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW02.

304

GREEN AND GRAY Author: Geoffrey G. O’Brien (1969) Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 90 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Poetry A penetrating and provocative collection that examines the complexities of memory and experience As part of the New California Poetry series, Green and Gray adds to the remarkable variety that has exemplified the series since its inception in 2000. While there were no volumes in the series published in 2001, in every other year since 2000 the series has published three collections each year. Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s first collection, The Guns and Flags Project, was published in 2002. This volume also was part of the New California Poetry series, which is run under the editorship of Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander. In addition to Green and Gray, the other two volumes published in the series during 2007 are Steve Willard’s Harm and Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts (Compleat). Over the years, the series has published such noteworthy poets as Fanny Howe, Mark Levine, Carol Snow, and Harryette Mullen. Each in their own way, these poets have proven themselves to be fresh and stimulating poetic voices for the twenty-first century. It is high praise indeed to be included in such a select group of bold poets and, therefore, the reader should approach O’Brien’s new collection with anticipation. O’Brien gained recognition for his meditative first collection. For this volume, he was compared to such American poetic giants as Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. While the poems of The Guns and Flags Project are dense creations in the tradition of the Language poets, they are richly rewarding for the patient and careful reader. The collection was considered fresh and brilliant by most contemporary critics, but it was also spoken of by more traditional critics and readers of poetry as being no more than mere fuzzy gibberish. O’Brien has been widely published in such respected poetry outlets as The American Poetry Review, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, River City Review, and The Iowa Review. There is a restless quality to many of his poems. For Green and Gray, the poet has continued to conjure up challenging poems that can be described as everyday images having been plucked from sources that can be found right under everyone’s proverbial noses. O’Brien opens the collection with the poem “Some Versions Of,” made up of seventeen three-line stanzas (kown as tercets). The opening stanza states, “There is no reason a poem would begin/ with reference to the territory/ with refrains to be used by all sides.” With this intriguing beginning, O’Brien commences to unravel common everyday associations; the presumed logic is turned upside down. One stanza blends into the next as with “Invincible a shining example/ of immediate environs

Green and Gray / o’brien

305

of damage and/ its image there is no reason a poem// Would begin the woods are white and Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of black/ green leaves blue at certain hours or/ two highly regarded volumes of poetry. the woods differed a poem beginning.” Things His poetry also has been published in that may be normally taken for granted must several poetry journals. In 2006, he be reevaluated. O’Brien points to what some- and Jeff Clark published the collection one may assume exists and what is truly there— 2A. O’Brien teaches at the University these are quite possibly at odds. Nothing is all of California, Berkeley. During 20032004, he was the Holloway Poet at the white or all black or all anything but rather university. many things rolled into one. The poem ends with “Would be gone by not having come/ would come to be used by all sides/ would begin with reference to refrains.” Poems serve as a version of the world, a version that has been chosen by the poet. The question can be asked whether there is a truly good reason for a poem to take one direction over another. Humans by their very nature distort the world around them. O’Brien employs a conversational style in his poems as he describes the absurdity that exists at every turn. There is a dark humor that permeates Green and Gray. As a poet, O’Brien understands the difficulty of describing even a version of the world that has the ring of authenticity. The world can be looked at as an onion having an endless number of layers, which have been further distorted by the way humans live. While there is an inherent pessimism in this view of the world, O’Brien cannot be described as a pessimist. He has not given up on the building of poems, the building of alternate angles on reality. The poet certainly has not thrown up his hands in defeat. He pulls at everything around him in order to create, to add a different perspective. In addition to “Some Versions Of,” Green and Gray consists of thirty-nine other fascinating versions of what the world is and is not. In “Logic of Confession,” O’Brien reveals what photographs, in a sense, do not reveal. The poem opens with the provocative line “All photos are taken out of remorse.” From this intriguing opening, the poet continues with “Are of where the senses go when closed/ All photos are still lifes of the senses/ Are at least of lost faith in the senses.” There is much that is out of focus in Green and Gray. Everything that is observed is not what it seems to be. The very act of observation taints the whole process. For the casual reader, what the poet is attempting may seem to be no more than mere head games. On first reading, the collection can appear vague and distant. There is much in many of these poems that appears random or simply plucked from thin air. O’Brien also employs the repetition of words in various poses. One particular word or expression may be examined from many different angles. In the poem “Three Seasons,” the poet speaks of a winter when all “the usual things happened.” There is winter, summer, and spring, and within each of these seasons there is a pattern that fits into an “arrangement.” The arrangement is “first one and then into/ another not yet there,/ many years of this refrain/ and all the productions within it.” This is what memory tells the poet has happened over and over, but is memory a true barometer of what has transpired? The poet admits that “I have forgotten what/ would travel from

306

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the north/ as a series seen from above/ or from below, and the followers,/ the flowers, I tore them up/ the next summer, or rather/ before or immediately after/ and thought no more about it.” As one season bleeds into another, there is much that becomes no more than a blur, a false positive within a cluttered mind. O’Brien does his best to remain off-kilter throughout the collection. The specifics of time and place do not hold court here. This is the poet’s world. He is the one who has given all the abstractions a form, a place to inhabit. Each line of a poem has much to offer the reader. While the world is hard to describe in any truly accurate way, it is the poet who fills the void with his architecture of ramblings, of his part north and his part south, of his part now and his part then. At the end of “In Re Others,” O’Brien concludes that “There are these/ true differences growing from and towards/ a single past, a winter in which all are the others./ So much for problems and their solution.” The clarity that may have existed in the past—an American past—may be close to impossible to recognize now. Black becomes white and green becomes gray. The “gray” of buildings and the “green” of nature look to be at opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. If one wins, then does the other have to lose? In Green and Gray, there is never an easy answer. Still, maybe through one nonspecific image after another, through one abstract adventure after another, a certain kind of revelation is possible. This may mean that abstraction can be used as an inoculation against abstraction. Toward the end of the collection, in “The Nature of Encounters,” the poet confesses that “I’m already screwing up the end of the poem/ with a hopeful form of forgetfulness.” While the poet had plans to write “a perfect poem,” it has become almost an impossible task since the “historical period” for this perfect poem has been forgotten by him and now a whole new period has taken its place. The startling revelation that comes at the end of the poem forces the poet and the reader to reevaluate how poetry is linked to life at all. O’Brien reluctantly confesses that “Under the trees, in the fog, the place/ where the poem ceases to be is life./ Here comes the prose they warned us we’d become.” There is a sadness in this statement. Poetry may not be one form of life, but can the human animal exist without the flights of fancy that are conjured up by the poet? Are “we” only to be the drudgery of “prose”? Having taken inspiration from Stevens and Ashbery, O’Brien is at home in delineating the accidents of the human mind and human condition. These accidents, though, do not lend themselves to be described in concrete terms. In “A Difficult Summary,” the poet speaks to the snowball effect an accident can render with “First the accident of thought then its music/ and then its potential to serve the stores and crowds.” A random thought can start something big, something consequential. O’Brien refuses to reassure the reader that there are any true beginnings or absolute conclusions. The world can be looked at as being no more than a loose confederation of nonallied elements. Even the integrity of the self cannot be trusted. To heighten the intensity of these poems, O’Brien limits his vocabulary. The repetition of words and phrases enhances the power of Green and Gray. It assists the poet in his portrayal of the “remorse of the senses.” In the poem “Hysteron Proteron,” he even takes parts of the Patriot Act to drive his point home. Poetry can be pulled out of thin air or even from something like the Patriot Act. The poet can stimu-

Green and Gray / o’brien

307

late the attentive reader to examine the world around him or her by using elements found within the everyday world. It is always a pleasure to read that change and poetry itself are already in the world ripe for the taking. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources The Boston Review 32 (November/December, 2007): 6. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 12 (March 19, 2007): 43.

308

THE GUM THIEF Author: Douglas Coupland (1961) Publisher: Bloomsbury (New York). 275 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Sometime in the 2000’s Locale: An unspecified Staples office superstore somewhere in the United States; London In Coupland’s eleventh novel, two lonely employees at an office superstore form a tentative bond by communicating to each other through journal entries and letters Principal characters: Roger, a divorced middle-aged man verging on alcoholism who works in a dead-end job in an office superstore Bethany, a young woman in her mid-twenties and Roger’s coworker DeeDee, Bethany’s mother Joan, Roger’s ex-wife Kyle, a Staples employee whom Bethany dates for a short time Steve, Gloria, Kyle, and Brittany, characters in Roger’s novel-in-progress Shawn, a mean-spirited Staples employee and gossip Greg, a regular Staples customer whom the staff has nicknamed “Mr. Rant”

Roger, a middle-aged divorcé who is perilously close to becoming a full-fledged alcoholic, barely squeaks by at his dead-end job at Staples, an office superstore. To help ease the mind-numbing boredom and keep his depression at bay, Roger spends his work breaks writing in a journal and reflecting on his life. One day, he writes a journal entry as if from the point of view of one of his coworkers, Bethany, an overweight young woman in her early twenties who hides from the world behind a costume of Goth clothes and black lipstick. When Bethany stumbles upon Roger’s journal in the employee break room, she is at first horrified by what she views as Roger’s perverted intrusion into her life, but she becomes intrigued in spite of herself and proposes that the two trade journal entries without ever openly acknowledging each other’s presence at work. Coupland builds upon this poignant and charming epistolary exchange by adding several additional layers, including letters to Roger from DeeDee, Bethany’s equally depressed mother with whom Roger once went on a single date. DeeDee is alarmed by Roger’s written exchanges with her daughter but eventually realizes that his interest in Bethany is purely platonic. Meanwhile, encouraged by Bethany’s tentative notice, Roger begins to share with her excerpts from his novel-in-progress, a satiric

The Gum Thief / coupland

309

drawing room comedy titled Glove Pond. In the novel, married couple Steve and Gloria Canadian writer Douglas Coupland trade alcohol-fueled barbs about each other’s can be described as a fiction-writing lack of success as, respectively, a critically ac- voice of Generation X, having claimed but commercially unsuccessful nov- published novels with such titles as elist and a community theater actress who Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated cannot remember her lines. Their only shared Culture (1991), Microserfs (1995), and passion is a love of Scotch, and even that JPod (2006). His 2003 novel Hey Nostradamus! was short-listed for the cannot mitigate Steve’s dismay over the imCommonwealth Writers’ Prize and won minent arrival of dinner guests Kyle and Brit- the Canadian Authors Association tany, in large part due to Kyle’s own meteor- Award for Fiction. The Gum Thief is itic rise as a novelist. his eleventh novel. While Coupland’s novel-within-a-novel concept is not new, his execution is both amusing and effective, and Roger’s invented characters subtly reveal information about Roger and the people around him. The Steve in Glove Pond, for instance, symbolizes Roger, who fears that his washed-up life is over. Kyle represents one of Roger’s coworkers, also named Kyle, by whom Roger feels threatened because Kyle is younger and seems to be developing an interest in Bethany. Brittany represents Bethany as a younger woman who may yet fulfill her potential as long as she does not allow herself to be stifled by the men in her life. Gloria’s role is somewhat less clear; she may correspond to Roger’s ex-wife Joan, who remains somewhat bitter about their divorce, Bethany’s depressed mother DeeDee, or some amalgam of the two. Although this structure is complex and confusing at times, it does not detract from the book’s charm and in fact allows Roger and Bethany, and therefore the reader, the relief of satire in between bouts of emotional revelations. Coupland adds even more recursive tiers to The Gum Thief; one such layer occurs when Steve reads the first chapter of his guest Kyle’s new work-in-progress, titled Love in the Age of Office Superstores, which is in turn a novel about Norm, a depressed alcoholic working at an office superstore, or, in other words, Roger. In addition, The Gum Thief ends with a chapter in the form of a note written by Ed Matheson, a writing instructor with whom Roger has shared his manuscript. Here, Coupland pokes sly fun at creative writing teachers with little publishing experience. Matheson tells Roger that his characters and situations in Glove Pond seem too real and therefore would be of little interest to readers, and he scolds Roger for mocking the class’s writing exercises from the point of view of a piece of toast. Matheson, who pretentiously includes in his signature line his B.A. degree, his Web site, and his single obscure literary award for “fiction dealing with equality,” then offers to edit Glove Pond for Roger at a rate of $40 per hour. The device of Matheson might have been more effective had it been fictitiously addressed to Coupland himself instead of to Roger, such that the reader could conclude that Matheson had read the entirety of The Gum Thief. As written, it is difficult to determine which parts of the manuscript Matheson has ostensibly read, since the toast writing exercises are between Roger

310

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and Bethany and are therefore not part of Glove Pond. Regardless, it is a particularly comic and fitting end to the book. Throughout The Gum Thief, Roger and Bethany gradually share more personal information with each other. In between anecdotes about a customer the Staples staff has nicknamed Mr. Rant, Bethany recalls for Roger the prior deaths of several relatives and friends within a short time period, while Roger reveals the loss of his son in an automobile accident. Several of Roger and Bethany’s personal experiences are ultimately incorporated into Roger’s novel; Steve and Gloria, for instance, claim to have a son named Kendall, but their dinner guests are understandably skeptical of Kendall’s existence as there are no photographs, and indeed no evidence at all that a child had ever lived in their home. This ambiguity reflects Roger’s own feeling that memories of his son do not always seem real, which undoubtedly fuels his depression. After Roger and Bethany have corresponded for some time, Bethany surprises everyone, including herself, by traveling to London on the spur of the moment with her coworker Kyle, whom she has begun dating. At first, Bethany is euphoric with the freedom of having quit her job and enjoys England’s novel sights and sounds. Even so, she depends on her correspondence with Roger to give her perspective and uses a Federal Express account stolen from her mother’s boss to write to Roger frequently. Unfortunately, it does not take long for Bethany to realize that the charm of Europe cannot sustain her tenuous relationship with Kyle. When he suddenly breaks things off with Bethany, he essentially leaves her to fend for herself and make her own way home. Bethany returns to Staples as a part-time holiday employee, and although she publicly maintains her dignity even when Kyle flaunts his new British girlfriend in front of the Staples staff, her backward progress depresses her so much that she attempts suicide. It is possible to argue that several of the characters’ viewpoints, particularly those of Roger and Bethany, are too coincidentally similar in tone and outlook, but there are enough diversions to mitigate this problem. In addition to the main entries of Roger, Bethany, and later DeeDee, Coupland includes several asides, such as a postcard from Roger’s daughter Zoë, believably written as by a preschooler, and an annual Christmas “form letter” penned by Brian, Joan’s irritatingly perky new husband and Zoë’s new stepfather. These devices skillfully impart plot information without seeming contrived, such as when a memo from the Staples manager, Rahad, indicates that Bethany has returned to the store to fill in part-time during the holidays. Perhaps the only truly dislikable character to “speak” is Shawn, a Staples employee who writes notes to a former coworker, Blair. The original “gum thief” of the novel’s title, Blair, had been fired when her theft was caught on store security cameras and subsequently viewed widely on the video-sharing Web site YouTube. Coupland’s use of Shawn is ingenious because it shows the reader how many of the staff members view and treat Roger and Bethany and provides explanations that would seem unnatural from the main characters’ points of view, such as when the staff discovers the Glove Pond manuscript and ridicules Roger so much that he throws a tantrum in the store and is fired, taking with him a pack of unpaid-for chewing gum as a last act of defiance.

The Gum Thief / coupland

311

Although Coupland has reportedly protested being thus labeled, many of his readers consider him something of a spokesperson for Generation X, a term generally used in the United States for those born from approximately 1965 to the early 1980’s. The Gum Thief continues Coupland’s tradition of highlighting generational differences, with the fortysomething Roger constantly commenting on how Bethany’s life as a twentysomething by default must be both better and worse than his own current state. In addition, Coupland liberally sprinkles his characters’ musings with references to historical events and cultural phenomena such as September 11, Google, and YouTube. The brevity of the novel, with its extremely short “chapters,” also gives it an air of modernity. Ultimately, The Gum Thief ends on a hopeful, yet not entirely unrealistic, note. DeeDee has reduced her overprotective and possibly smothering tendencies and can objectively observe that Bethany’s suicide attempt was probably not meant to succeed. The incident has, however, given both women the impetus they need to start making changes in their lives. Bethany quits working at Staples for the second and final time and may even be on the verge of a relationship with Greg (Mr. Rant), who visits her in the hospital after hearing of her suicide attempt. DeeDee decides to seriously explore her own career options, and Roger finishes writing the quirky Glove Pond. Although Roger’s accomplishment can hardly be expected to fix everything in his life, the reader senses that Roger finally shares the guarded optimism with which he ultimately imbues Steve, Gloria, and Brittany. Ironically, the Glove Pond Kyle remains rather self-centered and unaware, perhaps reflecting that Roger cannot remain objective about the character who represents the person who hurt Bethany. Overall, Coupland’s funny and highly sympathetic characters, combined with the novel’s humor and somewhat unusual structure, make The Gum Thief an entertaining and moving reading experience. Amy Sisson

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 34-35. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 14 (July 15, 2007): 681-682. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 64-66. New Statesman 137 (October 15, 2007): 52-53. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 14, 2007): 7. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 30. The Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 2007, p. 21.

312

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS Author: J. K. Rowling (1965) Publisher: Scholastic (New York). 759 pp. $34.99 Type of work: Novel Time: The early 2000’s Locale: England In the seventh and concluding novel in Rowling’s popular series, the wizarding world is at war, and Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort prepare for their final showdown Principal characters: Harry Potter, a seventeen-year-old former student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and leader of wizards opposing Lord Voldemort Ron Weasley, his best friend and fellow classmate Hermione Granger, his close friend and fellow classmate Albus Dumbledore, the deceased headmaster of Hogwarts and Harry’s mentor Severus Snape, the headmaster of Hogwarts, who seems to be a loyal follower of Lord Voldemort Lord Voldemort, Harry’s archenemy, who is bent on ruling the wizarding and muggle worlds

In the art of magic, seven is a sacred, mystical number, which symbolizes perfection and completion. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh novel released in the seventh month of 2007, J. K. Rowling concludes her monumental series, and her main character, Harry Potter, completes his task of ridding the wizarding world of Lord Voldemort and his followers. More than the six previous Potter novels put together, this volume sparked a firestorm of discussion in the media and online about what would become of “The Boy Who Lived” and his cohorts. Prepublication rumors ran rampant in the press, and spoilers, both accurate and fraudulent, abounded on the Internet. The publisher alternately tried to take advantage of the hype to aggressively market the book and, at the same time, keep a lid on false yet tantalizing revelations concerning the plot on blogs and in chat rooms. Such tight security surrounded the publication that even reviewers had a difficult time obtaining advance copies of the embargoed novel. Meanwhile, at the witching hour on July 21, eager readers camped out in front of bookstores worldwide in order to make sure they secured their copies. Expectations for the book were unquestionably high. Throughout the series, Rowling proves to be a masterful storyteller who carefully lays the groundwork leading up to the grand climax in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. When Harry is first introduced in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; published inthe United States as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 1998), he is an abused

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows / rowling

313

eleven-year-old orphan who discovers he is a wizard. When he enters Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he is targeted for death by Lord Voldemort, a renegade dark wizard who has murdered Harry’s parents. Harry also learns that not everything is as it seems. At the heart of each book is a mystery that Harry must solve in order to uncover more about his identity, his relationship to Voldemort, and his mission. Often, Harry misjudges situations, as well as people. For example, in Sorcerer’s Stone, he believes J. K. Rowling has published seven bestSeverus Snape, the duplicitous Potions (later selling Harry Potter books, which have Defense Against the Dark Arts) teacher, has captured the imaginations of adults and set his sights on the stone, which confers im- children alike. She has won the Hugo mortality on its owner. Harry believes Draco Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and Malfoy is the heir to Slytherin in Harry Potter the Whitbread Award for Best and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), and in Children’s Book, as well as many other Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban honors. Her books have been translated (1999) Harry is sure that escaped prisoner into sixty-one languages. Sirius Black betrayed his parents to Voldemort and is set on killing him, too. Similar mysteries occupy Harry in succeeding books. In each case, Harry not only perceives that many of his first impressions are wrong but also learns from his mistakes. His realizations lead him to a fuller knowledge of his own history and purpose. As Harry journeys from boy to man, the plot of each successive novel grows darker, the behavior of some characters becomes more baffling, and new questions are posed while existing mysteries deepen. Finally, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the enigmas Rowling has so carefully developed in the previous six books crystallize into five key questions: Who will live and who will die? Is Snape good or evil? Is Albus Dumbledore really dead after Snape apparently murders him? Is Harry a horcrux, host to one of the fragments of the Dark Lord’s soul? Will the two couples—Ron and Hermione and Harry and Ginny—ever get together? Book seven poses three more questions: What are the deathly hallows, where are they, and where are the horcruxes? As obsessed readers combed the first six books for clues in the runup to publication of the final volume, they no doubt expected that Rowling would tie up loose ends. She does just that, but perhaps not in the way her fans anticipated. Rowling once commented that she views Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as two halves of a whole, and the final book does indeed read less like a stand-alone novel and more like a continuation of the sixth book. At the close of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore lies in his white tomb on the grounds of Hogwarts, Snape has become headmaster under the watchful eye of Voldemort, and Harry mentally and emotionally prepares to confront Voldemort in a life-and-death battle.

314

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Two quests confront Harry and his friends, Ron and Hermione, who choose to accompany him on his mission: the continuing search for Voldemort’s horcruxes and a new assignment given by Dumbledore, the reunification of three magical objects known as the deathly hallows. The hallows were passed down to their descendants by the Peverell brothers, who lived in Godric’s Hollow, where Dumbledore was raised and where Harry’s parents were murdered. The invisibility cloak, originally owned by Ignotus Peverell, was left to Harry by his father, James. The resurrection stone, the centerpiece of Marvolo Gaunt’s ring, was inherited by Voldemort. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore destroyed the ring, also thought to be a horcrux, and kept the stone. The final object, the elder wand, is still missing. The wizard who reunites the objects will be master of death—a position eagerly sought by Voldemort, who has pursued immortality since the first book. The narrative begins with a thrilling chase as Harry is met by an Order of the Phoenix guard, who is sent to escort him from the Dursleys’ house to the Burrow, where his best friend, Ron Weasley, and his family live. Shortly after they take to the air on their broomsticks, Harry and his compatriots are attacked by Voldemort and his Death Eaters in the first of several dramatic and fatal confrontations. During the melee, Mad Eye Moody and Harry’s pet owl, Hedwig, are killed. The demise of Mad Eye and Hedwig foreshadow the deaths of more beloved characters as the plot progresses. Harry’s cinematic escape is the first of many action-packed scenes that will no doubt play well onscreen when the final title is translated from print to film. Sandwiched between the frenetic and fatal chase at the book’s beginning and the final climactic duel between Harry and Voldemort are revelatory chapters that include less action and more explanation about persistent questions raised in the series. For example, one question readers have raised concerns Dumbledore’s background. How did he become such a powerful wizard? The eighteenth chapter, “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore,” a book ostensibly written by muckraking Daily Prophet reporter Rita Skeeter, reveals that the younger Dumbledore was far from the wise and good wizard Harry—and readers— thought he was. His brief but intense friendship with dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald gave birth to their plan to rule both the wizarding and muggle worlds. After a disastrous episode that results in the death of Dumbledore’s sister, Grindelwald abruptly leaves town, and the guilt-ridden Dumbledore makes no effort to contact his former friend and fellow conspirator. Five years after the incident, Dumbledore and Grindelwald duel, and Dumbledore wins, resulting in Grindelwald’s imprisonment. The wizarding community has such faith in Dumbledore’s superior skill that he is repeatedly asked to become Minister of Magic. He turns down the requests and instead decides to accept the position as headmaster at Hogwarts. In a later chapter titled “King’s Cross,” the deceased Dumbledore, meeting with Harry in the afterworld, admits to his former student, “I had learned I am not to be trusted with power.” Dumbledore’s confession is ironic, coming from a man many consider the most accomplished wizard of his time, but it also highlights one of Rowling’s recurring themes—raw power untempered by wisdom and love is a danger not only to the person who wields it but also to the world at large.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows / rowling

315

Another frequently debated issue is whether Snape is good or evil. It is evident throughout the series that Snape intensely dislikes, or even hates, Harry. However, Dumbledore never wavers in his belief that Snape will protect the son of James Potter, Snape’s former schoolmate who bullied and humiliated him. In “The Prince’s Tale,” Snape lies dying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, where Voldemort’s huge snake, Nagini, attacked him. As Harry kneels next to him, Snape bequeaths his memories to Harry, and just before he expires, Snape looks into Harry’s green eyes—eyes that resemble Harry’s mother Lily’s eyes. When Harry pours Snape’s memories into Dumbledore’s pensieve, he discovers that the former Death Eater was deeply in love with Lily for years. Just as she gave her life to save her infant son from Voldemort’s attack sixteen years before, Snape risked his own life to protect Harry and bring about the downfall of his former master, the Dark Lord. Despite his shadowy past, Snape is nonetheless redeemed by love. It is that same love that motivates Harry to allow Voldemort to attack him when he finally confronts the Dark Lord in the forest. In an epigram at the beginning of the book, Rowling quotes a passage from William Penn’s More Fruits of Solitude (1682), which is a commentary on the permanence of true friendship, even in the face of death. Harry is certainly devoted to his friends, and they to him. In the light of Harry’s willingness to sacrifice himself for “the greater good,” Rowling could just as easily have quoted John 15:13 for the epigram: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” Voldemort’s ultimate undoing is rooted in his failure to understand that love trumps magic. Love protects Harry from temptation to misuse the deathly hallows when he briefly reunites them, and love prompts him to destroy the horcruxes, one of which is himself. In addition to including an epigram for the first time in the series, Rowling also includes an epilogue that reveals what happens to Ron and Hermione and to Harry and Ginny. Nineteen years after Voldemort’s destruction, the two couples have children of their own and are sending them off to Hogwarts, where Neville Longbottom is professor of herbology. After the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, reviewers and readers debated whether the happily-ever-after epilogue was necessary. Fans and critics speculated that Rowling wanted to lay to rest any false rumors concerning the future of Harry and his friends so that any would-be authors would be discouraged from publishing unauthorized sequels of the book. It seems, however, that Rowling could not stop herself from spinning more Potter tales. On her Web site and on her postpublication U.S. book tour, Rowling revealed that Harry and Ron become aurors; Ginny plays for the Holyhead Harpies quidditch team, leaves to have a family with Harry, and then works at the Daily Prophet as a quidditch correspondent; Hermione works for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures and then moves on to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; and Dumbledore was in love with Grindelwald, which is why he went along with the dark wizard’s schemes. True to form, Rowling will no doubt continue to tantalize readers with insights into the lives of her characters, thereby ensuring their immortality in literary history—without the aid of deathly hallows or horcruxes. Pegge Bochynski

316

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Entertainment Weekly, no. 948 (August 17, 2007): 30-34. Horn Book Magazine 83, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 551-553. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 16 (August 15, 2007): 810. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 14 (September 27, 2007): 32-35. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 12, 2007): 1-11. Newsweek 150, no. 5 (July 30, 2007): 60. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 30 (July 30, 2007): 83. Weekly Standard 12, no. 45 (August 13, 2007): 35-37.

317

HEAD AND HEART American Christianities Author: Garry Wills (1934) Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 626 pp. $29.95 Type of work: History, religion How the two great strains of American Christianity— Enlightenment and Evangelicalism—have played out in American history The Puritans saw America as a “city upon a hill,” where the Gospel could be preached and lived, but it has been said that they fled England to escape religious tolerance. Haunted by the fear of hell, they opposed the paganism of African and Asian religions, the denial of Jesus in Judaism and Islam, and (in what would become a recurring theme in American thought) the Roman Catholicism their founders had only recently broken from. For all their extremism, the Puritans were not unintelligent. They founded Harvard College (now University), and their emphasis on the individual remains central to American thought. They were not alone in America, however, and Garry Wills describes the 1660 execution of Mary Dyer, a Quaker who insisted on preaching her version of Christianity. Within Puritanism there were dissenters, such as Samuel Sewall, who came to repent of his role as judge in the Salem witchcraft trials and wrote The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (1700), an early attack on the institution of slavery, and Roger Williams, whose extreme devoutness led him to wonder if religion properly had any public aspects. The Enlightenment began to influence America in the eighteenth century. John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (published anonymously in 1695) led the way to Unitarianism, a version of Christianity that accepted the Bible but denied the divinity of Jesus. Quakers such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet (to whom Wills dedicates the book) used Christian and humanist arguments to oppose slavery. The religious approach most favored by the Enlightenment was Deism, the belief in a “watchmaker” God who created the universe and set it in motion but then left it alone. Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, were Deists. Jefferson went so far as to create a Deist Bible, eliminating the parts of the original Bible he could not accept and treating Jesus as merely a great teacher. The Enlightenment worldview of the Founding Fathers led them to one of the most radical results of the American Revolution: the disestablishment of religion. Here again, Locke was a major influence, with Epistola de Tolerantia (1689; a letter concerning toleration). Locke’s approach was moderate, seeing religious tolerance as a Christian virtue and setting somewhat narrow limits on it. Thomas Jefferson and

318

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

James Madison, however, radicalized Locke’s view, writing into the Constitution as complete a separation of church and state as they could manage. Wills traces the development of disestablishment through careful analyses of Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” (1779) and Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (1785) and refutes the most common arguments that try to limit the neutrality of the First Amendment not only among religions but also between religion and absence of religion. With the nineteenth century came Romanticism, which affected both the Enlightened and Evangelical aspects of American Christianity. The debate between Unitarian and Trinitarian versions led William Ellery Channing to publish “Unitarian Christianity” in 1819 and to establish Unitarianism as a separate sect within Christendom. However, the Transcendentalists, influenced by the Romantic emphasis on intuition and inspiration, found more and more of Christianity unacceptable. In his Harvard Divinity School address (1838), Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that Unitarianism should have jettisoned the belief in miracles along with the Trinity. The Transcendentalists imported an element of nature mysticism, derived from Hinduism; influenced writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman; and helped popularize abolitionism, but as Wills notes, they resembled their Puritan forebears in seeing themselves as individualists, yet joined by a mission from God, leading a mission into the wilderness. Meanwhile, the same Romantic emphasis on feeling led to the Second Great Awakening, a revival of religious fervor, particularly among Methodists. Francis Asbury, the first American Methodist bishop, had been a Loyalist during the American Revolution, and he refused to take an oath to the revolutionary government. Still, he remained in America, sending circuit riders all over the nation and its territories. Asbury was one of the first religious leaders to encourage African Americans to form churches, leading to the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the mid-nineteenth century, slavery divided the American churches as it divided the nation, with religious leaders on both sides claiming divine favor. After the Civil War, the revivalist spirit of the Second Great Awakening was continued by a new generation of preachers, notably Dwight L. Moody, who built an evangelist empire with the support of robber barons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Cooke. Under the umbrella of Moody’s movement, a new approach to the doctrine of the end times arose. Most America Protestant theologians had believed that the Second Coming would follow a millennium of improvement, in which America would lead the way, but in the late nineteenth century Reuben Torrey and John Nelson Darby popularized the doctrine of dispensational premillenarianism. Darby introduced the con-

Garry Wills is the author of more than thirty books on religion, history, and American culture. He has a Ph.D. in classics from Yale University and has taught at The Johns Hopkins and Northwestern Universities. In 1993, he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992). He has also won the National Medal for the Humanities and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Head and Heart / wills

319

cept of the Rapture, in which virtuous Christians would be taken to Heaven, followed by Tribulation, the final conflict between Good and Evil foretold in the Book of Revelation, and then the Final Judgment. Though, as Wills demonstrates, the scriptural justification for the concept of the Rapture is dubious, the concept has proven extremely popular. In the 1910’s, Lyman and Milton Stewart produced a series of twelve volumes of essays titled The Fundamentals, which led to the term “fundamentalism.” While fundamentalism favored an avoidance of the public sphere, other Protestants, particularly Episcopalians and Congregationalists, supported the Social Gospel, an attempt to invoke biblical standards of justice and mercy in programs to improve the condition of the poor. While the Social Gospel seemed dangerously radical at the time, it now seems (to historians such as Richard Hofstadter) somewhat tame and meliorist and fatally compromised by its alliance with American imperialism in the name of an effort to bring the supposed benefits of the American way of life to the rest of the world, welcomed or not. Prohibition represented a major triumph for Protestantism. It is seen as a rural, Evangelical movement, emphasizing the old hostility to Roman Catholics and a newer distrust of the cities, but Wills notes the contribution of progressive and reformist Protestants, such as Frances Willard, who took over the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and broadened its program to include woman suffrage, the eighthour workday, and federal aid to education. Meanwhile, evangelists such as Billy Sunday were bringing their message to ever more Americans. In the 1920’s, Evangelicalism suffered a sudden reversal. The Prohibition they had fought so hard for was disastrous, leading to an increase of lawlessness, and two new embarrassments appeared. The Fundamentalists had noticed their doctrine of biblical inerrancy was threatened by scientific developments, particularly evolution, and where they had sufficient political power, they passed laws against teaching the dangerous theory in public schools. This led to 1925’s Scopes trial, in which Clarence Darrow cross-examined William Jennings Bryan, perhaps America’s most famous Evangelical, about his belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and left him looking like a fool. The 1928 presidential candidacy of Roman Catholic Al Smith brought to the surface an ugly element of anti-Catholicism in much of Protestant America. Victory in World War II was followed by an attempt to downplay religious differences, to see America as a tolerant Judeo-Christian culture. The tolerance, however, was not universal; one reason for the unity among a variety of Jews and Christians was to oppose godless communism, and all forms of godlessness were felt to be outside the consensus. When a series of Supreme Court rulings took religious display out of the public schools, the Evangelicals were particularly offended. A more serious fissure came from the nation’s continuing race problem. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education raised the conflict to a new level. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a student of such Enlightenment Christians as Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr, used the rhetoric of Evangelicalism to call for an end to segregation. The Civil Rights movement ushered in what Wills calls the Rights Revolution, with women, gays, Catholics, Native Americans, and Latinos challenging their place in the great consensus.

320

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Evangelicals were particularly offended by much of the Rights Revolution, seeing abortion and homosexuality as sins and patriarchy as a biblical value. They had been willing to stay out of politics, but they felt that their rights were being attacked, and they began a counterrevolution. One battlefield was the schools. Under the direction of Texans Mel and Norma Gabler, Fundamentalists set up a pressure group to remove offensive concepts such as evolution, multiculturalism, and relativism from schoolchildren’s textbooks. Evangelical Francis Schaeffer proclaimed that secular humanism was a religion and thus that its ideas had no more place in public education than did sectarian dogma. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition became powerful political outlets for Evangelical resentment. A series of professedly Christian presidents—Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—seemed to offer promise but left the Evangelicals unsatisfied. All this leads up to what Wills calls the Karl Rove Era. The election of George W. Bush in 2000 brought in a president of perhaps more Evangelical belief than any of his predecessors and an unprecedented effort to win the support of Evangelicals at the expense of almost all other groups. That program includes federal money for social services going to sectarian organizations with only a pro forma effort to keep it from being used for sectarian purposes, support for the teaching of creationism in the public schools in the guise of intelligent design, and, when Evangelical support was most direly needed, support for a so-called defense of marriage amendment to the Constitution mandating that marriage be between precisely one man and one woman. Wills sees such an effort as an overreach similar to that of Evangelicalism in the 1920’s and urges that the intelligence of Enlightenment and the spirit of Evangelicalism unite again as they have in the past for the public good. Revisiting territory he first explored in Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990), Garry Wills’s Head and Heart: American Christianities presents a thorough and detailed, perhaps at times ponderous, account of the history of Enlightenment and Evangelicalism, their leading figures, and their conflicts, from the Puritans through George W. Bush. A Christian himself, Wills documents the important point that, contrary to the prevalent folklore about America as a Christian nation, the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to introduce a revolutionary new philosophy of disestablishment, where church and state did not interfere with one another. Arthur D. Hlavaty

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 1 (September 1, 2007): 4. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 781. Library Journal 132, no. 15 (September 15, 2007): 66. The New Republic 237, no. 7 (October 8, 2007): 57-60. The New York Times Book Review 157 (December 9, 2007): 10.

321

HEART-SHAPED BOX Author: Joe Hill (1972) Publisher: William Morrow (New York). 374 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Early twenty-first century Locale: Upstate New York and a road trip through the American South, with stops in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana This debut novel by Hill, the second son of Stephen King, focuses on the awakening of a middle-aged rock star who confronts supernatural horror and finds himself Principal characters: Jude Coyne, a witty, world-weary, fiftyfour-year-old heavy metal singer and songwriter Marybeth Stacy Kimball, nicknamed Georgia, Coyne’s twenty-three-year-old Goth girlfriend and former stripper Danny Wooten, Coyne’s personal assistant Craddock McDermott, a deceased Vietnam veteran, hypnotist, and dowser Anna May McDermott, nicknamed Florida, Coyne’s former girlfriend and McDermott’s stepdaughter Jessica Price, Anna’s sister, the seller of the heart-shaped box

Even though it has been three years since his last solo tour and even longer since the dissolution of his legendary heavy metal band, Jude’s Hammer, the charismatic Jude Coyne still looms large in the imagination of his fans. He now lives in relative isolation on a farm in upstate New York with two former groupies, one to keep the persistent public at bay and the other to share his bed, and two devoted dogs, Bonnie and Angus. A collector of occult memorabilia, Coyne places the winning bid on an intriguing Internet auction item—the restless ghost of a woman’s stepfather. When the dead man’s suit arrives from Florida in a heart-shaped box, the plot is set in motion. In chapter 3, which is composed of only one sentence, the reader is told that Coyne puts the box in the “back of his closet,” deciding “to stop thinking about it.” The box, or rather the suit inhabited by the ghost, has plans of its own, and it will not be content to become a static, dust-collecting addition to Coyne’s eccentric collection. The box in question makes indirect reference to the title of a song by Kurt Cobain of the American rock group Nirvana. Cobain was in the habit of exchanging with his wife, Courtney Love, heart-shaped boxes that served as repositories of items of significance to their relationship. According to some accounts, one such box is preserved by Love as a container for a lock of Cobain’s hair and a suicide note written shortly before he died in 1994, presumably from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

322

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

This real-life memento mori parallels the fictional items that make up Coyne’s somewhat gruesome collection, such as a “threehundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch” and a “stiff and worn noose that had been used to hang a man in England at the turn of the nineteenth century.” However, the box that a UPS truck delivers to Coyne’s door contains more than a vaguely sinister inanimate object; apparently the “black Johnny Cash suit” is haunted with the malevolent spirit of Craddock McDermott, a self-styled “mentalist” who is ostensibly out for revenge over the death of a stepdaughter that he accuses Coyne of having exploited and then abandoned. As his name implies, Jude (Judas) Coyne is no stranger to betrayal. Perhaps, for example, he could have done something to save his bandmates Dizzy, who died from AIDS contracted through sharing contaminated syringes, and Jerome, who drove his Porsche into a tree in despair over his divorce and failed finances. The novel hints that Coyne’s own personal emphasis on self-reliance may have been his justification for expecting others to fix their own problems. Perhaps he could have been more understanding in the case of his girlfriend Anna May, “Florida,” whose most recent breakdown unnerved him to the point that he sent her back to her dysfunctional family and thus sealed her doom. Her sister, Jessica Price, who sets up the online auction, claims that Coyne is to blame for Anna May’s suicide because of his presumably corruptive influence. Most reviewers have pointed out that it is impossible to avoid comparing the work of Joe Hill to that of his famous father, horror genre icon Stephen King. In regard to Heart-Shaped Box, Hill’s first novel, the reader soon discovers that the predicament facing the main character places Jude Coyne in much the same camp as Arnie Cunningham in Christine (1983) or Paul Sheldon in Misery (1987). The beginning of each of these novels finds the protagonist already cut off from others and from himself; the crisis that arises from the advent of some outside threat impels the main character, ironically enough, to make positive adjustments by reexamining his past and reprioritizing his future. In the case of Coyne, the clear and present danger posed by the ghost of McDermott, who is hell-bent on destroying the aging death metal rock star and anyone who comes to his aid, requires that the would-be victim learn all he can about his dark adversary. Coincidentally enough, as he peels back the layers of McDermott’s biography, Coyne sheds successive strata of his own carefully constructed public persona. McDermott’s specialty is psychological coercion, and he preys on other people’s weaknesses. In the case of Coyne’s assistant, Danny Wooten, McDermott works on the young man’s unhappy memories of his mother’s suicide to get him to follow suit. The relentless ghost very nearly succeeds in getting Coyne’s girlfriend, Marybeth, or “Georgia,” and even Coyne himself to do the same. The son of writers Stephen and Tabitha King, Joe Hill abbreviated his name, Joseph Hillstrom King, to honor a legendary labor leader and to conceal his formidable family connection until he could succeed in his own right. Hill revealed his identity two years after his first collection of short stories, Twentieth Century Ghosts, was published to considerable acclaim in 2005.

Heart-Shaped Box / hill

323

When he is not fending off the very active mind-bending assaults aimed at him and his companions, Coyne tries to get a fix on McDermott’s past life, both by initiating online inquiries and by perusing correspondence from Anna May subsequent to her return to her family, so that he can find some way to rid himself of the ghost. Over time, Coyne pieces together a sinister biographical trajectory beginning with McDermott’s tenure as an Army captain in Vietnam, where he mastered the darker side of “psychological operations,” to his return to the rural South, where he used hypnosis to manipulate and abuse others, including members of his own family. Each additional piece of the puzzle that Coyne collects offers him a corresponding opportunity to revisit parts of his own troubled past and reevaluate his personal choices. In trying to find the tools to battle his supernatural foe, he gradually discovers that he has much more in common with his nemesis and Anna May, their collective victim, than he had at first supposed. The emotional barriers that he has erected between himself and others are traceable to his formative years on a pig farm near Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, which is coincidentally the final destination of a frantic road trip taken by Coyne and Marybeth with the ghost of McDermott driving a smoke-colored Chevy pickup truck in hot pursuit. During those tense hours in his rebuilt 1965 Mustang, Coyne, a man who had long been “out of practice at apologies and loathed explanations,” opens up to Marybeth and unleashes a host of heretofore submerged memories about his abusive father and passive mother. His father, Martin Cowzynski, now on his deathbed, had always been an embittered man who terrorized his wife and tried to do the same to his son, whose left hand, his “chord-making hand,” he injured on purpose when Coyne disobeyed him by taking money from the family cash box and entering a battle of the bands contest in New Orleans. Thus, Anna May’s childhood, as well as Jude’s, were both shadowed by parental abuse, but while she tried to flee her past by reading palms, taking drugs, and sleeping with strange men, he finds his escape route in music. Coyne eventually comes to realize, however, that while rock and roll may have given him a measure of control over his personal world, the attendant lifestyle enabled him “to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences.” This careless disregard for the dividends of his success is exemplified by his calling his successive girlfriends by the state of their origin and refusing to learn their real names. The flight south to find answers, first to Jessica Price’s home in Florida and then to his father’s farm in Louisiana, has its own musical accompaniment. As readers might expect from a novel about a rock star written by the son of a famous father, whose own amateur rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, is a popular culture footnote, the book is peppered with references to other musical personalities, particularly of the Goth rock variety like Ozzy Osbourne and Trent Reznor, and to the titles of real songs, such as “If You Want Blood You’ve Got It” by AC/DC, one of Stephen King’s favorite groups. In fact, it can be argued that the whole novel comes with a sound track. Much of the key background music is supplied by Coyne himself, since the author makes timely reference to fictional compositions by the protagonist, tunes that serve

324

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

more than one purpose. At times, the titles offer commentary on the present situation; halfway through the novel, for example, on the road trip south, Coyne wakes up in a motel in Virginia with a melody in his head and jots down the beginning of a song he entitles “Drink to the Dead,” a reference to the many ghosts in his life. It also exemplifies Coyne’s compositional technique; he takes melodies that echo older musical traditions and dresses them “in black” and teaches them “to scream”—all part of the brooding Goth metal tradition based primarily on nineteenth century Gothic literature and twentieth century horror films. In this regard, Coyne is fully aware that his successful career is the result, in part, of his having plugged into a dark core in the collective human psyche. He himself admits that he makes “melodies out of hate and perversion and pain” and that his fans respond to the messages in his songs because they echo what is already inside their own heads. In this one essential way, Coyne is very much like his ghostly adversary in that both acquired power over others by plumbing the negative spaces deep within. Coyne’s musical artistry also sets him apart from McDermott, about whom Anna once asserted: “You never met a man with less music in him.” His coldhearted power is essentially mental, whereas Coyne taps into an emotional reservoir in his listeners. In fact, as Coyne and the reader discover late in the novel, music can draw a magic circle around any musician and his audience. The reader is offered proof of this assertion when, in his final struggle with McDermott’s ghost, Coyne rehearses his new song in his head, and the tune drowns out his enemy’s hypnotic voice. He had been warned earlier by Georgia’s grandmother, Bammy, that “the dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.” Over time, Coyne had succeeded in burying his own vivid memories of victimization beneath a carefully constructed rock star identity, replete with the “armor” of his big black jacket, black boots, and “flowing black beard that came almost to his chest.” The sudden intrusion of the ghost of McDermott in his life unlocks his own personal demons. This is the essential appeal of the novel. On one level, it is a classic horror narrative, marked by a propulsive momentum that is part battle royal and part car chase. On another level, it is a tale of self-discovery whereby the reader shares with the main character carefully crafted moments of incremental self-realization. For those who like action and an eye for detail, the novel meets these requirements; for those who revel in texts that explore the inner lives of their characters, Hill provides these pleasures as well. In basic structure, the novel is divided into four parts, each with its own heading: “Black Dog,” “Ride On,” “Hurt,” and “Alive”; these subtitles signal the basic course of the story line. In its suspenseful dramatic arc, Joe Hill’s debut novel provides a deeply satisfying tale of survival, both physical and psychological, against forces from without and within. S. Thomas Mack

Heart-Shaped Box / hill

325

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 7. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 111. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 11, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2006): 50. Rolling Stone, no. 1022 (March 22, 2007): 26. USA Today, February 12, 2007, p. 1.

326

HENRY JAMES GOES TO PARIS Author: Peter Brooks (1938) Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 255 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Literary history and biography Time: 1875-1916 Locale: Cambridge, Massachusetts; France; England; Switzerland; Italy; and Spain A fascinating account of the American novelist’s time in Paris, where he meets influential French writers and encounters French art Principal personages: Henry James, an American novelist William James, his brother, a philosopher Gustave Flaubert, a French novelist Émile Zola, a French novelist Guy de Maupassant, a French fiction writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a Russian novelist Paul Zhukovsky, a Russian aesthete Hendrik Andersen, an American sculptor Charles Sanders Peirce, an American scientist and philosopher William Dean Howells, an American novelist and editor of The Atlantic

Henry James (1843-1916) is often described as the father of the modernist novel, paving the way for such early twentieth century writers as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Though James began publishing novels and short stories in the 1870’s, it was not until the 1890’s that he began breaking away from the tenets of the realism that dominated American fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century and formulated a more distinctive style. James’s later method offers a more internalized, psychological, and impressionistic look at the lives of his characters. In Henry James Goes to Paris, a combination of biography, literary history, and criticism, Peter Brooks argues that James’s mature style owes an indelible debt to such French writers as Gustave Flaubert, whom James liked more as a man than as a writer, and to the French Impressionist painters. James was not initially receptive to these influences but slowly absorbed techniques of perspective and representation that he applied to such novels as The Golden Bowl (1904). At thirty-two, with his first novel, Roderick Random (1875), just published, James decided to polish his burgeoning talent by living in Paris and make what Brooks terms a “radical break” with his family and native country. Doing so was not that easy, with the young writer receiving a series of nagging letters from his mother about how wasteful he was being. James sent all his earnings back home to Cambridge,

Henry James Goes to Paris / brooks

327

Massachusetts, not only to repay his father’s investment but also to establish his inde- Peter Brooks has taught at Yale pendence. Henry James Goes to Paris is a University since 1965, becoming portrait of the evolution of a great writer Sterling Professor of Comparative and the development of a personality as well, Literature and French in 2001. His as James progressed from a slightly naïve other books include The Novel of loner who writes to a man at ease in soci- Worldliness (1969), The Melodramatic ety and acclaimed as the Master. This jour- Imagination (1976), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), the novel World ney, as Brooks painstakingly recounts, was Elsewhere (1999), and Troubling not smooth. Brooks’s analysis is built around Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law the irony of the young James rejecting works and Literature (2000). He has also by Flaubert, Claude Monet, and others that worked on scholarly editions of novels contributed to the development of modernism by Henry James and Honoré de Balzac. only to become the embodiment of modern ism himself. “James’s year in Paris,” Brooks writes, “seems to be all about missing things on the spot—but somehow storing them away for later retrieval and reinterpretation”—a concise statement of the purpose of Henry James Goes to Paris. In examining how James’s use of point of view changed during his career, the key words in Brooks’s study are “perspective” and “representation,” which he defines as “the use of signs, written or pictorial, that stand for and give a picture of the world.” In 1875, James was committed to the detailed representation of society practiced by Honoré de Balzac, his friend Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, who endlessly discussed novelistic theory with the young writer and introduced him to Flaubert, and George Eliot, seen by James as the greatest novelist of the time and an example the French were foolish not to emulate. James considered these writers more concerned with humanity than were Flaubert and his circle. He was also perplexed by their cultural insularity, particularly their refusal to read the English novelists. James expected his time in Paris to be nurturing to him as a young writer but found the French surprisingly lacking in what he needed. He complained to his friend and editor William Dean Howells that Turgenev “is worth the whole heap of them, and yet he himself swallows them down in a manner that excites my extreme wonder.” By 1884, James had modified this view, telling Howells of his respect for the French: “In spite of their ferocious pessimism and their handling of unclean things, they are at least serious and honest.” Through Flaubert, James met Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola and exchanged visits with them over the years, yet Brooks finds no evidence that these French writers ever read James’s fiction. Such a snub did not deter James from writing about the French. The collection French Poets and Novelists (1878) was followed by many more essays over the years as he came to recognize a maturity missing from many English and most American writers. Typical is “The Lesson of Balzac,” from 1905, in which James pits his favorite against Flaubert and finds in favor of Balzac, despite acknowledging his frequent artistic lapses. James saw Flaubert as dealing only with the surface of life, while Balzac probed beneath the surface, a view exactly opposite of that held by many

328

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

critics. Part of the paradox of such an attitude is James’s praise for the spiritual intensity of Balzac in contrast to what Brooks terms Flaubert’s “detached spectatorship,” a criticism many level against the Master himself. “This is very strange,” writes Brooks, “since James by 1902 was pre-eminently a perspectival novelist,” interested in “the limitations and uncertainties imposed upon observation.” While Brooks concentrates on the opposing lessons James learned directly from Balzac and Flaubert, what the novelist took from French painting came more indirectly. Just as writers and others have been influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud without ever having read his works, James took concepts of representation and perspective from the Impressionists as if by osmosis. James was not impressed by Monet and his colleagues in the 1870’s, preferring the academic painters favored by the French cultural establishment, and when he attended the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London in 1912, art critic Roger Fry tried and failed to explain how Flaubert and Paul Cézanne achieved the same effects in the manner in their representation of their subjects. Nevertheless, argues Brooks, “Starting in the mid-1890’s, James does produce work that parallels [Georges] Seurat’s pointillisme and anticipates [Pablo] Picasso’s cubism.” Brooks sees a connection in how the narrators of The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Golden Bowl try to deduce and to interpret from evidence that never stays put, both because they are moving and because the observed itself alters under the observing eye. Brooks explains that all of James’s fiction from this period is concerned with how his characters see and know, shifting his observers from central to marginal positions and their perceptions from direct and complete to indirect and partial. In doing so, James, as his greatest biographer, Leon Edel, observed, left the nineteenth century behind and paved the way for the modernists. Brooks illustrates his thesis by analyzing The American (1877), written during James’s Paris sojourn, set in Paris, and strongly influenced by Balzac, The Tragic Muse (1890), also set in France, What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Golden Bowl. He argues that James does not seem to know what he wants to achieve in The American and shows how James, in his preface to the New York edition of his works, appears not to understand what The Tragic Muse is about, one of several instances in which Brooks invites controversy with committed Jamesians. He is particularly convincing in his view of What Maisie Knew as James’s most French novel in its seamless overlapping of character, theme, and style: “Maisie anticipates Michel Foucault in the understanding that knowledge that would be power must conceal its face.” Such examples demonstrate James’s maturity as an artist and the incremental effect the French had on his evolving style and treatment of his subjects. Though not intended strictly as a biography, Henry James Goes to Paris offers a fascinating portrait of its subject, a man of many contradictions. On one hand, James was open to life and welcomed new experiences, even enjoying a bullfight in Spain. On the other hand, he was capable of Puritan reserve. Brooks strongly disagrees with the biographers, especially Sheldon Novick, author of Henry James: The Young Master (1996) and Henry James: The Mature Master (2007), that the novelist consummated any of his relationships with men. Brooks believes that, far from being sad and

Henry James Goes to Paris / brooks

329

unfulfilled because of his failure to have a stable homosexual relationship, James was essentially happy and content and far from the hesitant, indecisive characters he wrote about. Even though Henry James Goes to Paris is not presented with the theoretical baggage that makes much literary scholarship heavy going, it is still aimed at serious Jamesians, not general readers. Some of the most fascinating sections (playing charades with Turgenev) are the biographical passages that Brooks parcels out sparingly, and he might have provided a better balance between the factual and analytical sides of his treatment of James and his circle, especially more about his exposure to French painters. Still, there are many lovely vignettes, as with the brief portrait of Charles Sanders Peirce, with whom James dined weekly during 1875-1876. Imagining the conversations between the budding novelist and the distinguished but soon-to-be disgraced astronomer and physicist, who also founded pragmatism and semiotics, Brooks writes, “Their dialogue, unrecorded, ought to be reinvented in a play by Tom Stoppard.” Several times, Brooks refers to the young James as “prissy,” especially regarding his appreciation of French literature. In reviews and essays, James expressed shock at the “immortalities” he found in certain poems, stories, and novels. As late as 1903, James was preoccupied with Zola’s “indecency” and lack of discriminating taste. Ironically, his brother, William James, the eminent philosopher and psychologist, who could be even more stuffy than his younger brother, liked the controversial poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Brooks dwells on James’s sexuality, his friendships with Paul Zhukovsky and Hendrik Andersen, to establish a context for the writer’s ambivalence about sex and his trepidation over its treatment by French writers, both colored by the Cambridge values he struggled to overcome. James is characterized as stimulated by sexuality in private conversations, being delighted by George Sand’s sex life, but censorious in public comments. Interestingly, Brooks never addresses the repressed sexuality theme in The Turn of the Screw (1898), one of the most famous treatments of this topic in all of literature. He devotes considerable attention to James’s views of sex because French writers were so much more open about it and seem to have influenced James’s greater openness toward sexual matters at the end of his career, especially in The Golden Bowl. What is most important about James, Brooks argues, and what he took from the French was an evolving attitude toward human relations and the strengths and limitations of examining these relations in the novel. James grew steadily as an artist to a degree rare among novelists of any nationality but especially among Americans. Much more important than being a forerunner of modernism was James’s establishment of the novel as a serious means of looking at all of life’s complexities and contradictions: “James did more than any other novelist to establish the writing and reading of novels as a discipline.” Brooks makes a strong case that James could not have achieved this goal, could not have become the Master, without the influence of French writers and painters. Michael Adams

330

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources The Boston Globe, April 29, 2007, p. E7. Gay & Lesbian Review 14, no. 4 (July/August, 2007): 10-12. Irish Times, May 12, 2007, p. 153. Library Journal 132, no. 6 (April 1, 2007): 89. The New York Review of Books 54 (October 11, 2007): 43. The New Yorker 83, no. 8 (April 16, 2007): 153. The Times Literary Supplement, July 13, 2007, p. 7. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 75 (March 31, 2007): 11.

331

HOUSE OF MEETINGS Author: Martin Amis (1949) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 242 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1919-2004 Locale: Siberia, Moscow, and Chicago A Russian man lives through World War II, the gulag, post-Stalinist Russia, and a time in the United States, suffering and doing much evil Principal characters: The narrator, an eighty-five-year-old man who tells of his experiences in World War II and in postwar Russia Jocelyn, his wife from 1969 to 1982 Venus, his stepdaughter Lev, his younger stepbrother Zoya, Lev’s wife, promiscuous and oddly beautiful

Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, is chiefly known for his novel Lucky Jim (1954), a superbly constructed traditional comedy. Kingsley’s subsequent novels, and there were many, demonstrate how a talented author can work in traditional genres. Martin Amis’s career, in contrast, reflects his ability to explore different ways of writing fiction. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), dealt energetically, honestly, and humorously with adolescent sexuality. The hero of Money (1984) is a bumbling British pornographer loose in New York. London Fields (1989) is a phantasmagoric look at the horrors of the future. Time’s Arrow’s (1991) time scheme runs backward. The Information (1995) is a rather bland story told in the present, perhaps to settle one of Amis’s personal grudges. One critic has labeled Yellow Dog (2003) a postmodern self-parody. In short, one never knows what Martin Amis is going to do. House of Meetings does not disappoint. It is an epistolary novel containing only two letters. Most of the novel takes the form of a long letter written by the eighty-fiveyear-old unnamed narrator in 2004 to his twenty-four-year-old stepdaughter, Venus. The novel includes footnotes explaining the historical background of the events that shaped the narrator’s life, especially the deaths of Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Nikita S. Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. (The readers discover near the novel’s end that these footnotes have been added by Venus, presumably for the reading public upon publication.) Because the novel is written in the first person, the reader has no authorial comments to verify the narrator’s statements, and because the narrator is garrulous and disorganized, the story does not unfold in a straightforward manner. The reader learns that the narrator has just been in Chicago, that he was in a Siberian gulag many years ago, that he is now returning to Siberia, and that he was

332

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

once a flourishing capitalist in Russia. The narrator’s tale unfolds in swirling fashion, gradually zeroing in on the most important thing that he has to tell Venus. Readers will find the story hard to follow, but in general it goes something like this: The narrator was born in 1919 in a Russian village; his brother Lev was born some years later. The narrator fought in World War II during 1944 and 1945. He admits that in the later months of service he raped many East Martin Amis is the author of twelve German women. Soon after the war, a strange novels, including The Rachel Papers and desirable woman, Zoya, arrives in his vil(1973), winner of the Somerset lage, and his brother Lev marries her. Shortly Maugham Award, Time’s Arrow (1991), Night Train (1997), and Yellow thereafter, the narrator is for some reason, or perhaps for no reason, sent to a gulag (a Dog (2003), as well as many works of forced-labor camp) in Siberia above the Arcshort fiction and nonfiction. He lives in London. tic Circle near Predposylov. Minor offenses could get one sent to a gulag: For instance, one of the narrator’s girlfriends was dispatched for arriving at work late on three occasions. Life in the labor camp is terrible. The inmates are divided into various ranks, each of which picks on the others. Packs of wild dogs roam everywhere. Some time later, Lev arrives in camp. Whereas the narrator is forceful and determined, Lev is passive and poetical. When conjugal visits are allowed, Zoya arrives, and she and Lev spend a night in the House of Meetings, a shack partway up a mountain. After Stalin’s death in 1953, things change. The prisoners are released. Lev and Zoya are together, and the narrator begins to make good money as a television repairman, later as a creator of robotics in preparation for another world war. Zoya leaves Lev in 1962, and the narrator marries Jocelyn in 1969; the marriage lasts thirteen years. In 1983, the narrator receives a box containing Lev’s possessions, including an envelope with a long letter from Lev to him, a letter the narrator decides not to read until he too is near death. When Zoya visits the narrator in his Moscow apartment, she behaves provocatively; the sex they have could probably be called rape. In 1989, the narrator marries Venus’s mother. Finally, in 2004, as an old man of eighty-five years, the narrator returns to Russia, to Siberia, to the site of the gulag and the House of Meetings. Shortly after he completes his visit, the narrator is taken ill, probably with AIDS, and is hospitalized. The narrator opens Lev’s envelope, which contains a number of poems and a letter to him—the second letter of this epistolary novel. Lev’s letter contains many accusations but ends by wishing him well and explaining his admiration. In an epilogue to Venus, the narrator gives her a great deal of advice and tells her about his hospitalization. He will soon be taken to a small room where he will be given a lethal injection.

House of Meetings / amis

333

For all its precise dating, the novel can be confusing. Many references are unclear. The reader is not always sure where the action being described is taking place. Transitions are often abrupt and confusing. Moreover, the narrator’s method of telling his story is the most confusing element. As he gradually focuses on what happens during his 2004 trip to the gulag and his reading of Lev’s letter, he often switches from decade to decade with bewildering speed. Nevertheless, the attentive reader will have a general sense of the story. Despite these confusions, House of Meetings is a powerful novel. Amis’s earlier novels were often hurried or petulant or overemphatic. This novel is the work of a mature artist. It is very intense but never rushed and is always thoughtful. Amis’s fecundity of invention is amazing; readers will be constantly surprised by the turns of ideas. The novel’s originality and density are some of its most admirable qualities. The quality of writing is reflected in numerous passages. When the narrator looks out his Moscow apartment window, he sees “the Asiatic frenzy of the Kremlin.” The narrator describes a river port in Siberia: “It is a Mars of rust, in various hues and concentrations. Some of the surfaces have dimmed to a modest apricot, losing their barnacles and asperities. Elsewhere it looks like arterial blood, newly shed, newly dried.” About the pigs in the gulag Amis writes, “The only suggestion of moisture and mobility in their gray, closed faces was the vague lavatorial humidity that came off them when they were roused.” When the narrator sees Zoya in the camp, he notes “that famous tottering swagger—it set a world in motion.” Describing the warfare between two different factions in the gulag, the narrator compares them to “crocodiles in the . . . zoo”: “Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis. Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity.” The overall effect of the novel is impressive. At the end, Amis acknowledges some of his sources—obviously Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Arkhipelag GULag, 1918-1956 (1973-1975; The Gulag Archipelago, 1974-1978) but many others as well. He had explored the novel’s territory in the earlier nonfiction book Koba the Dread (2002), but the territory of House of Meetings is so wonderfully strange and unfamiliar that readers can be forgiven for thinking that Amis has created the whole world of the novel out of his imagination. What makes up this world? Life in the gulag is next to unbearable. Its lies north of the Arctic Circle and is therefore bitter cold. The scenery is like a wasteland: At one point, the narrator looks around and cannot see a living tree. Dirt is everywhere. The stench is unbearable. The slaves have been divided into a hierarchy of groups that fight, mutilate, and kill each other. Sadistic violence is everywhere—and even selfmutilation by swallowing glass and nails. The slaves are terrorized into working at silly tasks. (At one point, the narrator makes toys.) Their food is wretched. There is plenty of sex, but it is loveless. Many people die; their bodies are eaten by the packs of wild dogs. Russia is a total state, “with your sufferings selected, as if off a menu, by your sworn enemy.” In the gulag, “the Russian totality is emplaced. . . . [The] situation cannot be worsened.” Once the narrator and his brother are freed, the situation is not much better, especially in Lev’s opinion. Lev, who had been passive in the gulag, continues his decline,

334

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

writing poems that express his emotional emptiness. Making love becomes work to him. Zoya leaves him, and he dies. The narrator seemingly fares better. He has always been the stronger, more determined brother. He makes money, but it does not make him happy. Greed is at the heart of a particular kind of Russian capitalism. Sex is still rape without joy or love. Society is almost as violent as it was in the gulag. In general, the narrator concludes that every Russian knows that conditions are never what they seem. “All you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks.” The narrator’s melancholic wife reads the kind of English poetry her husband despises. Lev accuses his brother of having only two emotions, lust and hate. The narrator himself acknowledges that the state has robbed him of his power to love. He is somewhat redeemed by his confessions and by saying that in the end he has learned to hate hate itself. Even so, he tells Venus that “nobody ever gets over anything.” Amis’s novel presents a terrifying picture of life in Russia. The narrator notes that he and Russia are near death. (His final words are “Russia is dying. And I’m glad.”) The birthrate is steadily becoming lower than the death rate. The novel is a horrifying picture of the Soviet and later Russian state and the its effects on its citizens. The work can be characterized as Amis’s vision of hell on earth, a vision of a particular hell created in the twentieth century. George Soule

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 6. The Economist 381 (October 14, 2006): 88. Entertainment Weekly, no. 916 (January 19, 2007): 84. Esquire 147, no. 1 (January, 2007): 34. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 22 (November 15, 2006): 1140. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 105. London Review of Books 29, no. 1 (January 4, 2007): 14-17. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 3 (March 1, 2007): 14-17. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 14, 2007): 1-12. The Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 2006, pp. 21-22.

335

THE HOUSE THAT GEORGE BUILT With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty Author: Wilfrid Sheed (1930) Publisher: Random House (New York). 335 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Music Time: 1920-1950 Locale: New York City and Hollywood An entertaining, lively survey of the lives and works of the great American composers of the golden age of popular song from the 1920’s to the 1950’s Principal personages: Harold Arlen (1905-1986), Irving Berlin (1888-1989), Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981), George Gershwin (1898-1937), Jerome Kern (1885-1945), Johnny Mercer (1907-1976), Cole Porter (1891-1964), Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), Harry Warren (1893-1981), and Vincent Youmans (1898-1946), American composers and songwriters

Wilfrid Sheed has long been an admirer of the gifted American songwriters who provided the enduring melodies associated with the era of popular music from the end of World War I to the onset of rock and roll during the 1950’s. He has now written a series of essays about the important innovators and influences in the songwriting tradition. The result is The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, a book that fans of these melodies will want to own both for the insights that Sheed provides and the many superb anecdotes he recounts about these composers and their works. Sheed knew many of the songwriters and their intellectual world, and he has performed a labor of love in this volume. He is an unabashed admirer of the popular song as an art form and proceeds to make a strong case that the composers enriched the culture both of their nation and the world with their enduring melodies. The book grew out of essays he wrote for magazines such as The New Yorker about the Tin Pan Alley greats of that vanished era, and now he has collected them into a single volume. Sheed does not have the analytic depth of a Gene Lees or a Will Friedwald (neither of whom is mentioned in the text), but his enthusiasm for his subject carries the reader along. George Gershwin is, as the title suggests, the dominant presence in the narrative. A composer who spun off melodies with ease, he was also a generous patron of his fellow songwriters. Gershwin was never jealous of the success of his colleagues. In

336

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ways large and small he encouraged them to excel, confident that their triumphs would only enhance his own achievements. That warmth of spirit pervades Sheed’s sketch of Gershwin’s all-too-brief career. Sheed cap tures well the ebullient essence of Gershwin. The rest of the book proceeds through a series of biographical essays on other famous and lesser-known composers, from Cole Porter to the less-celebrated Harry Warren. Sheed is especially tart about the talented but unlikeable Richard Rodgers, whose capacity for self-involvement exceeded even his formidable gift for producing singable melodies. Sheed is in the camp of those who believe that Rodgers did his best work in the 1920’s and 1930’s with lyricist Lorenz Hart. Sheed argues that Oscar Hammerstein II, the partner of Rodgers on such shows as Oklahoma! and South Pacific, was innovative in his choice of themes but very much a practitioner of the older style of operettas. The life of Rodgers provides an edgy chapter amid the book’s warmth and nostalgia for its subjects. Johnny Mercer is another enigma in Sheed’s analysis. Building on the analysis of Lees and Philip Furia in their recent biographies of Mercer, Sheed probes the mystery of Mercer’s large talent and manifest character flaws. In many respects, Mercer was as generous as Gershwin and very popular with his colleagues, yet at the same time he was a depressed alcoholic, trapped in an unhappy marriage, and longing for some imagined past tied to the Savannah, Georgia, of his youth. He could embark on profane, drunken tirades at parties and then send roses the next day as a kind of apology. Through it all, as Sheed shows, Mercer was capable of superb tunes and especially brilliant lyrics for such songs as “Laura,” “Skylark,” and “Moon River.” The most enigmatic figure in Sheed’s survey of these composers is Harold Arlen, whose historical fame falls just below that of Gershwin, Rodgers, and Irving Berlin. The writer of such songs as “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “The Man That Got Away,” Arlen collaborated with Mercer and other lyricists to produce a significant body of high-class work. Later in life, however, he fell silent and became more reclusive. In such moments, there is a sense of tragedy that runs through Sheed’s narrative when he demonstrates that individuals who gave so much joy to others struggled with their own personal demons. Sheed’s book abounds with telling phrases and witty observations. In his chapter on Hoagy Carmichael, he recounts how a friend, driving through Carmichael’s native Indiana, came upon a full chorus, standing on a hill, singing the composer’s “One Morning in May.” There are equally good insights into how Frank Loesser, working with author Abe Burrows, took the stories of Damon Runyon and transformed them into the wonderful score for Guys and Dolls. The perceptive and sympathetic chapter on Duke Ellington’s many hits is another strong point of the book. In his treatment of songwriters from Hollywood, Sheed deals with the life and times of Jimmy Van Heusen. Born Edward Chester Babcock, Van Heusen was a gifted airplane pilot as well as a songwriter. He tested aircraft for the military during

Wilfrid Sheed is a prolific novelist and social critic. Born in England, he has written for The New Yorker and other magazines.

The House That George Built / sheed

337

World War II while writing songs for Hollywood movies such as the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road to . . .” pictures. Hope used Van Heusen’s real name for the character he played in these comedic pictures. After the war, Van Heusen became a member of Frank Sinatra’s hard-drinking entourage. Through all of the dissipation of the Sinatra “Rat Pack,” Van Heusen continued to turn out tuneful melodies for his talented friend. Little known to the public, Van Heusen comes to life thanks to Sheed’s graceful prose. Like so many of the writers whom Sheed discusses, Van Heusen would be an ideal subject for a full biography. Sheed has a good eye for the little-known songwriting career that illuminates the inner workings of the craft. Vincent Youmans, the composer of “Tea for Two” and “More Than You Know,” among other hits of the 1920’s, was intent on eclipsing the fame of Gershwin. Unlike Gershwin, who wanted all songwriters to succeed, Youmans resented his rival’s success and sought to outdo the more-talented Gershwin throughout the 1920’s. For health reasons and emotional problems, Youmans abandoned songwriting for the last decade of his life and died in relative obscurity. A brief summary cannot do justice to the riches of Sheed’s volume. He has a very attractive discussion of the melodic genius of Jerome Kern, the author of such hits as “Old Man River,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “I’m Old Fashioned.” From his early career when he wrote “They Didn’t Believe Me” (1914) through the pathbreaking musical Show Boat, Kern fused the operetta tradition with the newer American rhythms. He made the transition to Hollywood in an outstanding Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Swing Time (1936), which in addition to “The Way You Look Tonight” included standards such as “Pick Yourself Up” and “Bojangles of Harlem.” Collaborating with Dorothy Fields and Mercer, Kern was still turning out excellent songs until 1945, when he died of a heart attack. As far as soaring melodies were concerned, throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s the song was Kern. The chapter on Carmichael is equally well done. Sheed makes the excellent point that both Carmichael and Mercer, while both well within the Tin Pan Alley tradition, brought elements of rural America to the craft of writing songs. When the two men collaborated on a tune such as “Lazy Bones” in the 1930’s, they tapped into currents of midwestern and southern life. Carmichael created other alluring melodies such as “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind” as well as a persona of the piano-playing Hoosier that made him a wellrecognized figure in motion pictures and on television. At the purple dusk of twilight time, in the cool, cool, cool of the evening, or traveling in moon country, Carmichael was an American original. There are occasions in the book, such as the treatment of Kern and Porter, when Sheed’s dense and allusive style seems somewhat overdone. Intent on impressing the reader with his knowledge of these men and the inside information he possesses on their careers, Sheed often strains for a literary effect with words poetic. Readers will have to bring a sound knowledge of their own to the narrative in order to grasp some of the references that Sheed is making to contemporary events in the lives of Porter and others.

338

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The continuing mystery that Sheed confronts is to determine where this artistic flowering in popular song came from and why it ended when it did. The author identifies the confluence of ragtime and jazz, a cohort of gifted writers in New York City at a time when Broadway flourished, and a receptive popular audience as significant elements in the rise of these songwriters. A literate public sang the words and danced to the melodies in a fusion of sophisticated lyrics and tunes that could be hummed by one and all. On a summer’s night in that vanished time, the bands at the pavilions and the jukeboxes in the roadhouses pulsed to the big hits of that year. The bobbysoxers and the lindy hoppers did indeed make one Coke last them until it was time to scram to hear more Benny Goodman, Kay Kyser, and Glenn Miller. Within three decades, however, the golden age of popular song was over, and the tastes of the public had shifted to rock and roll and its subsequent offshoots. Answers to what happened to the golden age have ranged from the rise of bebop and modern jazz to the strikes of the American Federation of Musicians, led by James C. Petrillo. In the case of the musicians union, the wartime months when no songs were heard from composers associated with the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) allowed the founders of Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) to saturate the airwaves with country and western songs. The rise of the Sun Belt after World War II and the emergence of such performers as Elvis Presley wrote an end to the years when the Cole Porters and Johnny Mercers shaped America’s musical tastes. Whether these developments were a good or bad thing will depend on an individual’s taste in popular music. For some, the harmonic inventiveness of a Kern, the witty lyrics of a Porter, and the swinging rhythms of a Mercer have a timeless quality that rock and roll has never equaled or even approached. That these melodies have become “standards” attests to their emotional appeal and musical durability. Wilfrid Sheed has done much to recapture that vanished era when New York crowds punished the parquet, dancers stomped at the Savoy Ballroom, and everyone sang of the gal in Kalamazoo. In Sheed’s memories of these composers and in his evocation of their greatest hits, the reader is treated to a concert in the psyche as one melody and then another ring in the mind. Sheed is right: George Gershwin and his colleagues did something eternal in their brief period of popularity and creativity. Though the Rockies may crumble and Gibraltar may tumble, the love that these songwriters conveyed in their timeless classics is indeed here to stay. Lewis L. Gould

Review Sources Downbeat 74, no. 12 (December, 2007): 91. Fortune 156, no. 3 (August 6, 2007): 102. Harper’s Magazine 315 (July, 2007): 90. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 437. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 93.

The House That George Built / sheed

Maclean’s 120, nos. 35/36 (September 10, 2007): 96-97. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 13 (August 16, 2007): 14-16. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 22, 2007): 1-10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 20 (May 14, 2007): 46. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 152 (June 30, 2007): P6.

339

340

HOW DOCTORS THINK Author: Jerome Groopman (1952) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Boston). 307 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Medicine A mature and sensitive physician offers an inside look into medical thinking and the influences that limit doctors in their practice of medicine Many patients see doctors surrounded by an aura of infallibility. Well trained, well paid, and well dressed in the ubiquitous white coat, physicians are usually assumed to have authority, knowledge, and skills beyond ordinary mortals. Often this confidence is well placed. Doctors on the whole do make good decisions, help people to health and well-being, and care enough to listen to patients. Yet in the real practice of medicine, errors occur. Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think examines the multiple sources of such problems: errors in logic and thinking, lapses in diagnosis and treatment, and the emotional overlay that can impede and compromise communication on both sides of the physician’s desk. The reader will embark on a journey into the psychology of the medical profession. Some pathological conditions resist diagnosis. Misdiagnosis can bring discomfort, disability, and perhaps even death to frustrated patients. In the routine practice of medicine, errors in judgment and choices of treatment happen; such errors are not always caught by the professionals who make them. Patients may not respond to or may react poorly to treatment choices or medication. Without a satisfactory return to health, patients often seek other opinions. They may spend years moving from doctor to doctor seeking answers to their health problems. What is the problem? A doctor may miss key parts of the patient’s history or have preconceptions about what is wrong that block the doctor from discovering the real problem. How do doctors think? How should doctors think? What clouds the pure scientific judgment of the medical professional? The book tries to capture what happens in the doctor’s consciousness as he or she encounters a patient. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of medical practice, from the overwhelming task of the primary care physician to the more narrow (yet not necessarily less error-prone) world of specialists. The book considers everything from scientific studies—one shows that a doctor will ordinarily interrupt a patient after only eighteen seconds of narrative—to the very personal reaction of a doctor as patient, the story of Groopman’s own poignant reaction to an X ray as he is initially misdiagnosed. Young doctors take up to one-half hour to diagnose a patient’s condition; experienced clinicians may reach a conclusion in as little as twenty seconds. This instant messaging of the physician’s process is the result of what is called pattern recognition. Often the doctor is not even aware of what is happening during the process.

How Doctors Think / groopman

341

Sometimes the process of diagnosis results in cognitive errors, which the author ascribes to Professor of medicine at Harvard a lack of recognition of the feelings that ac- Medical School and chief of company the presumed detached process of experimental medicine at Beth Israel thinking. One study suggested that 80 per- Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, cent of misdiagnoses were the result of what Jerome Groopman is one of the world’s Groopman calls “a cascade of cognitive er- leading researchers in cancer and AIDS. He has authored 150 scientific rors” by doctors. articles and several books, including Sometimes the emotional overlay, perhaps An Anatomy of Hope (2004). even a patient’s healthy appearance, may cloud the medical decision making and result in misdiagnosis. Groopman offers richly described anecdotes to illustrate the interjection of the doctor’s feelings into the encounter with patients. Sometimes these emotions result in a lack of mooring to the professional process. Such a disconnect may result in bad medicine. Older doctors were not taught systematically how to think as clinicians. Listening skills and proper observation of patients historically were not part of medical school curricula. Rather, such techniques were supposed to be assimilated, perhaps even subliminally, from observation of wiser and more experienced practitioners. By contrast, the climate of modern medicine favors tests, algorithms, or “decision trees.” Medical students are trained to think systematically about clusters of symptoms, to rule out certain illnesses, and to arrive finally at the correct diagnosis. Modern doctors rely on these tools to lead them to quick and confident diagnoses. Modern medicine does not favor protracted listening to the patient. It assumes that the doctor, with wonderful diagnostic tools, knows the body of the patient better than the patient does. Traveling on the mental highways of this methodology may result in missing a side road of accurate assessment of a serious illness or condition. Even in the face of symptoms that do not quite add up, a common phrase is “We see this sometimes.” In many instances, such a dismissive reaction may be congruent to an insignificant condition; it may be also the prelude to a serious misdiagnosis of a very serious illness. Groopman illustrates this point as he recounts the story of a young boy injured while playing piggyback—a common situation. It was nothing much to diagnose, even though the seriousness of the injury seemed inconsistent with the first medical encounter. When the child returned with further injuries and additional symptoms, it became clear that he was seriously ill and had been overlooked. The primary care physician has a unique and monumental task. He or she must go beyond textbook knowledge to discern whether a complaint is caused by real illness, serious anxiety, or other masking conditions. In what Groopman calls “the monotony of the mundane,” the generalist may miss the diagnosis of a serious condition. The first-line physician, the gatekeeper, must make good decisions beyond the pressure to do more with less, beyond the prejudices brought to the encounter, beyond the social and cultural contexts, and perhaps with limited available data. Sometimes the patient or the family of the patient must be the advocate to push the physician to an

342

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

accurate conclusion. Again, Groopman’s stories from real people illustrate well the point he is trying to make. The author notes that inevitably there is uncertainty in the medical process. Doctors cannot claim perfection in talent or in knowledge about all diseases or pathological conditions. Limitation of time and talent preclude any physician from an encyclopedic knowledge of every disease, symptom, and cure, even for known syndromes. Further, medical knowledge often lags behind the real conditions that confront the physician. The dialogue between what the doctor may or may not know and the everadvancing horizon of medical knowledge is an incomplete conversation. Uncertainty is a hallmark of all medical practice, no matter how good the practitioner. Nevertheless, says Groopman, uncertainty is sometimes an essential ingredient for success in medical practice. Reality is the corrective to any overarching confidence that might color the judgment of the professional. Uncertainty is the window to reality. One of the more interesting chapters, “The Eye of the Beholder,” considers the imprecision of radiology. While those in the specialty are taught to evaluate components of an X ray in a systematic fashion, this very training may cause them to miss important clues. Studies document that errors in diagnosing films occur in more than 20 percent of cases and may be as high as 30 percent. Studies on the performance of radiologists have documented that those who performed poorly were often the same doctors whose self-confidence was rated as high. Groopman suggests that patients should understand the limits of such diagnosis. It is not a bad idea to ask for a second opinion, to enlist “another set of eyes.” Groopman contends that money is the driving force of many practices endemic to modern medicine. He examines in some detail how drug companies push doctors to use profitable new drugs, some of which are designed specifically to treat “diseases” that are a normal part of aging. He narrates extensively the story of a physician who was pressured by a drug representative, her colleagues, and even her spouse to prescribe a new medicine that she thought was not warranted. Patients respond positively to drug advertisements, which are ubiquitous on television, and pressure their doctors to write prescriptions for these medicines. Groopman also examines how there is subtle pressure in the form of drug companies’ promotional products, expensive dinners and outings billed as continuing education, and other incentives that prod physicians to use a particular product. The author quotes studies that support his thesis. Medical practice involves far more than good diagnosis and treatment. In one of the book’s later chapters, “In the Service of the Soul,” Groopman reminds the reader that ultimately the choices concerning an individual’s care plan must take into consideration the character and goals unique to each patient. In the case of cancer, for example, treatment is not simply a matter of odds and statistics for survival. Empowerment of the patient to point the way is particularly important in situations of serious illness, where the patient is more vulnerable than the average healthy person. The author strongly suggests that the choices faced by patients are colored by their own hopes for the rest of their lives. Decisions, he says, are “a mix of science and soul.” In the epilogue, the author recounts an acutely personal anecdote. A patient with pain and inflammation in his hand was sent to have a bone scan. The radiologist, read-

How Doctors Think / groopman

343

ing some spots on the patient’s ribs as metastatic cancer, calls the patient at home. The patient, as might be expected, is devastated. He goes for a confirming set of X rays, which return normal, yet the symptoms of the nonexistent cancer persist for hours beyond the confirmation that no cancer exists. The patient in this story is the author himself. The story illustrates the power of noncognitive aspects of medical diagnosis. The author comments on his own reaction: “ . . . after the shocking news was delivered in a blunt and absolute way, I needed someone to guide me, to provide balance, to raise doubt, to highlight uncertainty—to think for me and with me—because even though in another setting I would intellectually consider that the spots might be artifacts, I couldn’t grasp it viscerally.” He notes the power of the mind over the body, even the mind of a well-trained physician. This book should be on the holiday gift list of every young doctor, and maybe even those of senior practitioners. It could and should be read by patients as well. The author manages to explain complex medical terms and conditions in accessible language without talking down to nonmedically trained readers. He provides definitions and diagrams where appropriate. As the reviewer in Time magazine remarked, the book is a must-read for “every physician who cares for patients and every patient who wishes to get the best care.” Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 21. Business Week, March 26, 2007, p. 140. Commonweal 134, no. 14 (August 17, 2007): 22-23. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 62. The Lancet 367 (March 11, 2007): 807-808. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 9 (May 31, 2007): 16-20. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 1, 2007): 17. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 5 (January 29, 2007): 51. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 63 (March 17, 2007): 12.

344

IF I AM MISSING OR DEAD A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation Author: Janine Latus (1959) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). Illustrated. 309 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1965-2004 Locale: Kalamazoo, Michigan; Columbia, Missouri; Knoxville, Tennessee The author recalls her family background and her father’s casual cruelty toward his children; her struggle to remain in, then end, her volatile marriage; and her sister Amy’s murder by an abusive boyfriend Principal personages: Janine Latus, public radio commentator, freelance writer, and speaker on domestic abuse Kurt (pseudonym), her husband, a physician Amy Lynne Latus, her younger sister

Although the title If I Am Missing or Dead and the dust jacket subtitle A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation led some readers to anticipate a true-crime account of a murder and the subsequent investigation, Janine Latus’s memoir primarily addresses her own early relationships with her father, the men she lived with or dated, and her marriage to “Kurt” (a pseudonym), a doctor whom she eventually divorced. After a one-page prologue introducing the moment that Latus learned of her younger sister Amy’s disappearance, Latus follows with a straightforward time line from the girls’ childhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, through their first relationships with men, their marriages, and then Amy’s divorce and her involvement with the man who would kill her. Janine and Amy Latus were two of five children born to Pete, an insurance salesman, and Marilyn, a qualified nurse who stayed home to raise her children. Pete belittled Janine and her sisters, criticizing their bodies, crudely and publicly assessing their sexual attractiveness, and often making sexual advances toward them. Latus left home before she graduated from high school but stayed in touch with her father, even after he had his twenty-four-year marriage to Marilyn annulled. As Janine dances with her husband at her wedding, Pete comes up behind her and tells her that she has sexy legs; at both of Amy’s memorial services, he tells two offensive stories about her and, surveying a collage of photographs of Amy, calls her fat. In the spring of 2002, when Amy Lynne Latus failed to report to her job as a cost analyst at Kimberly-Clark in Knoxville, Tennessee, her coworkers searched through her desk and found a letter Amy had taped inside a drawer, addressed to the Knox County sheriff. The letter detailed the financial obligations Amy’s boyfriend

If I Am Missing or Dead / latus

345

Ron Ball had incurred toward her during their brief relationship. Paradoxically, Amy Janine Latus serves on the board of the remained romantically involved with Ball, American Society of Journalists and who had a criminal record, but still felt com- Authors. She teaches writing and pelled to document their financial situation journalism, has published magazine for the authorities in case he decided to re- articles on a wide range of subjects, solve his debts by killing her. Within two and is a frequent speaker on domestic weeks of her disappearance, Amy’s body was abuse. found at a rural construction site, wrapped in a tarpaulin and buried in a shallow grave. She had been strangled. In 2004, Ball pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and abuse of a corpse; he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Latus calculated that he might be released in sixteen years, in his fifties, young enough to find a new girlfriend and start his life over. Prosecutors told the Latus family that it would have been too difficult to convict Ball of first-degree murder under Tennessee laws. When Amy was killed, she had known Ron Ball for ten months, having met him in an Internet chat room. Ball had quickly moved into Amy’s house; using her own credit cards, she bought him a truck and supplies to set up his own business as a house painter. Ball refused to have sex with Amy and was obviously pursuing other women. He had spent time in prison—she believed for nonviolent financial crimes—and was jailed for driving under the influence while Amy was out of town visiting her family for Christmas. Nevertheless, Amy had high hopes for the relationship, downplayed these warning signs to her family, and stopped speaking to at least one friend who questioned the wisdom of her commitment to Ball. Amy’s story is told mainly through Latus’s recollection of telephone conversations between the sisters; the book’s final fifty pages include excerpts from Amy’s journals expressing her longing for a stable relationship and her disillusionment as she begins to realize that Ball is not the man she had hoped for. In describing Amy’s relationship with Ron Ball and her own with Kurt, Latus allows events to speak for themselves, recounting what happened or what was said with no need to explain the psychology that led both women into destructive situations. Her style is journalistic, factual, and lacking metaphorical language, but it is emotionally wrenching in its flat honesty. Latus unflinchingly records shocking events: her father suddenly tonguekisses one of her sisters, who promptly faints; she is molested during a babysitting job by a neighborhood man, then her parents tell her to keep it a secret or be considered a slut; during Thanksgiving dinner with her boyfriend Michael’s parents, Michael’s father throws the roast turkey across the room because Michael’s mother forgot to serve sweet potatoes. Latus’s account of her own independent thought processes is similarly frank, and she admits to her denial in outlining her beliefs about herself and her relationships as she pulls away from her family. She tells herself that Michael will never treat her the way his father treats his mother, and then recalls that Michael has already abused her physically. When Michael badly beats her on a skiing trip in Colorado, she declines to report him for assault, but rather submits completely to him sexually until the vaca-

346

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tion is over. As a young woman lying in a hotel room far from home, with a broken nose and ribs, Latus focused on pacifying Michael because he had her plane ticket home. Her father always said that men had needs, and women pushed men over the edge; she believed the beating was possibly her own fault. This incident comes back to her in force years later when she meets her father’s Denver relatives at Amy’s memorial service and weeps, realizing that help was a phone call away. Although Latus had nonabusive relationships with men and was capable of functioning in a stable situation, she shows how her courtship and marriage were typical of emotionally abusive relationships and how typical her reasons were for staying with her husband. After Michael beat her, Janine did not want to see a doctor, but Amy persuaded her to call Kurt, a doctor Janine knew from her job in a hospital pharmacy. (Latus would only realize much later that Kurt was sexually aroused when she was injured.) Kurt was married, and his wife was pregnant, but he promised to leave the marriage when their baby was six months old, which he did. Later, Latus believed that she might not have married Kurt had she not felt obligated because he had sacrificed his family to be with her. Kurt is fiercely jealous and Latus soon learns to lie to him about her friendships with male students or coworkers. Two days before they are married, Latus loses control of Kurt’s truck on an icy street and, expecting concern from the man who loves her, instead endures hours of recriminations because she ruined his truck. She persuades herself that his inappropriate anger is caused by his fear for her safety, accepts the flowers he sends later with an apology, and marries him. Latus is continually humiliated by the provocative, revealing clothing Kurt insists she wear—short skirts, tight sweaters, stiletto heels, thong bikinis—but Kurt withdraws angrily from her if she does not comply. Latus tells herself that their marriage is fraught with fear and anger because of their passion for each other; she thinks that other couples are jealous of their special connection. Latus initially enjoys the high drama; her marriage has “juice” and would be boring without the fights and turmoil. Kurt’s domination of Latus extends to her physical being when he encourages her to have breast implants, telling her repeatedly that she must be bothered by her small breasts. Mere hours after the surgery, Kurt approaches her for sex, and she submits. Years later, Latus has surgery on a torn tendon in her leg, and again Kurt initiates a painful sexual encounter shortly after her surgery, and again she complies. Amy, meanwhile, married an alcoholic who encouraged her to remain overweight, hoping that she would therefore be less attractive to other men. Amy’s husband is unable to keep a job and occasionally hits her. When Janine and Amy talk, each tries to avoid speaking too truthfully about her own situation while encouraging the other to either stand up for herself or leave. When Amy finally divorces Jim, Janine gives her a framed medal to celebrate her courage. Latus graduates from journalism school and becomes a successful commentator on public radio and a popular public speaker and publishes articles in major magazines, yet much of her self-worth depends on her unpredictable husband’s hard-won approval. The attention Latus draws in the clothes Kurt selects leads to accusations of adultery; Kurt rails at her for hours at a time about any man who speaks to her. Latus

If I Am Missing or Dead / latus

347

curtails her social activities to avoid rehearsing every moment with Kurt. Late one night, she finds him sitting naked at her home computer, trolling obsessively through her e-mail; shortly afterward, Kurt installs software to record every keystroke she makes. When Kurt discovers that she has kissed a coworker, Latus writes in a streamof-consciousness of her combined dependence, love, and guilt; she is terrified that Kurt will leave her but thinks that he must; she is afraid to be alone, fears the loss of his income, assures herself that he spies on her out of love, and finally believes that he is right not to trust her. After years of emotional abuse, an exhausted Latus decides to divorce her husband. To some degree, she is influenced by their adopted daughter, becoming aware that the child will see the true state of her parents’ marriage, grow up believing emotional turmoil and cruelty is normal, and will seek or accept it for herself. Only two months after Latus leaves her husband, she learns that Amy has disappeared. Amy had completed a college degree and begun work on her master’s degree, earned a promotion at Kimberly-Clark, bought a house in Knoxville and become a devoted hockey fan, and was trying to lose weight. In spite of Amy’s accomplishments, she felt that she had little chance of finding love; she either made excuses for Ron Ball or fell silent, keeping her troubled romance hidden. Her family did not meet Ball until after Amy’s murder, although Latus recalls disturbing telephone conversations with Ball. Once he told family members that he had kicked Amy out of her own house; another time he joked that he had killed and buried her in the backyard. Latus closes with Amy’s two memorial services; one in Tennessee for her coworkers and friends from Knoxville and Atlanta, and one in Michigan, where her ashes were scattered over a lake she loved to visit as a child. Latus founded an organization in Amy’s name to provide financial support to women who are fleeing abusive situations, hoping that her account would help women find the courage to leave. Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

Review Sources The Booklist 103, no. 21 (July, 2007): 13. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 209. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 2, 2007): 69.

348

IN A PROMINENT BAR IN SECAUCUS New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007 Author: X. J. Kennedy (1929) Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore). 205 pp. $35.00; paperback $18.95 Type of work: Poetry A collection of poems spanning over fifty years by a master of wit and humor Approximately three quarters of X. J. Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus is devoted to selected poems taken from nine of his earlier volumes of verse, and readers new to his work or those familiar with only a few poems have the opportunity to observe developments in style, themes, and form over a fifty-year span. Many of his bestknown poems, such as “First Confession,” “Nude Descending a Staircase,” and “In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus,” are included, but many readers will be pleased to find other “older” poems that are equally entertaining and provoking. For example, “The Blessing of the Bikes” from The Lords of Misrule (2002) provides a hilarious first-person account of a middle-aged biker receiving, along with Hell’s Angels and “suburbans with high-boughten karma,” blessings from the monsignor. The poem, derived from an Associated Press news item about such a ceremony conducted in the St. Daniel’s Church parking lot, satirizes not only the bikers but also the Roman Catholic Church. Bikes are “old rugged crosses”; the blessing consists of “some magic in Latin”; and the speaker fears not since “the Virgin is perched on my handlebars.” On a more somber note, “Aunt Rectita’s Good Friday” provides a glimpse at the aunt’s sense of injustice and her “bad” Good Friday. For the most part, the selected poems are short—one or two pages only—contain end rhymes, and use the four-stress line. Many are meditations of a sort, expressing the speaker’s reaction to relationships, religion, poetic craft, and humankind’s situation. Often they unfavorably compare the present to the past, and they contain allusions to the classical past, the Metaphysical poets, and the French poets. The overall tone is light, but somehow simultaneously somber, and Kennedy’s noted wit, with its puns and slang, is always present. Kennedy, a lapsed Catholic, often writes about religious subjects, but the poems are usually anticlerical and antiauthority. In addition to the poem about a priest blessing bikers, there is “First Confession,” the first poem in the book, and one that sets the tone for many of the following poems. The speaker’s hesitation is suggested by how he approaches, scuffing his feet with “Steps stubborn,” the confessional, which is a “telltale booth,” where the “robed repository of truth” awaits. The penance for his trivial sins, and his “sloth pride envy lechery,” unpunctuated to suggest a rush of meaningless generalities to the boy, is “Seven Our Fathers and one Hail,” which

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus / kennedy

349

can be sped through in one minute or less. Although the Church has successfully indoc- X. J. Kennedy has received many trinated the boy with his guilt and sense of awards for his poetry, including the damnation, the confession so trivializes the Lamont Award of the Academy of act that it is meaningless. In retrospect, the American Poets for his Nude speaker states that he was as “full of grace as Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, most,” implying that most of the congrega- a Ballad (1961), the Los Angeles Book tion had endured similar confessions. The last Award for poetry for Cross Ties: Selected Poems (1985), the Shelley line comparing his tongue to a “fresh roost for Memorial Award, and the Poets’ Prize the Holy Ghost” certainly diminishes Com- for The Lords of Misrule: Poems, munion. 1992-2001 (2002). He has also Belief or its absence is the subject of most received fellowships from the of the religious poems. “Song: Great Chain of Guggenheim Foundation and the Being,” alludes to Elizabethan times when National Arts Council. the universe was ordered with God at the top. In the poem, Kennedy uses slang to delineate the place that everything once had: “man was top dog,” “cut more ice,” “cruddiest of sparrows.” Then Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei broke the chain, which is likened to a sprocket on a bicycle, and in the ensuing chaos things lost their connection: “the angleworm and the angel can’t connect.” God’s throne, the “old arm chair,” has been vacated, and the “Blessed Mother” does not seem to intercede for humankind. Now Medicare and the credit bureau are the overseers. Humankind is left dangling from what is left of the chain. The repeated “Is seeing believing?” raises the question of belief and science. For the speaker, the sense of “believing is seeing” is absent, but the poem is more a lament than celebration. In addition to looking back to the past, Kennedy looks skeptically at the present and focuses on decay and degeneration. The speaker in “B Negative” is a groundskeeper whose job is to pick up debris. Although it is April, with its promises of rebirth, the scene is permeated with despair. His lover turns away from him, and the pigeon is the only one who will eat out of his hand. Sleeping on the subway instead of in a room, he spends the night in streets plagued by prostitutes and rats with the only probable end in a “flea-bag hotel” where he contemplates suicide. In an aside in the poem, the speaker notes that “lyre and lute lie down under three balls,” suggesting that literature (and the instruments are those of the past) is in hock, is destitute. The creative process is the theme of several other early poems. “Warning to Sculptors” has implications for writers, for it warns of pride. In the first stanza, Galatea seemingly takes shape on her own, despite the sculptor’s “dull hand,” and the form and content flow downward as in “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Once the sculptor says, “I made this,” the work goes cold, and the movement stops, because Kennedy slows the motion by repeating “stone” nine times. The vitality of the work dries up: “And stone to ravenous stone give suck.” Vitality is the subject of “The Ballad of Fenimore Woolson and Henry James,” two writers who admired each other, but the love is never consummated because of James’s aloofness. The plot of the ballad

350

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

resembles the plot of Daisy Miller (1878), a James novella, in which the aloof Winterbourne only too late realizes the depths of Daisy’s love. After Woolson’s suicide, James destroys the letters he wrote her and attempts to cover his tracks. He “transformed her into a work of art” rather than dealing with her as a person. Kennedy is also aware of writer’s block, the creatively dry period some writers experience. “In a Dry Season” describes such a time but treats it, in Kennedy fashion, lightly. The Muse is an “ungracious slattern” mocking his efforts to “mount the clouds,” when he can only walk and emit “squawks.” This kind of self-effacement also occurs in “Reading Trip” and “One A.M. with Voices,” a man’s and a woman’s. She complains about his unpronounceable rhymes and this “guttering in your head,” while he explains that he has almost caught the perfect rhyme, which is playing “cat-and-mouse about my head.” The twenty-nine new poems in the collection are of a piece with the rest of the poems. “Mrs. Filbert’s Golden Quarters” returns to the theme of creating poetry, again in a humorous way. The seven pounds of unfinished, perhaps “undoable” poems “sit stalled in a box/ margarine came in.” The writer’s block then becomes like constipation as the poems “ache like turds/ stuck in my chute,” suggesting that the poems are like excrement. In “Geometry,” Kennedy returns to metaphysical wit as he uses science to illustrate the likelihood of he and his love coming together after absence. Like the “stiff twin compasses” in John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” the two parallel lines that will meet will occur in life: “And though we coldly part, to run/ Our separate ways, a tether/ Shall join our paths till time be done/ And we two come together.” Kennedy’s interest in foreign poets also occurs in his “Poor People in Church,” which is derived from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Les Pauvres à l’église.” The poor are “poor slobs,” “beaten mongrels,” “shaggy crones,” and “bewildered epileptics” who pray “musty mumbo-jumbo” to a Christ who “dreams in his remote/ Window.” However, the rich, “classy dames,” also attend church with their “green and bilious smiles.” “God’s Obsequies” involves the speaker attending “the funeral of God,” who has, according to the speaker, been “done in” by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Copernicus, and Edward Gibbon, all of whom are portrayed in negative terms. Other attendees were Adam and Eve and the Seven Deadly Sins, with Pride in a monokini and “Lust playing with his weenie.” With God dead, the pope, who is now out of a job, worries about “who’ll hire an old man now,” and Jesus discusses “Dad” as an old man getting on in years. The remainder of the poem is devoted to how the world fails to respond to what should be seen as calamitous. Many of the other poems deal with the times in which modern humankind lives. “At Paestum” depicts a tour bus full of tourists shunning life and seeking “old stones” and a “bright fresco” as they exchange banalities. While the tourists indulge in their “belch-fest” lunch, the columns remain “like gods who went away and left their spines.” The people in “Silent Cell Phones” also engage in banalities but live only when they are on their phones. When the phones are silent, the people are wistful “prisoners” in solitary cells. In effect, they need the ringing of the phones to “demon-

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus / kennedy

351

strate to us they’re not alone.” People are other-directed, depending on the media to make their lives meaningful. In the ironically entitled “Innocent Times,” Kennedy assails the advertisers whose products are designed not only to heal people but also to make them feel better. While mercury, cigarettes, and X rays threaten existence, products like Listerine, Sanka, and sugar-saturated pies are posited as helpful; and yet people still die. The irony is summed up in “How in the Sam Hill could you end up dead?/ Hadn’t you lived according to the ads?” Other poems concern materialism and relationships. “Small House Torn Down to Make a Bigger” describes a house personified (“vein and bone”) and sacrificed to materialism. Histories have ended in divorce, and the “hopeful past” is rubble. The last line, “Too little in the living room to last,” describes both the furnishings and the positive feelings that have ended. The remains, antiques and collectibles of people’s houses, are on sale for profit in “At the Antique Fair,” in which a “monster combine” harvests the grains of memory so the relatives could make money. To make matters worse, the speaker sees himself “scavenging through the leavings of the slain.” These poems and others—about the death of a window-washer, whose legacy is only a “pane of glass,” a general who must make a “Command Decision” but does not care who wins, and a “Bald Eagle” who represents an elderly man confronting old age—are all about decline. Though Kennedy does not include political poems, he sees in politics the same decline, notably in “Fireflies,” in which the speaker describes the mating ritual and death of fireflies and then relates it to “the torture squad’s night shift.” Kennedy’s last poem, “Envoi,” is a kind of seventeenth century goodbye to his “slothful book,” which he hopes will find a fit audience, but, with his characteristic self-effacement, he realizes that it may well crash-land. Thomas L. Erskine

Review Source Booklist 104, no. 2 (September 15, 2007): 17.

352

IN THE COUNTRY OF MEN Author: Hisham Matar (1970) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Dial Press (New York). 246 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Summer, 1979; next fifteen years, briefly Locale: Tripoli, Libya; Cairo, Egypt An exiled Libyan recounts his traumatic family experiences as a nine-year-old living in the cruel and repressive regime of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi Principal characters: Suleiman “Slooma” el-Dewani, a nineyear-old only child Faraj “Baba” el-Dewani, his politically involved father Najwa “Mama” el-Dewani, his alcoholic mother Kareem Rashid, his twelve-year-old best friend Ustath Rashid, Kareem’s father, a university professor Salma Rashid, Kareem’s mother, Najwa’s best friend Moosa Yaseen, Faraj’s close friend, a law school dropout Judge Yaseen, Moosa’s father, a prominent attorney Nasser, Faraj’s enthusiastic young office clerk Ustath Jafer, a neighbor, prominent in the regime Um Masoud, his prominently fat wife Masoud and Ali, their children, Suleiman’s playmates Adnan and Osama, other neighborhood playmates Bahloul, miserable beggar who quotes the Qur$3n Uncle Khaled, Najwa’s brother, a poet Sharief, slimy leader of the local Mokhabarat squad Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libyan dictator beginning in 1969

In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar’s first novel, was short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the 2006 Guardian First Book Award in Great Britain. Though showing some of the typical faults of first novels, it is an impressive debut. Of Libyan background, Matar is an accomplished writer in English, which might be his first language. (He was born in New York City but grew up in Tripoli and Cairo.) He is also proficient in using the recursive narrative technique of postmodern novels, but what stands out most in the novel is its insider perspective on living in a totalitarian Muslim country. Matar is one of a number of writers with Muslim roots who write eloquently in English about this and similar themes, who provide valuable insight into the conflicted Muslim world, and who are reminders of the humane values existing within that world. On the other hand, Matar’s depiction of Libya under the rule of Muammar alQaddafi is a reminder of some of the worst tendencies in the Muslim world. Qaddafi,

In the Country of Men / matar

353

a well-educated and wily leader, seems to have been carried away by his desire to in- Hisham Matar, born in 1970 in New herit the mantle of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel York City to wealthy Libyan parents, Nasser (1918-1970) as leader of the pan- grew up in Tripoli and Cairo. He has Arabic cause. (Later Qaddafi, always the op- lived in England for more than twenty portunist, took up the pan-African cause.) years and is married to an American. From a peasant background, Qaddafi earned a In the Country of Men is his first novel. law degree in Libya and received advanced military training in England. Colonel Qaddafi used that training on September 1, 1969, to lead a coup against the Libyan royal family and establish the Libyan Arab Republic. Domestically, he tried to create a socialistic Islamic regime essentially in his own image. Internationally, true to his idea of pan-Arabism and with oil money, he supported other revolutions, funded terrorist operations, and even hired hit men to eliminate his critics abroad. Always a darling of the Third World, he supposedly mellowed and reformed in the early 2000’s, possibly to improve his image in the West and to avoid the fate of fellow dictator and self-appointed heir of the pan-Arabic cause Saddam Hussein of Iraq. In this novel, as in earlier articles and op-ed pieces, the author does not let Qaddafi and his regime off the hook. In the Country of Men is based, to some extent, on Matar’s own experiences with the regime. Like his young protagonist, Suleiman “Slooma” el-Dewani, Matar fled Libya for political reasons at the age of nine, accompanied by his mother and older brother. His father, a wealthy businessman under a political cloud (though earlier he had served in Libya’s U.N. delegation), was not able to escape Libya until a year later. Only when the family was reunited in Cairo did the father begin his political dissent against the Libyan regime. In 1990, the Egyptian secret police arrested the father and another exiled Libyan dissident and turned them over to the Libyans, who imprisoned and tortured them. The father smuggled a few letters out of the Tripoli prison to his family but has not been heard from since 1995. (Details of the family’s ordeal have appeared in various writings by Matar, most notably an article in the July 16, 2006, Independent titled “I Just Want to Know What Happened to My Father.”) In Matar’s novel, these circumstances are changed considerably, mostly for simplification purposes and purposes of characterization. The young protagonist, Suleiman, is an only child, which intensifies the relationship between him and his twenty-four-year-old mother, Najwa, who is an alcoholic and carries a grudge for being married off at fourteen. She had Suleiman when she was fifteen and has spoiled him since. The mother and son’s close bonds have ample opportunity to intensify because of the father’s long absences from Tripoli on business trips abroad. One time, when the father, Faraj, is supposedly traveling, Suleiman sees him in town on Martyrs’ Square, where he enters a building and hangs out a red towel from the top floor. This sighting is the boy’s first hint of his father’s dangerous political activity. Faraj is part of a large group of intellectuals and students distributing leaflets critical of the Qaddafi regime. The next-door neighbor, Ustath Rashid, an art history professor, also belongs to the group.

354

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Criticism of the government is accepted, even expected, in a democracy, but in Qaddafi’s Libya it is treason. Everyone in the neighborhood fully understands this, so they hastily gather and destroy the distributed leaflets, sometimes burning them and flushing the ashes. The volatile missives offer Suleiman and his playmates an opportunity for mischief: They tie stones to the incriminating leaflets and hurl them over people’s walls. Um Masoud, a neighbor and wife of an official in the Mokhabarat (secret police), comes forth and announces the official line: The people distributing the leaflets are “traitors” and are extremely upsetting to her husband, Ustath Jafer, who is “able to put people behind the sun.” As the close-knit, interactive neighborhood suggests, it is hard to keep a secret in Libya. In 1979, Libya’s total population was around three million. Although Tripoli numbered almost one million, a rural or small-town mentality prevails: Everybody seems to know everybody else and sometimes everybody else’s business. This mentality has its value, which has been almost lost in the urban West: Kinship and friendship ties are strong, reflecting centuries of tribal loyalties (for example, the honorific titles Um and Bu mean “mother of” and “father of,” respectively, the oldest son). Unfortunately, this close community is joined with the latest technology in Qaddafi’s Libya. The phones are regularly tapped, and the secret police even interfere in conversations. Interrogations, trials, and executions of so-called traitors (the trial and execution staged as one continuous event in a crowded sports arena) are televised nationally. Mokhabarat men start tailing family cars and showing up in the neighborhood. The first person arrested is Ustath Rashid, who is dragged from his home and assaulted in the street in front of his family and neighbors. He is next seen days later, looking the worse for wear, being interrogated on television, where he confirms a list of coconspirators but denies that Faraj el-Dewani is one of them. Ustath, looking still more beaten down, eventually is tried and hanged before a screaming sports arena crowd—a horrific event witnessed on television by Suleiman, his mother, family friend Moosa, and the nation. Meanwhile, the Mokhabarat have been rounding up others on the list, including a large number of university students. Suleiman’s father hides, and the Mokhabarat pay a rude visit to their home, intending to search it. Luckily, Moosa is there, and he shrewdly charms them by serving them tea and snacks, ensnaring them in the rules of hospitality. They leave without searching the home, allowing Najwa and Moosa to burn Faraj’s incriminating papers and books, except for one titled Democracy Now that Suleiman squirrels away. Despite these efforts, Faraj is taken away, as well as his clerk Nasser. Najwa throws herself on the mercy of their neighbor, Ustath Jafer, to intervene. Eventually, Moosa is able to collect Faraj and bring him home, but he is beaten almost beyond recognition. Moosa, an Egyptian, is deported, along with his Egyptian father, Judge Yaseen. Their return to Egypt provides a safe haven where Suleiman can be sent. He grows up and settles, exiled from family, home, and country. Suleiman’s point of view and characterization are somewhat inconsistent. The above events are narrated as Suleiman saw them at age nine, with gaps in information,

In the Country of Men / matar

355

such as how his father was caught, tortured, and released, but Suleiman is telling about them fifteen years later, after he had time to learn more. Conversely, little events and full conversations from fifteen years earlier are remembered with astonishing detail. This inconsistency is reflected in the style, which ranges from simple sentences to those extending half a page. Inconsistency in young Suleiman’s character can perhaps be explained by his family situation. Overall, he is depicted as a smart, sensitive, loving child who watches out for his mother when she is “ill” (that is, drunk) and keeps her alcoholism a secret. Despite his oedipal feelings, he loves his father. Yet the naïveté with which he gives up information to the Mokhabarat—even trying to deliver the book Democracy Now to the secret police—might be his father’s undoing. Surely a nine-year-old knows his father’s persecutors or at least knows to keep his mouth shut. Also disturbing are young Suleiman’s taunting of his best friend, Kareem Rashid, after Kareem’s father is arrested; his rock-throwing that injures his next best friend, Adnan, whose medical problem could cause fatal bleeding; and his attacks on the old beggar, Bahloul. Young Suleiman’s mixed-up behavior mirrors his mother’s alcoholism—or the Mokhabarat’s cruelty. Matar explores “the dark art of submission,” which finds “a shameful pleasure in submitting to authority,” through some relationships in the novel, most notably the brief relationship between young Suleiman and the Mokhabarat squad leader Sharief. Sharief’s physical description and behavior suggest a depraved, snakelike character, like Satan in the biblical Garden of Eden. Sharief seems to exercise a venomous fascination over the young Suleiman. The symbolic effect of Sharief is matched by that of the pathetic beggar Bahloul, who suggests the opposite pole of submission. Young Suleiman reacts powerfully to such symbolic overtones, like the rank smell that the Mokhabarat leaves behind or his beautiful mother’s sharp, alcoholic breath. The novel also explores the dark art of submission through a secondary theme, the status of women. Women’s status as chattel is exemplified by Najwa’s marriage. When, at fourteen, she is seen sitting across from a boy in the Coffee House—and even touching hands with him!—the “High Council” (her father and brothers) convenes and decides to hurriedly marry her off before word gets around that she is “damaged goods.” Najwa feels that they ruined her life, even though she is a dutiful wife and eventually comes to love her husband, particularly after she almost loses him to the Mokhabarat. Still, one cannot help noticing the parallels between marriage and dictatorship in the novel: In his home, each man in In the Country of Men is a little Qaddafi. One may conclude that much of the abuse depicted in the novel relates to the Islamic religion, which models the authoritarian family and state. Islam is an Arabic word meaning “submission.” In the Country of Men is interlaced with the Islamic teachings promoting submission, teachings that can create a fertile setting for the rise of dictators big and small. How hard the prototype or pattern is to break is exemplified by Najwa’s brother Khaled, a poet who lives in America and has an American wife. While visiting, Khaled is the one who sees Najwa in the Coffee House and leads the High Council to arrange her marriage. It is fair to say that his American wife does not

356

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

see things in the same way. One can only hope that with more time, understanding, and thoughtful interpretation, this pattern can be modified. Harold Branam

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 7 (December 1, 2006): 22. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 21 (November 1, 2006): 1095-1096. Library Journal 131, no. 19 (November 15, 2006): 58. The Nation 284, no. 8 (February 26, 2007): 30-33. New Statesman 135 (July 31, 2006): 58. The New York Times 156 (February 15, 2007): E10. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 4, 2007): 8. Newsweek 148, no. 11 (September 11, 2006): 61. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 43 (October 30, 2006): 34-35. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 62 (March 16, 2007): W6.

357

THE INDIAN BRIDE Author: Karin Fossum (1954) First published: Elskede Poona, 2000, in Norway Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund Publisher: Harcourt (Orlando, Fla.). 297 pp. $23.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1990’s Locale: Elvestad, a small village in Norway; Mumbai, India In a new volume in a popular series, Inspector Sejer has to solve the brutal murder of an Indian woman on her way to a new husband and a new home Principal characters: Poona Bai, the title character, a thirty-eight-year-old waitress from Mumbai Gunder Jomann, her new husband, a fifty-one-year-old farm machinery salesman Marie Dahl, Gunder’s sister, a woman of forty-eight Konrad Sejer, a middle-aged inspector, known for his success in solving crimes Jacob Skarre, his assistant, a good-looking man in his twenties Linda Carling, a thin, blond, excitable girl, a witness to the murder Ole Gunwald, a shopkeeper who lives near the site of the murder Gøran Seter, a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder Einar Sunde, a café owner Lillian Sunde, his discontented wife Kalle Moe, operator of a minicab and the man who missed Poona at Gardermoen Airport Anders Kolding, a young taxi driver and the man who drove Poona from Gardermoen to Elvestad Mode, a twenty-eight-year-old gas station owner and a champion bowler

Karin Fossum’s The Indian Bride is a mystery novel written in the police procedural subgenre. Like the earlier books in this series by the author, The Indian Bride features two detectives: the calm, deliberate Inspector Konrad Sejer and his young assistant, Jacob Skarre, who again proceed from clues and interviews to an arrest. However, the book is more complex than the format might suggest. The story is not only built around tragic love but also is a sociological study of a small Norwegian town and its inhabitants. The novel begins with a bloody battle between an unnamed young man and his Rottweiler, a struggle that ends only when both are covered with blood and the dog is thoroughly cowed. Fossum then introduces Gunder Jomann, a lonely, unmarried farm machinery salesman who has become fascinated with the photographs of Indian

358

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

women in a book given to him by his beloved younger sister, Marie Dahl. Soon Gunder informs Marie that he is flying to Mumbai, India, where he will devote two weeks to finding himself a wife. At a tandoori restaurant, he meets a pretty, unattached waitress, Poona Bai, and within a few days she is as much in love with the tall, quiet Norwegian as he is with her. They are married, and he returns home on schedule. Sixteen days later, she is to follow him to his home in Elvestad, Norway. Meanwhile, Gunder works frantically to refurbish his home in anticipation of her arrival. On the day that Poona is to arrive at Gardermoen Airport, Gunder is informed that Marie has been in a serious automobile accident and is hospitalized. It is uncertain whether she will come out of her coma or even whether she will survive at all. Since her husband is away, Gunder feels obligated to stay with her. However, he sends his friend Kalle Moe, who has a minicab, to pick up Poona at the airport and bring her to Elvestad. Somehow Moe misses her, and Gunder never hears from her again. When the body of a foreign woman is found only a few hundred yards away from his house, Gunder refuses to believe that it could be Poona. However, after Sejer shows him the filigree brooch that he had given Poona and the yellow bag that she always carried, Gunder can no longer hope that the murdered woman is not his wife. Devastated, he returns to the bedside of his still unconscious sister, not only out of his love for her but also because he feels that she is the only person left who cares about him. Although the people of Elvestad would like to think that the murderer was a stranger who just happened to be passing through their village, Sejer soon rules out that possibility, and they are left with the uncomfortable truth that there is a killer living among them. One would think that they would search their memories and provide the police with the necessary information to solve the case, but they do not. If they do proffer some details, the villagers omit others that are often even more important. One reason for their stubborn silence is that the village is a closed society. The young men in the village never go elsewhere to find young women; they simply pass around the girls at hand and eventually select their wives from the same group. Everyone knows better than to comment on a bride’s previous history. This is just one example of the importance of discretion in a village of just over two thousand people, many of whom are related to each other. While inevitably there is a good deal of gossip in Elvestad, it moves from friend to friend, given with promises of secrecy which, of course, are promptly ignored, but though the interesting item may be passed on to still another resident, often it does not reach the police. If even the urbanites who moved to Elvestad are not considered part of the village, one would hardly expect the policemen, who live elsewhere, to be accepted. They are outsiders and are treated as such. Because she writes from an omniscient standpoint, Karin Fossum reveals many details that her detectives learn late in their investigations or, in some cases, never discover. It is not surprising that when Sejer asks Gunder for a photograph of Poona,

Norwegian author Karin Fossum is best known for her mysteries starring Inspector Konrad Sejer, which have been translated into sixteen languages. The Indian Bride is the fourth of these novels to be translated into English.

The Indian Bride / fossum

359

Gunder denies having one. At that point, Gunder is still resolutely denying the possibility that the murdered woman could be his wife. Somehow, as long as he has their wedding photograph in his possession, he can believe that nothing is wrong, that she will turn up alive. It is also easy to see why Einar Sunde does not admit that he has Poona’s suitcase: He does not want to become a suspect in the unsolved case. Lillian Sunde, Einar’s wife, has even more urgent reasons for denying that Gøran Seter was with her at the time of the murder. By confirming her lover’s alibi, she might well find herself without her husband and her comfortable lifestyle. By contrast, Ole Gunwald has nothing to lose by telling the police that he saw Einar dispose of the suitcase. His silence is a habit, the product of a lifetime spent in Elvestad. When his conscience prompts him to call the police, he does so anonymously and fails to mention that it was Einar he saw. Similarly, the whole village knows that the murderer used a heavy object to crush Poona’s skull. At first, Sejer suspects that it could have been the battery that Anders Kolding, who brought Poona from the airport, mentioned buying that very night. However, after Anders is cleared, the men who spend their spare time at Einar’s café never do tell Sejer that Mode, who is one of their number, has a new bowling ball, which he carries everywhere with him, and which would certainly be an effective weapon for a murder. By the time Seter is arrested, Linda Carling, who is the only real witness to the murder, has fallen in love with Sejer’s good-looking young assistant, Jacob Skarre. Earlier, Linda had described the scene she witnessed as she passed by the meadow that night, which she took to be a prelude to lovemaking rather than a murderer’s hot pursuit of his victim. However, she later recalled some further details, which she decided to save so that she would have a good excuse for calling Skarre. Her insistence on talking only to him tips him off to her obsession, and prudently he decides to avoid her. However, as a result, he does not believe her when she reports being attacked, and thus he never learns that the man who threatened to kill her if she talked was not Gøran but someone taller, and that his voice was not that of the chief suspect. Similarly, Sejer and Skarre do not pay much attention when Gøran’s mother tells them that on the night of the murder, after he had wrestled with the dog, her son was singing in the shower. To the detectives, it is more important that he had quarreled with his regular girlfriend that night and then, according to Lillian, had been turned away by her as well. Unlike most murder mysteries, The Indian Bride ends in ambiguity. Under pressure from Sejer, Gøran confessed but now has withdrawn his confession. Moreover, Gunwald has finally told Sejer the secret that he kept for so long: that the man who disposed of the suitcase was not Gøran but Einar. Unfortunately, what Linda knows about the killer is not likely to be heeded, for after slashing Skarre’s tires in the hope of getting his attention, she has withdrawn into a fantasy world in which she imagines killing the young detective. At any rate, even though he is not aware of these gaps in his own knowledge, Sejer suspects that the defense can come up with enough questions to sway a jury and obtain Gøran’s freedom. At the end of the novel, Sejer’s only consolation is the fact that his dog Kollberg has survived his surgery and will undoubtedly be his companion for a few more years.

360

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

As for Gunder, though he has lost his wife and may still lose his sister, at least Poona’s brother was persuaded to let her be buried in the Elvestad cemetery, where Gunder can visit her every day. At the end of the novel, Gunder receives the letter that Poona sent her brother before she left India, in which she expresses her love for the man who was waiting for her and her hopes for their happy life together. For Gunder, there may be some consolation in this communication from beyond the grave; at least he can be reassured daily that he did not give his heart to someone unworthy of it. The Indian Bride displays all of the qualities that have earned the Inspector Sejer series popular notice and critical acclaim both in Norway and internationally. Karin Fossum’s precise prose style, her complex and often ambiguous plotlines, her understanding of village life and village secretiveness, her psychological insight, and her empathetic understanding of even her least-admirable characters are all mentioned by critics as contributing to her success. As more of her works appear in translation, her Inspector Sejer is expected to take his place with the best-known and most-admired figures in the genre. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 44. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 11 (June 1, 2007): 533. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July1, 2007): 59. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 8, 2007): 21. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 20 (May 14, 2007): 35.

361

THE INDIAN CLERK Author: David Leavitt (1961) Publisher: Bloomsbury (New York). 496 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twentieth century, alternating primarily between 1936 and the period from 1913 to 1920 Locale: England, particularly Cambridge and London A historical narrative based on a true story but with certain character traits and plot elements fictionalized to offer the reader a crucible by which to judge the smug assumptions of a past society Principal characters: G. H. Hardy, a Cambridge University don and one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time Srinivasa Ramanujan, largely self-taught mathematical genius, the Indian shipping clerk referred to in the title Alice Neville, a woman torn between the predictable comforts of married domesticity and the lure of the larger world Eric Neville, Alice’s husband, an almost stereotypical absent-minded professor whose poor eyesight is matched by his lack of insight Jack Littlewood, Hardy’s principal collaborator on mathematical research Gertrude Hardy, an art teacher and Hardy’s spinster sister Russell Gaye, a Cambridge University classicist and Hardy’s former lover whose “ghost” appears periodically to offer commentary on the mathematician’s social interactions

Just like his earlier novel While England Sleeps (1993), which is set against the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930’s, David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk takes actual people and makes them into characters in a narrative that blends history and fiction. The author uses a set of twelve lectures delivered by G. H. Hardy at Harvard University in 1936 as a framing device for a series of flashbacks to the years just prior to and during World War I when the British academician cultivated the native genius of a now-legendary figure in the history of pure mathematics, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Most readers may not immediately embrace the dramatic possibilities of mathematical discovery, and some reviewers have suggested that the pages that Leavitt devotes to such esoteric topics as number theory might well be skipped or skimmed. Nevertheless, the heart of this historical novel is not the often graceful evolution of a classic mathematical proof but the intriguing complexities of human relationships, particularly if those connections are recreated in a blend of fact and fancy, if the gaps in a person’s verifiable biography are filled in with details supplied by the writer’s imagination.

362

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In this case, it is well documented that in January of 1913, Hardy received from an obscure office clerk in Madras, India, a letter claiming that he had discovered a possible solution to a long unsolved mathematical problem. Hardy’s decision to investigate the truth of the claims made by Ramanujan and his eventual decision to bring the Indian prodigy to England set into motion a chain of discoveries that altered the course of modern mathematics. David Leavitt has been a major figure However, beyond the well-documented in gay literature since 1982, when public achievements of the principal players “Territory” became the first comingin this odd partnership, there is plenty of room out story to be printed by a major for conjecture regarding the private lives of American periodical. His novels The these two fascinating historical figures. InterLost Language of Cranes (1986) and estingly enough, in this regard, Leavitt made The Page Turner (1998) have been adapted for the screen, and he has the early decision to let Ramanujan remain garnered grants from the Guggenheim a cipher or code that the other characters try Foundation and the National to break. To Hardy, he is essentially a ratioEndowment for the Arts. nalist, a fellow resident of the world of mathe matics “remote from religion, war, literature, sex, even philosophy.” To Alice Neville, he represents the lure of the glamorous unknown, an “atmosphere very different from that of her living room.” On one level, both Hardy and Neville become rivals for Ramanujan’s attention. Hardy begrudges the time that both men are not devoting to their work; Neville, on the other hand, accuses Hardy of using Ramanujan as a “mathematics machine,” ignoring his creature comforts. Here the subject of sex looms large, and this is the one topic in which Leavitt, as a historical novelist, takes the most license. A series of lectures that Eric Neville delivers in India offers Hardy and his fellow researcher Jack Littlewood the opportunity to have someone of their acquaintance meet Ramanujan on his home turf and examine whether his epistolary claims have merit; because Alice accompanies her husband on this trip, her introduction to the exotic East, eventually embodied in the person of Ramanujan himself, becomes the occasion for a psychological and sexual awakening. Although her one and only attempt to seduce Ramanujan ends in embarrassment for them both, Alice Neville’s fixation on her heavy-lidded, black-haired guest offers Leavitt an opportunity to explore the behavioral restrictions imposed on women prior to the Great War and the enlarged range of possibilities that the decade of the twenties would make possible. Far more significant than the occasional chapter devoted to narrative filtered through the consciousness of Alice Neville, however, is the main plot trajectory impelled by the reminiscences of Hardy, whose point of view offers the primary perspective, albeit third-person, in the novel. Although most of his biographers paint him

The Indian Clerk / leavitt

363

as a closeted, presumably nonpracticing homosexual, Leavitt takes the imaginative leap of giving Hardy a sex life, partially in an effort to flesh out his relationship with Ramanujan and partially to offer the author an opportunity to explore the social position of gay men during a pivotal point in history. Hardy is actually the principal character in the book. Although, to the outside world, he is the embodiment of the British establishment at the outset of World War I—a Cambridge professor, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a scholar of international reputation—Hardy has his secrets. In fact, to most of his acquaintances he is as much a mystery as Ramanujan and, if the truth be known, just as alien. Leavitt himself has admitted that this particular line of fictional inquiry was inspired by a reference that Hardy himself made in describing his relationship to Ramanujan: “my association with him is the one romantic incident in my life.” What, as Leavitt himself asked, might have motivated that particular statement? To answer that question, the author devotes most of the book. Littlewood, Hardy’s virile, heterosexual research partner who has been carrying on a long-term affair with a married woman, sees his friend as a “dry, sexless” entity, as perhaps the personification of the abstract, mathematical problems that the two of them tackle together. Indeed, in Leavitt’s partially fictionalized characterization of Hardy, mathematical exercise may very well offer a momentary sublimation of physical desire. Very early in the novel, for example, the reader learns of Hardy’s attraction to a Cambridge undergraduate named Chatterjee, a handsome cricketer of Indian nationality whom the mathematician has seen from afar on the playing field and occasionally on campus. It is the appealing, sexually charged image of Chatterjee that Hardy has in mind when he peruses his introductory letter from Ramanujan. Even though, as the reader eventually discovers, the Indian mathematician in the flesh does not match the sexually charged figure of Hardy’s imagination, Ramanujan, like Littlewood before him, does trigger a psychosexual response from Hardy because he stands at the nexus of his intellectual and physical life. Littlewood, whose undraped gymnast’s body aroused considerable interest in Hardy and his gay friends when he swam in the River Cam as an undergraduate, is oblivious to the physical effect that he may have had on the man who would become his scholarly collaborator; Littlewood sees Hardy only in the light of what nineteenth century Anglo-Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde called the “independent life” of art or thought. This ability to compartmentalize components of one’s public and personal life, a necessary survival technique for gay people before their acquisition of civil rights, is at the heart of Leavitt’s depiction of Hardy. It is the essence of his appeal as a character. Although many of the real-life members of the Apostles, an invitation-only club of extraordinary Cambridge personalities, shared his sexual orientation, any active pursuit of physical desire Hardy must keep as secret as his membership in this exclusive group. Furthermore, as the periodic visitations of the specter of Russell Gaye, a former lover who committed suicide, will attest, Hardy has become so adept at hiding his feelings that he has becomes very nearly alienated from them. Except for passing infatuations with other men and a short-lived dalliance with a soldier on medical leave, Hardy lives almost exclusively outside of his body; he inhabits, instead, a men-

364

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tal landscape that he finds far more reassuring and far less confusing than the world of human interaction. The same can be said of Ramanujan, who finds in mathematics solace from the pain of life. Separated from his bride, Janaki, who leaves the family home back in Madras to escape the tyranny of her mother-in-law, and suffering from what is diagnosed as tuberculosis but which Leavitt hints may have been lead poisoning contracted from preparing his own native cuisine in inappropriate cookware, Ramanujan copes with his wife’s presumed desertion and his own physical ailments by losing himself in mathematical theory. Set in the heart of the British Empire on the eve of World War I, the novel is a tale of insiders and outsiders, exploring the place and function of gays, women, and ethnic minorities in a world controlled by white heterosexual males. The closeted Hardy; the repressed Alice Neville; Hardy’s own clever, acerbic sister, Gertrude, who bristles at the fact that her brother’s maleness gives his talent wider scope than hers; and Ramanujan, whom the popular press label the “Hindoo calculator” and whose achievements the academic establishment question as if his mental prowess were something freakish because of his race and place of origin, are all bearing witness to the injustices of a homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic system that will not survive intact to the end of the twentieth century. Using mathematics as an operative metaphor, Leavitt explores the arrangement and associated relationships not only of numbers but also of people. As part of the backdrop to the collective narrative of the principal characters are a host of historical figures who make appearances in the book, including the poet Rupert Brooke, philosopher and ardent pacifist Bertrand Russell, and novelist D. H. Lawrence. These cameo appearances not only lend an air of authenticity to the main plot but also serve to underscore some of the themes of the novel. Because of his idealism and good looks, for example, Brooke’s death on the way to the war poignantly reinforces the propriety of Hardy’s pacifist stance. Russell’s noble blood and attendant financial resources make it possible for him to resist compromising his antiwar activities as opposed to Hardy who lacks the money to withstand the retaliatory loss of his teaching position. Even the short visit of Lawrence to the campus reinforces how successfully Hardy has hidden his true nature from the world when the novelist shies away from more obvious campus homosexuals and cultivates Hardy’s acquaintance since he mistakenly finds him bland and “safe.” In short, The Indian Clerk epitomizes the best in contemporary biographical fiction in its use of the narratives of real men and women from the past to shed light on issues that resonate from their time into the present. S. Thomas Mack

The Indian Clerk / leavitt

365

Review Sources The Advocate, no. 991 (August 28, 2007): 60. Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 35. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 14 (July 15, 2007): 686. Library Journal 132, no. 6 (April 1, 2007): 82. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 16, 2007): 1-8. The New Yorker 83, no. 28 (September 24, 2007): 185. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 22 (May 28, 2007): 33.

366

INFIDEL Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Publisher: Free Press (New York). 353 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Autobiography, current affairs, religion, women’s issues Time: 1969-2006 Locale: Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Netherlands With remarkable skill, the author traces the immense personal and cultural changes in her life, which she has dedicated to freeing Muslim women (and men) from damaging, inflexible traditions Principal personages: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, née Magan, the author Mahad Hirsi Magan, her older brother Haweya Hirsi Magan, her younger sister Hirsi Magan Isse (Abeh), their father Asha Artan (Ma), their mother Ibaado (Ayeeyo), their maternal grandmother Osman Moussa, Ayaan’s legal but unwelcome husband Theo van Gogh, a controversial Dutch filmmaker

Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, focuses on her childhood in four African nations and her personal awakening to a wider world in the Netherlands. In Somalia, her birthplace, bloodlines were crucial. Within a dizzying system of clans and subclans, she was originally known as Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan, and like every other child she was taught to recite her ancestry as far back as eight hundred years, to the beginning of her father’s great clan, the Darod. After her father, Hirsi Magan, was jailed for his opposition to Somalia’s Marxist ruler, she alternated between life with her mother, Asha Artan, and grandmother in Mogadishu and in the northern desert. Hirsi Ali’s story is one of extreme violence, which, she hastens to point out, was the accepted method of child-raising. Although her mother and grandmother preferred the boy Mahad over his two sisters, the children received almost daily beatings. For Ayaan and her sister, Haweya, life also included obedience, heavy work, and the custom of genital excision, also known as female circumcision. Justified in the name of Islam (even though the Qur$3n does not mention it), excision was usually performed at around age five to keep girls pure until marriage. Infidel includes a horrific description of this procedure, arranged by their grandmother for both Ayaan and fouryear-old Haweya, for whom it was extremely traumatic and possibly contributed to her later disintegration. Following his escape from prison to Ethiopia, Hirsi Magan began to organize other exiles against the Somali government. Although he wanted his family with him in

Infidel / hirsi ali

367

Ethiopia, Asha protested that the country was Christian and therefore unsuitable. When the Listed as one of Time magazine’s One war between Somalia and Ethiopia began, she Hundred Most Influential People of convinced her husband to move them instead 2005, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of to Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam. How- The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation ever, just as his family arrived, he was called Proclamation for Women and Islam back to Ethiopia, leaving them isolated in a (2006). She is a resident fellow of the very strict society where Asha was forced to American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and is writing ask clan members for financial support. a philosophical novel. Hirsi Ali’s first real encounter with the power of Islam was in Saudi Arabia. There, buses were completely segregated, as were schools. Boys and girls studied in separate buildings, where education consisted primarily of Arabic, mathematics, religion, and beatings by her teacher. Laws for women were harsh: in Riyadh, the capital, men locked their wives in their homes whenever they left. Her mother could not even enter a taxi without a man to accompany her. Ultimately, the family was deported to Ethiopia. Hirsi Magan was an important man there, broadcasting to Somali exiles, but life was too dangerous. The cook was required to taste their food to prevent their being poisoned, and after a year they fled to Kenya. In Nairobi, Hirsi Ali attended a Muslim girls’ school where she became fluent in English and Swahili, and where her father again left them. As the older daughter, Hirsi Ali was expected to cook and do all the housework. If she complained, her mother tied her wrists to her ankles and beat her. She began to rebel against the customary subjugation of women, rejecting her mother’s dependence on others and questioning Saudi-influenced restrictions within Islam. Even as she secretly devoured forbidden novels, she longed to understand the words of the Prophet Muhammad, rather than accept them blindly. Asha hired an itinerant teacher to instruct her daughters further in the Qur$3n, but when Hirsi Ali challenged him, his response was merely to shout at her. Because she would not listen, he came to their flat while she was alone and beat her and smashed her head against the wall, fracturing her skull. She attempted suicide. A new female teacher, firm but gentle, who taught religious education at school and wore the full hidjab, strongly influenced Hirsi Ali. She became more conservative and for a time wore a black robe, yet she still felt that she was losing herself. She sought logic and consistency in her religion but perceived inconsistencies: If Islam taught that men and women are equal, why should women obey men absolutely? Why was a woman’s testimony only worth half of a man’s? Hoping to work, Hirsi Ali and her sister attended a Kenyan secretarial school that was much more worldly than what they had previously known. In 1990, relatives convinced their mother to allow them to travel to Mogadishu. Hirsi Ali found a job in a United Nations telecommunications office, where she quickly became aware of government corruption and increasing political unrest. Troubled Somalia was on the verge of civil war as a rival clan attempt to exterminate the Darod, and Asha urged her daughters to leave. As they fled Mogadishu, open warfare broke out. Hirsi Ali and a

368

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

friend managed to rescue thirty-one starving Somalis and guide them safely across the Kenyan border to Nairobi. Hirsi Magan briefly returned to Nairobi, where a visiting cousin from Canada, Osman Moussa, asked for Hirsi Ali’s hand. Osman, a very conservative Muslim, spoke broken English and was largely unaware of Somali language or culture. She thought he was an idiot, but her father was elated by the match and did not listen. The marriage was scheduled for six days after their first meeting. When Hirsi Ali refused to attend the ceremony that would officially unite them, she was informed that her presence was unnecessary. Customarily the men made all the arrangements, and she had no recourse. Afterward, Osman flew to Canada to expedite her visa and sent her off to Europe to await it. As Hirsi Ali arrived in Germany, she experienced immediate culture shock. Amazed at the clean, prompt buses and orderly houses, she realized that she could live safely there. With the help of a friend whom she had rescued from Somalia, she disappeared into a Dutch asylum center. She was awarded refugee status after she concocted a story of escape from Somalia’s civil war, altered her age, and changed her surname Magan to Ali (her grandfather’s original birth name) to avoid detection. Eventually tracked down by Osman, she refused to accompany him to Canada, and in the Netherlands he could not force her. He returned alone. Hirsi Ali attended Dutch language school to master yet another foreign tongue. Then, desiring to help fellow Muslim refugees, she served as an informal interpreter and mediator at the center. She worked at other small jobs before her classes and hoped someday to study political science. She wanted to understand why life in the Netherlands was so different from her own background and how Europe had achieved such peace, wealth, and security. Once she acquired the qualifications that allowed her to attend Leiden University, Hirsi Ali was fascinated by psychology, the history of ideas, and the concept of individual choice. She fell in love with reason and the Enlightenment, for her Muslim schools had avoided teaching anything that conflicted with Islamic doctrine. As her education broadened, she recognized problems stemming from the Dutch decision that permitted immigrants to follow their own customs, remaining in traditions that allowed no tolerance for ways different from their own and thus preventing their full integration into society. Hirsi Ali became a Dutch citizen in 1997. In her final year at the university, she wrote an article expressing her ideas on the “insular” underclass of immigrants who rejected Dutch values such as separation of church and state and the rights of women and homosexuals. As a junior researcher on immigration for the Labor Party, she watched the World Trade Center collapse on September 11, 2001, while Muslim children celebrated in the Dutch streets. She recognized that these children were not “a lunatic fringe” and that many Muslims (once perhaps including herself) saw such an attack as a “justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.” Her argument is that the destruction of the World Trade Center exemplifies the clash between reason and religious belief. In 2002, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament as a Liberal (corresponding to an American conservative). She advocated public statistics on the number of honor

Infidel / hirsi ali

369

killings in the Netherlands—where a Muslim woman would be put to death by her own relatives because she had brought shame upon the family—and civil punishment for the offenders. Being in parliament gave her a chance to effect changes that emphasized the rights of individuals. She worked for independent residence papers for women who came to the Netherlands to marry legal immigrants, thereby allowing them the right to stay even if they left their husbands, rather than being sent home to be punished or killed. Threats were made on her life as a Muslim apostate; her bodyguards became permanent, and she constantly changed residences. Hirsi Ali had thought of mounting a controversial art exhibit, “Submission,” to illustrate the oppression of Muslim women. (“Islam” literally means “submission.”) When she met Theo van Gogh, the eccentric Dutch filmmaker and greatgrandnephew of the artist Vincent van Gogh, he suggested that she turn her project into a ten-minute video, Submission: Part One, by writing a screenplay that he would film. They worked together over the summer while parliament was in recess, and their video was aired on Dutch television on August 29, 2004. Hirsi Ali begins and ends Infidel with the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by a Moroccan extremist on November 2, 2004. A threatening letter addressed to her was left on his body, and she too was hunted, placed under heavy guard, and hidden for a time in the United States. Later, her Dutch citizenship was temporarily nullified because she had given a different name and birthdate after she first arrived in the Netherlands (she had always admitted this), and she was forced to resign from parliament. A political furor ensued, briefly causing the Dutch government to collapse. The author, who identifies herself as a secular Muslim living in the United States, contends that Muslims need to realize what their beliefs actually do to human beings. She urges not only the emancipation of Muslim women but also the reduction of unemployment benefits and abolition of the minimum wage to eliminate the trap of poverty and to encourage immigrants to work. She concludes that all governments must recognize and deal with these problems. Hirsi Ali believes that “the pure moral framework that is Islam . . . regulates every detail of life and subjugates free will” and that “we [Muslims] had been hiding from reason for so long because we were incapable of facing up to the need to integrate it into our beliefs.” She calls for reform from within Islam so that people will begin to reassess their values. Well aware of the painful transition “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” and understanding that what she writes will be anathema to some, she offers hope that, just as the West “freed itself from the grip of violent organized religion, . . . the same process could occur among the millions of Muslims.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali exhibits impressive fluency in English; no ghostwriter is in evidence. With vivid imagery and sensory detail, she brings to life the ambience of each culture in which she has lived. Her arguments are largely persuasive, perhaps more so because she speaks from personal experience. Witnessing the life from which she came, one can only be impressed with her courage in daring to stand up for herself and others, transforming her life at the continued risk of losing it. Joanne McCarthy

370

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources America 196, no. 19 (May 28, 2007): 23-24. Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 30. Commentary 123, no. 4 (April, 2007): 67-71. Harper’s Magazine 314 (February, 2007): 85-86. National Review 59, no. 7 (April 30, 2007): 48-50. New Criterion 25, no. 8 (April, 2007): 86-88. The New York Times 156 (February 14, 2007): E1-E11. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 4, 2007): 14. Newsweek 149, no. 8 (February 26, 2007): 38. The Washington Post, February 4, 2007, p. BW05.

371

INVENTING HUMAN RIGHTS A History Author: Lynn Hunt (1945) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 272 pp. $25.95 Type of Work: History, philosophy Time: Eighteenth to twentieth centuries Locale: Western Europe and the United States The author seeks to explain why interest in human rights flourished in late eighteenth century Europe and North America, asserting that growth in feelings of empathy with other human beings, as much as logical arguments advanced by Enlightenment thinkers, led to active concern for the rights of all people Principal personages: Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748), Swiss jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Dutch jurist Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), American Founding Father and principal author of the Declaration of Independence John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), German social philosopher George Mason (1725-1792), American Founding Father and author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), English novelist Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), American political leader and chairwoman of the 1948 United Nations Commission on Human Rights Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss-French political theorist and novelist Voltaire (1694-1778), French philosopher

For Lynn Hunt, a leading historian of eighteenth century France, two striking aspects of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were the assertions that these rights were universal and self-evident. The claims echoed the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and were repeated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Despite use of the word “citizen” in the title of the French declaration, both in that document and in the American one the rights listed applied to everyone—with the understanding that for political participation “all men” did not necessarily include propertyless males, slaves, free blacks, women, or at times religious minorities. In Inventing Human Rights: A History, Hunt asks: If rights were self-evident, why was it necessary to declare them, and why was the claim made at this particular time? For Hunt, the particular time and place are important. She stresses that use of the phrase “rights of man” began in the eighteenth century. The first attempt to actually enumerate them was the Declaration of Rights written by George Mason and prefaced

372

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

to the Virginia constitution in early 1776. His list was widely copied by other states, and Thomas Jefferson used an improved version of Mason’s language in drafting the Declaration of Independence. Translations of American constitutions circulated widely in France in the 1770’s and 1780’s, influencing its 1789 declaration. Critics of Hunt object to her stress on the eighteenth century as too limiting, arguing that the rights claimed in 1776 and 1789 had a lengthy history. Beginnings can be traced as far back as the law codes of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century b.c.e., in the political speculation of Greek philosophers, in the commandments of all major religions, and in changing views of human individuality that arose during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Hunt rejects the call to study all possible sources of the declarations, objecting that it would involve writing a history of Western civilization (others would say of world civilization) and would not explain what changed in the eighteenth century. Although two of the Ten Commandments anticipated parts of John Locke’s trilogy of rights—the injunction not to kill clearly implied a right to security of life, the charge not to steal recognized a right to property—not until the political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did anything resembling modern concepts of liberty emerge. Hunt praises Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis libri res (1625; On the Law of War and Peace, 1654) for asserting the concept of natural rights independent of religion and applicable to all humankind, not just one country or legal tradition. JeanJacques Burlamaqui elaborated Grotius’s ideas in his Principes du droit naturel (1747; The Principles of Natural Law, 1748), widely translated into English and various European languages. Even more influential in America was Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), with its claim that states were formed under a social contract subject to natural law guaranteeing inalienable rights. What transformed abstract speculation on politics to a revolutionary movement, Hunt suggests, was the addition of a growing emotional identification with others, or empathy, to reasoned arguments. Belief in human rights became self-evident and a stimulus for action when people began to see others as their equals, as being like them in significant ways. Before that could happen, attitudes like that recorded of Madame Duchâtelet, “who did not hesitate to undress in front of her servants, not considering it a proven fact that valets were men,” had to change. In one of the most interesting and original assertions in the book, Hunt claims that reading novels was a major way that eighteenth century people learned to empathize with others. She focuses on epistolary novels, in which the author pretends to be only the editor of a series of letters by the heroine. The main characters were ordinary people, telling their stories in their own voices. The letters directly involved the reader

Lynn Hunt, a specialist in eighteenth century French history, is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and former president of the American Historical Association. She has published Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), and edited The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (1996).

Inventing Human Rights / hunt

373

with the protagonists, encouraging passionate identification with their fortunes and misfortunes. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741), swept the European continent, as well as Britain and North America, involving even aristocrats in the travails of a servant. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie: Ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) went through 115 French and 10 English editions before 1800, bringing the reader to sympathize with its middle-class heroine. Hunt notes that the vogue of the epistolary novel coincides chronologically with the birth of human rights. Such coincidence cannot prove causal relationships, but ardent responses of readers to the difficulties of lower- and middle-class heroines demonstrate a widening of human interest that supports Hunt’s interpretation. A chapter on changing attitudes to torture and cruel punishments provides further evidence for Hunt’s assertion that empathy with others increased in the eighteenth century. She illustrates the shift by examining Voltaire’s writings about the Calas murder case. Jean Calas, a French Protestant, was convicted in 1762 of murdering his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism; before his execution, Calas underwent judicial torture, described by Hunt in graphic detail, to force him to name accomplices. Calas went to his death protesting his innocence, insisting that where there was no crime, there could be no accomplices. Voltaire took up his cause that year, focusing attention on the case as a major violation of religious freedom, and continued to publicize it, but not until 1769 did he condemn Calas’s torture as a violation of his human rights. Traditionalists defended torture as a major deterrence to crime, and severe physical pain after conviction as necessary to hunt out conspiracies. However, majority opinion turned against torture and cruel punishment in the latter half of the century, testifying to growing recognition that other people suffered the same way as oneself. In the 1780’s, the royal government reduced use of torture; the French revolutionary government ended all forms of judicial torture in 1789 and in 1792 introduced the guillotine, claiming that it made executions uniform for all classes and as painless as possible. Practical applications of the lofty principles enacted in the 1789 declaration were less sweeping than the original language. However, once the French started defining human rights, expansion of these rights became unstoppable. In August, 1789, freedom of religion consisted in people not being disturbed over religious belief; shortly thereafter, Protestants received the right to practice their religion openly. Protestants were granted political rights on December 29, 1789, which opened the way for Jews to follow, despite many objections, on September 27, 1791. Great Britain saw a similar progression. Catholics gained access to the armed forces, universities, and judiciary in 1791, and were eligible for election to Parliament after 1819; Jews got the first concession in 1842, the second in 1858. Revolutionary France granted equal political rights to free blacks in 1792 and emancipated slaves in 1794; Britain and the United States followed more slowly. Revolutionary France provided civil rights regarding inheritance and divorce for women, but when Olympe de Gouges claimed that women deserved equal political rights, she was vilified and later guillotined. Hunt too easily dismisses the U.S. Bill of Rights as narrowly particularistic to the British and American legal tradition. The language of the articles drew on a long line

374

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

of lawyerly definitions of rights but also proved capable of future expansion in application. The Fifth Amendment is as universal in language and effect as any eighteenth century declaration when it states, “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—enacting Locke’s trinity of universal freedoms into basic constitutional law. Hunt treats the nineteenth century as a dark period in the history of human rights. No universal declarations were issued, nationalism dominated the world scene, and advances were few and addressed lesser specific problems. Her gloomy view of the century is overdone, ignoring the way reform movements that attacked particular problems continued to advance the principles of the great declarations. Most industrial nations established universal manhood suffrage by the end of the century. The antislavery movement was more successful than the demand for women’s rights, but the latter did enlarge women’s civil liberties in the nineteenth century and prepared the way for successful attainment of suffrage in the United States in 1920, Britain in 1928, and France in 1944. Labor movements, ignored by Hunt, developed in the course of the nineteenth century, adding economic and social rights to the political agenda of the eighteenth, questioning whether political privileges could be adequately exercised by those lacking sufficient material resources, leisure, and education. Demands for recognition of trade unions, restriction of the workday, public education, child welfare, and other social reforms appeared. Karl Marx and his followers took extreme positions, calling the basic ideals of the declarations liberal camouflage that served class interests of the bourgeoisie. For Marx, religious freedom always benefited the ruling elite; only abolishing religion would lead to true freedom. In the twentieth century, major challenges to human rights ideas grew out of anticolonial, anti-imperialist movements as Asian and African countries revolted against European occupiers. Many demands of independence movements echoed eighteenth century language, calling on Western nations to honor their declared principles. However, resistance to colonialism also took the form of defense of native culture and traditions, rejecting the concept of universal human rights as a form of Western aggression. Countries with a tradition of authoritarianism accepted assumption of dictatorial powers by leaders who claimed that democracy conflicted with their nation’s indigenous culture. Firmly Muslim countries objected to definitions of religious freedom that included the right of Muslims to change religious affiliation. For Hunt, the great event of the twentieth century was the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, compiled after much discussion by a committee headed by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted by the United Nations. Hunt prints its text along with the French and American declarations as appendixes to her volume. Its thirty articles include all that was in the 1789 declaration, along with statements of the economic and social rights advanced in the nineteenth century. Whether its ethical and humane principles would be better observed in the twenty-first century than they were in the preceding one remains to be seen. Milton Berman

Inventing Human Rights / hunt

375

Review Sources Commonweal 134, no. 9 (May 4, 2007): 26-27. Harper’s Magazine 314 (May, 2007): 89-93. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 85. London Review of Books 29, no. 22 (November 15, 2007): 14-15. The Nation 234, no. 15 (April 16, 2007): 25-31. The New Republic 236, no. 15 (May 7, 2007): 48-53. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 8, 2007): 30. The New Yorker 83, no. 13 (May 21, 2006): 81. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 53 (March 6, 2007): D6. The Washington Post, April 22, 2007, p. BW09.

376

THE INVISIBLE WALL A Love Story That Broke Barriers Author: Harry Bernstein (1910) Publisher: Ballantine (New York). 297 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1914-1922 Locale: Stockport, Lancashire, northern England A nonagenarian recalls his childhood in an English mill town on a street where Gentiles and Jews faced off in mutual mistrust Principal characters: Harry Bernstein, the narrator, recalling his childhood in England Mam, Harry’s long-suffering mother Jack, Harry’s brutish father Lily, Harry’s sister Arthur Forshaw, Lily’s Gentile lover Freddy Gordon, a neighborhood Lothario Sarah Harris, a Jewish girl who falls in love with Freddy Annie Green, a neighborhood woman whose baby is thought to be Freddy’s Larry, a genial rambler who boards briefly with the family Max, the rabbi’s freethinking son

What initially made publication of The Invisible Wall the object of international awe was the advanced age of its author, ninety-six, and the claim that this was his first book. In fact, as Harry Bernstein admitted to interviewers who sought him out in the retirement community in Brick, New Jersey, where he lived alone, he had over the decades written twenty to thirty novels, but none had found a publisher. The Smile could be said to have been published in 1981, but only in the most technical sense of the term; the novel’s publisher went out of business shortly after copies were printed, and they were never distributed. So, in his tenth decade, Bernstein—like Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her first book of poems, Ants on the Melon (1996), at eighty-three—represented an extraordinarily late literary debut. The book was written, Bernstein stated, as a kind of therapy to enable him to cope with the death of his wife, Ruby, after sixty-seven years of marriage. However, readers soon discovered that The Invisible Wall merited attention not merely because of the senescence of its novice author. More than just a literary novelty, it is a dramatic evocation of Bernstein’s harrowing childhood. Recalling objects, events, and conversations from ninety years earlier, he demonstrates a vivid memory, a powerful imagination, and a confident command of language. The memoir begins in 1914, when Harry (called “’arry” by everyone in his English neighborhood) is four, and it concludes eight years later, when he and most of

The Invisible Wall / bernstein

377

his family leave for America. It is set on a drab street in a Lancashire mill town; Born in England in 1910, Harry though unnamed in the book, Stockport is Bernstein emigrated to Chicago in the town, near Manchester, in northern En- 1922. Although he read manuscripts gland, where Bernstein spent the first dozen for movie studios and edited a building years of his life. Though it has been compared trade magazine, little of his work with Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s 1996 appeared in print. Bernstein began memoir of an impoverished Irish childhood, writing The Invisible Wall as therapy after the death of his wife. He lives in the book is Dickensian in its focus on growBrick, New Jersey, and has completed ing up poor in a grimy industrial English town The Dream, a sequel that takes up and in its cast of memorable characters. Harry’s story after his arrival in the The Invisible Wall derives its title from the United States. psychological barrier that divides the street where Harry lives. On one side live the Jews, including Harry and his family; Harry is the youngest of three boys and two girls. Across the street live the Gentiles. Most of the Jewish men work in nearby tailoring shops, and most of the Christian men have jobs in the cotton mills. Although Gentiles and Jews suffer alike from stifling poverty, deep-seated animosities separate the two groups. On the other side of the street, Jews are openly maligned as avaricious Christ-killers, and every day, traveling to and from school, Harry and his siblings run a gauntlet of thuggish “batsemas” (local slang for anti-Semites). Beyond using Christians as “fire goys,” to turn off ovens on the Sabbath, when their religion forbids Jews to do it themselves, Harry’s family and others on their side of the street try, in turn, to have as little as possible to do with their Christian neighbors. The Invisible Wall begins with a vibrant auditory memory—the early morning symphony of wooden clogs clattering on cobblestones as the Christian men march off to work in the mills. Anxious to secure a finer fate for her youngest child, who has to share a bed with his two older brothers, Harry’s mother desperately tries to get him leather shoes, a prerequisite for enrollment in a better school. However, her nasty, sullen husband, who squanders his wages on drinking and gambling, refuses to allot her enough money for shoes, and the headmaster, who zealously limits the number of Jews admitted into his school, rejects Harry for wearing clogs. For all her resourcefulness (to supplement the meager household budget, she gleans imperfect produce to sell in a makeshift shop) and devotion, Harry’s mother is trapped in poverty and a loveless marriage. What sustains her over the years is hope that relatives abroad with whom she—though illiterate, using her youngest son as scribe and reader— corresponds will send the family steamship tickets to America. Though Harry provides some explanation for his father’s surliness, in the harshness of his own childhood in Poland, Jack emerges as one of the cruelest paternal ogres in contemporary literature. Drunk or sober, he clashes with everyone, even Joe, the easygoing adventurer whom he invites to be a boarder. While written from the perspective of an old man recalling his childhood, the memoir also succeeds in entering the mind of young Harry. The perspective of a curi-

378

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ous and trusting child is most apparent in an early sequence in which the four-year-old boy is recruited to carry love letters between Freddy Gordon, a lusty neighborhood boy, and Sarah Harris, a Jew who lives on the other side of the invisible wall from him. Young Harry is only vaguely aware that, in acting as go-between, he is doing something improper, but the reader knows from the outset that a romance between Gentile and Jew violates a fundamental taboo of the neighborhood. When the couple is discovered, Sarah is abruptly dispatched to relatives in Australia. The incident foreshadows an even more serious breach of the invisible wall, one that provides the memoir with its subtitle: A Love Story That Broke Barriers. Harry’s sister Lily, a brilliant student whose educational ambitions are thwarted when her resentful father drags her by the hair to toil with him in a tailor shop, falls in love with Arthur Forshaw. When Lily and Arthur elope, Harry’s mother, who considers marriage to a Christian tantamount to death, is devastated. Rejecting the couple’s attempts at reconciliation, she sits shivah, the Jewish ritual of mourning, for her lost daughter. Though, like young Harry, the narrative never leaves Lancashire, World War I, fought in the trenches of continental Europe, is a powerful presence in the book. Wartime scarcities exacerbate the misery of the neighborhood, and most of its young men are conscripted into the conflict. Some never return. Freddy Gordon, once a vibrant wooer of women up and down the street, returns without legs. In one of the most affecting moments in the book, the paraplegic Freddy asks unsuspecting young Harry to wheel him to the top of a nearby hill, from which he proceeds to hurl himself down, to his death. Arthur Forshaw is disillusioned by military service. “There is no heroism,” he writes to Lily from the front. “There is only dirt and mud and cold and wet and men crying like babies and dead faces staring up at you and bodies lying huddled and still and the smell of death all around you and the sound of guns and flashes of fire bringing more death.” Though physically unscathed, Arthur returns home transformed, committed to a world without war and economic exploitation, in which human beings are no longer divided by religion and nationality, in which all can rejoice in his marriage to Lily. Arthur and Lily strengthen their utopian beliefs while attending socialist meetings in secret. Despite the wretchedness of their current circumstances and the fact that his new bride is disowned by her family, Arthur is convinced that some day “that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble, just like the wall of Jericho.” He assures Lily’s young brother: “Oh yes, ’arry, we’re going to have a better world. Things won’t always be the way they are now. There’ll be good times for all of us, not just a few.” The narrator’s longer perspective colors Arthur’s faith with bitter irony. Max, the local rabbi’s son, is the leading actor in another wrenching drama of faith. His proud father cajoles the brilliant young man into returning to his cheder to give an inspirational talk to the current pupils, including Harry. However, Max has been reading Karl Marx and has come under the influence of the renegade Jew’s unorthodox ideas. Refusing to be anything but honest, Max shocks his father when he publicly questions the possibility of theodicy, of reconciling the existence of evil with the exis-

The Invisible Wall / bernstein

379

tence of God. “If God is our creator, the supreme, kind, and benevolent being whom we all worship,” he asks, “why does he permit us to destroy one another? And why too does he permit one religion to persecute another when both are his children? And so there came that terrible question—supposing, supposing it is all fantasy— is there really a God?” The question is that much more vexing when filtered through the trusting mind of young Harry as well as through the jaded consciousness of an aging narrator who is aware that Max will travel to Russia to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution and become a casualty of the cause he embraced. In an epilogue, Bernstein recounts a return visit, after forty years, to the old neighborhood. Accompanied by his wife, Ruby, he arrives just as the houses on the street are being demolished. Little but memory is left of the world that contained him as a child. The final lines of the memoir circle back to the beginning, as the narrator recalls how he used to lie in bed listening to the clatter of clogs on the cobblestones outside. “Then there was silence,” he concludes, “and my eyes would close and I was asleep.” The resonant ending is remarkably similar to the final paragraph in a classic of American Jewish fiction. Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep concludes when David Schearl, the little boy who is the 1934 novel’s protagonist and who has gotten through another day in an environment, the lower East Side, as oppressive and impoverished as Harry’s Lancashire slum, decides that he, too, might as well “call it sleep.” Other parallels include the brutishness of the two boys’ fathers and the sense in both books that Jews are beset by enemies. Sixty years after Call It Sleep, Roth published his second novel, A Star Shines on Mt. Morris Park (1994). He was eighty-eight at the time, and he found its writing a way to cope with the death of Muriel, his wife of fifty years. Roth’s reemergence as a writer in his late eighties was as astonishing as nonagenarian Bernstein’s creative debut. Their autumnal artistry revivified American Jewish literature. Steven G. Kellman

Review Sources Booklist, 103, no. 5 (November 1, 2006): 17. Entertainment Weekly, no. 926 (March 23, 2007): 65. The Guardian, February 12, 2007, p. 12. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 24 (December 15, 2006): 1250-1251. Library Journal 132 (March 13, 2007): 78. The New York Times 156 (April 4, 2007): E9. The Newark Star-Ledger, April 15, 2007, p. 1. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2006): 54. The Times Literary Supplement, June 1, 2007, p. 27. USA Today, March 20, 2007, p. D1.

380

IVAN THE FOOL Russian Folk Belief—A Cultural History Author: Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) First published: Ivan-durak: Ocherk russkoi narodnoi very, 1991, in Paris Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov Publisher: Northwestern University Press (Chicago). 416 pp. $15.95 Type of work: History Time: 907 to the 1970’s Locale: Russia A comprehensive survey of Russian fairy tales and folk wisdom from the Middle Ages to the modern era Principal personages: Nikon (1605-1681), the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and instigator of reforms that would lead to a lasting schism in his religion Avvakum Petrovich (1620-1682), an exiled archpriest of the Russian Orthodox faith who opposed the reforms, and author of an autobiography detailing his sufferings

To the modern imagination, the term “fairy tale” has little meaning beyond certain imaginary characters—human or otherwise—whose functions range from mere entertainment to the inculcation of specific moral precepts. They are generally regarded as children’s bedtime stories, with some notable exceptions. Early German Romantic writers such as Novalis wrote serious literature in this genre, and most Americans are familiar with such Washington Irving stories as “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), which also derives in part from German folktales. What makes folk wisdom worthy of study is what it reveals about the character of a nation. While many Americans may associate fairy tales only with the Brothers Grimm, they certainly recognize the stilt-legged figure of Uncle Sam, the ridiculously clad folk character who serves as the unofficial national symbol. The national banner may wave over official buildings and ceremonies, but the popular imagination prefers the man who wraps himself in the flag. It is this notion of a national character being defined by its folk wisdom that permeates Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief—A Cultural History, Andrei Sinyavsky’s splendid search for the Russian soul through its folk tradition. Given his background as a literary critic and novelist, Sinyavsky was especially qualified for this assessment of the Russian folk idiom, a genre that spans all of Russian history, from its roots in pagan beliefs through the political upheavals of the twentieth century. One of the reasons Ivan the Fool succeeds is the fact that Sinyavsky begins the discussion by clearly indicating what folk belief is and what it is not—a crucial first step when dealing

Ivan the Fool / sinyavsky

381

with such a broad subject. Some critics, such as the late Joseph Campbell, tend to be some- After receiving a Ph.D. in philology, what dismissive of the folk tradition (the “un- Andrei Sinyavsky became a significant official” culture) in favor of myths (the “offi- critic at the progressive periodical cial” culture). Significantly, Sinyavsky takes a Novy Mir. After running afoul of the different view. Without question, the Russian Soviet authorities, he served five years Orthodox Church expressed the official my- in a prison camp and relocated to thology of czarist Russia. It was the arbiter France in 1973. In addition to teaching at the Sorbonne, he wrote the of Christian morality, and its clerics were a autobiographical novel Spokoynoy highly educated group in an overwhelmingly nochi (1984; Goodnight! 1989) and illiterate nation; however, as Sinyavsky cor- Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History rectly points out, the rarefied atmosphere of (1990). this official literate culture was quite distant from the illiterate masses. For the peasant, cultural continuity was determined less by Orthodox rites than by the oral tradition. Paganism, which preceded the conversion to the Orthodox faith, was never entirely supplanted by the new religion. Rather, the more ossified structure of the official church coexisted with the more flexible brand of Christianity fashioned by the Russian peasant. The Russia of today may be a world power wielding nuclear weapons, but Sinyavsky makes it abundantly clear that it is a nation largely constituted by its folk past, a past mostly shaped by peasant beliefs. In the most charming of the book’s four main segments, “The Folktale,” Sinyavsky understands precisely why Russian fairy tales endure to this day: “Evidently, the folktale, even understood as lies or invention, expresses vital aspects of the folk worldview. The popular memory would not have retained fairy-tale images for thousands of years if they did not contain enduring, undying values common to all mankind.” If fiction means lying in a literal sense in order to tell a deeper truth, then the fairy tale would seem to be fiction in its purest form. This is precisely why a novelist such as Sinyavsky would become enthralled by the folk genre. What is peculiarly Russian about these folktales is the almost complete dissociation between the hero’s moral constitution and his eventual happy fate. Sinyavsky points out that the heroes of Russian tales usually follow a path from rags to riches, a role reversal almost unthinkable in the reality of peasant Russia. While acknowledging the arbitrary nature of the dispensation of justice in these tales, he fails to see how this absence of what might be termed moral causality differs so markedly from standard Western fare. That is, in most fairy tales one comes to expect that good characters will be rewarded and that evil ones will be punished. One expects Cinderella to find happiness at the end of the story not simply because she is in need of it but also because as a good person who has suffered she deserves it—an allusion to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Not so in Russian fables, where one often encounters a starving hunter of no particular merit who suddenly finds himself sated and wealthy—not by virtue of goodness rewarded but solely through the power of magic. In one tale, a hunter braves a chasm to reach a small voice pleading for help and unwittingly unleashes an invisible entity emitting from a small box. Sinyavsky properly

382

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

associates the chasm with the otherworld, but he fails to identify this characteristic as being a remnant of Russia’s pagan past. This blindness is apparent when he attempts to summarize the chief characteristics of the folk hero. He seems to insinuate that the common path of the peasant hero rising from penury to luxury reflects a kind of challenge by the poor to the wealthy. However, if one puts this same plot feature in a wider cultural context, one can see that the peasant hero bears some resemblance to the trickster figure from mythology. Both undergo a series of adventures that are unrelated to their moral stature. This is evident in his discussion of the fool, the most common hero of the Russian folktale. In addition to being witless, the fool finds happiness and wealth despite the fact that he is often lazy and physically repulsive. Like a trickster, his eventual success seems to defy fate. What Sinyavsky does capture is this idea of a role reversal as being a necessary transformation, one that can empower the lowest of the destitute. Ivan the Fool is notable for the fact that Sinyavsky employs his skills as a writer and critic when assessing the literary worth of the Russian fairy tale. In his view, fairy tales rarely strive for innovation in terms of plot and character. In this sense, they are as hackneyed as anything to emerge from the Hollywood dream factory or television situation comedies. They are meant to entertain. He contends that what makes these stories spring to life is the effective use of language in the telling. When the parents in one tale unknowingly apprentice their son to a thief instead of a tailor, the story cleverly plays upon the boy’s new occupation as “he threads his way” through the streets at night. Sinyavsky correctly emphasizes the fact that this close attention to language is typical of an oral tradition. Rather than simply reprise an oft-told tale, the teller had the freedom to adapt the story to his audience, much as one might make cuts in a play for a particular performance. Although the tale could be ancient and familiar, the storyteller was free to insert names that were more relevant to the audience. Ivan the Fool is also useful in that it provides a rigorous analysis of the structure of the Russian fairy tale. Rather than simply launching directly into a story, the teller would employ a framing device that would introduce the tale and provide a few closing comments for the audience. The introductory portion (priskazka) tends to be a brief comic preamble that sets the mood for the ensuing fantasy and draws the listeners’ attention. As one might expect, if the opening section signals to the audience that one is about to enter Never-Never Land, the closing remarks (kontsovka) are intended to dispel the very magical mood created by the tale—often by openly dismissing the story entirely. Sinyavsky speculates that the reason for this often humorous framing device was so that a professional storyteller could draw attention for refreshments as a reward for his performance. That may be so, but Sinyavsky again fails to fully contextualize these valuable insights. One can easily associate the Russian storyteller in the tavern with such literary forbears as the mead hall bard regaling an audience with a rendition of Beowulf or even a chorus in a William Shakespeare play. There is a basic human need for such framing devices in a story. Such a structure provides a beginning, a middle, and an end; or to express it in more fundamental terms, the endless cycle of birth, life, and death. These would have been matters of keen importance to the peasants of Old Russia.

Ivan the Fool / sinyavsky

383

Sinyavsky follows his analysis of the structure of the fairy tale with a synopsis of the pagan elements that permeate the Russian psyche. Sinyavsky might have better served his subject if he had simply restricted the range of his inquiry and focused on the fairy tale, a subject that even in a broad treatment could probably constitute a book in itself. He indicates in his introduction that Ivan the Fool began as a college course he taught at the Sorbonne, and this probably explains why Sinyavsky’s book covers so much territory: Cutting a wide swath in a university course offers more opportunities for discussion than in a book, which favors a more in-depth treatment. Nevertheless, Ivan the Fool is a survey not just of fairy tales but of Russia’s folk beliefs in general, so the section on paganism is justified. As one might expect, there was a thunder god named Perun, who was the Russian equivalent of the Nordic god Thor, a fertility god known as Yarila, as well as a house spirit (Domovoi) and a forest spirit (Leshii). What is surprising are the ways in which the Russian peasant’s belief system combined elements of paganism and Christianity, something that emerges in Sinyavsky’s discussion of Holy Russia. As one would expect in a peasant culture, the notion of a Mother Damp Earth was revered as a symbol of life. However, in the peasant mind the Virgin Mary functions as a kind of connecting link between the Mother Damp Earth and Christ, who reigns above. Of course, all of this ran contrary to Christian dogma, and Sinyavsky handles the subject well. However, once again, he could have strengthened his discussion by linking it with the ancient pagan concept of the Mother Earth goddess. The final section of the book, which deals with the splintering of the Russian Orthodox Church beginning in the seventeenth century, demonstrates once again the difficulty with the survey approach. While one can justify its inclusion because of the fact that numerous religious sects were driven by peasant folk beliefs, it seems somewhat out of place in a book that devotes so much productive space to the Russian fairy tale. One could only wish that, if Sinyavsky had lived a longer life, he might have produced an annotated anthology of selected fairy tales as a companion volume. Still, Ivan the Fool is a wonderful contribution to the field of folk studies. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources Russian Life 50, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 61. The Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 2007, pp. 24-25.

384

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER The Early Years Author: Wayne Franklin (1945) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 708 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1785-1826 Locale: Cooperstown, Westchester, and New York City, New York A biography of the first major American novelist and his struggles to earn a living as an author in an age when America was not expected to produce its own cultural offerings Principal personages: James Fenimore Cooper, first major American novelist William Cooper, his father, ambitious founder of Cooperstown, and model for Judge Templeton of The Pioneers (1823) Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper, his mother and reluctant pioneer Hannah Cooper, his older sister, killed in a horse fall Susan Augusta DeLancey, his wife, from a distinguished Tory family William Holt Averell, an unethical lawyer whose suits devastated the Cooper estate Charles Wiley, the first publisher of Cooper’s novels James Lawrence, mentor, naval commander, and War of 1812 martyr John Paul Jones, Revolutionary War hero and model for The Pilot (1823) Enoch Crosby, the model for the selfless common-man hero of The Spy (1821)

After Mark Twain’s derisive essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” (1895), is it still possible to take America’s first major novelist seriously? In only two-thirds of a page of The Deerslayer (1841), according to Twain, Cooper committed 114 offenses against literary art; the novel was “a literary delirium tremens.” Of course, Twain exploited the humorous possibilities of exaggeration in his essay, and most literary historians think his literary criticism is as unfair as his satire is amusing. However, as Wayne Franklin notes in James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, the first volume of a projected two-volume comprehensive biography, such judgments have had lasting detrimental effects on this early American novelist’s reputation. Franklin’s purpose as the first biographer having access to the complete Cooper papers is to provide long-missing information and overdue correctives to false impressions. In the process of writing this book, he discovers not only a novelist of considerable significance but also a representative man of his time.

James Fenimore Cooper / franklin

385

Part of the fault for misunderstandings of Cooper lies with the novelist himself, and his A professor of English and director of family. They were reluctant to allow biogra- the American Studies program at the phers access to his life. He was a controver- University of Connecticut, Wayne sial political figure, often attacked by news- Franklin is also the author of The New papers sympathetic to the Whig Party; rightly World of James Fenimore Cooper or wrongly, he thought that limiting access (1982) and coeditor of The Norton to archival material after his death would Anthology of American Literature. protect his loved ones. Because Cooper has remained, in Franklin’s judgment, the last major American cultural figure without a comprehensive biography, distortions of him have unfortunately been left unanswered. If at times Franklin digresses from the main narrative of Cooper’s life, it is because he sees an opportunity to supply details that have long remained hidden from Cooper readers. Given a choice, one infers, Franklin decided to err on the side of too much detail rather than too little. That Franklin enjoyed access to voluminous material that other biographers never had is evident in the length and thoroughness of this book. The 708-page volume includes 156 pages of notes and a 26-page index. It begins just before Cooper’s birth in 1789 and ends in 1826 when he was thirty-six and on the verge of leaving the United States for a consulship in Lyons, France. The biography details the important influence of his father, the real estate speculator and developer whose visionary founding of Cooperstown left both inspiring memories and the careless bookkeeping that would ultimately destroy his proud legacy and fray the nerves of his eleventh child. It tells of the novelist’s mother, who apparently despised her life as a pioneer woman in upstate New York and withdrew emotionally from her family, and of his beloved older sister, who acted as his second mother until she tragically died after falling from a horse. This book also describes the early years of Cooper’s marriage to Susan Augusta DeLancey, daughter of a prominent family of Loyalists, and the birth of their seven children, two of whom died in infancy. It spends considerable time exploring Cooper’s economic necessities, his various schemes for earning money, and ultimately his use of his writings to earn a living and relieve his indebtedness. Finally, it is a biography of his books: Specifically, this volume describes the inspiration, composition, and publication of a book of tales and Cooper’s first six novels. What was Cooper’s literary legacy? Franklin strives to make his readers understand the sheer originality of Cooper’s body of work. Several novels are prototypes for subgenres of American fiction, including the Western adventure story, the sea tale, and the Revolutionary War romance. In answer to Twain’s critical satire, Franklin argues that Huckleberry Finn would not have been possible without Natty Bumppo, an earlier hero who found freedom in nature. Outweighing Twain’s mockery was the praise of many eminent writers. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, for example, acknowledged debts to Cooper’s sea fiction, which, beginning with The Pilot (1823), used the sea not simply as setting but as a stage for dramatic human action. As youths, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Francis Parkman all imbibed Cooper; his stories of the nation’s expansion, with all its attendant conflicts

386

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

between individualism and society, formed what Franklin terms a core myth of America: “Cooper set the terms of American dreaming.” Finally, Cooper’s elegiac treatment of Native Americans formed one influential stream of American thought with regard to lost Native American culture. Cooper’s career evolved much as American culture did in the early nineteenth century. Even after a revolution against a colonial power, the country continued with a postcolonial mentality. Americans read British novels and imitations of them. Following suit, Cooper began his career as an author vowing to best a dismally written English novel. The result was Precaution: A Novel (1820). However, even as he imitated British themes in that novel, he was envisioning truly American ones in the next. Even though he assumed that there was no demand for a novel about the origins of America, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) is remarkable for its unprecedented offering of just such a national myth. To Franklin, its protagonist Harvey Birch is the first commoner hero, and it asserted American cultural independence a full sixteen years before Emerson’s American Scholar (1837) called for it. Continuing to keep a foot in both literary camps, in 1823 Cooper published both Tales for Fifteen, purportedly written by a lady and as derivative of European models as Precaution, and The Pioneers: Or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, which featured the very original (and American) theme of westward expansion after the revolution. It was the latter book that caught his imagination. One of his best works, The Pioneers was a sublimation of his love of Cooperstown and an imaginative preservation of his father’s legacy, which was literally being decimated by lawsuits at the time he was composing the book. Franklin believes that he had long given up the legal fight for his father’s material legacy and had turned instead to more lasting memories, whose preservation was made possible through imaginative literature. It was a novel, he informed readers years later in a preface, that he wrote for himself. The other three novels composed during this early stage of his career all focused on telling the tale of America. At last, Cooper seems to have found his forte and to have gained confidence that American readers were finally interested in their own country’s origins. The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea is a Revolutionary War story of Cooper’s beloved U.S. Navy and of a heroic captain modeled on John Paul Jones. At that time, Jones was a neglected and even dubious hero, but Cooper admired him and did his part to revive interest in him. Lionel Lincoln: Or, The Leaguer of Boston (1825) is set in the early stages of the revolution and features an ambivalent protagonist of Loyalist persuasion. In Franklin’s view, Cooper was fascinated by stories of America’s origins, and from his wife’s family in Westchester County he learned a great deal about the position of Loyalists in the war. Finally, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) casts backward to discover presettlement times, when the unspoiled primordial forest covered most of the land and Native Americans still reigned. Franklin maintains that Cooper and his romantic generation regarded the American landscape very differently from his father’s generation. To William Cooper, the wilderness was a waste of creation; settlement would give creation a purpose. On the other hand, James Cooper saw settlement ambivalently. Humanity brought contention to a harmonious order. First envisioned as a minor

James Fenimore Cooper / franklin

387

character, Natty Bumppo became a major one perhaps because his resentment of the intrusive settlers would resonate with Cooper and his generation. This and the other Leatherstocking Tales were about conflicting claims, strife, and complex issues of social law and individual impulse. In Franklin’s view, Cooper’s grief over his father’s dwindling legacy perhaps gave him a sympathetic view of Native American claims on the land, as well. Beyond his significant literary legacy, Cooper, according to Franklin, was a representative man of his time. He was qualified by a breadth of experience to comment both in fictional and essay form on many facets of American life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was intimate with pioneer settlements like Cooperstown, the gentrified life of the rural Hudson Valley, and the developing cosmopolitanism of New York City. He knew of the literary and cultural worlds, the whaling industry, the merchant marine, and the American Navy. In fact, he would write a history of the Navy later in his career in part because he identified so closely with former Navy friends and commanders as they fought the British in the War of 1812. Cooper lived in a time in which America sought to assert and fortify its independence from Britain and other European influences, both through war and through cultural artifacts. He made many contributions to his country’s cultural independence. He was also typical of his time in that he discovered that economic stability was not assured. His father’s dream of providing his descendants a landed estate failed. In his generation, other sons also faced their fathers’ failures. He soon learned that market values determined outcomes, the law was used as the vehicle for economic competition, and even creative works had a price and a potential for securing economic stability. A long overdue contribution to American scholarship, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years is essential for understanding Cooper and the early years of the American republic. William L. Howard

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos.19/20 (June 1, 2007): 26. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 92. The New Republic 237, no. 7 (October 8, 2007): 61-63. The Times Literary Supplement, December 21, 2007, pp. 14-15. Weekly Standard 13, no. 13 (December 10, 2007): 42.

388

JASMINE AND STARS Reading More than Lolita in Tehran Author: Fatemeh Keshavarz (1952) Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill). 192 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Literary criticism, memoir Time: The 1960’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Iran and the United States A response to Reading “Lolita” in Tehran by Azar Nafisi that attempts to refute what Keshavarz sees as Nafisi’s Westernized critique of culture in Iran and that introduces the reader to a number of Iranian writers who have influenced her Principal personages: Fatemeh Keshavarz, the author Seyyed Abdurreza Fatemi, her uncle Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian poet Shahrnush Parsipur, Iranian novelist

The thirteenth century Persian poet Jal3l al-Dtn Rnmt tells a story of how an elephant was brought to a small town after nightfall. Eager to see the creature, the townspeople went out in the dark to find out more about it. The next day, those who had gone out tried to describe the animal to those who had not been there. Their descriptions varied, according to which part of the animal they had managed to touch. One thought the animal was like a fan, having felt the elephant’s ear; another, having touched the elephant’s trunk, thought the animal was like a pipe. Had they each had a candle, Rnmt concluded, they would all have seen the same creature. Fatemeh Keshavarz, author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than “Lolita” in Tehran, sees this story as having crucial importance in the early twenty-first century, as people face the challenge of trying to see the humanity in one another. Where, she asks, are the candles with which people can carry out this task? Everyone has gaps in their knowledge of the world; as an example, Keshavarz gives the Muslim Middle East. It is, she suggests, a place that appears to be a threat, but most people know little about it; indeed, people know little about how to deal with the threat it may represent. For Keshavarz, as an Iranian living in the United States, this is an extremely pertinent issue. She argues that in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, “knowing about the Muslim Middle East is not a luxury, it is a matter of life and death.” As a result, Keshavarz argues, people seek information, turning to those who might be able to tell something about the Muslim Middle East. These eyewitnesses— and she sees them specifically as writers—are her “candles.” There are many of them: Some, she notes, speak specifically to a specialized academic audience. Others are writing for an educated but lay audience.

Jasmine and Stars / keshavarz

389

However, Keshavarz raises concerns about these accounts of life in the Middle East, what Fatemeh Keshavarz is professor of she calls eyewitness literature. Her book is in- Persian and comparative literature and tended to provide, first, an in-depth critical chair of the Department of Asian and understanding of this eyewitness literature, Near Eastern Languages and what she calls the “New Orientalist” narra- Literatures at Washington University in tive, and second, an alternative approach to St. Louis. She is the author of four learning about an unfamiliar culture. As char- previous books. acterized by literary critic Edward Said, the original Orientalist narrative sought to justify the colonial presence of Europe in the East by subordinating the local culture to that of Europe. Everything was described in inferior terms, or else attributed to a glorious past, after which the culture had deteriorated. Colonial administrators and scholars often felt that they understood a country better than its own inhabitants. Eyewitness literature bears strong similarities to this Orientalist agenda, Keshavarz suggests, in that it takes a reductive approach toward its subject matter. Likewise, although the authors write from an “insider” point of view, they often exhibit impatience with local customs and culture, positioning themselves as superior because of their clear preference for Western culture and politics. Keshavarz cites a number of recent examples of the New Orientalist narrative, including The Kite Runner (2003) by Khaled Hosseini, The Bookseller of Kabul (2003) by Åsne Seierstad, and Reading “Lolita” in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi. The subtitle of Keshavarz’s own book makes it clear that she is specifically addressing Nafisi’s memoir, and she discusses aspects of it a number of times in her own narrative. Keshavarz suggests that the success of these New Orientalist narratives lies in part in their hybrid nature, blending as they do travel writing, memoir, journalism, and a certain amount of social commentary; yet, she suggests, they do not make demands on their readers in terms of supposing they already know about the culture being described, and their final effect is that of feeling an elephant in the dark. It therefore comes as something of a surprise to realize that Keshavarz is employing a similar narrative strategy in writing what must perforce be seen as a direct riposte to such memoirs, and to Reading “Lolita” in Tehran in particular. Despite promising a number of times in the introduction to provide an “in-depth critical understanding of this eyewitness literature,” Keshavarz chooses to address the issue in what seems to be a strangely oblique manner. Her belief is clearly that she can best shape a critique of eyewitness literature by directly providing an alternative cultural perspective, and the best way to do this is through creating her own eyewitness account of cultural and political life in Iran as she has experienced it over the years. That her enterprise must inevitably be viewed in the same light as those narratives she seeks to criticize is something of which she seems to be unaware. One of Keshavarz’s prime concerns is to show that Iranians are not all as Nafisi portrays them. She argues that Nafisi does not so much introduce the reader to people as to types. Furthermore, Nafisi tends to present all women as vulnerable, while all men are placed in positions of either personal or political power, which they then will-

390

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ingly exploit. Also, Keshavarz feels that there are people from many sections of Iranian society who remain voiceless in Nafisi’s book. Keshavarz attempts to redress this omission in a number of ways, mainly by introducing the reader to members of her own extended family and to the friends she made during her childhood in Iran. It is inevitably a problematic approach; if Keshavarz is keen to suggest that Nafisi paints an unrealistically dark picture of Iran in the years after the revolution, her portrait of her own seemingly carefree years in Iran must surely be equally open to query. This is not to suggest that her experience is any less truthful or accurate than Nafisi’s, or vice versa, but it does point up the fact that the reader is in neither instance in a position to judge the accuracy of the portrayal, let alone compare one with the other. In particular, Keshavarz describes encounters with her uncle, a soldier who gave up a successful military career to become a painter. She compares him to the men that Nafisi portrays in Reading “Lolita” in Tehran, representing him as being more typical of Iranian men than the domineering men and political extremists she believes that Nafisi represents all men to be. Keshavarz is particularly critical of Nafisi’s focus on Western literature, arguing that her memoir completely disregards the richness of Iranian literature while implying that Western literature is inherently superior, and also forbidden. Keshavarz insists that translation is a respected art in Iran and claims that Western literature is very easily available in translation, something that cannot necessarily be said of Iranian literature in the Western world. Further, she is keen to show that people from all walks of Iranian life appreciate literature and endeavors to demonstrate this through describing the successful radio show she presented for some years. To further counter what she considers to be a false picture of Iranian literature as being of little interest to foreign readers, Keshavarz introduces the reader to some of her favorite poets and novelists. In particular, she focuses on Forough Farrokhzad, a much-loved Iranian poet who died tragically young. Keshavarz traces the influence of Forough’s poetry on her own life and on the lives of the people she encounters as she grows up. She also discusses Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Zanan Bedun-e Mardan (1989; Women Without Men, 2004) and relates it to her own experiences and those of her friends as well as comparing it to Reading “Lolita” in Tehran. In some ways, Keshavarz’s text is as problematic as Nafisi’s. Should the reader regard it as a critical text, as a piece of polemic, or as a memoir? Can it truly be said to be social commentary, given the fact that the author visits Iran each year but no longer lives there? According to Keshavarz’s own argument, her narrative should count as much as Nafisi’s as a piece of social commentary. Indeed it is, so long as the reader understands that social commentary is an expression of opinion and that each author is as entitled to her opinion as the other. Keshavarz’s passionate response to Nafisi’s memoir seeks to redress the balance but fails to grasp the fact that she has become engaged in precisely the same project for which she criticises Nafisi. Unfortunately, it cannot be said that Keshavarz engages with eyewitness literature in the critical fashion that her introduction promises. Her decision to focus exclusively on responding to one narrative weakens her attempts to present a cohesive discussion of the problem she believes she has identified in this branch of literature.

Jasmine and Stars / keshavarz

391

However, Keshavarz’s narrative is extremely valuable as a personal testimony of her own experiences growing up in Iran and provides a counterbalance to Nafisi’s dark portrayal of her life in Iran. Keshavarz writes with great excitement about her literary discoveries as she grew up, and her enthusiastic desire to share her love of literature with others cannot be denied. Her enthusiasm may at times hinder rather than assist her attempts to communicate this love, but her sincerity on the matter cannot be doubted. Likewise, she describes her family life vividly and with great tenderness. The portrayal of her uncle is particularly affecting. Despite its shortcomings, Fatemeh Keshavarz’s memoir is nonetheless important, not for its critical approach to eyewitness literature and the New Orientalist narrative but because of its active participation in the debate about how Western views of Middle Eastern countries are colored by prejudice and stereotyping. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 53. Middle East Journal 61, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 535-536.

392

JOHN DONNE The Reformed Soul Author: John Stubbs (1977) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 565 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1572-1631 Locale: London, Oxford, and Mitcham, England; European Atlantic coast and islands; France, Italy, and Germany In later Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a great London poet modulated from exuberant youth to husband and father, from Roman Catholic to Anglican, from gentleman poet to cathedral dean Principal personages: John Donne, Jacobean Metaphysical poet Ann (More) Donne, his wife Izaak Walton, writer of the first important biography of Donne Sir Henry Goodyer, Donne’s favorite correspondent and link to the Elizabethan court Sir Thomas Egerton, Sr., wealthy court official and employer of the young John Donne Thomas Morton, Anglican dean who proposed the clerical life to Donne George Villiers, the first duke of Buckingham, Donne’s chief link to King James I

In the first paragraph of John Stubbs’s John Donne: The Reformed Soul, the young Donne (1572-1631) is found sneaking into a mansion to visit his girlfriend, whose family disapproves of him as a suitor. The girl’s father literally sniffs him out, however, for the intruder is wearing a “loud perfume,” and his daring invasion fails. As a result, Donne chides the young woman, for her father suspects him of a whole series of such invasions of his household, and she has done nothing to set him straight. That Donne succeeded in consummating a secret marriage with Ann More, then about sixteen years old, against the wishes of her father is an established fact. This episode makes an arresting beginning of this biography, but it is entirely based on one poem, an elegy called “The Perfume.” Is it a piece of Donne’s life or simply part of his poetic imagination? In the second paragraph, however, Stubbs assures the reader that “the girl about whom ‘The Perfume’ was written . . . may never have even existed.” Stubbs has told no lies; he has artfully suggested that in some sense “The Perfume” can be materially related to an important aspect of Donne’s life. If the young woman did exist, to be sure, her name would be Ann More.

John Donne / stubbs

393

This initial page of Stubbs’s first chapter raises questions that biographers of literary John Stubbs received his Ph.D. in figures have to confront. A poem is one Renaissance literature at Cambridge thing; a life is another. In Donne’s case, University. For his biography of the biographer may safely draw on a consid- Donne, then in progress, he received erable supply of facts about the man. How- the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood ever, the biographer of a great poet surely Award in 2004. must consider the poet’s work, and a number of Donne’s poems can indeed be linked to life records. Furthermore, the emotional content of these poems is frequently strong. A poem that seems to throw light on a high point in a poet’s life must be considered, but in what way should it be considered? It may be worthwhile to compare Stubbs’s manner of relating poetry to life to that of a previous Donne biographer, R. C. Bald, whose John Donne: A Life (1970) is generally considered definitive. In it, Bald also refers to “The Perfume” early in his book. This poem, he said, could have “started rumors,” but he advises caution. “One does not claim that Donne, before his marriage, was devoid of all sexual experience, but rather that he was not the licentious figure that some of the elegies might suggest.” To take an example of an early Donne poem that clearly refers to one of the poet’s early adventures, his verse letter to his friend Christopher Brooke, “The Storme,” clearly pertains to his participation in a voyage to the Azores in 1597, a foray in late Elizabethan England’s intermittent hostilities with Spain. Bald quotes once from it but claims that one of Donne’s prose letters is “more valuable for the additional personal details which it contains,” whereas Stubbs prefers to make a series of specific references to the poem. Throughout their books, both writers of course make extensive use of Donne’s letters, especially those to Sir Henry Goodyer, his most important epistolary friend. The differences in the two biographers’ use of poems is more striking in regard to Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, unpublished in the poet’s lifetime. Of Donne’s aubade “The Sunne Rising,” Bald comments only that it “must belong to the early years of Donne’s married life”; Stubbs envisions Donne “with Ann curled beside him,” able to put the old fool [the sun] firmly in check.” Of another aubade, “The GoodMorrow,” Bald says nothing, while Stubbs uses it to exemplify the point that “he realized that the relationship with Ann was the awakening he had been waiting years for.” There are many other instances in which Stubbs relates the emotional content of Donne’s poems to the poet’s experiences or to the thoughts and emotions that these experiences presumably aroused. Bald and Stubbs reflect two interpretations of the art of literary biography. The earlier biographer employs a more conservative approach, whereas the more recent biographer is inclined to discern Donne by sprinkling segments of his poetry through the biography. Bald’s style and techniques seem more typical of the 1960’s when he wrote, Stubbs’s of the early 2000’s. The fact that Bald wrote his book in his later years, Stubbs when he was less than thirty years old, may also help explain their

394

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

differences. The latter, by the way, is in no way seeking to defy his predecessor, whom he respectfully mentions many times. The differences between the two biographers’ techniques aside, the new biography is a welcome addition to Donne studies, for thirty-six years elapsed between the two works (Stubbs’s having appeared in England in 2006), and Donne scholars have been very busy during those years. Stubbs calls special attention to John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (1981) and Dennis Flynn’s John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (1995) as influences on his own work. Flynn’s book alerted Stubbs to the necessity of reconsidering the relationship between Donne’s roots in Roman Catholicism and his conversion to, and significant position in, the English Church. Donne’s religious career might not have unfolded had he not made what his first important biographer, Izaak Walton, considered his greatest mistake. His marriage to Ann More dislodged him from what could have been a civic career in London. Sir George More, a member of the House of Commons with an eye on a higher position, probably expected to offer Ann to a man of political or social eminence. As the son of an ironmonger, Donne was not that man. More was not able to stop the marriage, but he could retaliate. At the time of his marriage, Donne was working successfully as a secretary to a key man in the kingdom, Sir Thomas Egerton, Sr., the Lord Keeper of the Seal. However, Egerton’s second wife, who died in 1601, the year of Donne’s marriage, had been aunt and guardian of Ann More. Given Sir George More’s ferocity over the marriage, Egerton could not keep Donne on as secretary. Donne soon found other avenues also closed, and he had to face the unpleasant fact that his marriage had brought his budding career to a grinding halt. With his family growing rapidly in the early years of the seventeenth century, he had to depend on help from friends and from the kind of potential Maecenas who required a diet of toadying literary praises. This precarious situation continued until Donne’s ordination to the Anglican priesthood in 1615, although as early as 1607, according to Walton, a theological expert named Dr. Thomas Morton had suggested a religious vocation for him. Donne turned down the offer because of the “irregularities” in his life—an excuse that might refer to the marriage itself, to the events of his possibly rakish prior life, or to his Roman Catholic background. The conflict that brought about the great religious division in England began with King Henry VIII (1491-1547) and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), the king’s fiercely Roman Catholic lord chancellor and, incidentally, great-great-uncle of John Donne. From the time Henry declared himself the head of the Church and executed More, Roman Catholics faced disadvantages ranging from disablement to danger. Decades after the monarch’s assumption of religious authority, many still professed the old faith strongly but, if they were prudent, quietly. Donne’s own brother, Henry, died in Newgate Prison; had he lived, he might well have faced death as a religious subversive. From his early years, John Donne had to endure the possibility of a similar fate. Rejection of Roman Catholicism was the most prudent course an ambitious man could take. One example is Egerton, for whom Donne had worked, who filled a posi-

John Donne / stubbs

395

tion sometimes requiring him to take action against Catholics. However, Donne’s conversion was not a simple or merely pragmatic process. As so many of his poems make clear, his imagination was rooted in the old faith. His procession into the early seventeenth century version of English Christianity was not an easy one. This situation constituted one aspect of what Stubbs calls his “reform.” A man could not live by poetry, and Donne wanted to live well. He also wanted to do well by his children. Donne’s progress toward religious orthodoxy can be traced in his verse. Stubbs points out that most of Donne’s Holy Sonnets were written between 1609 and 1614, the years before his ordination. While he was recording the religious struggle in his soul, he also wrote two anti-Catholic prose treatises, Pseudo-Martyr, dedicated to King James I, in 1610, and Ignatius His Conclave in 1611. Stubbs sees Donne as disillusioned with religious controversy. He would write famously that “no man is an island,” that all persons are involved in the struggles of each. Overcoming his Roman Catholic background, he began a new form of life in his forties. He hesitated in choosing among several benefices that were offered him, but in 1616 he accepted the position of reader in divinity at Lincoln’s Inn, one of London’s legal societies, where his weekly sermons were immediately popular with members. His wife, Ann, mother of twelve children, died in 1617, leaving seven living children. After a trip abroad as chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, he sought the patronage of George Villiers, who, as a favorite of King James, was on his way to becoming duke of Buckingham. Donne, hoping for a significant clerical appointment, undoubtedly owed the offering of the deanship of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to Buckingham. Stubbs terms the various transformations in Donne’s life “reforms.” Donne proceeded from man-about-town with an erotic imagination (if not way of life) to stable married man, from the old religion to the new, from a secular career to the discipline of the clergy. His clerical life led him to compose two types of prose, in each of which he excelled. His Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) are both intensely personal and communal, as the famous “Meditation XVII” makes clear: “Every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.” The sermons, not collected until after his death but well known by his contemporaries, loom far above the enormous number of sermons contributed over the years by clergy no less zealous but far less literarily gifted. Had Donne never contrived a poem, he would still rank among the great English writers. It certainly is time for Donne’s life to be retold. Scholars have learned more about him, and if he has not changed substantially in four centuries, his readers have continued to change considerably over the generations. Stubbs’s lively presentation of the poet seems appropriate for readers in the early twenty-first century. Robert P. Ellis

396

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources British Heritage 28, no. 5 (November, 2007): 60-62. The Economist 380 (September 9, 2006): 80. Harper’s Magazine 314 (May, 2007): 88. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 4 (February 15, 2007): 165. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 10 (June 14, 2007): 59-61. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 26. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 5 (January 29, 2007): 55.

397

JOHN OSBORNE The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man Author: John Heilpern First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 527 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1929-1994 Locale: England This authorized biography, which uses Osborne’s unpublished notebooks for the first time, attempts not only to present a balanced view of his life but also to reestablish his place as one of the most important English dramatists of the twentieth century Principal personages: John Osborne, British playwright Thomas Godfrey Osborne, his father Nellie Beatrice (Groves) Osborne, his mother Faith Osborne, his sister Pamela Lane, Osborne’s first wife, 1951-1957 Mary Ure, Osborne’s second wife, 1957-1963 Penelope Gilliatt, Osborne’s third wife, 1963-1968 Jill Bennett, Osborne’s fourth wife, 1968-1977 Helen (Dawson) Osborne, Osborne’s fifth wife, 1978-1994 Nolan Osborne, Osborne’s daughter with Penelope Gilliatt George Devine, director of the Royal Court Theatre Tony Richardson, director of various Osborne plays and their movie versions, as well as Tom Jones (1963)

Drama in both the United States and Great Britain underwent a sea change in the years after World War II, with a new emphasis on the expression of passions by characters who had not been previously portrayed in the theater. In America, this transformation occurred earlier, in the works of Arthur Miller (1915-2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), particularly Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949) and A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947). In England, the explosion was chiefly the result of one work in 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. However, the importance of Osborne’s work in introducing passion and a new type of character in a theater ruled over by the intellectual sway of the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and the pent-up emotions in the works of Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) has recently been disputed, and one purpose of John Heilpern’s authorized biography, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man, is to reestablish the significance of Osborne’s work in moving the British theater, as well as British cinema, in a new and ultimately more modern direction.

398

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The passions expressed by Jimmy Porter, the protagonist of Look Back in Anger, as well as its title, led to Osborne’s being labeled by journalists an “angry young man,” along with novelists such as Kingsley Amis (19221995). (However, Amis and Osborne did not speak to each other later in life.) Heilpern maintains that the label became a “millstone” for Osborne throughout his life, although in what way is not precisely clear. Certainly his anger emerged regularly during his life with his mother, with four of his five wives, with his daughter, and with close friends and collaborators such as Tony Richardson. He even railed against the dead: When the death of his third wife, Jill Bennett, removed a gag order preventing Osborne from writing about her, he inserted, against all advice, a superfluous, vituperative chapter about her in the second volume of his autobiography, even though the work had not reached the period when he was married to her. The whole thrust of Heilpern’s work is to show how Osborne, throughout his life, was a despairing man, full of grief and anguish, which probably fueled his recurrent rages. Heilpern traces Osborne’s grief to childhood incidents: first (and foremost) the death of Osborne’s father from tuberculosis in 1939. Thomas Godfrey Osborne was, Osborne felt, the only adult who ever showed affection toward him, and he blamed his mother for his father’s death. At the end of the biography, Heilpern traces the death date of Osborne’s older sister, the aptly named Faith, and learns that she died three months after Osborne was born, less than two years of age. Some sense of survivor’s guilt must have been inculcated in him. “I have sinned” were the last words he wrote. In tracing Osborne’s emotional states, Heilpern is immensely aided by the access to more than twenty notebooks that Osborne’s widow, Helen, gave him. Several of the most important people in Osborne’s life—his father, as well as his artistic father, George Devine—died in January, so that month became an annual ordeal for Osborne, leading to depressive states lasting from one to four months. Osborne’s depressions finally culminated in a full-blown breakdown, for which he was hospitalized in 1966, triggered by the death of Devine, the failure of his latest play, and the breakup of his marriage to Penelope Gilliatt. One of Heilpern’s weaknesses as a biographer is that dates are very unclear in his work: The chapter on Osborne’s breakdown, for instance, ends with a series of harrowing quotations from his notebooks at the time, and the next chapter begins with his marriage to Jill Bennett in May of 1968. Indeed, Heilpern is an unconventional biographer in that the mechanics, the assembling of the work, are all laid bare as he tells it. The work begins with his recounting of Osborne’s widow offering him the opportunity to write the authorized biography. When he gets to a certain person in Osborne’s life, such as the editor

Born in Manchester, England, John Heilpern became noted for his profiles in the British newspaper The Observer, which won for him a British Press Award. His work with Peter Brook at the National Theatre led to his acclaimed book Conference of the Birds (1976). Heilpern moved to New York in 1980. He writes for The Times of London and The New York Observer and teaches at Columbia University.

John Osborne / heilpern

399

who encouraged Osborne’s first writing efforts, or Osborne’s daughter, Heilpern describes his meeting them, how they look that day, and any unusual circumstances. In the case of Osborne’s daughter, this becomes important (the clergyman who took her into his family after Osborne ejected her, later, after the interview, pleaded guilty to charges of sexually assaulting several underage girls). While Heilpern’s methods give the biography a chattier tone, they give readers who might use the biography for learning the facts about Osborne’s life much more difficulty. Heilpern also feels that he must answer three central questions about Osborne’s life that arose during it or since his death. First, was the boy given birth to by his second wife, Mary Ure, Osborne’s? Heilpern feels almost certain the child was the son of Robert Shaw, the actor for whom Ure left Osborne, but the clinching evidence Heilpern introduces is the resemblance of the child to Shaw. Second, was Osborne gay? This question arose after Osborne’s death when Osborne’s roommate and sometimes collaborator in the 1950’s, Anthony Creighton, declared that he and Osborne had been lovers at the time. It was given more importance because of Osborne’s perceived hostility to homosexuals, even though one of his plays, A Patriot for Me (pr. 1966), portrayed them sympathetically. Osborne had declared “God’s two greatest gifts” as being “born English and heterosexual.” Heilpern approached Creighton himself to find out the truth, and after paying Creighton £300, was told that the story was a fabrication. The money involved in both the accusation and its recantation make both suspect. Third, why did Osborne throw his teenage daughter out of his house, when she had come to live with him because of her mother’s alcoholism? Heilpern cannot sugarcoat the fact that Osborne was a terrible father who had no idea of how to deal with a teenage child, particularly without the prior experience of loving and living with that child throughout her life. He would write her aggrieved, belligerent, eight-page letters even while they were living in the same house. The arc of Osborne’s life that Heilpern traces seems to conform to two models, the first familiar to watchers of many of those successful in the arts. A young person becomes unexpectedly successful and soon rich beyond the dreams of avarice. (Osborne’s income at one point was £3500 per week.) The artist cannot deal with what William James called “the bitch-goddess Success,” and when the backlash inevitably occurs, the artist cannot change his or her mode of living, nor does the artist want to, and all too soon succumbs physically to ailments contracted during his years of fame. In Osborne’s case, it was diabetes, and his refusal to give up habits such as drinking and smoking can be linked to the fears that his mother inculcated in him during his childhood that he would succumb to “the white plague,” tuberculosis, the disease that killed his father at age thirty-nine. He felt he had the right to indulge himself after years of fear and restraint. The other model is more familiar to students of English literature: A writer, liberal and rebellious in his youth, becomes conservative in his old age. Examples adduced have included William Wordsworth and George Orwell. After the success of Look Back in Anger, Osborne became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and more notoriously wrote “A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen”

400

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

in 1961, the most famous words of which read, “Damn you, England.” Heilpern tries to attach the sentiments expressed in this letter to the British politicians who seemed ignorant of and uncaring about the possibility of nuclear warfare, but from the excerpt that Heilpern includes in the book, Osborne’s anger seems much more all-inclusive. Thus, when Osborne later appeared to become a dandiacal country squire, his enemies chortled over his apparent apostasy over his earlier ideals and anger. Heilpern attempts to counteract this perception of hypocrisy by showing that, in a phrase, Osborne loved England. Later in life, Osborne began churchgoing for the first time. Although Heilpern tries to use this as evidence of Osborne’s newly formed faith, he also admits that it was a further symptom of Osborne’s love of all things English: in this case, the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. The English subtitle of the biography reveals the emphasis on Osborne’s love of England that Heilpern stresses throughout: A Patriot for Us. Osborne’s self-destructiveness continued for the rest of his life. Because of his combativeness and refusal to compromise, the premiere of his last important play, Déjàvu (pr. 1992), the sequel to Look Back in Anger, was delayed for three years, as he alienated important actors such as Alan Bates and Peter O’Toole, who could have made the show an instant success. He was finally banned from the play’s rehearsals. Nevertheless, many people whom Osborne otherwise had hurt still testify to his genuine warmth and caring nature. He often reconciled with those whom he had broken with, like Tony Richardson, but he never healed the breach with his daughter. Heilpern’s main weakness is his failure to show, after the success of Look Back in Anger, how the rest of Osborne’s output fits into the history of British theater. The Entertainer (pr. 1957), Luther (pr. 1961), and Inadmissible Evidence (pr. 1964) are all major works, and Heilpern has little trouble relating them to Osborne’s own life: The Entertainer to Osborne’s lifelong love of the British music hall as an expression of British culture; Inadmissible Evidence to Osborne’s later breakdown. How they are significant in the wider context is not answered. Heilpern often gives the testimony of other playwrights as to Osborne’s importance to their development, but the larger picture remains elusive. In fact, The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man might be somewhat misleading in that Osborne was basically the same person throughout his life: a sensitive and perceptive lover of words who was always on the lookout for the slightest hint of betrayal and disloyalty. That out of his weaknesses he was able to craft enduring works of drama is one of the secrets of art, and John Heilpern’s work goes a long way in helping readers understand the connection. William Laskowski

John Osborne / heilpern

401

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 41. The Economist 379 (May 20, 2006): 86-87. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 72. London Review of Books 28, no. 14 (July 20, 2006): 8-10. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 28, 2007): 16. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 47 (November 27, 2006): 44. The Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 2006, p. 3. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 21 (January 26, 2007): W6.

402

THE KITCHEN SINK New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 Author: Albert Goldbarth (1948) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 345 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Poetry A remarkable and dazzling collection of old and new poetry that spans thirty-five years Albert Goldbarth has been wrestling with the poetic form and popular culture since the early 1970’s. He has earned the reputation of being one of the most important poets of his generation. Amazingly enough, Goldbarth has found a way not only to write penetrating and complex poems but also to be prolific in his output. Since the early 1970’s, he has averaged almost one collection a year. This certainly is a rare achievement. Goldbarth always has upheld a high standard. Humor, family, popular culture, and civilization have been but a few of the many topics that Goldbarth has successfully juggled. He likes to take the long view, to observe the present by investigating the past and finding connections. It is always an adventure for both the poet and the reader. A lesson must be learned, or the mistakes of the past will be repeated again and again. The wisdom imparted is never heavy-handed, though. Goldbarth believes that playfulness is a strength of poetry, not a weakness. The poet is absorbed with the architecture of a poem and the many cultures described. Born in Chicago, Goldbarth learned to appreciate the rhythm of the urban landscape. Both Saving Lives (2001) and Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (1991) won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Amazingly, Goldbarth is the only poet to have won the award twice. Asked about the purpose of poetry, Goldbarth has stated, “It’s not my place to define the job of poetry, but a lot of my poems do try to serve as memorials, as segments of frozen time that save people or cultural moments that have otherwise passed away or are in danger of passing away.” The poet can serve as a keeper of the record, someone who can capture the flavor of an age or a people. For Goldbarth, curiosity is paramount, curiosity about the world around him. There is a zest both for the mystical and the secular, and both must be given full voice. Goldbarth wrestles with the relationship between the material world and the religious domain. Some of his collections that take on these crucial themes are Faith (1981), Heaven and Earth, and Beyond (1998). It is always difficult for a poet to select poems for any collection. For Goldbarth, his publisher generously allowed him 350 pages for The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007, and the poet wondered whether he would be able to fill the book. Soon enough, however, Goldbarth realized that he had more than enough poems. First of all, it was decided that there needed to be a “substantial section

The Kitchen Sink / goldbarth

403

of ‘new’ poems.” With this in mind, the num ber of representative poems from the earlier collections had to be trimmed. Not wanting to “excerpt” long poems, a number of poems had to be instantly set aside. The inclusion of long poems would obviously mean that fewer poems could be included, and excerpts rarely do justice to the whole, so it is no surprise that Goldbarth and his publisher would agree that very long poems had no place in The Kitchen Sink. Albert Goldbarth is an award-winning He also wanted the “selected” poems to American poet who has published more have been published in his previous collec- than twenty acclaimed collections. He tions, not merely in journals. For the most holds the rare distinction of winning part, poems that Goldbarth has published two National Book Critics Circle since 1983 have received the largest represen- Awards for his poetry. Goldbarth also tation. The “Albert Goldbarth” who existed is the author of several essay before 1983 was “seminally important” but collections and a novel. receives “little representation” in this collection. The “Prefatory Note” is divided into “What’s Not Here,” and “What’s Here.” More times than not, a collection that includes poems from previous volumes will divide the sections by which collection the poems appeared in, but Goldbarth has decided not to follow that pattern. For The Kitchen Sink, he has divided the volume into four major sections, with a short opening section titled “An Invocation to the Muse” and a “Coda” to end the collection. Within the opening section, Goldbarth has merely included the poems “Shawl” and “Library.” Midway through “Shawl,” the poet states that “more reliable was the book; he was discovering himself/ to be among the tribe that reads.” The twenty-yearold male riding on a bus who had eyed the woman’s knee several times comes to realize that it is merely himself and the book that really matter. The poem “Library” opens with the line “This book saved my life.” The poem ends with “This book is going to save the world.” This poem can be looked at as a description of a book by the poet himself. In the library, readers can find books for every interest, with a wide spectrum of viewpoints. There are also every absurdity, every horror represented within the walls of a library. The poem includes such provocative lines as “This book gave me a hard-on,” “This book deflected a bullet,” “This book is an intercom for God,” and “This book I slammed against the wall.” The Kitchen Sink is Goldbarth’s library, his book about everything. It is evident that Goldbarth believes in the power of the printed word. The next two sections of The Kitchen Sink include poems that were published between 1983 and 2005. The first of these sections, “Love and Cosmology,” is divided into thematic groupings such as “The Far Perimeters,” “Ancestored-Back,” “The Gods,” “This Thing Larger than Self,” and “The Fathers.” For this collection, Goldbarth decided that he did not want to divide up everything by the previous volume in which each

404

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

poem had appeared. The poems have been arranged in a fresh way, allowing each to be read from a new perspective. This is an unusual arrangement, since most volumes of selected poems do identify the poems by collection. For the second section of poems from 1983 to 2005, Goldbarth grouped them by length. This section, “The Rising Place for the Dough,” includes only poems of one page each. Within these two sections of poems from the recent past, there are more than eighty well-chosen poems. Over the years, Goldbarth has written about love, including the need for love, love of family, love of life, and especially romantic love. He has revisited romantic love time and again. One of his one-page poems, “The Dating Report,” relates the progress made by his friend Don with his latest relationship. Don calls “to tell me about a woman he’s dating” and during the conversation confesses that even though he likes her that there are “small things” getting in the way. This new love has a “psychic therapist” who has told her that she had “drowned in Atlantis.” What is someone supposed to do with this knowledge? She is irritated by “His tightass opinion of television,” and Don is bothered by “her kids.” There also is “panic” and “the waters pouring in between.” It is difficult to see how this or any relationship survives the slings and arrows, the “tightass opinion” and “her kids.” With all of this and more, Goldbarth still believes in moving forward, in making connections. On the cover of The Kitchen Sink is an image by the artist John Schoenherr. There is a finger prominently stuck in the cosmos, possibly stirring the pot. As a poet, Goldbarth always seems to have his finger firmly placed in the cosmos. He must probe, test, experiment, gather evidence, and certainly make connections. Goldbarth’s poetry has been called “sprawling,” an appropriate word to describe his approach. One word will never do when five or ten words are available, yet they remain well-chosen words, well-chosen images that sparkle, that sting. The section “The Fossil of an Omelet” includes thirteen poems from 1972 to 1983. Of these early poems, one of the most memorable is “A History of Civilization.” The poem takes place in a “dating bar” where “the potted ferns lean down/ conspiratorially, little spore-studded/ elopement ladders” and “The two top buttons/ of every silk blouse have already half-undone all/ introduction.” At the end of the poem, “a hand tries a knee, as if unplanned.” This and everything in between constitutes the history of civilization. It can be said that there is really nothing new under the sun, in the mix, that drives the human heart. For the section of new poems, Goldbarth has seen fit to include thirty-four poems. The poet has named this section “Human Beauty,” and the title poem speaks to the idea of what makes up human beauty. The poem opens: “If you write a poem about love . . ./ the love is a bird,// the poem is an origami bird./ If you write a poem about death . . .// the death is a terrible fire,/ the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames// you feed to the fire.” The poet identifies how these images are “the space between/ our gestures and the power they address/ —an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,/ a distinctly human beauty.” The idea of how human beauty can be created, built, molded—in all of its insufficiency—is at the core of the poet, the inventor. Humans look for beauty, for meaning, as they muddle through the ordinary day.

The Kitchen Sink / goldbarth

405

In the new poem “Voyage,” Goldbarth details the inner demons that can haunt humans. It opens with “The banditos of the inner region would take not only/ your money but, with little provocation, your throat/ —their dogs were said to love that tender delicacy/ especially.” What someone encounters during the day can come back to haunt him at night. Toward the end of the poem, Goldbarth states that “when the bed has reached/ the shore of another morning, that’s when I often see him/ holding to the rail, somewhat weak.” The voyage in question is the one taken by Charles Darwin to the Galápagos. The last line of “Voyage” urges humans to “Go out and see what’s new today with the species.” The idea of collecting or gathering objects is a recurring topic for Goldbarth. Over the years, he has remained fascinated with archaeology, with linking the past to the present. He is intrigued by how humans fit into the mix, into the cosmos. Goldbarth recognizes, however, that pain, heartbreak, and death of a loved one can strike a blow to the human psyche that makes it difficult to recover. In one of his one-page poems, “The Theory of Absolute Forms,” Goldbarth expresses how it may not be easy to comprehend “an infinite universe,” but “how far pain can go in your bone” is a question that almost everyone must face. Unfortunately, the answer could be “Forever, I think.” In the second stanza of the poem, the poet relates how a wound that he has had for merely an hour is very familiar to his doctor. The doctor has been on “intimate” terms with it “for years.” Each time a doctor examines a patient, years of preparing for “this moment” come into play. The Kitchen Sink shows off Goldbarth at his expansive best. Always willing to take chances, to find new ways of exploiting his brilliant imagination, the poet has produced yet another extraordinary collection that reminds readers of this truly original voice. Jeffry Jensen

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 54. Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 11, 2007, p. 2. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 61-64. The Virginia Quarterly Review 83, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 264.

406

LAND OF LINCOLN Adventures in Abe’s America Author: Andrew Ferguson (1956) Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (New York). 279 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 2005 Locale: The United States The author observes the unusual ways in which Americans honor or recognize the significance of Abraham Lincoln Principal personages: Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, 1861-1865 Julie Cellini, inspiration for the creation of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois Bob Rogers, former Disney employee whose company, BRC Imagination Arts, designed the Lincoln Library

Abraham Lincoln arguably is the most recognized icon in American history and may very well be the individual about whom the most books have been written— some fourteen thousand according to author Andrew Ferguson. While the discovery of new primary sources is increasingly rare, this has not prevented authors from attributing all forms of qualities to the man. Questions have addressed “weighty” issues such as whether Lincoln suffered from Marfan’s syndrome, contributing to his gangly appearance, whether he was really a friend to African Americans, given his mixed feelings toward emancipation at the start of the Civil War, and even whether Lincoln was gay, since he carried out the (common for the times) practice of sharing a bed with traveling companions. Lincoln, it would appear, is the modern equivalent of a square peg that can be fitted into any round hole. In this reviewer’s opinion, only two recent books, each in its own way addressing the subject of Lincoln, bring a new perspective to the man. The first text, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005), explores presidential aspirant Lincoln’s political competitors and the ability of President Lincoln to utilize the strength from each in leading the country through America’s greatest crisis. In the other book, reviewed here, Land of Lincoln, Andrew Ferguson explores the modern Lincoln and the various ways in which the man serves as an icon for organizations as diverse as historical societies, business organizations, and even the restaurant owner with a statue of Lincoln on the counter, a businessman who brings new meaning to the phrase “our daily bread.” Ferguson developed his interest by visiting historic sites associated with the sixteenth president. Ferguson had the additional impetus of growing up in small town

Land of Lincoln / ferguson

407

in Illinois in a house not far from one in which Lincoln allegedly spent a night. Unfor- Andrew Ferguson has been a senior tunately, like many in his generation, the au- editor at The Weekly Standard and thor lost his interest and idealism in the Washingtonian magazines. He has iconic Lincoln. The change emerged from a contributed articles for publications combination of effects: competition for his such as The New Republic, The New interests—first the Beatles and then women, Yorker, and several major newspapers. and then the “shocking” discovery that Lin- A collection of these essays was published under the title Fools Names, coln was not a god but a mere imperfect morFools Faces (1996). tal. The change was a microcosm of the loss of idealism in the nation as a whole, and the result was the shift of Lincoln into a less prominent historical role in the minds of much of the population. Only in the viewpoints of Lincoln buffs and other historians did he retain an exalted position. Lincoln was not forgotten, but an understanding of the significance of his work and impact was beginning to recede in the public’s collective mind. As the author describes it, his own personal reawakening began with a newspaper headline and story referring to the controversy that erupted in the capital of the former Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, when a statue of Lincoln was to be unveiled in the city. Intrigued by the response of citizens generations removed from the Civil War, Ferguson traveled to Richmond to see for himself what inspired the controversy and to understand the depth of feeling among those on each side of the issue. The visit began a nationwide trek by the author in which he explored the varied ways in which Lincoln retains a significant place in the collective thoughts of the nation. Along the way, Ferguson integrates his observations and discoveries with a biography of Lincoln himself. Not surprisingly, given the sites associated with Lincoln prior to his presidential years, the author spent much of his search in the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky. The title of the book, Land of Lincoln, originates with the slogan for the state that provided the only true home for the future president, and it is in Illinois that Ferguson developed his search in earnest. Springfield was the capital in Lincoln’s time, as it is today, and it was here that Lincoln and his law partner William Herndon began a law practice that eventually led to Lincoln’s political career. Herndon would contribute as much as anyone to the image of the mythical Lincoln, a Christlike figure martyred for his country. More significant, from a historical standpoint, it was Herndon who provided first-person accounts for generations of Lincoln biographers. New Salem, the town outside of Springfield that was the site of Lincoln’s early businesses, exists today only for the tourist. This is not meant to belittle the importance of reconstructed villages, but the reality is that Lincoln’s New Salem is only a memory. It was in Chicago that Ferguson discovered the significance in the public’s loss of interest in Lincoln. The city that grew with the “Lincoln legend,” Chicago at one time was the repository of much of the significant Lincoln memorabilia, and the Chicago Historical Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society) was among the most

408

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

important Lincoln museums in the country. Lincoln’s life was depicted in rooms of displays and dioramas, with artifacts that ranged from Mary Todd Lincoln’s jewelry, their children’s letters, and even the furniture from the Washington room in which Lincoln died. Costs and lack of public interest did more than just gut the museum; it resulted in the probable permanent elimination of such a detailed display. Fortunately, all was not lost in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln.” The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum—largely the result of the strong will of a Springfield political lobbyist, Julie Cellini—was built and became the repository for much of the Lincoln memorabilia. Taking advantage of the power behind most male thrones, the wives, Mrs. Cellini convinced the spouses of both the Illinois Speaker of the House and the governor of the need for such a museum, and the museum was built. Displays exhibit an element of Disneyland, no coincidence since they were developed by a former Disney employee, but the entertainment model was considered critical to appeal to modern youth. Cutting through the verbiage and political correctness, author Ferguson convinces the reader that while the purist may object, the concept works. The book is not without strong elements of humor. One of Ferguson’s visits was to the Thai restaurant in Chicago owned by Oscar Esche. Esche and his wife emigrated from Thailand, settling in Chicago in 1973. They observed the ubiquitous name of Lincoln and naturally became inquisitive about the man. Drawing on the Thai custom of honoring the leader of their country, they began an annual pilgrimage to Springfield to visit both his home and his grave. During one of their trips, they purchased an ivory reproduction of the Daniel Chester French sculpture that sits in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The statue sits on the counter of the restaurant, and each day Esche places a fresh plate of food by the reproduction. As Esche described it to Ferguson, the food is changed every day, and everything is served except pork; the Esches “do not want to be disrespectful.” Ferguson looked puzzled. “He is Abraham Lincoln, yes?” Esche said. “Jewish people, they don’t eat pork.” The author’s explorations range from as far afield as Providence, Rhode Island, where the chief justice of the state supreme court, Frank Williams, has accumulated more than twenty-two thousand items of Lincoln memorabilia, to California, where in a Beverly Hills home of another collector Ferguson was able to observe Lincoln’s actual chamber pot and Mary’s undergarments. Collections and collectors of Lincolniana have evolved from objects owned or touched by the Lincolns (“secondclass Lincoln relics”), to “third-class relics,” those which came into contact with actual relics, and even extending to the catalogs that depict such artifacts. Interest in Lincoln seemingly knows no boundaries. In a town with the unusual name of Santa Claus, Indiana, Ferguson came upon a Lincoln “presenter” convention: tall Lincolns, of course, but shorter ones as well. They had in common two physical features: the beard, even though Lincoln lived all but the last five years of his life without one, and the mole, created using the eraser from a number 2 pencil. As at any historical conventions, discussions centered on anecdotes and ideas. Accompanying these men was an assortment of spouses, some Mary Todd Lincolns but mostly just bored wives.

Land of Lincoln / ferguson

409

The chapter that contains perhaps the most humorous anecdotes describes Ferguson’s attempt to follow the Lincoln Heritage Trail with his own wife and children. The idea for the trail had its origins during the early 1960’s and consisted of attempts by the governors of Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana to draw tourists; Ferguson himself had visited some of these sites in his youth. In an attempt to infuse his own interests and excitement in his children, the author describes the “rolling eyes” and sarcastic responses one might expect from the iPod generation. The visit presented both pathos—many of the sites had fallen into disrepair—as well as some measure of success, as Ferguson describes his children remembering both facts and music from their travels. Appropriately enough, Ferguson completed his trek at the Daniel Chester French sculpture at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Ferguson addresses the question, has this become just another icon? Comparing the views obtained from those he interviewed with the modern conception of what a historic icon should represent, he finds no answer. The exhibits and collections Ferguson enjoyed were alleged to depict not an icon but Lincoln the man—perhaps true if a man is represented by his possessions. The memorial, however, is more than that; it represents Lincoln’s ideas and ideals. As Ferguson reminds the reader, two of Lincoln’s speeches are etched on the walls: the 272 words of the Gettysburg Address, his most famous speech, and the 702 words he spoke during his second inaugural address in 1865. One honors what was then a unique ideal, “the proposition that all men are created equal,” and the supreme sacrifice made by men in support of that ideal, and that a country “of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” One also honors an idea, that despite that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” that unless that war was in vain, this country must “do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.” Ferguson has found Lincoln the man; America represents Lincoln the icon. Richard Adler

Review Sources The American Spectator 40, no. 7 (September, 2007): 68-70. Booklist 103, no. 15 (April 1, 2007): 20. Commentary 124, no. 2 (September, 2007): 82-84. Entertainment Weekly, no. 940 (June 22, 2007): 73. ForbesLife 179 (June 1, 2007): 132-133. National Review 59, no. 12 (July 9, 2007): 53-54. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 8, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 11 (March 12, 2007): 50. The Washington Post, June 17, 2007, p. BW02.

410

LAST HARVEST How a Cornfield Became New Daleville—Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway Author: Witold Rybczynski (1943) Publisher: Scribner (New York). 309 pp. $27.00 Type of work: History Time: 2002-2006 Locale: A ninety-acre former cornfield west of Philadelphia A professor of urbanism traces the construction of a traditional neighborhood development from the developer’s purchase of the land through the reactions of the purchasers of one of the houses Principal personages: Joe Duckworth, a residential developer Tom Comitta, a town planner Tim Cassidy, an architectural designer and landscape architect Bob Heuser, Duckworth’s planner of the New Daleville community Dave Della Porta, a lawyer and financial planner Jason Duckworth, Joe’s son, a trainee at the company Mike DiGeronimo, an architect and reviewer of house plans Scott and Meghan Andress, early buyers of a New Daleville home

Canadian architect and professor Witold Rybczynski took the trouble to meet all principals of a residential development in a rural area in Pennsylvania and to attend many of the numerous meetings that were necessary to complete the project. The long and somewhat satirical subtitle of Last Harvest suggests the various elements contained at least summarily therein. The result is a brief historical survey of American real estate development interwoven into an account of the many complications involved in one project. He withholds his own judgments but strives to portray the viewpoints of the various people involved in the process. The author begins with a prologue describing Chestnut Hill, the distinguished neighborhood in Philadelphia in which Rybczynski and his wife live. New Daleville is very different, but it resembles Chestnut Hill in two ways. New Daleville is home for commuters, although as a twenty-first century development it is an hour and a half by car from Philadelphia, whereas Chestnut Hill has long since been absorbed by the city. Also, it is much more modest; it is “a real estate development . . . designed to look the way it does.” In New Daleville, the emanation of a cornfield in Londonderry, Pennsylvania, the forces of real estate, land development, and residential architecture combine to design a traditional neighborhood development (TND). What makes it an unusual

Last Harvest / rybczynski

411

TND is that it is a relatively small and modest development of 125 houses on small lots in- Witold Rybczynski, who teaches at the tended to radiate much neighborhood appeal, University of Pennsylvania School of although in a rural location an hour and a half Design, has written thirteen other from Philadelphia, the work area for many of books, including A Clearing in the the eventual residents. It also will be rela- Distance (1999), which is a life of tively isolated from the rest of Londonderry. America’s first and most famous Characteristically, people who live in such lo- landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. cations desire lots much larger than those in New Daleville’s one-eighth of an acre. The roads in this development will be twenty-four feet wide, designed to emphasize closeness and encourage walkability. Where will residents walk? The town will have a center, but no one supposes that a community of perhaps four hundred people will generate very many commercial establishments. There will, however, be ample natural and recreational spaces. The plan guarantees that half of the land will remain unbuilt. The question of lot size has in recent years tended to make allies of environmentalists and developers. The former object to huge housing lots depleting natural resources, and the latter desire higher, and thus more profitable, population densities. “Smart growth,” as it is called, challenges typical suburban families’ fondness for large lots and raises other contentious issues such as subsidized mass transit and regional governments. Smart growth may not work in all areas, but the developers hope that it will in New Daleville. Readers who have been wondering why new developments take so long to emerge will receive some answers from this book. Residential development once consisted of an engineer to devise a subdivision plan, local approval that often was not difficult to acquire, and the building of houses. The same company would be responsible for both development and building. In most states, land development regulations have evolved in recent years. In a populous state like Pennsylvania, ascertaining suitable land for development and receiving permission to use it can be an arduous process. Development concentrates on obtaining land, getting permits, and establishing roads and infrastructure; builders work on the construction of houses. Joe Duckworth, a former pupil of the author, is the Realtor who has instigated the New Daleville project. Among the men who will deal with various details of the project is Tom Comitta, a town planner whose specialty is convincing town committees. The first meeting with Londonderry’s board of supervisors produces no action because the country planning commission has yet to discuss a newly proposed “neotraditional ordinance.” Comitta attempts to explain the ordinance, which suggests the possibility of limiting dependence on cars. In the process, he learns that the residents want to use cars, although they do not want to see the addition of many more of them. The proponents of New Daleville must negotiate with zoning boards torn between contradictory values. The local residents who serve on zoning boards desire the maintenance and increase of property values, but their neighbors also want them to limit

412

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

development. This project must come to fruition in the context of a town undergoing a search for a more satisfactory zoning arrangement. The promoters of New Daleville are inevitably involved in the internal affairs of the town from which permission must be obtained. Duckworth’s son Jason has the task of writing architectural plans for the project, which will not be able to provide simulations of farmhouses with very many colonialstyle details. Still, he must achieve attractive and consistent homes at a nominal price. Tim Cassidy leads the discussion on the design of individual houses, but because he is also a member of the Londonderry planning commission, he wants the local people to have some say in the matter. Dave Della Porta, a financial planner whose base is in Philadelphia but has been frequently employed by Joe Duckworth, disagrees. He is not eager for such participation and thinks that design should be left with the builders, but Cassidy has a Ph.D. in architecture, and he will not concede all control of design to the builders. These men work together, but their specialties make them see the project from different angles, and their disagreements are often vigorous. As the project continues, complications develop. The town must have its say on traffic lights and the width of roads. An expensive problem for developers is sewage treatment. The project will have a network of sewer pipes that will connect to a treatment facility. The treated wastewater must be either sprayed on a restricted area and allowed to sink into the ground or, in an innovation developed in the 1980’s, dripped into the ground through perforated plastic pipes. Since it is treated, at least some of it could be discharged into a stream. The county, however, recommends on-site disposal. The method agreed upon, drip irrigation, requires a larger area than that planned by Bob Heuser, whose job is the laying out of streets, lots, and open spaces, so he must revise his plan. These men are all focused on the present task; Rybczynski periodically examines the construction of New Daleville as a historian of urban planning and development. An early chapter introduces “America’s first mega-developer,” the man for whom Pennsylvania was named, William Penn, who received thirty million acres from King Charles II. The author traces the difference between a suburb and an exurb by citing a 1902 book by H. G. Wells, Anticipations, and the lectures of Frank Lloyd Wright and a community he planned in 1923 in California. The question of why people live in houses Rybczynski answers by pointing out that “rural people have always lived in houses” but that urban houses, as opposed to workplaces that served extended families, servants, and other employees, first became the norm in the Netherlands, “Europe’s first republic,” in the seventeenth century. Cultural links soon brought the urban house to the British Isles. The subsequent history of urban living has established that the simplest answer to the question of why people live in houses is that the house is what people have learned to want. In the 1940’s, a firm called Levitt & Sons took advantage of standardization, mass production, and technical innovation to build new towns in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. These Levittowns have drawn sharp (although undeserved, in Rybczynski’s view) rebukes. These developments have not turned into the “instant slums” predicted by Lewis Mumford, and they have outlasted criticisms that

Last Harvest / rybczynski

413

appeared in books of the 1950’s such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). Even the “precut” house, its major parts assembled in factories and shipped to the building site where they can be quickly assembled, is not new. Sears, Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and other companies offered mail-order houses. Between 1900 and 1940, individuals built more than 250,000 houses using kits including precut lumber and trim, cabinetry, and nails. Builders like the Levitts made precut houses available to people without the skill or opportunity to construct their own dwellings. Real estate developers face many bumps in their road, and by the time that the New Daleville houses could be sold, in early 2006, faltering housing sales led to a reduction of prices. The author interviews a couple who are among the early buyers, Scott and Meghan Andress. They have been married five years and have a fifteen-monthold daughter. Both work for consulting firms. Their needs seem typical of many young families. They consider Londonderry to be part of a good school district. The commute to work will be slightly longer, but there is a good supermarket not far away. The reduced price attracted them. They seem to be canny buyers who visited the site once a day for two weeks before they made up their minds. They do not mind the small lot because they both work and do not want to spend too much of their time maintaining it. They seem to subscribe to the developers’ notion that buyers are people who want to live in a true neighborhood and meet their neighbors face to face. The house they have chosen is a “simple box” with light gray vinyl siding and a deep front porch, porches now being a feature that buyers consider attractive. The Andresses examine the features of the house carefully, note any variations from what they have been promised, and obtain promises that a few details will be changed to suit them. There is a problem with the water supply, and their moving day has to be postponed for several weeks. When they move in, they are one of only four families in New Daleville, but more will come. On their first night, they enjoy sitting on their porch. The developers and builders will not get rich off this community, but they will make some money. Although Rybczynski finds the houses more alike than different, “individuality will creep in.” It will take two or three years to sell all the houses. The owners can be expected to introduce whatever modifications fashion dictates in the future. The author does not pronounce New Daleville a success but views it as a valid expression of how entrepreneurs and home owners have influenced, and will continue to influence, the course of American life. Robert P. Ellis

414

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 46. Business Week, May 21, 2007, p. 106. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 24. Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2007, p. R5. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 29, 2007): 19. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 92 (April 20, 2007): W4. The Washington Post, May 6, 2007, p. BW09.

415

THE LAST MUGHAL The Fall of a Dynasty—Delhi, 1857 Author: William Dalrymple (1965) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 534 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1857-1862 Locale: Delhi and Rangoon Dalrymple tells two interrelated stories—one of the final years of Emperor Bah3dur Sh3h Zafar II and of Delhi, the city he “personified,” and another of the four-month siege of Delhi conducted to regain the city from the Indian troops of the East India Company Principal personages: Bah#dur Sh#h Zafar II, the last of the Mughal emperors, r. 1837-1857, who was overthrown by the uprising in 1857 Zinat Mahal, his favorite wife Mirza Mughal, his fifth son and a prominent protégé of Zinat Mahal Mirza Ilahe Bakhsh, known as the “traitor of Delhi” for his collaboration with the British Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, Zafar’s prime minister, personal physician, and ultimately his betrayer Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, lyric poet whose writings provide “melancholy records” of the siege Bakht Khan, tactless rebel general demoted for his lack of success Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali, influential rebel leader who preached jihad against the British Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, de facto authority over the Mughal court who led the bloodthirsty campaign for revenge after the siege Midgeley John Jennings, chaplain for Delhi Christians, commonly seen as a bigot John Nicholson, brigadier general, “imperial psychopath,” and inspiring leader William Hodson, brutal leader of “Hodson’s Horse” who negotiated Zafar’s surrender Sir John Lawrence, effective leader who prevented the postuprising leveling of Delhi

The Mughal Empire (Mughal is the Persian word for Mongol) was established in the early sixteenth century by the Muslim B3bur, great-grandson of Tamerlane, reached its peak about 1700, and declined in power after the death of the harsh emperor Aurangzeb in 1707. A series of lesser rulers culminated in the accession of

416

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Bah3dur Sh3h Zafar II, who occupied the throne with Britain’s compliance from1837 to 1857. Zafar was himself a talented mysticalpoet, and he created around him a brilliant court starring two great lyric poets, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq. The end came for Zafar and the city he loved when in May of 1857 three hundred sepoys (Indian infantry privates employed by the East India Company) rode into Delhi from Meerut and massacred every Christian they could find. Zafar reluctantly let himself be identified as the “nominal” leader of what William Dalrymple calls the “Uprising,” but after four months of chaos the British regained Delhi on September 14, 1857, and immediately began looting the city and massacring its inhabitants. Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862. In The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty—Delhi, 1857, although Dalrymple asserts that the Uprising was “not one unified movement but many, with widely differing causes, motives and natures,” he argues that the collapse of the good feelings between Indians and British that prevailed in the eighteenth century “gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj” largely for two reasons: the rise of British power with its “undisguised imperial arrogance” and the “specific imperial agenda” of the Evangelicals and Utilitarians. Under the rule of Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, the British Resident and de facto authority over the Mughal court, Zafar was left virtually powerless by 1852. (Metcalfe was “a notably fastidious man, with feelings so refined that he could not bear to see women eat cheese.”) The Mughal court was domiciled in the large and splendidly turned out Red Fort, an architectural marvel with marble domes, a swimming pool, a library of twenty-five thousand books, Georgian furniture, and—among other indulgences—a Napoleon Gallery replete with memorabilia of Bonaparte. Metcalfe challenged the excess of the Red Fort by establishing his own “parallel dynasty,” Metcalfe House, a “palatial Palladian bungalow” on the banks of the nearby Yamuna River. In his zeal to match Zaraf’s cultural refinement, Metcalfe also commissioned a series of paintings of Delhi ruins, palaces, monuments, and shrines by the Delhi artist Mazhar Ali Khan. This innovative work became known as the Company School. The Reverend Midgeley John Jennings arrived in Delhi in early 1852 to serve as its Christian chaplain. Jennings was a rigid man of no charm, with the serious aim of uprooting old faiths and winning conversions. His convictions were shared by many other British officials who regarded the British Empire as a reward for their Protestantism. The ulema, or Islamic clergy, were made nervous by this attitude, as were those who participated in mixed Anglo-Indian marriages. Jennings’s arrival

William Dalrymple has written five previous books of history, including the City of Djinns (1994), which won the Young British Writer of the Year prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and White Mughals (2002), which won the prestigious Wolfson Award for History. The Last Mughal received the 2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He divides his time between New Delhi and London.

The Last Mughal / dalrymple

417

coincided with a rise in the “growing missionary phobia” and the swelling of British imperial arrogance. By 1852, Bombay enjoyed less intermarriage of British and Mughals, and “virtual apartheid” was becoming the rule. This “uneasy equilibrium” was exacerbated when in 1853 three British officials died in suspicious circumstances, the most prominent case being the obvious poisoning and lingering death of Metcalfe. The British widely believed that Zinat Mahal, Zafar’s favorite wife, was behind Metcalfe’s death. Metcalfe was succeeded by Simon Fraser, who at the death in 1856 of Mirza Fakhru, the heir apparent to Zafar, convinced Lord Canning, the governor general, to discontinue the royal line altogether. The introduction of the new Enfield rifles caused morale problems with the Indian troops of the East India Company. These new weapons had rifled barrels instead of smooth ones, which made them more accurate, but the balls had to be greased to get them down the barrels. The grease often fouled the barrel, and the loading procedure demanded biting off the top of the cartridge, a repellent step on two grounds: The grease was unpleasant to taste, and it was made of cow fat mixed with pig fat, making it offensive to both Hindus and Muslims. Sepoys who bit the cartridges were deemed outcastes by their fellows. On March 29, 1857, a Bengal sepoy named Mangal Pandey wounded two officers in a failed revolt and was hanged, but despite this obvious sign of resentment, a request by British officers to withdraw the Enfields was ignored, and eighty-five sepoys who refused to fire the cartridge were given ten years penal servitude. Finally, on May 10, 1857, the sepoys of Meerut massacred the Christians of that city and soon poured into Delhi. May 11 was fateful. The sepoys killed several important figures in Delhi, including the Reverend Jennings. British converts to Islam were spared, while all Hindu and Muslim converts to Christianity were cut down, including twenty-three members of the extended family of Thomas Collins. The lower classes were quick to join the sepoys, but the Hindu and Muslim elite kept their distance. The jihadis of the underground mujahideen network fought their own war in the Uprising quite separate from the sepoys. Muid ud-Din Husain Khan, the police chief of a nearby village, begged Zafar to stop the massacre, but the emperor wavered and finally supported the sepoys, thereby changing, Dalrymple says, “the whole nature of the rebellion.” Once the sepoys dominated the city, Delhi became the setting for all kinds of grievances to be settled by violence, and the ordinary citizens suffered the most in the looting and chaos. Conditions outside the city were worse. The royal house was divided in its sympathies, with five young princes supporting the rebels. One of them, Mirza Mughal, was ambitious and capable and may have conspired with the sepoys before their attack. Zinat Mahal opposed the rebellion because she feared it would hurt the chances of her only son, Jawan Bakht, to inherit the throne. When secret correspondence with the British surfaced on May 16, the sepoys slaughtered fifty-two prisoners. It soon became clear that the rebels had no discipline, and one of the most disturbing developments occurred on May 19 when a conservative mullah tried to turn the Uprising into “an exclusively Muslim holy war.” Zafar quieted this threat, but only temporarily, as eight weeks later fanatic Wahhabi mujahideen poured into Delhi.

418

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The conflict wore on with the British claiming victory in a battle under General Archdale Wilson at the bridge over the Hindan River, and on June 7 Wilson joined General Sir Henry Barnard’s field force at Alipore. With Barnard was William Hodson, the ruthless chief of intelligence and commander of Hodson’s Horse, a new regiment of irregular cavalry. His spies in Delhi were vital in the ultimate victory of the British forces. On June 8, Hodson led the British into battle against a large rebel force on the Grand Trunk Road and after bitter fighting captured the sepoys’ field guns, leaving their infantry vulnerable. Barnard then halted his troops at the ridge overlooking Delhi and positioned their guns to cover the north wall of Delhi. This seemingly enviable location, however, left them isolated with thousands of rebels swarming into the city. The British began shelling Delhi on June 10, and the horrific results were rotting corpses soon piled up on the slopes of Delhi Ridge. With them came myriads of flies, and the monsoon rains turned the ridge into a “humid, stinking, stagnant quagmire” and a breeding ground for cholera. Moreover, on July 1 a huge rebel force arrived under the command of General Bakht Khan and his Wahhabi spiritual mentor, Maulvi Sarfaraz Ali. Bakht Khan’s daily assaults exhausted the British, who often turned brutally on their servants. Dalrymple says this of the whole bloody contest: “It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim Emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys.” Finally, “If the Uprising in Delhi started as a contest between the British and a largely Hindu sepoy army drawn mainly from Avadh, it ended as a fight between a mixed rebel force, at least half of which were civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British-paid Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from the North West Frontier and the Punjab.” Despite Bakht Khan’s constant pressure, a stalemate ensued, and the British enjoyed a much-needed rest after Bakht Khan’s demotion. By late July, they were gaining the military advantage. The last stage of the carnage began on August 14 when Brigadier General John Nicholson arrived at Delhi Ridge with one thousand British troops and six hundred Punjabi Muslims, soon followed by sixteen hundred Sikhs. At the same time, food shortages were forcing many rebels to abandon the city, while others indulged their appetites riotously. When Bakht Khan led nine thousand men out of Delhi on August 14, Nicholson pursued them with twenty-five hundred men and sent Bakht Khan’s force back to Delhi in defeat. The arrival at the ridge a week later of sixty howitzers and mortars enabled the British to pound the city and advance on its walls. British victory was inevitable despite heavy losses, and it was followed by unconscionable butchery as “the British found it possible to justify such brutal war crimes with the quasi-religious reasoning that they were somehow handing out God’s justice on men who were not men, but were instead more like devils.” In the confusion, Zafar slipped out of the city and took refuge in the tomb of Hum3ynn, the second Mughal emperor. On September 21, Delhi was in British hands, and William Hodson soon captured Zafar, whose trial dragged on from January, 1858, through March 9. The whole sorry drama wound down in December when the last Mughal emperor arrived in Rangoon, where he was imprisoned until he died on November 7, 1862.

The Last Mughal / dalrymple

419

Dalrymple was helped in writing this excellent study by his discovery of the valuable Mutiny Papers in Urdu in the Indian National Archives, as well as by his access to many other files and to private papers. The book is jargon-free and includes fourteen pages of dazzling color plates. The Last Mughal is a model of historical narrative. Frank Day

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 17. The Economist 381 (November 11, 2006): 96. Military History 24, no. 5 (July/August, 2007): 72-74. The Nation 284, no. 17 (April 30, 2007): 25-30. New Statesman 135 (October 30, 2006): 56-57. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 9 (May 31, 2007): 40-42. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 22, 2007): 17. The New Yorker 83, no. 12 (May 14, 2007): 149. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 8 (February 19, 2007): 159. The Spectator 302 (October 7, 2006): 44-46.

420

THE LAST SUMMER OF THE WORLD Author: Emily Mitchell (1975) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 390 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1898-1919 Locale: France Mitchell’s first novel weaves the story of American photographer Edward Steichen’s experiences as an aerial photographer during World War I with memories of his marriage and its dissolution Principal characters: Edward Steichen, pioneering American photographer Clara Steichen, musician and first wife of Edward Mary Steichen, elder daughter of Edward and Clara Kate Steichen, younger daughter of Edward and Clara Marion Beckett, American painter accused by Clara of having an affair with her husband Mildred Aldrich, American journalist living in France and friend of the Steichens Auguste Rodin, French sculptor Alfred Stieglitz, famed American photographer and patron of the arts

In her first novel, Emily Mitchell chooses as her main character the famous American photographer Edward Steichen. Although Steichen began his career as a painter, he soon turned to photography. Born in 1879, Steichen met his wife Clara in 1898 and in 1906 moved with her to France, where he resided until 1914. Although his later life included commercial work for Vanity Fair, the directorship of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the creation of the 1955 exhibit The Family of Man, Mitchell chooses to focus on Steichen’s life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Well researched and finely written, Mitchell’s novel adds to a growing body of work by contemporary writers using historical figures of the past to people their fiction. Using the bare bones of Steichen’s biography as well as the backdrop of World War I, Mitchell imaginatively creates relationships, conversations, events, and consequences for her fictive Steichen, his wife Clara, their friend Marion Beckett, and other historical figures lending their names to the project. The book opens in June, 1918, in France, and each chapter title bears a date, ending in February, 1919. Within the chapters are sections headed by the name of particular photograph taken by Steichen. In these sections, Mitchell flashes back to Steichen’s past to reveal an event or consider a person in some way suggested by the photograph. For example, Mitchell titles a scene detailing Steichen’s first meeting with French sculptor Auguste Rodin thusly: “Rodin in

The Last Summer of the World / mitchell

421

His Studio. Meudon, 1901. Pigment Print.” The linkage between the actual photograph Emily Mitchell was born in London and and the events that follow serve to organize the attended Middlebury College in past for the reader, just as photographs seem to Vermont. While working on her M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, she studied with organize Steichen’s past for the photographer. The reader first meets Steichen in June, noted author Michael Cunningham. 1918. He is serving with the photographic di- Her work has appeared in Agni, vision of the American Expeditionary Force Indiana Review, and the Utne Reader. She lives in San Francisco. in France. World War I has been raging for four long years, and the misery of soldiers in the trenches forms a constant background to the book, contrasting to Steichen’s presence in the skies above the battlefield. It is his task to go aloft with a pilot and photograph the scene below. Upon landing, he must interpret the photographic images to reveal enemy movement and strongholds. In a way, it is a kind of cryptography, looking at images and shapes that only take form after learning the code. As Steichen instructs his men, “You have to learn the meaning in these lines. . . . You have to use the distances you know to measure the ones you don’t.” Steichen has also just received a letter from Marion Beckett, a woman who had been a mutual friend of both the photographer and his wife Clara. However, Clara suspects the two of having had an affair and has ended the friendship. Now, after leaving Steichen and taking their daughters with her, Clara has initiated a lawsuit against Marion for alienation of affection. Ironically, although Steichen has been unfaithful several times in his marriage, he has not had an affair with Marion. The receipt of the letter begins a long unraveling of the past for Steichen, who tries to recall how his personal life has become so chaotic. He begins with a self-portrait of himself as a boy in Milwaukee, enamored with the idea of photography. From there he moves on to his first trip to Paris and his meeting with sculptor Auguste Rodin, an artist who was to become one of his closest friends. He also travels back in time to pick up the story of Clara and of their meeting at a party in Paris in 1902. Clara, an accomplished pianist, is traveling in France with her sister and the noted journalist Mildred Aldrich. Marion Beckett is also in the room, as is Alfred Stieglitz. The moment of Steichen’s meeting with Clara seems fraught with significance for both parties, and Mitchell provides a description that could be a photograph itself. Scenes such as this come back to Steichen as he flies over the battlefields of France. The force of memory becomes so strong that he manages to persuade a pilot to fly him over the house he shared with Clara in France, on the Marne River: “They were flying parallel to the road as it mounted the hill, racing up the escarpment toward a small outcropping of trees, horse chestnuts and lindens and there, there, he could see it rushing toward them, there it was: his house, the house he had come up this same rise and seen . . . so many years before.” Steichen’s need to see his house from the air is the need of the cartographer to map a landscape. It is as if he will be able to understand the disaster of his marriage and control the chaos of his life if he can just see the whole picture at once, from one thousand feet.

422

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

While Mitchell’s language is lyrical as she transports the reader to the clouds over France, she is also unafraid to picture the danger and fear inherent in flight during war. With great economy of language and attention to detail, she never lets the reader forget the precarious position of pilots and crew during the early days of flight: “The sound of bullets: something insect about it, something electric in the way it cut the air to shreds, and Edward ducked as the three planes sped through the middle of squadron. . . . The air around him was filled with that hard fiery noise, and he felt, rather than saw, the volley knife past above him.” When Steichen himself is shot down, he finds himself in a field hospital attended by none other than Marion Beckett. Sharing the horrors of their situation rekindles the passion the two felt for each other during the summer of 1914. Although their previous connection remained platonic despite Clara’s suspicions, they now begin the affair they managed to avoid earlier. However, the horror of the war and the guilt over Clara turns their love to ashes by the time both Steichen and Marion are called to testify at the trial concerning Clara’s suit near the book’s closing in 1919. Mitchell’s choice of title for her book is both apropos and multilayered. The “last summer” refers to that of 1914. Many accounts of the days leading up to the beginning of World War I comment on the unusually pleasant weather most of Europe enjoyed during the summer of 1914. Only in hindsight did the irony of the pleasant summer become apparent; after the outbreak of war, the golden days of summer turned inexorably to the wet and cold winter of 1914-1915, when soldiers from both sides hunkered down in their trenches, trying to stay warm and safe from scavenging rats. The weather itself served as metaphor for the cataclysmic change between prewar and postwar Europe. The summer of 1914 thus stands as the divide between the idyllic days of the Georgian period and the stark, brutal reality of the modern age. In a very real sense, the summer of 1914 was the last summer of the world as its inhabitants knew it. On a more personal level, the summer of 1914 is also the last summer of Steichen and Clara’s marriage. At their house on the Marne, visitors pour in all summer, including Marion Beckett. In those final halcyon days, as all of Europe hovers on the brink of disaster, the Steichen marriage also hangs in precarious balance, only to topple when Steichen’s attraction to Marion, Clara’s best friend, becomes the one thing Clara cannot forgive. What distinguishes this first novel is Mitchell’s deft handling of the shifts in chronology as well as her control over the nuances of language. Certainly, the connection of the flashback interludes with specific photograph titles helps Mitchell organize her book structurally. Even more impressive, however, is her control over her language; she subtly shifts point of view throughout the novel. At the beginning, the reader sees all events through Steichen’s eyes, and Clara’s suit against Marion seems grossly unfair. There is even a question in the reader’s mind if Clara is mentally stable. However, as the book continues, the reader finds a growing number of scenes written from Clara’s perspective. No longer does Clara’s choice of staying in France in the house on the Marne seem insane, nor does her reaction to Marion seem unfounded. Steichen’s many infidelities emerge, and his failure to attend to his wife’s

The Last Summer of the World / mitchell

423

most basic needs becomes apparent. During the last summer of their marriage, he continually asks his friends to come and stay at their house, overwhelming Clara with work. In a telling scene, Clara, who has just managed to free one hour to play the piano, finds that Steichen has invited yet another guest: “Clara put her head down on the keys of the piano. Around her she felt the notes coming up and covering her, as though they wanted to drown her.” Likewise, Marion Beckett’s role in the drama becomes clearer as the reader begins to understand events from her perspective. Her experiences with Steichen and the war damage her: “At the end of the court case Marion felt all the good drain from the world. The universe was crooked and broken, without the possibility of justice or clarity.” The real tragedy of the novel is, of course, Steichen’s need to see life through a camera lens. Unable to see the needs of those directly in front of him, Steichen is doomed to view his life in flashback, his photographs providing the visual evidence of the people he has discarded. Clara understands this, finally, before she leaves the house on the Marne for the last time. As she looks over the photographs her husband has left behind, the photographs reveal the world as Steichen sees it, but Clara “knows that there is another version; that there are things his vision omits to show. The real world is far messier and more confusing than these photographs betray. As many dreams are denied as fulfilled; as many loves fail as endure.” Nevertheless, there is a seed planted at the end of the novel suggesting at least the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. Steichen sends Marion a key to a flat in Paris, a place where she can go without charge to try to pick up the pieces of her artistic career. There is a suggestion that he will be able to reconcile with his daughters. Most important, the photographs he thought were forever lost are returned to him, offering him a chance to reconfigure the life he once knew: “His whole life in discrete moments, stretching back to those first years when he’d hardly known what to do with a camera. . . . With each new print that he turns up, the memories explode inside his head, painfully vivid but wonderful as well.” Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 34. The Boston Globe, June 17, 2007, p. E4. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 7 (April 1, 2007): 303. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 75. The New York Times 156 (June 21, 2007): E10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 18 (April 30, 2007): 135.

424

LEGACY OF ASHES The History of the CIA Author: Tim Weiner (1956) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). Illustrated. 702 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Current affairs, history Time: 1945-2007 Weiner’s history of the Central Intelligence Agency identifies far more failures than successes, leading the journalist to conclude that the United States is in grave danger Principal personages: Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1953-1961 George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1997-2004 John McCone, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1961-1965 James J. Angleton, associate deputy director of counterintelligence, 1954-1974 Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2004-2005 William J. Donovan, director for the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945

Tim Weiner announces the thesis of Legacy of Ashes in its second sentence, asserting that “the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service.” In fact, his very title (taken from remarks made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower near the end of his administration) makes clear his opinion of his subject, the controversial Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA. As Weiner explains, the CIA had several predecessors. Most important was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which oversaw America’s spying operations during World War II. President Harry S. Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945 after receiving a devastating report on its performance, and he denied the plea of its director, General William J. Donovan, to create a new, centralized spy agency. Truman’s will was countermanded by Brigadier General John Magruder and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, both of whom believed that the Soviet Union posed a growing threat. They organized an ad hoc group they called the Strategic Services Unit to carry on the OSS’s mission. The CIA itself came into existence in 1947 under the provisions of the National Security Act, but it was two years before it had a real budget or a formal charter. Its mission was murky, and the secrecy under which it would operate was troubling to some close observers. Its job, according to the provisions of the act, was to sift intelligence and perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national

Legacy of Ashes / weiner

425

security.” Ominously enough, the country’s handful of spymasters had already drawn New York Times reporter Tim Weiner themselves into two camps. The first believed is the author of Blank Check: The that the new agency should concentrate upon Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) and a espionage and analysis, while the second be- coauthor of Betrayal: The Story of lieved that it should engage in covert action Aldrich Ames, an American Spy within the “other functions and duties” for- (1995). He won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for his investigation of the United mulation. States’ national security programs and The split between the two camps survives a 2007 National Book Award for to this day and according to Weiner has Legacy of Ashes. proven fatal to the operation of the CIA. In fact, within a year of the agency’s creation, covert operations had become its dominant function. Using millions of dollars skimmed from the Marshall Plan (an aid program designed to finance the recovery of the European nations after World War II), the CIA began funding émigré groups to penetrate the Soviet Union and its satellites. The consequences were disastrous, for time after time the émigrés were tracked down by skilled Soviet agents. Hundreds paid with their lives for the CIA’s naïveté, but there was another factor at work as well. The Soviets themselves had penetrated the Western intelligence agencies. Their mole was Harold “Kim” Philby, on the surface British intelligence’s liaison with the CIA. For a time, Philby operated out a room in the Pentagon, and he cultivated an extraordinary contact. His source of information was none other than James J. Angleton, a powerful CIA official in charge of counterintelligence who gladly shared details about the agency’s operations with his close friend and drinking partner. In Weiner’s formulation, the alcoholic (and increasingly paranoid) Angleton would eventually take the “CIA’s missions against Moscow down into a dark labyrinth.” According to Weiner, even the agency’s early successes were failures in disguise. The CIA helped overthrow the government of Iran in 1953 and that of Guatemala in 1954, but the acts would later be seen as blows to the United States’ moral standing and its strategic goals. The agency proved to be no better at straightforward espionage. It had failed to predict the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and the invasion of Korea by the communist Chinese in 1950. In the latter case, the CIA rejected the observations of its own agents on the ground, but military arrogance was at work as well. The leader of the allied forces in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, heatedly rejected any hint from intelligence agents that the Chinese would enter the fray, leading to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American soldiers. The first official critique of the CIA had come as early as 1948, instigated by Secretary of Defense James Vincent Forrestal. One of what would become a long series of negative assessments, it was prepared by Allen Dulles, who had been instrumental in creating the agency in the first place. He would become its chief of covert operations in 1951 and its head (director of central intelligence, or DCI) in 1953. Unfortunately, the urbane and diplomatic Dulles proved more adept at placating the president

426

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

than at running his agency. His growing obsession with covert operations led to an unconcealed contempt for espionage, and he took to evaluating intelligence briefs literally by their weight rather than by their content. One of the most devastating portraits Weiner paints is of Dulles reclining in front of the television in his comfortable office and watching baseball games while aides attempted without success to engage him in the finer points of their reports. Over the years, the CIA engaged in covert operations in a virtual gazetteer of nations. Besides Guatemala and Iran, it seems to have meddled in the affairs of every Latin American country, as well as in those of most Asian, African, and European countries. Only Australia and Antarctica appear to have been exempted. Most of the operations in question were failures, and abject ones at that. Readers will be more familiar with the later CIA activities that Weiner describes, particularly those involving Cuba, Vietnam, and Chile. In Cuba, the CIA’s plans to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro in 1961 resulted in the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which the agency misled President John F. Kennedy about the invasion’s likely success. Kennedy fired Dulles as a result. Under new DCI John McCone, the agency underestimated the number of Soviet troops on the island and failed to anticipate the Soviets’ insertion of nuclear missiles—the latter characterized by Kennedy’s advisers as a “near-total intelligence surprise.” Later still, the CIA plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate Castro, apparently with Kennedy’s tacit approval, but the plans may have backfired in the most disastrous manner imaginable. The CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) never willingly shared information with each other. Thus, even though both agencies had files on sometime Soviet defector and Cuban sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, neither bothered to put him under observation when President Kennedy visited Dallas on November 22, 1963. In the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, allegedly by Oswald, the CIA withheld information from the Warren Commission about its attempts on Castro’s life—information that would very probably have altered the thrust of the commission’s report. Angleton played a key role in the cover-up. Perhaps the CIA’s gravest mistake in Vietnam involved the intelligence behind the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. In this case, the CIA deliberately twisted confusing and fragmentary evidence of aggressive North Vietnamese naval action in the Gulf of Tonkin into a deliberately misleading account. Although based on error, the account gave President Lyndon B. Johnson exactly what he wanted—an excuse to go to Congress with a war resolution. The mistake was eerily predictive of the events that would lead the United States to invade Iraq four decades later. As described by Weiner, events in Chile show the CIA at its worst. The agency had spent $3 million to defeat leftist candidate Salvador Allende in the country’s 1964 election, but the popular Allende went on to win six years later. Undaunted, the CIA spent millions more to destabilize the country. When a military coup erupted in 1973, Allende shot himself rather than be captured. His suicide cleared the way for seventeen years of brutal dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. The CIA had originally been created to prevent another Pearl Harbor (a reference to the Japanese bombing of the Hawaiian port in 1941), but it failed to predict

Legacy of Ashes / weiner

427

the attack on New York City’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. DCI George Tenet was aware of the danger posed by terrorist group al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, but had been unable to pinpoint where an attack might come. He had also been unable to gain the attention of newly elected president George W. Bush. Two years later, Tenet assured President Bush that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons were the ostensible reason for the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, although they apparently had long ceased to exist. Once again, the CIA had been guilty of telling a U.S. president what he wanted to hear. Tenet himself resigned in 2004, to be replaced by Porter Goss, whose heavyhanded methods drove away many of the agency’s remaining veterans. Within less than a year, Congress and the president abolished the office of director of central intelligence altogether, creating instead a director of national intelligence (DNI) responsible for coordinating all the nation’s intelligence services. As first DNI, Bush appointed John Negroponte—a diplomat with no intelligence experience whatsoever. Weiner’s verdict on the CIA is a damning one, but he is far from being a critic of espionage per se. He argues instead that the United States desperately needs an effective intelligence service but that the CIA’s preoccupation with covert action has undermined its ability to gather and sift intelligence. At the same time, says Weiner, the agency’s generally disastrous covert programs have cost the country the goodwill of much of the rest of the world. Legacy of Ashes is probably the most comprehensive account of the CIA ever published. It is based on more than three hundred direct interviews with CIA personnel, more than two thousand oral histories, and some fifty thousand documents, some of them released as recently as February, 2007. It includes more than 150 pages of notes. However, with a volume of more than 700 pages, readers are liable to feel awash in a sea of names and events. Weiner and his editors could have helped them by supplying a time line and a roster of DCIs and their dates of service. Weiner’s stridently negative tone, however, leaves his objectivity in question. Far too often Legacy of Ashes reads like a prosecutor’s brief, with Weiner holding the CIA to an impossibly high standard. After the book’s publication, CIA historian Nicholas Dujmovic posted a review on the agency’s Web site identifying a number of factual errors and accusing Weiner of selective use of evidence. Dujmovic charged that Weiner had even misconstrued the nature of President Eisenhower’s remarks about a “legacy of ashes” and that Eisenhower was not referring to the CIA at all. The CIA’s reaction to Legacy of Ashes is to be expected, but the issues raised by Dujmovic and others suggest that the definitive history of the Central Intelligence Agency’s first six decades has yet to be written. Grove Koger

428

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 14. The Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 2007, p. 13. The Economist 384 (August 18, 2007): 72-73. Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2007, p. E1. New Statesman 137 (August 13, 2007): 48-49. The New York Times 156 (July 12, 2007): E9. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 22, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 43. The Wall Street Journal 250, no. 11 (July 14, 2007): P8. The Washington Post, July 22, 2007, p. BW03.

429

LENI The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl Author: Steven Bach (1940) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 388 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography Time: 1902-2003 A biography of the Nazis’ most important filmmaker that includes critical analysis of her contributions to the fields of cinematography and photography Principal personages: Leni Riefenstahl, filmmaker most famous for her documentaries who reinvented herself as a photographer after World War II Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl, her father Adolf Hitler, dictator and leader of the Nazi Party Joseph Goebbels, head of the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Hitler Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, who served as Germany’s minister of armaments during World War II Arnold Fanck, an early source of Riefenstahl’s inspiration whom she later rejected Peter Jacob, Riefenstahl’s husband from 1944 to 1947 Heinrich Richard “Harry” Sokal, a Jewish banker from Innsbruck who became one of Riefenstahl’s early supporters and lovers

Most audiences have found Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries more memorable than her fictional films. Although such works as Das blaue licht (1932; The Blue Light) and Tiefland (1954) suffer from a maudlin tone and turgid acting, Riefenstahl’s influential documentaries such as Triumph des Willens (1935; Triumph of the Will) and Olympia (1938) are commonly cited as models of cinematography because of their dramatic images, crisp editing, and innovative camera placements. Riefenstahl, it seems, was at her best when assembling images, not narratives, and she made her greatest contribution by reshaping depictions of actual events until they reflected her mental image of how the world “should” look. In Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Bach argues that Riefenstahl approached life in the same way that she approached her films: She continually “reedited” and reinvented images of herself, creating what can only be called a compelling fiction out of images drawn from reality. Steven Bach, the author of Final Cut (1985), The Life and Legend of Marlene Dietrich (1992), and Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2002), has brought a new interpretation to the life of a figure who is revered by some because of her influence on modern filmmaking, reviled by others for creating works that glorified Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, and grudgingly admired by still others as a survivor and

430

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

a woman who rose to dominate a society and industry largely controlled by men. Bach brings his experience as former senior vice president and head of worldwide productions for United Artists studios and as professor of film studies at Columbia University and Bennington College to his analysis of not only Riefenstahl’s life but also her creations. Just as in Final Cut Bach cast a critical eye on the inflated egos, errors of judgment, and misdirected optimism involved in Michael Cimino’s financially disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980), so in Leni does he challenge Riefenstahl’s interpretation of her life as it appears in her 1987 autobiography, Memoiren (Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir, 1993), and in numerous interviews that she gave after World War II. Bach presents Riefenstahl as an opportunist who took full advantage of the doors that were opened for her by Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Albert Speer when it was beneficial to do so and who then denounced them only when the political climate had changed. Bach presents Riefenstahl as learning early in life to obtain what she wanted by enduring the wrath of men, cajoling them when necessary, and, in many cases, seducing them. Her father, Alfred, forbade her from pursuing a career as a dancer, a restriction that Riefenstahl overcame through false promises, minor concessions, a string of deceptions, and eventually outright lies. When confronted by Alfred’s tirades, Leni would simply endure them with a look of false penitence, promise to change, and then continue doing whatever she wished, a pattern of passive aggression that would continue throughout her life. Her work as a dancer brought her some early offers to appear in silent films, such as the now-forgotten Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925; Ways to Strength and Beauty), and to serve as a photographic model. Nevertheless, it was the cinematic style of Arnold Fanck, with its glorification of rugged athleticism and idealized image of morally pure Alpine peasants, that proved to be a real turning point for Riefenstahl. She began by befriending Fanck, appearing in his films such as Der heilige Berg (1926; The Holy Mountain) and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933; S.O.S. Iceberg), and imitating his visual style in her own tentative efforts at directing. By the end of her life, however, she would come to deny that Fanck had any influence on her work whatsoever and refuse to be interviewed by any reporter who had first spoken to her onetime mentor. The visual style that Fanck inspired can be clearly seen in Riefenstahl’s early works, such as The Blue Light and Der Sieg des Glaubens (1933; Victory of Faith). In The Blue Light, for instance, she combined green and red filters for a visual effect that she was assured would be disastrous, but that nevertheless created spectacular images. Throughout her life, Riefenstahl would increasingly come to identify with the figure of Junta, the character she portrayed in The Blue Light, a misunderstood ideal-

Steven Bach served as a theatrical and film producer before heading worldwide production at United Artists, where he was involved in such films as La Cage aux Folles (1978), Manhattan (1979), Raging Bull (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981). He has written biographies of Marlene Dietrich and Moss Hart. Bach teaches film studies at Columbia University and Bennington College.

Leni / bach

431

ist, an individual who lived for the sake of beauty untainted by harsh realities, an innocent surrounded by corruption and jealousy. While Victory of Faith was a brief and largely unpolished early documentary, it established the visual vocabulary that Reiefenstahl would reprise in Triumph of the Will and Tag der Freiheit (1936; Day of Freedom): a glorification of strength and order, a depiction of Hitler as an almost divine figure, and a use of beauty to make repellant political doctrines seem more palatable. Although Riefenstahl would later claim that she had absolutely no knowledge of the crimes or even most of the ideology of the Nazi Party, Bach challenges these claims, depicting Riefenstahl as someone who simply could not have been unaware of the realities that were all around her. Appropriately, Bach devotes a large central section of his book to Riefenstahl’s most influential works, Triumph of the Will and her two-part documentary on the 1936 summer Olympic Games in Berlin, Olympia: Fest der Völker (Olympia: Festival of the Nations) and Olympia: Fest der Schönheit (Olympia: Festival of Beauty). At this stage in her career, Riefenstahl commanded a vast army of assistant directors, camera crews, and support staff. She had trenches dug and towers built so as to capture scenes from a wide variety of angles simultaneously. In postproduction, she worked herself almost to the point of exhaustion, scanning thousands of feet of film on light tables all around her, choosing the most beautiful images she could find, and discovering an “architecture” as she pared down the hours of film available to her. Gradually, Riefenstahl crafted (and, Bach alleges, it was sometimes others who then recrafted) movies that, although they were filmed with sound tracks, derived their basic aesthetic from that of silent movies. At its finest, Riefenstahl’s work elevated the importance of stunning images far above the role played by narrative. At its worst, Riefenstahl’s feeble attempts to tell a story were dismissed by audiences as hopelessly archaic even in their own time. Bach successfully refutes three of Riefenstahl’s most frequent claims about her most successful movies. First, Riefenstahl alleged that every single scene in her documentaries was presented as it originally happened, without any restaging of events or redubbing of sound. Refuting this claim, Bach demonstrates that several of the speeches in Riefenstahl’s films about the Nazis’ Nuremberg party rallies were filmed in studios after the rallies were over and that, even near the end of her life, Riefenstahl expressed a willingness to reenact scenes that would be included in “documentaries.” Second, Riefenstahl claimed that her two-part film on the 1936 Olympics was completely independent from Nazi control. Sifting through a mass of evidence, however, Bach proves decisively not only that the huge budget of Olympia was financed directly by Hitler himself but also that the film met with the complete approval of Goebbels, who saw it as advancing the Nazis’ initiatives in propaganda. Third, Bach argues that Riefenstahl did not merely capture reality on film, as she often claimed, but played an active role in helping to create the “Hitler myth.” Much of the power of Hitler’s message, Bach demonstrates, derives from the force of images first created by Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl continued her film work actively until the very end of World War II. With the collapse of Nazi Germany, she was interred by French authorities even while

432

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

she tried to regain control of the raw footage for her movie Tiefland and edit its final version. When Tiefland was finally released in 1954, however, it was regarded as a failure by critics and audiences alike. Her own style of acting as the Gypsy dancer Martha seemed to many to be stilted, and the movie’s emotional range appeared quaint or dated. For the rest of her life, Riefenstahl would continually defend herself against charges that the Gypsy actors used in the film were compelled into slave labor, that she had misled the Gypsies about her ability to help them once her film was completed, and that she was fully aware that they would afterward be sent to concentration camps and possibly extermination. Riefenstahl successfully defended herself in a number of lawsuits that she filed against those who made these charges, and the damages that she received from these cases, coupled with her ongoing royalties from her films, provided her with a source of income in her later years. Riefenstahl also supported herself after World War II through her work as a still photographer. After having seen images of Nuba tribesmen created by the British journalist George Rodger in 1951, Riefenstahl traveled repeatedly to Africa, taking pictures that would later be published in such books as The Last of the Nuba (1974), The People of Kau (1976), Vanishing Africa (1988), and Africa (2002). While some critics regarded Riefenstahl’s photography of African tribesmen as a renunciation of the Aryan ideals she had once glorified in her films, others saw them as a continuation of the same basic approach to the world, with Riefenstahl again favoring beautiful pictures devoid of narrative, idealizing masculine strength as the greatest of all virtues, and always willing to turn a blind eye to the social injustices that lay behind the pictures recorded by her camera. When Riefenstahl was already in her seventies, she reinvented herself one last time, calling herself Helene Jacob (using the formal version of her married name) and claiming to be twenty years younger than she actually was so that she could receive training as a scuba diver. Her underwater photography was later published in Korallengärten (1978; Coral Gardens) and Wunder unter Wasser (1990; Wonders Under Water). Although Riefenstahl would live to see her 101st birthday, Bach argues that her legacy had already been established in the first half of her life in the works that she created during the Nazi period. Leni was not directly responsible for [the atrocities committed by the Nazis], and whether they might have been avoided if she had never made [her films] is beyond speculation. What is undeniable is that she used her century’s most powerful art form to make and propagate a vision that eased the path of a murderous dictator who fascinated her and shaped a criminal regime she found both inspiring and personally useful. Her lifelong pose of naïveté about them is not credible, which is not to deny her the right to any political enthusiasm or, as she liked to claim, none at all. Nor does that make Triumph of the Will “a pure historical film” or one that merely captures a moment in time; it glorifies what it depicts and in doing so lulls and deceives.

Jeffrey L. Buller

Leni / bach

433

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 29. The Economist 382 (March 10, 2007): 82. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 57. Library Journal 132, no. 4 (March 1, 2007): 85. The Nation 284, no. 18 (May 7, 2007): 44-49. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 10 (June 14, 2007): 49-52. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 25, 2007): 1-10. The New Yorker 83, no. 4 (March 19, 2007): 136-141. The Spectator 303 (May 5, 2007): 57.

434

LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER Author: Jonathan Kozol (1936) Publisher: Crown (New York). 288 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Education, memoir Time: 1964 to the early twenty-first century Locale: Mainly Boston In his twelfth book, structured as letters to a first-year teacher in one of Boston’s inner-city schools, veteran educator Kozol continues to speak out about “the joys and challenges and passionate rewards of a beautiful profession” As a new teacher in Boston in the 1960’s, Jonathan Kozol began what would become his lifelong career— advocating for students in America’s inner-city public schools. Previously, Kozol had majored in literature at Harvard University; he had spent time in England as a Rhodes Scholar, then in Paris studying writing. In 1964, upon returning to the United States, Kozol decided that he wanted to teach in the public schools. The fact that he had no preparation as a teacher proved unimportant, with Boston embroiled at that time in violent controversy about racial integration, with its school system desperate for teachers who would agree to work in the poorest, inner-city neighborhoods. Within three weeks of making his desire known, Kozol says he found himself assigned to a fourth-grade class in Roxbury, “the section of the city where the black community of Boston was confined to live, a pattern of confinement . . . that exists unaltered to the present day.” Kozol has focused his career (some might say, his life) on education and social justice in the United States. A passionate and prominent critic of the education-industrial complex, he is a well-known speaker, activist, and prolific writer. Kozol’s latest book is a series of letters written over an eight-month period to a new teacher named Francesca (pseudonym), working—as Kozol did forty years earlier—in a Roxbury public school. Kozol explains in his introduction that Francesca initiated correspondence with him and invited him into her first-grade classroom, which he began to visit regularly. This book intertwines Kozol’s reflections on Francesca’s experiences with his own considerable time spent in the public schools of the United States. Francesca’s observations and sometimes appropriately impertinent questions tend to reenliven basic issues for Kozol, issues he has been focusing on for decades, yet new again from a first-year teacher’s vantage point. Kozol also uses her perceptive, searching nature as a platform from which to address issues emerging as critical to education in the twenty-first century. However, this is far from a depressing book. Kozol sets the tone early on when he focuses on the teacher-student relationship, believing that the bond of tenderness and trust is primary. He advises new teachers not to assume that a hostile or sullen child

Letters to a Young Teacher / kozol

435

“does not have the will to learn, and plenty of interesting stuff to teach us too,” as long as Jonathan Kozol has worked with innerteachers are prepared to put in the time and city school children for more than forty find a way to get beyond the child’s firmly years and is considered by many to be held belief that grown-ups mean him harm. America’s conscience regarding public Kozol also supports teachers in reaching out education. His books—required to parents, regardless of the form that this reading at most universities and in may need to take. He explains that schools of professional development programs for teachers—have been received as best education sometimes convey misinformation sellers and honored with many awards. to students about what constitutes “profes sional behavior” and states unequivocally: “I don’t think we ought to worry whether parents may consider us less worthy of respect when they discover that we lead real lives, and eat real meals, and even maybe like to spend our free time with our girlfriend or our boyfriend. Psychologically healthy people are not likely to be damaged by permitting parents to discover their humanity.” Letters to a Young Teacher affirms the spirit and commitment of new teachers who are every day entering the classroom for the first time, and the affection that Kozol feels for them, through Francesca, is obvious. Perhaps because of the book’s structure, certainly because of the nature of its author, it reads like an intimate conversation. Kozol unfolds a vision of education that is not necessarily standard practice in the nation’s inner-city schools, especially in classrooms that he believes have been turned into education factories or into holding areas for certain groups of children, yet Kozol does not foment revolt here among the newly initiated. Instead, he encourages idealistic, young teachers to find a way to “navigate the contradictions” without sacrificing their personalities or ideals in the process, to speak out about what they see around them but to do so in a way that allows them to keep their jobs. Readers will find Francesca and Kozol doing just that—creating deep connections with the children, keeping a sense of humor, bringing their own interests into the classroom, and visiting parents at home. In Francesca’s case, it is done with the knowledge of her principal. In Kozol’s early years as a teacher, however, such behaviors were cause for dismissal. Kozol gives detailed narrative of those days, and conditions in his Roxbury school were chilling. Some of the children seemed to accept the status quo, he said, while others simmered, hostile toward many of the teachers and the principal. When a child’s anger erupted, he was taken to the school basement, where an older teacher administered whippings with a rattan whip. Halfway through his first year, Kozol was reassigned to a different fourth-grade class, which had seen a succession of twelve teachers already. The one just previous to Kozol, a kindly but emotionally unstable man, had been locked out on the fire escape by students when he went out to clap erasers. Kozol says he knew how angry and distrustful the children would be, and he felt, rightly so. He thus began his first day with “the deepest trepidation,” but he realized that he also had to restrain his self-doubts and “do something, anything I could contrive, to give the kids the confidence that a new beginning had been made.” Kozol does not pretend his methods were always magically successful,

436

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

but he says that “establishing a chemistry of trust between the children and ourselves” is much more important than just launching into the next chapters of a textbook. Letters to a Young Teacher exudes both a chemistry of trust and the confidence of new beginnings, allowing Kozol and his readers to delve together into difficult issues. Kozol states his views boldly. He believes that aesthetics are an important part of education, that beautiful surroundings refine and ugly circumstances coarsen children, noting the physical differences between typical inner-city and suburban school buildings. He considers diversity curricula used in schools where there is almost no diversity at all to be providing a “feel-good resolution to the contradictions school officials do not dare to name.” He looks at life in middle and high schools, then calls for middle schools to be done away with entirely. Kozol continually encourages young teachers to bring their energy and new approaches into the classroom. However, in a cautionary letter, he suggests that many teachers fail to take advantage of the time-tested wisdom that effective older teachers can pass down, thinking them to be unsophisticated or lacking in innovation. He titles one chapter “High-Stakes Tests and Other Modern Miseries”; another is called “The Single Worst, Most Dangerous Idea: Education Vouchers and the Privatization of Our Public Schools.” After the chapter letters, Kozol offers in the afterword a retrospective conversation with Francesca, who, it seems, had trouble with some of the things she read in the book’s draft, feeling that she was made out to be a saint. Appendix 1 is a recipe for green slime; appendix 2 gives contacts for people who want to pursue Kozol’s ideas further. The book ends with acknowledgments and with notes, which give full references for the examples, sources, and data used conversationally in the chapters. A few critics have found the book’s structure distracting, even contrived, assuming that the polished letters have been heavily edited. Most, however, consider the format to be effective, and the book speaks to a wide audience. First and foremost are new teachers, most of whom will already be familiar with Kozol’s work from their studies. Education professionals of any age—in the classroom or in the office—also have much to ponder here, as do parents and others invested in how America’s future generations are being prepared. Letters to a Young Teacher offers gem after gem, any one of which might revolutionize public education if it were to be put into practice. Not the least of these is Kozol’s musing that he sometimes thinks every education writer, every would-be education expert, and every politician who pontificates, as many do so condescendingly, about the “failings” of the teachers in the front lines of our nation’s public schools ought to be obliged to come into a classroom once a year and teach the class, not just for an hour with the TV cameras watching but for an entire day, and find out what it’s like. It might at least impart some moderation to the disrespectful tone with which so many politicians speak of teachers.

Reinspired whenever he meets idealistic young teachers ready and able to give all their energy to their students, Kozol says he wants to tell them that the older generation is making the world out to be a more dangerous place than it really is. Among other things, this book details classroom triumphs and the delightful, irrepressible

Letters to a Young Teacher / kozol

437

antics of students, of teachers, and even of Kozol. At the same time, Kozol says he also finds himself “encouraging the strongest-hearted teachers” to begin “building a coherent oppositional mentality,” one that will support others to make their own views known, for he sees a fight for the “soul of education” on the horizon. Kozol concludes with the hope that Francesca and others like her are always able to retain the sense of joy and tenderness that brought them to teaching in the first place. When it is needed, he also wishes them “rightful anger, vigorous denunciation, and the saving grace of sly irreverence.” Despite Kozol’s forthright and continuing criticism of the politics of education over the years, he has clearly sustained his optimism about learning and teaching. In his seventh decade, Kozol seems as successful connecting with young people—students and teachers alike—as he has ever been. Jean C. Fulton

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 1 (September 1, 2007): 29. The Boston Globe, October 21, 2007, p. F7. The Christian Science Monitor, September 4, 2007, p. 15. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 592-593. Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2007, p. E2. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 41. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 6, 2007, p. E1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 2, 2007, p. F8. The Washington Post, September 2, 2007, p. BW17.

438

THE LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS Author: Zachary Leader (1946) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 996 pp. $39.95 Type of work: Literary biography Time: From the 1920’s to the 1990’s Locale: London, Oxford, Swansea, and Cambridge, England; Princeton, New Jersey An authorized, thoroughly researched, and alarmingly frank account of the life of Amis, one of the best comic novelists of his time and a controversial figure in post-World War II British literature and cultural politics Principal personages: Kingsley Amis, novelist, poet, and critic Hilly Amis, née Bardwell, his first wife, now Lady Kilmarnock Elizabeth Jane Howard, his second wife, novelist Martin Amis, his second son, novelist Philip Larkin, his closest friend, poet Robert Conquest, close friend, Sovietologist

The first authorized biography of Kingsley Amis was written while he was still alive. Eric Jacobs, a former journalist, met with his subject for long, alcohol-fueled sessions from 1992 until the novelist’s short illness and death in 1995, when Kingsley Amis: A Biography appeared. Amis had read and annotated, sometimes very lightly, a draft; however, beyond the correction of factual errors, he made no attempt to influence content. Passages in Jacobs’s book deeply hurt Hilly, Amis’s first wife, and Alastair Boyd, seventh Baron Kilmarnock, her third husband. When, very shortly after Amis’s death, Jacobs attempted to publish diary entries recording his friend’s last bewildered days, the family reacted with incredulity and rage. It was made clear to Jacobs that the plum job of editing Amis’s letters would not be his. Enter Zachary Leader, professor of English literature at Roehampton University in London and friend of Martin Amis, Kingsley’s son, by then a celebrated, or notorious, novelist in his own right. Four years’ work resulted in a widely praised edition of The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000). Amis fils went on to offer Leader the job of writing a second, fuller, authorized biography of his father. The result is a careful, even-handed, and widely researched 822 pages of text followed by 137 pages of notes and bibliography. Leader takes the reader through the stages of Amis’s alcohol-saturated, serially adulterous, combative, and extraordinarily productive life, from a suburban boyhood in southwest London, to Oxford University (before and after a stint in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II), to a lectureship at the University College of Swansea, to the remarkable success of

The Life of Kingsley Amis / leader

439

Lucky Jim (1954), still widely regarded as his best and most influential novel, to a fellowship at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, and to Amis’s career as a fulltime author who also became a right-wing public intellectual, lamenting what he saw as falling standards in education and supporting the American presence in Vietnam. The reader also learns about the two failed marriages and the unconventional arrangement that followed the breakup of the second: Hilly Zachary Leader is professor of English and Alastair Boyd went to live with Amis, literature at Roehampton University in who, among other phobias, was afraid of the London. He has edited The Letters of dark and being alone at night. Amis financed Kingsley Amis (2000) and written on this ménage à trois, which provided him with Romantic literature and modern British human companionship and essential support fiction. services for the last fourteen years of his life. Leader identifies six themes as forming his biography, two of which are rooted in his subject’s beliefs about literature and the duty of the writer. First, Amis lamented the gulf between high and popular culture, and wrote works in the genres of the ghost story and the murder mystery. Under the pseudonym of Robert Markham, he produced a James Bond novel. Second, he saw writing as a profession requiring craftsmanship and discipline and was regularly at his typewriter in the morning despite the adulterous tryst or alcoholic intake of the day before. Leader also considers the influence of Amis’s childhood as lifelong, and he notes his subject’s extraordinary energy, quoting Martin’s description of his father as “a great engine of comedy.” The last two themes are Amis’s aggression, seen repeatedly in his life and books, and his constant interest in bad behavior in the form of selfishness and lack of consideration for others, again a constant preoccupation of the novels for solidly biographical reasons. It is these last two themes that make The Life of Kingsley Amis so fascinating and horrifying a read. Leader has interviewed extensively, and some of Amis’s acquaintances, friends, and former colleagues acknowledge not merely that he was often “full of fun,” a favorite Amis phrase that Leader chooses as his closing words, but that he could be generous and kind as well. However, the man who wore down his first wife by multiple infidelities was well placed to create figures like the philanderer Patrick Standish of Take a Girl Like You (1960). In a nod to Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), author of Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-1748), a lengthy story of the eponymous heroine’s resistance to seduction and eventual rape, charming and attractive Patrick takes the virginity of beautiful and good Jenny while she is drunk and unable to resist. If Richardson suggests plot, it is the preoccupation of his rival Henry Fielding (1707-1754), with the tension between the desire to behave well and inevitable human failure, that Patrick uses to excuse his actions. In Take a Girl Like You’s sequel, Difficulties with Girls (1988), Jenny, now married to the unfaithful Patrick for

440

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

seven years, comments perceptively on the self-serving nature of her husband’s response to Fielding’s masterpiece Tom Jones (1749). Patrick has underlined Fielding’s authorial comment on his hero’s womanizing: “Though he did not always act rightly, yet he never did otherwise without feeling and suffering for it.” Jenny suggests that he read different books and cites stories of Somerset Maugham: “All about people not doing things they very much wanted to do because they thought they had an obligation to someone else. And going on not doing what they wanted for years on end, not just a couple of weeks.” Amis nicely catches Patrick’s moral ambivalence, lacking the fiber to make consistent efforts at fidelity but, in the words of his wife, “far from being a pig in a lot of things” and therefore bound to get hurt himself occasionally. Amis’s first marriage ended because of serial adultery in general and his falling in love with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in particular. If he had repeatedly cheated on Hilly, then he did somewhat better in that regard with Jane. However, Amis permitted his wife to use up her time as organizer of a large house that offered much hospitality, sometimes long term, to relatives and friends, as stepmother to his three children, and as chauffeur (Amis never drove), to the detriment of her own career, while his own needs and routines remained inviolable. Leader makes it clear that the second Mrs. Amis did her best as wife and stepmother: For example, it is Elizabeth Jane Howard who encouraged Martin Amis to begin serious reading. It seems likely that Amis was attracted to Jane because of not only her blond beauty but also her social cachet: Jane’s origins were upper middle class and wealthy, and she was culturally well connected. Unfortunately for her marriage with the lowermiddle-class Amis, less and less tolerant of cultural elitism, the therapeutic culture and its emotional openness, and, more specifically, what he would come to refer to as Jane’s “GROUPS and WORKSHOPS and crappy ‘new friends,’” it was this very disparity, combined with Amis’s drinking and the eventual, and perhaps consequent, failure of his libido, that led to their growing apart. Jake’s Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women (1984) both contain unflattering versions of Jane and comments about women who are notorious for their perceived misogyny. The last hundred pages of Leader’s biography narrate an increasingly embattled life. Stanley and the Women especially provoked outrage, and feminists on editorial boards in the United States delayed publication there. At least one friend fell away, explaining that “the price you had to pay for his company”—in the form of socially unacceptable comments about women and other “minority” groups—“got higher.” Leader’s biography reproduces the Vogue portrait of Amis dating from 1955 and the success of Lucky Jim, a photograph that made Amis “look like a matinée idol.” The final photographs are of a very different figure, heavy jowled and corpulent. (The dust-jacket illustration used by Jacobs, not reproduced in Leader’s book, shows a grim and red-faced Tory clubman, a suitable image for what some came to see as Amis’s increasing bad temper, public rudeness, and reactionary political views.) Leader writes that today academics, although unable to deny his “centrality,” do not approve of Amis because of his dislike of modernism, because he is a comic, not a serious, novelist, and because of his politics. Literary journalists, however, have almost unanimously approved of Leader’s account of Amis and his life and books. Dominic Sandbrook in The Daily Telegraph

The Life of Kingsley Amis / leader

441

(London) describes it as “the best biography I have read for ages: deeply researched, crisply written and beautifully judged.” John Carey in the Sunday Times (London) writes of “a book of true stature about a complex talent. Few literary biographies can match it for depth and intimacy.” Ferdinand Mount celebrates a “beautifully balanced, affectionate, unsparing and unfailingly accurate portrait” in The Spectator (London). American reviews have tended to be more tepid: A. O. Scott in The New York Times acknowledges “a detailed and convincing portrait of Amis in his times” but regrets “an oddly bland and bloodless picture.” Only Jonathan Yardley, in The Washington Post, is steadily hostile, complaining that in this “elephantine biography” the “inner man is as much a mystery at the end of this slog as he was at the beginning; the accumulation of meaningless detail . . . is a poor substitute for deeply informed, genuinely sympathetic speculation.” One example of Leader’s thoroughness in checking everything he could check will suffice. In a chapter titled “Lord David Cecil,” Amis’s Memoirs (1991) contains a few paragraphs about the rejection of his Oxford B.Litt. thesis, the villain of the piece being Cecil, formerly Amis’s supervisor for that degree. Cecil had, apparently willingly, granted his pupil’s request for a change of supervisor, Amis having found him elusive despite Oxford’s requirement that the two meet not less than twice a term. Amis was therefore taken aback to find that his oral examiners were two men, the senior being Lord David himself. After a slightly fraught encounter, Amis learned that he would not be entitled to write “B.Litt.” after his name. Eric Jacobs accepts Amis’s interpretation of Lord David’s resentment. Leader, however, in addition to reading and commenting on the thesis itself, has contacted the junior of the two examiners, J. B. Bamborough, and quotes his differing view (“I’m sure the failure was a disappointment to him, and it isn’t surprising that he constructed a kind of mythology to account for it and to comfort himself”), while finally leaving the matter open. It is difficult to imagine the need for any further biographical inquiry into Amis’s life, although some may wish for a slimmer and more lively volume that yet takes advantage of Leader’s careful research. M. D. Allen Review Sources The Daily Telegraph, November 19, 2006, p. 23. The Independent, November 17, 2006, p. 23. London Review of Books 28, no. 24 (December 14, 2006): 28-31. The New Republic 236, no. 16 (May 21, 2007): 55-61. New Statesman 135 (December 4, 2006): 56. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 36-37. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 7 (February 12, 2007): 76. The Spectator 303 (November 11, 2006): 43-46. Sunday Times, November 19, 2006, p. 45. The Washington Post, April 15, 2007, p. BW15.

442

A LIFE OF PICASSO The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 Author: John Richardson (1924) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). Illustrated. 608 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Biography, fine arts Time: 1917-1932 Locale: Paris, Provence, and Cap d’Antibes; Rome and Naples; Málaga, Barcelona, and Madrid; London; Zurich In this third volume in his projected four-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, Richardson focuses on the artist’s virtual invention of cubism, on his other artistic innovations, and on his romances Principal personages: Pablo Picasso, a preeminent twentieth century cubist Olga Khokhlova, Picasso’s first wife Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s mistress after 1927 Gertrude Stein, an American writer, one of Picasso’s most important patrons Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American friends Georges Braque, Picasso’s friend and collaborator in cubism Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes Jean Cocteau, French filmmaker and writer

This volume of John Richardson’s biography of Pablo Picasso, the undisputed genius of modern art and, with Georges Braque, the founder of cubism, chronicles the years from 1917, when World War I was being fought, to 1932, when the world was in the throes of a severe financial depression. In this decade and a half, Picasso, already recognized as one of the leading artists in Europe, emerged triumphantly as the century’s most inventive artist, a judgment generally confirmed in subsequent years. He captured in his work, as Peter Plagens has noted, the dual stimuli of his times, fracture and invention, which lie at the heart of cubism with its spatial and conceptual distortions that reflect the ambiguities of the era in which Picasso flourished. The time period Richardson explores in this volume falls into two sections. From 1917 until 1927, Picasso was a much more public figure than he was after 1927, the year in which Marie-Thérèse Walter came into his life and caused him to adopt a more limited public image than he had maintained in the preceding decade. This volume of Richardson’s biography begins as Picasso and Jean Cocteau come from Paris to Rome, where Picasso was commissioned to design the sets and many of the costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Parade, a production of the Ballets Russes, of which Diaghilev was impresario. The ballet’s score was to be provided by Erik Satie,

A Life of Picasso / richardson

443

the choreography by Léonide Massine. Coc teau had pressed Diaghilev to stage Parade in John Richardson, who has published Paris, but the French capital was war-torn, two earlier volumes of a projected fourobserving a strict blackout at night against volume biography of Pablo Picasso, bombardments from the German aggressors. met Picasso in the 1950’s when he Picasso welcomed the opportunity to escape lived on the French Riviera with the art to Italy, where life was proceeding more nor- scholar and collector Douglas Cooper. Following Picasso’s death, Richardson mally. maintained his friendship with the Picasso, long eager to visit Italy, imbibed a artist’s widow, Jacqueline. A freedom there that he could not experience in corresponding fellow in the British Paris during the war years. He also greatly Academy, Richardson was Slade broadened his artistic horizons when, in Professor of Fine Arts at the University Naples, he visited the Museo Nazionale, of Oxford in 1995-1996. where he was dazzled by the Farnese marbles, monumental works of classical sculpture. These sculptures imbued Picasso with a sense of form that was to affect his artistic production for the rest of his life. To understand Picasso’s art, one must recognize that the artist was a man of overwhelming sexual drives, a libidinous male who sought sexual encounters with women wherever and whenever he could, often patronizing the many brothels in Paris, and, after he came to Italy, in Rome and Naples. He exuded sexuality and, although he was patently heterosexual, he also attracted an admiring following of homosexuals, including Jean Cocteau, who longed, quite unrealistically, to connect with him. The sexually charged atmosphere in the artistic world of the period was constantly palpable and contributed a great deal to the tenor of the times. When he came to Italy, Picasso was unabashedly in quest of a wife. At thirty-five, he was still unmarried despite the efforts of his imperious mother, Doña Maria, to entice him into marriage with a respectable Spanish girl so that he could produce an heir. In the preceding year, “rejection by the two women he had hoped to marry had left him uncharacteristically desperate.” A seething sexuality characterizes much of Picasso’s painting. Many of his abstractions contain covert (and sometimes overt) phallic imagery. The artist’s personal obsession with sex was a compelling element in much of his work as it was in his life for decades. Richardson avoids sensationalizing the sexual element in his presentation of Picasso, but he discusses this element to help his readers understand many of the artist’s abstract paintings. Richardson reveals that Picasso insisted on having the women with whom he had extended relationships that might have resulted in marriage read the Marquis de Sade. This suggests that in his sexual encounters the artist was sadistic to the point of scaring away the women with whom he had any possibility of marriage. In Rome, Picasso met and fell in love with a Russian ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, who guarded her virginity scrupulously. Her sexual reticence probably caused Picasso to fall in love with her, challenged by Olga’s seeming unobtainability. Driven to desperation by her refusal to let Picasso bed her before their marriage, he regularly

444

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

patronized brothels and, when the ballet company moved on to Paris, married Olga. Actually, Diaghilev frowned on this marriage, having identified what he considered a more suitable member of his ballet company to become Picasso’s wife, but Picasso was not interested. The artist’s marriage to Olga was a defining moment in his life. Olga’s sexual inexperience and reticence were, quite predictably, at odds with the raging sexuality that drove her husband. Soon Olga banned him from her bedroom, although at times she relented in an effort to bring harmony to their troubled relationship. Olga figured in many of Picasso’s paintings of this period. Through her many manifestations in his paintings of her, one can chart with some accuracy the artist’s conflicted feelings about his wife. The marriage, which produced one son, Paul Joseph, born in 1921, was not a happy one. Picasso, ever the bohemian, rankled at Olga’s undisguised social climbing and conventional respectability. It is, therefore, not surprising that in 1927, when Picasso, age forty-five, spied a comely blue-eyed girl looking into a shop window in Paris, he approached her and urged her to model for him. Marie-Thérèse Walter, then seventeen, was Picasso’s bed partner within days of their meeting. She was the mother of his daughter Maia. Their relationship lasted for nearly ten years, but Picasso finally tired of her. Richardson provides an interesting insight into Picasso’s attitude toward love. The artist gave Olga a wristwatch and, in 1919, produced a painting of her titled Woman Wearing a Wristwatch. He later gave Marie-Thérèse a wristwatch. Lydia Gasman perceptively writes “that wristwatches had a special significance for Picasso.” Gasman goes on to suggest that “the ominousness of wristwatches in Picasso’s imagery has to do with ‘time corroding love.’” This shrewd observation sheds light on the artist’s conflicted view of love. The noted Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, after viewing Picasso’s Zurich Retrospective in 1932, wrote an assessment of it contending that Picasso had strong schizophrenic tendencies. He chided him for what Jung perceived to be Picasso’s demonic attraction to ugliness and evil. As Richardson points out, however, the very demonic qualities that Jung denounced can be read as exorcisms stemming from what Richardson calls Picasso’s shamanic nature and his deeply held belief that art serves a magic purpose. This is not to dismiss Jung’s speculation, but it helps to explain Picasso’s reactions to ugliness and evil. Certainly the schizophrenia that Jung attributed to Picasso seems not to be a fatuous attribution, although “ambivalence” might be a more accurate descriptor than “schizophrenia.” When the artist went to Switzerland with his wife and their son for the Zurich Retrospective, snapshots “reveal[ed] the artist, who had depicted his wife as a lethal monster six months earlier, as a quintessential père de famille bourgeoise on holiday.” It is clear that before Marie-Thérèse became a major factor in Picasso’s life, much to Olga’s chagrin, Picasso had developed an antipathy for his wife that lasted until her death in 1955. The two never divorced, but their intimacy essentially ended shortly after Marie-Thérèse became the artist’s mistress. Picasso resisted any official termination of their union because, under French law, a divorce would have given Olga half of Picasso’s property.

A Life of Picasso / richardson

445

Richardson traces how Picasso’s stay in Rome during 1917 resulted in his embarking on a new direction in his painting. He began to employ pointillism extensively in his work after 1917. Richardson observes that “by fracturing color, much as he and Braque had fractured form, he hoped to breathe new life and new light into his synthetic cubist paintings. Pointillism would have a permanent place in his arsenal of techniques.” Picasso was a prominent fixture in Paris’s avant-garde society of the 1920’s when members of what Gertrude Stein labeled the “lost generation” congregated in the city. Stein became a major collector of Picasso’s works and had a congenial relationship with the artist, as did Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas. Richardson tells of how Picasso made designs for Toklas to transform into needlepoint. Picasso also traveled in the circles frequented by Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, although the language barrier sometimes limited his communication with them. Fortunately, he was fluent in French, which many of the Americans living in Paris spoke. Picasso was friendly with Gerald and Sara Murphy, an American expatriate couple, who helped to turn the French Riviera, which had been largely a winter resort, into a summer resort as well. Born in Málaga, Spain, Picasso had an affinity for the Mediterranean, so the French Riviera was among his favorite places, and he counted the Murphys among his best friends there. John Richardson has a deep personal involvement with his material. His extended association with the artist and, after Picasso’s death, with his widow, gave him access to vast archives of pertinent documents and provided him with a great deal of anecdotal material that he weaves skillfully into his spirited narrative. At times he digresses into areas not wholly germane to what he is writing about, but even these occasional detours are interesting and sometimes quite informative. When Richardson’s multivolume biography is completed with the publication of the fourth volume, it will undoubtedly become the standard and authoritative resource on Picasso’s life and on the huge body of his work. In his lifetime, the artist produced more than 13,500 paintings, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations, and more than 300 pieces of sculpture. He sometimes produced a painting every day for extended periods. A word must be said about the overall composition of the three volumes of Richardson’s biography published to date. They are replete with black-and-white reproductions of much of the art being discussed at given points in the narrative. A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 contains 274 such well-placed illustrations. In this book, between pages 304 and 305, readers will find a fascicle containing forty-eight pages of color reproductions, well-chosen and exquisitely presented. These reproductions cover the full range of Picasso’s work during the decade and a half on which the book focuses. Richardson has done his research thoroughly and presents his material with accuracy, verve, and clarity. This volume represents a monumental achievement by a scholar well equipped to write knowledgeably about Picasso and his work. R. Baird Shuman

446

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources The Economist 385 (November 17, 2007): 99-100. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 19 (October 1, 2007): 1040. London Review of Books 30, no. 1 (January 3, 2008): 19-21. New Criterion 26, no. 3 (November, 2007): 78-82. The New York Times 157 (November 6, 2007): E1-E8. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 11, 2007): 1-9. Newsweek 150, no. 19 (November 5, 2007): 60-61. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 38 (September 24, 2007): 61. Time 170, no. 10 (September 3, 2007): 62.

447

LINGER AWHILE Author: Russell Hoban (1925) Publisher: David R. Godine (Boston). 134 pp. $15.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Early twenty-first century Locale: London A lonely elderly man approaches a film technician and asks that he bring to life a B movie star who has been dead for more than forty years Principal characters: Irving Goodman, an eighty-three-year-old man who falls in love with Justine Trimble long after she has died Justine Trimble, B movie star in 1950’s Western films who miraculously comes back to life Istvan Fallok, proprietor of a sound studio who masters an arcane procedure to restore Trimble’s life Chauncey Lim, Chinese dealer in photographic novelties Grace Kowalski, jewelry maker and neglected paramour of Istvan Fallok

Russell Hoban is an acclaimed author of juvenile and adult fiction who garnered considerable popular and critical attention for his novel Riddley Walker (1980), a science-fiction vision of an apocalypse that leaves the world and language fractured and nearly unrecognizable. Hoban specializes in creating worlds that parallel, but never duplicate, those most readers would recognize. His works typically involve fantastic elements and involve surreal juxtapositions and extraordinary developments. His five novels since 2001 feature characters who appear and reappear, creating a fictional cycle that continues to evolve. Linger Awhile extends the reach of his fertile and fantastic imagination. Instead of locating action in some far-distant time, as in Riddley Walker, he sets his characters in contemporary London, though he allows them technologies and abilities that exceed current practice. Twenty-seven years after Irving Goodman’s beloved wife, Charlotte, dies, the eighty-three-year-old man falls in love once more, this time with Justine Trimble, an actress dead for forty-seven years. A mutual friend suggests that Goodman visit Istvan Fallok, owner of Hermes Soundways, to seek technical advice that seems utterly absurd. Goodman implores Fallok to use all of his technical skills to revive Trimble from the grave through a process of isolating an image from one of her films on photo paper and dipping it into a emulsion of frog DNA that ultimately animates the image and produces a life-sized version of the actress. However, she is a denatured creature, entirely monochromatic and nearly insubstantial until given an infusion of blood. Once fully Technicolored,

448

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

she exhibits a voracious sex drive until the need for more blood arises. Fallok, like Goodman, also falls in love with her and begins ignoring his business and his lover, Grace Kowalski. Goodman’s inquiries about the procedure go unanswered, as Fallok becomes more obsessed and Trimble evolves into a vampire, accosting people at night and consuming their blood. A third figure, Chauncey Lim, owner of a photographic novelty store who advises Fallok on key details of the animation procedure, also falls for Trimble and steals her away from Fallok. Lim has his own mad sexual romp, replete with more homicides and a stratagem to hide Trimble from the police investigating the murders. A second love story develops as Goodman, searching for Fallok, meets Kowalski, and the two spend time with one another. The attraction is as much sexual as it is alcoholic, and they both enjoy endless bottles of vodka and the songs of Johnny Cash. Grace seeks revenge for her rejection by Fallok and provokes the creation of a second Trimble, Justine 2, who also sets about acquiring blood and kills Fallok, who mistakes her for the first Justine. After Lim and Goodman meet their deaths, Kowalski becomes an avenging angel and dispatches the second Justine back to her celluloid origins. Although Hoban is an original, his works remind readers often of magical realists. Like many such writers, he appears to reject the notion that the novel’s obligation is to mirror extraliterary reality. There is, nevertheless, a recognizable surface reality in this novel, in this case conveyed though all the specific details about London locations and various streets and neighborhoods. However, amid the recognizable minutiae there are businesses like Elijah’s Lucky Dragon, a restaurant named after the Old Testament prophet that specializes in Chinese-Jewish cuisine, such as latkes Xingjiang with sour cream or matzo balls made of Yanzheng ingredients. Furthermore, it is believable that men in their sixties and eighties, as are Fallok and Goodman, could still have healthy libidos, but it strains credulity to think they could actually fall in love with a celluloid image, much less create life from it. The emulsion in which they mix the frog DNA and ultimately animate the Justines is repeatedly referred to as a “suspension of disbelief,” and indeed suspension of disbelief is the key to any appreciation of Linger Awhile. In its exaggerated way, the work asks the reader to do the very thing that all fictions, even less extravagant ones, request—that one accept as momentarily believable and compelling mere ink strokes on a page as something definably human. The novel teases one to accept numerous possibilities and realities, and as Goodman admits at one point, “There isn’t just one reality, there are lots of them. No, there’s just the one and it contains all the others. It’s

After brief careers teaching and as an illustrator, Russell Hoban began publishing children’s books in 1958, many illustrated by his first wife, Lillian. In 1973, he published his first adult novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, and his novel Turtle Diary (1975) was adapted for the screen. Riddley Walker (1980) was an award-winning best seller in the United States. Since the turn of the century, he has published five novels, with a sixth forthcoming.

Linger Awhile / hoban

449

a polyhedron and each plane is a window to a different reality. What’s happening now is not the same kind of reality as some I remember.” One night after too many drinks, Goodman admits to Kowalski that he especially appreciates the Clark Gable-Charles Laughton version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), in particular the figure of Captain Bligh. He praises the man’s ability to navigate his overloaded skiff safety to Timor without any nautical technology. “‘Well,’ said Grace, ‘he suspended his disbelief and all that remained was the belief that he could do it.’” All of the characters have done just that—pledged themselves to producing the extraordinary and unthinkable in the face of opposing logic. Such insistence, however, comes with a price, and for most it is severe. The novel’s series of catastrophes reminds one of Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.” Each of the men, initially attracted to Justine’s meretricious cowgirl beauty, quickly tires of her or grows disgusted and is happy to fob her off on someone else. Each finds himself yearning for his former condition, the tedium that he sought to break by willing Justine to life. As Chauncey Lim, the last of the vampire’s lovers and victims, remarks, “I knew that I was no longer the Chauncey I used to be before I took up with Justine. . . . Some things that can be done are better left undone, and Justine was one of them.” Not surprisingly, a major theme in the novel is loss. The most obvious and dramatic of the many losses are the lives cut off as result of this amorous experiment. The first is an anonymous female victim named Rose Harland (after a figure in an A. E. Housman poem), followed soon by each of the three male protagonists who participated in the invention and who then compete with one another as much for Justine’s affections as to simply outdo one another in ridiculous contests of male ego. Detective Inspector Hunter, who develops an overweening empathy for Rose Harland, loses his grip on a predictable world and the satisfaction of a solvable case. Ralph Darling, Harland’s brother (Rose’s actual name is Rachael Darling) loses a beloved sister and becomes the killer of the original Justine. The most poignant loss, however, is Kowalski’s, when she learns of Goodman’s passing. Their relationship is by turns improbable and hilarious but movingly human. While the two are incarcerated for murder, she asks Goodman if he feels dead and demands that he prove his vitality by admitting that he loves her. “Irv’s dead. What do I do now? Just the other night he said he loved me but even then I didn’t know what he was to me. Now that he’s gone there’s an Irv-shaped empty space that’s bigger than he was.” Entrusted with this ashes, she daily communes with them, “I’ve got him on a shelf in my studio. Sometimes I hold the biscuit tin in my lap and have a drink while I talk to him. ‘What’s a month or two between friends?’ I say. ‘This is Grace talking to you, Irv. Linger awhile, OK?’” Hoban has often been described as a postmodern writer, and the label is at least partly deserved for the teasing self-referentiality of this and his other books. Hoban reprises characters such as Kowalski from earlier novels (Her Name Was Lola, 2003), not only to extend the range of their development but also to mock the convention ofinventing new, seemingly believable figures. These characters, he insists, are con-

450

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

structs, albeit delightful and pleasing ones. Similarly, he revives another character from The Medusa Frequency (1987), Gösta Kraken, whose book, Perception Perceived, is quoted once more, verbatim and at length; the gist of the passage revolves around the statement that “being is not a steady state but an occulting one.” In one of the novel’s most amusing sections, Hoban invents himself in the figure of novelist Herman Orff, “white-haired and rosy-faced, and he was what you might call a successful failure.” He is asserted to be the author of The Medusa Frequency, the same title as Hoban’s sixth novel. Hoban’s style is a continuing delight. The use of a sequence of short chapters, each told from the point of view of the different characters, allows for a panoply of voices, and Hoban is careful to distinguish each from the other through syntax, word choice, and verbal tics. Justine’s crude, vulgar directness contrasts with Goodman’s precision and Inspector Hunter’s stilted police jargon. Hoban’s wit is evident throughout, and his punning remains constant. For instance, when speaking of Orff’s failure of imagination, he characterizes the problem as “what we in the trade call blighter’s rock.” Furthermore, his penchant for aphorisms continues with passages such as, “There are flavors that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind.” Hoban is a prodigious writer, one with an extraordinary range of interests and abilities. He seems equally at home in crafting children’s fantasies as well as creating demanding postmodern fictions that challenge literary assumptions. Linger Awhile is a deceptively simple book that proves to be more complex and delightful with each rereading. David W. Madden

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 35-36. The Daily Telegraph, January 7, 2006, p. 9. The Guardian, December 24, 2005, p. 14. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 7. The Seattle Times, September 2, 2007, p. K8. Sunday Times, January 15, 2006, p. 45. The Times Literary Supplement, January 13, 2006, p. 20. The Washington Post, August 24, 2007, p. C12.

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 Essay-Reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2007

With an Annotated List of Titles

Volume Two Lit-Z Edited by

JOHN D. WILSON STEVEN G. KELLMAN

SALEM PRESS Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Copyright ©2008, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews or in the copying of images deemed to be freely licensed or in the public domain. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 77-99209 ISBN (set): 978-1-58765-416-9 ISBN (vol. 1): 978-1-58765-417-6 ISBN (vol. 2): 978-1-58765-418-3

first printing

printed in canada

CONTENTS

Complete Annotated List of Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li Little Boat—Jean Valentine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier—Ishmael Beah . . . Lost City Radio—Daniel Alarcón . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil— Philip Zimbardo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . 451 . . . . . . 455 . . . . . . 459 . . . . . . 463

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign—Edward J. Larson . . . . . . . . . . . The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life—José Maria Eça de Queirós . . Making Money—Terry Pratchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Maytrees—Annie Dillard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miyazawa Kenji: Selections—Kenji Miyazawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”—Mother Teresa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity— Sarah B. Pomeroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense— Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain—Oliver Sacks . . . . . . . . . Nada—Carmen Laforet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Naming of the Dead—Ian Rankin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist—Lois Gordon . Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick—Jenny Uglow . New England White—Stephen L. Carter. . . . . . . . . . . . . Nixon and Kissinger : Partners in Power—Robert Dallek . . . . Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World— Margaret MacMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notebooks—Tennessee Williams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Novels in Three Lines—Félix Fénéon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nureyev: The Life—Julie Kavanagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

468 473 477 482 486

. . 491 . . 495 . . 500 . . 505

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

509 514 519 524 528 533

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

538 543 548 552

Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding—Scott Weidensaul. . . . . 556 On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561 xlvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Other Colors: Essays and a Story—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 Out Stealing Horses—Per Petterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 The Overlook—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 Peeling the Onion: A Memoir—Günter Grass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pentagon: A History, The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and to Restore It Sixty Years Later—Steve Vogel . . . . . The Pesthouse—Jim Crace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poor People—William T. Vollmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Post-Birthday World—Lionel Shriver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present— Michael B. Oren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties—Robert Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ralph Ellison: A Biography—Arnold Rampersad . . . . . . . . . . . . Ravel—Jean Echenoz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Reagan Diaries—Ronald Reagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Regensburg Lecture—James V. Schall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Religion—Tim Willocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Reluctant Fundamentalist—Mohsin Hamid . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss, and the Myths and Realities of Dieting—Gina Kolata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Run—Ann Patchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia—Anna Politkovskaya . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

582 587 592 596 600 605 610 615 619 623 627 631

. . . . 635 . . . . 639 . . . . 643 . . . . 647

The Savage Detectives—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Second Diasporist Manifesto (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses)—R. B. Kitaj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Secret Servant—Daniel Silva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Shadow Catcher—Marianne Wiggins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shadow of the Silk Road—Colin Thubron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shortcomings—Adrian Tomine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Slave Ship: A Human History—Marcus Rediker . . . . . . . . . . . . The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology— Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snow Part—Paul Celan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation—Marc Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Souls of the Labadie Tract—Susan Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spook Country—William Gibson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer—Tim Jeal . . . The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West—Mark Lilla . xlviii

. . . . . .

578

. . 652 . . . . . .

. . . . . .

657 662 667 672 676 681

. . 685 . . 690 . . . . .

. . . . .

694 699 704 708 713

CONTENTS

The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe— Mayer Hillman, with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan . . . . . . . 718 Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl— Craig Harline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723 The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables— Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ten Days in the Hills—Jane Smiley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition—Mary Douglas . . Thomas Hardy—Claire Tomalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Thousand Splendid Suns—Khaled Hosseini. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005—Robert Hass . . . . . . . . . . The Tin Roof Blowdown—James Lee Burke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Touch and Go: A Memoir—Studs Terkel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toussaint Louverture: A Biography—Madison Smartt Bell . . . . . . . . A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories—Primo Levi . . . . . . . . . . . . Travels with Herodotus—Ryszard Kapukci5ski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tree of Smoke—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction—Patrick Anderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints—Joan Acocella . . . . . . . . . . . Two Histories of England—Jane Austen and Charles Dickens . . . . . . Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice—Janet Malcolm . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

729 733 738 742 746 750 755 759 763 768 772 777

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

782 786 790 795

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939—Katie Roiphe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800 The Unnatural History of the Sea—Callum Roberts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World—Rupert Smith . . . 809 Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver— Arthur Allen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814 Varieties of Disturbance—Lydia Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto—Niccolò Capponi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 823 The Water Cure—Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Welsh Girl—Peter Ho Davies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848— Daniel Walker Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What the Dead Know—Laura Lippman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa—Peter Godwin . . The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia—Orlando Figes . . . . . White Walls: Collected Stories—Tatyana Tolstaya . . . . . . . . . . . . xlix

. . . 828 . . . 832 . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

836 841 845 851 856

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think)—John Leland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World Without Us—Alan Weisman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Worldly Country: New Poems—John Ashbery . . . . . . . . . . . . The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein—Martin Duberman . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

860 864 868 872

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945— Saul Friedländer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 876 The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881 Young Stalin—Simon Sebag Montefiore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 886 Biographical Works by Subject. Category Index . . . . . . . . . Title Index . . . . . . . . . . . Author Index . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

l

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

893 895 900 903

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

VOLUME 1 The Abstinence Teacher—Tom Perrotta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 A divorced teacher and an ex-Deadhead Evangelical convert clash sharply when the culture wars invade their quiet suburban town in the guise of a demand for abstinence-only education After Dark—Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 A student and a young jazz musician are among those who lives overlap one night between midnight and dawn The Age of Huts (Compleat)—Ron Silliman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 A complex and mesmerizing collection that challenges the reader to make sense of what is presented Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life—Hugh Brogan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 This biography of Tocqueville amasses a great deal of information about the French political writer and presents it in accessible prose but especially in its second half becomes quite negative about its subject, turning into a series of criticisms of Tocqueville instead of an exposition of his achievements Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution— Thomas McNamee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The story of Alice Waters and her creation of the now legendary restaurant, Chez Panisse, site of the invention of a new American cuisine and birthplace of the “Delicious Revolution” Angelica—Arthur Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The story of a disintegrating Victorian family is explored from four competing perspectives: the overwrought mother who suspects her daughter is a victim of a sexual demon; the skeptical father, who concludes his wife is a madwoman; a spiritualist who doubles as a kind of psychologist; and, finally, the source of the family’s anxiety, the daughter Angelica herself, in whose memories all the novel’s voices exist

li

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life—Barbara Kingsolver . . . . 27 A family of four spends a year eating locally, opening up to new and wonderful tastes more than denying familiar ones, suggesting that the move toward industrial agriculture and convenience food—away from the family farm and the dining table— is more costly to society than people realize Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration— Sam Quinones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 In nine tales, plus an introduction and an epilogue, the author focuses on issues concerned with Mexican immigration to the United States and on the problems and accomplishments of Mexican immigrants, most of them undocumented, who leave Mexico to find a better life in the United States and to save enough money to set themselves up comfortably when they return to Mexico Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters—Arthur Conan Doyle . . . . . . . . . . 36 This generous collection of Doyle’s letters, most of them addressed to his mother, sheds light on many facets of his life, from his school days to his activities as a leading advocate of Spiritualism The Assistant—Robert Walser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 A previously untranslated novel from the highly influential modernist author of Jakob von Gunten Asylum in the Grasslands—Diane Glancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 In this collection, far from being marginal, the “Native American experience” as rendered in current times in all of its variousness is exemplary At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches—Susan Sontag . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 A posthumous collection that explores the full range of Sontag’s interests in world literature and politics as well as her view of contemporary culture, especially arts like photography Away—Amy Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Lillian Leyb fled to New York City’s Lower East Side after her parents and husband were murdered and her young daughter Sophie disappeared in a Russian pogrom; learning that Sophie may have survived, Lillian travels west to find her, to Seattle and through the Yukon wilderness toward Siberia The Bad Girl—Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 A complex, intertwined story of love, politics, obsession, self-aggrandizement, self-effacement, ecstacy and despair, illusion and reality

lii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears—Dinaw Mengestu. . . . . . . . . . . 64 The experience of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, dramatizes the ambiguous experience of the exile who must reconcile his new country with the world he left behind Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself—Ann Wroe . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 An unconventional biography that forsakes chronological development of the poet’s life for an attempt to probe the way Percy Bysshe Shelley perfected his own personality, one that estranged him from his contemporaries even as it made his poetry possible The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics—Jonathan Chait . . . . . . . . . . 72 Supply-side economics generated a fixation on tax-rate reduction as an economic panacea, was influential in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and was the centerpiece of a general process in which the Republican Party became increasingly an instrument for raising the incomes of the rich The Big Girls—Susanna Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Four characters narrate an interwoven tale as they are brought together in the aftermath of a heinous crime Biography: A Brief History—Nigel Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 In this brief history of the art of biography, Hamilton traces its evolution, cites some of its renowned practitioners, and argues for its legitimacy as an interdisciplinary field of academic study The Biplane Houses—Les Murray. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Australia’s best-known poet returns to his characteristic strengths in a volume of short poems concerned with emotion and history, nature and society Blackbird and Wolf—Henri Cole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 The poet continues to explore the regions of ice—death, separation, loneliness— with great beauty, courage, clarity, and formal control and in the closing section moves away from the self and into the social realm, forming his own response to the post-September 11 world Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army— Jeremy Scahill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 An exposé of the most successful private security firm of recent times, its farright founders, and their ties to “theoconservatives” and President George W. Bush’s administration liii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary—Robert Alter . . . . . . 97 This translation of the Book of Psalms seeks to re-create for the Anglophone reader the experience of encountering the work in its original Hebrew, while accompanying notes place these poems in their philological, theological, and historical context Boomsday—Christopher Buckley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 A young Internet blogger and a U.S. senator champion government-assisted suicide for baby boomers to save the nation’s Social Security system, but their initiative, originally meant to draw attention to the need to adequately fund the retirement system, takes on a life of its own Bridge of Sighs—Richard Russo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 A novel about childhood friends in a small factory town in upstate New York and the lives that spin forth from their early triumphs and tragedies The Broken Shore—Peter Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 A homicide detective who has returned to his hometown to recuperate from the incident that killed his partner is thrust into a murder investigation that is not nearly as straightforward as it initially seems Brother, I’m Dying—Edwidge Danticat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 A powerful and touching account of loyalty, separation and struggle, illness and ultimate survival of an extended Haitian family both in their native country and in the United States The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh—David Damrosch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Moving backward from the Victorian era, this book traces the deciphering, discovery, and composition of the epic of Gilgamesh, a work dating from the third millennium b.c.e. The Careful Use of Compliments—Alexander McCall Smith . . . . . . . . . . 122 Isabel Dalhousie is back in this fourth installment of a series that began in 2004 with The Sunday Philosophy Club The Case for Literature— Gao Xingjian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 A series of twelve essays (most originally delivered as speeches to a variety of audiences) address the functions of literature, the responsibilities of the author, and the forces opposing the free expression of writers in China and the West

liv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Castle in the Forest—Norman Mailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 A well-researched fictional rendering of the childhood of the most brutal dictator in history, Adolf Hitler Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us— Philip Rieff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 A set of reflections on the concept of charisma and on how this concept is connected to religious faith and social order Cheating at Canasta—William Trevor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Twelve new stories by the brilliant Irish master of the short-story form The Children of Húrin—J. R. R. Tolkien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 The tragic story of Túrin Turambar and his sister, Niënor, who were doomed by a curse placed on their father, Húrin, by the Dark Enemy, Morgoth Christine Falls—Benjamin Black . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 While investigating the suspicious death of an unwed mother and the disappearance of her infant, pathologist and amateur sleuth Dr. Garret Quirke discovers two converging conspiracies, one that involves the Roman Catholic Church and the other that involves members of his own family The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America—Allan M. Brandt. . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 This history of cigarettes examines the growth of a rogue industry that helped define important cultural changes in the United States even as it spreads disease and death Circling My Mother: A Memoir—Mary Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Gordon uncovers the layers of her mother’s complex person and story and the struggle of the writer to find her mother’s heart and soul beneath a multitude of surface-level details The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War—David Halberstam . . . . 160 Told from the perspectives of common soldiers, junior officers, commanders, and the leaders responsible for thrusting the country into its first “limited war,” this final effort by America’s premier journalist sheds light on acts of valor and hardships faced by those caught up in the least-known of America’s twentieth century armed conflicts

lv

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998—Zbigniew Herbert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Herbert is a major international prize-winning poet of the last century, often compared to T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, whose lyrical and epigrammatic lines are studded with brilliant metaphors Coltrane: The Story of a Sound—Ben Ratliff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 An incisive and stunning study of the musical giant and his influence on jazz The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition—César Vallejo . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Vallejo broke new ground in his intensely personal poetry by eschewing the traditional features of the poetry of his time, such as rhyme, stanzaic regularity, and subject matter, in favor of verbal ingenuity, arrhythmic lines, and surreal imagery The Complete Stories—David Malouf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 In thirty-one short stories, written over the last two and a half decades, one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed writers focuses on the presence of the past in the lives of his characters, on their violent impulses, and on their fascination with death Considering Doris Day—Tom Santopietro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 A thorough analysis and reevaluation of Doris Day’s career in movies, music, and television Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America— Jeff Wiltse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 The author recounts why municipal swimming pools were first built in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and how pool use since then has been influenced by issues of class, sex, and race Crossing the Sierra de Gredos—Peter Handke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Handke’s visionary postmodernist work of fiction advocates the abandonment of traditional, media-manipulated ways of perception and the acquisition of new images to deal with a fragmented and confusing world Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts— Clive James. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 An encyclopedia of cultural enthusiasms and dislikes that aims to set the record straight as to who and what is worth preserving for future generations The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts—Milan Kundera . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Kundera offers ruminations on the art of fiction writing and the history of the novel

lvi

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle— Janet Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 This biography traces the life and death of Fanny Wollstonecraft, the first child of Mary Wollstonecraft, and those around her, especially her half sister Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future— Bill McKibben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 McKibben argues that, in order to have a sustainable future, societies must reject the notion that more is necessarily better, pursue locally based economies that protect the environment, and safeguard happiness by asking “How much is enough?” Devils and Islands—Turner Cassity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Using meter and often rhyme, this eccentric but entertaining poet continues his witty, satirical commentary on a variety of topics, especially political correctness, for whose shibboleths he shows little respect The Diana Chronicles—Tina Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the princess’s death, Brown’s glitzy biography uses previously published sources, more than 250 new interviews, and personal knowledge to present Diana, master and victim of the media, as a transformative force for the British Royal Family and an icon of her times Divisadero—Michael Ondaatje . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 One act of passion and violence haunts a family for years to come The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade—William St. Clair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 St. Clair chronicles from primary manuscripts the day-to-day activities at Britain’s main slave-trading post on the western coast of Africa, Cape Coast Castle, between 1664 and the end of the British slave trade in 1807 Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism—John Updike . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Updike collects more than a hundred essays, reviews, and brief notices published between 1998 and 2007, displaying both his wide range of interests and his insight into modern character and culture Edith Wharton—Hermione Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 A major study of one of the most important American writers of the early twentieth century

lvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Einstein: His Life and Universe—Walter Isaacson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Based on previously and recently released public and private papers, this comprehensive biography integrates the scientific, personal, and humanitarian life of Albert Einstein, a theoretical physicist who became one of the most important persons of the twentieth century Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot—Viktor Shklovsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 An expansive, leisurely, and factually grounded study of the literary techniques of such major Russian authors as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, presented in a format that connects the autobiographical experiences of Shklovsky’s subjects to their published work Exit Ghost—Philip Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 After eleven years of rural seclusion, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York and the ambitions and contentions of contemporary culture Expectation Days—Sandra McPherson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 McPherson’s collection once again shows her able melding of fact and emotion, the outer and the inner worlds Falling Man—Don DeLillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 The eagerly awaited 9/11 novel by the master of national trauma and postmodern angst A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World— Gregory Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 An effort to answer two central questions in economic history: why the economies of some nations began to undergo rapid industrialization about the year 1800 and why a large gap in economic development persists among nations Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family—Alexander Waugh. . . . . 263 A family chronicle of five generations of male Waughs, at least three of whom became internationally acclaimed authors, and an account of (and an accounting for) their intersecting roles as fathers and sons in relationships that often caused mutual incomprehension and dismay Finn—Jon Clinch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 This parallel text to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) unfolds the mystery of the villainous Pap Finn, exploring the sources of his malice, his indigent life on the Mississippi, his relationship with his son Huck and the boy’s mother, and finally Finn’s violent demise

lviii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Five Skies—Ron Carlson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Carlson’s novel about three men with lives in disarray who work together not only in building their project but also in rebuilding their broken lives A Free Life—Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 The story of a Chinese American immigrant family whose father struggles between making ends meet and pursuing his dream of becoming a poet; the book is written with humor, honesty, and deep insight into the complex psyche of the protagonist The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge—Adam Sisman . . . . . . . . . . 282 The biographer maintains neutrality in describing the trajectory of a famous literary alliance from ardent friendship and shared ambition to eventual estrangement Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . 287 Two travelers through the Caucasus Mountains attempt to return the throne of the Khazar Empire to its rightful heir God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything— Christopher Hitchens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 A passionate antitheist argues that religion not only outrages reason and common sense but also poses a grave threat to society Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.—Scott W. Berg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 An account of the life and work of architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant and his vision to design and create the magnificent city that would become Washington, D.C. The Gravedigger’s Daughter—Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 This novel follows the dark adventures of Rebecca Schwart, who, escaping her suicidal father and a brutal, wife-beating husband, changes her name and works at various menial jobs until she meets her true love Green and Gray—Geoffrey G. O’Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 A penetrating and provocative collection that examines the complexities of memory and experience The Gum Thief—Douglas Coupland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 In Coupland’s eleventh novel, two lonely employees at an office superstore form a tentative bond by communicating to each other through journal entries and letters

lix

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—J. K. Rowling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 In the seventh and concluding novel in Rowling’s popular series, the wizarding world is at war, and Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort prepare for their final showdown Head and Heart: American Christianities—Garry Wills . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 How the two great strains of American Christianity—Enlightenment and Evangelicalism—have played out in American history Heart-Shaped Box—Joe Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 This debut novel by Hill, the second son of Stephen King, focuses on the awakening of a middle-aged rock star who confronts supernatural horror and finds himself Henry James Goes to Paris—Peter Brooks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 A fascinating account of the American novelist’s time in Paris, where he meets influential French writers and encounters French art House of Meetings—Martin Amis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 A Russian man lives through World War II, the gulag, post-Stalinist Russia, and a time in the United States, suffering and doing much evil The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty—Wilfrid Sheed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 An entertaining, lively survey of the lives and works of the great American composers of the golden age of popular song from the 1920’s to the 1950’s How Doctors Think—Jerome Groopman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 A mature and sensitive physician offers an inside look into medical thinking and the influences that limit doctors in their practice of medicine If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation— Janine Latus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 The author recalls her family background and her father’s casual cruelty toward his children; her struggle to remain in, then end, her volatile marriage; and her sister Amy’s murder by an abusive boyfriend In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007— X. J. Kennedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348 A collection of poems spanning over fifty years by a master of wit and humor In the Country of Men—Hisham Matar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 An exiled Libyan recounts his traumatic family experiences as a nine-year-old living in the cruel and repressive regime of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi lx

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Indian Bride—Karin Fossum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 In a new volume in a popular series, Inspector Sejer has to solve the brutal murder of an Indian woman on her way to a new husband and a new home The Indian Clerk—David Leavitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 A historical narrative based on a true story but with certain character traits and plot elements fictionalized to offer the reader a crucible by which to judge the smug assumptions of a past society Infidel—Ayaan Hirsi Ali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 With remarkable skill, the author traces the immense personal and cultural changes in her life, which she has dedicated to freeing Muslim women (and men) from damaging, inflexible traditions Inventing Human Rights: A History—Lynn Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371 The author seeks to explain why interest in human rights flourished in late eighteenth century Europe and North America, asserting that growth in feelings of empathy with other human beings, as much as logical arguments advanced by Enlightenment thinkers, led to active concern for the rights of all people The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers—Harry Bernstein . . . 376 A nonagenarian recalls his childhood in an English mill town on a street where Gentiles and Jews faced off in mutual mistrust Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief, A Cultural History— Andrei Sinyavsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380 A comprehensive survey of Russian fairy tales and folk wisdom from the Middle Ages to the modern era James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years—Wayne Franklin . . . . . . . . . . 384 A biography of the first major American novelist and his struggles to earn a living as an author in an age when America was not expected to produce its own cultural offerings Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran— Fatemeh Keshavarz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388 A response to Reading “Lolita” in Tehran by Azar Nafisi that attempts to refute what Keshavarz sees as Nafisi’s Westernized critique of culture in Iran and that introduces the reader to a number of Iranian writers who have influenced her

lxi

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

John Donne: The Reformed Soul—John Stubbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392 In later Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a great London poet modulated from exuberant youth to husband and father, from Roman Catholic to Anglican, from gentleman poet to cathedral dean John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man—John Heilpern. . . 397 This authorized biography, which uses Osborne’s unpublished notebooks for the first time, attempts not only to present a balanced view of his life but also to reestablish his place as one of the most important English dramatists of the twentieth century The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007— Albert Goldbarth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402 A remarkable and dazzling collection of old and new poetry that spans thirtyfive years Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America—Andrew Ferguson . . . . . . 406 The author observes the unusual ways in which Americans honor or recognize the significance of Abraham Lincoln Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville—Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway— Witold Rybczynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410 A professor of urbanism traces the construction of a traditional neighborhood development from the developer’s purchase of the land through the reactions of the purchasers of one of the houses The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857— William Dalrymple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 Dalrymple tells two interrelated stories—one of the final years of Emperor Bah3dur Sh3h Zafar II and of Delhi, the city he “personified,” and another of the four-month siege of Delhi conducted to regain the city from the Indian troops of the East India Company The Last Summer of the World—Emily Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 Mitchell’s first novel weaves the story of American photographer Edward Steichen’s experiences as an aerial photographer during World War I with memories of his marriage and its dissolution Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA—Tim Weiner. . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 Weiner’s history of the Central Intelligence Agency identifies far more failures than successes, leading the journalist to conclude that the United States is in grave danger lxii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl—Steven Bach . . . . . . . . . . 429 A biography of the Nazis’ most important filmmaker that includes critical analysis of her contributions to the fields of cinematography and photography Letters to a Young Teacher—Jonathan Kozol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434 In his twelfth book, structured as letters to a first-year teacher in one of Boston’s inner-city schools, veteran educator Kozol continues to speak out about “the joys and challenges and passionate rewards of a beautiful profession” The Life of Kingsley Amis—Zachary Leader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438 An authorized, thoroughly researched, and alarmingly frank account of the life of Amis, one of the best comic novelists of his time and a controversial figure in postWorld War II British literature and cultural politics A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932—John Richardson . . . 442 In this third volume in his projected four-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, Richardson focuses on the artist’s virtual invention of cubism, on his other artistic innovations, and on his romances Linger Awhile—Russell Hoban . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 A lonely elderly man approaches a film technician and asks that he bring to life a B movie star who has been dead for more than forty years

VOLUME 2 Little Boat—Jean Valentine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Valentine uses her spare style and oblique images to take her readers into a world of dream and mystery where she considers love and death A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier—Ishmael Beah . . . . . . . . . 455 The author describes his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war, where he was driven to kill by hunger, fear, and drugs Lost City Radio—Daniel Alarcón . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 A narrative about a country torn apart by a civil war, told through the tragedies and hardships that its civilians have undergone

lxiii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil— Philip Zimbardo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 A research-based account of how larger forces influence human beings to choose evil, as well as some suggestions for resisting pernicious influences A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign—Edward J. Larson . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468 In the first contested election in U.S. history, and amid predictions of doom if the other won, Thomas Jefferson led radical Republicans to victory over Federalist incumbent president John Adams in a close contest decided in the House of Representatives The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life—José Maria Eça de Queirós . . . . 473 Eça de Queirós traces three generations of a wealthy Portuguese family, as they cease to hold on to their moral and principled roots and sink into idleness and decadence, to metaphorically illustrate a similar movement throughout Portugal and nineteenth century Europe Making Money—Terry Pratchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477 Moist von Lipwig is a former con artist and current postmaster of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork when he reluctantly becomes the city’s leading banker and head of the mint, where he revolutionizes the city’s economy by introducing the concept of paper money The Maytrees—Annie Dillard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482 The story of one couple’s lifelong relationship amid the artistic community of Provincetown, Massachusetts Miyazawa Kenji: Selections—Kenji Miyazawa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 The Buddhist poems of Kenji Miyazawa capture the imagination of the reader with their moving promotion of mental tranquility in the face of personal suffering, their modern evocation of humanity’s place in the cosmos, often exemplified by the landscape of northeast Japan, and their reflections on human folly Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta”—Mother Teresa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 This partial biography of Mother Teresa focuses on her interior life through her letters and other writings, as she labored to establish a new religious order while struggling with devastating spiritual doubt The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity— Sarah B. Pomeroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495 A classical scholar uses a wide range of evidence to piece together the circumstances surrounding the life and death of a Roman woman in the second century c.e. lxiv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense— Joyce Carol Oates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 A collection of ten previously published stories of violence, gore, and horror featuring serial killers, other murderers and psychopaths, their family members, and their victims Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain—Oliver Sacks . . . . . . . . . . . 505 A collection of discussions of the many ways that music can affect the brain for good or for ill drawn primarily from cases and patients with whom the author has worked in his profession as a neurologist Nada—Carmen Laforet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509 A coming-of-age novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who travels to Barcelona to attend a university and live with her deceased mother’s relatives as she searches for her identity in her new family, school, and society, which mirror the emptiness and confusion that many Spaniards felt in the wake of the Spanish Civil War The Naming of the Dead—Ian Rankin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514 The sixteenth novel in the well-known series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus finds Rebus facing multiple challenging cases just when world leaders are gathered for the G8 summit near Edinburgh Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist—Lois Gordon . . . . . . . . . 519 The turbulent life of modernist poet and publisher Cunard, Jazz Age socialite turned journalist and political activist Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick—Jenny Uglow . . . . . . . . . 524 Uglow’s biography describes the life and work of Thomas Bewick, a gifted engraver whose charming but accurate wood engravings provided the ordinary people of his age with their first lessons in natural history New England White—Stephen L. Carter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528 Three murders, one thirty years old, draw a university president’s wife into a web of past and present secrets, scattered clues, and dangerous episodes that expose forces and fault lines in her own life as well as in race relations in America Nixon and Kissinger : Partners in Power—Robert Dallek . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 A brilliant examination of the relationship between Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger that explains their decisive impact on American foreign policy

lxv

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World— Margaret MacMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538 Nixon’s visit to China was a pivotal moment in world history and a step toward world peace, but the devil was in the details Notebooks—Tennessee Williams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543 In almost eight hundred entries written in thirty notebooks covering twenty-five years, Williams records the oftentimes agonizing process of writing his poetry, fiction, and plays while coming to terms with his homosexuality and dependence on drugs and alcohol Novels in Three Lines—Félix Fénéon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 548 A translation of 1,066 news items that were each condensed into three lines of text by the French anarchist and literary figure Nureyev: The Life—Julie Kavanagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 552 An in-depth and probing portrayal of Rudolf Nureyev as an exceptional ballet dancer, a star personality, an individual tormented by his otherness, and a volatile and charismatic individual Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding—Scott Weidensaul. . . . . 556 Traces bird watching in America from the Native Americans’ use and understanding of birds through the split of bird study into science (ornithology) and hobby (birding) to its reunification in the “citizen-scientist,” the birder who contributes to scientific studies of birds On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561 A young, sexually inexperienced British couple’s wedding night proves both upsetting and disappointing for each, effectively ending their brief marriage Other Colors: Essays and a Story—Orhan Pamuk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 A compilation of mostly short essays about Turkish culture that includes literary criticism, autobiography, and a story by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature Out Stealing Horses—Per Petterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 In a poignant and personal novel, readers are allowed glimpses into the life of Trond Sander, as he reminisces about his childhood and family, and develop an understanding of the life those experiences and relationships created The Overlook—Michael Connelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 Harry Bosch solves a complicated murder case despite interference from his colleagues and federal authorities lxvi

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

Peeling the Onion: A Memoir—Günter Grass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578 In this brilliant memoir, Grass tells the story of his life from his youthful exploits, his first love, and his military experiences up through the writing of his first novel and reveals his lifelong devotion to the power and beauty of art The Pentagon: A History, The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and to Restore It Sixty Years Later—Steve Vogel . . . . . 582 Describes the political and engineering challenges that faced the people who built the Pentagon during the 1940’s and the equally daunting challenges facing those tasked to rebuild the damaged structure after it was attacked on September 11, 2001 The Pesthouse—Jim Crace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587 Two strangers accidentally meet and begin a journey to embark on a voyage east to escape a ravaged America Poor People—William T. Vollmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592 Building on previous work from his seven-volume treatise on violence, Vollmann turns his attention to poverty throughout the world, interviewing people who seem poor in order to learn about their circumstances and report their views on poverty The Post-Birthday World—Lionel Shriver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596 Children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern’s life branches into two concurrent time lines based on her decision whether or not to act upon her physical attraction to Ramsey Acton, a charismatic professional snooker player Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present— Michael B. Oren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600 An account of America’s involvement in the Middle East from the earliest days of the republic to the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties—Robert Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 An evocation and assessment of a turbulent and frequently misconstrued era in American history from the personal perspective of one of the most admired and accomplished writers of that time Ralph Ellison: A Biography—Arnold Rampersad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610 A critically acclaimed biography of the author of Invisible Man (1952), the novel named as the most significant work of fiction by a twentieth century African American writer

lxvii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Ravel—Jean Echenoz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615 A marvelously crafted yet carefully restrained picture of the triumph and the increasing decline of the aging composer Maurice Ravel during his final ten years of travel and travail The Reagan Diaries—Ronald Reagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619 The daily writings of President Ronald Reagan, skillfully edited by one of America’s foremost historians The Regensburg Lecture—James V. Schall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623 The complete text of Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial lecture on Islam, faith, and reason, delivered in September, 2006, accompanied by Schall’s commentary and exposition of the lecture The Religion—Tim Willocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 627 The story of an adventurer whose search for the lost son of a captivating noblewoman takes him to Malta, where he finds himself fighting with the Christians against the Turks besieging the island The Reluctant Fundamentalist—Mohsin Hamid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631 A Pakistani man, torn between fundamentalist Islam and America, relates his story to his American guest Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss, and the Myths and Realities of Dieting—Gina Kolata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635 Billions of dollars are spent each year on the quest for thinness, while scientific evidence gained from repeated studies and data analysis indicates that all these dollars are being spent in vain Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639 Donald, close to death at age forty-five, dictates his life story to his wife so that family members will appreciate their part-Native American heritage; after his death, the people closest to him are forced to deal with the loss of an important influence on their lives Run—Ann Patchett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643 This family saga tells the story of two adopted brothers whose birth mother suddenly reenters their lives through a car accident; the author portrays how bonds of love and affection develop in a family, whether its members are related by birth or by choice

lxviii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia—Anna Politkovskaya . . . . . . . . . . . . 647 A compelling account of recent Russian history, with special focus on terrorist activities in Chechnya and Russia and on political changes under Vladimir Putin The Savage Detectives—Roberto Bolaño . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 652 A multivoiced epic of two poets’ search for the vanished founder of visceral realism, and the consequences of their meeting, extending over two decades and five continents Second Diasporist Manifesto (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses)—R. B. Kitaj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657 A famous modern figurative painter shares his strongly felt impressions on the correspondences between literature and art The Secret Servant—Daniel Silva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662 Israeli spy Gabriel Allon tries to rescue the daughter of the American ambassador to the United Kingdom after she is kidnapped by terrorists The Shadow Catcher—Marianne Wiggins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 This dual narrative twines the character Wiggins’s trip to investigate the illness of a man professing to be her father with the story of photographer Edward Curtis’s life, marriage, training, and work documenting Native Americans by taking their photos in tribal dress and settings in the early twentieth century Shadow of the Silk Road—Colin Thubron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672 Thubron describes an eight-month journey along the fabled Silk Road, from China to Antioch in Turkey Shortcomings—Adrian Tomine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 In his first full-length graphic novel, the prolific Adrian Tomine combines gritty realism and subtle humor to create a memorable, sometimes painful exploration of Asian American identity The Slave Ship: A Human History—Marcus Rediker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681 A well-researched study that describes the physical structure of slave ships that transported slaves from West Africa to the New World during the eighteenth century The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology— Bernd Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685 Heinrich recounts his father’s life and scientific career, and his own, with emphasis on their interactions with each other and with the events and biology of their times lxix

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Snow Part—Paul Celan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 690 Tormented Holocaust survivor Celan’s last poems, including his unpublished ones, are ably translated Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation—Marc Fisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694 A scholarly yet readable account of changes that took place within America’s broadcast industry as rock-and-roll music came of age Souls of the Labadie Tract—Susan Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699 Howe explores historical episodes, including the foundation and dissolution of the Labadist utopian community (1684-1722) in Maryland, through the lens of her experimental poetry, employing both verbal and visual elements Spook Country—William Gibson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704 The second book in a trilogy started with Pattern Recognition in 2003, bringing a science-fiction sensibility to bear on the contemporary world Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer—Tim Jeal . . . . . 708 This biography of Henry Morton Stanley presents new information on the discoverer of David Livingstone and emphasizes his role as an explorer; though marred by excessive defensiveness about Stanley, the book raises important issues about European colonialism The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West—Mark Lilla . . . 713 An intellectual history of the separation of politics from religion during the early modern period of Western civilization and of efforts to bring the two together again The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe— Mayer Hillman, with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan . . . . . . . 718 Hillman argues that drastic, rapid measures must be taken immediately to reduce greenhouse gases in order to save humans and other species from the pernicious effects of global warming, and he and his colleagues recommend a practicable, albeit civilization-altering, program Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl— Craig Harline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723 A lively account of the rise and development of a day that has been both dreaded and beloved, focusing especially on England, Holland, France, Belgium, and the United States and showing that the way Sunday has evolved in these settings says much about what is unique to them

lxx

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables— Mario Vargas Llosa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729 Vargas Llosa explores Hugo’s endeavor to write a novel enveloping a complete fictional world and by so doing to change the real world Ten Days in the Hills—Jane Smiley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 733 In her latest novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Smiley uses Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1351) as a template for her tale of ten days in the Hollywood Hills, where ten characters try to make sense of things during the conflict in Iraq Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition—Mary Douglas . . . . . 738 A distinguished anthropologist explains a technique of composition widely used in oral societies but little understood in the modern print culture Thomas Hardy—Claire Tomalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 742 Tomalin examines the life of the renowned writer who began his career as a novelist at the end of the Victorian era but became one of the leading Modern poets A Thousand Splendid Suns—Khaled Hosseini. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 746 The second novel by this Afghan American author recounts the woes of two very different Afghan women in their homeland during a time of violent political upheaval, bloody civil war, and foreign invasions by Soviet as well as U.S. and NATO troops Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005—Robert Hass . . . . . . . . . . . . . 750 In this long-awaited, award-winning collection of poetry from a celebrated California poet, Hass explores the subjects of art, nature, and social issues The Tin Roof Blowdown—James Lee Burke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 In his sixteenth Dave Robicheaux novel, Burke weaves a New Orleans tale of death and destruction wrought by small-time criminals with the horror of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath Touch and Go: A Memoir—Studs Terkel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759 Terkel looks back on the astonishing ninety-five years of his life Toussaint Louverture: A Biography—Madison Smartt Bell . . . . . . . . . . . 763 A scholarly and balanced account of Toussaint-Louverture’s life, with an emphasis on his struggle against slavery and for Haitian autonomy A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories—Primo Levi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 768 Light, darkness, and shadows permeate this collection of stories, echoing the Holocaust and exploring the beauty and ugliness of which humans are capable lxxi

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

Travels with Herodotus—Ryszard Kapukci5ski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 772 A journalist parallels his early travels to Asia and Africa as a foreign correspondent to the life and times of Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian Tree of Smoke—Denis Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 777 An ambitious novel that chronicles a CIA intelligence operation gone awry during the Vietnam War The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction—Patrick Anderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 A breezy overview of contemporary thriller writers by an engaging thriller novelist and book reviewer that is nevertheless weak on the history of the genre and provides no guide to other studies Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints—Joan Acocella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 A collection of essays that are representative of Acocella’s literary, dance, and art criticism originally published primarily in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books Two Histories of England—Jane Austen and Charles Dickens . . . . . . . . . 790 Sixteen-year-old Austen’s highly subjective tongue-in-cheek history of England from Henry IV to Charles I parodies subjective eighteenth century histories for young ladies, while Dickens’s lively, dramatic children’s tale of England from Elizabeth I to the death of Charles I provides personal insights into how England acquired democratic freedoms Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice—Janet Malcolm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 795 Three essays, originally published in The New Yorker, explore Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s relationship, works, and lives Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939—Katie Roiphe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800 Roiphe examines seven couples in literary London in the opening decades of the twentieth century and reveals the difficulties they had in trying to redefine marriage for modern times The Unnatural History of the Sea—Callum Roberts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 By examining the thousand-year history of fishing and hunting of marine life, the author shows how increasingly sophisticated technologies have facilitated depleting once superabundant oceans of more than 90 percent of their fish and mammals, but marine reserves offer a hope for resurrecting these vanished ecosystems

lxxii

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World—Rupert Smith . . . 809 A British general argues that the era of conventional interstate industrial war is over and that the world has entered a period in which wars will be limited, long, and fought among the people Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver— Arthur Allen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814 An account of the development and use of vaccination as a means to control disease; political, industrial, and medical controversies associated with vaccination have all played their respective roles in the subject Varieties of Disturbance—Lydia Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 819 A brilliant, opaque writer’s seventh collection, a gathering of fifty-seven stories that range from one-sentence jolts of recognition to forty-page faux case studies Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto—Niccolò Capponi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 823 Capponi presents a meticulously researched and brilliantly written account of the Battle of Lepanto, which saved the West from domination by the Ottoman Turkish Empire The Water Cure—Percival Everett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 828 One man’s exploration of sanity, rationality, humanity, and justice as he transforms himself from victim to assailant after he captures the monster that brutally murdered his eleven-year-old daughter The Welsh Girl—Peter Ho Davies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832 A first novel by Davies chronicling the wartime convergence of three young people: a sheep farmer’s seventeen-year-old daughter who must live a devastating lie, a German POW who falls in love with her, and an Anglicized German Jew, an interrogator assigned to break through Rudolf Hess What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848— Daniel Walker Howe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 836 A comprehensive narrative account of the United States from the end of the War of 1812 until the end of the Mexican War, with a good balance among political, military, cultural, technological, and economic components What the Dead Know—Laura Lippman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 841 Thirty years after two adolescent sisters mysteriously disappeared from a Baltimore mall, a woman stopped by police following a hit-and-run accident on the Baltimore Beltway claims to be one of them lxxiii

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa—Peter Godwin . . . . . 845 A poignant memoir of the African-born author’s return visits to Zimbabwe, where he strove to protect the welfare of his aging parents in the midst of deteriorating political and economic conditions; while looking after his parents, he made a startling discovery about the true origins of his father that moved him to see his own life from a radically new perspective The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia—Orlando Figes . . . . . . . . 851 An account of the private lives of ordinary Russians that focuses on the totalitarian Soviet Union from the Revolution of 1917 until Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 White Walls: Collected Stories—Tatyana Tolstaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856 A collection of twenty-four stories, including all those from the author’s first two books, as well as previously uncollected stories Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think)—John Leland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 860 Leland presents a compelling argument for the enduring value of Jack Kerouac’s novel as a guide to growing up and leading a responsible life The World Without Us—Alan Weisman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864 Weisman imagines an Earth from which all people suddenly vanish and traces what might then happen to the homes, factories, and farms left abandoned, as well as the natural world as it begins to regenerate and reshape itself for post-human existence A Worldly Country: New Poems—John Ashbery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868 The twenty-sixth collection by a prolific and preeminent American poet The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein—Martin Duberman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 872 Duberman’s monumental biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of the brilliant man responsible for bringing George Balanchine to America, for helping to create the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, and for founding the New York City Ballet The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945— Saul Friedländer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 876 A multifaceted account that includes analysis as lucid as it is complex, the second volume of Friedländer’s history of the Holocaust covers the years of World War II and achieves distinction by continuing the author’s insightful integration of narratives about the German perpetrators and their Jewish victims

lxxiv

COMPLETE ANNOTATED LIST OF TITLES

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—Michael Chabon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881 In this alternate history, in which surviving European Jews settled in Alaska instead of Israel after World War II, Meyer Landsman is a detective who investigates a murder, discovers the victim was the estranged son of a local crime boss, and uncovers an international conspiracy to destroy an important religious shrine Young Stalin—Simon Sebag Montefiore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 886 New sources revise the understanding of Joseph Stalin’s early years and, hence, his personality

lxxv

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

451

LITTLE BOAT Author: Jean Valentine (1934) Publisher: Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, Conn.). 67 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Poetry Valentine uses her spare style and oblique images to take her readers into a world of dream and mystery where she considers love and death A number of commenters on contemporary poetry in America have noted that the last few decades have produced a trend toward accessibility. Writers such as Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Sharon Olds, to name only a few, have contributed to the trend, which has resulted in events such as poetry slams and Collins’s radio readings on Prairie Home Companion. There’s a comfort in such accessibility. Jean Valentine, however, is not in the accessibility school. Her stripped-down poems (one critic has said they seem more like notebook jottings than poems) demand that readers give to each of her few words the same careful attention she used to select them. Her spare style, her slant images, her unconventional punctuation (which sometimes includes extra spaces between words in a line) may remind one of Emily Dickinson and explain why many call Valentine a “poet’s poet.” The minimalist poems of Little Boat, like those in Valentine’s earlier books, draw the reader into a fragile and dreamlike world where the poet considers subjects such as love and death. Poems like these do not offer the reader many conclusions about their subjects; instead, they invite the reader to participate intuitively to discover the author’s vision. The opening poem of the volume, “La Chalupa, the Boat,” offers a sample of Valentine’s approach. In the opening lines, the speaker is a young person drifting in “la chalupa.” The little blue boat is painted with flowers, roses, and lilies. The second stanza revises: “No, not drifting, I am poling/ my way into my life. It seems/ like another life.” From this point on, the poem exchanges present tense for past. Evidently the life the speaker poled herself into was some time ago. The third stanza suggests past obstacles in that life by listing “walls of the mind” and even “cliffs of the mind,” “seven deaths” and finally “seven bread-offerings.” The last image seems to evoke more worship, even blessing, than frustration. The explanation may lie in the vessel that carried the speaker into life, the boat that the last line identifies as the little boat “you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school.” The presence of that “you” in the last line gives the poem a surprising direction that often appears at the end of Valentine’s poems. Here it suggests how the speaker was able to deal with life’s walls and cliffs, for she has set out in a craft that “you” built carefully, long before. Such reading is a little like what a hiker might do if he or she discovers a skeleton— dry, bleached bones—in the woods and reimagines the animal with flesh and hide.

452

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Valentine’s poems give enough of bone and sinew that the discoverer will understand the omitted flesh; at the same time, they offer the stark beauty of the bare bone itself. Several of the poems in this volume allude to graphic artists. “The Artist in Prison” is designated “for Ray Materson,” whose work as an embroiderer of miniatures during his prison sentence has brought him considerable public attention. Valentine writes the poem in Materson’s voice, but it becomes a statement of how all artists work, poets included. The speaker begins by offering to trade cigarettes for other prisoners’ socks, so that he can use the threads to embroider tiny pictures, as in fact Materson has done. He then goes on to trade days of his freedom and even “red shadow/ on the inside of my skull” for the socks that are the medium of his art. The poem thus becomes not only a tribute to Materson but also a description of how all artists work, trading their freedom for whatever they need to bring the red shadows of their artistic vision to life. Several of the poems in the first section of this book deal with loss, prison, and death. “Photographs at her Wake,” for example, pictures the life of the dead woman through images as small as the tortoiseshell combs she wore, as tiny as hair under a page of a phone book. In “Lord of the world!” one whose hand has been found to be “caught in the prisoner’s hand” prays for protection. Many of the poems of this section suggest the speaker responding to loss. In “The father was a carrier,” the speaker laments the loss of a man who carried everything—perhaps all the burdens of his life—in five buckets. By the end of the poem, he has morphed into all men who are heavy-laden. In “The Eleventh Brother (2),” Valentine builds on the Hans Christian Andersen story of the sister who must weave shirts for all her eleven brothers to return them from swan to human form. The sister leaves one shirt without a completed sleeve, and in Valentine’s version the one-winged brother loses control of his car on a bridge. He cannot be recalled to life, even after the sister dives into the dark water to deliver the missing arm. “‘Remote Objects of Intense Devotion’” uses the objects in the miniature box installations of the surrealist artist Joseph Cornell as representations of loss in the way it is felt by ordinary people—“A guy smoking, in his chair.” The second section of Little Boat is titled “Jesus Said,” drawing some of its subject and form from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the so-called Gnostic gospels, which attribute to Jesus a number of sayings not found in the New Testament canon. The subtitle to the section quotes one of these sayings: “Jesus said, Split a piece of wood, and I am there.” In this section, “Annunciation Poem” suggests a love poem from mother to longed-for child, “the eye of my eye.” “The Teacher’s Poem” begins with an epigraph from Pablo Picasso: “If you don’t have red, use green.” It then opens with a saying of Jesus: “Jesus said, Fix anything.” As the poem progresses, however, it lists things that cannot be fixed, not a granddaughter’s sorrow or the end of life or even a stovepipe. Is all this in answer to Jesus’ command or part of what Jesus himself said?

Jean Valentine has published ten books of poetry. Her first volume of poems, Dream Barker, won the 1965 Yale Younger Poets Series award. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, won the National Book Award for 2004.

Little Boat / valentine

453

Either reading is possible; in the end, neither red nor green can remedy what is wrong. The poem seems tied to the one that follows it, “Death Poem.” Here Jesus tells his hearer that neither his life nor his death has been of use to the one who has moved against him. The section concludes with “The Afterlife Poem.” In it, Jesus is quoted again: “But I am ‘alive’!” He then goes on almost whimsically to define that life in afterlife: “It’s the same material,/ but lighter,/ summer stuff.” The “Strange Lights” section of the volume is composed of five poems, each with “Hospital” as part of its title. Their reference to hospitals is mostly oblique; “doctor” shows up in one, however, and “MRI.” In “Hospital: It was euphoria,” the speaker describes how little veins of euphoria sent a “burst to the brain,” which showed like fireworks on the MRI. Euphoria happened also “when you stove my boat/ & brought me over/ listing in the racing foam.” Here, as in the opening poem, the boat seems to suggest the speaker’s soul. In the section titled “A Bowl of Milk,” several poems seem to address the dead. “This Side” illustrates the oracular quality of much of Valentine’s work. It begins by describing “window-eyes” that seem to observe the world from across the street. The speaker prays and waits, even extends an antenna wrapped in aluminum foil. Still waiting for the message, she carries the aerial with her, caduceus she calls it, the twowinged staff of Hermes the messenger. In the last section of the poem, the speaker leaves a bowl of milk on the threshold so that the dead may return to drink. With a powerful picture of grief, she concludes “& in the morning/ licked it where he licked.” “His White Jade Eggs” describes the dislocation the grieving one can feel after a death; it is the strange sense of uncertainty one has when the train begins to move, or perhaps the train next to one’s own. It is the elusive sense of trying to watch the floaters in one’s own eye. The section “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil” draws on the questions that the British Punjabi poet Bhanu Kapil Rider used to create her work The Vertical Interrogations of Strangers (2001), a work in which she posed a sequence of twelve questions, ordered variously, to strangers. Those questions form the titles of these poems to which Valentine has built her own answers. The “Maria Gravida, Mary Expectant” section draws its image from the icon described in “Maria Gravida” where the “gold mother,” the pregnant Mary, draws the speaker into the icon. Its images of goldfinches and peacocks suggest death and immortality. The very earth seems pregnant: “Not a casket but a darkroom for our love,” mysteriously impregnated by the silver fertility image, the herma. Here, as in many of these poems, mystery is a dominant theme. In “Moose and calf,” Valentine begins with a picture of the moose and calf of the title, eating willow shoots beside an Alaskan highway, “looking for you” she adds ambiguously, as if the moose and speaker are both seeking “you.” The next stanza continues the idea; the seeker is also thirsting for something she cannot name “before I can’t remember you any more,” suggesting the common fear of the bereaved, that the memory of the dead will fade to nothingness. In the poem’s third stanza, however, the implications that the “you” is a human are transmuted to suggest Christ, often portrayed with a broken heart and here with a wound in his side as well, a wound that

454

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

becomes wide enough “to offer refuge for all.” The line is quoted from the fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, whose visions suggested to her a mystic unity of all the world in God’s love. The volume’s last poem, “The Rose,” seems to draw on traditional associations of the rose with both human and divine love. The poem’s first lines seem to deny this, however. It looks like the sort of labyrinth that might reveal God, but at its center it is merely a rose. The poem continues to describe the rose as growing in “us,” nourishing us in life and love; “only flesh itself” Valentine adds, reminding the reader of Christianity’s view of the connection between God and flesh. The concluding stanza pictures “god the mother” comforting Jim and inviting him with the homely image of her knees as a country porch on which he can rest. Reading Jean Valentine’s poems is like stepping into a landscape from which some road markers have been removed; although the land remains familiar, the task of travel requires new, perhaps unaccustomed, attentiveness from the reader. The reward for that attention, however, is a journey into a dreamscape more lovely, more evocative than the usual journey into the common suburbs where the roads are full of signs identifying the street names and telling us matter-of-factly when to merge. Ann D. Garbett

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 2 (September 15, 2007): 16. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 92. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 33 (August 20, 2007): 48.

455

A LONG WAY GONE Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Author: Ishmael Beah (1980) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 229 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1993-1998 Locale: Sierra Leone The author describes his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war, where he was driven to kill by hunger, fear, and drugs Principal personages: Ishmael Beah, a boy whose family is killed in his country’s civil war and who becomes a child soldier Junior, his brother Esther, a nurse who helps Beah begin to heal after he is rescued from military service Uncle Tommy, Beah’s uncle, who gives him a home Laura Simms, an American storyteller who adopts Beah

While readers in the United States might occasionally read a news report that mentions child soldiers or encounter statistics about the fate of children in war zones, few can imagine how average people, and especially children, could take part in the atrocities. Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, tells how an ordinary boy became a ruthless soldier and then overcame his terrible experiences. The memoir not only highlights the complexity of human nature under stress but also adds an important voice to political and policy discussions on the effects of war on children. Beah acknowledges in the prologue (dated New York City, 1998) that readers will probably be emotionally distant from the subject matter. For part of a page, he provides details that set up a contrast with what will follow. The narrator describes speaking with high school friends who are curious about the war in his home country. They think it is “cool” that Beah “saw people running around with guns and shooting each other.” He promises to tell them about it sometime. The prologue anchors the story as one told after the fact by a storyteller to friends. Although many of the details in the memoir are horrific, Beah helps the reader through it by maintaining the tone of a storyteller somewhat distanced from what has happened. Though many of Beah’s memories include tragedy, personal loss, and extreme violence, he lets the facts speak for themselves. Beah begins the main narration in chapter 1 by explaining that, at the beginning of the war, he knew about it only through stories told by others fleeing the fighting.

456

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In this way, he opens the memoir by forming connections with the readers, who are likewise learning about the war through a story told by someone else: “There were all kinds of stories told about the war that made it sound as if it was happening in a faraway and different land.” While Beah observes that the refugees telling the stories have been strongly affected by what they have seen, his own experience with war, like that of American readers’, is formed through popular culture. He mentions books and movies such as Rambo: First Blood (1982). Those works of fiction produced in other countries at first seem more real than the war in his own country. As the fighting moves into his area, getting together with his friends and listening to rap music remain the twelve-year-old’s immediate concerns. When their village is invaded by rebel soldiers, Beah and his brother Junior are visiting friends in town. Separated from their family and not knowing if any of them are alive, they and their friends wander from village to village trying to stay away from the soldiers. Most people are too afraid of teenage boys to help them. They encounter other homeless boys in their travels, but there is no system in place to help them. In fact, all semblance of normal society has fallen apart. It is not clear what the fighting factions stand for, and no governmental services remain. There are no police officers protecting anyone, no one to feed or shelter the war orphans, and no one to help children separated from their families to find them or to find food while they search. After being separated from Junior and his friends, Beah spends time alone, lost in a forest, and eventually meets up with another group of boys, some of whom he knew before the war. After months of roaming, he meets someone from his former village who knows where his parents and brother Junior are. As they approach the village where the family is staying, gunshots break out. They hide in the jungle until the fighting ends, but by that time everyone in the village is dead. While much of the memoir is narrated in a fairly neutral tone, the description of the village after the slaughter is one of the most detailed in the book, and Beah includes his intense emotions in the narration. “I screamed at the top of my lungs and began to cry as loudly as I could, punching and kicking with all my might into the weak walls that continued to burn. I had lost my sense of touch. My hands and feet punched and kicked the burning walls, but I couldn’t feel a thing.” His grief gives way to anger, and he hits the friend who brought him to the village. Around the time Beah calms down, soldiers return to the village. From where he is hiding, he can hear them casually discussing their attack on three villages, killing everyone in the one where Beah’s family was staying. Their conversation shows no compassion for the people they killed and no remorse for their actions. They laugh as they talk and sit playing cards in the middle of the carnage. The horror of soldiers who have lost all sense of humanity is clear.

Ishmael Beah has had writing published in Vespertine Press and LIT. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken widely about children affected by war, including several speeches at the United Nations. His memoir has met with wide acclaim, both in literary publications and the popular press.

A Long Way Gone / beah

457

By the time Beah and his friends become soldiers, their lack of options is clear. They have lost their families and their homes; they have no source of food or shelter; the few people who are willing to help them risk their lives to do so. When the boys are taken to a village where they are given food and a place to sleep, they feel safe for the first time in a long time. However, when their safety is threatened by the rebels, whom the soldiers blame for killing their families, their willingness to join the fight comes as no surprise to the reader. When the boys are called up for their first military encounter, they have spent the day in typical childhood activities—playing soccer and swimming. Beah’s tent companions are so young that that they have trouble holding up their guns. The outing is an emotionally charged part of the memoir, reflecting the boys’ terror at meeting the armed enemy in the forest. Beah watches one of his tent mates die, and he loses other friends as well. His description of Josiah’s death is poignant in its detail, and its effect on the narrator is evident from the strength of the prose: “As I watched him, the water in his eyes was replaced by blood that quickly turned his brown eyes into red. He reached for my shoulder as if he wanted to hold it and pull himself up. But midway, he stopped moving. The gunshots faded in my head, and it was as if my heart had stopped and the whole world had come to a standstill.” The following chapters narrate Beah’s acceptance of killing, helped by constant access to marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs. The boys’ lives as soldiers consist of watching war movies, taking the drugs that stave off fear and prevent them from thinking clearly about the horrors of what they are doing, and remorselessly slaughtering soldiers and civilians. Beah and his friends become like the soldiers who casually discussed their day’s work after killing Beah’s family and everyone else in the village. Unlike most war memoirs, which are often written by military leaders or adult soldiers with some knowledge of the strategy and politics involved, Beah’s is a firstperson account by a child with little understanding of the reasons for the war. In fact, Beah’s memoir describes a society in so much chaos that it is not clear that even the military leaders have a good understanding of what the war is about. Young boys are given guns and drugs and persuaded to fight because they want to avenge the deaths of their families and because they have no other way to get food. The boys hear rumors about political developments but have no real understanding of the war. Once Beah is rescued from the fighting and taken to a center for rehabilitating the young soldiers, it becomes clear that the boys who fought for the opposite side have no better understanding of the reasons for the war and endured horrors just as extreme. In the end, the book gives no evidence that one side had greater moral authority than the other. At the rehabilitation center, the boys fight with those from the other side, destroy the buildings and furniture, beat up the workers, and steal food from the kitchen and drugs from the health center. The center’s administrators are patient and do not punish them; their repeated refrain is “this isn’t your fault.” As the drugs slowly work out of his system, Beah begins to trust the center’s nurse Esther and other workers. He begins to tell her what has happened to him and to return to more civil behavior.

458

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

After learning details about his life and family, the workers at the center find Beah’s uncle, Tommy, who lives in the same city, based only on his first name and occupation. Beah’s uncle and his family welcome him into their home. Despite the constant dangers of the war, Beah is able to attend school. Beah is invited to interview to be one of two children from Sierra Leone to speak at the United Nations at a conference about children affected by war. Children from around the world attend the conference, and Beah recognizes how his story fits into the larger issue of how children are taken advantage of and suffer because of war. Beah humorously describes his initial reaction to New York City. He says that his expectations came from rap music, but he resorts to Shakespeare to try to make sense of what he sees. When he learns that it is dark so early in the afternoon because it is winter, he thinks, “I knew the word ‘winter’ from Shakespeare’s texts and I thought I should look up its meaning again.” He never imagined that it could be so cold, and he has only summer clothes. At the conference, Beah meets an American storyteller named Laura Simms. After he returns to Sierra Leone, his uncle dies, and the fighting in the city escalates. Beah asks Simms if he can stay with her if he can get to New York, and she later adopts him. After escaping the country, he finishes high school in the United States, where the prologue’s conversation with his friends takes place. Joan Hope

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 112. Chicago Tribune, February 11, 2007, p. 4. Denver Post, March 4, 2007, p. F14. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 3. Library Journal 132, no. 4 (March 1, 2007): 91. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 25, 2007): 12. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 50 (December 18, 2006): 55.

459

LOST CITY RADIO Author: Daniel Alarcón (1977) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 257 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Undetermined Locale: A nameless South American country A narrative about a country torn apart by a civil war, told through the tragedies and hardships that its civilians have undergone Principal characters: Norma, the host of a radio program that tries to reunite those separated by the war Victor, a boy sent from his village, 1797, with a mission to read the names of his village’s missing on Norma’s show Elmer, Norma’s nervous station manager Len, Norma’s engineer at the station Elijah Manau, a teacher sent from the city to teach in Victor’s village who later takes Victor to Norma Adela, Victor’s deceased mother Rey, Norma’s missing husband and suspected Illegitiment Legion member Nico, Victor’s friend who leaves 1797 to join the army Trini, Rey’s uncle and former police chief Marden, Rey’s underground contact in the Illegitiment Legion Yerevan, a disc jockey at Norma’s station who disappears after appearing sympathetic to the Illegitiment Legion Zahir, an elder in Victor’s village who lost his hands at a Tadek rite

Bearing striking resemblances to dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio describes an anonymous South American country torn apart by a decade of civil war, of which no citizen remembers its beginning or its purpose. The war resulted in a new totalitarian government, which is committed to obliterating the native cultures and allegiances by renaming all villages using a numbering system (odd numbers indicate the village is near water, and the higher the number the more remote and mountainous the village), quelling native Indians’ languages and dialects and replacing them with politically approved languages like Orwell’s newspeak, and rewriting the history, geography, and culture of the country. Lost City Radio, however, is not about political strife or the effects of war on a country, but rather about the effects of war on the individual. The novel interlaces the stories of three main characters as it jumps from character to character, village to city, and decade to decade.

460

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The novel’s first protagonist is Norma, a woman who has become a national treasure through her voice, yet her face is unknown to her fellow countrymen. Working at the only radio station in the capital city, Norma prepares news stories to be approved by the government and reads them the following day. Any mention of the war or of any dissident is strictly forbidden. This rule is reinforced when one of Norma’s coworkers, a classical music host named Yerevan, disobeys the rules, then disappears, never to be heard from again. What has brought Norma celebrity, however, is not her reading of the daily headlines but her program Lost City Radio. Every Sunday evening, Norma hosts Lost City Radio, with the goal of reuniting families and friends who have been separated and have had their lives torn apart by the civil war. The program highlights the stories of the hundreds of thousands of missing, who came from Indian villages and poor barrios and were recruited by the army or relocated to the city in hopes of finding work. Perhaps dead, rotting in a military prison, or devoured by the city, the missing have never returned to their homes, leaving their loved ones to listen to Lost City Radio, hoping for Norma to reinstate their families, homes, and lives. Her listeners send her gifts and photos of their missing, while other listeners pretend to be the missing. At first, these impostures angered Norma, but over the years she has come to realize that “there are people out there who think of themselves as belonging to someone. To a person who, for whatever reason, has gone. And they wait years: They don’t look for their missing, they are the missing.” Thus, Norma invites her callers not only to search for loved ones but also to share their memories, to re-create the feel and scents of their villages. In doing so, the callers construct a new community, and Norma’s voice helps to heal a “country [that] had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it.” Norma also has personal reasons for hosting the weekly radio program. Besides helping those in desperate need, Norma too is missing someone. One year before the end of the war, Norma’s husband, Rey, went on a routine trip into the jungle and never came back. Norma had long suspected that Rey had been involved with the underground Illegitiment Legion (IL), who were opposed to the regime in power and were therefore tortured and often killed when captured. The night Norma had met Rey, before the war, he was arrested and taken to a dissident torture camp known as The Moon. A year later, when he was released, he would rarely speak of his time there but would wake up screaming from nightmares. Rey, the second protagonist, was a college professor of botany and specialized in medicinal usages of jungle plants. He regularly ventured into the jungle, performing research and interviewing the Indians about plant usages. Rey was particularly interLost City Radio is Daniel Alarcón’s first novel. He previously published a collection of short stories, War by Candlelight, a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. In 2001, he won a Fulbright scholarship, which allowed him to write an anthropological study of San Juan de Lurigancho, in his native Lima, Peru. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly Peruvian magazine.

Lost City Radio / alarcón

461

ested in psychoactive plants and wrote an article about the practice of Tadek, used to find and punish criminals. After a crime was committed, villagers fed a young boy hallucinogens, then set him loose in the village to identify the culprit. Once discovered, the culprit was tied to a tree and both hands were chopped off. Much to Norma’s horror, Rey published this Tadek article, something outlawed in the government’s quest to stamp out all ties to native customs and beliefs. Rey further angered authorities by not denouncing the practice, even claiming Tadek as “the antique precursor to the absolutely modern system of justice now being employed in the nation” and “applauded a few well-publicized cases of tortured union leaders and missing students as successful, contemporary versions of Tadek, whereby the state assigned guilt based on outward signifiers.” The article placed Rey on the government’s radar as an insurgence collaborator once again. Throughout his life, whether safely at home, in the jungle, or working with the IL, Rey wonders how he became so entwined in a war he knew nothing about. Remembering the beginning of the war and his involvement, Rey reflects, “Even then anyone paying attention should have known what was coming. But they had stepped together into this chaos, the insurgency and the government, arm in arm, and for nine violent years, they’d danced.” On a research trip into the jungle, nine years into the war, Rey does not come back. Ten years later, Norma continues to hold out hope that he will hear her voice and return. The novel jumps yet again to another character and time, as Norma’s life is altered when a scrawny eleven-year-old boy from the jungle, Victor, appears at the radio station one morning looking for Norma. Victor, the third protagonist, is from the village 1797, the last place Rey had been seen. Victor, who “was slender and fragile and [whose] eyes were too small for his face,” has brought with him a list of his village’s missing. The villagers wrote the names of their loved ones and trusted Victor to travel to the city, read their names, and help bring their loved ones home. Taking pity on the boy, Norma takes Victor in and begins to learn of 1797. She reads the note and is shocked to find Rey’s name on Victor’s list. With new hope and determination, Norma and Victor track down Elijah Manau, Victor’s teacher who had left the city to teach in 1797 and had returned, almost retreated in surrender, to his hometown under the excuse of bringing Victor to Norma. Manau sought refuge in his parents’ house after returning to the city, considering his experience in 1797 as being “exiled . . . to teach in this humid backwater,” a “testament to his consistent mediocrity.” When Norma finds him, she presses Manau for information about how Rey’s name got placed on the list of missing. Reluctantly, Manau shows Victor and Norma a drawing that will forever change their lives and relationship to one another. The drawing, which was created by an artist who traveled among villages drawing the missing based on descriptions from those they left behind, is of Rey. It was given to Manau by Victor’s mother, Adela, who recently died in the village river. Manau reveals that he and Adela had been lovers and that Adela confided a great deal to Manau, perhaps sensing her immanent death. One of her secrets was that of her love for a scientist who would visit the village to study the local plants and their medicinal implications. As Norma listens to the stranger talk of her husband as described by

462

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

his deceased lover, it is nearly more than she can bear. She forces herself to listen in hopes of finding a clue to Rey’s location, or to his demise. Manau explains that Rey and Adela had a son eleven years ago, and Norma’s focus shifts to Victor. Upon learning this, she feels the need for “some explosive act of violence: for the rending and tearing of some heirloom or photograph, the destruction of a meaningful item, some article of clothing,” but instead must listen and ask only her unanswerable question as to what became of Rey—is he alive? She now must struggle to redefine herself and her relationship with Victor. In a graceful and effortless fashion, Alarcón is able to switch from the big city to the remote 1797, and from era to era, with each chapter. The author takes the reader inside each character’s mind to reveal his or her thoughts, emotions, and the true effects the war has had on each of them. He describes the atrocities of war through the havoc wreaked on the characters rather than through describing the battles themselves. Alarcón also exposes war’s futility when he writes that none of the characters could remember how or when the war started or could ever tell who was winning. At one point, the desperate and exhausted villagers of 1797 look to Rey to explain this war that they are not a part of yet are devastated by. One villager asks, “‘Tell us, sir,’ . . . already speaking of the war in the past tense, ‘who was right in all of this?’” Rey, like so many of his countrymen, has no answer. With great tenderness, Alarcón writes of the emptiness and endless longing Norma and others feel as they search for their missing, of the perhaps naïve hope that their loved ones will return. In a poignant line, Norma admits, “The person [she] missed most of all in Rey’s absence was not Rey but the person she had been when she was with him.” This admission reinforces a theme throughout the novel: that the war not only separated families from one another but also separated people from themselves. Sara Vidar

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 20. Chicago Tribune, April 1, 2007, p. 3. Harper’s Magazine 314 (February, 2007): 86. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 22 (November 15, 2006): 1139. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 105. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 25, 2007): 19. The Washington Post, January 28, 2007, p. BW15.

463

THE LUCIFER EFFECT Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Author: Philip Zimbardo (1933) Publisher: Random House (New York). 551 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Psychology, current affairs A research-based account of how larger forces influence human beings to choose evil, as well as some suggestions for resisting pernicious influences Principal personages: Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor who led the Stanford prison experiment “John Wayne,” an everyday college student turned abusive prison guard Christina Maslach, a psychology student and Zimbardo’s partner who brought an end to the experiment Carlo Prescott, an ex-convict who served seventeen years in prison and who influenced Zimbardo’s perspective on prisons Ivan “Chip” Frederick, a U.S. Army soldier who abused Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and whose defense was supported by Zimbardo’s expert testimony

In exploring human morality and temptation, Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil labors in a field that has been tilled by almost every important figure in the Western canon, from the writers of the Old Testament to modern philosophers and psychologists. According to Zimbardo, the dominant modern perspective on evil is “dispositional”: People commit evil because of some flaw in their characters, morals, or personalities, and therefore the only one at fault for an evil deed is the one who commits it. To Zimbardo, the Western emphasis on personal responsibility provides the basis for theory and practice in fields as diverse as education, medicine, psychiatry, religion, and criminal justice. As Zimbardo contends, the emphasis on personal responsibility for evil is flawed for several reasons. First, almost a century’s worth of research in social psychology demonstrates that people can be led to do a wide range of previously unthinkable actions when the conditions are right. Second, dispositional approaches lessen the responsibility of others to create social conditions that are fair, just, and workable. Also, the dispositional approach does very little to prevent future evil; removing bad apples from a barrel does not stop other apples from rotting. Finally, the dispositional approach does little to explain how ordinary people often commit acts of good in spite of pernicious social forces. The title of The Lucifer Effect refers to an angel turned archfiend, a figure in JudeoChristian religious thought whose story was described in the first few books of the landmark poem Paradise Lost (1667), by John Milton (1608-1674), the eminent

464

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

seventeenth century English poet. Basing his poem on both canonical and apocryphal books of the Bible, Milton writes that Lucifer was once God’s most beautiful and favored angel but became disgruntled by God’s preferential love for humanity. In his pride, Lucifer rebelled, was cast out of heaven, and was transformed into the devil. Frustrated in his exile from heaven and aware that he could not win in open revolt against God, the devil’s plans changed, to warp humanity into rejecting God. By secretly working on human beProfessor emeritus at Stanford ings, tempting them with half-truths and illuUniversity, Philip Zimbardo has sions, the archfiend works behind the scenes, published scholarly work, including subverting God’s providence. numerous peer-reviewed articles and In offering this figure as symbolic, Zimbooks. He has also hosted a public bardo observes that each of us can easily betelevision series on psychology and testified as an expert witness in come transformed into someone we would prisoner-abuse trials. hardly recognize, choosing evil when before we would have considered ourselves wholly good. Similarly, the symbol illustrates Zimbardo’s second point: People must remain watchful of the temptation to consider themselves stronger than their circumstances. These circumstances include letting the desire to be a part of a group outweigh our moral compasses, when we are led to believe that others will take responsibility for our actions, when we believe that we can act anonymously, and when we believe that those who suffer are not as important as ourselves. In making the argument that circumstances matter, Zimbardo is not claiming that those who commit evil should not be blamed for it. In fact, he repeatedly expresses his belief that those who do wrong should face the consequences of their misdeeds. In addition to personal accountability, however, Zimbardo makes the commonsense claim that conditions influence personal choice and that we are all responsible for changing abusive, inhuman circumstances. To support this claim, Zimbardo offers a wealth of evidence from social psychology. One of Zimbardo’s more compelling examples of the power of situations to influence action comes from an experiment at Princeton University in 1973. Theology students at Princeton were asked by experimenters in the psychology department to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament. The parable describes the moral duty of good people to help others when they are in need. The experiment, however, demonstrated the power of time pressures to make us ignore others’ needs. Some theology students were told that they were late for the videotaping session and would have to hurry; other theology students were told they had a little more time; still others were told they had plenty of time. During the walk across campus, each theology student was confronted by a distressed stranger, calling

The Lucifer Effect / zimbardo

465

for help. The vast majority of theology students in a hurry ignored the stranger, despite seemingly obvious parallels between the situation and the sermon they were pondering. This is the evil of inaction; the students in a hurry failed to help. In contrast, those students who believed they had more time were more likely to help. If theology students thinking about the Good Samaritan failed to resist time pressures, the rest of us are equally likely to let situations influence our actions. Other, more dramatic studies in The Lucifer Effect go into greater detail about the blended guilt of those who do evil and those with power who allow it to continue. One example is Zimbardo’s own Stanford prison experiment (SPE). As an experiment in the social sciences, the SPE was poorly designed and executed. As an example of how easily people can be led to commit evil and how evil those in power can be, however, the SPE warrants summary. The idea for the SPE came at a time in America when abusive prison conditions were front-page news. Guards were frequently represented in popular literature and movies as natural sadists, prisoners as attractive antiheroes. In 1971, Zimbardo and colleagues decided to construct an experimental prison. They wanted to see whether the allegedly abusive conditions in prisons were due to supposed character traits of guards and criminals or inherent in the system itself. For his part, Zimbardo believed and continues to believe that penal systems in the United States are inherently abusive, and his sympathies are with prisoners, reasons for incarceration notwithstanding. Usually, social scientists work to minimize such biases; for example, in this case, bias could have been minimized by using multiple small jails across the country to lessen the impact of Zimbardo’s own preconceptions. This easy, if more expensive, step was not taken. In fact, experimenter bias was built into the experiment. In the months leading up to the SPE, Zimbardo cotaught a course in the psychology of imprisonment with Carlo Prescott, a San Francisco-area personality who had served seventeen years in prison for attempted murder. In an opinion piece he wrote for the Stanford Daily in 2005, Prescott claims that he gave Zimbardo the idea for many abusive techniques months before the SPE took place. Prescott claims that he took part in the SPE because he wanted to transform it into an indictment of the California prison system. After building their own prison, Zimbardo and his colleagues placed advertisements in local newspapers, offering $15 per day for a two-week simulated study of prison life. Those who responded were given tests and interviews to weed out any violent tendencies, mental illness, or extreme points of view. The goal was to find as absolutely average a group of young men as possible. Those selected were randomly grouped into prisoners or guards. Although some have suggested that the guards became abusive, the truth is Zimbardo required them to abuse from day one. There were no toilets in the prison, so guards were told to hood and chain prisoners before escorting them to the toilet in another part of the building. If given the ability to choose on their own, perhaps the guards would have decided on other, more ethical toileting techniques. With abuse built into the system, it is not surprising that some guards took matters further. One third of the guards, especially one nicknamed “John Wayne,” became

466

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

creatively abusive, depriving the prisoners of self-respect, sanitation, nutrition, and adequate sleep. The threat of physical force was ever present. Zimbardo says that he prohibited physical violence, but he armed his guards with clubs. Throughout the experiment, Zimbardo and colleagues watched the guards use these clubs to intimidate the prisoners. It is doubtful the prisoners knew they would not be hit; certainly Zimbardo never told a guard to stop menacing the prisoners. As some guards ramped up the abuse, some prisoners developed stress-related emotional problems, including psychotic symptoms. Within six days, the experiment had to be ended—not out of concern for the subjects but because Zimbardo’s partner rightly pointed out that the SPE was inherently immoral. As he describes it, Zimbardo came to his senses and devoted his subsequent work to helping others break free of mental prisons of their own or others’ making. While the SPE fails as an experiment, it surely supports Zimbardo’s claim that those who create abusive systems bear responsibility for what takes place within. He never hit, threatened, or deprived a student prisoner of sleep; but he designed the experiment, he failed to institute proper controls, and he failed to rein in the more abusive guards. He had the power to make things better and failed to do so. Zimbardo’s awareness of the power of abusive systems leads to his two final points in The Lucifer Effect. First, based on his awareness of guilt in creating the SPE, Zimbardo lays considerable blame on those who have power in the real world to harm or to heal. Much of the second half of The Lucifer Effect documents the guilt of members of the U.S. government, all the way up to President George W. Bush, for abuses that have been perpetrated in Iraqi prisons that first came to light in 2004. In that year, media around the world presented the dramatic news that American soldiers serving as prison guards at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad had been subjecting Iraqi prisoners to extreme physical and mental torture. Like most Americans, Zimbardo was repulsed by the news, angered about the abuse, about the conditions that led to abuse, and about the military’s plans to scapegoat individual soldiers. One soldier, Ivan “Chip” Frederick, a country boy from Virginia with an almost pristine military record, was being represented as a particularly “bad apple.” After reviewing available records and conducting interviews, Zimbardo served as an expert defense witness for Frederick, arguing that intolerable and stressful living conditions, an overcrowded prison, unclear guidelines, and malevolent leadership had to be taken into account when considering this one soldier’s guilt. To Zimbardo’s credit, he does not end his book with a lengthy diatribe against the Bush administration or the military establishment, nor does he leave readers without suggestions for increasing their own capacity to perceive situational influence and resist it. Quite often, he claims, we are led to make bad choices when others we respect tell us a series of lies, including the lies that we are anonymous, that others will take responsibility for our actions. These others could be teachers, doctors, scientists, or military superiors. They can push us and lie to us, but we must never allow them to convince us that our actions are free of consequences. Michael R. Meyers

The Lucifer Effect / zimbardo

467

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 6. Discover 28 (April, 2007): 68-69. Library Journal 132, no. 5 (March 15, 2007): 83. The New Republic 236, no. 16 (May 21, 2007): 51-55. Publishers Weekly 254 (February 12, 2007): 74. The Times Higher Education Supplement, April 6, 2007, p. 21. The Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 2007, pp. 3-5.

468

A MAGNIFICENT CATASTROPHE The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign Author: Edward J. Larson (1953) Publisher: Free Press (New York). 352 pp. $27.00 Type of work: History Time: 1776-1801 Locale: The United States In the first contested election in U.S. history, and amid predictions of doom if the other won, Thomas Jefferson led radical Republicans to victory over Federalist incumbent president John Adams in a close contest decided in the House of Representatives Principal personages: John Adams (1735-1826), president of the United States, 1797-1801 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), president of the United States, 1801-1809 Aaron Burr (1756-1836), vice president of the United States, 1801-1805 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), Adams’s Federalist running mate, 1800 Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828), Adams’s Federalist running mate, 1796 Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), Federalist leader, secretary of the Treasury, 1789-1795 George Washington (1732-1799), president of the United States, 1789-1797 Abigail Adams (1744-1818), Adams’s wife

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been close collaborators and friends during the American Revolution, but in 1800 each headed opposing political parties. In 1776, both urged the Continental Congress to declare independence, and Adams served with Jefferson on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence, suggesting improvements to Jefferson’s draft. As American diplomats in Europe after the peace, they supported each other’s efforts, and the two families grew close. Abigail Adams aided Jefferson’s daughter while Jefferson introduced young John Quincy Adams to the niceties of European diplomacy. Absent from the 1789 Constitutional Convention while serving in Europe, each supported the new Constitution with reservations; as Adams phrased it, he feared the rise of an aristocracy while Jefferson worried about the possibility of monarchy. By 1800, what had seemed differences in emphasis had become unbridgeable chasms. The divergence began during George Washington’s presidency, when Secre-

A Magnificent Catastrophe / larson

469

tary of State Jefferson objected to the do mestic policies of Secretary of Treasury Edward J. Larson is professor of Hamilton, which Jefferson thought favored history and law at Pepperdine wealthy, urban investors to the detriment of University. His previous books have rural Americans. As Edward J. Larson points dealt with issues of science and out, disagreements over domestic policy be- religion from a historical perspective, came highly emotional when they intersected including Trial and Error: The with different reactions to the French Revolu- American Controversy over Creation and Evolution (1985), Evolution’s tion. To Jeffersonians, it was a continuation Workshop: God and Science on the and validation of the American Revolution Galápagos Islands (2001), and Summer as a world-altering event. Those who became for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and the Federalists shuddered at French Revo- America’s Continuing Debate over lutionary excesses, blaming extreme democ- Science and Religion (1997), which racy. With one group favoring France in the won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for history. European wars and the other England, each could accuse the other of treasonable conduct that threatened the survival of American independence. Emotions became even more intemperate in 1798 when French depredations against American ships and requests that U.S. negotiators bribe their French counterparts led to an undeclared war with France. Congress appropriated funds to build warships. It increased the size of the army; George Washington accepted command and chose Hamilton as his deputy, putting him in charge. In the name of national security, a Sedition Act made criticism of the government and its officials a crime, but prosecution of opposition newspaper editors backfired, creating in the eyes of their supporters honorable martyrs for freedom of the press. In the 1798 election, war fever elected a large Federalist majority to the House of Representatives. Larson stresses that partisans on each side insisted the public faced a choice between order and liberty. When news of Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1799 coup d’etat reached the United States early in 1800, as Americans began to think about the coming presidential election, it confirmed prejudices on each side. Federalists, Larson notes, viewed the development as proving the weakness of excessive democracy; Jeffersonians stressed the dangers of a standing army, implicitly pointing to Hamilton’s command of the U.S. Army. Adams and Jefferson had been the leading candidates in 1796 when Washington retired. Adams received 71 votes from the 139 electors, Jefferson 68. Under the original Constitution, which did not separate votes for vice president from presidential votes, Jefferson became vice president. Hamilton, who thoroughly disliked Adams, covertly tried to sabotage his candidacy by urging electors to withhold votes for Adams, thereby putting his running mate, Thomas Pinckney, in the presidential chair. The plot backfired when New Englanders, angered over news of his plan, dumped Pinckney, permitting Jefferson to come in second. Parties were still evolving, and one elector in both Virginia and North Carolina deviated from otherwise solid Jeffersonian blocs by voting for Adams. Larson points out that Jefferson would have won if

470

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

he had received the two votes, a possibility noted by his partisans, who determined to prevent such defections in the future. Larson goes into great detail describing the variety of ways states organized in 1800. Republicans in Virginia created state and local campaign committees, the first signs of true party organization; similar groups appeared in Maryland and New Jersey. In ten states, legislatures chose the electors. Of five states permitting voter choice, three (North Carolina, Kentucky, and Maryland) divided the state into districts, each selecting one elector, while two (Virginia and Rhode Island) asked voters to choose between statewide party lists. The Pennsylvania legislature, where the two houses were dominated by opposing parties, deadlocked over how to choose electors and nearly failed to participate in the election. Virginia switched from using separate districts to a general list for the entire state, to ensure that this time all its electoral votes would be cast for Jefferson. Massachusetts responded in kind, switching from separate districts to legislature choice to eliminate dissident votes. Aaron Burr created an extensive organization in New York City, with groups in every precinct set to bring Republican voters to the polls in the April, 1800, legislative election. Winning the city’s thirteen assembly seats created a Republican majority in the state legislature, guaranteeing that New York would vote for Jefferson in 1800, not Adams as it had in 1796. Larson points out that equally as important as Burr’s machine in achieving that result was his success in getting eminent New Yorkers, including an ex-governor and a Revolutionary War general, to run for the lower house of legislature. In sharp contrast, Hamilton sponsored a Federalist slate of undistinguished personal loyalists. Hamilton’s opposition to Adams, covert in 1796, became overt in 1800. In May, convinced there was no danger of a French invasion, Adams disbanded the additional Army troops under Hamilton’s command. He finally dismissed two cabinet members he had continued from the Washington administration, even though they were followers of Hamilton. Hamilton was furious. He decided to write an open letter virulently attacking Adams’s fitness to be president, calling for Federalist electors to dump Adams in favor of his running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. Supposedly addressed only to Federalist worthies, the October letter (which ran fiftyfour pages in a pamphlet edition) was widely reprinted in newspapers and hailed with glee by Republican editors who used it to discredit both author and target. Partisans shamelessly launched personal attacks on their opponents. Republicans accused Adams of wanting to replace the republic with a monarchy and of moral misconduct in the White House. Abigail Adams never fully forgave Jefferson for the way his partisans slandered her husband. Federalists endlessly assailed Jefferson as an atheist who threatened the morals of the nation and was unfit to occupy the presidential chair. Larson keeps a running total of the voting as states finally choose their electors. He calculates that by November 19, when Rhode Island voters chose four Federalist electors, Adams and Pinckney had 58 votes pledged to them, Jefferson and Burr 57. Pennsylvania’s legislature was still deadlocked, and South Carolina’s would not meet until

A Magnificent Catastrophe / larson

471

November 24, nine days before the electoral deadline of December 3. Pennsylvanians finally compromised and split their votes, eight for Jefferson and Burr, seven for Adams and Pinckney, leaving the four tied at 65 votes each. South Carolina, where party loyalties were still fluid, would decide the election. In 1796, South Carolina’s legislature had chosen electors committed to voting for Jefferson and Adams’s Federalist running mate, South Carolinian Thomas Pinckney. If this year they chose Jefferson and favorite son Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Adams and Burr would be eliminated, and Jefferson and Pinckney would each have 73 votes, with the final decision left to the House of Representatives. Hamilton’s letter now had the reverse of his intended effect: It led Pinckney to insist that, as a matter of personal honor, he wanted votes only from electors pledged to both Adams and himself. The legislature bowed to his wishes, and South Carolina’s eight votes went to Jefferson and Burr. The electoral votes would not be officially counted until Congress convened in March, but as word of what electors had actually done trickled into Washington, it became apparent that Republicans had blundered by failing to differentiate their presidential and vice presidential candidates. Federalist electors had withheld one vote from Pinckney, giving Adams 65 votes to Pinckney’s 64, but Republicans cast 73 votes for both Jefferson and Burr. The Constitution provided that in case of a tie, the House would vote by states, each state casting one vote, with a majority of states necessary to win. The House in March, 1801, was still the one elected in 1798; the winners of the 1800 election, dominated by Republicans, would not take office until December. Jefferson needed to carry nine of the sixteen states, but Republicans were a majority in only eight. Two states (Maryland and Vermont) were equally divided and could not cast a vote. The six states with a Federalist majority all supported Burr. At first, Burr congratulated Jefferson on his victory, but when he learned of the electoral tie he became strategically silent. Larson believes most Federalists despised Burr as an unprincipled adventurer, but they hated Jefferson. Hamilton tried to intervene against Burr, but he had little credibility left. The deadlock lasted thirty-four ballots. Rumors had Pennsylvania and Virginia militias poised to descend on Washington if Congress failed to confirm Jefferson’s victory. When it became clear that Burr would make no promises, the sole congressman from Delaware decided to abstain, and Federalists in Maryland and Vermont followed his lead, delivering those two states to Jefferson, who received ten votes on the thirty-fifth ballot. No Federalist voted for Jefferson—the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island delegations voted for Burr to the bitter end while other Federalists abstained rather than vote for their detested opponent. Larson provides a clear, detailed narrative of this crucial election. He did not engage in archival research, but made very effective use of the many scholarly editions of letters and documents dealing with the early republic now available. Unfortunately, Larson’s stress on details tends to drain away the drama from the events he records; the highly emotional reactions of the participants are mentioned, rather than shown.

472

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

There are two minor slips in A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign. The United States did not send ambassadors to foreign countries in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries as Larson assumes, but chose the more republican title of minister for its emissaries. Surprising for a law professor is his assertion that the Constitution provides for the president pro tempore of the Senate to become acting president in the absence of a president and vice president; in fact, the succession when there is no vice president is set by act of Congress. For Larson, the major significance of the 1800 election is the arrival of a two-party system. Equally important is the example set. For the first time, an opposition peacefully replaced an administration in power—despite apocalyptic rhetoric, no one had to be killed, no one sent into exile—a precedent the American republic would follow for succeeding centuries. Milton Berman

Review Sources The American Scholar 76, no. 4 (Fall, 2007): 129-131. Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 24. The Christian Science Monitor, September 18, 2007, p. 14. Entertainment Weekly, no. 957 (October 5, 2007): 75. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 593. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 15, 2007): 103-104. The New York Times Book Review 157 (December 16, 2007): 28. The New Yorker 83, no. 27 (September 17, 2007): 94-98. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 21 (May 21, 2007): 43-44.

473

THE MAIAS Episodes from Romantic Life Author: José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) First published: Os Maias: Episódios da vida romântica, 1888, in Portugal Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa Publisher: New Directions (New York). 628 pp. $17.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The end of the 1800’s Locale: Portugal Eça de Queirós traces three generations of a wealthy Portuguese family, as they cease to hold on to their moral and principled roots and sink into idleness and decadence, to metaphorically illustrate a similar movement throughout Portugal and nineteenth century Europe Principal characters: Carlos da Maia, a wealthy young Lisbon doctor Alfonso da Maia, his grandfather, who raises him Pedro da Maia, Carlos’s father, who committed suicide Maria Monforte da Maia, Carlos’s mother, who abandoned him as a child João da Ega, Carlos’s best friend Maria Eduarda, Carlos’s lover and sister Dámaso Salcede, Carlos’s pompous enemy Vilaca, the Maias’ family financial administrator

Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of José Maria Eça de Queirós’s The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life has been hailed by such literary critics as Harold Bloom as infinitely more readable than the other versions of this nineteenth century Portuguese masterpiece available in English. They agree that it will no doubt become the standard translation. Set in Lisbon at the close of the nineteenth century, The Maias can be viewed as a classic bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. Carlos da Maia, the novel’s young hero and the heir to one of Portugal’s greatest fortunes, has been living a petty, idle life of parties, fine wine, and romantic intrigue. Suddenly, he is forced to learn that all the money in the world cannot buy happiness and to accept the fact that actions have consequences, even though it might take generations for the results of irresponsible conduct to come to light. Carlos grows up under the tutelage of his illustrious, highly principled and loving grandfather, Alfonso da Maia, after his father Pedro da Maia commits suicide in “romantic” desperation upon the departure of his beautiful and mysterious wife, Maria Monforte, with a man simply called the Italian. Maria takes with her Carlos’s

474

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

sister, Maria Eduarda, whom she favors, but leaves Carlos behind in the care of his father. Knowing full well the horrific family drama, and in time coming to learn that his sister has died, Carlos grows up and flourishes at the hands of his attentive grandfather, who takes solace in his grandson as the youngster grows in kindness and character. Although he is heir to one of Portugal’s largest family fortunes, Carlos applies himself to his education and decides on a career in medicine to help his fellow human beings. However, despite his high intelligence and his well-meaning plans, after his return from the University of Coimbra to Lisbon, he soon falls into the opulent lifestyle of the city’s upper crust. Sleeping until all hours, dressing luxuriously, lunching for hours, dining and drinking well into the night, attending the theater, and conducting casual sexual rendezvous in carriages with the wives of the local nobility take up all his time. He never gets around to establishing a list of patients, not to mention writing medical treatises or helping his fellow man. His offices in time become merely well-decorated meeting places for his long list of dandified acquaintances. Chief among these friends is João da Ega, who, after being cast aside by the love of his life, spends most of his time at the Maias’ richly decorated compound known as Ramalhete in the neighborhood of Janelas Verdes on the outskirts of Lisbon. Another friend, Dámaso Salcede, uses women for social gain. When these young, fashionable men tire of women, they coldly cast them aside and get angry when the women make a scene or have the effrontery to tell them they love them. Despite numerous affairs, Carlos has never been in love and looks askance at men who feel passion and devotion. However, this is shortly to change. Meanwhile, Carlos’s grandfather feels deeply disappointed by his grandson’s behavior but remains patiently waiting in the family dwelling, in Olivas, for his sole heir to put aside childish things and grow up. Although he may not be ready, life will soon hit Carlos da Maia over the head and he will fall down hard. The main plot of the novel begins one night when Carlos spies a beautiful, sophisticated-looking woman who, his pompous friend Dámaso tells him, is Maria Gomez, newly arrived from Brazil with her husband, Castro Gomez, and young daughter, Rosa. The boastful Dámaso promises Carlos an introduction but fails to deliver. When Carlos is called to attend the Gomez family’s governess, Miss Sarah, Maria and Carlos instantly connect and begin an affair after the husband returns to Brazil. Carlos buys an idyllic summer home in the forest, and Maria and Rosa move in. The couple are ecstatically happy and plan to run away together—that is, until Castro returns and informs Carlos that Maria is merely his mistress, not his wife, and that, in fact, she was earlier the mistress of another man named MacGren.

José Maria Eça de Queirós, who has been called one of the leading intellectuals of his era, wrote twenty books and introduced naturalism and realism to Portuguese literature. He founded literary reviews and worked as a diplomat throughout his life, living in Havana, London, and Paris. In 1878, while serving in the Portuguese consulate in England, he began work on his masterpiece, The Maias. He died of tuberculosis in 1900.

The Maias / eça de queirós

475

Carlos is deeply angry and swears to have nothing to do with Maria until he hears the story of Maria’s wretched life. Earlier, in Brazil, young Maria had sunk into poverty in the company of her mother, who had led a fast life of luxury with a variety of men until her good looks and health failed her. Literally left with nothing to eat, Maria is forced to live with an Irish military man named MacGren, to whom she becomes engaged. She gives birth to Rosa before MacGren can marry her, and he dies in action, leaving her penniless. Forced then to take up with Castro Gomez, she pretends to be his wife to make social encounters easier. Carlos is deeply saddened by Maria’s story, and, after his anger disappears, he asks her to marry him. The happy couple plan to leave Portugal permanently, but Carlos is troubled by how this decision will affect his grandfather. Soon, critical remarks about Maria begin to appear in the local gossip newspapers, and Carlos is forced to confront his jealous former friend Dámaso for planting the salacious items. A duel is proposed, but Ega manages to negotiate for a written retraction instead. Dámaso must explain in writing that when he made the accusations against Maria he was drunk and, furthermore, that he comes from a family of drunks. One evening, with Ega in tow, Carlos attends the theater to hear a friend’s vocal performance and here meets Dámaso’s uncle, who has taken offense at his nephew’s written remarks about his drunken family. Ega manages to soothe the uncle, and soon they begin a friendly conversation about the da Maia family. At the end of the evening, Dámaso’s uncle, who heartily dislikes his nephew, asks Ega to return a box of papers given to him years before by Carlos’s mother. He mentions to Ega that he is making this request because he had seen young Maria and her brother in a carriage and that he was glad the two were finally reconciled. At first, Ega is puzzled. Then the dreadful truth dawns on him. After checking that the older man could not possibly be mistaken about the identities of those involved, Ega is forced to accept the fact that his best friend has unknowingly been having an incestuous affair with his own sister. He ponders how to tell Carlos without having him commit suicide like his father. Finally, Ega confides in Vilaca, the Maias’ financial administrator, and both men approach Carlos with the news and the evidential box of papers that includes a note verifying the truth from Carlos and Maria’s own mother. Carlos is beyond despair. At first he attempts never to see Maria, the sister whom he believed to be dead. However, he gives in to his passion and sleeps with her, knowing full well that she is his sister. Worse still is the realization that his grandfather knows the truth. Carlos is devastated after his deeply saddened grandfather is found dead in the garden. After a while, Maria is made aware of the truth, and it is she— far wealthier now since she is entitled to half the da Maia estate—who takes matters into her own hands by returning to Brazil with her daughter. Carlos and Ega and friends begin an extended journey around the world. It takes an aging Carlos ten years to find the courage to return to Lisbon, the site of all his youthful troubles. He is worn out with traveling and finally acknowledges that all he wants is peace.

476

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

At the end of the novel, in the year 1887, the world of horse-drawn carriages is dying out and the twentieth century is burgeoning. Despite their unlimited opportunities, neither Carlos nor Ega have fulfilled their youthful ambitions. Ega has not become a famous writer or literary critic; Carlos has wasted his medical education. He no longer treats patients and has even failed to write his promised medical treatise. As the now middle-aged friends ponder the past, a tram passes, and the men run frantically, hoping they might still catch it. The reader is left wondering whether Carlos and Ega will be able to catch up, not only to the modern-world tram but also with their lives. Will they grab the only chance they have left, or will they fail yet again and remain stuck in the regret of what might have been? In his comprehensive portrayal of nineteenth century Portuguese politics and social history, Eça de Queirós, Portugal’s greatest nineteenth century novelist, was influenced by both naturalism and Romanticism. The author, who sought to bring about social reform through writing literature, utilizes satire and an air of detached irony to dissect, layer upon decadent layer, the social strata of his day by brilliantly evoking, and simultaneously condemning, slow-to-change Portuguese society. Thematically, The Maias deals with regret, not just in the sense of Carlos’s impossible love for his sister but also over the fact that Portugal, once a great imperial power, has declined in glory in the eyes of the world. Gradually undermined by duplicity, complacency, and sexual license, the Maia fortune has continued to diminish over three generations. Similarly, Portugal has, as Eça de Queirós would argue, sunk from grandeur into scarcity. Overall, the novel illustrates the debauched lifestyle of the well-to-do in nineteenth century Portugal. It criticizes the decadent manner of living that did not confine itself solely to Portugal but spread insidiously throughout most of Europe and culminated in the rise of totalitarianism, both world wars, and the emergence, in this case, of Portugal’s fascist dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970). Footnotes to help decipher the Portuguese history and cultural references would have proved helpful. Otherwise, readers might benefit from reading a brief overview of nineteenth century Portuguese history before beginning the novel. M. Casey Diana

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 410. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 66. London Review of Books 30, no. 1 (January 3, 2008): 13-14. The Nation 285, no. 18 (December 3, 2007): 23-28. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 6.

477

MAKING MONEY Author: Terry Pratchett (1948) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 394 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Locale: Ankh-Morpork, the largest, dirtiest, and oldest city on Discworld Moist von Lipwig is a former con artist and current postmaster of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork when he reluctantly becomes the city’s leading banker and head of the mint, where he revolutionizes the city’s economy by introducing the concept of paper money Principal characters: Moist von Lipwig, postmaster general of Ankh-Morpork Adora “Spike” Belle Dearheart, von Lipwig’s fiancé Lord Havelock Vetinari, ruler of Ankh-Morpork Topsy Turvy Lavish, owner of 50 percent of the Royal Bank Mr. Fusspot, friendly mongrel dog, owner of 1 percent of the Royal Bank, and heir to Topsy’s share Mavolio Bent, chief cashier of the Royal Bank Cosmo Lavish, Topsy’s nephew by marriage Pucci Lavish, Topsy’s niece by marriage Cribbins, con artist masquerading as a priest of Om Hubert Turvy, the bank’s chief economist and Topsy’s nephew by blood Igor, Hubert’s assistant Professor Flead, ghost of a three-hundred-years-dead wizard who was an expert on golems Gladys, a female golem

Before J. K. Rowling introduced the enormously successful Harry Potter series, Terry Pratchett was the best-selling author in the United Kingdom and is best known for his Discworld fantasy series. There have been more than thirty books in the series since the first novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. The authors parodied in the various books include J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, William Shakespeare, Ayn Rand, and many others. Making Money is the second novel in the series to feature Moist von Lipwig, introduced in Going Postal (2004), and there is a hint at the end of Making Money that he will return in a future book. Normally, each of the Discworld books stands on its own and can be read in any order. However, in this case, readers would be better served if they read Going Postal first. Going Postal and Making Money are also atypical Discworld books in that they are divided into chapters.

478

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Discworld is a satirical fantasy universe in which the world is flat and disk-shaped. It is balanced on the backs of four gigantic elephants who themselves stand on the back of an even more gigantic turtle, Great A’Tuin, who swims through space. In this universe, magic works, and there are magical creatures such as golems, werewolves, trolls, and vampires. In Making Money, a group of wizTerry Pratchett’s novels have sold ards, called the Department of Postmortem more than forty-five million copies Communications at the Unseen University, worldwide in thirty-five languages. His summon the ghost of Professor Flead, a wizfirst short story was published when he ard who has been dead for three hundred was thirteen and his first book when he years. This ghost takes a lecherous interest in was twenty. Making Money is the von Lipwig’s girlfriend and likes to haunt thirty-sixth novel in the Discworld the Pink Pussycat Club, Ankh-Morpork’s series. leading exotic-dancing club, where he occu pies seat number seven in the center of the front row. Golems, creatures created from clay, play a particularly important role in both Going Postal and Making Money. On Discworld, they are traditionally slaves who do not require food, drink, sleep, sex, or vacations. They cannot die of natural causes and are extremely difficult to kill. Anghammarad, a golem in Going Postal, for example, is 19,000 years old. Although there is a strong golems’ rights movement to grant them freedom and equality, they still compete with humans for jobs at the low end of the pay scale, if only to raise the money to buy other golems their freedom. In Going Postal, the most prominent golem is Mr. Pump, who received his name after tending a water pump one hundred feet underground for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for 240 years without a break. His only job is to be von Lipwig’s parole officer. Adora Belle Dearheart (nicknamed “Spike”), von Lipwig’s girlfriend, works for the Golem Trust, a charity that finds golems, sets them free, and ensures that they have decent working conditions. She makes sure that Mr. Pump and the other golems get at least one day off each week, even if they do not know what to do with their leisure time. In Making Money, the most prominent golem is Gladys, first introduced in Going Postal. In the earlier novel, Miss Maccalariat, the senior female post office employee, insisted that only a female golem be allowed to clean the ladies’ restroom. (Miss Maccalariat also objects to hiring female dwarfs, because their beards make them impossible to distinguish from the male dwarfs, who might then sneak into the restroom for a peak at half-dressed human females.) The problem with determining golem gender is that golems do not have any sex organs; they are neither male nor female. Traditionally, they are referred to as male. Von Lipwig, as head of the post office, addresses the problem by selecting a seven-foot-tall golem, renaming it Gladys, and having it wear a dress. By Making Money, Gladys has acquired female gender by

Making Money / pratchett

479

reading publications such as Ladies’ Own Magazine, studying women’s fashions, learning to cook, and listening to the conversations that women have among themselves. She also acts as a mother figure to von Lipwig, making sure that he eats regularly and gets enough sleep. However, her one attempt at giving von Lipwig a backrub almost kills him, because she does not know her own strength. Making Money is one of the many Discworld books set primarily in AnkhMorpork, a city-state known for its pollution and corruption and the largest on Discworld. Pratchett patterned it after Tallinn and Prague, with elements of eighteenth century London, nineteenth century Seattle, and twentieth century New York City. Its nickname is the “Big Wahoonie.” It is also home to the Unseen University, where wizards learn magic. The Machiavellian ruler of Ankh-Morpork is Lord Havelock Vetinari, called the Patrician. He is a tyrant in the sense that there are no laws to restrain him. His only restraint is his own intelligence, which tells him that instead of ordering people around, it is better in the long run to persuade them that they really want what he wants. An example is von Lipwig in both Going Postal and Making Money. In the first book, Vetinari makes him an offer he cannot refuse, a choice between death by hanging and becoming postmaster general of Ankh-Morpork. (Capital punishment for relatively minor offenses such as swindling is normal for Ankh-Morpork.) Vetinari felt that von Lipwig’s experience as a con artist was good preparation for becoming a government official. Although von Lipwig tries to find a third alternative, he is eventually convinced that he will live at least a little longer if he becomes postmaster. He is successful in introducing the concept of postage, thereby spawning the hobby of stamp collecting and reinstituting the practice of actually delivering the mail to the people to whom it is addressed. As a sign of his office, he wears a golden suit, which also has significance at the end of Making Money. At the beginning of the latest novel, von Lipwig is still the postmaster of AnkhMorpork, but his success has left him bored with his life. Before the events in Going Postal, he was a swindler—a thrilling livelihood, since the smallest mistake could cost him his life. Through the manipulations of Vetinari, von Lipwig now becomes Master of the Royal Mint and the effective head of the Royal Bank. The mint is in especially bad shape because it costs more than a penny to manufacture one. Von Lipwig revolutionizes the economy by introducing the concept of paper money, for which he has to set up a printing and engraving operation in the bank. One challenge is that the city’s best artist is on death row for counterfeiting stamps, so von Lipwig arranges for his escape and hides him in the bank. One of von Lipwig’s opponents is Mavolio Bent, the bank’s chief cashier, who believes that only gold is real money. Bent lives in a modest room in a boarding house, dislikes the theater, poetry, music, or any other art, and has no sense of humor or social life. Some of his subordinates at the bank suspect him of being a vampire, but he has a secret that he considers to be even more shameful. Near the beginning of the book, Topsy Turvy Lavish, matriarch of the Lavish banking family, is visited by Death, a recurring character in the series who takes people’s souls to the afterlife. In her will, she leaves a controlling interest in the Royal

480

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Bank to her dog, Mr. Fusspot, the smallest and ugliest dog Lipwig has ever seen. Her will also makes von Lipwig the dog’s guardian. Von Lipwig has two incentives to accept the post. First, there is an annual fee, and von Lipwig has no aversion to taking money. Second, Ms. Lavish placed a deposit with the Assassins’ Guild for them to kill von Lipwig if Mr. Fusspot dies of unnatural causes. Cosmo and Pucci Lavish, Topsy’s nephew and niece, respectively, both live lavish lifestyles and were the reason Topsy always kept two loaded crossbows on her desk. They are to inherit Mr. Fusspot’s share of the bank if the dog dies and would not grieve were von Lipwig to meet an untimely death. Cosmo also has ambitions to replace Lord Vetinari as the city tyrant. Von Lipwig causes some trouble for himself when he accepts the bank’s valuation of its gold reserve on face value, and the authorities discover that there is much less gold in the vault than there is supposed to be. Another problem arises with the appearance of Cribbins, a man who knew von Lipwig ten years ago when he went by the alias of Albert Spangler. Masquerading as a priest of Om, Cribbins intends to blackmail von Lipwig, as he needs money to replace his malfunctioning set of false teeth. Pratchett satirizes economists by introducing the Glooper, a mechanical model of the Ankh-Morpork economy that is so accurate that it causes economic change. Pratchett based it on the Phillips Economic Computer, built in 1949 and based on hydraulics. The Glooper is tended by Hubert Turvy, who is portrayed as a mad scientist, and his assistant, Igor. Igors, creatures made from dead people’s body parts, are recurring characters in the series. They are all named Igor, talk in lisps, limp, and sneak up behind people. They also tend to get nervous if their masters display any signs of sanity or rationality. One of Pratchett’s techniques is to provide background information on the world by means of footnotes. In this novel, he uses them to explain a tabloid, the Blind Letter Office, dwarfs, a fee, assassin clothing, the kind of people who employ Igors, a food called minced collops, an offense called “wasting watch time,” lawyers, guarding, the advantage of committees over the iron maiden, crossword puzzles, and costs. Pratchett writes in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and other British satirists. In this book, he satirizes modern concepts of money and banking. The series is also in the tradition of nineteenth century English novels such as those by Anthony Trollope, with their detailed descriptions of urban landscapes. However, this novel does not have the narrative drive of other books in the series. Furthermore, there is very little character development. Except for Gladys, all the major characters are essentially the same people at the end of the book as they were at the beginning. Thomas R. Feller

Making Money / pratchett

481

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 9. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 749. Library Journal 132, no. 17 (October 15, 2007): 60. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 32 (August 13, 2007): 43. USA Today, November 8, 2007, p. D5. The Washington Post, September 20, 2007, p. C5.

482

THE MAYTREES Author: Annie Dillard (1945) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 216 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: About 1945 to 2000 Locale: Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Camden, Maine The story of one couple’s lifelong relationship amid the artistic community of Provincetown, Massachusetts Principal characters: Toby Maytree, poet and carpenter Lou Bigelow Maytree, his wife Deary Hightoe, his second wife

Annie Dillard has consistently held a high place in American letters since the publication of her first book, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), when she was still in her twenties. This is despite the fact that her publications tend to be brief, infrequent, and distributed over a wide range of genres, in both fiction and nonfiction. What is common to all of them is a poet’s skill in the use of figurative language, a passion for the natural world, and a philosopher’s sense of humanity’s place in the cosmos. In her best-known work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Dillard chronicled the wonder and terror of the natural world at the edge of civilization in Roanoke Valley, Virginia. Like her literary predecessor, Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, Dillard is obsessed with humanity’s intersection with nature as she observes the process from the margins of society. This is no less true of The Maytrees, a novel set among the bohemians of Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the decades following World War II. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek revealed her fascination with Thoreau’s life in a cabin at the edge of town; The Maytrees demonstrates that this idea is still a potent stimulus for her imagination. In their shack by the sea, Toby and Lou Bigelow Maytree are outsiders in bohemian Provincetown, which is itself a repository of outsiders. In her portrayal of this independent community, Dillard emphasizes that these characters bring the same sense of originality to their lives that they invest in their art. This is implied in the naming of her characters. On one side of the spectrum, there are writers for whom a character’s name evokes little interest beyond its utilitarian value: a signifier for someone who plays a role in a story. At the opposite end of the literary continuum are the writers who employ naming as a means of revealing a character’s role or his or her inner life. Ishmael, for example, is an appropriate name for the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) because he, like the biblical character of the same name, is an outcast. Dillard, on the other hand, takes a somewhat different approach. The singular nature of the inhabitants of this artistic community is embodied in their names: Deary Hightoe, Reevadare Weaver, Cornelius Blue, Sooner Roy.

The Maytrees / dillard

483

The oddness of the names is also due in part to their high vowel content—not a minor matter to a poet as skilled as Dillard. Indeed, Dillard brings a poet’s sensibility to the overall structure of the novel. At just over two hundred pages in length, The Maytrees is a lightweight in the world of modern fiction; if it were any shorter, it would qualify as a novella. In spite of its brevity, however, Dillard imposes a formal structure on her novel worthy of an epic narrative. In addition to the prologue, there are three numbered Annie Dillard gained early fame in parts and a concluding epilogue. In formal 1974 with the publication of the poetry terms, Dillard appears to be building a modest collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel cottage with walls as thick as a fortress. It and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which serves a function, but it initially seems out of won the Pulitzer Prize and became the proportion to the narrative she seeks to relate. first volume in a trilogy that includes This can be partly accounted for by the fact Holy the Firm (1977) and For the Time she often brings a skewed sense of propor- Being (1999). Dillard was elected to tion to her best writing. In Pilgrim at Tinker the American Academy of Arts and Creek, for example, the devouring of a tiny Letters in 1999. toad by a large insect triggers a wave of shock and horror in the narrator that permeates much of the rest of the book. Again, the key to understanding Dillard’s reasoning lies in the fact that this is a prose work by an accomplished poet. One should keep in mind that in a poem—even a brief poem—structure is both visually and aesthetically important, from the lines within a stanza to the grouping of stanzas into named sections. The density of the prose, moreover, often belies the brevity of the book. Thus, the initial impression of an oversized structure for such a small book is one that soon dissipates. The plot itself is simple enough: A prologue follows the Maytrees as their romance progresses into marriage and a child; part 1 focuses on the breakup of the relationship as Toby Maytree falls in love with Deary Hightoe; part 2 finds Lou living alone and Toby in his second marriage; part 3 and the epilogue find Toby and Lou back together again. All of this sounds like a cliché, like a typical popular romance really, and it does not do justice to Dillard’s carefully crafted prose. What enables Dillard’s work to succeed and hold the reader’s attention is the power and originality of her language. When Toby first meets Lou, Dillard reveals the signal importance of the event in words so poetic they could easily be set into a stanza: “She was young and broad of mouth and eye and jaw, fresh, solid and airy, as if light rays worked her instead of muscles.” It is a striking image of the character, one that works on more than one level. On the surface, it is a physical description of Lou Bigelow, one that captures some essential aspects of her appearance. Dillard is letting the reader know that, far from being the musings of an omniscient narrator, the passage implies that this is a view of Lou as perceived by the poet Toby Maytree. The

484

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

succeeding passage confirms this: “Oh, how a poet is a sap; he knew it.” Given Dillard’s skill as a poet, it is also a deliciously ironic comment regarding her own craft. On a deeper level, one can recognize some significant characteristics of Dillard’s writing, telltale points that recur throughout her prior works as well as The Maytrees. Note that the comment on the broadness of Lou’s facial features proceeds to the simile that likens her to light rays. Upon first reading, this perception of Lou seems flawed in its contradictory union of the concepts of solidity and airiness. In one sense, the description works within the context of the scene because its contradictory nature seems to capture the tumultuousness of love at first sight, but Dillard has consistently used such oppositional imagery throughout her long career. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for example, she says of a monarch butterfly that it “climbed a hill by falling still.” The key to understanding the description about Lou lies in the simile to which it is tied. The invocation of light undoubtedly reflects Toby’s budding affection, but it also calls to mind the fundamental properties of light itself: It exhibits the characteristics of both waves (airiness) and particles (solidity). Unlike many poets, Dillard does not make a distinction between art and science. In her best works, the facts of modern science often form the basis for much of her imagery. In preparing for the writing of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she read widely in the physical sciences and frequently invoked statistics when describing nature. Of course, a bare recitation of facts and figures would be out of place in a novel. Even so, Dillard has thoroughly immersed herself in the formal study of the physical world, and it is something that suffuses the novel. Her intensive study in the sciences often produces imagery so startling that it threatens to overpower the very story it is intended to relate. Early in the novel, Dillard tries to convey Toby’s growing affection for the beautiful young Lou. When describing Toby’s attraction to her, Dillard states that in Lou’s absence he “felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled part.” This is a risky approach to writing fiction, one that proves beyond question that Dillard is more concerned with her craft than with pleasing the masses. It is such an arresting image that, rather than just conveying Toby’s feelings, it focuses the reader’s attention more on the simile than on what it is intended to represent. The same effect occurs late in the book when Toby returns to Provincetown and Lou after an absence of twenty years. Rather than simply indicate that he is now wrinkled with age, the text states that Lou “saw parallel lines in his cheeks like presliced bacon.” Not only does the imagery tend to overwhelm these somewhat shadowy characters, it also makes them seem less human at times. Dillard is too skilled a writer for this to be an oversight, and it is obvious that she never intended to dash off a conventional romance. If there is a certain flatness to Dillard’s characters, it can be explained in part by the role of nature in the novel. In For the Time Being (1999), references to sand and clouds appear with such frequency that they almost function as recurring characters. A similar effect also occurs in The Maytrees, where once again nature seems to vie for equal attention with the novel’s protagonists. Although the book is nominally set in Provincetown, what action there is mostly takes place on the beach, a beach so iso-

The Maytrees / dillard

485

lated that it offers a perfect view of sand, ocean, clouds, and stars, but nothing of the town itself. Nature is always in a state of flux, but under such conditions one is confronted with an ever-mutating panorama of color, light, water, and earth. Conversely, if the scene is perpetually in motion, it also presents the viewer with the antithetical property of stasis. As Dillard herself succinctly states, “Each offshore surf line contained commotion but got nowhere, like someone’s reading the same line over and over.” Given this majestic backdrop of the larger forces of nature, the usual conflicts that drive fiction—particularly romantic fiction—tend to pale in comparison. This is apparent when Toby abandons his wife and young child for another woman after some fourteen years of marriage. In most fictional renderings of the subject, a writer would seek to wring every last particle of emotion from the breakup and follow the shock waves as they impact both major and minor characters. Dillard, however, creates a character in Lou who bears no malice toward her former husband, and their prior relationship resumes as though no breakup ever occurred. To Dillard, the pattern of relationship formation and severance is no different than the ever-repeating patterns of nature. Even though the plot revolves around the relationship between Lou and Toby, and the novel devotes about equal time to each of them when they live separate lives, it is Lou who emerges as the central character in the novel. As taciturn as she is beautiful, it is she rather than her poet husband who absorbs the lessons of nature and accepts the vicissitudes of life with philosophical calm. That Dillard succeeds so well in treading such difficult ground is a tribute to her formidable talent as a writer. With its deep wisdom and memorable imagery, The Maytrees will appeal to serious readers everywhere. Cliff Prewencki

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 2 (September, 2007): 130. Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 4. The Christian Century 124, no. 21 (October 16, 2007): 45-46. Entertainment Weekly, no. 939 (June 15, 2007): 81. Library Journal 132, no. 5 (March 15, 2007): 56. London Review of Books 30, no. 1 (January 3, 2008): 34-35. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 29, 2007): 12-13. People 67, no. 24 (June 18, 2007): 50. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 6 (February 5, 2007): 36.

486

MIYAZAWA KENJI Selections Author: Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato Foreword by Geoffrey O’Brien Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley). 248 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Poetry Time: The 1920’s to the early 1930’s Locale: Japan The Buddhist poems of Kenji Miyazawa capture the imagination of the reader with their moving promotion of mental tranquility in the face of personal suffering, their modern evocation of humanity’s place in the cosmos, often exemplified by the landscape of northeast Japan, and their reflections on human folly Principal characters: The persona, an often autobiographical alter ego of the poet Toshiko, sister of the poet who dies of tuberculosis

Miyazawa Kenji: Selections offers new translations by Hiroaki Sato of the poems of one of Japan’s most celebrated early twentieth century poets. Even though Kenji Miyazawa published just one anthology of his poetry during his lifetime, Haru to shura (1924; spring and asura), the efforts of his friends to publish his works after his death assured him a place in the canon of contemporary Japanese poetry. The English-speaking reader who encounters the poetry of Kenji Miyazawa for the first time in this anthology is struck quickly by Miyazawa’s modernism. Miyazawa deftly combines classical Japanese themes and Buddhist beliefs with images and words taken from the industrial age that entered Japan in force by the later years of the Meiji era (1868-1912) when Miyazawa was a boy. Thus “Proem” opens with a modern view of the fragility of the self: “The phenomenon called ‘I’/ is a blue illumination/ of the hypothesized, organic alternating current lamp” that also casts flickering landscapes and creates a whole universe that may be nothing but an illusion of the mind. The modern image of an electric lamp is complemented further by the persona’s use of scientific geological and meteorological terms such as “the glittering frozen nitrogen/ at the top stratum of the atmosphere” that contributes to his observed reality. “Spring and Asura,” the popular title poem of Miyazawa’s sole lifetime anthology, presents the persona as “Asura incarnate” who is “spitting, gnashing, pacing back and forth.” As Hiroaki Sato’s excellent introduction tells the reader, an Asura is a Buddhist demon who loves to quarrel. An Asura lives just below the realm of the humans

Miyazawa Kenji / miyazawa

487

in Buddhist cosmology. Japanese critics have stated that for Miyazawa, the world of the During his lifetime, Kenji Miyazawa Asura most closely resembles that of real life self-published only one collection of full of war and struggle, where Buddhist com- poetry, Haru to shura (1924), and a collection of children’s and fairy tales, passion is needed most. Though even what the Buddha spoke is ab- Chnmon no fi ryfriten (1924), while sent in his world for now, for “(the True working as teacher of agriculture. Words are not here,/ Asura’s tears fall on the Other poems were published in magazines. Based on his posthumous earth),” Miyazawa’s Asura uses his eyes to popularity, by 2004 there existed in observe a world that takes scant notice of him. Japanese eight complete and one Life can be a struggle in Miyazawa’s poems, unfinished zenshn, complete collections but like the angry and sad little Asura, human- of his works also based on his ity is well advised to persist. The spiritual unpublished manuscripts. reward may be such life-affirming visions as that described in the optimistic poem “Daybreak.” Reflecting on a winter sunrise, the persona observes, “The rolling snow/ gets bright peach juice poured into it” as darkness recedes. The cycle of poems written on November 27, 1922, the day Miyazawa’s beloved sister Toshiko died from tuberculosis, “The Morning of the Last Farewell,” “Pine Needles,” and “Voiceless Grief” as well as the later “White Birds” are among to the most moving elegies of modern Japanese poetry. The first poem opens with the haunting realization of the persona that “Before the day ends/ you will be far away, my sister.” After observing the incongruity of brightness on a dark November day with sleet falling, the poet interjects the voice of Toshiko in brackets as she asks her brother for a last favor: “(Please get me some rain-snow).” As the persona obliges this request that is repeated as a motif later throughout the poem, he gathers “two chipped ceramic bowls/ with blue water-shield designs” to gather the sleet. He approaches a snow-laden pine branch to gather drops of snow that, like Toshiko lingering in the state between life and death, “maintain the pure-white two-phase system of snow and water.” Again, Miyazawa intersperses modern scientific terms into his poetry before giving expression to the paradox that “From that terrifying, disturbed sky/ this beautiful snow has come.” Similarly, in Buddhism, death can be occasion for achieving heavenly happiness beyond all suffering. This is exactly what the persona wishes for his sister to achieve at the end of the poem. With “Pine Needles,” the next poem of the Toshiko cycle, as is the case with other key poems of this anthology, Sato chose to juxtapose some of his own translations of Miyazawa’s poems with previous ones, most often those by American poet Gary Snyder done in the early 1960’s. This technique calls the reader’s attention to the fact that any translation, and especially that of poetry, remains a somewhat subjective act. What Snyder rendered as “some raindrops still clinging/ —I brought you these pine boughs” for Miyazawa’s opening lines, Sato translated as “Here’s the beautiful

488

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

pine branch/ I took the sleet from.” While the next lines show more convergence with Snyder’s “—you look like you’d jump up/ & put your hot cheek against this green” and Sato’s “Oh, you almost leap to it/ pressing your hot cheeks to its green leaves,” the reader easily realizes that each translation has its own flair. The courage with which Sato highlights this difficult aspect of translating poetry in Miyazawa Kenji can be applauded critically because it acknowledges that there is hardly a final authorized version possible that exactly and immutably conveys the Japanese original into another language. Nevertheless, the reader is offered powerful choices of experiencing key poems of Miyazawa. Sato brings home again his point of incertitude in translation with Kenji Miyazawa’s most famous poem, “November 3rd.” After the quotation of many other alternatives, Sato freshly translated the poem so that the opening lines read “neither yielding to rain/ nor yielding to wind/ yielding neither to/ snow nor to summer heat.” This poem expresses the persona’s wish for an exemplary Buddhist life of quiet self-reliance and constant readiness to help and support others in need. It became especially popular during Japan’s dark days at the end of World War II. Sato’s excellent introduction relates that after the war, the occupation authorities took exception even to the persona’s meager daily diet of “eating one and a half pints of brown rice.” Miyazawa’s line was changed and the amount of rice cut by one fourth. Only after this censorship was “November 3rd” published in a postwar textbook. The incident casts a telling light at the intersection of poetry and politics in postwar Japan. In his poems selected by Sato, Miyazawa’s landscapes are rendered in vivid colors. Miyazawa often used scientific or nontranslated Western words in his poems to give them a modern, cosmopolitan touch. At the same time, natural objects are ironically personified. Thus, “The Tsugaru Strait,” about the channel separating the Japanese islands of Honshn and Hokkaidf, opens with “In the south black shelves of cumulostratus have formed/ and the two antiquated verdigris-colored peninsulas/ mutually shed afternoon fatigue.” In a similar vein, in the opening lines of “Volcano Bay: A Nocturne,” Miyazawa includes a modern scientific explanation for the color of the vegetation observed: “Dextrin, the green gold of young peas,/ where do they come from, and shine so?” Here, even though the glucose polymer Dextrin is named as being responsible for the poetically rendered color, the question as to the reason for its existence is left open. The poem creates a conscious fissure between scientific observation and philosophical questions. Many of Miyazawa’s poems selected by Sato also include a poetic commentary on humanity’s place in the natural world the poet describes. The world of Miyazawa’s poems is generally that of the farmers and small-city dwellers, who labor and live close to the land. In “Okhotsk Elegy,” the persona observes that “I know the man is all right/ because on that empty street corner/ when I asked him, Where’s the busiest section of the shore?/ he said, It must be over there/ because I’ve never been there.” Yet the poems of Miyazawa do not hide the hardship experienced by the farmers and laborers he observed at work. In “Distant Work,” Miyazawa’s persona merci-

Miyazawa Kenji / miyazawa

489

lessly exposes the pain behind the apparent idyll. The noise emanating from a brick factory appears pleasant enough from afar, yet for workers it is a different experience: “But at night Chnichi returns from there,/ tired, furious.” Often, Miyazawa pokes fun at human folly. His poems ironically expose the false sense of self-importance affecting upper members of the rural and small-town society he lived in. “Mr. Pamirs the Scholar Takes a Walk,” “Colleagues,” “The Landowner,” and “Hateful Kuma Eats His Lunch” are wonderful examples of Miyazawa’s keen, but ultimately empathic, portrayals of people caught at the cusp of tradition and modernity. Similarly, “An Opinion Concerning a Proposed National Park Site” ironically describes the efforts to develop a tourist attraction to embody a fake version of the Buddhist Hell. Ingenious technology is envisioned to create special effects, such as “As a finale, blast off real shots electrically/ from two field cannons.” About the majestic natural mountainside of the proposed park, the poem’s interlocutor laconically explains “that, you see, will be the backdrop.” For Miyazawa, it was often the animals of his poetry that appear to embody best the spirit of undaunted perseverance valued in some branches of Buddhism. In the poem “The buckets climb,” “A moth lies flat/ From the smooth powerful surface tension” of a pond, yet by the end of the poem it manages to break free and fly up and escape in “the indeterminate forms of clouds.” For all his occasional sarcasm directed at the folly of his fellow humanity, and animals surpassing humans in inner wisdom, Miyazawa’s poems also treasure his community. Perhaps this is conveyed best in the untitled poem beginning with the lines “The man I parted from, below.” Here, the persona confesses that “I feel a mysterious, helpless/ love for our land.” It is lines like these that help the reader to understand why Miyazawa’s poetry is so popular in his native land of Japan. Miyazawa Kenji concludes with poems written by Miyazawa during periods of illness all the way to the last day of his life before succumbing to sickness. There is agony in Miyazawa’s descriptions of his sick, failing body. Even though death could bring enlightenment and absence of pain for a devout Buddhist, in “Night” Miyazawa admits that even though his mind understands this idea, he is not yet ready to die: “new blood wells up and/ once again pale-white I become frightened.” Yet in the last poem Miyazawa wrote, in the morning on the day of his death on September 21, 1933, his persona expresses hope that he may die in possession of “the dharma,” the Buddhist concept of the right way of life. Aptly, to introduce the poet Kenji Miyazawa to his English-speaking audience, Sato opens his edition with a perceptive foreword by poet Geoffrey O’Brien that illustrates the quintessential modernism of Miyazawa. Sato’s own introduction contains a substantial biography of the poet that focuses on his life, his Buddhist beliefs, and key elements of his poetry. The excellent, substantial selection of Miyazawa’s poetry is followed by three perceptive essays by two Japanese poets, Shuntarf Tanikawa and Gfzf Yoshimasu, who tell of Miyazawa’s influence on their own work. A final short essay by Michael O’Brien compares Miyazawa’s poetry to Western poets and writers.

490

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

It is to be hoped that Miyazawa Kenji will help to familiarize more English readers with the outstanding poetry of Miyazawa. Miyazawa’s work strongly influenced Japanese postwar national self-consciousness and can serve to make a Western reader understand this topic. Thus, overall, Miyazawa Kenji opens to the English reader a fresh window into the work of an important modern Japanese poet who captured much of the soul of his country in the brief years in which he was active. Miyazawa’s poems have been given a perceptive translation by Hiroaki Sato. In English, too, they do not fail to show their perceptive power. Miyazawa’s poems offer a deep insight into humanity’s modern condition. R. C. Lutz

Review Source Booklist 103, no. 18 (May 15, 2007): 16.

491

MOTHER TERESA Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” Author: Mother Teresa (1910-1997) Edited and with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 416 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Letters, religion, biography Time: 1928-1997 Locale: Primarily Calcutta, India This partial biography of Mother Teresa focuses on her interior life through her letters and other writings, as she labored to establish a new religious order while struggling with devastating spiritual doubt Principal personages: Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity Celeste Van Exem, her spiritual director beginning in 1944 Ferdinand Périer, archbishop of Calcutta from 1924 to 1960 Lawrence Trevor Picachy, her spiritual director after 1956 Joseph Neuner, the theologian in whom she confided

Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” published on the tenth anniversary of the nun’s death, reveals her inner life in her own words, as well as through the testimony of those who knew her. The book is meticulously documented by editor Brian Kolodiejchuk, a Catholic priest of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers and official postulator of the cause for her canonization. Kolodiejchuk, who met Mother Teresa in 1977 and was associated with her until her death twenty years later, also provides an essential narrative that places the various writings in context. He spends little time on Mother Teresa’s early life. She was born in Skopje, Ottoman Empire (now in Macedonia), on August 26, 1910, and baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her first language was Albanian; her second, Serbo-Croatian, which she spoke at school. English came much later, after she realized that she had a vocation to serve the poor and traveled to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto, a missionary order dedicated to educating the young. In 1928, she took as her religious name that of her patron saint, the Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux. The new Sister Teresa began her novitiate in India in 1929, making her first profession of vows two years later. Appointed to teach at Saint Mary’s School for girls in Calcutta, where she would eventually be named principal, she also became an Indian citizen. After she made her final vows in 1937, she was addressed as Mother Teresa. The editor focuses his attention on three distinct aspects of Mother Teresa’s interior life: a private vow she made while still a Loreto nun, the subsequent mystical events that inspired her to found the Missionaries of Charity, and the spiritual dark-

492

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ness that plagued her for most of her lifetime. With the permission of her confessor, the Jesuit priest Celeste Van Exem, Mother Teresa made a private vow in April, 1942 (similar to one by Saint Thérèse), binding herself under pain of mortal sin never to refuse God anything, no matter what He asked of her. It was an attempt to hold herself to absolute, unquestioning obedience as proof of her intense love for Jesus, a promise she would faithfully keep, albeit with difficulty. No one knew of this vow except her spiritual advisers. On September 10, 1946, as she traveled by train from Calcutta to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling for an annual retreat, Mother Teresa underwent a mystical experience, a calling to give up her life in Loreto and go directly into the streets “to bring Souls to God—and God to Souls.” Her notes and letters, often with erratic punctuation, describe a voice, imploring her to “come—carry me into the holes of the poor.— Come be My light,” and urging her to dedicate herself to the abject poor in the slums of Calcutta. She believed this to be the voice of Jesus, which would continue to speak to her intimately for several months, entreating her to become a Missionary Sister of Charity, dressed simply in a sari and living in absolute poverty with the Indian poor, sharing their lives and ministering to them. The voice told her, “There are plenty of Nuns to look after the rich and well to do people—but for My very poor, there are absolutely none. For them I long—them I love. Wilt thou refuse?” She could not. This experience marked the genesis of the Missionaries of Charity, the society Mother Teresa ultimately founded. She reported these events to Father Van Exem when she returned to Calcutta. However, she could not act without the consent of her superiors, including Van Exem and Archbishop Ferdinand Périer, both of whom were cautious. Finally, with Van Exem’s permission, she wrote an impassioned letter to the archbishop, detailing her plans for this proposed society of missionary nuns and requesting permission to live beyond the convent walls so that she could go freely to the poor and sick of Calcutta’s slums. Archbishop Périer questioned whether her call to do God’s work was genuine. She wrote to him reassuringly, “[God] will do all. . . . I am only a little instrument in His hands.” She sent further accounts of her dialogues with Christ and of three visions of Jesus on the cross that she experienced, adding, “If the work be all human, it will die with me, if it be all His it will live for ages to come.” She continued to hear the voice through the summer of 1947. Then it ceased. Early in 1948, Pope Pius XII granted Mother Teresa’s petition to begin her new mission in the slums. Alone, she left Loreto to obtain the basic nurse’s training she would require to serve the poor. The Missionaries of Charity was officially established in Calcutta on the third floor of a private home, and by mid-1950 the community of one had grown to twelve. Nuns taught the children, nursed the sick, and comforted the dying. In spiritual terms, the society’s mission was “to quench the thirst

Mother Teresa authored several volumes of speeches, prayers, and meditations. She received many humanitarian awards, including the Jawaharlal Nehru Award, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2003, she was beatified by Pope John Paul II as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa / mother teresa

493

of Our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls” and “bring about their conversion and sanctification.” In every Missionaries of Charity chapel, Christ’s penultimate words on the cross, “I thirst” (John 19:28), would appear next to the crucifix as a reminder of this call. For herself, Mother Teresa wrote, “I want . . . to drink only from His chalice of pain and to give Mother Church real saints.” Although she saw the words of Jesus being fulfilled, she told Périer, “One part [is] still left . . . that I would have to suffer much.” Most shocking to those who admired Mother Teresa is her revelation of an inner darkness that no one suspected. “There is such terrible darkness within me,” she wrote. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’” In 1955, she mentioned to Périer an inner loneliness so intense that she could not speak about it even to Van Exem: “I used to get such help and consolation from spiritual direction— from the time the work has started—nothing. . . . Pray for me—for within me everything is icy cold.” Two Jesuit priests were especially helpful to Mother Teresa. After she was deeply moved by a 1956 retreat led by Lawrence Trevor Picachy (later, Cardinal Picachy), she began a correspondence that revealed how abandoned by God she felt, even as her love for Him increased. Except for the archbishop and her confessors, she offered up her suffering in silence for the poor she served: “I want to smile . . . at Jesus and so hide . . . the pain and the darkness of my soul even from Him.” After the death of Pius XII, the darkness in her heart briefly disappeared, but within a month it returned. Father Picachy encouraged her to write to Jesus what she could not say: “My God—how painful is this unknown pain. . . . What are You doing My God to one so small?” Perhaps her bitterest cry of doubt appears in another letter to Him: “What do I labour for? If there be no God—there can be no soul.—If there is no soul then Jesus— You also are not true. Heaven, what emptiness. . . .” Still, she was faithful. In the same letter she added, “Your happiness is all that I want. . . . I am ready to wait for You for all eternity.” Mother Teresa was aware of her contradictions. Nevertheless, she had great difficulty comprehending the purpose of this darkness, although she accepted it as God’s will. After theologian Joseph Neuner conducted a 1961 retreat in Calcutta, she began to speak to him also about her interior life. What she could not deal with was the feeling of abandonment; she had been so close to God, and now there was nothing. Neuner too asked her to write down her feelings. She wrote of “this terrible sense of loss—this untold darkness—this loneliness—this continual longing for God.” Neuner was particularly supportive by giving Mother Teresa new insight into her darkness, as a silent sharing in Christ’s agony on the cross. She began to view it as a “very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth” and was then able to welcome it. To Neuner she wrote: “For the first time in this 11 years—I have come to love the darkness. . . . If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” Her good works were many. When the Missionaries of Charity first began, people were dying in the streets, cases so hopeless that hospitals would not accept them. Mother Teresa wanted to create a shelter where they could receive basic medical care

494

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and die with peace and dignity, and the city of Calcutta provided her with such a place. She also built orphanages, schools, and homes for AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis patients. Archbishop Périer gave her permission to open new missions outside of Calcutta and appointed her superior general of the society, a position she held until shortly before her death. In 1965, she began to establish missions worldwide. Mother Teresa included lay coworkers in the society, men and women who wished to join and work with her but were prevented by illness or disability. These became “spiritual twins” of the nuns who served the poor, each group offering encouragement and prayers for the other. She founded the Missionaries of Charity Brothers, the first male branch of the society, followed by a contemplative branch of priests and brothers, and by the Missionary of Charity Fathers. Frequent travel for speeches and awards only made Mother Teresa feel more isolated. An increasingly public life was a trial for her, for she did not like to be in the public eye. Even as she inspired others, her own spiritual aridity persisted. She suffered from chronic headaches, and in later years a serious heart condition required a pacemaker, but she kept up normal activities as much as possible. She died September 5, 1997, at eighty-seven. At that time, the society consisted of more than 600 missions in 123 countries, with 4,000 sisters, 300 brothers, and 100,000 volunteers. Kolodiejchuk’s book has engendered controversy. Mother Teresa wished all her correspondence to be destroyed to avoid focusing interest on herself rather than on Jesus, yet some critics are angered that Kolodiejchuk and others chose to ignore this request. Others have charged that money she collected was not spent on the poor, that she had no interest in eliminating poverty, and that she was a hypocrite. Writing in Newsweek, Christopher Hitchens dismisses her as “a confused old lady” who “suffered from . . . self-hatred.” Kolodiejchuk argues that Mother Teresa endured not a crisis but a trial of faith and that without the pain of her interior darkness and the extended test of faith that followed, she could never have achieved such absolute identification with the poor. He concludes that it was not her suffering that made her a saint but her intense love for God and her fellow humans. Clearly, his intent in this book is to support her canonization, but his evidence, in her words, remains impressive. Joanne McCarthy

Review Sources America 197, no. 8 (September 24, 2007): 14-17. Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 27. Newsweek 150, no. 11 (September 10, 2007): 41. Time 170, no. 10 (September 3, 2007): 36-43. The Washington Post, September 5, 2007, p. A21.

495

THE MURDER OF REGILLA A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity Author: Sarah B. Pomeroy (1938) Publisher: Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.). 249 pp. $24.95 Type of work: History Time: The second century c.e. Locale: Rome and Athens A classical scholar uses a wide range of evidence to piece together the circumstances surrounding the life and death of a Roman woman in the second century c.e. Principal personages: Regilla (Appia Annia Regilla Caucidia Tertulla), the Roman wife of the Greek Herodes Atticus, the mother of his six children, and the victim, in Greece, of a violent death that is the focus of this investigation Herodes Atticus (Lucius Vibullius Hipparchus Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes), one of the wealthiest men in the Roman Empire and both tutor and friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius Bradua (Appius Annius Atilius Bradua), Regilla’s younger brother who brought a charge in Rome against Herodes Atticus for the murder of his sister

More than a million people annually visit the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and inevitably look down from the Acropolis on the well-preserved remains of the massive odeon or theater, with a seating capacity of about five thousand, built in 161 c.e. by Herodes Atticus in memory of his wife Regilla. Many of these tourists learn that Herodes Atticus, one of the richest men in the Roman Empire of the second century c.e., was a major benefactor of building projects throughout his native Greece, and especially in Athens. What is less well known is that this Greek philanthropist was probably responsible for the violent death of his pregnant Roman wife in 160. In The Murder of Regilla: A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity, Sarah B. Pomeroy, a prominent scholar of the history of women in the ancient Greek and Roman world, makes a noble effort to fill this unfortunate knowledge gap and uses her vast knowledge of the social history of the Roman Empire to piece together from meager evidence the biography of Regilla and the circumstances surrounding her death at the relatively young age of thirty-five. Unfortunately, no words of Regilla herself have survived to communicate her feelings and experiences directly to posterity. To understand Regilla and her difficult position as the wife of Herodes Atticus, Pomeroy employed varied and often wide-

496

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ranging evidence: letters between Marcus Aurelius (121-180) and his friend, Marcus Cornelius Fronto (c. 100-c. 166), a prominent grammarian and lawyer; a biography of Herodes Atticus by Flavius Philostratus (c. 170245); archaeological remains of monuments associated with Herodes and Regilla in Italy and Greece; and inscriptions written to commemorate husband and wife, as well as other family members. Illustrations include many of these monuments and inscriptions. In addition to such material evidence directly related to Herodes and Regilla, Pomeroy appropriately cites ancient sources and evidence on the lives of Roman women in Regilla’s time in order to fill out the picture of her subject’s probable daily life and experiences. Almost no full-length biographies of Greco-Roman women exist in antiquity, when only the poet Sappho of Lesbos received such attention. More recently, modern historians have begun to provide biographies of prominent ancient women such as Cleopatra VII and Livia, the wife of Augustus. Pomeroy’s study of Regilla goes further by focusing on the life of a woman who lived a quieter life on the fringe of the powerful and famous. The importance of Regilla’s pedigree is suggested by the significance of her full Roman name: Appia Annia Regilla Caucidia Tertulla. The longer a name in Roman society, the more important the person was or wanted to appear. Appia associates Regilla with the Appii Claudii, an ancient Roman dynasty associated with the Appian Way, on which Regilla’s own family owned an estate. Her father’s family, the Annii Regilli, prominent in their own right, gained further importance as close relatives of Annia Galeria Faustina, wife of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Regilla, the name by which she was commonly known, means “little queen” in Latin. From her mother, Atilia Caucidia Tertulla, Regilla bears the name Caucidia, suggesting that her maternal ancestors claimed descent from the Etruscans, who ruled Rome in its early days. From her mother she also inherited the name Tertulla, literally “little third daughter.” Pomeroy’s investigation is both an inquest into the death of one specific Roman woman and the examination of the kind of life such women lived in the second century c.e. Thus, lacking facts about Regilla’s own childhood, Pomeroy describes the typical life of a wealthy, upper-class Roman girl of that era. A girl such as Regilla would have lived a sheltered and happy life, surrounded by slaves who catered to her every wish. She would have been well-educated at home by slaves and would have learned Greek at an early age. Her upbringing groomed her to become the wife of a prominent Roman husband. Regilla was married to Herodes Atticus around 140, when she was about fifteen years old. She probably had little say in the selection of her husband, chosen by her father, who was undoubtedly delighted to create by marriage a tie with such a wealthy

Distinguished Professor Emerita of Classics and History at the City University of New York, Sarah B. Pomeroy has been a pioneer in women’s studies in the ancient world with works like Goddesses, Wives, Whores, and Slaves (1975), Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece (1997), and Spartan Women (2002).

The Murder of Regilla / pomeroy

497

man and close acquaintance of the emperor. It would have mattered little to her father or to Roman society that Herodes was old enough to be Regilla’s father. Within the year, Regilla bore Herodes his first child, a son who died in infancy. The death of this child is, in fact, mentioned in the extant correspondence between the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his friend Fronto. Their next child, a girl, was born within the next year, as Herodes prepared to move his family back to his native Greece. Regilla gave birth to at least three more children in Greece, including one son who died in childhood. At her death, she was pregnant with her sixth child, who may have died in the trauma of her death or shortly afterward. Of her six children, only three lived to adulthood, two daughters and a son. Unfortunately, this son, named Bradua (Tiberius Claudius Marcus Appius Atilius Bradua Regillus Atticus) was such a great disappointment to his father that he was disinherited in Herodes’ will, although Bradua probably inherited substantial wealth from his mother. Despite Regilla’s fecundity, it was, perhaps, her inability to produce a satisfactory male heir for her husband that soured the marriage. Pomeroy also notes Herodes’ preference, possibly sexual, for several male foster children, which may have further distanced him from his Roman wife. In Greece, Regilla lived at Herodes’ ancestral estate at Marathon in Attica. Herodes gave (or sold) his wife a substantial portion of this estate. The remains of a formidable entrance gateway, known as the Gate of Eternal Harmony, suggest that Regilla’s portion of this estate was completely surrounded by that of Herodes. Such a division of an estate between spouses was highly unorthodox in the period and may further suggest an unusual, if not troubled, marriage. The wife of a prominent and wealthy Greek would have been expected to lead a public life in Greece as well. Unfortunately, her Roman ancestry disqualified Regilla from the most obvious and coveted roles open to women in Greek society, namely priestesses of one of the religious cults in Athens. Consequently, her husband seems to have used his considerable wealth to purchase for his wife the priesthood of Demeter Chamyne at the sanctuary of Olympia. Evidence of the couple’s generosity at Olympia includes an aqueduct built by Herodes and a prominent nymphaeum or public fountain, of which a statue of a bull survives with a record of Regilla’s donation inscribed on its flank. This fountain was also decorated with statues of Regilla and her children. Fragments of some of these statues also survive. Herodes also created a public role in Athens for his wife by establishing the Roman cult of Fortuna (Tyche in Greek) and making Regilla priestess of Tyche. The Temple of Tyche was built above the Panathenaic Stadium, which Herodes restored between 139140 and 143/144, a stadium still visible in its reconstructed form in the modern city. During her lifetime, a statue of Regilla was also erected by the public council of the city of Corinth at the famous Peirene Fountain, perhaps, as Pomeroy suggests, because she was the benefactor who paid for its renovation. Regilla’s headless statue and an accompanying inscription survive on the site. A similar dedicatory statue in her memory has also been found at Delphi and may commemorate another act of munificence. Regilla died in 160. From the surviving legal charge leveled later by her brother Bradua against Herodes in Rome, Regilla’s death was the result of a blow to her abdo-

498

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

men inflicted, at her husband’s direction, by his freedman Alcimedon. Bradua suggested in his deposition that the beating was “for trivial reasons.” While Alcimedon might have been acting independently when he beat Regilla, Pomeroy suggests that it was much more likely that the freedman did so at the explicit or implicit direction of Herodes. Pomeroy leaves no doubt that Herodes, who was known for his violent temper and was philosophically opposed to apatheia, the repression of personal feelings advocated by the Stoics, was responsible for his wife’s death. The trial in Rome was conducted before a jury of Roman senators. By custom, the accuser, Regilla’s brother, served as prosecutor. Herodes spoke in his own defense and denied that he had ordered his freedman to beat his wife. Despite an inevitable senatorial bias in favor of Bradua, who was one of their own, Herodes was acquitted, probably because of imperial influence. Following his wife’s death, Herodes expressed his grief publicly, most conspicuously with the magnificent Odeon in Athens. At his wife’s family estate on the Via Appia, he also built a temple-like cenotaph in his wife’s memory (now the church of San Urbano). In these and many other memorials, including his own Greek poetry and a lengthy poem in Latin commissioned from the poet Marcellus of Side, the distraught husband repeatedly refers to his wife’s virtues as well as his own conjugal affection. In all of these efforts, Pomeroy suggests, Herodes was attempting to placate the avenging spirit of his dead wife by transforming her into a gracious and benevolent heroine. Regilla’s life is particularly interesting because she married not a fellow Roman but a Romanized Greek and spent most of her married life in her husband’s native Greece. Examination of Regilla’s biography provides an almost unique opportunity to consider the challenges a Roman woman would face living in Greece during the Roman Empire. Many of the details of her life in Greece are unknown, but much may be deciphered from the situation itself. Regilla, whose native language was Latin, not only would probably have had to use Greek in her husband’s home but also would have faced major differences in cultural expectations. In her native Rome, she would have had significant freedom and power as a married woman, while in Greece, even in the second century c.e., the life of a married woman was circumspect, restricted, and tied to the authority of her husband. Modern readers might assume that the Roman Empire in the second century c.e. was a tranquil, homogeneous society. The history of the marriage of Regilla and Herodes Atticus reveals the flaws and the realities of life in that Roman world. In particular, in The Murder of Regilla, Pomeroy reveals the fragile and possibly dangerous status of even wealthy, aristocratic women like Regilla. If a woman like Regilla could have experienced a marriage and a death like hers, what, one imagines, was life like for her humbler female contemporaries? Thomas J. Sienkewicz

The Murder of Regilla / pomeroy

499

Review Sources The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 6 (October 5, 2007): 14. The New Yorker 83, no. 39 (December 10, 2007): 113. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 41-42.

500

THE MUSEUM OF DR. MOSES Tales of Mystery and Suspense Author: Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Publisher: Harcourt (Orlando, Fla.). 229 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: 1950’s to the 2000’s Locale: Western upstate New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and the Midwest A collection of ten previously published stories of violence, gore, and horror featuring serial killers, other murderers and psychopaths, their family members, and their victims Principal characters: Anonymous male, victim of jogger’s rage Seth M. Niorde, prison inmate under suicide watch Laurence C. Niorde, his visiting father Colum “The Kid” Donaghy, mid-level boxer found dead Patrick Hassler, his best friend Daryll, puffed-up young humanities professor Benjamin S. “Bad Habits” Haslit, Jr., serial killer Dolores, Trevor, and Albert, his children Derek “Derrie” Knight, a child who turns feral Kate and Stephen Knight, his parents Liam Gavin, a serial lover and killer of women Hannah, Mrs. “Evvie” Knudsen, and Olive Lundt, his victims B—— and C——, identical twins and rivals Dr. A——, their manipulative father Anonymous killer, a man who murders a prostitute Dr. Moses Hammacher, a retired family doctor and coroner Virginia “Ginny” Hammacher, the divorcée who marries him Ellen “Ella” McIntyre, Ginny’s daughter by her first marriage

It is hard to say where Joyce Carol Oates gets the ideas for such gruesome subjects and images as those featured in The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense—a jogger who shoots another in the face, a poached baby, a humanities professor who turns his decaying corpse into a valentine, a chubby little boy who returns to the wild, a man who appreciates the infinite variety of women before he kills them, and a dotty old doctor who creates a museum of medical horrors. The stories in this collection are not for the queasy or weak at heart or for before- or afterdinner reading.

The Museum of Dr. Moses / oates

501

The Museum of Dr. Moses is also prob ablynot among the best works in this prolific author’s fifty-year writing career. (For Oates’s best, readers should go to such novels as 1969’s them and 1996’s We Were the Mulvaneys and such story collections as 2006’s High Lonesome.) A couple of the collection’s stories are little more than sketches, some characters and actions are not well developed, and Oates overdoes the gory details and ambiguous endings. Significantly, the collection is still high-quality work: fascinating, Joyce Carol Oates has written almost gripping, imaginative, and morbidly enter- fifty novels and thirty collections of taining. Oates is equally good at entering the short stories, plus novellas, poetry, minds of both children and psychopaths, and plays, criticism, and young adult and she is such a practiced and accomplished children’s books. She has won many craftsperson/stylist that she can hold the awards, including the 1996 PEN/ reader’s attention much like a snake charmer. Malamud Award for short fiction and To students and scholars, the stories are also the 1970 National Book Award for the useful for what they reveal about Oates and novel them (1969). her work. For one thing, the stories tap into elemental, archetypal human fears that run through folklore and fairy tales and that help shape the American urban landscape, with its ghettos, suburbs, and gated communities. Almost any newspaper or news report shows that these fears are not just imaginary or psychological but realistic (even if often exaggerated or sensationalized): Violence is endemic to American life, both on a personal and societal basis, and is obsessively reenacted in movies, television shows, and games. It is not surprising that the sensitive and highly intelligent Oates, who grew up poor in rural upstate New York, was a teenager in the repressed 1950’s, was valedictorian of her two-thousand-strong graduating class at Syracuse University, and taught college English in or near decaying Detroit during the troubled 1960’s and 1970’s, should take an interest in violence. In addition, it is not surprising that she would depict violence realistically but also be drawn to Gothic forms and conventions, with their evocation of fear and horror. Both realism and the Gothic element are parts of the American literary tradition, and the well-read Oates had plenty of models to look to. The Gothic element, for example, enters into the work of such modern writers as William Faulkner (18971962) and Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) and the earlier writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Another contemporary writer who makes use of the Gothic is Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933). It seems to be the point of both McCarthy and Oates that, too often in American life, the realistic and the Gothic tend to converge. Among nonliterary influences apparent in The Museum of Dr. Moses are feminism and Freudianism. In the title story, for example, old Dr. Moses Hammacher wants his

502

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

new middle-aged wife to get a face-lift—and even performs the operation himself, using staples—so that she will look young again as he remembers her. From the context, the author makes clear what she thinks of face-lifts, women who get them, and men who push women into getting them (Dr. Moses comes over like a Nazi Frankenstein). The stories also feature sexual predators and battered women. Nevertheless, some feminists apparently reject Oates, perhaps because she is not feminist enough or is also influenced by Freudianism. The influence of Freudianism can be seen in her depiction of pathological minds. The destructive effect of poor parenting on children, both actual and alleged, is a repeated pattern in the stories. In “Suicide Watch,” for instance, Seth M. Niorde blames lack of attention from his father for his own drug addition, self-destruction, and violence, but Seth is hardly one to cast stones, since he tells a horrible story (maybe not true) of how he accidentally poached his own two-year-old son by leaving hot water running in the bathroom while taking a nap. In “The Hunter,” Liam Gavin similarly blames his mother, who abandoned him at birth, for his predatory hunting out, loving, and killing of women who are already maimed. In “Feral,” parents who fail to investigate the near-drowning of their son watch him turn wild and take to the woods. Only in “Bad Habits” do the damaged children of a serial killer show signs of recovering, led by their hopeful mother, who represents the positive side of Oates’s theme. Some of the stories, like “Feral,” challenge credibility. What parents would not inquire into the near-drowning of their son, especially if foul play is suspected? Can his near-drowning be the cause of his return to the wild or just another post hoc fallacy? How about turning feral in the first place? Still, one advantage of the Gothic tradition is that the rules of credibility are looser, if not nonexistent: Challenges to credibility are commonplace, even expected. Rather than the usual credibility, the stories take on a psychological, symbolic, or allegorical credibility. For example, “Feral,” whose ending is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” could be read as an allegory of the loosening strings of parenthood as kids grow up and, say, leave home for college. Even the flimsier and more realistic stories are, like “Feral,” carried along by the power of Oates’s writing. “Hi! Howya Doin!” is the opening story, about joggers in a university setting. The main character is a big, unnamed athletic man who startles or irritates other joggers by shouting “Hi! Howya Doin!” as he blasts by. Finally, one day, an irritated jogger pulls a pistol and shoots him between the eyes. This incredible story seems grimly comic until one recalls similar shootings on university campuses, sometimes places of tension that draw out psychopathic personalities. Oates tells the story in one long six-page sentence that captures these tensions, mimics the breathless effects of jogging, and builds to the violent climax. A similar story is the even sketchier “Stripping,” a stream-of-consciousness aria in the shower by a former teacher at St. Ignatius Middle School who is cleaning up after butchering a prostitute. The most bizarre and gory story is “Valentine, July Heat Wave,” narrated by a university humanities professor, Daryll, whose wife has left him. Daryll is a priggish, snobbish, egotistical, totally demented academic whose “most original work” in his

The Museum of Dr. Moses / oates

503

thirties propelled him into a senior professorship. Specializing in philosophy of mind, he clarified Descartes’ mind/body dichotomy: . . . “mind” inhabits “body” but is not subsumed in “body.” For the principles of logic, as I have demonstrated by logical argument, in a systematic geometry in the mode of Spinoza, transcend all merely “bodily” limitations. All this, transmuted into the most precise symbols.

He also married the department secretary, a disastrous mismatch: She was incapable of understanding his work, and he was incapable of understanding her little gestures of love, like leaving a valentine for him. Now she has left him entirely but plans to return briefly for her things. In a bizarre application of his philosophical thesis, Daryll plans to leave her an elaborate valentine of his eight-day-old corpse rotting in their bed. A couple of stories reflect Oates’s special interests in boxing and in twins. In the short nonfiction work On Boxing (1987), Oates characterized boxing as a relic of the cult of masculinity. This feminist perspective is not as strong in “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza,” although Colum “The Kid” Donaghy, the protagonist, does womanize and abuse his wife (who seems to hold her own). Instead, a workingclass 1950’s atmosphere prevails: Donaghy is depicted sympathetically as a wellliked mid-level boxer who is trying to rise in the corrupt boxing world and who pays with his life. The long realistic story also focuses on personal relationships, especially between Donaghy and his best friend Patrick Hassler, and has some surprises at the end. Oates’s interest in twins recurs in a number of her works and is explored here in “The Twins: A Mystery.” This somewhat confusing story (but perhaps intentionally so) looks at mature mirror twins who are rivals manipulated by their old father. Complaining that “nothing [on TV] to challenge the intellect is ever on,” the decrepit Dr. A—— inserts a DVD of his twins that symbolizes how he plays and replays them. The DVD and reality in the story seem to overlap. Dr. A—— previews the title story’s Dr. Moses, another mean, mad old man. However, “The Museum of Dr. Moses” returns emphatically to the Gothic mode, recognizable by the title, the setting, and the grisly contents of the doctor’s museum. The doctor’s forbidding old stone house, isolated in the country in fictional Eden County, western upstate New York, could have been the setting for the movie Psycho, while the gracious host Dr. Moses (though he does once lose his temper and bang on the dinner table) seems like an elderly combination of Dr. Frankenstein and Dracula. The story also features twenty-six-year-old feminist Ellen “Ella” McIntyre, who, at 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds, has come to duke it out with Dr. Moses and rescue her mother, who for some strange reason married him and is “clearly a woman in distress, in thrall to a tyrannical male.” Both of the story’s main characters suggest some interesting autobiographical possibilities: Ella, a returning hometown product proud to have escaped the confining circumstances of her upbringing, could easily be a stand-in for the younger Oates, while Dr. Moses and his museum suggest the archive at Syracuse University where Oates began storing her writings, manuscripts, and letters in 1990.

504

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Much as Dr. Moses’ museum is a collection of legitimate if sometimes gruesome medical artifacts and specimens, except for the horrors in the Red Room, so Oates’s writings are far more than a collection of Gothic horrors. The ten stories in The Museum of Dr. Moses demonstrate her enormous range and versatility in short fiction, and the striking similes she keeps reaching for are a reminder of her prodigious work in poetry and other genres. Even the stories here with Gothic elements evoke subtle meanings lurking below the surface, like the disturbed minds at work in “Suicide Watch” and “Stripping,” the satire of academia in “Valentine, July Heat Wave,” the satire of the media in “Bad Habits,” the allegory in “Feral,” and the autobiographical tensions in “The Museum of Dr. Moses.” Harold Branam

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 17 (May 1, 2007): 36. The Boston Globe, August 26, 2007, p. D5. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 11 (June 1, 2007): 535. Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 26, 2007, p. 9. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 26 (June 25, 2007): 31. School Library Journal 53, no. 11 (November, 2007): 160. The Washington Post, October 28, 2007, p. BW04.

505

MUSICOPHILIA Tales of Music and the Brain Author: Oliver Sacks (1933) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 381 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Music, medicine, science A collection of discussions of the many ways that music can affect the brain for good or for ill drawn primarily from cases and patients with whom the author has worked in his profession as a neurologist In recent years, the fields of neuroscience and neurobiology have expanded greatly. The technological resources of many different and sophisticated types of brain imaging have aided this expansion. Now insights from neuroscience are contributing to almost every area of human activity and aspect of the human condition. This knowledge of neuroscience is not limited to a minority of scientists. Increasingly popular scientific literature is making the advances of neuroscience available to a wider audience. Music is one area of human life that has engaged the interest, attention, and imagination of people throughout history. The title of Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain addresses this very issue. In the preface, Sacks states: “This propensity to music shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species.” By the term “musicophilia” he means that music “lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate.” However, the question about music has always concerned how we apprehend music. How do our brains integrate the complex aspects of musical experience? Music engages many areas of the brain. Music activates the auditory sense. We perceive its structure. It is deeply embedded in memory. Even listening involves and evokes motor responses. Most famously and mysteriously, music stirs deep and varied emotions. In addition, if music is so central to our whole being, why do some people have such prodigious musical talents while others seem to be lacking these abilities? Neuroscience is a field that is well suited to make significant new contributions toward addressing these central questions about music and the human mind. In Musicophilia, Sacks does not tackle these big questions directly. Rather, the subtitle of his book indicates his approach. Much as in his other nine books, he colects narratives of cases that he has encountered as a neurologist that demonstrate varying aspects of the effects of music on the brain. This presentation has advantages and disadvantages. One positive aspect is that, unlike other books in which neuroscience takes center stage with illustrative case examples, Sacks is able to bring a human face to the sometimes arcane neurobiology of music. Indeed, many of the people that the reader meets through Sacks’s stories have inspiring tales of the power of music to ameliorate suffering and to help overcome disabilities. At the same time, disadvan-

506

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tages include the fragmentary organization and lack of broader analytical perspective. Sacks presents his material in twenty-nine chapters. Most of the chapters address a topic with several cases illustrating the individual variations on the basic theme. For instance, in “Part II: A Range of Musicality,” Sacks devotes one chapter to the phenomenon of synesthesia and music. Synesthesia refers to a true mixing of the senses. With music, one manifestation of synesthesia is the way some people see or perceive color as integral to the experience of music. Thus, one musician specifically associates a color with a musical key. Another person who is not a musician associates color with light, shape, and position. She says of this imagery: “A chord will envelop me.” Sacks also discusses scientific work on synesthesia but reaches no conclusions. Rather, he leaves the chapter open-ended about the neurobiology of synesthesia and the varying attitudes of synesthetes toward the role of this phenomenon in their lives. Although none of the chapters are lengthy, most of them leave the reader with some food for thought. Some of the chapters are less satisfying, and a few are so brief that one wonders about the reason for their inclusion. An example is chapter 17, “Accidental Davening: Dyskinesia and Cantillation,” which is only two pages in length. Sacks does not explain what dyskinesia and cantillation are. The example goes nowhere. This interlude seems puzzling and discordant. Although there is some mixture of more positive aspects of music and the brain, the first two parts of the book, “Part I: Haunted by Music” and “Part II: A Range of Musicality,” focus on the ways that musicophilia can become an affliction. Sacks tells of several cases that show how music can provoke seizures, a condition called musicogenic epilepsy. Sacks cites the case of the nineteenth century music critic Nikonov, who, after his first major seizure at a performance of an opera, became so sensitive to music that he developed a phobia of music and had to give up his profession. Sometimes music can go beyond the irritating mental replaying of musical tunes and phrases to full-blown musical hallucinations where a person cannot escape the music that constantly plays unbidden through his or her mind. In part 1, these troubling conditions are balanced with the opening chapter about a man who was struck by lightning and was subsequently seized with a passion for classical music, to which he had previously paid scant attention. Over the following years, he became a talented amateur pianist and composer. In part 2, Sacks explores the neurological basis for the extensive variance in musical ability and responsiveness to music that is encompassed within the concept of musicophilia. On one end of the spectrum, there are a number forms of “amusia,” the inability to perceive certain aspects of music. For some people, the amusia has to do with tone deafness and lack of apprehension of melody, sequences of notes, or pitch.

Oliver Sacks is a physician and professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, most of which examine case studies of neurological phenomena, including Awakenings (1973), which led to an Oscar-nominated film; The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985); and the autobiographical memoir, Uncle Tungsten (2001).

Musicophilia / sacks

507

For others, the amusia falls into the category of rhythm and meter. Still others have minimal emotional response to music. In some instances, neuroscientists are beginning to identify damage or abnormalities in areas of the brain that seem to correspond with certain types of amusia. Still, therapeutic interventions for these conditions do not yet exist. Two of the chapters in this section focus on problems stemming from the auditory sensory function. In “Pitch Imperfect: Cochlear Amusia,” Sacks explains that because of the extreme complexity and delicacy of the ear, many things can impair hearing. The next chapter, “In Living Stereo: Why We Have Two Ears,” he further elaborates on the importance of the way we “hear” music. These two chapters could have benefited from a more extensive discussion, perhaps with illustrations or diagrams, of the auditory canal in relation to the brain. Still, an important cautionary point is the vulnerability of the ear, especially its delicate hair cells, to loud noises, with which we are bombarded constantly. As Sacks points out, “once the hair cells are destroyed, it has been long thought, they are lost forever.” On the opposite side of the spectrum, Sacks discusses several aspects of unusual musical ability. He devotes one chapter to absolute pitch, and other chapters look at people who compensate for other deficiencies, disabilities, and losses by the intensive development of musical talents. Examples include musical savants and blindness. In the case of absolute pitch, which is actually independent of musical inclination, neuroscientists have found “an exaggerated asymmetry between the volumes of the right and left planum temporale” in people with absolute pitch. This centrality of the planum temporale for the perception of both speech and music among other things has led researchers to examine intriguing questions about the interrelationship and origins of both linguistic and musical abilities. Citing the German Romantic writer Novalis—“Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution”—in the third and fourth parts of this book Sacks highlights the ways that music can become an effective therapeutic intervention. Sacks makes an important distinction between music therapy that is directed toward problems with movement and motor coordination and music therapy that requires not just music itself but also the empathetic and relational skills of the therapist to help the patient with memory loss. In connection with movement, one chapter is devoted to the role of music therapy in Parkinson’s disease. The “right” kind of music, usually legato with a clear rhythm, can help patients with Parkinsonian symptoms “entrain” their movement, particularly walking, with the steady rhythm of the music. Sacks discusses even more dramatic and inspiring instances where music can become a lifeline for people with amnesia or dementia. One chapter focuses on the welldocumented case of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who suffered devastating amnesia as a result of a brain infection, herpes encephalitis, that affected the memory parts of his brain. He exists only in the moment, with no past memories and no way to hold on to new memories. Wearing has said: “It’s like being dead.” However, when he plays music or conducts his procedural memory along with the structure and momentum of the music, he comes alive again. Once the music stops, he returns to a “lost place.”

508

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Regarding working with patients who have varying types of dementia, music therapy can have more global effects. It can immediately and dramatically bring patients out of an inner world to which they have retreated or calm patients who are excessively agitated. Beyond this, Sacks points out that the reason for the effectiveness of music therapy is that “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion, and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.” Music can improve their quality of life and restore some sense of self. Sacks notes that “improvements of mood, behavior, even cognitive function” can continue for extended periods of time after the therapeutic encounter with music. One of the most affecting chapters addresses music and emotion. Sacks speaks of personal experiences when music pulled him out of states of grief and depression. Whether it is grief or joy, music has the power to stimulate emotional response and release when nothing else can. Interestingly, this moving chapter is almost devoid of any connections with neurobiology. Sacks summarizes the emotional effects of music by saying that music “has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.” This major topic could benefit from more integration of neurobiology and emotional states that has been developed, for example, in works such as Daniel Siegel’s The Mindful Brain (2007), where experiential and neuroscientific knowledge come together in illuminating ways. Musicophilia has much to offer. At the same time, the reader is left with a sense of missed opportunities. Sacks presents many topics that arouse curiosity about the ways that the human brain and mind process music. However, each topic and each case remain rather discrete. Many ideas are put forward; few are developed fully. Sacks successfully shows that musicophilia is a crucial part of being human. He points the way toward a greater neurological understanding of how and why music is such an integral part of the human experience and why it can be so devastating to an individual when the facility for music goes awry. In the end, music retains an affective power that neuroscience may never be fully able to explain. Karen Gould Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 1 (September 1, 2007): 4. The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 10 (November 2, 2007): 63. Commentary 124, no. 5 (December, 2007): 73-77. Entertainment Weekly, no. 961 (October 26, 2007): 71. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 16 (August 15, 2007): 843. Library Journal 132, no. 15 (September 15, 2007): 76. New Statesman 137 (October 29, 2007): 55-56. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 28, 2007): 16. Science News 172, no. 19 (November 10, 2007): 303. Time 170, no. 17 (October 22, 2007): 89.

509

NADA Author: Carmen Laforet (1921-2004) First published: Nada, 1944, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman Introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa Publisher: Modern Library (New York). 244 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The 1940’s Locale: Barcelona, Spain A coming-of-age novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who travels to Barcelona to attend a university and live with her deceased mother’s relatives as she searches for her identity in her new family, school, and society, which mirror the emptiness and confusion that many Spaniards felt in the wake of the Spanish Civil War Principal characters: Andrea, the eighteen-year-old protagonist, who moves to Barcelona to attend a university and live with maternal relatives Her grandmother, the religious matriarch of the family Angustias, her aunt Gloria, Juan’s wife Juan, Andrea’s uncle Román, Andrea’s uncle Ena, Andrea’s friend at the university Jaime, Ena’s boyfriend Pons, Andrea’s friend at the university, who introduces her to bohemian culture Gerardo, a schoolmate who takes an interest in Andrea Antonia, the ornery maid of Calle de Aribau Don Jerónimo Sans, Angustias’s boss and secret lover Guíxols, a bohemian artist with a studio that serves as a haven for other young artists and Andrea Iturdiaga, a bohemian artist Calle de Aribau, the house where Andrea’s family lives

Sixty years after its original publication in Spain in 1944, Nada has been translated and published in English, bringing not only the coming-of-age story of one young girl but also the story of a country coming out of a civil war and into a fascist regime to a new audience. A longtime classic in Spain, Carmen Laforet’s Nada captured the void, the nothing (nada) that many Spaniards felt under Francisco Franco’s rule in the years immediately following the civil war (1936-1939) and hinted of the artistic revolution that was to occur by paralleling the struggles Spaniards experienced with the pain of an adolescent girl. Twenty-three-year-old Laforet wrote Nada in a style that is

510

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

simultaneously calming and unnerving, that elicits pity and unease, as she shares the heartbreaking tale of eighteen-year-old protagonist Andrea. Nada begins with Andrea alone at a Barcelona train station after traveling to the city to attend a university. Orphaned as a child, Andrea has moved from relative to relative across Spain and travels to Barcelona to find an education, freedom, and herself. What she does not anticipate finding is a demented and depressing family waiting to welcome Carmen Laforet entered the Spanish her, and potentially destroy her, with their canon at a time when literature was dominated by men. Nada, Laforet’s first dysfunctional structure. The family is made up of the maternal novel, received the Premio Nadal grandmother matriarch, “a black-white blotch award in 1944. She also was awarded Spain’s National Prize for Literature in of a decrepit little old woman,” Andrea’s uncle Juan, whose “face was full of hollows, 1955. Laforet wrote five additional novels, including Al volver la esquina like a skull in the light of the single bulb in the (2004; around the block), La mujer lamp,” Juan’s baby and his wife, Gloria, who nueva (1974; the new woman), and a is “thin and young, her disheveled red hair collection of short stories. falling over her sharp white face,” Andrea’s uncle Román, “with curly hair and an amiable, intelligent face,” and her Aunt Angustias, whose “expression revealed a certain contempt. She had graying hair that fell to her shoulders and a certain beauty in her dark, narrow face.” They inhabit an overcrowded apartment that Andrea’s grandparents purchased new. After the grandfather died, they divided their once-large flat into two, selling one half and forcing themselves and their possessions into the other. The result is a macabre environment, a gothic labyrinth filled with antiques and oppressive furniture precariously stacked and rich yet tattered curtains that keep the sun out and the dust thick. Andrea reflects on the factors that attracted her grandparents and herself to the city and muses, “They came to Barcelona with a hope contrary to the one that had brought me: They wanted rest, and secure, methodical work. The city I thought of as the great change in my life was their safe haven.” Barcelona more than changes Andrea’s life, it offers her one for the first time and serves as a sometimes emotionally painful backdrop for her rites of passage. The apartment on Calle de Aribau becomes its own character—reserved, oppressive, and cold, reflecting the Franco regime, with its isolationist and oppressive control over its inhabitants. The dysfunction that occurs on Calle de Aribau is not limited to the mountains of possessions in various stages of disrepair but extends to the family members themselves. The grandmother is aware only of what she wishes through her dementia. Juan and Román fight nearly to the death regularly, Juan taking breaks only to beat Gloria, who supports the family by running an illegal gambling den out of her sister’s house and secretly selling off pieces of furniture to local ragmen. Aunt

Nada / laforet

511

Angustias judges the other occupants with a puritanical strictness and attends church regularly—not to pray but to criticize how others are praying and dressing. Finally, the bitter maid Antonia, about whom Andrea remarks that “no other creature has ever made a more disagreeable impression on me,” is kind only to her dog Trueno and sneaks around the house taking pleasure in everyone’s pain. Andrea describes the bizarre human menagerie and their oppressive setting as “a thousand odors, sorrows, stories, rose from the paving stones, climbed to the balconies or entrances along Calle de Aribau. . . . A mix of lives, qualities, and tastes—that’s what Calle de Aribau was. And I: one more element on it, small and lost.” Such is the overall theme of Nada: one girl feeling obsolete and unaccepted, along with a country waking up from a bloody civil war to discover its citizens too were small and lost. In the midst of the familial madness, Andrea quietly tries to go unnoticed, so as not to encounter a lecture, a possible flying hatchet, or an attack on her lifestyle from Angustias, who threatens, “If I’d gotten hold of you when you were younger, I’d have beaten you to death”—to have prevented her from growing up to be wicked and without morals. Andrea finds a degree of refuge at the university, where, awkward and introverted, poor and shabbily dressed, she draws the attention of her classmates and is pitied by Ena, a beautiful, wealthy, and popular girl. Ena and Andrea become fast inseparable friends, studying together at Ena’s house and socializing with Ena’s friends. The time Andrea spends with her are the only moments of happiness that Andrea has; she is so intoxicated by Ena that at times she doubts whether their friendship truly exists. Yet through this relationship and others she develops, Andrea is constantly reminded of what she does not have; she spends her meager monthly allowance in just days to impress her friends, then goes hungry for the remainder of the month, resorting to drinking the water used to boil vegetables. In fact, Andrea lacks more than money; she lacks the family, love, and confidence her friends possess, increasing her feelings of separation and casting her into deep despair. The one almost normal aspect of Andrea’s life is shattered when Ena develops a friendship with Román that excludes Andrea. Out of fear for her friend’s well-being, and motivated by personal jealousy, Andrea tries to end the relationship; in doing so, she discovers secrets about Ena’s mother and witnesses an unsettling side of Ena. Andrea makes other friends to fill the void left by Ena, but each relationship only reminds her that she does not truly fit in. Pons, a friend from school, introduces Andrea to the bohemian art scene by taking her to his friend Guíxols’s studio. Although his friends welcome her, it is more out of a curiosity than acceptance. Poor and alone, she is never able to relate fully to their conversations and experiences. Her feelings of isolation climax when Pons invites her to a dance at his parents’ house. Feeling as if she were Cinderella, Andrea arrives at the dance to find that she is grossly underdressed (although in her finest clothes), and, after Pons declares his feelings for another girl, she leaves the party embarrassed and ashamed. It is at that moment when Andrea “began to realize that it is much easier to endure great setbacks than everyday petty annoyances.” Andrea has plenty of both. Laforet parallels the feelings of isolation, political conformity versus nonconformity, and sexual and artistic repression that followed the civil war through the life-

512

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

changing events that Andrea experiences in Nada. The characters of Calle de Arbrau are isolated in their fortress of an apartment, with little interaction with outsiders, and what interaction they have is frequently negative. Andrea too suffers from feelings of isolation and alienation, both within her relatives’ home and with her friends at the university. Although she has family and friends for the first time in her life, she still feels as if she is an outsider and never truly assimilates. Many citizens of Spain experienced similar feelings under Franco’s regime, as if they no longer belonged within their country, their home. Andrea, in her quest to create a new life for herself, struggles between conformity and nonconformity. She conforms to Angustias’s strict laws, silently takes the abuse from her uncles, and goes through her university invisible. Ultimately, she ignores Angustias’s rules, stating, “I realized I could endure everything: the cold that permeated my worn clothes, the sadness of my absolute poverty, the dull horror of the filthy house. Everything except her control over me.” She rebels against her uncles as well. Andrea also seeks out nonconformity at school by socializing with the Barcelona bohemian sect, discussing art and politics (even if only as an outsider). As in Andrea’s world, such decisions to conform or revolt took place throughout Spain, as many Spaniards rebelled against the fascist rule and created an artistic revolution, their own coming-of-age. Laforet draws further parallels between Spain’s sexual repression and sexual tensions surrounding Nada’s characters. Throughout the novel, there are subtle references to and innuendo about incest and adultery. Gloria had a relationship with Román while carrying Juan’s baby. The current status of this relationship is unknown. At the same time, Román makes several uncomfortable comments toward Andrea and blatant advances toward young Ena, while carrying on a secret affair with the maid Antonia. There are also undertones of feelings of more than friendship between Ena and Andrea, which are interrupted by Ena’s boyfriend Jaime, who takes Andrea on the couple’s outings. Even Aunt Angustias’s skeletons are exposed, as her love affair with her married boss, Don Jerónimo Sans, is revealed, forcing her to join a convent. After a difficult and emotionally uncomfortable coming-of-age of a girl and a nation, Laforet allows Andrea to realize that “perhaps the meaning of life for a woman consists solely in being discovered like this, looked at so that she herself feels radiant with light. Not in looking at, not in listening to the poisons and stupidities of others, but in experiencing fully the joy of her own feelings and sensations, her own despair and happiness. Her own wickedness or goodness.” This revelation gives Andrea meaning and strength and was a daring sentiment for Laforet to write under Franco, since it not only went against the government by empowering women but also suggested that meaning for Spaniards was not defined by what the government deemed acceptable but by what uniquely constituted the individual during a time when individuality was discouraged. Sara Vidar

Nada / laforet

513

Review Sources The Guardian, June 23, 2007, p. 16. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 23 (December 1, 2006): 1192. New Statesman 136 (March 5, 2007): 59. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 15, 2007): 8. The Times Literary Supplement, March 16, 2007, p. 21. The Washington Post, February 18, 2007, p. BW15.

514

THE NAMING OF THE DEAD Author: Ian Rankin (1960) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 452 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Novel Time: July 1-July 9, 2005 Locale: Scotland, mainly Edinburgh The sixteenth novel in the well-known series featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus finds Rebus facing multiple challenging cases just when world leaders are gathered for the G8 summit near Edinburgh Principal characters: John Rebus, an aging detective inspector with the Edinburgh police, officially the Lothian and Borders Police Siobhan “Shiv” Clarke, the detective sergeant who works with Rebus and is placed in charge of a serial killer case, even though Rebus outranks her James Corbyn, the new chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police who puts Rebus and Clarke on suspension so their case will not embarrass Scotland during the G8 summit Ellen Wylie, a woman connected with the serial killer case to whom Rebus turns for information Mairie Henderson, a newspaper reporter and acquaintance who wants information from Rebus and vice versa David Steelforth, a London-based Special Branch (S012) commander overseeing the police during the G8 summit Gareth Tench, a former preacher, now a popular Edinburgh councilor Keith Carberry, a young thug who seems close to Councilor Tench Morris Gerald “Big Ger” Cafferty, a longtime gangster leader in the Edinburgh underworld who also knows Carberry Teddy Clarke, Siobhan’s father, an aging hippie activist who has come with his wife to join the protestors and demonstrators surrounding the G8 summit Eve Clarke, Siobhan’s mother, who is physically assaulted while in the demonstrators’ Peace Camp Santal, a young woman at the camp who attaches herself to Siobhan’s parents

Ian Rankin’s The Naming of the Dead takes its title from a ceremony organized by protesters at the G8 summit of world leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July, 2005. The marchers climbed to the top of Calton Hill in Edinburgh and solemnly read the names of lives lost during the Iraq War as a dramatic feature of their antiwar demonstration.

The Naming of the Dead / rankin

515

Rankin’s sixteenth novel in the Detective Inspector John Rebus series is set during the week of the summit, and the ceremonial reading of names captures some of the political resonance of the hundreds of thousands of people who came to Edinburgh during that week. The title also signals other deaths, such as the victims whose killer Rebus is seeking, and others murdered during the course of the novel. The novel opens with Ian Rankin has won Edgar and Gold Rebus at the funeral of his younger brother, Dagger Awards and the Cartier Michael, who had apparently died of a mas- Diamond Dagger award for lifetime sive stroke at age fifty-four. On a much achievement. In 2007, he received the broader level, the naming of the dead sug- Edinburgh Award and was named a gests remembering all losses and the lament Deputy Lieutenant of Edinburgh. The voiced by Rebus that often one can do little Naming of the Dead won a British except name them. Despite that, Rebus is Book Award and was named the determined to seek justice and prevent further Worldbooks Crime Thriller of the Year. murders by at least one killer, a serial killer in the case at hand. Rebus has been with the Crime Investigation Department (CID) of the police in Edinburgh (the Lothian and Borders Police) for many years. He is nearing mandatory retirement, which he does not want to contemplate. Work is essentially his only interest, other than smoking and drinking too much and knowing a lot about popular music. Most of his superiors and some of his fellow officers, however, would be glad not to have him around. Except for his colleague and protégée Detective Sergeant Siobhan “Shiv” Clarke, he is basically a loner, antithetical to supervision, an unpredictable “rogue” cop who follows his own rules. That he is obsessively dedicated and solves his cases has made him a legend, but that too serves to distance him from most of the others. More than once it is suggested to him that he just coast through his last year on the force. Rebus is weary, depressed about his brother’s death, frustrated with his superior officers, and more introspective than ever, but he will not slack in his work. He does not even want to know how to. Despite the many hundreds of extra police and law enforcement personnel from different agencies who have been assigned duties connected with the G8 summit meeting, his superior, Chief Constable James Corbyn, specifically excludes Rebus as a troublemaker and orders him to stay behind at the police station. Rebus gets involved anyway, when a call comes in that the body of a Labour member of Parliament, Ben Webster of Scotland, has been found on the ground below the walls of Edinburgh Castle during a high-level political meeting and party. The word is that Webster committed suicide. Rebus thinks it equally likely that he was pushed rather than jumped, especially when Rebus learns that Webster was campaigning against the arms trade. Also going on at the same time is a case involving the murders of at least three men, all of whom were recently released from prison for rape or sexual-assault

516

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

crimes. Siobhan Clarke has been assigned the case, with Rebus to work with her, even though he outranks her. The top police are not particularly interested, considering who the victims are. Now new evidence has been found at Coolie Well, where possible clothes of the victims have been left displayed in a wooded grove, as though the killer is leaving clues and daring the police to catch him or her. Chief Constable Corbyn orders Clarke and Rebus not to work on the case because he does not want the media to report such local embarrassments when the world is focusing on Edinburgh and the G8 summit. When he learns that they are still pursuing it, he suspends them from duty. They continue anyway. Rebus learns that there is a Web site that provides alerts about sexual-assault criminals being released from prison. It seems designed to encourage the unidentified killer to find new victims. One of the people who apparently helps maintain the site is Ellen Wylie, who for personal reasons clearly has no sympathy for such criminals. Rebus has a heavy task trying to persuade Wylie to reveal what she knows and how much she is involved. The detective team also suspects a local crime figure, Morris Gerald “Big Ger” Cafferty, because one of the murder victims was formerly working as his muscle man. This brings Rebus into contact with Mairie Henderson, a wellknown newspaper reporter who had ghostwritten a biography of Cafferty. Rebus wants information from her, and she wants information from him about the serial killer case, but he does not know if he can trust her regarding splashing the news in the headlines in the midst of the summit. Others who seem to be involved include an Edinburgh councilman, Gareth Tench, who before he entered politics had been a popular evangelical preacher, well known in the city for his work with wayward boys. Keith Carberry, a young hooligan, seems to be close to Tench but also close to Cafferty. Rebus suspects that Tench may be trying to take over the territory that Cafferty claims as his own section of the city and that Tench’s motives may be as self-serving as those of the current crime boss. The situation becomes more critical when another murder occurs, though this one is not of a released sex offender. A further complication arises when David Steelforth, the Special Branch commander in charge of security, approaches Rebus about the case but is unwilling to explain his interest. Throughout all this interaction with an intricate cast of well-drawn characters, another problem arises. Siobhan Clarke’s parents, both of whom have a long history of demonstrating and working for various causes—the peace movement, feeding the hungry, and others—have come to Edinburgh to join the multitude who are using the summit to gain publicity for their political action issues. Teddy and Eve Clarke had not approved of their only child becoming a police officer, a role they consider too conformist to the establishment. Siobhan has distanced herself from them but wants to see them. When she locates them in the Peace Camp, they are glad to see her, but they seem more engaged in what is taking place at the moment. They also seem more interested in a young woman who goes by the name of Santal, who has attached herself to them, than they are in their daughter. As the daily television reports show, a ring of police surround the Peace Camp, primarily to keep the protesters from getting closer to the big eight world leaders.

The Naming of the Dead / rankin

517

Some of those inside the camp become too noisy and confrontational, or the police become confrontational, and physical assaults occur. Word comes that Eve Clarke has been hit in the head, and she has to be taken to a hospital. Suddenly, nothing else matters to Siobhan except her mother’s welfare and finding out who hit her. It galls her to think that this was probably the work of a fellow police officer. In her attempt to locate video footage that might include the attack and to identify the attacker, she arranges a meeting with Big Ger Cafferty to get his help—the last thing she would want her superiors (or even Rebus) to know about. As if there were not enough stress and anxiety going on that week in Scotland, on July 7, the second day of the summit meeting, multiple severe terrorist bombs wreak havoc, creating fear and causing considerable loss of life, in London. The series of subplots that make up the overall plot are carefully interwoven and ultimately lead toward a common theme, that of the omnipresence of evil. Criminal acts, especially those based on greed and a fundamental lack of humanity toward others, abound at all levels. No one is safe. World leaders often add to the corruption and deceit rather than try to eliminate it, but the “common person” may be equally part of the problem rather than the solution. Police officers and others who work in law enforcement may also be criminals themselves; preachers may be as guilty as mobsters; those who are victimized may in turn victimize others. Ian Rankin is often labeled the originator of “Tartan Noir,” detective fiction by authors from Scotland and set in Scotland. The Naming of the Dead is firmly set in Edinburgh and the immediate surrounding area, and the city itself becomes a rounded character with many facets. However, in terms of crime, the setting could be any large urban area. The novel, especially by invoking the actual event of the summit meeting of eight world leaders, clearly implies a global perspective. Rankin is considered the number-one best seller of crime fiction in the United Kingdom, and The Naming of the Dead was named the Worldbooks Crime Thriller of the Year, as was the novel that preceded it, Fleshmarket Close (2004). This testimony to his popularity is equaled by his high praise from critics. Rankin’s writing is considered superb,including his use of dialogue and his attention to characters and character development. What Rankin accomplishes in The Naming of the Dead is to demonstrate again that some of the finest writing in contemporary literature is in the genre of detective fiction. His police procedural portrays a world that seems to capture well the spirit and realities of the times. The Naming of the Dead, by depicting the work and dedication during one week in the life of Rebus and Siobhan Clarke, also keeps alive the idea of justice and the need for compassion and individual responsibility. Lois A. Marchino

518

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 6. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 55. The New York Times 156 (April 2, 2007): E1-E6. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 155-156. The Times Literary Supplement, November 10, 2006, p. 21. The Washington Post, April 23, 2007, p. C7.

519

NANCY CUNARD Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist Author: Lois Gordon (1938) Publisher: Columbia University Press (New York). 447 pp. $32.50 Type of work: Biography Time: 1896-1965 Locale: Europe, America The turbulent life of modernist poet and publisher Cunard, Jazz Age socialite turned journalist and political activist Principal personages: Nancy Cunard, wealthy daughter of an English baronet who spent her life and her fortune in the pursuit of literary and social causes Maud Cunard, Nancy’s mother, American heiress (Lady “Emerald”) and premier London society hostess who disinherited her daughter for publicly advocating black rights George Moore, Irish writer, an early and lasting influence, and (as one of Maud’s lovers) possibly Nancy’s natural father Henry Crowder, African American jazz pianist and Nancy’s lover in the 1930’s Janet Flanner, Paris-based columnist for The New Yorker, Nancy’s longtime friend and correspondent

To readers having more than a nodding acquaintance with literary modernism, Nancy Cunard will be something of a known figure. Her achievements as publisher, anthologist, poet, and general bad girl of letters have secured her a firm if secondary place in the genealogy of early twentieth century arts and culture. Even those unfamiliar with the literary history of this period and unaware of her actual achievements might well recognize Cunard from the by-now iconic photographs made of her by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton in the 1920’s. With her close-cropped hair and hard, chiseled features, the thin arms braceletted to the elbow with dozens of her signature ivory bands, she appears like some kind of fierce flapper siren, an embodiment of Jazz Age glamour, all edge and intensity, the image of insouciant daring and primitivist yearning. Lois Gordon’s new biography, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist, however, suggests that Cunard was considerably more than this modernist pinup. Gordon sees Cunard not only as a vivid emblem of the new twentieth century aesthetic but also as a deeply involved political activist, a progressive campaigner for black rights, and intransigent foe of fascism in all of its forms. The biography mounts a persuasive case for making a principal player of a woman whom other commentators on the period have so often made a colorful figure in the background.

520

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Certainly she was colorful. Socially and sexually rebellious, with a history of headlong passions and furious enthusiasms, Cunard was a dazzling figure of avant-garde bohemianism, a high-profile, high-energy critic of artistic conventions and moral orthodoxies. She slept little, ate less, and seemed perpetually on the move, devouring experience with a gusto that delighted and shocked her peers and tortured and scandalized her parents. She was a prodigious drinker and defiant drunk and was promiscuous on a positively epic scale. Yet these excesses went hand in hand with a fastidious set of manners and real delicacy of feeling; she had an air of elegance at odds with her acts of violence. What any writer about Nancy Cunard must try to explain are the causes that fueled such extremes of behavior. What drove this mercurial aristocrat to her obsessive pursuit of unpopular causes and constructive social action while pushing her with equal force toward a systematic program of selfdestruction? What made her a consummate “lost generation” insider in the immediate post-World War I years and made her such a curious outsider, an eccentric anachronism, in the decades thereafter? What linked her selfless martyrdom and her selfish manias? Gordon goes some way toward delivering satisfying answers to these crucial questions, supplying a persuasive psychological profile that clearly had its roots in a difficult, even scarring childhood. Nancy Cunard was the only child of Sir Bache Cunard and the American millionaire Maud Burke, distant and unloving parents—the father benignly absent, the mother actively antagonistic. While born an heiress to the shipping fortune and spending her childhood in a bona fide castle, her life was scarcely that of a storybook princess. It was lonely, regimented, chill. Abandoned to cold and repressive governesses, restricted in diet and dress, drilled in relentless studies, she quickly formed a hatred of tyranny and a fiery resistance to upper-class authority. Her mother, for decades a brilliant society hostess and patroness of the opera (as well as longtime mistress of its conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham), epitomized to Nancy the fossilized conventions and false pieties of the belle époque world she was expected to embrace. Though she did not rebel at the time, she would later define herself precisely through this lifelong rebellion against a smug antiegalitarian ethos she forever associated with “her ladyship.” She was also a deeply romantic young girl, influenced by another of her mother’s lovers, the Irish writer George Moore, and inspired by her own solitary reading of lyric poetry. By 1914, her coming-out year, she was not just another wealthy debutante, she was a fully formed romantic idealist and at least a closet anarchist. Her life would be forged around these identities. The years 1913-1919 were teeming with activities for Cunard. She was a charter member of the “Corrupt Coterie,” young aristocrats and artists and writers who met regularly at London’s Eiffel Tower Restaurant, and later the Café Royal, for monumental bouts of drink and talk and sex. She became intimate with Ezra Pound and the Imagists, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, Bloomsbury and the Omega Workshop

A distinguished professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Lois Gordon is a critic of drama and American culture, having published several books on Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

Nancy Cunard / gordon

521

designers. New movements in art were bursting forth, and these “Bright Young Things” were in the thick of it all. Cunard was writing poetry by day and making history—or at least headlines—by night. When the war started, the volume was turned up even higher: a romance with a soldier who was killed, a rebound marriage with another that was dissolved, a breakdown after the whole awful bloodbath was over. Given the epidemic of disillusionment among the young generation, her collapse was not really surprising. Besides, since childhood Cunard had regularly experienced disappointment in her restless pursuit of an ideal that would make her feel whole, satisfied, secure. She tried to find it romantically with men, then politically with social causes, but, as Gordon makes clear, it never did and never could materialize. The pattern had been set early on: She needed something important to do, a quest worthy of her talents and energies, but she inwardly questioned the possibility of success and was too often frustrated by the outcomes. She launched grand adventures in spite of their futility. Her life of relentless, frenetic travel suggests a flight from loneliness as much as a search for stimulation and meaningful work. Hers is a history of undeflected recklessness that, while producing clear casualties on all sides, ultimately allowed her to achieve some extraordinary things. The achievements began in Paris, where Cunard arrived in 1920 to find an artistic and intellectual home in the expatriate community there. She had affairs with Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon, godfathers of Dadaism and Surrealism. She inspired novels and poems, sculptures, paintings, and photographs—from Ernest Hemingway to Aldous Huxley, Constantin Brancusi to Cecil Beaton. She published three volumes of her own poetry—passionately confessional verse, with hints of T. S. Eliot in the fragmented imagery. She founded The Hours Press, publishing experimental writing (the first work of Samuel Beckett) and producing hand-crafted books with a distinctively modernist design. Most important, she found her purpose: In the jazz clubs of Paris, just as later in the dance halls of Harlem, she discovered her passion for black culture and began a long campaign to make it better known. She took a black lover, jazz pianist Henry Crowder, and wrote a scathing exposé of her mother’s racist response to their relationship. For this she was disinherited, and for the rest of her life money would be increasingly difficult to come by. She now had to produce an income by her pen, and she did, throwing herself into political and social issues and writing about them with the same uncompromising passion she had focused on the world of literature. She researched and assembled the vast anthology Negro (1934), which was the first ever compendium of black culture studies—an 800-page volume from 150 writers, with some 200 entries covering everything from the history of the slave trade to the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. This mix of scholarship and personal recollection, music, poetry, and photography was a breakthrough publication and seen as such among black communities on three continents, though it generated little but hatred for her as a race traitor in her own country. Crucial as the quest for racial justice was to Cunard, her involvement in the Spanish Civil War was an even more defining struggle, and its failure was the great lingering catastrophe of her life. She immersed herself in the Republican cause, seeing it as the front line of the fight against fascism; and she spent the war years as

522

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, walking where troops walked, living where they lived, eating what they ate. She endured staggering deprivations and dangers and wrote about it all. She enlisted other writers too, producing the 1937 volumes Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español (The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People) and Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. Even after the war, she never really abandoned her resistance to the Francisco Franco regime in Spain. She organized food relief, coordinated resettlement plans, worked tirelessly and gave generously until she was officially ejected from the country and barred from reentry. By this time, the 1950’s, Cunard was living part of the year in an isolated cottage in France’s remote Dordogne region and traveling nonstop the rest of the year to visit friends. It is not a pretty story. Alone much of the time, in alarmingly bad health (emphysema from the eternal Gauloise at her lips, emaciated and anemic from the herculean drinking and infrequent meals), she eked out a living as she had during World War II in London, surviving on tinned meats, biscuits, and whiskey, and banging out an endless stream of poems, manifestos, translations, letters, and prospectuses for antifascist projects. Finally, having miraculously gotten herself to Paris after an enforced commitment to a London psychiatric hospital, she flung herself, barely able to walk, from hotel to taxi to the street, where she was found ill and unconscious three days later. She died alone, in a common ward, burned out but somehow splendid, even heroic, in her refusal to give up a life lived on her own terms. There has already been one telling of this life, Anne Chisholm’s award-winning Nancy Cunard (1979), and in many important respects that earlier account has not been surpassed, in spite of additional material being available. Certainly, Chisholm is the more engaging, the better writer. Gordon, by comparison, can be flat and seems singularly at odds with the throb and hum of her subject’s story. Readers do not need to experience on every page the propulsive energy, the tense and dizzying drama that characterized Cunard’s life, but surely some of that pace and its breathtaking vibrancy should make its way into the text. It does not. Gordon is more a coordinator of biographical material than a writer of gripping narrative. Instead of a fluid string of events and figures mingling to create a riveting story, we too often get a series of chronological entries of the sort more appropriate to literary encyclopedias. On Imagism, say, she gives definitions, descriptions, principal practitioners, relation to Cunard; on Bloomsbury, definitions, descriptions, principal achievements, principal anecdotes, relation to Cunard; on World War I, principal causes, principal outcomes, relation to Cunard. Chapters begin with a kind of overview and then backtrack to fill in the details. It makes for a jumpy narrative, full of first-rate factual material (extensive revelatory passages from various Cunard diaries, for instance), but lacking imaginative shape and evocative power. Nevertheless, a clear picture does emerge here, and it is an irresistibly striking one. If she was not, in Gordon’s sweeping phrase, “one of the most unusual women of the twentieth century and perhaps of all time,” Nancy Cunard was still a personality of fascinating range and astonishing ambition, a genuine eccentric whose hypnotic

Nancy Cunard / gordon

523

character inspired individual artists and whole communities. In her fevered pursuit of a few cherished ideals (whether of romantic love or racial equality or political freedom) she blazed a path that only the bravest and most high-minded have had the courage to follow. Thomas J. Campbell

Review Sources American Book Review 28, no. 6 (September/October, 2007): 21-22. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 420-421. Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 28-29. The Nation 285, no. 5 (August 13, 2007): 30-35. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 1, 2007): 1-11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 172. The Times Literary Supplement, July 6, 2007, p. 34.

524

NATURE’S ENGRAVER A Life of Thomas Bewick Author: Jenny Uglow Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). Illustrated. 458 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography, fine arts Time: 1753-1828 Locale: England, primarily Northumberland Uglow’s biography describes the life and work of Thomas Bewick, a gifted engraver whose charming but accurate wood engravings provided the ordinary people of his age with their first lessons in natural history Principal personages: Thomas Bewick, English engraver and book illustrator Ralph Beilby, jeweler and engraver who was Bewick’s master and subsequently his partner Reverend Christopher Gregson, vicar of Ovingham and cleric who tutored and guided Bewick Isabella Bewick, née Elliot, Bewick’s wife Gilbert Gray, freethinking bookbinder who influenced Thomas Bewick

Whether they know it or not, most Americans and Canadians have seen the works of Thomas Bewick. His small, intriguing, seemingly anonymous wood engravings have been reproduced so many times—in books and magazines, on pieces of advertising ephemera, and on greeting cards—that they have become practically invisible. Yet these modest images were once revolutionary, a contradiction that Jenny Uglow explores in the engaging biography Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. Bewick was born on August 10 or 11, 1753, near the village of Eltringham in the northeastern English county of Northumberland. The River Tyne runs beside the village, and the Scottish border lies just a few miles north. Growing up on his parents’ farm of Cherryburn, Bewick was a rowdy boy who might have come to nothing had the Reverend Christopher Gregson, who ran a school in nearby Ovingham, not taken him under his wing. It was while he was in school that Bewick began to pursue what had already become his two overriding interests—drawing and nature. He also began to turn against the crueler aspects of “sport” as enjoyed by his neighbors. A particular incident that stuck in Bewick’s memory illustrates both the tenor of the times and the boy’s developing attitudes. He had caught a panic-stricken hare that was being chased by dogs and turned it over to a farmer who promised to protect it. Instead, the farmer

Nature’s Engraver / uglow

525

broke one of the animal’s legs and set it loose again to give the dogs a few more minutes’ enjoyment. When he was fourteen, Bewick was apprenticed to jeweler and engraver Ralph Beilby, who lived upriver in the bustling town of Newcastle upon Tyne. Significantly enough, the last drawing he made before leaving home showed a horse tethered to a tree. Although the apprenticeship allowed Bewick to learn the basics of engraving on copper and silver, he felt that he was being denied the opportunity to learn the finer points of the craft. The young man also found his master somewhat overbearing. By this time, however, he had developed an interest in engraving on wood, a technique that he would eventually transform into an art. Bewick and his contemporaries had grown up with woodcuts, crude images produced from cutting designs into pieces of wood along the grain. Bewick’s particular achievement lay in producing “wood engravings” on the end of the block of wood, cut across the grain. This technique allowed for much finer detail, particularly since Bewick used precision metalworking tools that he himself had adapted. At the time, Great Britain was experiencing an increasing demand for books and a growing sophistication in popular taste. Bewick capitalized on these trends by seeking out a broad range of models for his engravings, many from the Continent, and many by such noted artists as Albrecht Dürer. Although he remained apprenticed to Ralph Beilby until 1774, Bewick established a reputation in the printing world and was soon commanding handsome prices for his little blocks of wood. Among the first important books that he illustrated were an edition of The New Lottery Book of Birds and Beasts (1771) and a version of Aesop’s fables. A more ambitious and sophisticated project, undertaken by Newcastle printer Thomas Saint, was an edition of Fables by the Late Mr. Gay (1778). The “Mr. Gay” in question was versifier Thomas Gay. Newcastle bookbinder Gilbert Gray was to have a profound influence on Bewick. During his apprentice days, Bewick spent evenings and early mornings reading through Gray’s collection of books. He also absorbed much of the radical philosophy of Gray’s circle of friends and apprentices, signing a petition against the conflict that Americans know as the Revolutionary War. In 1776, Bewick visited Scotland, whose freedom-loving ways he admired, and the British capital of London, which he found stultifying and disease-ridden. Bewick gladly returned to Northumberland in 1777. The same year, after some hesitation, he agreed to become Beilby’s partner, overseeing the engraving business while Beilby branched out into making and selling watchmaking tools and parts. Bewick took on his brother John as the first of many apprentices but continued his wood engraving. He had learned to eliminate the borders with which illustrators routinely framed their works, and as a result the open air seemed to permeate his works.

Jenny Uglow is an editor with English publisher Chatto & Windus. Her other books include The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (2002), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, and A Little History of British Gardening (2004).

526

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Bewick lost both his parents in 1785. He was a shy man and had long resisted the idea of marriage, but the following year he proposed to and married Isabella Elliot. Isabella’s sister became their housekeeper, and their first daughter, Jane, was born in 1787. As a man, Bewick was both practical and ambitious. With his business and domestic affairs set firmly in order, he set out to produce his own books with his own illustrations. His first such work was A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), which he had contemplated for nearly a decade. There had been other such studies, but Bewick found their illustrations unconvincing and felt that he could do better. He was right. Whenever possible, he produced his etchings from drawings he had made directly from nature. Some were actual portraits of particular animals whose owners lived in the area. In the case of rarer animals, which he knew only from others’ pictures, he acknowledged his sources. Bewick’s partner Beilby wrote the accompanying texts, which Bewick quietly corrected as necessary. The first edition of the work, which described 260 wild and domestic animals, was produced in two sizes. Fifteen hundred copies were printed in a smaller format, and one hundred in a larger and more expensive one. The work was widely praised, particularly for its etchings, and sold out within a few months. A second edition, with eleven new animals, appeared in 1791, and a third the following year. Bewick was uncomfortable with fame, but the profits from the work allowed him and Beilby to move their offices to a better location. Bewick followed his book on quadrupeds with A History of British Birds, which, like the earlier project, he had been considering for years. For this work, nascent naturalists throughout the country sent him untold specimens, while he himself traveled to County Durham to study a unique collection of more than eight hundred stuffed birds. Although restricting his subject to the British Isles, Bewick found that he needed two volumes to do the subject justice. The first, devoted to land birds, appeared in 1797, but not without a serious misunderstanding. Years before, Beilby had attempted to claim credit for the quadruped volume, although the matter had been worked out amicably. Here again the issue arose, with Beilby, who had written the work’s text, intent on identifying himself as author. The partners presented the issue to an informal panel, which recognized Bewick as the sole author. It was to be their last major project together, and the partnership was dissolved at the end of the year. Bewick’s volume on waterbirds appeared in 1804, and although it cost him great effort to produce both the engravings and the text, he ultimately was rewarded. Like its companion, it sold well, and solidified its author’s reputation as one of the leading naturalists of his time. By this time, Bewick found his workshop deluged with work. He added entries to new editions of A General History of Quadrupeds, filled orders (with the help of his apprentices) for etchings from all over Great Britain, and even went into the exacting business of producing plates for banknotes. In the meantime, he was preparing A Supplement to the History of British Birds, which eventually appeared in 1821. Two other major projects occupied Bewick in the 1820’s—his autobiography, A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself, which was destined to appear only in

Nature’s Engraver / uglow

527

1862, and a natural history of British fishes. The latter was never finished, as Bewick died after a short illness on November 8, 1828. As Jenny Uglow makes clear, Thomas Bewick’s success was the result of several complementary factors. The first was his undoubted talent, which he displayed from an early age, filling every available flat surface with drawings. The second factor, which came in his apprentice years, was his recognition of wood engraving as the best medium for his talent. The third was at once the simplest and the most complex— his ability to see the world around him. Bewick saw particular trees where others saw only undifferentiated forest; he recognized individuals where others saw only types. As a boy, he had spent hours looking, and as a young man he learned to reproduce faithfully what he looked at. Many of the wood engravings that he produced were no larger than postage stamps or thumbprints, yet his inclusion of tiny, telling particulars sets them apart from similar works of the period. As a grown man, Bewick renewed his contact with nature by walking for hours through the countryside and by fishing. In writing about Bewick, Jenny Uglow has produced an ideal biography. She draws much of her material from Bewick’s autobiography, but in addition she brings a wide-ranging knowledge to her subject. She clearly knows the geography of Northumberland and is thoroughly at home with the age in which Bewick lived and worked. The latter point is particularly important, as most American readers will be unfamiliar with the context in which Bewick produced his modest masterpieces. Attractively printed and copiously illustrated with examples of Bewick’s works, Nature’s Engraver is the finest imaginable tribute to its subject. Grove Koger

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 32. The Economist 383 (May 26, 2007): 98-99. The Guardian, September 30, 2006, p. 9. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 214. New Statesman 135 (November 13, 2006): 57. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 17, 2007): 8. The New Yorker 83, no. 17 (June 25, 2007): 93. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 12 (March 19, 2007): 52. The Times Literary Supplement, October 6, 2006, p. 36. The Washington Post, June 24, 2007, p. BW10.

528

NEW ENGLAND WHITE Author: Stephen L. Carter (1954) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 556 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: Spring, 2003, to summer, 2004 Locale: The fictional New England city of Elm Harbor Three murders, one thirty years old, draw a university president’s wife into a web of past and present secrets, scattered clues, and dangerous episodes that expose forces and fault lines in her own life as well as in race relations in America Principal characters: Lemaster Carlyle, former White House counsel and recently appointed president of the Ivy League university in Elm Harbor Julia Carlyle, his wife, a deputy dean of the university’s divinity school Vanessa Carlyle, their troubled seventeen-year-old daughter Kellen Zant, an internationally known professor of economics at the university Bruce Vallely, the university’s chief of safety Trevor Land, the university’s old WASP secretary and fixer Cameron Knowland, a rich alumnus, benefactor, and fund-raiser for the current president of the United States Mona Veazie, Julia’s mother, an expatriate leftist academic Byron Dennison, a powerful, now dying, former congressman and Lemaster’s mentor

Like Stephen L. Carter’s first novel The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), New England White is a mystery in which an African American academic from the unnamed Ivy League university located in the fictional New England city of Elm Harbor becomes a detective. This time, that character is Julia Carlyle, a deputy dean of the divinity school, who is the daughter of a prominent black feminist professor, the wife of a powerful black lawyer and former judge who has recently become president of the university, the granddaughter of leading figures of Harlem’s aristocracy in the first half of the twentieth century, the descendant of a family that has been a leading member of the Clan—the informal name for the oldest families of the black elite—since before the Civil War, and the mother of two daughters and two sons. Raised in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her mother taught at Dartmouth and she earned her undergraduate degree, she was a biology teacher for several years before attending the divinity school in Elm Harbor, where she met and married her husband, who was also a student there. The novel begins on the night of the second Friday in November, 2003, as Julia and Lemaster Carlyle are driving home from a fund-raising event, talking about their

New England White / carter

529

evening and about their seventeen-year-old daughter Vanessa. In February, she had set fire to her father’s midnight blue Mercedes on the Town Green in Tyler’s Landing, the nearly all-white bedroom community where the family is living while the president’s house at the university is being renovated. Since then, Vanessa has been in therapy, but they are not sure whether it is helping, and they still do not understand why she did it. Taking a shortcut on a back road, Lemaster loses control of their Cadillac Escalade on the ice, and Stephen L. Carter was a clerk for they have an accident. When they get out to Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall survey the damage, Julia sees something in before becoming a professor of law at the woods next to the road. It turns out to be Yale University in 1982. He is the the dead body of Kellen Zant, a professor author of seven books of nonfiction, of economics at the university—and Julia’s including Reflections of an Affirmative lover more than twenty years ago, before she Action Baby (1991), The Culture of Disbelief (1993), Integrity (1996), met Carlyle. When it becomes clear that Zant has been Civility (1998), God’s Name in Vain: murdered, and that he had been asking ques- The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in tions about the same thirty-year-old story of Politics (2000), as well as the bestanother death on another snowy night in Ty- selling novel The Emperor of Ocean ler’s Landing that has been obsessing their Park (2002). daughter, Julia soon finds herself trying to uncover the truth about both murders. Ultimately, her search will reveal more secrets than she is sure she wants to know—about her lover, her husband, and her daughter, but also about the president of the United States, a Democratic senator who is running against him in 2004, and about hidden currents of power in the black and white communities of Tyler’s Landing, Elm Harbor, and the America beyond. “Time covers truth like snow,” she will write to her mother on the novel’s last page. “The best part of New England life is that it is a very long time before the snow melts.” Carter first came to prominence with his Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (1991), which combined memoir with a cultural analysis of racial attitudes in America. He has since gone on to write books about religion, politics, law, integrity, civility, and loyalty. In New England White, he touches on all of these themes in a tale that is, at once, a detective story, a novel of manners, and a family drama, as well as an exploration of upper-class black characters seldom seen in the fiction of other African American writers. It is hardly surprising, then, that his novel is more than five hundred pages long; what is surprising, perhaps, is that Carter manages to hold his readers’ interest until that last page. He knows how to weave and satisfyingly complicate a plot; to end episodes and chapters with cliff-hangers that make the reader want to turn the page; to create main characters who engage his readers’ curiosity and sympathy

530

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and develop in intriguing ways; to introduce minor characters who are quickly defined and just as effectively used to advance, retard, confuse, divert, and resolve the action; to use humor to lighten the mood and reveal a character; and how to tie up all—well, most—of the loose ends, while exploring the manners and mores, textures and tones, aspirations and foibles, of the black and white, urban and suburban, academic and political worlds he treats. Like John le Carré or Scott Turow, he offers the satisfactions of first-class genre writing, and something more. Thirty years ago, when Lemaster Carlyle was himself an undergraduate at the university he now heads, he lived with three white roommates from wealthy and powerful families: One was a rich playboy who died several years ago; another became the current president of the United States (nicknamed “Scrunchy”), and the third became the Democratic senator who now seeks to defeat him. They were known as the Four Horsemen, and Carlyle was the only serious student in the group: His gravity, sense of duty, and responsibility led the others to nickname him “Big Brother.” Ever since, he has managed to remain close to both the president and the senator who are now running against one another. While these young men were at the university, the body of Gina Joule, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a faculty member who lived in Tyler’s Landing, was found raped and murdered at the town beach. A black teenager from the Elm Harbor ghetto, DeShaun Vinney, who had stolen a BMW the night she died and was reportedly the last person seen with her, was suspected of the crime; when he was pursued by the police and shot, the case was closed. Julia Carlyle reopens it because she senses it is somehow connected both to her daughter’s behavior and Zant’s death. At the same time, the university’s chief of security, an ex-special forces soldier named Bruce Vallely, is asked to begin his own investigation of Zant’s murder on behalf of the school by a senior member of the administration, Trevor Land. Carlyle and Vallely each uncover connections between the two murders, and Carter skillfully moves back and forth between them as they pursue their investigations. Along the way, they meet a wide range of characters, including Jeremy Flew, Lemaster’s multitalented and shadowy assistant; Mary Mallard, an investigative reporter on the trail of a big story; Cameron Knowland, a rich man who is used to getting exactly what he wants; Tricky Tony Tice, a shady lawyer; Arthur Lewin, an economist who sees the world through his own peculiar lens; Representative Byron Dennison, the dying Machiavel who was, and still is, Lemaster’s mentor; Tonya Montez, chief sister lady of the local chapter of the Clan’s women’s society, the Ladybugs; Terry Vinney, DeShaun’s mother; and Roderick Ryan Rutherford, the keeper of the keys to the divinity school’s archives. Carter gives each of these characters his or her own particular angle of vision and distinctive voice. The clues that keep Julia, Bruce, and the reader guessing are every bit as ingenious as any mystery fan could ask and include messages in mirrors, two broken driveway lampposts, a Broadway show poster, a dented fender, a cell phone’s records, a stale box of maple walnut fudge, spyware on a computer, a buried police report, an insurance claim, a secret shrine, a business card, a missing term paper, chocolate smears on a file folder, hidden envelopes, a train ticket, a plane ticket, a diary, and several anagrams. In addition, this novel about the murder of a world-famous economist uses

New England White / carter

531

terms from economics—utility function, inventory risk, all-in auctions, supply curve, market clearing—as both metaphors and clues to understanding. As a novel of manners, New England White focuses on the university and the black upper crust, both of which Carter seems to know intimately. He lightly satirizes the academy’s bureaucratic infighting, the officiousness of people given a small amount of power over others, the rumor mills that operate in any organization, the poses of administrators and faculty, and political correctness. (A faculty plan for a no-confidence vote on President Carlyle for his decision to merge gender and women’s studies is forgotten when he “ascended to a new status, that most beloved of campus figures, the victim.”) The manners and self-importance of the Clan and Carter’s fictional versions of its social organizations—the Ladybugs, the Littlebugs, the Empyreals—are also gently mocked, while the historical reasons for their creation and their importance to some African Americans who live their public lives in worlds where they are a minority are clearly explained. The reality that wealth, status, and education do not prevent a black person from experiencing racism in contemporary America is vividly reflected in several incidents in Julia’s story, and the fact that problems of race and poverty are more often than not placed at the bottom of the national agenda becomes a critical point in the plot as well as a prime motive for the behavior of several characters. The novel also manages to present a contemporary family’s life in a wholly believable and sympathetic way. Julia juggles the tasks that so many women do—working, helping her husband in his work, dropping off and picking up her children, managing the household, dealing with an often uncommunicative teenager, and trying at the same time to get a husband who is distracted, uncomfortable with emotion, and reluctant to express his feelings to communicate with her. (One of Carter’s inside jokes occurs early in the novel, when Lemaster lies in bed flipping channels when Julia wants to talk to him and settles for a few moments on Book TV, “where a famous novelist was explaining why men should never write in women’s voices.” Carter has clearly ignored the advice.) Vanessa is beautifully drawn—from her monosyllabic responses to direct questions to the way she drops her head so that her braids cover her face when her mother tries to talk to her, from her acts of rebellion to her pride in her mother’s growing strength, from her angry outbursts to her sudden displays of warmth and affection, from her surprising knowledge of unexpected subjects to her obvious insight into her parents. Lemaster Carlyle, the powerful, and powerfully buttoned-up, enigma at the heart of the family and the story, is an equally impressive creation. In his second novel, Stephen L. Carter demonstrates that the success of his first was not a matter of luck. While teaching law and writing serious books about important public issues, he has also found the time and imagination to develop his own version of the mystery genre and focus in it on a social landscape that few of his contemporaries have explored. Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr.

532

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 5 (November 1, 2007): 72. The Boston Globe, July 15, 2007, p. E5. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 8, 2007): 11. The New Yorker 83, no. 18 (July 2, 2007): 74-75. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 19 (May 7, 2007): 40. Time 169, no. 27 (July 2, 2007): 82. USA Today, July 4, 2007, p. D4. The Washington Post, July 8, 2007, p. BW03.

533

NIXON AND KISSINGER Partners in Power Author: Robert Dallek (1936) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 740 pp. $32.50 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1969-1974 Locale: Washington, D.C. A brilliant examination of the relationship between Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger that explains their decisive impact on American foreign policy Principal personages: Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), president of the United States, 1969-1974 Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), national security adviser and secretary of state, 1973-1977 Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982), leader of the Soviet Union, 1966-1982 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai; 1898-1976), premier of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976 H. R. “Bob” Haldeman (1926-1993), White House chief of staff under Nixon William P. Rogers (1913-2001), secretary of state, 1969-1973

Richard M. Nixon remains one of the most enigmatic and interesting of all of the twentieth century presidents. From humble beginnings in Southern California to his disgrace and resignation with the Watergate scandal, Nixon embodied key elements American politics. During his presidency, he fashioned a close working relationship with his national security adviser and later secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Their interaction and what it meant for the world throughout the early 1970’s is the subject of Robert Dallek’s fascinating book Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. An acclaimed biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy, Dallek has tackled another high-profile presidential subject with his customary skill. Throughout his career as a prize-winning author and popular teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dallek has displayed a continuing adroitness at making the presidents about whom he writes come alive on the page. His access to John F. Kennedy’s previously closed medical records helped make that biography a national best seller. Dallek has hit pay dirt once again with this study of the unlikely team of the introverted, tormented national politician Richard Nixon and the German refugee turned world strategist Henry Kissinger. Using the extensive transcripts of Nixon-Kissinger telephone conversations in Kissinger’s papers at the Library of Congress plus the Nixon tapes in the National Archives, Dallek reconstructed with precision what the

534

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

two men said to each other about foreign policy and the international personalities involved. Their remarks are candid, frank, and often damning to the reputation of the president and his most intimate adviser. Neither of the principals expected that their words would be made public in this fashion. The result is an inside look at how foreign policy was really made during the Vietnam conflict and the Cold War. Many facets of the characters of both men are troubling. Nixon was in private a coarse, crude individual who delighted in emphasizing how tough he was toward his enemies. Dallek accurately labels the president “a cultural anti-Semite” for his disparaging remarks about Jews and their effect on American foreign relations. That Kissinger, himself a Jew, listened to this rhetorical bilge without protest and often with tacit agreement illustrates the toadying quality that granted him so much sway with Nixon. Richard Nixon was obsessed with being regarded as a strong president during his administration and later in history. As Dallek reveals, Nixon spent ample time every day making sure that his aides told the press just how resolute and determined he was. Through his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon ran a sophisticated public relations campaign to make the case for his presidential excellence. He would not be the last president who emphasized an image of toughness over actually making tough decisions for their own sake. While Nixon prided himself on his focus and discipline, Dallek’s analysis indicates that the president often wasted his time with trivial matters designed to feed his ego rather than making policy choices. The self-absorption and narcissism that characterized the mature Nixon are developed with great narrative skill in Dallek’s gripping pages. Kissinger, on the other hand, comes across as the deft courtier, always ready to chime in with the fulsome praise that Nixon coveted. Dallek shows that Kissinger trashed the president in private and to the friendly journalists that he ensnared with leaks and exclusives. Nixon was smart enough to realize how Kissinger was behaving but tolerated the methods of his valuable subordinate nonetheless. There are portions of this book that read as though Dallek had transcribed passages from the script of the television series The Sopranos rather than revealed the wise conduct of American foreign policy at the highest levels. Both of these leaders had a deep disdain for the institutions by which Americans had chosen to govern themselves. Nixon came into office with a contempt for the Department of State and an intention to run foreign policy out of the White House. Secretary of State William P. Rogers was a marginal figure in Nixon’s calculations, yet Dallek shows that often the bureaucrats at the State Department had a wiser comprehension of the complexities of foreign policy than the men in charge had. For all their high estimate of their own abilities, Nixon and Kissinger needed the counsel of individuals with more experience in specific areas of the world.

Robert Dallek is an award-winning biographer of American presidents who has published studies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy. He taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nixon and Kissinger / dallek

535

The president and Kissinger had an equally powerful loathing for the role of Congress in foreign policy. Nixon regarded Capitol Hill as a burdensome nuisance and believed that his judgment was far better than that of any of the lawmakers interested in international affairs. As a result, he tried to deny legislators any meaningful part in the shaping of foreign relations. If Nixon had devoted even a small portion of the time he spent getting around Congress to the more productive task of working with senators and representatives, he might have achieved more positive outcomes for the nation. Throughout the narrative of the book, Dallek traces the corrosive effect of the war in Vietnam on the decisions that Nixon and Kissinger made. Though he never said that he had a secret plan to end the conflict in Southeast Asia, Nixon had campaigned in 1968 as though he intended to wind down American involvement in South Vietnam. In that way, he said, the United States could achieve peace with honor. Mindful of what had happened to destroy Lyndon Johnson, the new president did not wish to see his presidency collapse over the Vietnam issue, so he wanted to convey the impression that the war was ending. At the same time, Nixon resisted the idea that his nation should concede defeat in Vietnam. He believed that such an outcome would undermine the world position of the United States and embolden the Soviet Union and China. The problem was, as Dallek shows again and again, that there was no viable strategy for victory in Southeast Asia. The government in Saigon lacked the political will to sustain itself against the unrelenting pressure from the Communist north. Nixon and his administration hoped that over time their strategy of Vietnamization would enable the South Vietnamese to establish a credible government. The United States could draw down its troop commitment to reduce domestic discontent with the war while at the same time the South Vietnamese would stand up to assume the burden of defense. Such an approach assumed that there was a real nation in South Vietnam, a proposition that proved false as the Nixon presidency went forward. Nixon’s policy thus went back and forth between a recognition that the war could not be won and an equal unwillingness to accept an American defeat. In the process, thousands of American troops continued to lose their lives in the conflict. Dallek makes a strong case that Nixon and Kissinger could have gotten the same terms for a settlement in 1969 that they agreed to in 1973. His work raises the question of whether the devastating military casualties incurred during those four years served any useful purpose. It is a stern indictment of the cynical leadership that Nixon offered to the nation in foreign affairs. The overriding problem that influenced these decisions in Southeast Asia was the persistent tension with the Soviet Union amid the Cold War. The Nixon presidency evolved the concept of détente in dealing with Moscow, and Dallek traces the interaction of the two superpowers with insight and perceptive analysis. Nixon sought to have Moscow and its leader Leonid Brezhnev help secure a settlement in Vietnam without success and pursued other means of reducing strains in the EastWest relationship. To that larger end, Nixon and Kissinger crafted the opening to Communist China as the most famous diplomatic initiative of the Nixon years. Of course, one obstacle in

536

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

the way of previous Democratic presidents taking similar steps had been the adamant opposition of Republican conservatives, led by Nixon, to any engagement with Beijing. Since no one could question Nixon’s credentials as an anticommunist leader, he had the political leverage to take actions that he would have decried if a Democrat had initiated them. Dallek effectively presents how Nixon and the Chinese diplomatic leader Zhou Enlai interacted in this area. The chance to take such a bold move in a clandestine manner also appealed to the side of Nixon and Kissinger that preferred to conduct diplomacy in secret and without much influence from the established bureaucracy or the Congress. When these two men could conspire out of the public view and with few restraints on them, they were in their element as leaders. In the case of China, this approach paid large dividends. However, Dallek also indicates that the secrecy could spill over into unwise actions such as the bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970. One of the great strengths of the book is the balance that Dallek shows in dealing with these very controversial historical issues. The reader knows that Nixon will run afoul of the Watergate scandal as Dallek’s story progresses. While Kissinger was not involved in the criminal events that led to Nixon’s impeachment, he shared the perspective that impelled the men around the president toward illegal acts. Like Nixon, Kissinger believed that political enemies were out to frustrate the administration’s initiatives. As national security adviser, Kissinger approved wiretapping of journalists suspected of being the recipients of leaks of inside information. From these actions and others taken to punish political opponents, it became easier and easier for Nixon and his other aides to justify extreme measures as part of fighting back against their adversaries. The reader gets a good sense of how fragile civil liberties and the rule of law were in the hands of Richard Nixon when he was bent on victory. Dallek explains a large body of complicated information with great deftness. Readers should be prepared for an intense immersion in the operations of American foreign policy during these years. Dallek’s work sheds new light on the conduct of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the tensions between India and Pakistan, and the United States’ involvement in the 1973 overthrow of the government of Chile. The roots of many of the contemporary issues that now divide Americans over the nation’s role in the world are explained in Dallek’s lucid analysis. At the end of the epic tale of Nixon and Kissinger, readers will have a new appreciation for the difficulties that face historians of the recent past. The mass of sources that Dallek had to traverse, the intricacy of the issues to be understood, and the human fascination of men such as Nixon and Kissinger would test the talents of any scholar. Dallek has overcome these obstacles in a story that should become a standard source for understanding these two troubled and talented men. Lewis L. Gould

Nixon and Kissinger / dallek

537

Review Sources The Economist 383 (May 19, 2007): 87. The Journal of American History 94, no. 2 (September, 2007): 652-653. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 204. Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2007, p. E1. The New York Times 156 (April 24, 2006): E1-E6. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 29. Newsweek 149, no. 20 (May 14, 2007): 47. Washington Monthly 39, no. 6 (June, 2007): 58-61. The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, p. BW07.

538

NIXON AND MAO The Week That Changed the World Author: Margaret MacMillan (1943) Publisher: Random House (New York). Illustrated. 404 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1972 Locale: The United States and China Nixon’s visit to China was a pivotal moment in world history and a step toward world peace, but the devil was in the details Principal personages: Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), president of the United States, 1969-1974 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung; 1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, 1935-1976 Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), Nixon’s national security adviser Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai; 1898-1976), Mao’s foreign minister, 19491958, and premier of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1976 H. R. “Bob” Haldeman (1926-1993), Nixon’s chief of staff Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch’ing; 1914-1991), Mao’s actress wife and political activist, member of the “Gang of Four”

Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World depicts the meeting of two of the world’s most powerful and enigmatic leaders that changed the international political situation favorably. The meeting could easily have failed, leaving relations between the United States and China even worse than before. There were significant misunderstandings of their common past. Americans saw themselves as China’s historical friend and protector, its ally during World War II; Chinese saw Americans as part of a West that had treated them as inferiors through the era of imperialism, as backers of the hated Kuomintang that was now in Taiwan and was pretending to be the legitimate government of all China, and as the embodiment of modern capitalism. The Korean and Vietnam Wars had intensified mutual fears and mistrust. The time had come to change this situation. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War was isolating the United States, while China’s rigorous efforts to shape a new, more egalitarian society had managed to alienate even much of the communist world. President Richard M. Nixon was widely regarded as a dangerous ideologue and warmonger, Mao Zedong as a mass murderer of his own people and destroyer of their traditions. Both were, however, basically practical men—realists, in a sense, who believed that morality was inappropriate in power politics. Both also wanted to do good, as they understood it, and were seeking to advance their national interests while

Nixon and Mao / mac millan

539

avoiding what seemed to be an inevitable war. If they succeeded, history would look Canadian-born Margaret MacMillan on them as great men. Most importantly, was provost of Trinity College at the Nixon was the only American politician who University of Toronto from 2002 to could have brought conservatives to trust 2007, when she took up a new post at him. Communists took him seriously, and Oxford University. Her book Paris even liberals could dismiss him only at their 1919: Six Months That Changed the own cost. He had his enemies, his personality World (2001) won numerous prizes for academic and literary excellence. flaws, his impossible hopes and his psycho logical contradictions, but he saw an opportunity to divide the communist bloc and make China into an ally. Mao’s peasant background, his tumultuous personal and political life, and his habit of dealing ruthlessly with enemies had sharpened natural habits of cunning and paranoia. What he said now and did later often had little in common. What were his motives for inviting a hated enemy to China? Even historians who are skeptical of psychohistory see few other ways of approaching either Nixon or Mao. Both were very private, even secretive. Both had clawed their way up from the bottom, and both believed their hold on power was tenuous. Nixon puzzled everyone who met him—his insecurity, his fears bordering on paranoia, his great talents and insights, his ability to rebound from defeat and humiliation. Mao was a powerful despot with the power of life and death over the most populous nation in the world, but he had two serious problems, neither well-understood inside or outside of China. First, he was not well—he could barely walk and sometimes could not get out of bed; second, his government was unstable, but he refused even to appoint a successor. Experts analyzed the personality and motives of each leader but could not make much sense of either one. The Americans had almost no information from which to work; the Chinese were fearful of failing to follow the party line. Thus it was that when Nixon’s plane taxied to the reception committee in China, no one knew exactly what would happen. Nixon’s people even looked out the window to see whether the president should wear an overcoat when he stepped out to shake the hand of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Pat Nixon wore a vivid red coat, ignoring warnings that in China only prostitutes wore red. Many of the officials in the reception party were acting ministers or deputy ministers. This was not intended to be an insult: So many prominent men had fallen from favor in the recent Cultural Revolution that inexperience and confusion reigned in every bureau. The great exception was Zhou, born to a Mandarin family during the Boxer Rebellion, who was well educated and urbane. During his youth, China fell increasingly into powerless confusion and under foreign domination. Studying in Japan, Zhou encountered the works of Karl Marx; in 1920, he went to France, two years later helping found the Chinese Communist Party. When he came home, he was among the nation’s foremost experts on the West; when he joined Mao in 1935, he became so valuable that in 1949 he was named the victorious communists’ first foreign minister. He was soon internationally known as a capable and subtle negotiator.

540

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Zhou’s American counterpart was Henry Kissinger, a former Harvard professor who agreed with Nixon that diplomacy was a critical and enjoyable art, best conducted by individuals who could judge situations with little regard for morality or political pressures. He had come to the United States as a teenager, escaping from Nazi Germany at almost the last moment; as a scholar he demonstrated extraordinary brilliance at analysis and argument. He could not be Nixon’s friend, but they had much in common—insecurity, sensitivity to insults, a love of the pomp and ceremony of office, and joy in the slippery world of politics. As national security adviser, he was to eclipse the colorless secretary of state, William P. Rogers; it helped that Nixon mistrusted all career diplomats, who were too cautious, too bureaucratic, and unable to see the big picture as he did. The first meeting of the two leaders had little planning. Mao, wanting to meet Nixon immediately, was barely persuaded to allow the visitors to go to their villa and refresh themselves. Unable to restrain himself long, however, he ordered the president brought to him immediately. The ensuing conversation was a stunning success, each of the men even making fun of Kissinger, but they discussed nothing of significance. Zhou remained largely silent, looking anxiously at this watch, concerned both about Mao’s strength and the banquet scheduled for the evening. Each side knew that the world was watching. Consequently, the emphasis was always on the positive—jovial photographs, toasts at banquets, and visits to tourist sites. Zhou remembered the snub by John Foster Dulles who, in 1954, refused to shake his hand; he was determined to avoid a repetition of that insult. There were serious issues, such as avoiding nuclear war, that Nixon wished to discuss, but Mao and Zhou preferred to develop personal relationships first. Indeed, there was a great deal of history that lay behind this encounter, and the Chinese leaders were unwilling to ignore it. Their subordinates, meanwhile, had no more idea what was happening than did the American delegation. All four leaders were secretive by nature, and all enjoyed springing surprises. This very visit had been such a surprise. Nixon, the arch-anticommunist, had used Pakistani contacts to arrange a visit by Kissinger the previous July. Kissinger had sensed that Taiwan was the principal stumbling block to good relations and assistance in bringing the Vietnam War to an end. This issue might be bypassed by a general agreement that the United States would detach itself from Taiwan if China would vow not to attack. China wanted freedom on its southern frontiers in order to confront an increasingly bellicose Soviet Union. All this was very indirect and tentative, but enough for Nixon to risk his reputation on the visit. He later summarized his goals: Taiwan was the most crucial, Vietnam the most urgent. These were important distinctions, because one was long-term, the other immediate. What the world knew was the picture presented by White House chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, who micromanaged every image and word about the historic meeting. Given the large number of reporters present, this meant providing them with something to send home every day. Below that surface were mundane meetings, meaningless banquets, and endless discussions of trivial matters. Zhou warned, obliquely, that Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, could ruin everything if she wished.

Nixon and Mao / mac millan

541

Jiang had risen from obscurity to become a major force in the Cultural Revolution; she hated foreign ideas, foreign practices, and foreigners in general. She selected one of her operas, The Red Detachment of Women, for the visitors’ entertainment. Some worried that its bold propaganda would insult the guests, but Jiang herself was more worried about whether or not to wear a dress, which the Americans would expect but which had been banned; in the end, she wore neither a dress nor a proletarian costume but a suit. Nixon enjoyed the show and applauded lustily. What had this visit produced? That was the problem. The very language of the joint summary, the Shanghai Communiqué, was so vague as to bother Secretary of State Rogers. While trade, exchanges, the India-Pakistan conflict, and Taiwan were all mentioned, other subjects, such as world revolution, were not. There were even disagreements as to whether the participants should have their middle initials in their names. How would Nixon handle the shocked reactions in Moscow, Tokyo, and other world powers? After a week, the principals were too tired to continue talks. They had inched toward one another on basic matters, each evening breaking for long and elaborate banquets, and they had visited cities and tourist sites. Most of the work fell to Kissinger and Zhou. The details were few and unimportant. The visit’s significance was in establishing a new relationship between the two nations. Optimism was the prevailing feeling in both countries. The potential for peace could be sensed by all. Nixon received a hero’s welcome at home, the last he would enjoy. When North Vietnam immediately launched an offensive into the South, Nixon ordered heavy bombing that provoked only a mild protest from Beijing. Although the Soviet Union signed a major arms limitation treaty and American forces were being withdrawn from Vietnam, Nixon’s reelection had been followed by the Watergate hearings. When impeachment seemed certain, Nixon resigned. The Chinese watched all this with bewilderment. Mao did not understand it at all, but his health was failing too rapidly for that to matter. Since he mistrusted all doctors, he agreed only reluctantly to allow medical specialists to see him; no one dared recommend treatment, and in any case he would have refused it. Mao’s courtiers began intriguing for the succession. Jiang seemed best poised to seize power, although Zhou helped make Deng Xiaoping vice premier, Deng had to take refuge in the south, protected by the army. Zhou’s death was followed shortly by Mao’s. A month later, the army struck, arresting Jiang and her closest collaborators (the “Gang of Four”). The gains for America were less immediate: South Vietnam and Cambodia fell, but relations with the Soviet Union improved; Taiwan became less of a problem. The gains for China came equally slowly, but more surely: The Chinese Communist Party abandoned its efforts at social engineering, reached out increasingly to the West, and became an industrial giant. The relationship had been bound to change, but it took four men to begin the process. William L. Urban

542

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 299, no. 5 (June, 2007): 122-123. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 438. Current History 107, no. 701 (September, 2007): 299. International Herald Tribune, February 24, 2007, p. 13. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 25, 2007): 14-15. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 48 (December 4, 2007): 47. The Spectator 303 (March 3, 2007): 55-56. Washington Monthly 39, no. 4 (April, 2007): 43-45.

543

NOTEBOOKS Author: Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) Edited with notes by Margaret Bradham Thornton Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 828 pp. $40.00 Type of work: Diary Time: 1936-1958 and 1979-1981 Locale: Principally St. Louis, New Orleans, New York City, and Rome In almost eight hundred entries written in thirty notebooks covering twenty-five years, Williams records the oftentimes agonizing process of writing his poetry, fiction, and plays while coming to terms with his homosexuality and dependence on drugs and alcohol Principal personages: Tennessee Williams, a leading American dramatist of the mid-twentieth century Edwina Dakin Williams, his mother Rose Isabel Williams, his sister and model for many of his heroines Frank Merlo, his lover for fourteen years Donald Windham, his friend and one-time collaborator Paul Bowles, his close friend and composer of incidental music for Williams’s plays Audrey Wood, his longtime agent Elia Kazan, a leading director for film and theater, including several of Williams’s plays

During much of Tennessee Williams’s playwriting career, including the extraordinarily prolific period from The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944) through The Night of the Iguana (pr. 1961) when he wrote almost a dozen enduring works for the stage that established his reputation as one of America’s foremost dramatists, he kept a series of private journals as well. Unlike what might be expected, these journals, now finally in print under the collective title Notebooks, almost never contain working ideas or plot outlines for his fiction or character sketches or fragments of dialogue for his plays. Rather, they tell a personal story, even generally more revealing than the one found in his Memoirs (1975). While that admittedly commercial publishing venture arrived with great public fanfare, Williams was ambivalent over whether these Notebooks should ever be read by others, sometimes indicating that they were for his eyes only as a potentially therapeutic confessional. Indeed, when he later goes back and rereads them and sometimes even reacts to them, his second thoughts about his earlier entries, reproduced here in his own handwriting, assume a startlingly poignant immediacy.

544

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The preponderance of the Notebooks cover two periods: what might be called his apprenticeship period, the eight years from November, 1936, through November, 1943, that saw the disastrous Boston tryout of what was to have been Williams’s first Broadway play, Battle of Angels (pr. 1940), but also the writing of the prison drama Night About Nightingales, composed in 1939 but only very belatedly produced by the National Theatre in London and New York to posthumous praise sixty years later; and the two years from June, 1953, through September, 1955, the first of which witnessed the Broadway failure of his expressionistic Camino Real, while the second saw the triumphant success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The lengthiest gap, on the other hand, is the twenty-year period from 1958 to 1979, for which no journals seem to exist—although Williams suggests in one of his retrospective annotations that his life during those years was substantially “similar” to that recorded elsewhere. In fact, the leitmotifs that will recur over and again in these journals are already well-established in the first several years: his insecurity and anxiety; his lack of confidence and sense of failure; his self-pity and self-absorption; his loneliness and restless wandering; his fear of death and of time’s destruction of physical prowess and creative energy; his emotional problems and multiple physical ailments. He was prey to what he called, as early as 1943, his “blue devils” or “neuroses,” a “Williams family trait . . . tak[ing] the form of interior storms that show remarkably little from the outside but which create a deep chasm between myself and all other people.” Every day was undoubtedly a battle to keep going on; and yet write he did, virtually every single morning. In fact, “En Avant!” which first appears in entries for 1942, became his lifelong motto. The composite portrait that emerges is of an enormously conflicted and yet compelling human person, as complex as the best characters he created, with all the “mystery” and unknowability that he found essential marks of truth. Thus, Williams cautions his putative readers, “these notebooks despite their attempt at merciless candor about my life fall short, give very little, perhaps really distort unfavorably for I seem inclined to note only the seedier things.” As Elia Kazan, the director of several of Williams’s most lasting plays, warned Margaret Bradham Thornton, the independent scholar responsible for editing these Notebooks, “Williams was one of the most secret people he had ever known. ‘Latch onto that word,’ he instructed.” Two tensions that exerted an immeasurable impact on his development as an artist are his relationship with his sister Rose, with whom he shared an inordinately strong emotional attachment and who was ultimately diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox and subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy, and his coming to terms with his own

One of the most prolific authors to emerge from the American South, Tennessee Williams wrote poetry, fiction (both short stories and a novel), screenplays, essays, and autobiography. He remains best known as the playwright of such classic dramas as The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (pr. 1955), the last two of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Notebooks / williams

545

homosexuality. Williams, who felt enormous failure for not having been at home to prevent Rose’s lobotomy, would immortalize her as the model for Laura in the autobiographical Menagerie. Still, that would not assuage a gnawing guilt—related both in the Memoirs and again here—over an incident when he experienced revulsion toward her and, in a moment of deliberate cruelty that he came to see as unforgivable, called her “disgusting.” It is not just that her affliction is unfathomable, or that the string of “obscenities” she uttered during one of the family’s visits to the sanitarium proved shocking, but that her mental condition makes him question the “mysterious” ways of God. Nevertheless, forty years later, in light of his commitment to always see that her financial needs were met, he praises her as “the living presence of truth and faith in my life . . . [who] defined a true nobility to me and gave to my life what I have known of grace.” The notebooks suggest that Williams’s first consummated homosexual encounter occurred not in raffish New Orleans but on a trip to California in the summer of 1939, an event that apparently nauseated him as a violation of some essential “purity.” Still, physical release is also liberating for him as a writer, something that he craves not only as a “diversion” but even more so because it is integral to and expressive of something essential to his nature as a human being. Nevertheless, the promiscuity involved in incessant cruising for sex partners as a surrogate for any strong family connection would continue to trouble him because of his residual Puritanism. He yearns, instead, for something that will be “clean” and lasting, not the transient and endless succession of one-night stands that seem sometimes to have an enervating effect upon his work. What he seeks can only be found when physical sex is linked to tenderness and love, “comfort” and affection; but then, that is no different from what characterizes mature heterosexual relationships in Williams’s works, since it is only selfish sexuality that uses and abuses the other that Williams consistently denigrates and judges harshly. Physical sexuality has the potentiality, then, for being not only transformative but even a kind of religious experience, as it was for D. H. Lawrence, one of the writers Williams most admired (along with Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov). At the best of times, it is “as if a benign Providence, or shall we be frank and say God, had suddenly taken cognizance and pity of my long misery . . . and given me . . . a token of forgiveness.” What he fears and condemns, both in his rejection of Rose and in selfcentered acts of sex, is a kind of “calcification” of the heart that is the very opposite of the ethical code that adumbrates his plays: the requirement to go out nonjudgmentally in kindness to all those other “tortured” people in need of compassion. What he valorizes most of all are decency, tolerance, and gentleness. As he writes in an entry from 1941 that presages the indelible curtain line of A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947): “To you—whoever you are—when I am gone—Remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person—For me.” Those who approach the Notebooks hoping to find comments about specific works will generally be just as disappointed as those who read the Memoirs for that reason, for although the difficult process of composition is everywhere clear, there is little discussion of the plays themselves. As Williams wrote memorably in his Memoirs, in

546

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

a passage that applies just as easily to the Notebooks: “Why do I resist writing about my plays? The truth is that my plays have been the most important element of my life for God knows how many years. But I feel the plays speak for themselves. And that my life hasn’t and that it has been remarkable enough, in its continual contest with madness, to be worth setting upon paper.” On the nature of his art in general, Williams reveals here that he early realized that he was a better playwright than poet, that writing drama required him to curb and control his lyrical impulse, and that he believes his works are most satisfying when they are most simple and direct. During the last twenty years of his life, oftentimes many critics were cruel not only in their dismissiveness of his more experimental works but also in their intensely personal attacks on Williams’s choosing to continue to write—one even going so far as to suggest that it would have been better had he died in the late 1950’s. To them his dignified rejoinder is: “Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn’t, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence.” To read just the pages reproducing Williams’s journals means, however, learning only half the story, since that would be to ignore half of what appears in the published Notebooks. On the pages facing his entries, Thornton has provided close to 1,100 notes, identifying references to people, places, productions, and publications. These include thumbnail sketches of family members, friends, and companions, as well as of fellow authors (such as novelists Carson McCullers and Christopher Isherwood) and theatrical associates (including director Erwin Piscator, set designer Jo Mielziner, and actress Anna Magnani). Other annotations provide performance histories of plays; plot synopses of unpublished and unproduced works, many of which would later appear under other titles; and facsimiles (both holograph and typescript) of unpublished poems or passages from letters held in various scholarly archives. Most usefully, Thornton traces the appearance of various abiding interests (including the influence of film), recurrent subjects (such as suicide), or thematic motifs (“the destructive impact of society on the sensitive, nonconformist individual”) that infuse Williams’s works; she inserts, as well, two dozen brief biographical and historical narratives that bridge the hiatuses in the journals themselves. Finally, she has searched out and selected the 200 facsimile pages and 350 photographs, including numerous set designs and more than a dozen of Williams’s own paintings, that superbly illustrate the volume, ending with photos of the playwright’s death mask and the crowd of admirers, mostly young, gathered outside New York’s Hotel Elysee where he died. All in all, the book becomes not only a treasure trove for aficionados of Williams and the American theater and a sociocultural record of his life and times but also a meditation on the toll of success and celebrity and the inevitable tension between the public and private life of the artist. Thomas P. Adler

Notebooks / williams

547

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 13. Georgia Review 61, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 422-427. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 73. London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 31-33. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 20 (December 20, 2007): 38-44. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 4, 2007): 20. New Statesman 136 (March 19, 2007): 56. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 39.

548

NOVELS IN THREE LINES Author: Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) First published: Nouvelles en trois lignes, 1997, in France Translated from the French and with an introduction by Luc Sante Publisher: New York Review Books (New York). 208 pp. $14.00 Type of work: Current affairs, miscellaneous Time: 1906 Locale: France and the Middle East A translation of 1,066 news items that were each condensed into three lines of text by the French anarchist and literary figure Novels in Three Lines is a work that is all but impossible to characterize. Its translator notes that “the closest literary relative to Fénéon’s three-line novellas may be Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States (1885-1915), Recitative (1965, 1968, 1978),” but, since Reznikoff’s work is unlikely to be known by most readers, the comparison conceals even more than it reveals. The story behind Novels in Three Lines is this: For several months in 1906, Félix Fénéon (Arthur Rimbaud’s editor, former correspondent for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, and anarchist sympathizer) wrote a series of brief entries for the liberal newspaper Le Matin under the heading Nouvelles en trois lignes. The title of Fénéon’s column was itself a play on words that is difficult to convey in English. Since the term nouvelles applies to both “news” and “novellas,” Fénéon’s column suggested that it was a series of either “three-line news items” or “three-line novels,” and the entries themselves reflected qualities of each. Each of Fénéon’s columns would contain roughly twenty items, organized into such categories as banlieue parisienne (events occurring in the area surrounding Paris), départements (other French provinces), and étranger (foreign countries, which to Fénéon almost always meant the Middle East). The author would take a few news items that caught his eye, reduce them to no more than three lines of text, and produce an extremely short but highly evocative story. Although written in prose, Fénéon’s entries possessed a highly poetic quality. Each entry is reminiscent of haiku, the fragments of Sappho’s lyric poems, or the epitaphs from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). The result is equally a vivid picture of daily life in 1906 France and an exploration of what it is that makes a story compelling. Fénéon was particularly interested in suicides, of which there were a surprising large number during the months of his column. Hanging appears to have been the suicides’ method of choice in France of 1906, and the victims’ motives included such perennial causes of despair as rejection in love, business failure, and a desire to es-

Novels in Three Lines / fénéon

549

cape debilitating illnesses. At times, how ever, Fénéon provides insight into more un- Félix Fénéon was a minor figure in the usual aims for self-destruction, such as in the avant-garde cultural circles of Paris case of one man: “Widowed customs agent during the early twentieth century. With Ackermann, of Fort-Philippe, Nord, was to interests in painting, fiction, and have been married today, but was found poetry, he translated into French the hanged over the tomb of his wife.” This short works of Jane Austen and James Joyce, narrative is typical of the entries that appear edited several literary journals, reviewed trends in literature and in Novels in Three Lines. With only a few painting, worked as a journalist, and words, Fénéon tells a complete story. The sold paintings at the Bernheim-Jeune reader is able to visualize Ackermann, griev- gallery. ing (perhaps for many years) over the death of his wife, before finally hoping to make a new beginning. He agrees to marry again. Perhaps he is even genuinely fond of his new fiancé, but all of this is not enough. On the day of the intended ceremony, Ackermann finds that he cannot go through with his plans. Unable to “betray” his deceased wife through this new marriage, he turns to the only option that he can find and hangs himself. Many of Fénéon’s entries are similar. Stories that, if told at any greater length, would cause a reader to skim them quickly and just as quickly forget them become memorable, almost archetypical in their nature. The actual people about whom Fénéon writes prove familiar to the reader—the grieving widower, the jilted lover, the young fool out on a careless spree, the inattentive parent—and the resulting stories condense to fifteen or twenty words an experience that somehow transcends its original setting. Fénéon is fond of the “pointed style” of the Roman poet Martial or the author O. Henry in which a detail revealed only at the very end causes the reader to reexamine everything that came before: “To ensure his place in heaven, Desjeunes of Plainfang, Vosges, had covered with holy pictures the bed where he killed himself with rum.” Often Fénéon uses this type of ending merely to create a pleasant surprise. Nevertheless, at other times, such as in the case of the pious drunkard Desjeunes, the effect results in something far more profound. What is the reader to make of Desjeunes’ unusual death? It is clear from the tone adopted throughout Novels in Three Lines that Fénéon (or perhaps his editor at Le Matin) was cynical about religion. Perhaps for this reason, Desjeunes is characterized as inconsistent at best, a genuine hypocrite at worst, who sought to redeem himself through mere tokens for defects that possibly spanned his entire life. In other entries, Fénéon uses these surprise endings to suggest far more than he tells and to leave the reader imagining what may be the rest of the story: “At a ball in Saint-Symphorien, Isère, Mme Chausson, her lover, his parents, and his friends knifed to death M. Chausson.” What, the reader is forced to wonder, could have caused so many different people to attack this single victim? Part of Fénéon’s story is suggested by the pairing of Mme. Chausson with “her lover.” Still, what caused M. Chausson’s own parents and friends to unite against him so fatally? In the case of this story, the narrative impact is derived from unanswered questions, each of which the

550

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

reader is entitled to answer as he or she wishes. The reader may envision M. Chausson as a modern-day Caesar, cut down on his own Ides of March, or as a real-life Ratchett, the victim who was stabbed by nearly everyone in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Chausson may have been undeserving of his fate or he may have received his just comeuppance. In either case, it is in what Fénéon does not say that this story finds its power. Several of Fénéon’s stories have multiple layers and are capable of tragedy and comedy simultaneously: “Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train. She was then run over by a passenger train.” The reader first experiences a sense of relief in Rosello’s narrow escape, then dark humor as she dives out of the frying pan into the fire. The “punch line” comes as rapidly as the passenger train that seems to arrive out of nowhere, and yet, as one glances back at the passage, the words “mother of four,” which are passed over almost without notice on a first reading, seem to stand out hauntingly from the passage. What at first seems humorous because Rosello is unknown to the reader assumes elements of tragedy in light of those words. Rosello’s death, one realizes, has consequences, and it becomes all too easy to visualize its impact on the victim’s young family. Despite its brevity, therefore, this entry and others like it develop a great deal of complexity. It is also possible to view Novels in Three Lines as an exploration into the nature of what constitutes a satisfying narrative. Although Fénéon preferred to support the works of others rather than to publish on his own, he had excellent credentials as a man of letters. Fénéon edited Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations (1886; Illuminations, 1932), encouraged the publication of Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), translated Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), founded a bewildering array of literary journals, and published the first translation of James Joyce’s fiction in France. He was a regular member of Stéphane Mallarmé’s weekly salon and befriended several of the Symbolist poets. With a background such as this, Novels in Three Lines emerges as an experiment in minimalism. For instance, an accidental death can be retold with only a few words while still possessing all the elements of a complete narrative: “Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up.” The structure that appears in the above example is repeated in many of Fénéon’s entries, such as the following tale about a young man from a Parisian suburb: “Sigismond Martin, of Les Clayes, went to sleep in a field. His friends came to wake him up. They were unsuccessful; he was dead.” In these two examples, the name of the deceased combined with the setting of the incident (Houilles, Les Clayes) gives the story an emotional weight that it would lack if it were merely about “a young man” from “some village.” A bare minimum of background information (drinkers passing around a pistol, Sigismond Martin sleeping in a field) sets the stage for a misunderstanding—the drinkers thought the gun was unloaded; his friends thought Sigismond Martin was asleep—which is then followed by a single action (the pulling of the trigger, the inability of the group to rouse their friend) and a sudden dénouement. Just as Fénéon’s Symbolist colleagues were experimenting with concise phrasing that suggested multiple levels of meaning, and while the post-Impressionists who

Novels in Three Lines / fénéon

551

knew Fénéon were reducing images to a few essential shapes and colors, Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines was achieving a similar effect in prose. Fénéon drew his material from the strange events that occurred in the lives of ordinary people throughout 1906. He then stripped away everything that was not vital, leaving the reader with only a few core details capable of revealing everything that was really necessary. Several repeated subjects suggest matters that were topical in Fénéon’s day. For instance, about a dozen passages deal with the counterfeiting of coins, for instance, while roughly the same number involve a controversy over whether crucifixes should be allowed in public school classrooms. Usually, however, Fénéon introduces no thread that continues beyond a single three-line item. Someone appears, either does or suffers something unexpected, and then vanishes again, never to reappear. In several of Fénéon’s entries, it is not the incident itself or the author’s structure that is particularly interesting but an unusual turn of phrase that elevates the incident from the commonplace: “Prematurely jealous, J. Boulon, of Parc-Saint-Maur, pumped a revolver shot in the thigh of his fiancé, Germaine S.” Here the words “prematurely jealous” cause the reader to study the entry. Perhaps, Fénéon appears to be saying, if Germaine had been Boulon’s wife instead of his fiancé, this act of jealousy would have been less noteworthy. In other passages, Fénéon uses incongruity to achieve a similar effect: “Since Delorce left her, Cécile Ward had refused to take him back unless he married her. Finding this stipulation unacceptable, he stabbed her.” “Finding this stipulation unacceptable” is language one more frequently associates with business negotiations than with affairs of the heart, particularly those that lead to violent assault. Nevertheless, by juxtaposing the two last clauses in this entry, Fénéon both surprises the reader and develops interest out of what may otherwise have been a merely tawdry and insignificant tale. The entries included in this work were collected more than fifty years after Fénéon’s death. Although Novels in Three Lines can be quickly read, it is a book that is best enjoyed when savored. Readers should remember that they would have encountered only a handful of entries in any one issue of Le Matin and resist the urge to read too many in a single sitting. Like short and evocative poems, Fénéon’s three-line novels assume their deepest meanings only through reflection and close examination. Jeffrey L. Buller

Review Sources London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 9-11. Modern Painters, July/August, 2007, p. 93. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 21. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 46. The Village Voice 52, no. 49 (December 5, 2007): 44.

552

NUREYEV The Life Author: Julie Kavanagh (1952) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 782 pp. $37.50 Type of work: Biography, fine arts Time: 1938-1993 Locale: Russia, Paris, Denmark, London, and the United States An in-depth and probing portrayal of Rudolf Nureyev as an exceptional ballet dancer, a star personality, an individual tormented by his otherness, and a volatile and charismatic individual Principal personages: Rudolf Nureyev, world-famous Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Hamet Nureyev, his father, an army man and Tartar Farida Nureyev, Rudolf’s mother, who took him to ballet as a child Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, Nureyev’s teacher and mentor in Leningrad Xenia Josifovna Jurgenson Pushkin, Alexander’s wife, friend, and lover of Nureyev Tamara Zakrzhevskaya, lifelong friend of Nureyev Teja Kremke, East German student at the Vaganova School, friend and first male lover of Nureyev Clara Saint, ballet enthusiast, instrumental in helping Nureyev defect Erik Bruhn, Danish dancer, the ideal dancer in Nureyev’s opinion, and later his lover George Balanchine, Russian choreographer working in the United States, revered by Nureyev Margot Fonteyn, Royal Ballet prima ballerina assoluta, partner of Nureyev Ninette de Valois, director of Royal Ballet Wallace Potts, lover of Nureyev Charles Jude, protégé of Nureyev at Paris Opéra Ballet Douce François, friend who was obsessively in love with Nureyev

In Nureyev: The Life, Julie Kavanagh presents a detailed, factual account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life as a dancer, as an individual who was fascinated by all the arts and ever eager to learn more about them, and as a man driven to experience as much as he could during his life. The biography is supported by extensive and meticulous research. Drawing on Nureyev’s An Autobiography, published in 1962, and his personal letters and papers as well as interviews with his family members, Kavanagh

Nureyev / kavanagh

553

has provided a comprehensive coverage of his childhood. This biography vividly por- Julie Kavanagh is a journalist who has trays the poverty in which Nureyev lived as worked as a dance editor for The achild and the hardships imposed upon the Spectator. She has also been an editor family under the Soviet system. The biogra- for Harpers & Queen, Vanity Fair, and phy also presents a considerable amount of The New Yorker. She received the background information on his parents, Dance Perspectives Foundation de la Hamet and Farida, as well as insights into the Torre Bueno Prize for her biography Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Tartar culture in which Nureyev was reared. Ashton (1996). Kavanagh’s account of his arrival at the Vaganova School in Leningrad and his years of study there emphasize Nureyev’s overpowering desire to dance and his determination to succeed regardless of his less-thanideal dancer’s body and his rather late beginning of serious ballet training. Kavanagh also fully develops the problems Nureyev faced as a result of his being different from the other students and of his volatile and intensely sensitive nature. She portrays Nureyev’s insistence upon his own ideas about what dance should be and his individualism as a dancer even when he was a beginning student. He was never satisfied to accept even a teacher’s control of his dancing. Kavanagh’s portrayal of his relationship with Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin and his wife, Xenia Josifovna Jurgenson Pushkin, calls attention to how influential they were in his development both as a dancer and as an individual. Having obtained access to the KGB files regarding Nureyev’s defection in 1961, Kavanagh recounts the episode with a sensitivity to what it meant for Nureyev, for his family and friends, and to Russia as a political entity. Although Nureyev was completely apolitical and wanted only the freedom to dance as he wished and to become a star, the defection could be nothing other than a political embarrassment for the country and a very difficult situation for his loved ones. Kavanagh emphasizes the real and serious danger in which Nureyev placed himself but underscores his lack of choices, as returning to Russia would have destroyed his career. Since he was unable to accept the state control that dominated every aspect of communist Russia, Nureyev would not have been permitted to continue to dance with the Kirov Ballet but would have been exiled to a provincial school. After his defection, he lived many years with the ever-present fear of being either killed or seized by the KGB and returned to Russia, where he would have been tried as a traitor. Kavanagh includes myriad detailed descriptions of Nureyev’s solo performances in which he made changes to dances that had traditionally been performed in exactly the same way since their creation. She also provides extensive descriptions of his costumes and treats his interest in costuming and its importance for him as a dancer. Concerned about his short legs, Nureyev was always very much aware of how a costume made him appear, and he used both color and design to lengthen the appearance of his legs. Such passages provide further insight into why Nureyev needed to leave Russia and to pursue his career in the West, where change and innovation were not only welcomed but also encouraged.

554

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Having studied ballet herself, Kavanagh includes informative discussions of the various schools of ballet and the techniques associated with them, especially the Vaganova and the Bournonville. She examines how these schools either conflicted with Nureyev’s ideas about dance or complemented them. She repeatedly returns to Nureyev’s obsession to transform the male ballet dancer from a mere support for the ballerina into a performer in his own right, equal to the ballerina he partnered. Nureyev incorporated certain ways ballerinas moved into his own dancing. He danced on the balls of his feet and used the emotive port de bras of female ballet dancers. Moreover, Kavanagh makes apparent Nureyev’s extreme respect for and fascination with Erik Bruhn as the ideal male dancer and with George Balanchine as the most innovative of choreographers, as well as Nureyev’s desire to emulate Vaslav Nijinsky. However, Kavanagh never loses sight of the fact that Nureyev never intended to be a replica of anyone but rather wished to learn from each dancer or choreographer the techniques and skills he admired and then to incorporate them into his own style. Kavanagh gives a thorough, chronological presentation of Nureyev’s work and performance after his defection. As she discusses his work with the various companies, she sensitively recreates the artistic and aesthetic tensions that he faced as he attempted to incorporate the styles and techniques of Western ballet into his own performance without totally rejecting his Russian traditions. Her discussion of how Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet, developed into the most renowned dance partnership of their time leads the reader to understand how dancers with different attributes and techniques can create roles together, acquiring new dimensions of performance from each other. With her controlled and concise way of dancing, Fonteyn brought about a measure of reserve and stability in Nureyev’s dance while with his Russian bravura he released an intensity of emotion not seen in her before. Nureyev’s individualistic, temperamental, and egotistical characteristics dominate Kavanagh’s portrait of the dancer. Nureyev appears as a disruptive force. He is always Nureyev the star, always insisting upon controlling the roles he dances and the costumes he wears. He is quick to anger and given to tantrums if he does not agree with how a role is being choreographed or how a dancer is portraying the role. With the Royal Ballet, he does not want to be simply one of the company but to remain Rudolf Nureyev who dances with the Royal Ballet. This inability to become one of the company delayed his dancing with Balanchine’s company for a considerable time. His tenure as director of the Paris Opéra Ballet was fraught with discord with the administration as he insisted upon having his way. Kavanagh softens her portrayal with an emphasis on his charisma and enthusiasm for life. Including many anecdotes in the biography, Kavanagh fully explores Nureyev as an individual as well as a dancer. She dwells on his Russian-Tartar heritage, which made him susceptible to melancholy and feelings of rejection. She touches upon the problems of communication that he always faced after his defection. He never lost his heavy Russian accent and often had difficulty understanding English. She also reveals how much he missed Russia and how he felt that only Russians could under-

Nureyev / kavanagh

555

stand what it meant to be Russian. The longer he was away from his country, the more he wished to use classical Russian technique in the ballets he staged. Kavanagh devotes a considerable amount of the book to Nureyev’s sexual passion, the other driving force in his life. Kavanagh depicts Nureyev as endowed with a sensuality that was irresistibly attractive to both men and women. She recounts his many amorous attachments, both heterosexual and homosexual, including his first homosexual experience with Teja Kremke, his affair with Pushkin’s wife (which was instigated by Xenia), his long love affair with Bruhn, his later love affair with Wallace Potts, and his attempted love affair with Charles Jude, as well as other sexual encounters and his tendency to cruise the homosexual sections of London and Paris. The last chapters of the book deal with Nureyev’s affliction with AIDS. The major themes of this section are his determination to continue to perform and to plan for the future and the devotion shown by a core of friends: Wallace Potts, Douce François, Charles Jude, Jeannette Herrmann, and his two sisters. For almost ten years, Nureyev still appeared on stage as a dancer, even returning to Leningrad to dance at the Kirov Theater. At the same time, he began to learn to conduct an orchestra in order to have a new career, since he was weakening as a dancer. Kavanagh devotes the final pages of her book to a description of Nureyev’s funeral and internment in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Based on ten years of exhaustive research, Nureyev: The Life has been recognized as the definitive biography of Rudolf Nureyev. It has for the most part enjoyed a positive reception; however, there has been some objection to the amount of space devoted to Nureyev’s sexual exploits as well as a certain dissatisfaction with Nureyev’s portrayal as, for the most part, morose and difficult. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources The Advocate, no. 994 (October 9, 2007): 57. Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 14. The New Republic 237, no. 10 (November 19, 2007): 34-42. The New York Times Book Review 157 (December 2, 2007): 34-36. The New Yorker 83, no. 30 (October 8, 2007): 88-94. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 32 (August 13, 2007): 58. San Francisco Chronicle, October 14, 2007, p. M3. The Spectator 305 (October 13, 2007): 50. The Washington Post, November 11, 2007, p. BW03.

556

OF A FEATHER A Brief History of American Birding Author: Scott Weidensaul (1959) Publisher: Harcourt (Orlando, Fla.). 358 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Environment, history of science, nature Time: Prehistory to 2007 Locale: The United States Traces bird watching in America from the Native Americans’ use and understanding of birds through the split of bird study into science (ornithology) and hobby (birding) to its reunification in the “citizen-scientist,” the birder who contributes to scientific studies of birds Principal personages: John James Audubon, best-known early American illustrator and student of birds Alexander Wilson, pioneer bird artist and student, often called the father of American ornithology Mark Catesby, English naturalist who produced an early book describing and picturing American birds and other wildlife Roger Tory Peterson, American ornithologist who renovated the field guide, making it more attractive to and usable by laypersons David Sibley, American ornithologist who took the field guide for birds to new heights of detail and precision

Scott Weidensaul seems to have two purposes in writing this book. The first, insinuated by the title Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, is to outline the history of the burgeoning hobby of bird watching (birding). The second is to encourage bird watchers (birders) to go beyond their proclivity to count as many bird species as possible on each outing. He believes they should pay more attention to the natural history, behavior, and ecology of birds. Expanding on the second purpose, Weidensaul explores the tensions that have existed between bird watchers and scientific students of birds (ornithologists). In the first chapter, he contrasts the two camps and suggests that no such tension was present in the early history of North American bird study, because each early student of North American birds was both birder and ornithologist. He describes the lives and work of Mark Catesby, Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, and others as examples. At several points later in the book, he explores the development of different tensions between the two groups. Later still, he points out several ornithological endeavors that depend on nonscientists for much of their data and encourages birders to be involved in collecting those data, in a sense reuniting birder and ornithologist. Finally, he argues that birders and ornithologists need to be more proactive in bird protection and conservation.

Of a Feather / weidensaul

557

His consideration of the origin and early development of the combined science and Scott Weidensaul has written a number hobby is neatly done. After a very brief out- of popular books on natural history, line of the connections Native Americans had including Living on the Wind (1999), with birds, he considers the lives, contribu- which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He tions, and foibles of Catesby, Wilson, Audu- has also written for the Philadelphia bon, and other ornithological pioneers, com- Inquirer and other periodicals. He has plete with the plagiarism of Wilson on a federal license for banding birds and, true to his own admonition, is an active Catesby, Audubon on Wilson, and Catesby birder, ornithologist, and on his predecessors. Weidensaul seems to ex- conservationist. cuse this malfeasance by pointing out that such “borrowing” was common in that day, but he does not let the plagiarists off the hook entirely. He points out that much of the borrowing was not acknowledged, a clear breach of morality, and he explains some of the subtle ways that the borrower changed his version, suggesting a conscious attempt to cover up the similarity and thus the plagiarism. Weidensaul describes the methods of the early ornithologists in a chapter titled “Shotgun Ornithology”: Find the organism, shoot the organism, prepare the organism for the museum, and study the prepared specimen. Catesby, Wilson, Audubon, and many others used that system. Later, however, these methods led to serious disagreement between ornithologists and birders. Few modern birders see the need for specimen collection. They would document the bird photographically or visually without collecting it, while some ornithologists still prefer to document species and their distributions with specimens. In the “Shotgun” chapter and the following chapter, titled “Angry Ladies,” Weidensaul traces the accomplishments of female ornithologists and birders. He introduces a few whose skill and determination carved out niches for them in the maledominated field. He argues that women were the backbone of early conservation efforts, which opposed large-scale scientific collection and other activities detrimental to birds. Two examples of such female leadership involve the early history of the National Audubon Society, which was organized to protect birds from hunters, feather collectors, scientific collectors, and others who were slaughtering them at the time. Ironically, the society’s namesake, Audubon, was a “shotgun ornithologist.” The society was named for him because of his contribution to the knowledge of North American birds and his paintings, not for his collecting skills. Collection of specimens was (and still is) necessary to understand some aspects of ornithology. However, the combination of overenthusiastic collectors of birds and their eggs (often collecting more than necessary) and market hunters who killed birds for several uses, including feathers to decorate women’s hats, was decimating bird populations. In 1886, George Bird Grinnell led an attempt to form an Audubon Society to protect birds. It failed in 1888. Beginning in 1896, Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and several other women renewed the effort, resulting in the Audubon Society’s more permanent development.

558

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The second example is from the 1930’s. When the male leadership of the Audubon Society failed to press for the protection of the birds passing Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, women stepped in again. Local geography funnels migrating hawks past this point in the Appalachian Mountains, and hunters were shooting many of them as they passed. Richard Pough documented the slaughter photographically, but the Audubon Society responded sluggishly to the evidence. Rosalie Edge and her Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) purchased Hawk Mountain and converted it into a hawk watching point instead of a killing field. It remains one of the best spots in North America to see migrating hawks. Weidensaul uses another woman to introduce the growth in popularity of birding. Miss Jane Hathaway occasionally appeared as a nerdy bird watcher on The Beverly Hillbillies television show, a favorite of young Weidensaul. Although he recognized that the characterization was widespread opinion at one time, the birders he knew were not like Miss Hathaway. In contrast to the Hathaway model, he describes birding today as a widespread and rapidly growing hobby or sport. He goes so far as to declare it a mainstream activity, on the verge of cool. He credits Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide for the transformation from nerdy to cool and for generating widespread enthusiasm for bird watching. Peterson’s field guide emphasized a few key characteristics that differentiated species from one another and that could be seen on the live bird in the field. In contrast, professional ornithologists often used a long list of minute details that could be seen only on a bird in the hand, often only on a dead bird in the hand. He painted pictures of each bird with arrows pointing to the key characteristics. He placed similar birds on the same page for easy comparison, rather than in an order entirely determined by evolutionary relationships. Incipient birders found the simplifications delightful. Several field guides preceded Peterson’s and many followed his and are available today. Weidensaul describes some of them, exploring their strengths and shortcomings. The Sibley Guide to Birds (2000) gets the most attention. Admitting that it is quite large to be carried in the field, Weidensaul praises its thoroughness. To address the size problem, David Sibley has produced separate, smaller versions for the eastern and western sections of the continent. The original guide covered the whole of Canada and the United States. Weidensaul spends the last part of the book encouraging birders to go beyond the focus on maximizing their species count as their ultimate birding goal. He documents their proclivity to do so by describing the history of bird identification contests such as the World Series of Birding, in which teams of birders compete to see who can find the most species in a given amount of time; the big day (or big year), in which a birder attempts to see as many species as possible in a day (or a year); and even the big sit, in which a birder counts the bird species that he or she sees or hears in a specified amount of time while sitting at a strategic point. Life lists, in which birders check off new birds as they see them for the first time, are another indicator that birders are too tied to the species count. He has no problem with any of these activities (he participates in them himself) except as they become end points in birders’ efforts and thus interfere with other observations and activities. In his view, birding should go

Of a Feather / weidensaul

559

beyond counting, to include observing behavior, environmental associations, and other aspects of bird life. To encourage birding beyond counting, Weidensaul suggests that birders become “citizen-scientists” and contribute data to ornithological studies. Opportunities to do so include Christmas bird counts, in which groups of birders fan out all over the country around Christmas day each year, counting the number of individual birds they see in each species they encounter; breeding bird surveys, in which specific routes with specific survey points are run each year and the number of individuals of each species encountered is reported; and breeding bird atlases, in which the species of birds reproducing in a given geographic subunit are determined and results from the subunits are put together to generate a pattern for an entire state. The first two activities are counting exercises and so might seem to feed into birders’ tendency to count species only, but they also require the determination of the number of individuals in each species. The data are reported to a central location so that they can be used to monitor population changes through time, making it possible to suggest the species of birds that are declining so that action can be taken before they are so depleted that they are beyond help. The data are used in other studies as well. Breeding Bird Atlases demand that the birder record behavior related to breeding in order to determine where birds breed and in what numbers. These exercises take birders beyond their species-counting tendencies into the world of bird behavior and ecology, and in addition, generate data of use to the ornithological community. The citizen-scientist idea is another source of tension between birders and ornithologists. Ornithologists (and more experienced birders) tend not to trust the less experienced birders’ identifications and tend to question the validity of data collected by such citizen-scientists. On page 185, in the context of a similar argument, Weidensaul quotes Ludlow Griscom’s answer to this concern. Admitting that there will be mistakes in the data if inexperienced participants are involved, he argues that the additional data (mostly correct) collected by the less experienced birders more than makes up for the errors. Without birders acting as citizen-scientists, none of the programs described in the preceding paragraph could be as extensive as they are. Finally, Weidensaul urges birders and ornithologists to get involved with bird conservation. He criticizes them for not having conservation high on their agenda in the past. To support this accusation, he points out that, as a group, birders have been reluctant to pay fees for using wildlife areas to watch birds and to pay special taxes on the purchase of binoculars and other equipment related to birding. Theoretically, the money from these payments and taxes would go into the purchase and maintenance of natural areas with habitat for birds and other wildlife. He models these arguments on hunting and fishing, enterprises in which the participants are required to buy licenses for the right to hunt or fish and to pay special taxes on their equipment purchases. The book fulfills its dual purpose. It presents an excellent outline of the history of birding and of field ornithology in North America, and it argues convincingly that birders should be more than listers, should produce useful data, and should work for, and help to pay for, bird conservation.

560

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The book contains some errors. The most significant is probably on page 107, where the Santa Rita Mountains are placed north of Tucson, Arizona, when they are actually south of the city. In addition, abbreviations to be used later should have been introduced in parentheses with the first use of the term being abbreviated. For example, had the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) of Rosalie Edge been introduced as shown here, ECC would have been more easily recognized when it was used alone. The index is thorough, the notes and bibliography give extensive access to other works, and the illustrations complement the text. Reviews of the book have been very favorable. Carl W. Hoagstrom

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 18. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 781. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 115. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 9, 2007): 27. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 27 (July 9, 2007): 44. Science News 172, no. 10 (September 8, 2007): 159.

561

ON CHESIL BEACH Author: Ian McEwan (1948) Publisher: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (New York). 208 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1962 Locale: England A young, sexually inexperienced British couple’s wedding night proves both upsetting and disappointing for each, effectively ending their brief marriage Principal characters: Florence Ponting, a young, upper-class classical musician Edward Mayhew, a young man whose intellect and education have raised him above his original social class Geoffrey Ponting, Florence’s father, a wealthy businessman Violet Ponting, Florence’s mother, an Oxford don Marjorie Mayhew, Edward’s brain-damaged mother Harold Mather, Edward’s friend

On Chesil Beach concerns the wedding night of a young British couple in 1962. As they dine together in their room in an unassuming hotel on the Dorset coast, they are both apprehensive about their first sexual experience but too polite and timid to share their feelings. Before their actual first encounter, which constitutes the heart of the novel, Ian McEwan supplies the reader with the background of both Florence Ponting and Edward Mayhew, including not only their personal situations but also the times in which they grew up. Both born in 1940, Florence and Edward are the children of parents who endured economic depression and world war. They are well behaved and serious. Their careful upbringings have prevented them from anything in the way of sexual acquaintance; there is an almost stereotypical Victorian quality, in fact, to the inhibitions of Florence. Additionally, Florence and Edward come from very different social classes. Florence, a gifted classical musician, is the daughter of a woman who is not only an Oxford don but also a pioneer in what will prove to be a significant reformation of British cookery. Florence’s father, a wealthy businessman, takes an interest in the arts. Edward, on the other hand, is the son of a schoolmaster; his mother Marjorie suffered brain damage in a railway accident involving some possible carelessness on the part of an upper-class businessman. While Florence is well-bred enough to be gracious about Edward’s background, Edward finds Florence’s father competitive and her mother’s cool intelligence unsettling. On a psychological level, there is a suggestion that Florence’s problems with sexual intimacy may be a consequence of her mother Violet’s reserved and undemonstra-

562

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tive nature, and although Florence forms a close bond with her father, this bond may also be responsible not only for her many intellectual and personal virtues but also for her severe sexual anxieties. Edward, on the other hand, is eager for his honeymoon night and is far more open to the sensual pleasures it promises. His problem is not with sexual inhibition but with anger; the reader learns that Edward is prone to moments of explosive violence. He finds in fighting a sense of freedom and release he experiences nowhere else in his regulated life; but as fulfilling as he finds street fighting, an incident involving the defense of one of his sensitive friends, Harold Mather, allows the reader to understand that his tendency to brawl is alienating him from the more civil side of English life. Sobered by the more selfcontrolled Mather’s withdrawal from the friendship as a result of his violence, Edward is also tempered by his new status as a student of medieval history at the University of London. Anticipating a more genteel career as a historian, he finds that he is developing interests that are slowly raising and refining his cultural level in a way that would make him a fitting partner for someone like Florence. Returning to the present moment at their honeymoon hotel, McEwan spends much time on the couple’s awkward abandonment of their unappetizing meal and on their subsequent awkward attempts to consummate their marriage, which is depicted in an excruciatingly protracted sex scene that is at once horrific, comical, and sad. Far from achieving any real intimacy, Edward finds that his worst fears, of “arriving too soon,” are realized, driving a squeamish and panicky Florence away and out into the night. When Edward eventually follows her down to the long expanse of Chesil Beach, their escalating quarrel, ironically, becomes a time of intimacy greater than any they had previously experienced together. The reader has already learned that Edward is in fact in his element as a fighter, but as each gives vent to their disappointments with the other, their love for each other becomes more tenuous. Florence, who is not afraid to take the initiative when she sees fit, tries to save the day by offering him an unconventional marriage in which he will be free to have affairs, an offer she views as self-sacrificing, generous, and modern. An affronted Edward, however, explodes in righteous indignation at this attempt at negotiation, driving Florence from him. As Florence walks away on her own, Edward stands rigid with anger, watching her recede before his eyes, and although at the same time he senses that she would turn back to him if he simply called out to her, he is too proud and too furious to do so. This small decision—in which Florence turns from him and in which Edward fails to call back a woman who he knows is still in love with him—changes the course of each of their lives. The novel, however, does not end with this dissolution of their union on Chesil Beach. Up until this point, in a fashion characteristic of McEwan, the perspective has moved deftly and frequently from Florence’s to the differing Edward’s and back again. The final section of the novel, however, is told exclusively from Edward’s point of

Ian McEwan is the author of two collections of stories and ten previous novels, including Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam (1998), for which he won the Booker Prize, Atonement (2001), and Saturday (2005).

On Chesil Beach / mc ewan

563

view. The reader does learn, however, that Florence was not only ahead of her time in her suggesting an “open marriage” but also, like her mother, ahead of her time in her ability to sustain a serious career in a profession largely associated with the opposite sex. Playing violin for a highly regarded string quartet that is praised for its skill, youthful passion, and intensity, Florence is singled out in a review that rapturously describes her musicianship as that of a woman in love with life itself. Although the reader never does return to Florence’s perspective, McEwan here suggests that there was more to Florence than the reticent and intimidated bride on her honeymoon night. Edward, on the other hand, who was always an advocate of jazz and rock music, has gone on to be an active part of London’s freewheeling swinging sixties. He is delighted with the new freedoms of that era’s sexual revolution and, most especially, with the era’s happily sexually acquiescent women. He enjoys a childlike lightness and ease quite opposed to the adult seriousness of the years in which his tastes ran to women like Florence. Although he had thought to write history books, the ensuing decades saw him managing outdoor concerts and record shops, and, instead of marriage and family, his love life is composed of a number of far less earnest but essentially forgettable freewheeling romances. Edward’s unmarried condition, however, also suggests that he never achieved what marriage represented to him, namely, a passage into maturity and adult responsibility. Although Edward appears to have been pleased with the course his life took, at the age of sixty he begins to look back at his failed relationship with Florence with regret. Here, McEwan subtly shifts the reader’s perceptions as he explores the rest of Edward’s life. Even as Edward enjoyed greater comfort and personal freedom, he feels that the end of his relationship with Florence also saw the end of his ambition and his sense of serious purpose. Increasingly, he begins to blame himself for the failure of the marriage. Although he acknowledges that the sexual inhibitions and ignorance inculcated by the era in which they lived affected them both, he begins to feel that he did possess the resources of character necessary to work through the problems that ended up dividing them. He applies to the incident on Chesil Beach a pet theory he had entertained back in the early 1960’s, namely the “great man” theory of social change, which suggested that it was possible for an individual to rise to the occasion and change the course of his times by taking command of events. He begins to feel that had he tempered his own impatience, felt greater empathy for Florence, and rose to the occasion in a way that would befit a true leader, it would have been possible that their marriage—and all that the marriage would have represented—would have succeeded. That he did not take the initiative and did nothing to try to save his relationship with the woman he has come to remember as the rather magical girl with the violin haunts him as the moment in which he failed to answer the call to greatness. Furthermore, Edward’s “great man” theory, which pointed not simply to personal change but to the redirection of national destiny, suggests that the blunders of Edward and Florence on one level represent the lost opportunities of England itself. In addition to the historical setting of this novel, which took place just before the great social changes that ushered in a new era in British life, the physical setting of

564

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Chesil Beach is another important aspect of this novel. Although an aspect of the honeymoon resort evokes a poky provinciality that is just slightly behind the times, the presence of the sea suggests something more enduring and eternal. The great, rolling sea can be said to mock the thwarted passions of the young couple, suggesting that they have managed to put themselves out of touch with a profound life force to which they are, ironically, in very close physical proximity, choosing instead to remain on the hard pebbles that are unique to this particular beach. The sea comes to represent a sexual mystery so remote from their daily lives as to be similar to a mystical experience; it is both exquisitely near and tragically far away from the young couple squabbling on the shore. Additionally, Chesil Beach references McEwan’s previous novel, Saturday (2005), which featured poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s major Victorian poem “Dover Beach.” There remains in this novel a faint echo of “Dover Beach,” with its evocation of the sea’s withdrawal as a metaphor for loss and vital absence. As Arnold’s poem enjoined his two lovers to be true to one another in the face of the larger indifference of the universe, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach suggests that the sundering of Florence and Edward is a failure to do just that and that their parting may have as much to do with the death of the heart as any sexual dysfunction. The heartlessness of Edward on Chesil Beach informs both the novel’s theme and narrative style: McEwan’s own cool and fearless analysis of all that went wrong with this couple is what has led to this novel’s evaluation as both a horror story and a comedy, each of which depend on a certain diminution of empathy. There is also in this novel the masterful narrative tension and surprising turns of plot that have contributed to McEwan’s reputation as an author of literary thrillers. McEwan also is presenting a love story that is able to engage the reader empathically with Edward and Florence; his ability to evoke deep sympathy for his two characters as they struggle for intimacy is in the great tradition of the English novel’s mission to educate the heart. Furthermore, the poetic way in which he juxtaposes his lost young couple against the great sea of life speaks not simply to issues that arose in one repressive era in recent times but to love problems that belong to the human condition and to all time. Margaret Boe Birns Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 1 (July/August, 2007): 134-138. Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 73-75. The Boston Globe, June 3, 2007, p. C4. Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2007, p. R2. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 12 (July 19, 2007): 32-33. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 1-13. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3, 2007, p. F9. The Seattle Times, June 10, 2007, p. L8. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW15. Weekly Standard 12, no. 46 (August 20, 2007): 39-40.

565

OTHER COLORS Essays and a Story Author: Orhan Pamuk (1952) First published: Öteki Renkler, 1999, in Turkey Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 433 pp. $27.95 Type of work: Essays Time: 1952 to the 2000’s Locale: Istanbul and Kars, Turkey; New York City; Stockholm A compilation of mostly short essays about Turkish culture that includes literary criticism, autobiography, and a story by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature The opening line in Orhan Pamuk’s preface to Other Colors: Essays and a Story states, “This is a book made of ideas, images, and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels.” He says that the various pieces in the book are put together in a continuous narrative, but the book is not chronologically organized. It is divided into nine sections. The first one, called “Living and Worrying,” contains sketches that Pamuk wrote between 1996 and 1999 for a magazine, Öküz (ox), devoted to politics and humor. The section begins with an essay that is essentially literary criticism or theory, “The Implied Author,” that is also autobiographical. Pamuk says that for him literature is like medicine, and he needs a dose every day. It must be good literature—that is, dense and deep. About his own work he feels differently: He is happy if he gets a good half page after spending ten hours alone at his desk. He goes on to explain what he feels like when that does not happen and its effect on his family. What he most longs for is a kind of spiritual inspiration that he describes in his novel Kar (2002; Snow, 2004). In his 2006 Nobel Prize speech, which concludes Other Colors, Pamuk repeats some of the aspects of novel writing and develops them further, but throughout his book he returns repeatedly to his experience as a writer or reader. In some respects, then, Other Colors resembles Philip Roth’s Reading Myself and Others (1975), although it contains much besides Roth’s kind of literary criticism. For example, the second essay in the book, “My Father,” concerns Pamuk’s experience the day his father died. Pamuk explains the importance of his father, an unpublished writer among other things, not only in this essay, but again in the Nobel Prize speech. The rest of the essays in the first section are much briefer sketches, some of them illustrated by the author, such as “When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep” and “Giving Up Smoking.” The first part also includes several sketches of his young daughter, Rüya, some of them humorous. Among the most compelling essays in this section are those that describe the earthquake that hit Istanbul on August 17, 1999, in which thirty thousand people died. The next essay

566

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

describes the angst that the people of Istanbul experienced long afterward. The second section, “Books and Reading,” includes topics such as “How I Got Rid of Some of My Books,” “The Pleasures of Reading,” and “Nine Notes on Book Covers.” What follow are essays of literary criticism that focus on various classics, beginning with the tales from One Thousand and One Nights. Pamuk’s foreword to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) is an excellent piece of criticism, insisting on the patience necessary to read and grasp Sterne’s novel. He concludes that the subject of that novel is the impossibility of ever getting to the point, hence the required patience on the part of the reader. Pamuk argues that novels are valuable insofar as they raise questions about the shape and nature of life. They offer a new way of understanding life, which, he contends, is exactly what Tristram Shandy does. Other essays in this section are on Victor Hugo, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Salman Rushdie, and others, and three on Fyodor Dostoevski, whom Pamuk especially admires. The next section in Other Colors is “Politics, Europe, and Other Problems of Being Oneself.” Here one needs to recall that Pamuk was indicted in his native Turkey for speaking out, not in a novel but in an interview, about the Armenian genocide, which Turkish law forbids its citizens to criticize. In his essay “On Trial,” Pamuk describes part of what he went through following the interview in February, 2005. Charges against him were eventually dropped, but he remains outspoken against certain aspects of his country’s policies, especially regarding human rights abuses. Throughout many of the essays in this section and others, Pamuk also focuses on the contrast, if not the conflict, between Eastern and Western cultures, seeing himself as a Turk with a definite Western outlook. The problems of East and West are put into high relief in the essay “Family Meals and Politics on Religious Holidays.” Opposition to the West among Muslims, Pamuk explains in “The Anger of the Damned,” is motivated not by the religion of Islam or by the poverty that millions of Muslims experience daily, but by the “crushing humiliation” they feel caused by Western attitudes of superiority. The fourth section, “My Books Are My Life,” is aptly named, for Pamuk is a fully committed writer. The essays on his novels Beyaz Kale (1985; The White Castle, 1991), Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1994), Yeni Hayat (1992; The New Life, 1997), Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998; My Name Is Red, 2001), and Snow are extremely illuminating, essential reading for anyone interested in those books. Some of these essays derive from interviews he has given on them or are written retrospectively, as in the essay on The Black Book, looked at from the perspective of ten years later. The essays are highly personal and offer glimpses into the novelist’s creative process and the problems he has encountered, as for example the difficulty in bringing The Black Book to a close, which took him almost five years to write. Pamuk confesses that it is his characters’ uncertainties, sorrows, and silences that he relates to most closely, not Orhan Pamuk, the most widely read novelist in Turkey, is the author of seven novels. His novel Benim Adim Kirmizi (1998; My Name Is Red, 2001) won the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and in 2006 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Other Colors / pamuk

567

their victories or acts of courage. Hence, he pays most attention to the moments of fragility in his books, comparing himself in this way to the miniature painters he has written about in My Name Is Red. The essay on Snow is made up of selections from Pamuk’s notebooks written during many visits to Kars, the city in northeastern Turkey that is the locale for most of the story. Particularly interesting are the accounts of the Unity Teahouse and the police, who figure significantly in the novel. “Pictures and Texts,” the next section, begins with “Lirin’s Surprise” and opposes a good story against theory. He admits that he has learned much from theory, has even been beguiled by it, but often feels the need to steer clear of it. The reason is that, however good and convincing the theory may be, it will always be someone else’s theory; on the other hand, a good story that has affected a reader just as deeply becomes one’s own. The difference between theory and a good story is the difference between the abstract and the concrete, and Pamuk proceeds to tell some very good stories. The first is one he tried to tell in The Black Book about a painting competition; the other derives from One Thousand and One Nights and tells of the love between Hüsrev and Lirin that is aroused through the use of portraits hanging on trees. Each story has been told over time with variations and raises important questions for the reader: For example, which is more effective, Hüsrev’s picture or the man himself, the reality or the image? Other essays in section five include “Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective Novels,” which claims that Turkey is the current leader in state-sponsored murder and other human rights abuses, and the very humorous “Entr’acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra!” which is subtitled “Going to See a Film in Istanbul.” Films come late to Istanbul after their initial release because Turkish distributors are unable to meet Hollywood’s prices for first-run showings, Pamuk says. This of course arouses all the more interest in some films, like Cleopatra (1963), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The attraction for Pamuk, he admits, was not only to lose himself in illusion and become entranced by beautiful people in beautiful settings but also to come face-toface with the West and to mimic various attitudes and gestures learned from such films. In “Why I Didn’t Become an Architect,” Pamuk explains why he dropped his studies in that field and decided to write instead. It was a question, he says, of being able to realize his dreams in ways that a Turkish architect could not at that time. “Bellini and the East” is another lively essay in this section, illustrated in the same manner as “Black Pen.” The section concludes with a humorous essay on “Meaning,” where the words on the page directly address the reader. “Other Cities, Other Civilizations” contains two very vivid accounts of Pamuk’s experience living in the United States, especially his time in New York City, where he was once mugged and had to deal with the police. It also includes his disappointment with cinnamon rolls and his encounter in a subway with someone he knew years earlier in Istanbul who had come to live abroad. Following this section is the Paris Review interview in which Pamuk again talks about his writing. He admits that over the years writing has not become easier for him but that he usually knows the whole story line of a novel in advance. Nevertheless, he sometimes gets blocked and moves from writing, say, chapter 5 to chapter 15, but he always waits to write the last chapter

568

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

last. He is most happy, he says, when he is alone in a room and inventing. Here again he reminds one of another committed novelist, Philip Roth. Before ending Other Colors with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pamuk inserts a story, doubtless taken from life but fictionalized, called “To Look Out the Window.” It is about a boy growing up in a middle-class Turkish family in Istanbul, visiting relatives, collecting picture cards, fighting with his older brother, and saying goodbye to his father, who goes off alone to Paris, leaving his family behind, just as Pamuk’s own father did from time to time. The Nobel lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase,” is not only about the legacy his father left him (his writings) but also about being a writer at the present time, especially in Turkey. He repeats that to become a writer requires a full commitment: shutting oneself up in a room to escape crowds and company and all the rest of ordinary, mundane existence. One requires inspiration, but also hard work and patience. Writing, paradoxically, is not a lonely process, however; one has the company of words by those who came before—that is, tradition. Literature is, Pamuk insists, the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered to help understand itself. Luckily, Pamuk’s father had an extensive library that helped prepare the way for him. What a writer must do today, he insists, is to investigate people’s basic fears—the fear of being left aside, of counting for nothing, and feelings of worthlessness. Here he speaks very much like the Istanbullu he is. Jay L. Halio

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 2 (September 15, 2007): 16. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 774. Library Journal 132, no. 16 (September 15, 2007): 62. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 17 (November 8, 2007): 4-8. The New York Times 157 (October 5, 2007): E38. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 30, 2007): 16-17.

569

OUT STEALING HORSES Author: Per Petterson (1952) First published: Ut og stjæle hester, 2003, in Norway Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 258 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century and the 1940’s Locale: Norway’s forests and countryside In a poignant and personal novel, readers are allowed glimpses into the life of Trond Sander, as he reminisces about his childhood and family, and develop an understanding of the life those experiences and relationships created Principal characters: Trond Sander, the narrator, who tells the story from a sixty-seven-year-old and fifteen-year-old perspective Lyra, his dog and companion Jon Haug, his childhood friend Lars Haug, Trond’s neighbor and childhood friend, Jon’s younger brother Poker, Lars’s dog Odd Haug, Jon’s younger brother and Lars’s twin, who dies during childhood Barkald, local landowner from whom the boys steal horses Franz, a neighbor from Trond’s youth Ellen, Trond’s daughter

Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses is a relaxing novel that takes the reader on a tour of the Norwegian countryside and forests throughout the eras, jumping between modern-day Norway and 1940’s Norway just after the German occupation, following protagonist Trond Sander as he is forced to relive his past to understand his present and to accept his future. Three years after his wife died in a tragic car accident, Trond finds himself widowed and alone, living in a new house and environment. He has cashed out his retirement and moved to the remote countryside to avoid people, who he never cared for much, and spends the rest of his years living as he wishes with his dog, Lyra. Not knowing anyone, nor they him, Trond remarks how little communication is needed to form relationships in small communities where neighbors “know about my working life, how old I am, that my wife died three years ago in an accident I only just survived myself, that she was not my first wife, and that I have two grown-up children from an earlier marriage, and that they have children themselves.” Trond accepts and

570

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

enjoys his superficial relationship with his new community, offering them just enough information necessary for them to form their own understanding of him, knowing that “people like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are,” and liking the fact that “what they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and lets you off the hook.” Not having to make an effort to be accepted by the community and retaining his solitude seems to be working until Trond discovers that in his quest to remove himself from all aspects of his former life, he has moved next door to a ghost from his past. One evening, a neighbor wanders onto Trond’s property while looking for his dog. Trond instantly recognizes the man as his childhood friend Lars Haug, stating, “Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating.” Lars is a part of the past that Trond has worked a lifetime to repress. By pointing out the farfetched coincidence that the protagonist should happen upon the person partially responsible for him wanting to escape society, Petterson gives the chance meeting realism and honesty, a twist of fate to which the reader is able to somehow relate, or at the very least, accept. Unnerved by the unwelcome presence from his adolescence, Trond is thrown back to the summer of 1948, where he spends a summer working with his father on their timber farm in Norway’s forests, while his mother and older sister remain at home in Oslo. He is woken one morning by fellow fifteen-year-old Jon Haug, who wakes him regularly to steal horses from their neighbor Barkald, the wealthiest landowner in the region, and take them for a joy ride, returning them unharmed. Their day begins as any other adventure, but after their ride, Trond witnesses a frightening side of Jon as he crushes a tiny bird’s nest in his hands, destroying something helpless and precious and upsetting Trond without him fully grasping why. Trond returns home emotionally disturbed, soaked to the bone after a sudden rainstorm, and anxious to get away from his friend. As he dries by the fire, his father delivers the grave news that Lars, Jon’s younger brother, shot and killed Odd, Lars’s twin. The killing, of course, was an accident, but it had been perpetrated using Jon’s air rifle, which he neglectfully left out loaded. Jon voluntarily left the family to live with relatives in Innbygda, never to see Trond again, and taking part of Trond’s innocence with him. The incident causes an older Trond to reflect on “my friend Jon who one day just disappeared out of my life because one of his brothers had shot the other out of his life with a gun that he, Jon,

Per Petterson’s novels have received much acclaim throughout Norway. He has received the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, the Critics’ Award for Best Novel, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2007, Out Stealing Horses was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the highest prize for a novel published in English.

Out Stealing Horses / petterson

571

had forgotten to unload. It was high summer then, he was his brothers’ keeper, and in one instant everything was changed and destroyed.” The accidental killing, which is too much for anyone to comprehend, leaves fifteenyear-old Trond alone without his best friend to make sense of the unfathomable. Shortly after the killing, his father puts him on a train to Oslo, promising to follow shortly, but never making the return trip home. That summer, Trond would experience the death of a friend, and of his childhood, as he assumes the position of man of the house. Trond had managed to live fifty years without having to revisit the tragedy that occurred during that summer, until he runs into his new neighbor Lars Haug, the very boy who had killed his twin brother by accident. The reunion, although not welcomed necessarily by either side, nor openly acknowledged between the two men (for the reader gets the feeling that Lars too has not made peace with the demons of his past), forces the adult Trond to return to the year when the innocence of his youth ended at the butt of an air rifle and the loss of a father. With age, life experience, and the clarity of time, Trond begins to reexamine other aspects of that summer and reevaluate his father and his actions with his adult perspective. He recognizes an inappropriate relationship his father had with Jon’s mother and remembers revealing conversations he had with their neighbor Franz. Petterson returns the reader once again to the boy’s youth, displaying male pride, strength, and a sort of rite of passage, as Trond, his father, Jon’s father, and Franz try to outdo one another as they work to get the logs downstream to Sweden. Trond at one point leaves the men and comforts Jon’s attractive yet grieving mother by holding her innocently, yet a little too closely. The gesture does not go unnoticed by the working men. That evening, Trond and his father, battered and physically exhausted, have a conversation in which his father pronounces Trond a man, and then the two play like schoolboys as they ready for bed. The father, however, does not join Trond in the bedroom. Trond goes to look for his father and finds him in an intimate embrace with Jon’s mother, understanding instantly that this is not the first time the two have been like this. Confused and upset about seeing this side of his father, Trond develops a friendship with Franz. While young Trond believed his father was away working on their timber farm every summer, Franz informs Trond of his father’s involvement with the Norwegian resistance under the Nazi occupation. Franz vividly describes his father’s and Jon’s mother’s roles in smuggling people and documentation over the Swedish border with sometimes successful, sometimes heartbreaking results. Franz’s revelations open up too many questions for a young mind to process, as Trond realizes he has no idea who his father is or where his allegiances lie. Confused and shaken by these revelations, Trond realizes that “life had shifted its weight from one point to another, from one leg to the other, like a silent giant in the vast shadows against the ridge, and I did not feel like the person I had been when this day began, and I did not even know if that was something to be sorry for.” Before Trond has the opportunity to further question Franz, he is sent home to Oslo, never to see his father again. Having given the reader just enough background from Trond’s past to begin to see the layers that have made him the man he is presently, Petterson jumps back to the

572

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

present as Trond prepares for the snowfall and settles into his newly chosen life. He is setting the table for dinner, for he is a widower but maintains his manners, when there is a knock at his door. His neighbor is found on the porch and is quickly invited in for dinner. Lars wastes no time in telling Trond that he knows who he is. Trond in turn admits that he too knows who Lars is, and the two men continue to eat their supper with the uncomfortable truth now behind them. Lars turns out to be an invaluable friend and asset to Trond by helping him when his tree comes crashing down, to find a man to plow his driveway, and most importantly, to provide company at a distance, should it be needed. Lars also opens up many doors that were once closed, allowing Trond to make peace with his past so that he can put memories to rest and live the remainder of his life unburdened. Through their dinners together, Trond learns that Jon returned to the home that Lars had helped his mother maintain during Jon’s absence and claimed the farm as his own without protest. Lars left the home that day and had never returned, nor had he ever spoken with his family members again. Out of politeness, Trond asks if Lars’s mother or brother are still living, instead of asking his true question—whether they had been living with his absent father for all of these decades. The real question is never asked, and Lars never offers the information, leaving readers to arrive at their own conclusions. The two abandoned men are left to create new lives for themselves. Petterson lulls the reader into a comforting serenity through his simple and honest descriptions of Norway’s terrain and the tender yet disturbing memories of an innocent boy and an elderly man who mean no one any harm. Petterson’s writing style is cinematic, painting vivid pictures and scene changes, while allowing the reader to develop an emotional bond with the characters. Out Stealing Horses is a relaxing and calming read whose occasionally cinematic simplicity is easily excused by the novel’s unpretentious honesty and purity. Sara Vidar

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 38. Chicago Tribune, August 18, 2007, p. 10. Entertainment Weekly, no. 936 (June 1, 2007): 71. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 415. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 84. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 19 (December 6, 2007): 53-55. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 24, 2007): 1-13. The New Yorker 83, no. 19 (July 9, 2007): 91. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 15 (April 9, 2007): 32.

573

THE OVERLOOK Author: Michael Connelly (1956) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 225 pp. $21.99 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 Locale: Los Angeles Harry Bosch solves a complicated murder case despite interference from his colleagues and federal authorities Principal characters: Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Rachel Walling, a special agent with the Tactical Intelligence Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Bosch’s former lover Clifford Maxwell, an FBI special agent and Walling’s former partner Jack Brenner, an FBI special agent and Walling’s current partner Dr. Stanley Kent, a medical physicist who has been murdered Alicia Kent, his widow Ignacio “Iggy” Ferras, a young detective with the LAPD and Bosch’s current partner Jesse Mitford, a young Canadian vagrant Ramin Samir, a former professor at the University of California and a spokesman for Muslim causes Captain Don Hadley, head of the LAPD’s Office of Homeland Security

Veteran detective novelist Michael Connelly constructs two narratives in The Overlook. The first, overt narrative involves terrorists and the robbery of nuclear material that could be used in a terrorist attack. The other narrative underlies the first and involves what is by comparison an almost old-fashioned crime: a cold-blooded murder carried out for the sake of passion. The narratives run parallel to each other and unfold in little more than twelve hours. The Overlook opens as Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch receives a midnight call from his supervisor, Lieutenant Larry Gandle. It seems that a homicide victim has been discovered at an overlook above Mulholland Dam. At the moment, Bosch is a member of Homicide Special, a branch of the Robbery-Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Although the Hollywood Division would normally have handled the crime, Bosch’s unit has been asked to take over the investigation, and Gandle has assigned the case to Bosch and his new partner, Ignacio “Iggy” Ferras. After Bosch calls Ferras, he drives to the overlook, which is near his home, in his own car. There he discovers that the Hollywood detective waiting to hand over the

574

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

case is his former partner, Jerry Edgar. The body appears to be that of Dr. Stanley Kent, discovered by a routine patrol investigating a car parked in a no parking zone. The body had been found lying face down in a clearing with two bullet wounds—apparently .22 caliber— in the back of the head, and the identification had been made through a wallet and a hospital identification tag on the body. As Bosch questions Edgar, it becomes clear that Edgar has done little to move the case forward. A further complication arises when an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) appears on the scene after Edgar leaves. To Bosch’s consternation, the agent is Rachel Walling, his sometime lover. Walling explains that she too had been called out in the middle of the night, and she proceeds to confirm the identification. Kent’s role as a medical physicist means that he has had access to the potentially deadly nuclear material cesium, and an initial search of his name by the LAPD on the National Crime Index Computer has alerted Walling’s office. Suspicious of the FBI’s involvement and of Walling’s obvious reluctance to tell him more, Bosch tricks her into revealing the truth. She and her partner had interviewed Kent the previous year to warn him of his vulnerability to terrorists. At Kent’s house, Bosch and Walling find Kent’s wife Alicia lying on the bed, stripped, gagged, and with her wrists and ankles tied together behind her back. When she is revived, she tells them that two men—one of them apparently Middle Eastern—forced their way into the house earlier in the evening. At this point, Walling’s partner Jack Brenner arrives, and as the three listen to Alicia Kent’s story they learn that the intruders have stolen her car and her husband’s .22 caliber revolver. A check of her e-mail reveals that they had also sent her husband a photograph of her on the bed as a means of blackmailing him into stealing a quantity of cesium. It appears that he was executed after following the intruders’ orders to bring the cesium to the overlook. The first break in the case comes as Bosch learns in a phone call that Ferras has found a witness to the execution, Jesse Mitford. A young vagrant who has hitchhiked from Canada, Mitford had been sleeping in a deserted yard near the overlook and had seen and heard much of the murder. Afraid that the federal authorities will take Mitford under their control, Bosch checks him into a hotel under an alias but tells Brenner that he has let the young man go. Ferras has been growing increasingly uncomfortable with his partner’s methods, but when the two revisit the Kent residence at dawn, Bosch gives Ferras further cause for alarm. An officious FBI agent guarding the house refuses them entry, and, frustrated that he is being shut out from his own investigation, Bosch easily overpowers the agent—whose identification reveals that he is Clifford Maxwell—and handcuffs him. Bosch is puzzled by several seemingly unimportant details in the house, including a rectangular discoloration on the wall of the workout room where a poster or cal-

Michael Connelly chose to become a writer after reading the works of Raymond Chandler in college. His novel The Black Echo (1992) won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and several of his subsequent novels have been named to annual “best books” lists compiled by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

The Overlook / connelly

575

endar might have hung, but does not know what to make of them. As the two detectives leave, Bosch tosses the keys to Maxwell’s cuffs on the floor where the agent will have to crawl to retrieve them. Another apparent break comes when Alicia Kent’s car is located, parked in plain view in front of the house of Ramin Samir—for some time a “person of interest” to the LAPD. Samir is notorious for his noisy espousal of various anti-American causes, but, knowing that Samir’s main interest is in self-aggrandizement, Bosch is immediately suspicious of a set-up. However, the location of the car is enough to send Captain Don Hadley, head of LAPD’s Office of Homeland Security, into action with a paramilitary unit. Hadley’s reputation for bungling has already earned him the sobriquet of “Captain Done Badly.” Sure enough, Samir is shot and killed by Hadley’s men, but no evidence of the stolen cesium is found in either the house or the car. A deputy coroner provides Bosch with the most significant break in the case when he calls him with a tip. A patient named Digoberto Gonzalves has been admitted to a local hospital with acute radiation poisoning. When Bosch and Walling reach the hospital, the patient is unconscious, but a Toyota key recovered from his pocket leads Bosch to search the neighborhood where the man had been found. After cruising the parking lots in the area, Bosch and Walling find a dilapidated Toyota pickup and camper parked next to a large Dumpster. Inside the camper, Bosch finds an odd but incriminating assortment of materials: the portable lead container or “pig” that Kent would have used to transport the cesium, a rolled up poster of yoga positions, a .22 caliber revolver, and, ominously, several loose cesium capsules. However, it is the remaining trash and debris in the pickup that suggest the truth to Bosch—that Gonzalves had simply been scavenging in the early morning hours on trash-collection day. He had found the “pig” and the revolver in a Dumpster, and, not realizing the nature of his find, had poisoned himself. At this point, the key elements of the case come together for Bosch, and as he explains them to Walling, the second, implicit narrative of The Overlook becomes apparent to the reader. Bosch had been troubled by the fact that Stanley Kent’s murderers had spared his wife, and he realizes now that she has actually conspired in the murder. The recovered—and potentially incriminating—poster that had hung in the Kents’ workout room pictured a yoga pose identical to the presumably painful position in which Bosch and Walling had found Alicia tied. The robbery of the cesium was a red herring. Whoever had worked with Alicia Kent had realized that in the current climate of suspicion, authorities would seize upon the robbery as the work of terrorists. The information Alicia had supplied about her alleged assailants, coupled with the presence of her car in front of Samir’s house, would make the terrorist angle irresistible to credulous authorities. If Gonzalves had not found the cesium and the other evidence hours before trash was collected, it would all have disappeared into a landfill. The final revelation comes as Bosch suggests to Walling that her partner Jack Brenner, who along with Walling had met Dr. Kent and his beautiful wife the previous year, would have been in a perfect position to work out the details of the crime. It is now Bosch’s turn to be surprised as Walling explains that her partner that year had

576

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

not been Brenner but Clifford Maxwell, the agent who had been so anxious to keep Bosch and Ferras away from the crime scene. The Overlook now races to its conclusion as Bosch and Walling strive to capture Maxwell. However, the renegade agent shoots the one person who could implicate him, his lover Alicia, and then, as Bosch and Walling move in, himself. The Overlook captures the underlying mood of paranoia and the concomitant mistrust of those of Middle Eastern origin that have gripped the United States since the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001. In addition, it illustrates how easily individuals and institutions can fall prey to such paranoia and mistrust while at the same time capitalizing on them. Last but not least, it highlights Connelly’s ability to construct an ingenious plot from familiar and even hackneyed ingredients. The Overlook was initially published in sixteen weekly installments in The New York Times Magazine in late 2006. In preparing it for book publication, Connelly expanded the work to twenty-two chapters and added a secondary story line. He also shifted the time from late 2006 to early 2007—essentially the period in which the book became available. Serialization before book publication was once common, and was practiced by such luminaries as nineteenth century English novelist Charles Dickens—one of whose books Jesse Mitford happens to be carrying in his backpack. Despite Connelly’s reference to Dickens, he works most obviously in a tradition of American crime fiction that stretches back to the middle decades of the twentieth century—a tradition created by Raymond Chandler (who also wrote memorably about Los Angeles) and Dashiell Hammett. He alludes indirectly to the former in many of his works, counting on astute readers to recognize the references. At the end of Chandler’s masterpiece, The Big Sleep (1939), narrator Philip Marlowe wonders: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?” On the last page of The Overlook, Bosch allows himself a rare moment of introspection: “But Bosch thought that it didn’t really matter if you died cornered in a butcher shop or on an overlook glimpsing the lights of heaven.” Unfortunately, such bravura moments are rare in The Overlook, which perhaps moves too quickly for its own good, nor does Connelly aspire to Hammett’s lean, artfully honed style. On the next-to-last page of The Overlook, Connelly writes unimaginatively of Walling, “She looked at [Bosch] and smiled sort of sadly.” For better or worse, Connelly’s style resembles Harry Bosch himself: well meaning, fast moving, and a little tired. Thanks to advances in telecommunications, however, Connelly has done his illustrious predecessors one better. He has written a final, twenty-third chapter distributed to subscribers to his electronic mailing list. Although it does not alter the sense of what has come before, it adds a sly fillip to the plot as well as a glimpse of Bosch and Walling setting off together on a tangentially related case. When The Overlook is reprinted in paperback, the chances are good that this chapter will find its way into it. Grove Koger

The Overlook / connelly

577

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 15 (April 1, 2007): 5. Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2007, p. 6. The Denver Post, May 20, 2007, p. F13. Entertainment Weekly, no. 935 (May 25, 2007): 87. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 8 (April 15, 2007): 354. Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2007, p. R4. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 40. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 20, 2007, p. F9. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 5, 2007, p. C1.

578

PEELING THE ONION A Memoir Author: Günter Grass (1927) First published: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 2006, in Germany Translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim Publisher: Harcourt (New York). Illustrated. 432 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1927-1959 Locale: Danzig (now Gda½sk), Poland; Germany In this brilliant memoir, Grass tells the story of his life from his youthful exploits, his first love, and his military experiences up through the writing of his first novel and reveals his lifelong devotion to the power and beauty of art In August, 2006, Günter Grass aroused emotions across the literary world when he revealed in his memoir, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS as a teenager. Reaction to the news was swift, with many calling for him to hand back the Nobel Prize in Literature he received in 1999. Others were more supportive of Grass, pointing out that he had already paid the price of his youthful actions by living all these years with his guilt over having served in the SS. By the time the English translation appeared one year later, the controversy had died down considerably, but critics continued to raise questions about the nature of art and the artist’s role in politics. Critics also raised questions about the nature of memoir, since Grass’s book possesses a fictional quality, often alternating between a firstperson telling of the story and a third-person narration of the story of a young man’s life. More than any other quality, these shifting points of view raised serious questions about Grass’s ability either to tell the truth about his past or to recall with any degree of clarity the events of his young life. Michael Henry Heim’s elegant translation of Grass’s memoir now allows English-language readers to see what all the fuss was about. Reading Peeling the Onion shows the controversy over Grass’s involvement with the Waffen-SS to have been so much media puffery. Many readers and critics have read Grass’s first novel, Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1961), as an autobiography. In that story, young Oskar Matzerath decides to stop growing and talking when he reaches the age of three. Oskar is both attracted and repelled by the Nazi Party but eventually straps on a military drum and communicates by means of high-pitched screams and the beat of his drum. The novel captures not only the pervasive sense of German guilt over the loss of World War II but also the ambivalence that many Germans felt about Nazism and its programs toexterminate Jews. Like Oskar in the novel, Grass’s childhood did come to an end with the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Danzig, and, like Oskar, Grass begins to

Peeling the Onion / grass

579

ponder the meaning of these events and his involvement in them, but The Tin Drum is not autobiography. Grass writes Peeling the Onion in order that critics who mistake The Tin Drum for memoir cannot have this last word. As the title indicates, Grass uses the metaphor of peeling an onion to write about the richly layered experiences of his life. As he slowly removes the dry, crackly skin of his present life, a moister layer appears, the removal of which reveals yet another moist Novelist, poet, and artist Günter Grass layer ripe for the picking. If he were to chop is the author of numerous books, the onion, it would produce tears, but his including Die Blechtrommel (1959; peeling produces a sober examination of the The Tin Drum, 1961), Katz und Maus many layers of his life. However, Peeling the (1961; Cat and Mouse, 1963), Der Butt Onion resembles as well an impressionistic (1977; The Flounder, 1978), Mein painting in which the uncovering of one layer Jahrhundert (1999; My Century, 1999) on the canvas not only reveals another but and Im Krebsgang (2002; Crabwalk, also reveals how intricately the layers over- 2003). He was awarded the Nobel lap. These are moments in the painting of a Prize in Literature in 1999. life, moments that touch all aspects of Grass’s life and his readers. In Peeling the Onion, Grass does recall his involvement with the Waffen-SS. As a teenager, he became a part of this military operation, and he offers a quite stark portrait of life in the young Nazis. When he was ten, he joined a kind of young boy’s cadet organization, the Jungvolk. He recalls that as a member of the Hitler Youth, he was a believer to the end. Part of the rank and file, Grass did not question the speeches of Adolf Hitler or Hermann Göring but took to heart the message that his fatherland was surrounded by and threatened by enemies. At fourteen, Grass participated as a volunteer in the Luftwaffe artillery, more as a diversion from his schoolwork than as a path to a military career. He recalls that he and his classmates spent long hours at their posts, scaring more rabbits than airplanes. However, Grass points out, he often spent these hours scribbling poems. By the age of sixteen, Grass had joined the Waffen-SS, and he spent his short-lived military career as a tank gunner. Sent to the Eastern Front in the spring of 1945, Grass gets separated from his unit, is wounded, and eventually ends up in an American prisoner of war camp until the end of the war. At the camp, he continues to write, to draw sketches, and he plays dice with a fellow inmate named Joseph, whom Grass believes may have been Joseph Ratzinger, the man who was to become a famous conservative Catholic cardinal and then Pope Benedict XVI. While in the camp, Grass sees photographs from the concentration camps of the piles of corpses, the ovens, the starving and the starved, and the skeletal bodies of survivors from another world and cannot believe that Germans could have been responsible for such activities. These photographs send waves of shock and guilt through him. He also admits honestly and poignantly, though, that he

580

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

never fired a shot while in the Waffen-SS and that the guilt and shame of his involvement have gnawed ceaselessly on him since then. Peeling the Onion does not stop with his youthful military involvement. Grass recalls the tortures of his youthful life: his flirtations with religion, his lustful hunger for various young women, his consuming desire for art, and his earliest forays into the writing life. Peeling the Onion records Grass’s life from his birth up until the publication of The Tin Drum. In Peeling the Onion, Grass tells readers that hunger was his first teacher. Literally, after the war, he could not get enough to eat. Another hunger—the lustful desire of a young man for a young woman—soon began to compete with his physical hunger. The hunger that most motivated his life, though, was his hunger for art. As a young boy, he had collected coupons from cigarette boxes that reproduced classic works of art. He also read voraciously. Grass concedes that books have always been his gap in the fence, his entry into other worlds. In the late 1940’s, he apprenticed himself to a tombstone maker in order to become a sculptor. During those years, he began writing poetry and discovered the way that words could satisfy this new hunger. Eventually, Grass marries his first wife, Anna. They move to Paris, where he joins a group of writers, including Paul Celan, and rattles away at his Olivetti typewriter on the pages that soon grow into The Tin Drum. From the writing of The Tin Drum until now, Grass has lived page to page and between book and book, his inner world still rich in characters. His desire to be an artist emerged early in his youth. The collected albums of picture cards of great European masterpieces set him on his quest for art. Grass recalls that at the age of ten, he was able to distinguish right away Hans Baldung from Matthias Grünewald and Frans Hals from Rembrandt. When he was not leafing through these albums of paintings, he was curled with one of the books from his mother’s bookshelves: Fyodor Dostoevski’s Besy (1871-1872; The Possessed, 1913), Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899), or Wilhelm Raabe’s Der Hungerpastor (1864; The Hunger-Pastor, 1885) among them. Grass derived great pleasure from reading Vicki Baum’s Stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer (1928; Helene, 1933), a book blacklisted by the Catholic Church because of its heroine’s teenage pregnancy and her attempts to end it by abortion. Grass’s uncle, Arthur, was a minor poet and novelist, and Grass one day discovered a suitcase full of Arthur’s writings in the family’s attic. Although the verses often glorify the fatherland or the great honor of the führer, Grass nevertheless recalls his fascination with the process of putting words on paper to form artistic works. Early in Peeling the Onion, Grass wonders what his own first scribblings would resemble, if they still existed. Would they reflect, like his uncle’s verses, his unwavering faith in the fatherland and his ardor for Germany? Grass wrote a youthful first novel, now lost, and he wonders in his memoir whether it might have been marked by this same pride in country. Because of his early encounters with art and writing, Grass knew even as a teenager that he wanted to become a famous artist. The final chapters of Grass’s memoir chronicle his struggles to write and complete The Tin Drum. Since his hunger for art so consumed his life, he could not put down his

Peeling the Onion / grass

581

pen to stop writing or put down his pencil to stop drawing sketches. He admits, however, that he experienced difficulty in finding a form that would adequately express his emotions and convey the weight of his own experience. He even evaded the attempt to capture on paper the stories that most engaged him and instead pursued writing characterized by wordplay. Grass’s first exhibition of drawings and sculptures in November, 1955, in Stuttgart proved to be the event that broke open the vessel so that his words might pour forth. The memoir closes with Grass and Anna dancing until dawn at the Frankfurt Book Fair, celebrating the success of his novel. Peeling the Onion offers readers a glimpse of the torturous, frustrating, consuming, and ultimately rewarding nature of the reading and writing life. In spite of the many obstacles that Grass encounters in his quest to become an artist, he succeeds famously to become a chronicler of postwar Germany and its attempts to come to terms with its past. Above all, though, Grass emerges from this memoir as a man whose heart continually questions the deeply seated morals and values of the time. Consequently, this book and his other works teach deep and abiding moral lessons about the nature of politics, the character of beauty, and the role of the artist in the world. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 3 (October, 2007): 139. Booklist 103, no. 18 (May 15, 2007): 4. Harper’s Magazine 315 (July, 2007): 89. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 11 (June 1, 2007): 540. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 92-93. The Nation 285, no. 5 (August 13, 2007): 25-28. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 13 (August 16, 2007): 21-23. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 8, 2007): 1-10. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 19 (May 7, 2007): 55.

582

THE PENTAGON A History—The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and to Restore It Sixty Years Later Author: Steve Vogel (1960) Publisher: Random House (New York). 656 pp. $32.95 Type of work: History Time: 1940 to the early 2000’s Locale: Washington, D.C. Describes the political and engineering challenges that faced the people who built the Pentagon during the 1940’s and the equally daunting challenges facing those tasked to rebuild the damaged structure after it was attacked on September 11, 2001 Principal personages: Brehon B. Somervell, Army general who spearheaded plans to build the Pentagon Leslie R. Groves, Army colonel who supervised Pentagon construction Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States, 1933-1945 Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war under Roosevelt John McShain, builder whose firm constructed the Pentagon G. Edwin Bergstrom, principal architect of the Pentagon Walker Lee Evey, program manager for Pentagon renovations begun in 1997 Allyn Kilsheimer, construction supervisor for Pentagon rebuilding, 2001-2002

In 1940, as it stood on the brink of war with Germany and Japan, the United States government undertook one of the most colossal building projects in history: the construction of a new headquarters for the Department of War. Motivated by concerns that elements of the Army’s various departments were scattered all over Washington, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed himself to be convinced that a giant new building would solve this important command-and-control problem. For the next three years, the unusual five-sided structure seemed to rise from the ground across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia. As its design became evident, people began referring to it as “the Pentagon building,” and the name stuck. When it was completed in 1943, the Pentagon was the largest office building in the world. Over the next sixty years, it would become the symbol of America’s military might—so much so that when terrorists chose to attack the United States in 2001, it was one of four targets selected for destruction. Unlike the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City, however, the Pentagon withstood the devastating blow from the hijacked civilian jetliner flown directly into the structure. The resilience

The Pentagon / vogel

583

of the building’s inhabitants, and of the gov ernment’s efforts to rebuild it, quickly be- Steve Vogel is a military correspondent came a hallmark for the nation’s response to who has reported on operations in the Middle East and Africa. For his the terrorist threat. The story of the Pentagon’s construction, coverage of the U.S. involvement in and its role in American history since, is the Afghanistan he was nominated for the subject of veteran military journalist Steve Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Vogel’s detailed and engaging The Pentagon: A History—The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon, and to Restore It Sixty Years Later. Blending his skills as an interviewer and researcher with an exceptional ability to write clear, compelling prose, Vogel provides a detailed account of the genesis of what would become one of the most important edifices in the world. He explains how dozens of engineers and thousands of laborers transformed the swampy terrain along the banks of the Potomac into a solid foundation for a monumental building that would eventually house more than twenty-five thousand workers and the intricate network of roads and interchanges that would carry them to and from their jobs. He describes the construction methods employed to ensure that the building would serve not only as a safe and structurally sound home for the War Department but also later as a repository for government records—the ultimate purpose Roosevelt believed the Pentagon could serve when conflict with Germany and Japan ended and the nation could reduce its military to prewar levels. He details the architectural features that distinguish the building, noting how the final structure is a combination of the design of California architect G. Edwin Bergstrom, builder John McShain, who would go on to become one of the leading contractors in the nation’s capital, and President Roosevelt, whose tinkering with the plans produced some of the most notable aspects of the Pentagon’s final appearance. On the whole, however, Vogel’s book is less about bricks and mortar (and concrete and dirt) than it is about people—the people who had the vision for the nation’s largest building and the drive to get it built in the 1940’s, and those who had the tenacity to rebuild sections of it destroyed by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Insights into the personalities of men such as McShain, Bergstrom, and a number of others influential in getting the building approved, constructed, and opened provide the human touch that will appeal to a wider reading audience than those who might simply be interested in details of construction, architecture, and financing. Dominating the pages of Vogel’s narrative as he dominated the project to construct the Pentagon is Brehon B. Somervell, the audacious (some might say egomaniacal) Army officer who conceived the idea for the building and drove efforts to complete it. Somervell, a West Point graduate of 1914, had managed to see action during World War I but like most career officers had shifted from job to job for the next twenty years. By 1940, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel and made a name for himself by cleaning up the corruption and inefficiency that had plagued the New York Public Works Administration. His efforts attracted the attention of officials in Washington, and Somervell was selected to oversee a massive buildup of military bases and

584

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

facilities to serve the Army that Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson knew would be needed when the United States finally entered the war against the Axis Powers. Promoted to brigadier general, Somervell quickly realized that the Army needed a central command post. With typical bravado, he convinced Roosevelt and other key administration officials that such a facility was essential to the war effort. He assumed complete charge of the project, coercing politicians and military superiors to bow to what amounted to demands for a free hand in both design and construction. After selecting a site just east of Arlington National Cemetery, he set about assembling a team of architects, selecting a builder, and recruiting Army officers to work for him as dayto-day project managers. The key figure on this team was Colonel Leslie R. Groves, who, before he went on to head up the Manhattan Project that produced the world’s first atomic weapon, was given the unenviable task of supervising construction of the Pentagon. Groves rode herd on the contractor, architect, and suppliers whose work had to be done on time, if not on budget. As Vogel makes clear, the truly amazing aspect of the Pentagon’s construction was not so much its vast scope but the speed with which construction proceeded. Somervell’s grandiose plans for the building were sketched out over a weekend. He not only proposed to erect the largest building in Washington (more than five times the size of the Capitol) but also promised to do it in a year, with the first occupants moving in within six months. Although he did not keep to that schedule, he did deliver on his major promise: to construct a building large enough to house the essential members of the Army’s leadership at this critical time in the nation’s history. He rode roughshod over those who opposed him and dealt summarily with subordinates who did not share his sense of urgency. In fact, many soon found that Somervell (and Groves) would resort to anything—including subterfuge—to ensure that the project continued on schedule, even in the face of serious concerns expressed by some members of Congress that the building was fast becoming a poster child for fraud, waste, and abuse. That kind of scrutiny seemed to have little impact on Somervell’s activities or his status within the War Department. By the time senior Army leadership moved into the Pentagon, Somervell had been promoted to lieutenant general and was serving as chief of services of supply, one of the three most important Army positions in Washington. Of course, constructing a building as large as the Pentagon is hardly a one-man endeavor, and Vogel is careful to balance his account of high-level planning with stories of laborers who helped build the Pentagon and of the first workers who occupied the building even before construction was complete. Through the eyes of laborers, readers get a sense of both the immensity of the project and the sacrifices made to bring it to completion. These were the people who sweated in the broiling Washington summers or shivered in the freezing winters as they poured concrete forms or erected the Pentagon’s superstructure. These were the bureaucrats who endured two-hour commutes over inadequate road systems and slogged through the muddy construction site to half-finished offices where they tried to get the Army’s business accomplished in windowless offices inside a building where the air conditioning system did not work

The Pentagon / vogel

585

and the noise from bulldozers and pile drivers often drowned out conversation. Some of these people were African Americans who, as Vogel recounts with special poignancy, discovered they were welcome to work for the federal government but were still subjected to Virginia laws that demanded they use “separate but equal” facilities. One of the most stirring anecdotes in the book is Vogel’s account of the group of courageous African Americans who refused to eat in the “colored only” cafeteria, insisting instead that they be served in the more luxurious dining area reserved for white patrons. More than half of Vogel’s book is devoted to an account of the Pentagon’s construction. The brief middle section consists of a series of vignettes from the four decades between the end of the war and September 11, 2001. Included are stories of the reshaping of the structure to accommodate the newly created Department of Defense, a traumatic experience for Navy and Marine Corps leaders, who had to learn to live as equals with the Army and the newly created U.S. Air Force. Vogel also depicts the perilous days during the 1960’s when the Pentagon became the target of antiwar protestors, describing the confusion that reigned among the highest military and civilian leaders who did not want to use force against American citizens exercising their rights of assembly and free speech but who could find no easy way to prevent violence—or bad press. The final third of The Pentagon is an account of the heroism of the men and women who responded to the terrorist attack on the Pentagon in September, 2001. The stories of individuals who risked their lives to save others are related in some detail. Vogel’s chief interest, however, is in explaining what happened to the structure, why it survived, and how it was rebuilt so quickly. The two men principally responsible for this near-miracle were Walker Lee Evey, the career government bureaucrat selected in the late 1990’s to supervise much-needed renovations of the aging building, and Allyn Kilsheimer, a demolitions contractor hired by Evey within days after the attack who made it his personal mission to erase the scars on the Pentagon created by the attack. Evey’s foresight in strengthening the building’s interior structure— work already completed on the section that was hit by the plane—and Kilsheimer’s almost maniacal drive to have the destroyed sections rebuilt within a year after the tragedy are described in a way that makes these men seem as heroic as the people who were caught in the building on September 11. Throughout his narrative, Vogel employs a prose style that recreates the sense of urgency felt by the original builders in the 1940’s and their successors in 2001-2002. His occasional digressions—such as his history lesson about the area in which the Pentagon was constructed (a seamy region known as Hell’s Bottom), or about the infighting among the military services both before and after the Pentagon was constructed—enhance his narrative by providing a larger context in which to view the main story. As a result, The Pentagon offers readers a thorough and engaging account of the history of one of the nation’s most important buildings. Laurence W. Mazzeno

586

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 18 (May 15, 2007): 8. The Economist 383 (June 30, 2007): 93-94. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 439. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 10, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 18 (April 30, 2007): 150. The Washington Post, June 17, 2007, p. BW03.

587

THE PESTHOUSE Author: Jim Crace (1946) Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 255 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: An indeterminate future Locale: Eastern America Two strangers accidentally meet and begin a journey to embark on a voyage east to escape a ravaged America Principal characters: Margaret, a thirty-one-year-old woman quarantined by her family because of an unnamed disease that is usually fatal Franklin Lopez, a young man who has traveled from the Midwest seeking to escape America for Europe Jackson Lopez, Franklin’s brother, who leaves his younger sibling behind because of a wounded knee

Jim Crace is hardly a household name; however, his eight previous novels have received sterling reviews, and his reputation may be greater in America than in his native Great Britain. In each of his fictions, he defamiliarizes the familiar, creating worlds that parallel, but never duplicate, those most readers would recognize. His works span extraordinary historical ranges, from the pre-Bronze Age of The Gift of Stones (1988) to Christ’s sojourn in the desert in Quarantine (1997) to his most recent novel, which imagines a future unthinkable to most Americans. His landscapes are frequently bizarre or unfamiliar, such as a seventh continent in Continent (1986), and he continually examines the implacable forces of nature, as in Being Dead (2000). The Pesthouse partakes of all these features and more as it imagines a postapocalyptic America some time in the future. The reader is never certain what exactly has happened, but the United States as a political and cultural entity is gone, replaced by a diseased landscape in which a few intrepid travelers trek eastward in hopes of boarding ships bound for Europe or beyond. The novel begins nightmarishly, “Everybody died at night,” and the air of mystery and foreboding is never entirely dispelled. Young Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, have arrived in a burg called Ferrytown, hoping soon to make it to the ocean; however, Franklin has injured his knee and is left behind to allow his brother swift passage. During a torrential downpour, he laboriously climbs a hill outside town and takes refuge in an old shack, inhabited by Margaret, suffering from the “flux,” some type of plague, and left for dead. During the night, toxic fumes from the nearby lake are stirred up, and the entire town expires, while Franklin slowly nurses Margaret back to health.

588

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Franklin pushes Margaret and their few possessions miles in a handcart, until a band of marauders take him captive as a slave but shun Margaret because of her shorn head, a potent sign of her illness. Through a series of further peregrinations and misadventures, Margaret falls in with a fundamentalist sect known as the Finger Baptists, who live in an establishment they call the Ark, where metal is forbidden as an element of diabolical purposes. When the same marauders attack the fortification and kill the elders, Margaret escapes and inspires Franklin to do the same. As they attempt to elude his captors, Franklin suddenly becomes homesick for his mother and the family farm and abruptly decides against embarkation in favor of a second odyssey back to his homestead. By now the couple are guardians of a little girl, Jackie, and although they are not lovers, it is clear that they have pledged their lives to each other. The novel ends on an entirely different note than its beginning, “Going westward, they would go free,” and such a dire narrative suddenly seems almost sentimental. One of the novel’s most striking features is its vision of postapocalyptic America. This is a place with no electricity, machines, industry, money, employment, culture, books, learning. Few animals can be found anywhere, and crops have been almost entirely annihilated by some unexplained, meteorological disaster. Life is cheap and human relations are almost thoroughly exploitative or predatory. These are the new dark ages, or as Crace described it on his Web page, “The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but with something that it has always wanted and lacked—a medieval ‘past,’ an ancient European experience.” Disease is rampant; what they call the “Great Contagion” has claimed countless lives, and in the place of medicine superstition prevails. (Franklin and others believe a fever can be broken by tying a pigeon to the afflicted’s feet.) Religion, or what passes for it, amounts to more superstition, as revealed by the Finger Baptists who disdain metal and bury any they find in large pits outside their compound. Their elders refrain from using their hands for labor, pleasure, or eating, to the point that they wither and become inoperable. Their destruction at the hands of the invaders suggests the relative ineffectuality of their beliefs and lifestyle. By means of an episodic plot, Crace suggests that most human actions are chaotic and often purposeless. Characters wander ceaselessly, chasing rumors and halfformed dreams, and ultimately they are at home nowhere. America has devolved into a location of overwhelming failure and defeat, and rather than cast this vison in the stereotypes of rotting architecture and blasted surfaces, Crace constructs an alternate vison. America has become a vacuum. The landscape remains, but infertile and completely uninviting. Domiciles are intact but uninhabitable; sentimentality is a luxury

Jim Crace was born in 1946 in Hertfordshire, England. His first novel, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, and The Guardian Fiction prize. Crace earned acclaim and awards with eight other novels—The Gift of Stones (1988), Arcadia (1991), Signals of Distress (1995), Quarantine (1997), Being Dead (2000), The Devil’s Larder (2001), Genesis (2003), and The Pesthouse.

The Pesthouse / crace

589

few can afford. All are lost who journey here, and the impression is one of utter vacancy. Franklin’s determination to turn back to his origins speaks to an overpowering need for orientation and positioning at a center. Suddenly, all their experience changes: “It was as if the country that had once been hostile to them was regretful for it and was now providing recompense—fewer dangers, warmer nights, softer going in a season that was opening up rather than closing down. It even decorated the way with early flowers.” This is hardly the America of early Puritan writing or that of Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, all of whom emphasized abundance, fertility, and freedom. America’s utopian promise has been replaced by a dystopian nightmare, and it is through his manipulations of the conventions of the dystopian novel that one can appreciate Crace’s invention. The dystopian novel was primarily a twentieth century response to nineteenth century optimism. Novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (1927; We, 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1949), and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) center on the idea of a monolithic, oppressive political state. Certain conventions remain fairly consistent: Individuality and originality are harshly controlled or punished; conformity becomes the highest virtue; and social mobility is impossible and social strata are inflexibly defined. Later in the century, economic and religious dystopias replaced political ones, as in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). However, with The Pesthouse a new concern for a new century is evident. Most dystopian fictions begin with some explanation for the work’s state of affairs; however, in The Pesthouse no such explanation ever appears. Indeed, there is a plague, but that alone cannot explain the lack of all social and political institutions and a complete loss of collective memory. Only some dire cataclysm, much larger than the one that decimates Ferrytown, could produce such monumental results. In this respect, Crace’s novel stands in the company of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Thus, the book reminds readers of science fiction, the origin of most modern dystopian novels, while at the same time avoiding the usual sci-fi obsessions and clichés. Unlike most science-fiction dystopias, which emphasize a soulless yet technologically advanced world, The Pesthouse is positively primitive. People are not overwhelmed by a sophisticated system; instead, this is a vision of lost humanity crudely destroying itself. Where most dystopias feature protagonists who boldly resist the dominant forces in their worlds, Franklin and Margaret are rather ineffectual. They do not so much oppose as evade or quietly assimilate themselves into the circumstances and forces they confront. Their ultimate decision to return west is not so much an escape as an embrace of hardship, although that embrace is motivated by a curious sense of hope and obligation. Franklin, in particular, knows how desperate that return will be, yet he yearns to make the attempt regardless. Typically, dystopias arise out of a writer’s attempt to link current situations to less desirable, and in some cases less predictable, results. In an interview with Suzi Feay of The Independent, Crace admits that the book began as a critique of American opti-

590

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

mism and world domination: “[The book would] deal a blow to America at a time when I think it needs to have a blow dealt to it. It will take America from the top of the pile and put it at the bottom of the pile, politically and culturally. It will defer to Europe, instead of Europe having to defer to it. This is what I would do: I would reduce America in this work of fiction, and I would show it as an entirely failed nation.” One way to read the novel, then, is to see it as the culmination of political hubris and technological rapaciousness. Here, in effect, is what happens when a nation has too much of everything and still grasps for more. However, the seemingly melodramatic ending reveals Crace’s later attitude to his creation: “There’s a moment when, if a book has any power of its own, it abandons you and takes over. And it became clear to me that what the book was doing was resisting the failure of America. It didn’t want me to write this political novel that reflected my anger at America. It was too fond of the American dream, all those narratives we’ve been told of hope and getting your own acre. . . . The American dream doesn’t always deliver, but there’s something powerful about it.” Given the novel’s dystopian features and Crace’s comments, it is certainly inevitable that readers will be mindful of the American Dream. The notion of a civilized society that encourages the pursuit of happiness is radically called into question here. The fertile plains have dried up, there is no economic opportunity, Horatio Alger is long dead, there is certainly no wealth to be had for anyone, and the great belief in mobility and progress is found wanting. Some—the strong, able-bodied, or those endowed with booty—can journey east, but women, except for the few who are young and physically alluring, cannot book passage. Furthermore, the great dictum of heading west and finding fortune is inverted—everyone wants to travel east. In Crace’s hands, America is no longer synonymous with opportunity. Crace writes with a mesmerizing grace, a style that eschews verbal pyrotechnics yet delights at every turn. The narrator moves among pointed observations, clear descriptions of place and action, and arresting rhetorical questions (“how could anyone not know by now how mischievous the world could be?”). In all of his books, Crace reveals his fascination with natural history and natural processes to the point that he anthropomorphizes nature, yet never sentimentally. Instead, the inevitable workings of natural elements are given full play to the extent that they are characters integral to the text. Thus, the ocean becomes “one great weeping eye,” illness is “a weak and passing visitor,” and “death ususally expressed itself more forcibly.” Crace’s imagination is remarkably fecund; he never writes the same book twice, and The Pesthouse is testament to the range of his vision and interests. He is at once an elegant stylist and incisive thinker, and when he experiments with genre fiction, as in this case with the dystopian novel, his creation is thoroughly his own and original. This novel will certainly not please ideologues and jingoists, but it is an important contribution to European assessments of the American experience. David W. Madden

The Pesthouse / crace

591

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 6. Library Journal 132 (March 1, 2007): 69. New Criterion 25, no. 9 (May, 2007): 33-37. New Statesman 136 (March 5, 2007): 59. The New York Times 156 (May 15, 2007): E9. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 29, 2007): 8. The New Yorker 83, no. 10 (April 30, 2007): 84-85. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 5 (January 29, 2007): 38. The Spectator 305 (November 24, 2007): 49. The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, p. BW05.

592

POOR PEOPLE Author: William T. Vollmann (1959) Publisher: Ecco Press (New York). Illustrated. 314 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Current affairs Building on previous work from his seven-volume treatise on violence, Vollmann turns his attention to poverty throughout the world, interviewing people who seem poor in order to learn about their circumstances and report their views on poverty In Poor People, William T. Vollmann reports on poverty with personal interviews from around the globe. Through the use of local guides and interpreters, he asks randomly selected individuals, and in some cases their family members, if they consider themselves poor and why some are poor and others rich. Poor People is therefore Vollmann’s report about those he interviewed. His narrative recounts their lives, the conditions surrounding them, and their answers to his questions. The responses to his questions range from a religious belief that the poor person is paying for past sins from a previous life to the practical response that there is no work. Vollmann offers his own perspectives and philosophies and compares poverty among different countries. For example, in the United States, poverty to some might mean not being able to afford cable television, while in Vietnam it might mean not being able to have electricity. Poverty also seems to be subjective to the afflicted, as he notes when he asked one young woman if she thought she was poor. Her reply, “I think I am rich,” provides an opportunity to reflect on what it means to be poor and who makes the determination, society or the individual. Building on this subjectivity, Vollmann delves deeper into the issue of poverty by examining what it means to live a normal life. He wonders what living conditions create normalcy and how that view of normalcy affects poverty. Is it normal to live in a cardboard box or beg for money? Who decides? He also examines the effects and consequences abject poverty has on the individuals he interviews. He notes how the poor seem invisible and theorizes that perhaps the condition of poverty itself is what makes them invisible. Is the invisibility due to a lack of money or is it because society, or at least those with money, would like to pretend it does not exist? Do the affluent tend to ignore the poor because they do not know how to help, or is it out of fear that they could end up in a similar situation? For the poor women in Afghanistan, who are required by the Taliban regime to wear a burka but forbidden to beg, the garment, along with the government, comments Vollmann, makes them invisible. In later chapters, Vollmann notes that in some instances poverty seems to offer its victims a certain level of freedom that the more affluent do not have. For example, he observes that poor children typically are able to roam and play freely, while

Poor People / vollmann

593

experience with his daughter and even his own childhood memories offer no such recol- William T. Vollmann is an author of lection of being free to play with such wild several novels, short stories, abandon. He comments on some men in a tea documentaries, and nonfiction critical shop leisurely enjoying the afternoon con- analyses. His writings have won versation, contrasted with his affluent neigh- awards such as the National Book bors who seem to be in a constant state of Award for his novel Europe Central motion while rushing from one event to the (2005). His largest work to date is the seven-volume critique of violence next. Vollmann states that while the poor Rising Up and Rising Down (2004), may lack monetary resources, they are rich in which was nominated for the National time. Book Critics Circle Award. Another consequence of poverty that Vollmann describes is a condition he refers to as accident-prone-ness. In this context, he is not writing about a tendency toward having accidents but the tendency to have detrimental consequences arise because of the conditions of poverty. An illness that might easily be cured with proper rest and appropriate medicine but instead is detrimental to the poor victim who can afford neither is an example of accident-prone-ness. The man who, in trying to resolve an arrest for violence, most likely due to poverty, ends up with more fines and a dead pet because of his lack of resources is another example. Vollmann also talks about crime as a condition of poverty, how a lack of resources seems to correspond with a loss of personal security, with more incidence of rape and murder. He devotes an entire chapter to the Snakeheads, Asian underground gangs primarily involved in human trafficking. His stories of the Snakeheads show how poverty breeds organized crime groups who prey on those seeking to escape their impoverished conditions. Vollmann also includes a chapter on pain, noting that lack of access to medical care for the poor results in missing teeth, visible sores, and premature aging. He explains that he did not include a section on hunger because it is a given when discussing poverty. Vollmann goes on to offer more than just the commentaries from his interviews. In offering a broader perspective of poverty, he proposes that in some instances the poor hate the rich or may blame the rich for their present conditions. He also notes the expectation of the poor to be helped by the rich. There are times and circumstances where those with money, in turn, hate the poor because they may feel forced or pressured to give up their hard-earned resources. Vollmann shares his own experiences, noting that as a nonpoor person, he at times has felt inconvenienced by the presence of the homeless. There is also conflict that may be experienced by those who want to help but do not know how to effectively do so. Vollmann himself explains how he paid people for their interviews, noting at times his own desire to do more to help and knowing that simply throwing money at the people might alleviate hunger for a day but do nothing to alleviate their long-term impoverishment. He also touches on a fear of the poor by commenting on how intimidating it can be to interact with people who have nothing and who might be willing to resort to violence in order to ensure their own survival. He shares several personal stories to illustrate his own

594

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

instances of fear and intimidation when interacting with people on the streets. He thus addresses many of the issues surrounding poverty by discussing how poverty affects everyone, rich and poor. Vollmann shows in subsequent chapters how a desire for wealth and prosperity can create better conditions for some while creating more poverty for others. His chapters on the oil refining in Sarykamys, Kazakhstan, and the development in Nanning, China, illustrate that for those who are already living marginally, there are few choices for escaping. In these examples, it seems that Vollmann suggests that in some cases government is to blame for creating or continuing impoverished conditions. With Nanning, home owners were forced to sell their homes so that a larger road and newer housing units could be built. Their homes were demolished, and the payment they received from the government was not enough to afford the newer homes. The story of Sarykamys highlights the problems that governments and big corporations can create in their pursuit of wealth. In this small corner of the world, the initial discovery of oil was viewed as economic salvation. Unfortunately, the necessity to refine sulfur out of the oil has created hazardous living conditions. In a footnote, Vollmann seems to indicate some notion from those he interviews, and perhaps his own bias, that governments should step in to prevent this type of abuse and to some extent that the affluent people of the world are to blame, because they demand the resource, causing the need to produce it, which in turn causes human ailments, further suffering, and more poverty. He does not directly place any blame with the corporation. For whatever reasons, the mind-set of the townspeople in Sarykamys, who most likely live from one paycheck to the next, is one of acceptance of their conditions. Even more disturbing and perhaps more revealing of the problem is that many of the people from this town whom Vollmann attempted to interview would not talk with him out of fear of repercussions. He infers from his stories of Sarykamys and Nanning what happens when governments and corporations view people as somewhat disposable. He also highlights how poverty can create an unfortunate acceptance by those who lack the resources to fight or demand more equitable conditions. Ironically, the governments in both cases are, in theory, trying to create better conditions for the inhabitants. Poor People has been well received, although commentaries on Vollmann himself seem contentious. Some have compared his work to another similar text on poverty written by James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Even Vollmann himself mentions this work. Still, while similarities between the two works may seem obvious, Poor People offers a current global perspective on poverty. Vollmann also notes that his previous works have been criticized for being difficult to read; Poor People, however, is difficult to put down. While Vollmann does not himself offer any answers to the question of why some people are poor and others rich, his reporting of the matter provides groundwork for a better understanding of poverty and how it affects those afflicted. His comparison of the poor among various countries also shows both similarities and differences.

Poor People / vollmann

595

If Vollmann were a social scientist instead of a journalist, he might have attempted to conduct his interviews in a more systematic and controlled manner. In place of a scientific study on poverty, he offers a glimpse of poverty from many different angles. Along with his interviews and findings, he interjects his own experiences and suppositions. As he explains, he is not himself poor, nor has he ever experienced poverty. He also suggests that most of the people who will read Poor People will not be poor. Nevertheless, his snapshots of poverty, along with the deeply moving photographs of those he interviewed, provide a personal account of poverty from those who live it daily. Susan E. Thomas

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 299, no. 3 (April, 2007): 116-117. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 457. Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 32. Esquire 147, no. 3 (March, 2007): 86. Harper’s Magazine 314 (March, 2007): 81-82. Library Journal 132, no. 4 (March 1, 2007): 98. New York 40, no. 8 (March 5, 2007): 66. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 18, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 172.

596

THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD Author: Lionel Shriver (1957) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 517 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1997-2003 Locale: London Children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern’s life branches into two concurrent time lines based on her decision whether or not to act upon her physical attraction to Ramsey Acton, a charismatic professional snooker player Principal characters: Irina McGovern, an American children’s book illustrator living in London Ramsey Acton, a professional snooker player Lawrence Trainer, an American research fellow specializing in terrorism, Irina’s live-in partner of several years Bethany Anders, Lawrence’s coworker, with whom Lawrence has an affair in one time line Jude Hartford, a children’s book writer and Ramsey’s ex-wife Raisa McGovern, Irina’s mother, a ballet dancer who resents that she had to give up performing when she became pregnant with Irina

In Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, Irina McGovern, a sensible and somewhat staid children’s book illustrator, is fairly content with her equally rational boyfriend, Lawrence Trainer, with whom she has lived in London for several years. While Irina is slightly dismayed that Lawrence rarely kisses her and apparently has no desire to marry her, she genuinely believes herself fortunate for having found a stable, considerate man. One evening, however, Irina’s world is turned upside down. Irina and Lawrence had made an almost accidental habit of celebrating the birthday of their casual friend, professional snooker player Ramsey Acton, with Ramsey and his wife, Jude. That couple’s divorce, however, has taken Jude out of the picture, and Lawrence is away on a business trip, leaving Irina to entertain Ramsey on her own. At the end of the evening, Irina is startled to find that she is powerfully drawn to Ramsey, and she longs to kiss him. She senses that her decision to act on that impulse will have profound implications for her life. Further, she knows that if she does not kiss Ramsey she will always wonder what would have happened if she did. The reader, however, is not left to wonder. At this point, the novel splits into alternating narratives marking the two very different paths that Irina’s life takes. In one time line, Irina kisses Ramsey. They go no further than kissing that night, or on many subsequent meetings, because neither is comfortable with betraying Lawrence to that incontrovertible degree. Irina cannot get the prospect of sleeping with Ramsey out of her mind, however, and when Ramsey tells Irina that she must either leave Lawrence

The Post-Birthday World / shriver

597

or stop seeing Ramsey, she follows her heart and leaves Lawrence. A few short months Lionel Shriver is an American novelist later, after a whirlwind tour of the profes- living in London. Her novel We Need sional snooker circuit, Irina marries Ramsey, to Talk About Kevin (2003) won the setting forth on a more tumultuous relation- prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, and she also won literature ship than she ever could have imagined. In the other time line, Irina resists the im- grants from the Northern Ireland Arts pulse to kiss Ramsey, instead fleeing to the Council in 1993 and 1996. The PostBirthday World is her eighth novel. bathroom to compose herself. Then, because she does not see Ramsey often, she compartmentalizes the incident in her mind, taking it out occasionally to speculate what direction her life might have taken had she acted upon that impulse. Irina plods along, vaguely disturbed by Lawrence’s increasing emotional distance, only to find out years later that Lawrence started an affair with a coworker not long after the fateful birthday with Ramsey. While the idea of divergent outcomes based on a pivotal moment is not new, Shriver’s deft handling of the alternate time lines makes this novel truly unique. For instance, certain conversations are repeated almost verbatim within the two narratives, but with different characters taking each part. In one life, when Irina takes Ramsey home to meet her family, she begs him not to pick a fight with her during the visit, knowing that any mention of her ex-partner Lawrence by her tactless mother is likely to set Ramsey off. In the other time line, Lawrence pleads with Irina not to pick a fight with her own mother during their Christmas visit. When the inevitable friction between mother and daughter occurs, the volatile Ramsey does indeed start an embarrassing fight with Irina yet fiercely defends his wife when his new motherin-law criticizes her. Lawrence, on the other hand, would never humiliate Irina with such a jealous display, but neither does he support Irina in her family relationships, implicitly blaming Irina for not being able to get along with her mother. The fact that Irina’s possible lives differ so greatly depending on her choice of partner might lead some readers to infer that Shriver believes a woman’s life depends more on the man she chooses than any other factor. This criticism is too simplistic, however, because the novel also examines the profound differences in the men’s lives based on their relationships with Irina. For instance, the Lawrence that Irina ultimately leaves for Ramsey senses her pulling away during her months of indecision, such that he examines their relationship and tries to reestablish their emotional connection. For this Irina, it is too little and too late, but Lawrence nonetheless becomes a more thoughtful and emotionally available man because of Irina’s influence. The Lawrence that Irina stays with, however, senses Irina’s efforts to cling to him, and he responds by drawing back, ultimately seeking passion elsewhere instead of trying to reestablish it with Irina. Similarly, the Ramsey who marries Irina, distracted by their passion and his own jealousy, never wins the National Snooker Championship, an honor that has eluded him with several near-misses throughout his entire career, while the other Ramsey reconciles briefly with Jude and does win the championship, but he does not seem particularly happy.

598

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Shriver draws clever parallels within this framework, in particular showing the effect of Irina’s choices on her illustration work. The Irina who has married Ramsey at first neglects her work shamefully, because the jealous and childish Ramsey cannot bear to play in a snooker tournament without her at his side, and she is so addicted to her newfound passion that she loses interest in everything else. When Irina’s sloppy work leads to a lost commission, however, she finally buckles down and writes her first children’s book instead of merely illustrating the work of other authors. Her book tells the story of a young boy who must choose whether to pursue snooker against his parents’ wishes or settle down to a more respectable career. The book is written and illustrated in one direction showing that the boy has become a snooker player, and it proceeds in the other direction showing his life as an astronaut. In both scenarios, the boy wonders what his life would have been like if he had made the other decision, concluding in both time lines that life is about compromises. Most important, Irina is able to infuse the illustrations with the long-dormant passion that Ramsey has awakened in her, and her previously obscure career takes a new turn when she is short-listed for a prestigious and financially lucrative Lewis Carroll award. Irina is shocked when she wins the award, ironically beating out Ramsey’s ex-wife Jude for the same prize, but Ramsey ruins her triumph by creating a jealous scene at the awards ceremony to which Irina has invited her ex-partner Lawrence. In the other time line, the Irina who has stayed with Lawrence also writes and illustrates her own book. She tells a story about a little boy who abandons his best friend for a new acquaintance but is attacked by such guilt and grief that he goes back to the first friend, who subsequently deserts him. Irina illustrates the story as with an Etch A Sketch toy, using computer graphic programs to do so. This book is also nominated for the Lewis Carroll award, but in this time line Irina loses the award to Jude, and one of the judges covertly whispers to Irina that while her illustrations were wonderful, they were somehow a bit too clinical. In spite of this, Irina is deliriously happy at the ceremony, because she realizes that Lawrence’s shock that she did not win is evidence of his unwavering faith in her work. Another effective technique that Shriver employs is to examine Irina’s reaction to significant news events, such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In one time line, Irina and Ramsey are having such a vehement, days-long argument over the awards ceremony that they are not even aware of the September 11 events until September 13. In the other time line, Irina and Lawrence are still in New York when the attacks occur, and Lawrence is much in demand by news networks seeking his expert commentary on the subject of terrorism. As happens often in the time line with Lawrence, Irina is humbly grateful for her life and somewhat ashamed about any dissatisfaction that she might feel. With Ramsey, however, her life is full of emotional ups and downs that often obscure what is happening in the outside world. Though the beginning of the book moves slowly, and though Irina analyzes her feelings to a perhaps obsessive degree, Shriver successfully builds the narrative tension to a crescendo, such that the reader is anxious to find out what happens in each time line. Not long after the awards ceremony, Ramsey is diagnosed with terminal cancer in both time lines. In one, his wife Irina is shocked to find out that he has frit-

The Post-Birthday World / shriver

599

tered away all of his substantial snooker earnings, yet she finds a certain strength within herself as she nurses him through his grueling cancer treatments. In the other time line, the Irina whom Lawrence has just deserted for his mistress finds herself turning back to Ramsey, but by this point he is in no condition to consummate the earlier passion upon which they had not acted. Instead, Irina is able to offer Ramsey the quiet companionship that he needs during this difficult time. Ultimately, Shriver’s genius is that she makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the reader to decide which choice and which life is better for Irina. With Ramsey, Irina discovers that she is capable of great passion in her life and her work. While she will always regret hurting Lawrence by leaving him, she believes that the incredible highlights of her too-short time with Ramsey before his death were worth the devastating low points. In the other time line, in the aftermath of Lawrence’s devastating yet oddly gentle betrayal, Irina muses about what would have happened had she kissed Ramsey but believes that she maintained her integrity and therefore made the right decision. Ironically, while the predivergence Irina believed that she could not live without a man, each Irina ultimately ends up alone but learns in the process that she is capable of coping without a man after all. Although the characters are fictional, Shriver has stated that the idea for The PostBirthday World came from a real-life situation in which she had to decide whether to remain with her longtime partner or begin a new relationship with a man she had fallen in love with; she ultimately did the latter. Like Irina, Shriver found herself second-guessing her decision, which undoubtedly lends to the authenticity of Irina’s doubts in both time lines. One can also draw parallels between Shriver’s life and Irina’s experiences as a nominee for an important literary award, which she wins in one time line and loses in the other. Shriver’s seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), won the prestigious 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, which Shriver, like Irina, indicates was particularly gratifying after years of relative obscurity. Amy Sisson

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 33. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 23 (December 1, 2006): 1196. Library Journal 132, no. 3 (February 15, 2007): 115. New Statesman 136 (May 7, 2007): 72. The New York Times 156 (March 9, 2007): E29-E34. The New York Times Book Review 156 (March 18, 2007): 17. The New Yorker 83, no. 6 (April 2, 2007): 79. People 67, no. 11 (March 19, 2007): 49. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 31-32. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 63 (March 17, 2007): P12.

600

POWER, FAITH, AND FANTASY America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present Author: Michael B. Oren (1955) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 778 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History, current affairs Time: 1776-2006 Locale: The United States and the Middle East An account of America’s involvement in the Middle East from the earliest days of the republic to the Iraq War of the early twenty-first century Principal personages: John Ledyard, American explorer of the Middle East Washington Irving, American author James Madison, U.S. president, 1809-1817 Mark Twain, American writer Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president, 1913-1921 Harry S. Truman, U.S. president, 1945-1953 George H. W. Bush, U.S. president, 1989-1993 Bill Clinton, U.S. president, 1993-2001 George W. Bush, U.S. president beginning in 2001

Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present describes American involvement in the Middle East that began at the time of the American Revolution. In his narrative, the author discusses the individuals and events that populate his historical canvas by interweaving the three themes of power, faith, and fantasy. The power is political, economic, and military, ranging from the wars waged against the pirates of Barbary in the early national era to the war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003. Faith pertains to Christianity. In the nineteenth century, many Protestants journeyed to the Middle East with the hope of converting the region’s Muslim majority to Christianity. Few were converted, but the missionaries established schools and hospitals that had a lasting impact. More recently, with the emergence of Zionism and the later Nazi Holocaust, Palestine became the focus of many Jews. Last, the Middle East, with its religious roots, foreign cultures, and exotic landscapes, has proved to be an addictive fantasy for many Americans over the past two centuries. Power, Faith, and Fantasy begins with John Ledyard, a New Hampshire frontiersman turned sailor who, after attempting to walk across all of Eurasia, journeyed to the Middle East in 1788, the first American to experience that region. He was not impressed with Egyptian society, then under Ottoman rule, nor even the Nile River, among whose sand dunes he died and was buried. The U.S. government’s earliest encounters were occasioned by North Africa’s Barbary pirates. Here, the concern was

Power, Faith, and Fantasy / oren

601

power, explicitly economic power and the right to trade. With no navy to protect the infant republic’s merchant shipping, Americans were captured and held for ransom. Diplomacy and bribery were initially tried, with little effect. It was only in 1815 that the Barbary threat was eliminated after President James Madison sent warships against the pirates, but it was not the final end of North African seizure of Americans for ransom. In 1904, Ion Perdicaris, a businessman in Tangier and supposedly an American citizen, A native of New Jersey, Michael B. was taken hostage by a Berber chief, Mulai Oren immigrated to Israel, where he Ahmed el Raisuli. President Theodore Roo- has served in both military and sevelt’s famous response was terse: “We political capacities. The author of the want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.” Neigh- award-winning Six Days of War boring Morocco paid the ransom and Per- (2002), he is a graduate of Princeton dicaris was freed. The incident was later im- and Columbia Universities and has mortalized in the 1975 film The Wind and the written extensively for numerous Lion, and in typical Hollywood fashion his- prestigious newspapers and magazines. tory became fantasy, with the middle-aged Perdicaris played by Candice Bergen and Raisuli played by Sean Connery, a Scot. While early nineteenth century presidents were creating a standing navy to confront the Barbary states, other Americans were discovering the Middle East as a place of fantasy and faith, where the women were lustful, the men brave warriors, and society corrupted by the false religion of Islam, a vision that resulted from the combined influence of the Bible and One Thousand and One Nights. Washington Irving’s A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (1832) presented a romanticized view of Spain under the Islamic Moors. After the Civil War, notable Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain, discovered the region as tourists. One by-product of the United States’ involvement in the Middle East was Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s iconic Statue of Liberty, originally intended to be placed adjacent to the Suez Canal and titled “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia.” Because the bankrupt Egyptian government had no money for statues, it ended up in New York harbor. The Middle East as fantasy also occurred at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which included an Algerian Village, a Turkish Pavilion, a Moorish Palace, a Cairo Street, and the popular if controversial belly dancer Little Egypt. In the silent film The Sheik (1921), Rudolph Valentino’s role as the title character sent female American hearts aflutter. Later, a more historical but still romanticized view of the Middle East was presented in 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, which was based in part on the early reporting of Lowell Thomas, an American journalist. With American missionaries, faith was often tinged with fantasy, including the belief that the Muslim Middle East could be converted to Christianity. Nevertheless, the

602

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Protestant missionaries were at the forefront of American involvement in the region during most of the nineteenth century. The religious aim of converting Muslims as well as Jews and even Orthodox and Maronite Christians to Protestant Christianity was merged with the belief of America as a “city on a hill” with the obligation to create a new model of society for the world. For many Americans, one hope was to restore to the Jews their ancient land, and “restorationism” remained a major goal. The missionaries had little religious success, but they did establish schools and hospitals, and they fueled the interest of Americans at home. In the 1880’s, Zionism, with its vision of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the biblical “Land of Israel,” inspired many European Jews, although most American Jews were less enthusiastic. Some Protestant Americans supported Zionism as an extension of restorationism. Mark Twain was no Protestant enthusiast, but after becoming acquainted with Theodor Herzl, a leading Zionist, he gave his public support to the movement. World War I was a watershed for Western civilization. Millions died, and ideals and beliefs collapsed, as did long-lived empires, including the Ottoman Empire. American relations with the Ottoman Empire had been generally positive, but the Armenian holocaust of 1914-1915 changed the hearts and minds of many. However, President Woodrow Wilson pursued a policy of noninvolvement in the affairs of the Old World until April, 1917, when the United States declared war against Germany, but not against the Ottoman Empire, a decision that ensured that America’s influence on the region’s postwar settlement would be minimal. The demise of the Ottoman Empire led to a restructuring of the Middle East. In 1917, Britain’s Balfour Declaration gave assurances to Zionists that a Jewish homeland would be established in Ottoman Palestine. The existing Arabic Palestinian population, mostly Muslim, was ignored. By the early 1920’s, an independent Turkey had come into existence, but much of the Arab world was divided into League of Nations’ mandates, with France gaining Syria and Lebanon and Britain awarded Iraq and Palestine. The United States retreated into isolationism, and Wilson’s hope for a democratic Middle East, with self-determination as the guiding principle, was not to be. The story of modern Israel and its relations with its Arab neighbors plays a major role in Power, Faith, and Fantasy. In the early twentieth century, Zionism increased among American Jews as exemplified by Golda Mabovitz, a Milwaukee schoolteacher who moved to Palestine in 1921, known later as Golda Meir, an Israeli prime minister. There were also 100,000 Arabs in the United States in the early twentieth century, mostly Christians, and they were as opposed to an independent Israel as Middle Eastern Arabs were. During the interwar years, American policy toward Palestine was guarded neutrality. America’s relationship with the Middle East became more complex because of demands for oil. In the 1920’s, American oil companies were included in the consortium that gained oil rights in the British mandate of Iraq, and in the 1930’s oil agreements were made with Saudi Arabia. The Americans and the Saudis were joined at the hip by oil, and, in spite of occasional differences, they have remained so to the present. The military power of the United States returned to North Africa in 1942 in Operation Torch against the Axis Powers. Fantasy followed in the form of films such as Ca-

Power, Faith, and Fantasy / oren

603

sablanca (1942) and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944). As a result of the Holocaust, support increased in the United States for an independent Israel, although President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to walk a narrow line, given the increasing need for Middle Eastern oil, even meeting with Ibn Sa4nd, the Saudi monarch, who adamantly opposed any Jewish immigration to Palestine. After Britain was unable to quell the violence between Israelis and Palestinians, in 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two independent states. The reaction in the Arab world was predictable, with war breaking out even before Israel’s formal independence in May, 1948. Since 1948, Cold War rivalry, the challenge of Arab nationalism, the more recent Islamic revival, and the ever-growing need for oil has found the United States increasingly involved in the region. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was instrumental in undermining Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal; the Eisenhower administration forced the invaders to back down. For many Americans, the murky complexities of the Middle East were romantically simplified. In 1959’s Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince comes together in alliance with an Arab sheikh. In the real world, American presidents’ attempts to solve the Palestinian imbroglio met with little success, and war between the Israelis and Palestinians became the norm rather than the exception. Fundamentalist Islam came to the attention of most Americans in 1979 with the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the establishment of the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini. In November of that year, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage by Iranian militants; fifty-two of the hostages were held for 444 days. In 1983, two truck bomb attacks in Lebanon killed more than 250 Americans. On December 21, 1988, Pan American Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the deaths of 259 people onboard. Meanwhile, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Disney’s Aladdin (1992) portrayed Hollywood’s fantasies about the Middle East. In the 1980’s, during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States sided with Iraq. In the aftermath, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait. President George H. W. Bush responded, gaining U.N. approval, and with an alliance of more than thirty nations Operation Desert Storm quickly drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait. However, because of fears of Iran’s strengthened role if Iraq was excessively weakened, Hussein was allowed to survive. In 1993, Islamic extremists attempted to destroy New York City’s World Trade Center’s twin towers, but casualties were minimal. During the 1990’s, President Bill Clinton responded to Saddam Hussein’s continuing threats by launching missiles against the regime, but with little effect. In 1998, the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The response to launch missiles against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan had little result, as did Clinton’s attempt to resolve the IsraeliPalestinian issue. The death of almost three thousand innocent civilians at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, changed everything—and changed nothing. President George W.

604

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Bush, whom Oren describes as a combination of previous American personalities involved in the Middle East—a warrior-diplomat and a warrior-evangelist—launched a “crusade” (an unfortunate term, given Muslim memories of the medieval Christian Crusades) against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan and, ironically, against some of the same forces that the United States had earlier supported when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Bush soon extended his crusade against Saddam Hussein and his “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), and in March, 2003, the “coalition of the willing” (mainly the United States and Great Britain) invaded Iraq. No WMD were discovered, and, echoing Wilson’s and America’s earlier idealism, the justification for the invasion shifted from WMD to creating an American-style pluralist democracy in Iraq as a paradigm for the rest of the Middle East. The fantasy WMD were replaced by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and the fantasy of a pluralist democracy became a wasteland of religious sectarianism. Power, Faith, and Fantasy is well written, and in spite of its cast of thousands, the narrative is clear and its themes well developed. It could be argued that the author devotes too much space to the subject of Israel-Palestine, but the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a continuing cancer that affects the entire region. Eugene Larson

Review Sources American History 42, no. 3 (August, 2007): 67-68. The Atlantic Monthly 299, no. 1 (January/February, 2007): 148. Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 8. Commentary 123, no. 1 (January, 2007): 53-57. Foreign Affairs 86, no. 1 (January/February, 2007): 174-175. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 21 (November 1, 2006): 1116. Library Journal 132, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 124-125. National Review 59, no. 1 (January 29, 2007): 44. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 28, 2007): 12. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 46 (November 20, 2006): 52.

605

PRIME GREEN Remembering the Sixties Author: Robert Stone (1937) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 229 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Memoir, literary history Time: 1958-1972 Locale: The world’s oceans, the United States, Paris, and London An evocation and assessment of a turbulent and frequently misconstrued era in American history from the personal perspective of one of the most admired and accomplished writers of that time Principal personages: Robert Stone, the author Janice Stone, his wife, a paragon of patience Ken Kesey, a charismatic counterculture hero and great writer

Robert Stone’s memoir of the 1960’s, aptly named Prime Green to suggest the spirit of renewal and revitalization that defined the era for him, is designed as a corrective to the spate of recent volumes that demonize and denigrate the counterculture that Stone has recalled with a clear-eyed and candid depiction. Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: An Experimental Life (2006), for instance, is a study that is relatively accurate in terms of the factual information it offers but that misses the idealism and enthusiasm that were the crucial components of a vision of social reality that inspired a significant segment of those Americans born during or just after World War II. Like Stone, who was born in 1937 and raised in New York City by a single mother afflicted with a bipolar disorder, they took part in some of the most dynamic and disturbing events in American history, but the passage of time and the political agendas of some prominent commentators has resulted in a negative distortion of these moments. Stone’s very readable book provides a necessary balance by recalling with what Richard Ford accurately identifies as “unnostalgic compassion and intelligence” what Ford designates “those tumultuous times.” Stone’s highly acclaimed novels A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), which won the National Book Award and was the basis for the film Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), A Flag For Sunrise (1981), and Children of Light (1986) are set in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as are the stories in his short-fiction collection Bear and His Daughter (1997). Stone followed what in retrospect seems like a classic American route toward his vocation. As he outlines in the inviting opening pages of Prime Green, he joined the Navy after graduating from high school, following in the tradition of Ishmael, who established a format for a young man yearning for the kind of experience that he might transform into literature. As Herman Melville’s archetypal

606

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

questor states, “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Among many others, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg all embarked from a New York port, and Stone, already far in advance of most collegiate English majors in his familiarity with classical and contemporary literature, took to sea as both an avoidance of a specific, limiting job and in response to the call of faraway places. In a passage akin to the narrator’s description of his first view of the East in Joseph Conrad’s Youth (1902), Stone writes: In the Strait of Malacca, I saw the thousand little ringed lights of the fishing-pirate junks of the Malay sea people. Picking past their craft we heard their flutes and bells. It was a faraway ocean but was what I’d come for. Passing the Lipari Islands headed for Beirut we passed between Scylla and Charybdis. From the peak of Stromboli great rich salvos of flaming molten rock were tossed in the smoky air. The ocean smelled of the Malvasia grapes that grew on the slope.

Stone’s evocation of his sojourn on the USS Arneb, “an ungainly naval transport ship with the lines of a tramp streamer,” serves the essential function of introducing the narrative consciousness of the memorist, the mind through which the reader will experience the world and the voice that will make it vivid. Stone’s skills as a writer of imaginative fiction are evident here, his descriptive powers engrossing, his sense of character compelling, and his ability to develop a supple but firm narrative structure that carries a kind of wandering expository thread skillfully constructed. As he relates his reactions to an endlessly varied seascape and the rituals of the Navy onboard, the captivating quirks of his personality emerge, as well as some of his core principles. While the narrative is in the form of an ongoing present, it is apparent that the retrospect of a mature man is operative. When Stone observes that “history’s narratives are being revised to suit our sorry times,” his political perspective begins to take shape, and when he says that he admired the “Australian dimension” that “provided a sometimes prevailing good humor and a tolerant sense of absurdity,” he is speaking for his own way of being. The narrative turns toward the familiar “education of a young man” mode when Stone begins his first job as a very low-level employee of the Daily News, enrolls at New York University, and attends a few sessions at the Hagen-Berghof acting studio. Relatively down and out in the city, Stone is ecstatic about his freedom and the city’s myriad possibilities, and, as he states summarizing the cultural turning that was beginning to gain momentum, “Rock and roll was coming. It would change everything.” Interspersed among other observations are casual literary allusions, indicative of Stone’s self-directed, eclectic course of reading and his ambitions. As his ship wallows amid icebergs, driven by a fierce wind in Antarctica, he hunkers below deck, staying “with Leopold Bloom as long as I could” in the copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) he has from the Norfolk Library. He does not mention that it is newly published, but he relates that Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) was “one of my other traveling books,” and he tells how he had “amassed a small collection of magazine rejection slips” during his time in the Navy, encouraged by a handwritten note on the

Prime Green / stone

607

form from The New Yorker that advised, “Try Robert Stone’s first novel, A Hall of us again.” To this point, the contents of Prime Green Mirrors (1967), won a William are essentially prologue. The heart of the book Faulkner Foundation award for best appears in an almost offhand fashion when first novel, and Dog Soldiers (1974) Stone meets a classmate, Janice, who becomes won a National Book Award. His works his wife in a brief chapter that seems just as in- Damascus Gate (1998), set in terested in Stone’s attendance at the Seven Arts Palestine, and Bay of Souls (2003), located on a Caribbean island Gallery coffee shop where he heard Kerouac, resembling Haiti, continue the Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, and imaginative realist concepts of his Ted Joans—gods and lesser deities of the bur- earlier volumes. geoning Beat scene—read poetry. He and Janice move to New Orleans in 1960 and start a life together that, contrary to many unions launched as the decade arrived, endures and evolves in ways that represent the trials and triumphs of Stone’s life. Following a familiar path, Stone moves from one mundane job (encyclopedia salesman, actor in religious pageant) to another, the fascinations and temptations of the city partially compensating for the hardships of raising a family with hardly any money, while gradually realizing that the nature of his experiences were leading toward what he saw as “something like a novel.” Troubled by a persistent sense “that authenticity, whatever it was, resided somewhere else,” a kind of restlessness that also resulted in an inclination toward sexual adventure, he realized on a fundamental psychic level that his soul as a man and as an artist required an ultimate faithfulness to his craft and to Janice, resisting the immediate lure of various illicit pleasures. “I also knew at about that moment that I would never leave her, not ever, that this thing was forever,” he recalls. What was not resistible, nor even considered improper, was the allure of the growing drug scene. Stone’s entrance into the regions of psychic exploration and excess brought him into close proximity with some of the most prominent people of the entire epoch. Casual use of marijuana was a common practice among the inhabitants of what Kerouac called the “subterranean” strata of society, easily available at jazz clubs, then ubiquitous among anyone associated with a bohemian subculture. At the same time, as Stone recounts with an insider’s experience and a scholar’s further investigative knowledge of a large phenomenon, the discovery of psychedelic substances led to a national craze that was responsible for a transformation in American society that has been summarized by the term “the Sixties.” For Stone, whose descriptions of some of his mental excursions are terrifyingly beautiful, the perils were apparent, but the allure was sufficient to overcome reluctance. Part of the appeal was the attraction of the company he joined, and its hero/leader, Ken Kesey. Kesey had already published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) when Stone met him. His portrait of Kesey is a masterpiece of appreciative understanding, capturing the “transactional charisma” of an exceptionally gifted man who knew the power he had and tried to use it decently. Awed by Kesey’s energy and insight, Stone sees him as a man “who personally embodied the winning side in every historical

608

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

struggle that had served to create the colossus that was nineteen sixties America: An Anglo-Saxon Protestant Western American White Male, an Olympic-caliber athlete with an advanced academic degree, he had inherited the progressive empowerment of centuries,” while recognizing that there was also a Gatsby-like quality that could not be easily conveyed: His ability to offer other people a variety of satisfactions ranging from fun to transcendence was not especially verbal, which is why it remained independent of Kesey’s fiction, and it was ineffable, impossible to describe exactly or to encapsulate in a quotation.

However, as Larry McMurtry tellingly observed about the deceptively named “Merry Pranksters” as a “floating court” for Kesey, “There were always a few good friends who were not of the court. Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, myself.” Stone’s presence on the bus, on which the Merry Pranksters careened across the country, enables him to catch the excitement, excess, stupidity, and damage that followed in Kesey’s wake, his capsule images of people like Kerouac and Neal Cassady, “famous long ago” as Bob Dylan put it, revealing the sadness without deflating the enticement of that now legendary journey. Stone’s time with Kesey as a fellow semi-outlaw when Kesey was hiding out in Mexico completely captures the psychic sense of romantic adventure and drugged-out, even dangerous, “drunken dumbshow” (as Ginsberg described it) that marked the moment. At the same time, Stone was attending to the novel he had imagined in New Orleans. He got off the bus in the middle of the country, had some perilous encounters with heartland hostility while traveling east alone—an implied parallel with Kesey’s wild ride—and carried his search for “authenticity” across the Atlantic to Paris and London, where his life shifted from a student’s bottom view (Paris) to a privileged person’s pleasures when Hall of Mirrors was published in the United Kingdom in 1968. When Paul Newman called to request permission to film the novel, with Stone as the screenwriter, in spite of his view of Hollywood as responsible for a significant portion of the rampant stupidity of American popular culture, Stone accepted immediately. His frustration and disappointment with the filmmaking process were predictable and probably inevitable, but he liked Newman immensely and saw him as a “considerate man, of grace and reserve. . . . The better I got to know him, the more I liked and respected him.” In one of the most revealing expressions of his fundamental philosophy, Stone decries all dogmatic ideologies, insisting: “Ordinary decency, I thought, was about the best of which I, and again most people, were capable. And it was not so easy at that, not so ordinary.” Just when the urgency that has been driving the narrative seems to diminish slightly, its episodic elements perhaps undermining the imminence of revelation previously apparent, Stone juxtaposes the Moon landing with the Manson murders, bitterness overwhelming the fading vision of a corrupted hippie dream, his own life sinking toward a party where everyone—children included—is consumed by a desperate grasping for the nitrous oxide high that mingles blissful oblivion with greedfilled aggrandizement. Disgusted by his deterioration, Stone goes to Vietnam in an

Prime Green / stone

609

attempt to reconnect with the idealism that marked the start of the decade, to try to do something useful in “the heart of darkness.” The last section of the book, taut and trim, is evidence of the “authenticity” of Stone’s account. Without overstating his expectations (“I was not over there to be Ernie Pyle or Richard Harding Davis”—noted war correspondents), the density of detail and the intensity of feeling that Stone brings to the narrative are a testament to the seriousness of his inquiry. His novel Dog Soldiers, not mentioned here, was built on the foundations of this experience. The final chapter, “Epilogue,” is both an epitaph and epigraph for the era. As he says, recalling Walt Whitman’s proclamation about the Civil War (“I was the man; I suffered; I was there”), “I knew a few things,” and while he is as hard on himself and his peers as real wisdom demands, his envoi to an epoch reflects his ultimate judgement: “Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail.” Leon Lewis

Review Sources The American Spectator 40, no. 4 (May, 2007): 68-71. Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 17-18. Commonweal 134, no. 3 (February 9, 2007): 25-26. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 18 (September 15, 2006): 943. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 2 (February 15, 2007): 36-38. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 7, 2007): 1-10. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 40 (October 9, 2006): 45. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 5 (January 6, 2007): P12.

610

RALPH ELLISON A Biography Author: Arnold Rampersad (1941) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 657 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1913-1994 Locale: Oklahoma, New York City, Europe A critically acclaimed biography of the author of Invisible Man (1952), the novel named as the most significant work of fiction by a twentieth century African American writer Principal personages: Ralph Ellison, an African American author Ida Ellison Bell, his mother Langston Hughes, an African American writer, a friend and supporter of Ellison’s work Richard Wright, an African American novelist, Ellison’s mentor early in his career Rose Poindexter, Ellison’s first wife Ida Espen Guggenheimer, the patron who financially supported Ellison early in his career Fanny McConnell Ellison, his second wife Kenneth Burke, a literary critic whose modernist theories influenced Ellison’s writing Stanley Edgar Hyman, the publisher who played a significant role in the publication of Invisible Man John F. Callahan, the editor of Juneteenth (1999), published after Ellison’s death

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was an immediate sensation in the literary world. White critics were enthusiastic, but black critics accused Ellison of unfairly stereotyping African Americans. Until the publication of Invisible Man, the leading black writers of the mid-twentieth century were Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940), and poet Langston Hughes. While both Wright and Hughes mentored young Ellison and helped launch his writing career, Ellison eventually moved beyond their influence to discover his unique fictional voice. Invisible Man, employing myth, fantasy, and symbolism, was recognized as a breakthrough that changed the face of African American literature in the twentieth century. Ellison and his wife Fanny saved the voluminous correspondence, journals, and notes that record the details of his life and placed them in the Library of Congress. Arnold Rampersad, author of biographies of Jackie Robinson and Langston Hughes and editor of several African American literary anthologies, made extensive use of

Ralph Ellison / rampersad

611

the Ellisons’ collected papers. He also con ducted numerous interviews with Ellison’s contemporaries. Rampersad’s scholarly interpretation of this material has been frequently cited as the definitive treatment of Ellison’s life and work. The question that has intrigued Ellison’s readers—why was he unable to complete the lengthy manuscript of his second novel?— is not Rampersad’s main concern. He presents a portrait of a complex man, the foremost black intellectual of his generation, whose Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart gentlemanly bearing and charm gave him en- Kimball Professor in the Humanities try into the exclusive world of white society. and a member of the Department of Ellison also drank heavily, behaved cruelly to English at Stanford University. His his two wives, and ignored younger black books include biographies of Langston writers who sought his support. Rampersad Hughes and Jackie Robinson, and he also offers keen critical insight into Ellison’s collaborated with Arthur Ashe on his creative process and the demons that plagued memoir, Days of Grace (1993). Rampersad has published many articles him as he struggled to write a second novel. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, in literary journals and is a member of 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Ida and the American Academy of Arts and Lewis Ellison, whose ancestors had accepted Sciences. the government’s offer of one hundred acres in the Oklahoma Territory after the Civil War. Ellison often expressed pride in his mixed Indian, white, and black heritage. This racial history of the territory profoundly influenced his lifelong view of America as a land of hope and opportunity. Ellison, named for the New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, was initially embarrassed by his name but later acknowledged his debt to this distinguished heritage. Lewis Ellison’s death after an injury incurred while delivering ice was a disaster for Ida, three-year-old Ralph, and his younger brother Herbert. Dependent on the charity of friends and relatives, the family lived in abject poverty, humiliated and outcast by the respectable black community. Rampersad believes that Ellison, a proud and angry man throughout his life, never recovered from this childhood emotional damage. However, in later years, Ellison romanticized the experience of growing up on the Oklahoma frontier and returned several times—but only after he had become famous. Young Ellison began work before he was twelve as a shoeshine boy and later as a waiter and as a drugstore clerk. He showed an early talent for music, excelling as a trumpet player and pianist, absorbing the jazz and blues of Oklahoma City dance halls. He enrolled as a music major at Tuskegee Institute, the conservative, all-black school founded by Booker T. Washington. These were unhappy years during which he constantly begged his mother for money for the barest essentials. Moreover, a

612

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

dean of the school whom he trusted as a father figure made unwelcome sexual advances. However, it was a Tuskegee English professor who first inspired his interest in literature. Ellison left Tuskegee without finishing his degree and moved to New York City in 1936. He supported himself as a server at the Harlem YMCA, and later as a clerk for a psychiatrist and a laboratory assistant at a paint company. At the YMCA, he met Langston Hughes, the generous poet who encouraged him to write. Both Hughes and Richard Wright, to whom Hughes introduced Ellison, were members of the Communist Party and wrote for socialist publications. Although Ellison was never a party member, he was initially in sympathy with socialist politics. Ellison went to Ohio in 1937 after the death of his mother and was reunited with his younger brother Herbert. They spent several homeless months subsisting on their hunting skills. This hand-to-mouth existence, coupled with the discovery that an incompetent black doctor had caused his mother’s death, reinforced his anger and cynicism. He returned to New York City, having begun to try his hand at writing fiction. Sponsored by Wright, Ellison joined the New York Writers’ Project, a program of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA). Here he researched African American history, material that would energize his novel. He disciplined himself to read extensively among classical novelists like Fyodor Dostoevski, as well as the modernists Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. The writings of French existentialist André Malraux inspired Ellison’s search for an intellectual understanding of the relationship of the “Negro” (the term in common use at that time, and one he favored throughout his life) to the white American society. He supported himself by writing essays and book reviews for socialist publications and edited the shortlived Negro Quarterly. He served briefly as a cook in the merchant marine during World War II and married Rose Poindexter, a union that ended in 1945 after his affair with a white woman. Rampersad traces in detail the genesis of the text of Invisible Man. Ellison was unsettled by Richard Wright’s nonfiction book Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) and his novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942). Under the influence of literary critics Stanley Edgar Hyman and Kenneth Burke, he was abandoning his communist leanings to explore modernist theories of mythology and symbolism. Two short stories, “Flying Home” (1943) and “King of the Bingo Game” (1944), attracted favorable critical attention. In 1945, during a vacation in Vermont with Fanny McConnell Buford, who would become his second wife, he typed the words “I am an invisible man”—and his imagination took flight. He envisioned an epic masterpiece that would trace the history of the Negro in America. The invisible man of the title would, in Ellison’s words, “move upward through Negro life, coming into contact with its various forms and personality types, will operate in the Negro middle class, in the left-wing movement and descend again into the disorganized atmosphere of the Harlem underworld.” After years of struggle with the manuscript, Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952. Crucial to the success of the novel, Rampersad believes, were Ellison’s choice of the first-person narration and the surrealistic expression of chaos, as the black man

Ralph Ellison / rampersad

613

tried to construct the meaning of his existence in an alien white society. His technique was experimental, juxtaposing comedy and tragedy, describing the wildly fantastic journey of the young protagonist toward self-fulfillment. Although certain plot incidents were based loosely on his experiences, the novel was not autobiographical. However, Rampersad interprets the isolation of the narrator in the epilogue as a sign of Ellison’s increasing distance from the realities of the world of ordinary black people. Invisible Man created an immediate sensation in the predominantly white literary world. Black critics, however, called it a betrayal of the race. Ellison’s response was that his critics had neither the intelligence nor the sensitivity to understand his achievement. In 1953, Invisible Man won the National Book Award, winning over Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: “The chief significance of Invisible Man” is “its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” His success gave him entry into the white literary establishment and the homes of wealthy socialites, where he and Fanny, now married and greatly enjoying their celebrity, were usually the only black people present. He won a two-year fellowship to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome. Back in America, Ellison formed friendships with noted writers, among them Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, and John Cheever. However, in securing his place in the white world, Ellison was separating himself from African American culture, the roots of his creativity. Younger black writers looking to him for encouragement were ignored, even insulted. As he garnered honors and prestigious appointments with organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, Ellison worked on his second novel. He accepted a series of university lecturing duties that allowed time for his creative work. Despite his success, beneath Ellison’s charming public persona lurked a different figure. He had frequent angry outbursts and drank heavily, becoming quarrelsome. He excused his affair with a white woman by blaming Fanny for their childlessness. It was rumored that he carried a knife and was dangerous. Invited to join exclusive organizations like the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New York Century Club, he voted to keep out women and other African Americans. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, Ellison believed that as an artist he had no obligation to take an active role beyond some financial support for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He continued to ignore, and often insult, younger black writers, including James Baldwin. He publicly dismissed as inferior the work of Black Power activists such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka. Still, he was deeply hurt when students called him an “Uncle Tom.” He began declining speaking engagements and academic appointments, claiming that he needed time for his second novel. In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays that Rampersad ranks among the best African American writing about race. His many honors included two Presidential Medals of Arts awarded by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson

614

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and Ronald Reagan. As African American literature gained acceptance in the academy, Invisible Man became an influential text. A second collection of essays, Going to the Territory, was published in 1986. Ellison continued to gather honors and was in demand as a speaker for the rest of his life, but he never published a second novel. He died on April 16, 1994. The sprawling collection of episodes he had struggled for years to complete was edited and published as Juneteenth five years after his death. Rampersad remains impartial in presenting this nearly overwhelming body of material. Invisible Man and the two collections of essays are, in his view, a monumental achievement. Ellison himself he describes as a liberal humanist, a lifelong believer in the possibilities of the American Dream and the conviction that the lives of black and white Americans must be inseparable. However, in cultivating his white relationships, he distanced himself from his roots in the African American culture whose strength and resiliency he revered. The evidence preserved by Ellison and his wife Fanny reveals a troubled personality with a record of nasty, unpredictable, often cruel behavior. However, was he unfairly criticized for his failure to publish the long-awaited second novel? Perhaps. As this biography portrays him, Ellison was a perfectionist who had set his sights so high that to surpass the achievement of Invisible Man would have been impossible. Rampersad concludes that, whatever Ellison’s personal flaws, his many admirers believe that “no one who had written Invisible Man and so skillfully explicated the matter of race and American culture in his essays could ever be accounted a failure.” Marjorie Podolsky

Review Sources American Scholar 76, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 121-126. Commentary 124, no. 3 (October, 2007): 67-70. The Humanist 67, no. 6 (November/December, 2007): 38-40. The Nation 284, no. 21 (May 28, 2007): 11-18. The New Republic 236, no. 18 (June 18, 2007): 48-51. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 10 (June 14, 2007): 56-58. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 20, 2007): 18-19. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 10 (March 5, 2007): 54.

615

RAVEL Author: Jean Echenoz (1947) First published: 2005, in France Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale Publisher: The New Press (New York). 126 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1927-1937 Locale: France, the United States, and Canada A marvelously crafted yet carefully restrained picture of the triumph and the increasing decline of the aging composer Maurice Ravel during his final ten years of travel and travail Principal personage: Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), a famous French composer and pianist

Born of Basque and Swiss parents and raised in Paris, Maurice Ravel is perhaps one of the best-known musical innovators of the early twentieth century. His professional milieu was the emerging Impressionism in France, which served up a nouvelle cuisine of both visual and musical art. Ravel’s contributions to this gastronomic abundance are well known. In her novel Ravel, Jean Echenoz has selected several episodes from the composer’s final ten years. The author’s choices flesh out both the triumph and the tragedy of his life. The book is part cartoon, part tragedy, and is thoroughly readable. While the author is impeccably true to historical detail, he avoids the recitation of facts that constipate many nonfictional accounts of famous lives. The book is composed of nine rather brief vignettes, each illustrating a small slice of time in Ravel’s life between 1927 and 1937. In 1927, Ravel has already achieved status as the darling of the international community. The selected ten years are illustrative of his success as well as his relentless but subtle disintegration. The book concludes with his final lingering illness and tragic death following brain surgery for a possible tumor. In the first vignette, the reader is introduced to the famous composer in the nude, just as he steps from the bathtub. Given that the book begins at the zenith of Ravel’s career, the detailed description of quotidian banality is somewhat quixotic. It is discomforting to be a voyeur at someone’s daily routine. Later the reader appreciates this scene as a foreshadow of what is to come: Ravel’s vulnerability, gradual decline in health, and eventually death. The bath is part of Ravel’s elaborate preparation for an extended victory tour of the United States. The very ordinariness of the scene provides a vivid contrast to Ravel’s public presentation of himself, taken up later in the book. Echenoz describes in exquisite detail stray hairs in the tepid bubbles, the machinations of leaving the tub. (“Caution is advised, to avoid bumping one’s crotch or risking a nasty fall.”)

616

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

He prolongs the account of Ravel’s extensive ritual of grooming. Every detail of personal toilet is described. The passage is reminiscent of the equally off-putting yet compelling description of John Updike’s psoriasis in his reluctant memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989). However, there is a camera-like detachment to the account in Ravel. The description is devoid of emotion. Even though Ravel is presented as totally revealed in his nudity and in his personal rituals of daily life, the reader learns little of his inner life and thought. The shading and color must come later. As the novel progresses, the composer’s insecurity is uncovered bit by bit. Perhaps the novel illustrates that his vulnerability increases bit by bit. Ravel is meticulous about his dress and grooming, unwilling to enter the public eye with improper shoes or his pocket handkerchief not quite right. On his triumphant transoceanic trip to the United States—first class in a luxury liner—he brings a “squadron of suitcases” that include sixty shirts, twenty pairs of shoes, more than seventy ties, and twenty-five pairs of pajamas. Ravel at his prime is pictured as utterly preoccupied with his appearance. There is never a hair out of place nor an outfit less than perfectly congruent to the occasion. As he encounters his adoring public, he does so only in sartorial perfection—no stray hairs or tepid bubbles. Sadly, there lingers a sense of loneliness and a lack of security about Ravel, even at the apex of his career. To some extent he is an anonymous passenger on the voyage to America. Time aboard ship lags: a swim in the pool, some parlor games, the endless changing of outfits to suit the prescribed events of luxury travel. Although Ravel is asked to give a small concert and to sign the special visitors’ book that the captain brings to his cabin, the truth is that he is very much—forgive the double entendre— at sea. He wanders about the boat trying to kill time and to fill the seemingly endless days on the solitary and long Atlantic voyage. Even his first-class stateroom appears small. It “allots his body the precise range allowed by a hospital room—a vital but atrophied space with nothing to cling to but oneself.” The boat arrives in New York. Ravel is greeted by a gaggle of important people, representatives of various associations, and the press. Echenoz’s take on the scene is that Ravel’s preoccupation is not with the many who have come to greet him but rather with his dazzling wardrobe. Ravel shouts to friends on the dock, “Wait till you see . . . the splendid ties I brought with me!” Neckwear elegance notwithstanding, the grand tour of the United States is an abundant success. With barely a breath Ravel races, in nine exhausting pages, from coast to coast, giving concerts, attending receptions, and always selecting his wardrobe with care. He visits all the major cities of the time, as well as some of America’s tourist attractions such as the Grand Canyon. Perhaps this story is not so much about Ravel and his career as it is about the fragility of human life, even and maybe especially the life of someone famous and talented. Hints of what is to come are tucked neatly into the parsimonious accounts: a slip of memory here, an omission of a movement as he plays a concert there, the extensive

Jean Echenoz published his first novel, Le Méridien de Greenwich (1979; the Greenwich Meridian), at thirty-two. He is the recipient of a number of literary prizes and resides in Paris.

Ravel / echenoz

617

medical treatments, and (always) the insomnia. Details of decline stain the pages with the foreboding of Ravel’s degeneration and death. The triumphant trip to the United States, his first, will be also his last. It is a whirlwind tour from which Ravel draws energy. He is seemingly at the top of his game both in performance and in crowd adulation. Still, he often feels insecure and alone. Still, he cannot sleep. The author constructs the nine sections in such a way that the length of the vignette indicates the inner perception of time by the composer. Echenoz spends one whole chapter getting Ravel from his bath to his boat. While the actual passage of time is brief in comparison to other parts of the story, the number of pages it occupies in the novel is large. He lavishes two rather long chapters on the sea voyage, mimicking the leisurely pace of luxury liner travel in more formal times as well as Ravel’s boredom. With little to do, Ravel explores the ship, asks questions, swims, and reads. In contrast is the American tour itself, which lasts four months, and which the author dispatches very quickly. Ravel visits a long list of cities, performing and preening. His tour moves across the continent from New York, Boston, Cambridge, New Orleans, to the major West Coast cities of the United States and Canada. These frenetic four months are blown through in barely nine pages. The palpable sense of urgency and exhaustion is felt not only by Ravel but by the reader. Upon Ravel’s return home he is still “at sea.” Without the structure of the tour and without the predictable flattery from his audiences, Ravel does not know quite how to behave. Plagued by inattention, insomnia, and boredom, he is not quite whole. He forgets to invite a close friend to a large party at his home. Echenoz’s earlier hints at Ravel’s worsening condition give way to stronger and stronger suggestions. There is no denying it. Ravel’s ability to remember and to focus is degenerating. It is during this period that the controversial musical piece Boléro is composed. A serious automobile accident seems to accelerate the progress of Ravel’s decline. After his taxi is hit by a speeding car, he is incapacitated for three months. During this time, he appears acutely distracted and disinterested in his surroundings. Perhaps it is just a normal response to the accident. Perhaps it is more. None of the then state-ofthe-art therapies seem to improve his condition. This event seems to mark the beginning of the end. The composer never returns to the level of function he enjoyed before the accident. The doctors conjecture that perhaps the decline is due to a tumor in the brain. They decide to operate. Ten days after the surgery, Maurice Ravel is dead. The facts of Ravel’s life have been documented elsewhere. Echenoz selects certain facts as a containing frame in order to paint a detailed canvas of his interpretation of Ravel’s psychology. He pictures a man fastidious to a fault about his dress yet apparently lazy in the discipline it takes to be an accurate and excellent pianist. He is energized by the adulation of his audiences in his whirlwind tour of the United States, yet he quickly succumbs to apathy and insomnia when the crowds are gone. Here is a picture of a highly talented and successful artist as well as a fragile, vulnerable human being. Readers’ detached observation of the man gives way to pity as Ravel unravels in front of them. His techniques for going to sleep, for example, appear merely pathetic. Echenoz compresses the details of Ravel’s final illness, which in reality lasted a prolonged four years. These years are telescoped into a tumbling-down-a-hill account

618

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

given in the final two vignettes. Sleep becomes more and more elusive. The ability to remember details or even his very close friends slips through Ravel’s increasingly inept fingers. At the piano, he is not the consummate performer that he was. Is it boredom that causes him to skip a movement or the ominous foreboding of a worsening dementia? Unlike many books read in translation, Ravel does not leave the reader with the sense that he or she is missing something. The translation feels like a patent and faithful rendering of the original French. The text remains powerful and well crafted. In instances where the English-speaking reader may miss the allusions to persons or contexts, explanatory footnotes are given. The translation renders the French in beautiful English prose. It is no wonder that the translator is the recipient of awards for translation. Overall, the book exudes a sober intimacy. The tepid water and stray hairs of the first chapter linger at the end, a tribute to the humanity and vulnerability of this largerthan-life composer. There is little wrong with the book except perhaps its inevitably somber tone. Dolores L. Christie

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 41-42. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 6 (March 15, 2007): 243. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 74. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 10. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 36. Review of Contemporary Fiction 26, no. 2 (Summer, 2006): 88.

619

THE REAGAN DIARIES Author: Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) Edited by Douglas Brinkley Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 767 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Diary Time: 1981-1989 Locale: Washington, D.C.; Santa Barbara, California; Camp David, Maryland The daily writings of President Ronald Reagan, skillfully edited by one of America’s foremost historians Principal personages: Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), fortieth president of the United States, 1981-1989 Nancy Reagan (1921), First Lady Tip O’Neill (1912-1994), Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1977-1987

The presidency of Ronald Reagan is one of the most interesting of the twentieth century. It was a time of political and ideological realignment, as a new form of American conservatism came of age with Reagan’s election. As the oldest elected U.S. president at sixty-nine, Reagan was often accused by the press of napping in cabinet meetings and working short days, and many people viewed him as not one of America’s brightest or energetic chief executives. The appearance of The Reagan Diaries, edited by Douglas Brinkley, will put most of these misconceptions to rest. Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (2004) and The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2006). He is the history commentator for CBS News and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Only four other presidents—George Washington, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and Rutherford B. Hayes—kept diaries on a consistent basis. Such access to a president’s daily inner thoughts are therefore rare indeed. Reagan regretted that he had never kept a diary before becoming president. “The Sacramento years”—when he was governor of California—“flew by so quickly,” he writes, but “we just did not seem to have time.” From his first day as president, however, he was determined to write daily, which he did, except when he was in the hospital. Each night before retiring, Reagan would chronicle his day in longhand. Other twentieth century presidents, Harry S. Truman for example, left behind the official daily appointment books and then recounted their presidency in memoirs written after leaving office. Before Reagan, no president, even those who kept daily diaries, had ever revealed their daily activities so candidly and personally. Reagan wanted to leave a detailed daily record of his eight years in office not only for posterity but also so that he and Nancy could better remember their White House days after they left Washington.

620

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

What quickly emerges from Reagan’s writings is the grueling daily grind that comes with the nation’s highest office. Endless meetings, speeches, luncheons, and ceremonies are all part of the job. Reagan took them all in stride. Apparently, the press was not aware of the tremendous amount of activities the president undertook during an average day: “The press keeps score on office hours but knows nothing about the never-ending desk and paperwork that usually goes on ’til lights out,” he reflects. This was not a part-time president by any means. Reagan’s relationship with the press was cordial but often a source of annoyance. Regarding his visit to a Nazi military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985, the president wrote that he could not understand why reporters continued to criticize him for what he viewed as honoring the war dead of both sides of a conflict that must never happen again. Despite the negative press, he stuck to his promise to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl to visit the cemetery. Eventually, the American people came around to Reagan’s side. In another incident, the press tried to create a scandal over the so-called Jimmy Carter playbook. Sources claimed that Reagan’s campaign staff had gained access to Democratic candidate Carter’s strategy book for the 1980 campaign. Reagan wrote that he knew nothing about it. This denial, however, immediately started rumors of a cover-up. In frustration, he wrote that he hoped the whole matter would simply go away, which it soon did. One feature that is very apparent throughout his writings is his deep love and affection for his wife, Nancy. She was his rock and the center of his life. He misses her greatly whenever she is away from him for any length of time. Days after he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., on March 30, 1981, Reagan writes, “I opened my eyes to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there.” Interestingly, in spite of their extremely close relationship, he never seems to confide in her or seek her advice on government matters. His time with Nancy is relaxing time and family time, never business. Throughout his presidency, Reagan found time to relax at his California ranch and at Camp David in the Maryland mountains. He loved horseback riding and farm work at his ranch—clearing brush, chopping wood, and repairing fences. At Camp David, swimming and movies were his diversion. As with most presidents, these times away from the White House were not true vacations. He maintained very close relations with his son and daughters, although his relationship with his adopted son Michael was stormy. Reagan will probably be best remembered for his efforts to confront communism and the Soviet Union. His determination and steadfastness when dealing with Soviet leaders comes through forcefully throughout the diary. Facing down the Soviet military and maintaining U.S. military superiority was a top priority of his presidency and in his mind the road to a lasting peace in the world. Historians will long note Reagan’s

Ronald Reagan achieved fame as a television and film actor before turning to politics, serving as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and as U.S. president from 1981 to 1989. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 and died in 2004.

The Reagan Diaries / reagan

621

powerful “tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate by the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987. He mentions the speech in his diary but apparently was unaware of the lasting significance his words would have on history. “I addressed tens and tens of thousands of people—stretching as far as I could see. I got a tremendous reception— interrupted twenty-eight times by cheers.” It would in fact become a defining moment in American-Soviet relations. During his presidency, Reagan struggled with many problems on the international front. Grenada, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Libya, Cuba, and Nicaragua were constant trouble spots. Reagan correctly predicted that the Middle East, and Iran in particular, would be a growing concern for the United States for years to come. His efforts to fight communism in Nicaragua led to the Iran-Contra affair, an attempt to funnel money to the anti-Sandinista rebels, or Contras, by illegally selling weapons to Iran. The diary shows that Reagan was kept in the dark about many of the dealings. He was concerned that the American people were now questioning his truthfulness about what he called “the Iran mess.” Reagan had long been planning to run for a second term in 1984. He knew that he was a popular president with the American people. His diary entries during the campaign contain not a hint of concern that he could lose the election. Proudly recording the outcome on election day, he writes: “Well 49 states, 59 percent of the vote and 525 electoral votes. . . . The press is trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide or should I say mandate?” An interesting insight into Reagan’s personality is revealed through his numerous encounters with world leaders. He went to great lengths to ensure that visiting leaders were comfortable and made every effort to have them leave the United States not just as allies but as friends. Many times he would write how much he “liked” a particular leader and was certain he could count on him or her. Reagan’s warm and friendly manner and his genuine sincerity served him well. He rarely has a mean word to say. One his favorite leaders was British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: “[She] is a tower of strength and a solid friend of the U.S.” In his dealings with Congress, Reagan used his enormous public support to keep the legislative branch in check. His main adversary was Congressman Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House throughout the Reagan years. O’Neill clashed with the president on both domestic and foreign policy, arguing that Reagan favored the rich as well as large corporations at the expense of common people. Reagan frequently notes his frustration with O’Neill. He especially bristled when O’Neill would deliberately quote him out of context. Interestingly, there were many times when they could put their political differences aside. It was certainly not the case that Reagan ignored or was insensitive to the personal struggles of ordinary Americans. There are anecdotes in which he would read about the plight of a family and quickly intervene with help. In one case, he saw a story on ABC News about a family in Los Angeles who were charged $6,000 back rent by the city for street lights and for years were never told they owed any money. Reagan personally called Frank Reynolds, the ABC News anchorman, to confirm the story. He then asked his Deputy Secretary of State Bill Clark to investigate. There are similar

622

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

entries throughout the diary detailing the president’s efforts to reach out to help. Also revealing is Reagan’s forgiving of his would-be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr. “Getting shot hurts,” Reagan wrote, and goes on to say that he could not ask for God’s help while at the same time being filled with hatred for the man who shot him. “I began to pray for his soul,” he writes, “and that he would find his way back to the fold.” Throughout his presidency, Reagan called hundreds of deceased servicemen’s spouses and parents to offer condolences. He also frequently called the relatives of fallen Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and police officers. Reagan wrote that his most difficult phone calls were to the wives and husbands of the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded shortly after liftoff on January 28, 1986. “There is no way to describe our shock and horror,” he writes. Reagan recounted that he was scheduled to give the state of the union address that night but decided to delay it for a week. Instead, he delivered a moving five-minute speech honoring the fallen astronauts. It would be one of his most memorable. He relates that every one of the astronauts’ spouses urged the president to see that the space program continue. Historian Douglas Brinkley has done a masterful job in editing and abridging the five volumes left behind by Reagan into a one-volume, eminently readable book. His selection of materials paints an in-depth picture of the daily pressures, triumphs, and disappointments faced by the president. Those who lived through the Reagan years will gain a new and deeper understanding of Reagan the person, as well as Reagan the president. They will also recall many of the events of their own lives—where they were and what they were doing as national and international events that Reagan writes about unfolded. For those too young to remember those eight years, this diary will provide a remarkable inside look into the daily activities of America’s fortieth president. Raymond Frey

Review Sources The Economist 384 (July 7, 2007): 81. The New York Times 156 (June 17, 2007): 11. The New Yorker 83, no. 14 (May 28, 2007): 72-76. Newsweek 149, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 14 (April 2, 2007): 53. The Saturday Evening Post 279, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 20-22. The Spectator 304 (July 14, 2007): 41. The Washington Post, May 2, 2007, p. A1.

623

THE REGENSBURG LECTURE Author: James V. Schall (1928) Publisher: St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Ind.). 174 pp. $20.00 Type of work: Religion, current affairs The complete text of Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial lecture on Islam, faith, and reason, delivered in September, 2006, accompanied by Schall’s commentary and exposition of the lecture The dust jacket of The Regensburg Lecture promotes the book with this teaser: “Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture (included in this book) called for freedom of conscience in religious matters and a reasoned debate. Not everyone agreed.” The importance of the pope’s address, as the jacket implies, derives both from the content of the lecture and from the reaction to it. In the days following September 12, 2006, when the pope visited the University of Regensburg, Muslim protests occurred in Palestine, India, and Egypt, among other places, in reaction to what was perceived as anti-Islamist sentiments. In this book, James V. Schall, professor of government at Georgetown University, presents an exposition of the lecture. The pope’s words themselves appear in an appendix, but that order distorts the true structure of the book. The lecture is central, and Schall clearly assumes his words are secondary to the pope’s address. The address itself is quite short, broken up into sixty-three numbered paragraphs. Because the pope was an academic, having been a professor at Regensburg from 1969 to 1977, his speech exhibits erudition, clarity, and orderliness. The thesis of the address is well defined: Any true religion must show itself to be compatible with reason because God’s nature itself is reasonable. Following Thomas Aquinas, the pope argues that the Greek philosophical tradition needed to be complemented by the Judeo-Christian revelation of God and that neither can be viable apart from the other. It is important to see that the pope draws a distinction between modern rationality, which he likens to empiricism, and a broader sense of reason that derives from Plato and Aristotle. The pope worries that the mutually enriching conjunction of the best of Greek thought with the Christian message is weakening through a process he calls dehellenization. The pope traces three historical stages of dehellenization: the influence of the Reformation, particularly Martin Luther; the rise of liberal theology in the late nineteenth century; and the pluralistic tendencies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In each of these moments, certain individuals or groups within Christianity attempted to strip away metaphysics from religion, and in each case, both were devalued by the attempt. However, the thesis of the address was, as Schall points out in his introduction, overshadowed by a single paragraph. In it, the pope cites a fourteenth century dia-

624

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

logue in which a Byzantine emperor said about the Qur$3n—with what the pope calls “a brusqueness that we find unacceptable”— “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The pope uses this quote, along with a verse from the Qur$3n (“There is no compulsion in religion”), in order to examine Muslim theolJames V. Schall teaches government at ogy. Is God, the pope wonders, free to act in Georgetown University. He has written a manner contrary to reason, and if so, is that numerous books and articles for both scholarly and popular audiences. Many the grounds for violence in Islam? For the pope, it is clear that since violence contradicts of his works, such as Another Sort of reason, it must also be contrary to the will of Learning (1988), focus on liberal God. He pointedly wants to know whether education. Islam agrees with him. In the aftermath of the lecture, many criticized the pope for intemperately fanning the flames of an already tense situation. His detractors argued that, if the pope himself found the emperor’s language brusque, why use it at all? According to the pope’s critics, he should have expunged this paragraph from the lecture and concentrated on his primary topic—the role of reason within religion. The question to ask about the speech is whether the medieval anti-Muslim quote was a misguided throwaway line or an integral part of the pope’s argument. Schall responds to this question by saying that it was absolutely essential that Pope Benedict bring up Islam. Schall begins by highlighting the significance of the university setting of the pope’s lecture. For Schall, the pope’s question of whether or not Islam condones violence, if the question is to be raised, ought to appear in a university setting. No question that honestly explores truth should be ruled out of bounds in a university discussion. Schall finds this accusation of the pope’s rashness unpersuasive and says that the question, “Does the Qur$3n support religious violence?” must be posed. If nothing else, the question had the fortuitous consequence of drawing attention to an academic discourse that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. More important, the pope’s provocation, along with the reaction in the Muslim world, demonstrates the absolute necessity of raising the question. Schall implies that a reticence to ask about the centrality of violence to Islam indicates an unwillingness to expose the root of terrorist acts done in the name of religion. It is a pertinent and reasonable query, as evidenced by the sporadic violent protests in the aftermath of the address, and the pope was right to urge Muslims to interrogate themselves about the centrality of violence in their theology. According to Schall and the pope, the theological concept that most clearly separates Christianity from Islam is voluntarism. When monotheistic religions contemplate God’s will, the question of God’s freedom also arises. Voluntarism denotes

The Regensburg Lecture / schall

625

the theological stance that God’s freedom cannot be constrained; therefore, God can choose different actions and moralities at different points in history. In the most extreme case, voluntarism leads to notions of a “capricious God,” to use the pope’s words. Schall sees in Islam strong tendencies toward voluntarism, most heinously in the case of suicide bombers. These suicide bombers focus exclusively on the will of God, as if God were nothing more than will itself, and this myopic theology causes them to ignore God’s connection to rationality and, more importantly, to humans. Voluntarism underlies suicide attacks because if God’s will is supreme, no argument from reason or human compassion can ultimately matter. Against this view of God, Schall presents the Christian and Jewish conceptions of God, in which God’s actions are consonant with reason. He argues that although some Christian thinkers have demonstrated voluntaristic tendencies, the pope is right to assert that, traditionally, reason is needed as a precursor to revelation. This is, in fact, the pope’s primary theological claim in the address—that when John 1:1 says, “The word [logos] was God,” it means that God abides by order and reasonability, both concepts intricately tied to the Greek understanding of logos. The majority of the pope’s lecture centers on history, and Schall devotes much of his book to historical analysis. The pope refers to a passage in Acts 16, in which the apostle Paul has a vision of a man from Macedonia pleading with him to come over from Asia. Paul’s crossing of the Aegean into Macedonia signifies not only an important historical event in the spread of Christianity but also allegorically represents, according to the pope, the decisive and providential confluence of biblical faith and Greek rationality. Schall elaborates upon this bold thesis by pointing out the contributions Europe has made to world cultures. Because it has been based on both reason and revelation, Europe has been the shining global example of how society, at its best, could achieve vitality and peace. He even goes so far as to say that during the Crusades, the Europeans fought as defenders, not aggressors, and what they were defending was this bastion of reason and faith. Presently, since Christianity continues to decline in Europe, Schall wonders if it will lose its preeminence on the world stage, with a corresponding loss of the best hope for the world. The historical investigation continues in Schall’s exposition of the dangers of the dehellenization that the pope outlines in his lecture. All three of these waves led toward an unraveling of the synthesis of reason and revelation so central to Europe’s identity. Schall’s exposition of dehellenization finds two distinct dangers in the phenomenon: a devaluation of humanity and a philosophy of relativism. Greek rationality, when it became dehellenized, transformed into a scientific rationalism. Whereas reason for Aristotle or Plato or Paul explored the entirety of humanity’s relationship to nature, now reason applies only to that which can be scientifically examined. This reason devoid of the influence of faith—a goal of the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack, whom the pope often cites—severely constrains what it means to be human. Relativism follows in the train of dehellenization because modernity assumes that the Greek culture stands as only one among many, not the preeminent beacon of reason that the pope upholds. Schall intimates that this relativism vitiates any Western

626

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

critique of Islam because once reason loses its foundational status, one cannot, for example, condemn a suicide bomber for acting irrationally. The distrust of rationalism and relativism, in both the pope’s lecture and in Schall’s analysis, goes to the heart of the viewpoint expressed in each. These two men, both of whom are equally scholars and churchmen, see Truth as objective and universal. The Greeks expressed it best, and God revealed it most fully in Christianity, but that does not make Truth particular to those traditions. From their standpoint, both God and reason illumine humans about “what is” (a phrase used in particular by Schall) and therefore about universal matters. Until all humans, including Muslims, realize the universality of reasonable truth, civilization will continue to have the type of violent conflicts that have accompanied globalization. This surety about Truth represents both the book’s boldest and most controversial claim. The pope was both courageous and correct to question why and how the West and the so-called Muslim world have failed to interact. The analysis of the situation by both the pope and Schall, however, seems somewhat myopic. Perhaps the pope could not have addressed opposing viewpoints in the constraints he was given, but Schall certainly could have. He does not take seriously a number of trends in philosophy and theology that seriously question the pope’s thesis. He ignores, for instance, defenders of moral relativism, some of whom come from the Catholic tradition. Neither does he refer to religious thinkers that strongly support dehellenization as a method to retrieve authentic Christianity. Neither man claims that European Christianity alone exemplifies a closed system. In fact, both explicitly state that non-Western cultures—including Arab Islam—can teach Westerners new ways of understanding Truth. However, these men are perhaps too sanguine about the universality of their own understanding. In a postmodern world in which fragmentation is the norm rather than the exception, Pope Benedict and Schall envision a worldwide conversation whose ultimate outcome could be reasonable agreement. Their optimistic vision of a possible future characterized by reasoned dialogue looks backward nostalgically to a European Christianized culture that appears to be waning. The hopes and presuppositions of Pope Benedict and Schall may be too strongly linked to the past to reach fruition in the twenty-first century. The pope’s address, however, correctly highlighted a need for a rapprochement between the Muslim world and the West through engaged dialogue. Even if it does not proceed in the direction he would like, the benefits of a dialogue are certainly pertinent in a global society. Kyle Keefer

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 18. Choice 45, no. 2 (October, 2007): 300.

627

THE RELIGION Author: Tim Willocks (1957) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). Illustrated. 618 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: Spring, 1540; 1565-1566 Locale: The Fagarus Mountains, Hungary; Malta; Messina, Sicily; Rome; Aquitaine, in France The story of an adventurer whose search for the lost son of a captivating noblewoman takes him to Malta, where he finds himself fighting with the Christians against the Turks besieging the island Principal characters: Mattias Tannhauser, a thirty-seven-year-old Saxon arms dealer, once a Muslim janissary Carla La Penautier, a widowed French countess in her late twenties Ludovico Ludovici, a Dominican monk in his forties, a ruthless Inquisitor, once Carla’s lover Orlandu di Borgo, Boccanera, the twelve-year-old illegitimate son of Carla and Ludovico Amparo, a nineteen-year-old visionary whom Carla befriended Abbas bin Murad, the kindly, cultured Turkish captain who reared Mattias as his son Bors of Carlisle, a Messina tavern-keeper, Mattias’s business partner and friend Jean Parisot de La Valette, the seventy-one-year-old Grand Master of the Order of Saint John Fra Oliver Starkey, the sole Englishman in the Order of Saint John

Tim Willocks’s first three novels were set in the American South during the late twentieth century. Though The Religion is similar to these earlier works in that it combines heroic deeds, graphic violence, and penetrating psychological analysis, unlike them it is a historical novel, epic in scope. The Religion is the first book in a projected series of three novels, the Tannhauser Trilogy, named for Mattias Tannhauser, who is introduced in The Religion and will be the epic hero of all three books. Though the title of this novel is the specific term used by the Knights of Saint John on Malta to denote Christianity, in the minds of their Turkish enemies the only true “religion” is not Christianity, but Islam. Each group views the adherents of the other faith as heretics, destined to spend eternity in Hell. However, having lived both as a Muslim and as a Christian, Mattias Tannhauser knows that each side has both good and evil people. Thus, he is not committed to either religion. In fact, he loathes religious fanaticism, which he has seen used to justify horrific cruelty, and he distrusts all

628

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

causes, religious or political, because in his experience they are merely means by which unscrupulous people seek wealth for themselves or power over others. The Religion begins with a prologue, dated 1540, in which twelve-year-old Mattias has his first experience with religious fanatics. A band of Turks swoop down upon the Carpa thian village where he lives and massacre all the members of his family except his blacksmith father, who is plying his trade elsewhere. Mattias himself is saved by the Turkish captain, Abbas bin Murad, the only humane person in the troop. It is later revealed that Abbas treated Mattias more like a son than a slave. The boy was trained as one of the select group of slaves called janissaries, and his heroism in the service of his sultan eventually earned him his freedom. The narrative now moves ahead twenty-five years. “The World of Dreams,” the first of the five main sections into which the novel is divided, begins on Sunday, May 13, 1565, in the office of the Grand Master of the Order of Saint John, the warrior monks based on Malta who refer to themselves as “the Religion.” In planning his strategy for defending Malta against an imminent Turkish invasion, Grand Master of the Order Jean Parisot de La Valette has decided that the adventurer and arms dealer Mattias Tannhauser must be drawn to Malta, so that the Christian defenders of the island can make use of Mattias’s intimate knowledge of the tactics and thought processes of his former captors. The English monk, Fra Oliver Starkey, is sent to Messina, Sicily, to entice Mattias to join the Christians on Malta. Since Mattias is known to have a weakness for women, La Valette suggests that Starkey use Carla La Penautier as an inducement; the countess has been begging the Grand Master for permission to come to Malta to search for her long-lost illegitimate son. As Starkey leaves the Grand Master’s office, the merciless Ludovico Ludovici enters. Ludovico not only is the father of Carla’s son, Orlandu, but also will become Mattias’s archenemy and rival for Carla’s love. Eight days later, Mattias and Carla are on Malta, along with Mattias’s friend, Bors of Carlisle, and Carla’s protégée, Amparo. The homeless boy Orlandu has made his appearance, though he has not yet been identified as Carla’s son. Moreover, Abbas bin Murad has appeared on the battlefield, determined to avenge the wrongs done to Muslim pilgrims and merchants over the last four decades. Although Mattias intends to leave the island as soon as Carla locates her son, the chaotic conditions in the besieged city, along with the fact that she knows nothing about him except his age and parentage, makes the task of finding him more difficult than she anticipated. Throughout June, July, and August, Mattias and Bors take part in one bloody battle after another. From time to time, Mattias dons Turkish garb, slips off to the Muslim camp, and socializes with the soldiers there, picking up information that he relays to the Christians. At other times, he wanders through the Turkish market, trading for opium, which becomes one of his most useful tools. When he is with

Tim Willocks, who for twenty years practiced psychiatry in London, published his first novel in 1991. His second, Green River Rising (1994), established his reputation as an impressive new author. Willocks also writes screenplays. He lives in Ireland.

The Religion / willocks

629

the Muslims, Mattias becomes once again the young man he once was; it seems as natural for him to invoke Allah as to breathe. Back with the Maltese, he will recite the Christian prayers he learned in his childhood. Mattias sees very little difference between the two creeds. What he does know is that in the heat of battle, the men on both sides are driven by their love of the god of war, not the god whose name they shout as they attack their opponents. Mattias finds it just as impossible to commit to one woman as he does to one faith. While they are still in Messina, he strikes a bargain with Carla: If he goes with her to Malta and finds her son, she must promise to marry him, thus enabling him to rise into the ranks of the aristocracy, as he has long wished to do. The fact that Carla is young, beautiful, intelligent, and, as he later discovers, both kind-hearted and courageous makes the prospect even more appealing. On her part, Carla finds Mattias so attractive that, though she repels his initial advances, she almost immediately regrets having done so. Though thereafter she tries to encourage him, it is late in the novel before he succumbs. However, Mattias is also attracted to Amparo, who makes no secret of the fact that she has fallen desperately in love with him and, unlike Carla, is always available. Before battles and after battles, Mattias seeks out Amparo, and for a few moments they manage to forget the horrors around them. Though Mattias is never long absent from the narrative, occasionally the author focuses on other characters, especially Ludovico. If the descriptions of battles in The Religion illustrate the human appetite for violence, the scenes in which Ludovico appears reveal human nature at its most cold-blooded. Ludovico’s sins are those that are consigned to the lowest levels of Hell by the Italian poet Dante in his La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802): misuse of reason through deception, intrigue, and betrayal. Ludovico has a single goal: to become pope. From his beginnings as a monk, noted for his asceticism, he has risen steadily in the Church. Once he was named an Inquisitor, he could make a name for himself as a man who served God by stamping out heresies. Thus empowered, he could torture people at will, extract confessions of heresy, and burn them alive, thus gaining the respect—and the fear— of his colleagues and easy access to the most influential figures in the Church. Unlike many of the other characters in The Religion, such as Bors of Carlisle and even La Valette, Ludovico is not in love with war, though when he does find himself in battle he does enjoy the kill. Ludovico’s only reason for joining the embattled forces on Malta is his ambition to become a member of the Order of Saint John, which would aid him in his papal ambitions. Although reviewers praise Willocks for his skill in characterization, and though most readers would agree that his insight into characters as complex as Mattias, Carla, and even Starkey is almost flawless, the author seems less sure of himself where Ludovico is concerned, particularly near the end of the novel. Ludovico’s attempt to make Mattias kill La Valette, thus removing an obstacle to the monk’s plans, is quite in character. However, when throughout the book Ludovico has been motivated solely by his ambition, it is unlikely that he would become so besotted with Carla that he would rather marry her than become pope. His last-minute repentance also seems out of character; it is unlikely that a man who so misinterpreted the Christian message

630

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

as to justify the most sadistic deeds would suddenly reverse his thought processes, even at the point of death. At any rate, poetic justice prevails. Although Ludovico manages to block the planned escape and for a while has Mattias, Carla, and Amparo in his power, in the end Mattias kills Ludovico, and Mattias, not Ludovico, is made a Knight of the Order of Saint John, thus attaining the aristocratic rank for which he longed. Most critics sum up The Religion as a gory but entertaining thriller, whose author is as skillful in his use of language as he is in characterization. However, the novel has more profound implications than may be evident at first reading. Willocks’s basic theme is that the real difference between people is not their professed faith but their capacity for love. In the section titled “The Winnowing Winds,” Mattias quotes Abbas’s comparison of a winnowing wind, which separates wheat from chaff, to an event that separates the lovers of life, or the wheat, from the lovers of death, or the worthless chaff. Thus, though Abbas and Mattias are both warriors, they kill only because they must, not because they are infatuated with death-dealing. This dichotomy between the lovers of life, who are capable of love, and the lovers of death, who are not, is related to another recurring theme in the novel: the father-son relationship. When Mattias sees Abbas again, he calls him “father,” and though he knows that Mattias at least nominally is a Christian, Abbas treats him as a son. During the course of the novel, each of them saves the other’s life. It is also significant that in the epilogue, which is titled “The Grace of God,” Mattias has to seek out his real father and reestablish the ties between them before he can formalize his relationship with Carla. Even Ludovico has some feelings about fatherhood: His only selfless act comes when, finding that Orlandu is in peril, he goes to his son’s rescue. The Religion has been called the finest historical novel of the year. Certainly it has a broad appeal: a suspenseful plot, political intrigues, graphic battle scenes, and torrid sex. It also has characters of epic stature, just flawed enough to be appealing. Moreover, this brilliant re-creation of a major sixteenth century conflict has implications for the twenty-first century, not only because it shows two religions at war with each other but also because it suggests that the real meaning of life may not be found in dogmatic differences but in compassion and love. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 24. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 4 (February 15, 2007): 149. Library Journal 132, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 65. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 20, 2007): 19. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 2 (January 8, 2007): 29. Times Literary Supplement, August 11, 2006, p. 22.

631

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST Author: Mohsin Hamid (1971) Publisher: Harcourt (Orlando, Fla.). 192 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Lahore, Pakistan; New York City; Valparaíso, Chile A Pakistani man, torn between fundamentalist Islam and America, relates his story to his American guest Principal characters: Changez, Pakistani narrator torn between Pakistan and the United States Erica, Changez’s American girlfriend, who is unable to get over her boyfriend Chris’s death Jim, Changez’s supportive mentor at Underwood Samson Juan Bautista, Chilean businessman who helps Changez see himself as a janissary Changez’s guest, an American who is either a target or a killer

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is told from the first-person point of view in the present, as a kind of prose dramatic monologue addressed to Changez’s unnamed guest at a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district of Lahore, Pakistan. With first-person narration there is usually a problem with the reliability of the narrator, and that is the case with this novel. As is the case with Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, which are much shorter, the speaker not only tells his own story but also gives his readers information that they must weigh and interpret. In effect, there are two stories, the one Changez tells about why he became an Islamic fundamentalist and the account of the interaction between Changez and his listener. Those two stories are intertwined throughout the novel. Changez’s story begins with his trip to America, where his outstanding record at Princeton University leads to his job with the Underwood Samson company, which evaluates businesses. Before he joins the company, he and some other Princeton graduates travel to Greece, where he falls in love with Erica, who is still recovering from the death of her fiancé, Chris. Jealous of the time she devotes to Chuck and Mike, Changez reveals his incipient anti-American feelings, feelings that deepen after 9/11. He finds his American rivals to be “devoid of refinement,” disrespectful of their elders, and insistent on having things their way. When Chuck mimics his mannerisms, Changez states that his dream is to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; he suggests that it is only a joke, but later events indicate that it is not. Erica, however, he considers above reproach, belonging more to the camp of the classy actress Gwyneth Paltrow than to the camp of the vulgar pop star Britney Spears.

632

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

After Changez assumes his post with Underwood Samson, Erica’s parents invite him to their home in the Hamptons, where he interprets Erica’s father’s comment, “You guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism,” as an expression of typical American condescension. While Changez becomes Erica’s unofficial escort, she cannot forget Chris, and their “affair” is never really consummated. She drifts away from him and from life and finally is sent to a clinic, then disappears. Erica’s mother gives him Erica’s manuscript, but to his dismay he is not even a footnote in the book. What seemed so attainable is out of reach. His business career follows a similar pattern. Jim, who interviews him for the job at Underwood Samson, sees his potential, notes that he is “hungry” (ambitious), and that like Jim, he is a “shark” and “outsider,” a term that initially suggests that they both come from disadvantaged backgrounds. At Underwood Samson, efficiency is the god, and the training is “mental judo for business.” Changez excels in this competitive environment, emerging first in the class and being assigned to work in the Philippines, where he does an outstanding job. The bombing of the World Trade Center’s twin towers changes everything. He actually smiles at the 9/11 event, is “pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents,” and relishes the notion that America has been “brought to her knees.” Like other Muslims, he experiences some persecution: He is profiled at the airport, called a “fucking Arab” in the company parking lot, and encounters some prejudice at work. Nevertheless, he receives a good review and a bonus for his work. He then returns to visit his family in Pakistan, where he discovers that he is seeing things through the eyes of a foreigner, an “entitled and unsympathetic American.” The family home has not changed; he has changed. Even his parents sense that he is divided in his feelings about America. Partly as a result of what he begins to see as self-contempt, he begins to grow a beard, an act that only causes more apprehension when he returns to Underwood Samson. He asks himself “how it was that America was able to wreak such havoc in the world . . . with so few apparent consequences at home.” Without a “stable core” and uncertain as to where he belongs, he is assigned to a job in Valparaíso, Chile, a city he compares to Lahore. Like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, he stops working and goes into a kind of occupational coma. Juan Bautista, the owner of the firm he is evaluating, notices his state and tells him he is a janissary, a mercenary working for a foreign government. Looking at his life from a different perspective, he sees himself as a member of a suspect race and as an indentured servant. Changez returns to New York, where he meets with a disappointed Jim, who fires him. Changez has his regrets and wonders if he will miss “this city of possibility, with its magical vibrancy and sense of excitement.” He returns to Lahore, becomes a

Mohsin Hamid was born in Pakistan but was educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities before taking a position in New York City. Moth Smoke (2000), his first novel, won the Betty Trask Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Time, and The Independent. He lives in London.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist / hamid

633

university professor, becomes involved in politics, and even spends a night in jail for taking part in an anti-American demonstration. Interspersed throughout Changez’s story are his comments to his guest, who sits with his back against the restaurant wall and refuses to take off his jacket, which may contain a shoulder holster and gun. Changez describes his guest as inscrutable, with a “wary gaze” that seems to focus on the women in the marketplace. He is “ill at ease” as he glances constantly around him, and Changez wonders if he is “predator or prey.” Since the guest is so suspicious, when the tea arrives, Changez switches the teacups in case the guest fears being drugged or poisoned. When the lights go out in the market, the guest leaps to his feet. From Changez’s comments, the guest has reason to be apprehensive. Changez is curious about the nature of the guest’s business and declares that “tonight . . . is a night of some importance.” The waiter, described as “burly,” is a bit intimidating and threatening, though the reader cannot tell if Changez is reassuring his guest or trying to make him more suspicious. As the evening wears on and the area becomes almost deserted, the tension increases, as does the ominous tenor of the comments Changez makes. He mentions that his guest is familiar with “the bloodiest of tasks” and declares that “such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.” When Changez and the guest finally leave, the waiter follows them. Changez denies that the sound they hear is a pistol shot and notes that his guest seems ready to “bolt.” The narrator even raises the possibility that he signaled the people following them. The situation is ambiguous: Changez admits he is paranoid and fears for his life because of his political activity, but his attempt to shake his guest’s hand may be an attempt to detain him for the grim-faced waiter and his accomplices. One of his comments reflects the ambiguity: “You should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.” When Changez extends his hand, the guest reaches into his jacket and Changez sees the “glint of metal,” which he adds enigmatically may be from a credit card holder. The indeterminate ending leaves readers with a host of unanswered questions: Who is the prey? Who is the predator? Is Changez attempting to ingratiate himself with the guest or is he trying to frighten him to forestall an assassination? What was the purpose of the meeting? At the end of the novel, Changez is waiting, fearful that America might send an emissary to intimidate him or worse. He feels “rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe,” an appropriate allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Cultured, literary men, both Kurtz and Changez have “gone native” and turned to violence; Changez may, like Kurtz, be waiting for an emissary. As in Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Heart of Darkness, The Reluctant Fundamentalist may indeed end in violence, but in Hamid’s tale the reader is not sure who commits the violence, the American representing Western values or the Pakistani representing the East and the Other. Hamid’s tale is told not by someone like Marlowe, but by someone like Kurtz. The Reluctant Fundamentalist juxtaposes two cultures and has the protagonist adept at operating in both. America is the land of opportunity, riches, excitement,

634

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

freedom, and “illiterate barbarians” as opposed to Pakistan, which is an older culture with traditional values. When speaking of bats, Changez remarks that they belong to “a dreamier world incompatible with the pollution and congestion of a modern metropolis.” Changez resents the fact that people do not realize that his countrymen were creating magnificent literature and monuments while America was but a “collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.” He also resents the way America operates, using its financial power to impose its values on other peoples, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Changez is, however, a “reluctant” fundamentalist, one who has to be forced by his experiences and by America’s foreign policy (he is particularly upset by what he regards as America’s pro-Indian policy) to turn against a country where he found so much success. He attained the American Dream so many immigrants desire, but then he rejected it. Essentially, his story is also the story of a Muslim world that also turned against the values and power it sought in America and the West. His story also accounts for why the twin towers were bombed, even though most Americans are more concerned with seeking revenge than in attempting to understand why the atrocity occurred. A reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides some answers, even if they are not the ones Americans want to hear. Thomas L. Erskine

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 50. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 6-7. London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007): 25-26. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 15 (October 11, 2007): 22-24. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 22, 2007): 8. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2006): 42. School Library Journal 53, no. 8 (August, 2007): 144.

635

RETHINKING THIN The New Science of Weight Loss— and the Myths and Realities of Dieting Author: Gina Kolata (1948) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 257 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Medicine, psychology, science Billions of dollars are spent each year on the quest for thinness, while scientific evidence gained from repeated studies and data analysis indicates that all these dollars are being spent in vain Gina Kolata tackles one of the largest obsessions of Americans today—weight control. Her book, Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting, follows three distinct lines in alternating chapters. She takes readers through the history of dieting, touches on past and current university research on obesity, and follows a group of obese people participating in a two-year university study comparing the Atkins diet with a low-calorie diet. What she uncovers is fascinating, startling, and ultimately troubling. Weight loss is big business, which should be no surprise to the reader. The surprise is that, essentially, most of what passes for accepted diet wisdom has been around for more than a century. Everything from eating less and exercising more to trendy diets such as the grapefruit diet have a long and unsuccessful history. Weight-loss programs and diet books eat up time and money, and yet more Americans than ever find themselves in the overweight or obese categories. For many who do manage to lose weight, sooner or later the weight comes back. Sometimes dieters gain even more pounds than they had before they started a diet program. What is going on? According to “a report on obesity treatments by the National Academy of Sciences . . . the battle for weight control is never won, even after you lose weight. ‘An obese individual faces a continuous lifelong struggle with no expectation that the struggle required will diminish with time.’” Still, the image of thinness portrayed as ideal in American society continues to be sought. Academic researchers warned that the belief that anyone can lose weight if they really try, the “blame-thevictim message,” is “leading to a society in which prejudice against the overweight and obese has become the last remaining socially acceptable one.” Kolata sat in on the weekly support group meetings for the dieters in the Atkins versus low-calorie diet study. Four of the dieters talked with her at length over the course of the study, and she revisited the group at intervals of one, two, three, five, six, and ten months, and at two years (the end of the study). The average weight of the subjects was 216 pounds, and all had tried diet after diet, lost weight and regained it, and

636

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

hoped that being part of this study would make a difference this time. For the researchers conducting the story, gathering information was the goal of the study. To their astonishment, no one had ever tried to compare diets in this way before. A discussion on their concerns about the thenwildly popular Atkins diet led them to see what evidence had been amassed so far. Their initial small study of 63 obese men and women revealed that, although both the Atkins and low-calorie diet participants lost and regained about the same weight, the Atkins dieters ended up with more HDL, the good type of cholesterol, and lower triglycerides, both of which reduce the risk of heart disease. This was not what the researchers expected to find, and so they set out to conduct a much larger study, using hundreds of subjects. Going in to the study, the subjects did not know whether they would be assigned to the Atkins or low-calorie diet, but most of them fervently wished for Atkins. Probably because of its current popularity, they hoped that this diet, along with the monitoring and counseling, would help them reach their weight-loss goals. Unlike the researchers’ purely academic interest, the subjects were deeply emotionally invested in the study, pinning all their hopes for success at last on this experiment. Randomized clinical trials such as this study did not allow them to choose which diet to follow; they were assigned one or the other. During the first month, everyone lost weight. This was expected; most diets show at least preliminary losses. Three months into the study, the dieters have lost 10 percent of their body weight. The dieters are dismayed when the researchers tell them that they should be happy even if this is all that they lose. Their hopes are still high. At six months, the hopes are plummeting. Not only is weight loss stalling for some, but also weight is coming back. The desire to be thin has not diminished, but the dieters find their control over eating is slipping. At ten months into the study, one of the dieters has reached his lowest weight, and he would begin to gain it all back. Everyone agrees that their control lasted only about six months. At the end of the two-year study, most of the dieters do not even show up. Despite not having reached their initial goals, all of the dieters, even those who did not come to the last meeting, agreed that they had had a useful experience. They now had more realistic expectations of the weight they could expect to lose. Despite all the support and counseling, the lesson learned from the study is the same as all the previous studies: “No matter what the diet and no matter how hard they try, most people will not be able to lose a lot of weight and keep it off.” Although overweight and obese persons can learn to control their eating, get regular exercise, and gauge portions and calories, they are facing a lifelong effort, and “true thinness is likely to elude them.”

Gina Kolata writes on science topics for The New York Times. She is the author of five previous books, including Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (1994; with Robert T. Mitchell, John H. Gagnon, and Edward O. Laumann), Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It (1999), and Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health (2003).

Rethinking Thin / kolata

637

Kolata relates many historical attempts at weight loss. Even the ancient Greeks attempted weight loss, and the fact that gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins made fat frowned upon. The real change came in the nineteenth century, however. The poet Lord Byron popularized drinking vinegar as a way to lose weight, and he often lived on vinegar and water alone for days at a time. Despite warnings about this diet, it was popular both in America and Europe. In 1825, Jean Anthelme BrillatSavarin wrote a best seller titled Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste, 1949). In it, he related his loss of an eighteen-year-old woman he loved to the vinegar craze, and his observations of fat dinner companions eating potatoes, rice, and rich desserts led to his belief that eating only meat was key to healthy weight control. A London undertaker, William Banting, found relief from his obesity by giving up carbohydrates and sugars, and his last name became a synonym for dieting. The Reverend Sylvester Graham exhorted his followers to severely restrict their food intake, to eat simple foods, excluding beef and pork, and to drink only water. His followers were “the first Americans to keep close track of their own weight, and even to weigh their food.” Next came Fletcherism, in which Horace Fletcher advocated chewing “every morsel of food until there is no more taste to be extracted from it.” He thought that gobbling food caused overeating and thus obesity. Experiments followed in which Yale University athletes were instructed to eat only meat or become vegetarians for almost a year. The vegetarians turned out to be the strongest after testing, and so vegetarianism gained ascendancy. This fad did not last either. When Kolata entered obesity research facilities to speak with the scientists firsthand, she learned of many studies that had not made their way out to the public, including the discovery of a substance named leptin, which helped control appetite and food consumption. Injections of leptin cured a young girl who could not stop eating and who was found to produce no leptin on her own. Unfortunately, the magic bullet again eluded scientists. Although the discovery of leptin led to the unraveling of the brain pathways that control appetite, simply injecting obese patients with leptin did not work, except in a few cases. Sometimes the problem was not leptin itself but was located somewhere else in the system. Chapter 8, “The Fat Wars,” relates an astounding discovery and a more astounding reaction against it. Katherine Flegal and David Williamson wrote a paper refuting the findings of another researcher, David Allison, in which he claimed that hundreds of thousands of Americans die every year solely from being overweight. Flegal and Williamson looked at the data Allison used and thought that he had not analyzed it correctly, but it took them some time before they could figure out how best to conduct the analysis. Using the federal National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey—in which the sample of Americans was more representative, and who had actually been weighed and measured rather than self-reporting their heights and weights—led to different conclusions. They found that, rather than overweight people having an increased risk of dying, they actually had a slightly lower risk than normal-weight people. Only the extreme ends of the scale of thin to obese persons had greater mortality risks. They published their findings to a firestorm of professional and very public indignation. The critics who attacked their methods came from the obesity and research

638

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

community, while statisticians uninvolved with obesity studies praised their work. Flegal and Williams were stunned at the level of hostility and backlash they received. Other studies held up to refute their findings all seemed to come from the Harvard University data that was not representative of the American population. Such a reaction may be unheard of in professional circles, but the reason for it is not hard to figure out. There are research centers devoted to obesity research, and grant dollars flow in to support them. There are researchers whose only area of study is obesity. If being overweight is not a serious health and social problem, their reason for existence would be less pressing. So many of the beliefs about dieting and being overweight have been held so long that people are reluctant to let go of them. Flegal and Williams’ research abruptly challenged the status quo on weight and threatened with information that had been backed up by research and statistics, as well as commonly held opinions. Kolata speculates that now that smoking has been diminished as the number one killer, obesity has been targeted in its place, and over 40 percent of Americans believe obesity is equally bad. Between research that reveals that even the simple “eat less, exercise more” regimen cannot help the overweight person and that all people have a genetic predisposition to being thin or fat, the notion that being fat is not such a horrible thing might relieve overweight Americans of the agony and guilt associated with their condition. Kolata’s writing flows easily, and she supports her reportage with numerous facts and citations, footnoted for further information. She approaches the subject with objectivity and wit. This book should be read by anyone who has ever looked in a mirror and thought they should lose a few pounds. Patricia Masserman

Review Sources The Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 13. Entertainment Weekly, no. 934 (May 18, 2007): 71. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 3 (February 1, 2007): 90. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 6, 2007): 22. People 67, no. 18 (May 7, 2007): 55. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 69. School Library Journal 53, no. 10 (October, 2007): 188.

639

RETURNING TO EARTH Author: Jim Harrison (1937) Publisher: Grove Press (New York). 272 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1995-1996 Locale: Mostly the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Ontario, Canada Donald, close to death at age forty-five, dictates his life story to his wife so that family members will appreciate their part-Native American heritage; after his death, the people closest to him are forced to deal with the loss of an important influence on their lives Principal characters: Donald, a man of mixed Native American and Finnish ancestry who is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease Cynthia, his wife and companion for nearly thirty years Herald, their son, a graduate student in California Clare, their daughter, who was especially close to her father K, short for Kenneth, Clare’s boyfriend who views Donald as his substitute father David, Cynthia’s eccentric brother, who spends winters in Mexico and summers in northern Michigan Mr. Burkett, Cynthia and David’s father, an alcoholic Flower, Donald’s full-blooded Native American cousin who knows many tribal folktales and legends

In Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, Donald is very sick at an advanced stage of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease. He worked as a bricklayer for many years and was proud of his strength, but his body is giving out. His wife Cynthia must purée all of his food because swallowing has become very difficult. Sometimes his speech is almost impossible to understand. Worst of all is the excruciating pain of muscle seizures. As he describes it: “Back in high school when I ran track or played football you were likely to get a cramp. With this disease at times you are a cramp, your whole body seizes up so that even your mind seems inside a cramp. You’re all cramp, pure and simple.” ALS is a cruel disease because of the pain. Cynthia has learned that there is no known cure and that the average survival time is only three years. Donald was embarrassed to go to a doctor when symptoms of muscle weakness first appeared, so he probably had the disease already for some time before it was diagnosed. Although he is only forty-five years old, he sees clearly that death is not far away. Donald has started dictating the story of his Native American and Finnish ancestry to his wife in order to preserve a family history for their two children and other relatives.

640

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Donald’s father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather were all named Clarence. They mostly worked as laborers in mining, lumbering, and farming in northern Michigan and Minnesota. The first Clarence had lived with a Native American woman, which made their descendants part American Indian. Donald’s mother was three-quarters Native American, so Donald inherited the characteristic appearance of dark skin, a large nose, and high cheek bones. Donald has a full-blooded Native American cousin named Flower, from whom he has heard some of the Native American legends about life and death, bears, ravens, natural medicines, and various tribal customs. Before Donald became ill, he had gone on a traditional vision quest. For three days, he lived in the woods without food, water, or shelter. He is reluctant to talk about his solitary experience, but he did say that he had a premonition of an early death when his parents (who were deceased) said to him in a vision, “Don’t be afraid to come home, son.” Donald’s father, Clarence, worked for a wealthy landowner named Mr. Burkett, who had a teenage daughter named Cynthia. Mr. Burkett liked young girls and once paid $100 to Cynthia’s girlfriend to see her naked. Cynthia got so angry at her father that she hit him with a club. Donald met Cynthia when he came to work with his father to help dig the foundation for a building. Cynthia offered a glass of lemonade to Donald, which was the beginning of their romance. Mr. Burkett had another employee, a Mexican man with a twelve-year-old daughter named Vera. In a drunken fit, Mr. Burkett raped the young girl. She went back to Mexico with her father and later gave birth to a son. After this traumatic incident, Cynthia could not stand staying at home any longer, so she and Donald ran off and got married. The story of Mr. Burkett is not finished yet. Donald tells about Cynthia’s brother, David, who years later talked his alcoholic father into going to Mexico to look up Vera and her son. Instead of a reconciliation, a fight develops; Vera’s son slices off Mr. Burkett’s two hands with a machete and then sets him and David adrift in the Gulf of Mexico in a rowboat. David eventually dumps his father’s body into the water. Donald’s dramatic narrative skips quickly from one subject to another, so the story of Mr. Burkett is followed by memories of a fishing trip he took with his daughter, Clare. Donald tells stories as they occur to him, with no particular chronological connection. The fishing trip reminds him about a nature documentary that he saw on television, which leads into a sad story about a young fellow who was sent to prison for growing marijuana and now is confined with no access to the world of nature. Cynthia faithfully records Donald’s stories as he tells them. Donald has planned how he wants his life to end. He wants to be buried naked, not in a coffin (which explains the title of Harrison’s book). He asks his doctor for medicine that can be used to induce death when he is ready, but the doctor refuses on the grounds that euthanasia is illegal. Donald has kept a quantity of pain pills that he received from a veterinarian when his dog was sick, and he figures that they will suffice.

Jim Harrison was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of several works of fiction and poetry, as well as three books of nonfiction. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Returning to Earth / harrison

641

He wants his grave to be on a hillside near the shore of Lake Superior on the Canadian side. As his seizures become more severe, Cynthia recognizes that the end is near and calls their two children home. Clare, who has always been close to her father, sits by his bed through a difficult night. Sensing his frustration with his sickness, she tells him, “Dad, I know what you are going to do and I can’t say I blame you.” Herald, after witnessing a convulsion by his father, is so upset that he says he is ready to suffocate him in order to stop the torture. The word “suicide” is never mentioned, but it has become clear to Donald’s family that he has decided to end his pain. Part 2 of Harrison’s book is the story of a young man who goes by the name of K (short for Kenneth), with whom Donald has formed a close friendship. When K was quite young, his father had died in a motorcycle accident. K became part of Donald’s extended family when David married K’s mother. Donald became a surrogate father during K’s teenage years and later helped him through a period of depression. K is a frequent visitor at Donald and Cynthia’s house, where he becomes romantically involved with their daughter. Cynthia is thankful that K can take Donald on periodic trips, because he is strong enough to lift Donald into and out of the car. K has a hard time finding his niche in society. His worldview is that life is chaotic, like “a ten-thousand-piece beige jigsaw puzzle.” However, he is grateful to Donald as a mentor and a friend. In the plan for Donald to bring an end to his life, K and Herald are to dig the grave for him at the chosen location by Lake Superior. They will go through customs into Canada, pretending to go on a fishing trip. Following later in a second car will be Cynthia and Donald, together with Clare and David. Donald has chosen the summer solstice, June 21, when he wishes to return to the earth. K has obtained two hypodermics filled with Nembutal, which commonly is used to euthanize horses when they break a leg. Cynthia thought the hypodermics were necessary because Donald is no longer able to swallow pills. Everything proceeds according to the plan: Donald sits down at the edge of the grave that was dug for him, Herald gives him the injection, they lay Donald into the grave on a bed of cedar branches, and in a few minutes he is dead. The grave is refilled, tears are shed, and the family members return home. Part 3 of Harrison’s book is about David. David and Cynthia had received a substantial inheritance after their parents’ death, so he does not have to work for a living. However, he feels the need to find some kind of meaningful occupation. One day, he saw a picture in a newspaper of some Mexicans who tried to cross the border into the United States but died of dehydration in the desert. David came up with the idea of an emergency travel kit to help these illegal immigrants make it across the border. He uses his inheritance money to buy thousands of kits, which he then takes to Mexican churches and community centers for distribution. He finds satisfaction in being personally involved in doing something to relieve suffering. Perhaps there is also a deeper psychological need for David to atone for his father’s sin many years ago against the young Mexican girl Vera. The connection between David and Vera eventually is resolved in an unexpected way. The last part of Harrison’s book is titled “Cynthia.” Several months have elapsed since Donald’s death. Cynthia worries about Clare, who has gone to live in the woods

642

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

with Flower. Clare is trying to learn Native American ways and thinks that maybe her departed father has become a bear. Cynthia gradually realizes that her daughter needs to grieve in her own way, while she has to get on with her own life without Donald. A friend tries to help Cynthia by getting substitute teaching assignments for her. However, she decides that she would prefer to do individual tutoring, especially for students of Native American background who have difficulty adjusting to the white culture. Before Donald died, he had told his wife that after he was gone, she needed to find a new boyfriend. The boyfriend and the tutoring come together in the person of Vincent, a college student who needs help with English but who also becomes her ardent lover for a week-long “sexual extravaganza.” As the first anniversary of Donald’s death approaches, she reaches the decision to resume her teaching career, not in the white schools of Michigan but on an Indian reservation in Montana. Cynthia is ready to move on into the future. The dominant personality in Harrison’s book is Donald. He acts on his instincts with few regrets afterward. The stories he tells are about real people in specific situations. He has little interest in abstract ideas. In contrast to Donald, his son Herald thrives on mathematics but finds people confusing. His wife’s brother, David, is an intellectual who does a lot of reading but has a hard time reaching a conclusion. Donald describes him as someone who “doesn’t seem to have both oars in the water.” Clare and K have an on-again, off-again love affair but seem unable to make a longterm commitment to each other. Cynthia is the one who has come the furthest in absorbing Donald’s decisive lifestyle. Harrison has created a memorable collection of diverse personalities, all in one family, for whom Donald has been a center of stability for their life journey. Hans G. Graetzer

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 4 (October 15, 2006): 5. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 20 (October 15, 2006): 1035. Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2007, p. R2. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 11, 2007): 1-8. San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 2007, p. D2.

643

RUN Author: Ann Patchett (1963) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 295 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Boston This family saga tells the story of two adopted brothers whose birth mother suddenly reenters their lives through a car accident; the author portrays how bonds of love and affection develop in a family, whether its members are related by birth or by choice Principal characters: Bernard Doyle, a Boston politician and lawyer whose wife had died of cancer, leaving him to raise three sons Sullivan Doyle, the oldest son, a rebellious child after the death of his mother Tip Doyle, an adopted African American son, now a student at Harvard University Teddy Doyle, Tip’s younger brother, who is considering whether to enter the priesthood Uncle Sullivan, an elderly priest, the brother of Bernard Doyle’s deceased wife Tennessee Alice Moser, the birth mother of Tip and Teddy Kenya Moser, eleven-year-old daughter of Tennessee

Near the beginning of Ann Patchett’s novel Run, Tip and Teddy Doyle, adopted sons of Bernard Doyle, are sitting with their father attending a lecture by civil rights activist Jesse Jackson on the campus of Harvard University. Doyle had named his sons after two well-known Massachusetts politicians, anticipating a career in politics for them. Both sons have come reluctantly to the lecture, out of a sense of obligation to their father. Tip had to interrupt his work at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he helps to maintain the large collection of fish. He is fascinated with ichthyology, but his father was disappointed for having “paid more than forty thousand dollars a year to one of the finest universities in the world to give his son the right to peer into glass jars at dead fish.” Teddy has just come from seeing his Uncle Sullivan, a muchadmired, elderly priest living in a nursing home. Uncle Sullivan is quite sick, and Teddy would have preferred to stay with him to deal with the many visitors who badger him with requests for intercessory prayers. Tip is frustrated about the time he has to spend at the lecture. He needs to study for semester exams and to finish his work at the museum. When the lecture finally ends, the father makes a further demand on his time, asking him to attend a reception for Jesse Jackson, but Tip’s resentment boils over into an emotional outburst: “I’m not

644

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

going to do this. . . . You don’t care about the things I care about. I don’t care about the things you care about.” Distracted by his argument, Tip stumbles over the curb into the path of an oncoming car. At the last second, an African American woman standing nearby pushes Tip out of the way, taking the impact of the car herself. An ambulance is called to take the woman, who is in critical condition with multiple injuries, to a hospital. The woman’s young daughter is left behind at the scene of the accident with the three men of the Doyle family. Tip has a broken ankle from the accident and is about to be transported to the hospital in a police car with his brother and father. The girl is very upset to be separated from her mother and demands to be taken along. Teddy talks to her and tries to calm her down. She tells Teddy that her name is Kenya, “like the country,” and her mother’s name is Tennessee, “like the state.” Teddy probes Kenya about getting in touch with her father or other relatives, but she insists that she wants to stay with them. Then she tells them “the one thing I’m never supposed to tell”—that the woman who saved Tip’s life is actually Tip and Teddy’s birth mother. Kenya’s mother had taken an apartment in a housing development near the Doyles and had discreetly been watching her sons from a distance when they played outdoors and later when they went to school. Tennessee and Kenya had been sitting near the Doyles at the Jackson lecture and afterward were standing close by when the car collision was imminent. It is not just a chance coincidence that Tennessee was in the right place at the right time to save her son from serious injury. The father is suspicious that Kenya’s story may be a fabrication. A DNA test of Tennessee and his two sons would be needed to verify the maternity claim. Tip and Teddy are shocked to learn that they appear to have a younger sister. At the hospital, Tip gets a cast on his ankle and is released with crutches. Kenya’s mother is in intensive care, scheduled for surgery the next morning. Exhausted, the Doyles take Kenya home with them. However, another surprise is waiting for the Doyles at home. The boys’ older brother, Sullivan, who has been out of touch with the family for some two years, has come home unexpectedly. Sullivan was a protective, older brother for Tip and Teddy when they were young children, but he became antagonistic toward his father after his mother died of cancer. He has been estranged from the family since causing a scandal some years ago. Most recently he had been living in Africa, delivering HIV medication to hospitals but making money on the side by selling some of it on the black market. When his illegal activity appeared to be on the verge of being discovered, he made a quick exit back to Boston. He arrives just in time to participate in the unfolding events. When Sullivan is introduced to Kenya, he sees a clear resemblance to Tip and Teddy in her appearance. He is willing to accept the story of Kenya and her mother as

Ann Patchett is the author of four earlier novels, including Bel Canto (2001), which sold more than a million copies and received the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award. She has written for various publications, including Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Run / patchett

645

genuine. While the others in the Doyle family go to sleep, Sullivan is restless with jet lag and decides to go to the hospital to see the black woman for himself. Tennessee is awaiting surgery, only half-conscious as a result of the pain medications, so Sullivan sits by her bedside. Gradually he is drawn to tell her a traumatic incident from his life. He tells Tennessee about the death of his girlfriend in college for which he had been responsible but had never before admitted to anyone. The scene is like a deathbed confession, but with the roles reversed. He finds great relief in finally being able to admit his guilt: “She had taken his burden for a moment, lifted the thing he had carried with him for so long he hadn’t even understood that he was still holding it.” Readers may find it difficult to accept the almost instantaneous bond of intimacy that develops between Sullivan and Tennessee. Nevertheless, the emotional confession is described by Patchett with compassion and great tenderness. In the morning, Kenya wants to be taken to the hospital right away, but her mother is in surgery. It is an awkward time for the Doyles as they figure out what to do about Kenya. No one had any idea that Tip and Teddy had a sister or even if that story is to be believed. When Kenya mentions that she loves to go running, Tip volunteers to take her to the Harvard field house for some exercise after making a brief stop at the museum. Kenya is a precocious, delightful child who is fascinated by the thousands of jars filled with fish. As Tip gives her a tour of the collection, he is gratified to hear her express a genuine interest in his work, something that he never got from his brother or father. Later at the field house, Kenya runs with such speed and grace that she soon has an admiring audience of college students. Kenya is overjoyed to have an older brother who can give her entrance to a world where she could never have gone on her own. Tip and Kenya have bonded together in a special way. After surgery, Tennessee is brought back to her hospital room under heavy sedation. She has a surrealistic vision of being visited there by her closest friend, a young woman who had died some years ago. The friend’s name was Tennessee Alice Moser, and she had a baby daughter named Kenya. In grief after her friend’s funeral, she decided to keep Kenya as her own child. To avoid the costly adoption process, she took her friend’s name and moved to a different neighborhood in Boston. She took a different job using her new name and struggled to make ends meet as a single mother. She showered her love on Kenya, knowing that her own sons, Tip and Teddy, had a good home in which she had no role. She had told Kenya about giving up her sons for adoption and let her assume that they were her brothers. Tennessee dies at the hospital soon after surgery, without ever revealing to Kenya the story of her birth mother. The final chapter of the novel is a celebration several years later. The Doyle family, now including Kenya, are all attending the graduation ceremony of Tip from medical school. Tip’s classmates are talking about where they plan to go for an internship, but Tip has other plans. He has decided that his career will be in the scientific study of fish, no matter what expectations his father or other people may have for him. His medical training in physiology will help him in his chosen field. Kenya has been fully accepted into the Doyle family since the death of her mother. Her life has been transformed as she has moved from an environment of near poverty into the upper class. She is attending a private, Catholic high school, making a name for herself as an

646

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

outstanding runner. She imagines that her mother somehow arranged for the car accident that enabled her to gain three brothers and a father. Each character in Patchett’s novel is portrayed as a unique, memorable personality. The father is a loving but controlling parent to his adopted sons, as shown by some tender incidents from their childhood. Tennessee’s harsh life as a single parent is described sympathetically: working late hours for low pay, living in a low-cost housing development, watching out for the safety of her adopted daughter. Kenya is an obedient, loving, appreciative adolescent. Father Sullivan had been full of energy and confidence as a young priest, but his deteriorating health leads him to deeper questions about the effectiveness of prayer and the meaning of eternal life. Sullivan Doyle is the “black sheep” of the Doyle family, reinstated by the compassion he receives from the mother of his adopted brothers. Significant childhood experiences show how Teddy’s close relationship with Uncle Sullivan and Tip’s longtime fascination with fishes got started. Patchett skillfully uses conversations and events to round out the portraits of the people who make up this extended family. Some of the coincidences in Run seem rather contrived. For example, just by chance Tennessee had been an employee at Father Sullivan’s nursing home, so the characters already had a connection before the accident. Also, it seems far-fetched that Tennessee could so often observe Tip and Teddy from nearby without herself being noticed. Nevertheless, in this era of many dysfunctional families, it is refreshing to read a positive story of the bonding that can grow among family members, whether they are related by adoption or by birth. Hans G. Graetzer

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 21 (July 1, 2007): 31. The Christian Science Monitor, October 9, 2007, p. 13. The Economist 384 (September 15, 2007): 103. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 30, 2007): 7. The New Yorker 83, no. 29 (October 1, 2007): 98-100. The Washington Post, September 23, 2007, p. BW15.

647

A RUSSIAN DIARY A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia Author: Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) Publisher: Random House (New York). 400 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Current affairs Time: The 1990’s and early 2000’s Locale: Russia A compelling account of recent Russian history, with special focus on terrorist activities in Chechnya and Russia and on political changes under Vladimir Putin Principal personages: Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), Russian journalist whose insights frame the narrative Vladimir Putin (1952), president of Russia beginning in 2000, whose efforts to consolidate and extend his political control over Russia dominate Politkovskaya’s observations Shamil Basayev (1965-2006), Chechen terrorist, suspected of masterminding the Nord-Ost theater and Beslan school hostage crises Ramzan Kadyrov (1976), an utterly ruthless and pro-Russian warlord who advises the Kremlin on matters of Chechen security Garry Kasparov (1963), international chess champion turned politician

Celebrated internationally on its publication, A Russian Diary chronicles slightly more than two years worth of bald-faced political wrongdoing, deadening public apathy, and shockingly callous terrorism taking place in Russia under President Vladimir Putin. For certain audiences, the book offers much of value. For those readers with prior interest in or knowledge of recent Russian political history, the book offers a hard-nosed reporter’s insightful anecdotes. For those with an interest in human rights or those who have read Anna Politkovskaya’s other books—A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2003), A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (2003), or Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (2004)—this work offers another glimpse into the dirty struggle of desperate men in troubled Chechnya. Those readers who are aware of the threats made against Politkovskaya and of her unsolved murder will appreciate her bravery in truth-telling whatever the cost. For those readers who are not in any of the above groups, however, most of A Russian Diary will seem slow moving and esoteric, if not bewildering.

648

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Born in 1958, Politkovskaya was a career journalist, cutting her teeth reporting news for Izvestia, the official newspaper of the Soviet government. During the glasnost period and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Politkovskaya covered news for Novaya Gazeta, a biweekly news digest. During the 1990’s, she frequently found herself covering events in the First and Second Chechen Wars. Her spe cialty was covering the human side of major events, focusing on the impact of war, terrorist activities, and reprisals on the innocent men, women, and children who are made to suffer. Most of the significant events in A Russian Diary relate in one way or another to two wars fought in Chechnya between Russian and Chechen forces. Both wars stemmed from Chechen nationalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. This desire for independence resulted in armed conflict between pro-Russian and separatist forces in Chechnya. A mountainous region, Chechnya was difficult for pro-Russian forces to pacify, and from 1994 to 1996 Chechen independence forces were able to wrest control of the region despite overwhelming Russian manpower. The cost of the war was enormous, and the new national government was unable to neutralize many warlords who dominated different regions. In 1999, the most powerful of these warlords began calling for the republic’s transformation into a militantly Islamic state and arguing for the forcible transformation of predominantly Muslim neighboring states. One such warlord was Shamil Basayev, who led an unsuccessful incursion into Dagestan and who became the mastermind of various terrorist outrages in Russia, including the two events that bookend A Russian Diary. For its part, the Russian government took a dim view of Chechen efforts to import Islamic revolution and invaded Chechnya in late 1999. It was the newly elected Vladimir Putin who became associated with the most destructive and heartless phases of this war; in particular, he wanted to limit Russian casualties by attacking Chechen towns with wave after wave of extremely lethal fuel-air bombs and enormous artillery attacks. As Russian forces advanced into the region, most civilians fled; those who remained were put into concentration camps. Although Russian troops seized the Chechen capital city of Grozny in early 2000, Chechen forces under warlords such as Basayev remained in existence, fighting small-scale combats against Russian and pro-Russian forces. Besides encouraging the ill treatment of civilians, Putin’s government made the stunning mistake of giving power to outrageously violent men such as Ramzan Kadyrov. One of the striking parts of A Russian Diary, in fact, consists of an interview with Kadyrov, a vain and stupid man. Politkovskaya recounts Kadyrov acknowledging his complicity in criminal acts against civilians and announcing his unrealistic plan to pacify Chechnya by fighting Basayev in single combat. As Politkovskaya points out, one of the worst aspects of Russia’s policy in Chechnya was the support

Called Russia’s bravest journalist and the author of multiple books, Anna Politkovskaya won numerous awards for her accounts of life in Chechnya and Russia. While working on A Russian Diary, she was killed outside her apartment building in Moscow. The case remains unsolved.

A Russian Diary / politkovskaya

649

given to such men as Kadyrov. She considers it the hatching of “baby dragons,” who must be continually fed lest they destroy everything. Under the control of baby dragons like Kadyrov, Chechnya becomes a land of endless terror, dominated by unending kidnappings, murders, rapes, and torture. While this chaotic and violent region churns to the south, the rest of the country lies in apathetic somnolence, only occasionally shaken from slumber by terrorist actions. For example, A Russian Diary begins shortly after the conclusion of the Nord-Ost theater siege in October, 2002. At that time, a Moscow musical theater was taken over by Chechen terrorists who wanted Russian forces removed from Chechnya. The group took 800 hostages and threatened to blow them up should the terrorists’ demands not be met. Over the course of three days, Russian security forces developed a plan to use knock-out gas to incapacitate the terrorists before storming the building. In the early morning hours of October 26, after hearing what sounded like gunfire inside the theater, Russian special forces pumped an opium-based gas into the building, opened a hole in a theater wall, and stormed inside, guns blazing. About two hours after storming the theater, the incident was over: Security forces had killed all the terrorists, shooting many at point-blank range. More than 110 hostages had died as well, most from the gas. The incident points to a troubling conclusion for Politkovskaya: Either the security forces were slipshod in their tactics—hence demonstrating an official preference for ineptitude—or they intentionally chose a slow-acting gas, accepting that semiconscious terrorists would probably explode their bombs, thereby increasing the scale of the crime. A devious government could use the fear of such crimes to increase support for its policies, especially those aimed at defeating terrorism and ending the lingering conflict in Chechnya. The unfortunate conclusion reached by the author is that the government under Putin was both devious and inept. Its methods for maintaining political control are so obvious and so frequently illegal that only an apathetic or subdued population would countenance them. As A Russian Diary continues, the narrative offers multiple examples of political malfeasance. One is the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the governing board of the Yukos Corporation. Formed during a period of privatization of government assets, Yukos was a petroleum giant—and its founders paid hefty bribes to national leaders. By 2002, however, it had become a new type of business in Russia; its board of directors were vowing to make the corporation transparent, with Western accounting practices and due diligence for its shareholders. As Politkovskaya observes, the determination to do business in a more honest way differentiated Khodorkovsky from Russia’s new plutocrats who were living the high life while the rest of the country suffered shortages. When the bribes stopped flowing, the Russian government turned a vengeful eye on Yukos. Members of the governing board were found guilty of tax evasion, and Khodorkovsky was sent to Siberia even though the allegedly criminal actions were completely legal when undertaken. As Politkovskaya describes, the Yukos prosecution demonstrates the end of an independent judiciary in Russia; the courts are another way for the government to silence opposition. The government gets away with this because there is literally no

650

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

meaningful opposition. Indeed, A Russian Diary documents the difficulty of waging a presidential campaign against Putin. In the first place, Politkovskaya observes, one must have a viable candidate: Several of the opposition parties have to resort to running political nonentities or worse. Another legitimate candidate is apparently kidnapped, roughed up, flown into a country, and given memory-affecting drugs. Given this context, when one political party names its candidate, the man publicly announces his wish that Putin would win the election; oddly enough, the party continues to put him forward as a candidate. To Politkovskaya, the fact that events like these provoke no outrage, no protest marches, no upsurge of support for outside candidates such as Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned Putin critic, indicates the extent to which the average Russian is subdued. The average Russian, Politkovskaya observes, is content with little, expects the government to be brutal and callous, and feels uncomfortable with the notion that it is his or her duty to hold the government to account for its actions. Instead, she notes, the average Russian prefers living in a metaphorical bunker, ignoring everything that passes overhead. The typical Russian feels this way, perhaps, because Putin’s government is so ruthless in its control of the media. A Russian Diary documents the closing of independent television stations and newspapers. Their hard-hitting journalism is replaced by pablum. When he appeared on a television public affairs show, for instance, Putin was asked no hard questions regarding show trials, the lingering war in Chechnya, or meaningful reform; instead, members of the audience called him to ask about his plans for the puppies his pet dog recently had. Toward the end of the book, Politkovskaya turns her attention to perhaps the most brutal of terrorist attacks in recent history, the Beslan school hostage crisis. The heinous attack was directed at children, some as young as five, and throughout the crisis children were made to suffer when their suffering could have been prevented. Early on September 1, 2004, on the first day of school, a group of thirty-four heavily armed men and women broke into a school in Beslan, a small town in North Ossetia, a region in Russia. Although some people managed to escape, more than 1,200 adults and children were herded into the school gymnasium. All the adult men (teachers as well as fathers who had taken their children to school) were selected from the crowd and shot. Within minutes, the terrorists began stringing high explosives around the perimeter of the gym and among the crowd of children. Using children as human shields, the terrorists called for all Russian troops to leave Chechnya or the children would be killed. Despite intense negotiations over the next two days, the terrorists refused all compromises, including exchanging the children for adult hostages. As food and water ran low, the terrorists refused to feed the children or give them water. On September 3, in the early afternoon, several of the terrorists’ bombs exploded, opening a section of the gym wall. In the chaos and confusion, many of the children tried to escape, and Russian security forces began storming the school; to compound the catastrophe, the walls of the gymnasium, weakened by the explosions, collapsed, and many were buried alive. As Russian special forces began clearing the school, an ugly event turned

A Russian Diary / politkovskaya

651

hideous: Small groups of terrorists held out in the school’s cafeteria and basement, both groups using children as human shields. The final death toll amounted to more than 350, most of whom were only identifiable through DNA sampling; more than half of the victims were young children. What goes unsaid during A Russian Diary, but perhaps should have been mentioned by the author, were the repeated threats against her and the attempts on her life. It would certainly be worthwhile to know that while documenting the political changes in Russia, Politkovskaya was followed by a group of men and women who took note of her comings and goings. It adds a dimension of immediacy and respect to know that on the flight to Beslan, Politkovskaya was poisoned. Certainly, she earned no small number of enemies in documenting the political corruption in Russia, the culture of bullying that dominated the army, and in interviewing the “baby dragons” of Chechnya. The goonish Kadyrov even staged a mock execution in front of Politkovskaya and has been implicated in her murder on October 7, 2006, when she was gunned down outside her apartment building in Moscow. Michael R. Meyers

Review Sources America 197, no. 10 (October 8, 2007): 26-27. The Economist 383 (April 7, 2007): 82. Foreign Affairs 86, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 177. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 9 (May 1, 2007): 436-436. New Statesman 136 (April 16, 2007): 56. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 1, 2007): 7. Sunday Times, April 1, 2007, p. 40. The Village Voice 52, no. 49 (December 5, 2007): 42.

652

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES Author: Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) First published: Los detectives salvajes, 1998, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 592 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1976-1996 Locale: Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Tlaxcala, Mexico; Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Paris; Israel; Rome; Vienna; Los Angeles; Managua; Rwanda; Liberia; and the Sonoran Desert A multivoiced epic of two poets’ search for the vanished founder of visceral realism, and the consequences of their meeting, extending over two decades and five continents Principal characters: Arturo Belano, a visceral realist poet, based loosely on the writer Ulises Lima, a visceral realist poet who joins Belano in the search for Cesárea Tinajero Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old poet who narrates the first and third sections of the novel Luscious Skin, a visceral realist poet Lupe, a Mexican prostitute who accompanies the poets on their search Cesárea Tinajero, the founder of the visceral realist school, who vanished in the Sonoran Desert some fifty years before the novel opens María Font, a visceral realist poet and lover to García Madero Angélica Font, Maria’s sister and visceral realist poet Quim Font, father of the Font sisters and owner of the car driven by Belano and Lima

In one of the great road stories of the twentieth century, Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolaño traces the steps of his alter ego Arturo Belano and his friend Ulises Lima as they search for the founder of the visceral realist school of poetry in the Sonoran Desert, where she disappeared some fifty years earlier. The Savage Detectives is not an easily read novel, but it rewards the persistent reader with its wit, its playfulness, and, paradoxically, with its gravity. Bolaño’s brilliance is evident in the range of voices and breadth of character he creates. Bolaño’s life offers much of the raw material from which the novel is crafted. Born in Chile in 1953, he moved with his parents to Mexico in 1968. With the election of leftist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Bolaño returned to Chile, hoping to participate in a revolution. Shortly after his arrival, however, Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government, and Bolaño found himself in prison for several days.

The Savage Detectives / bolaño

653

He returned to Mexico City and began writ ing poetry, founding along with Mario Santi- Roberto Bolaño was born in Chile in ago a radical literary movement called infra- 1953, moving to Mexico City with his realism. These poets attempted to fully merge family in 1968, and finally settling in life with literature and to work against the Spain in the 1980’s. The founder of the current literary establishment. They would infrarealist school of poetry, he began often show up at readings by other poets (in- writing fiction in the 1990’s to cluding the great enemy of the fictional vis- immediate critical and popular acclaim. His work has won many major ceral realists, Octavio Paz) and disrupt the prizes and has been widely translated events, often by shouting or reading their own into English. Bolaño died in 2003. poems. Bolaño ultimately left Mexico, travel ing around Europe and Africa before finally settling in Catalonia, near Barcelona. He married and had a son. After years of writing poetry, he understood that he could not support himself this way. Thus, in the 1990’s Bolaño began to write fiction. Critical and popular acclaim was immediate on the publication of his work, and in the ten years before his death while awaiting a liver transplant in 2003 he produced ten novels and three collections of short stories. It was with the publication of Los detectives salvajes in 1998, however, that he received the respect and fame reserved for writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. The year of this novel’s publication, Bolaño won two major Spanish language literary awards, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela and the Herralde Prize in Spain. Natasha Wimmer’s exceptionally well-received 2007 translation of The Savage Detectives made the novel widely accessible to Englishspeaking audiences around the world. The Savage Detectives has a three-part structure. As narrator of the first section, Juan García Madero, a seventeen-year-old would-be poet and law school dropout, chronicles his introduction to the poetic group known as the visceral realists through a series of diary entries, beginning on November 2, 1975. García Madero’s voice is charmingly naïve in its affected worldliness. Readers witness his initiation into both sex and drugs and discover that García Madero knows every word for every rhetorical and poetic device ever devised. García Madero also offers readers their first glimpses of the peripatetic heroes of the story, poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. These young men are the founders of the infrarealist movement and are thinly veiled stand-ins for Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago. In a very funny scene, García Madero describes his poetry workshop, led by Professor Álamo, on the day that Belano and Lima crash it. In response to an attack on his critical system by the visceral realists, Álamo accuses them of being “cut-rate surrealists and fake Marxists.” García Madero, along with a “skinny kid who always carried around a book by Lewis Carroll and never spoke,” sides withBelano and Lima: “I decided to put in my two cents, and I accused Álamo of having no idea what a rispetto was; nobly, the visceral realists admitted that they didn’t know either but my observation struck them as pertinent, and they said so; one of them asked how old I was, and I said I was seventeen and tried all over again to explain what a rispetto was.”

654

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

By the end of the first section, García Madero not only has become a visceral realist but also has lost his virginity, hooked up with a prostitute called Lupe, and jumped in a car with Lima, Belano, and Lupe as they race north out of Mexico City, running away from Lupe’s pimp Alberto, and racing toward their collective futures in the Sonoran Desert. The tone of the story seems to change at this moment, toward some darker, unknown, yet inevitable conclusion. In his last entry of the first part, García Madero recalls: I realized that I always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. . . . I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala’s window.

The second part of The Savage Detectives abruptly leaves Belano, Lima, García Madero, and Lupe driving north and turns to a series of first-person narratives of varying lengths, dated between 1976 and 1996. In all, there are over fifty narrators, including Belano’s former lover, a mental patient, the “mother of Mexican poetry,” fellow visceral realist poets, a Mexican Jew, enemies, friends, intellectuals, and a variety of other voices. In each case, the narrator speaks to some unknown interviewer about his or her memory of Arturo Belano or Ulises Lima. Many of the same events are recounted from a variety of perspectives; in other cases, a narrator speaks of his or her relationship with Belano or Lima. What emerges from this collage of voices is a portrait of Belano, of Lima, and of the times. With over fifty narrators, many of whom narrate more than one small section, it at first seems difficult to keep track of the wide range of voices. However, once a reader envisions himself or herself as a detective, a worker whose job is to piece together the testimonies of a wildly divergent group of witnesses, the novel becomes irresistible. Each new voice adds a new layer to what the reader understands about Belano and Lima and about what must have happened to them in their drive north. Indeed, the entire middle section of the book is a series of clues of what has happened to the young characters who seemed so full of life (and so full of themselves) in the earlier pages. The clues also point the reader to how the novel should be read. As narrator Iñaki Echevarne says in a section dated 1994, “Everything that begins as a comedy ends as tragedy.” Or as narrator Felipe Müller says later, “Everything that begins as a comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren’t laughing anymore.” One of the most memorable voices is Auxilio Lacouture, an Uruguayan poet who calls herself the “mother of Mexican poetry.” This narrative provides a glimpse into the university scene of the 1960’s and her own role in the rebellions. She also indirectly warns readers about accepting any of the stories found in the book; her story of remaining in the bathroom for fifteen days during the uprising has been co-opted by other storytellers: “The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of ’68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year.”

The Savage Detectives / bolaño

655

Another important narration is that of Ernesto García Grajales, in the penultimate scene of the middle section. He tells the reader, “In all humbleness, sir, I can say that I’m the only expert on the visceral realists in Mexico, and if pressed, the world. God willing, I plan to publish a book about them.” Like the final moments of a movie that tell what happens to each of the characters in the years after the events of the movie, this small narration brings together all the characters of The Savage Detectives, telling who died, who lived, who still writes. Much of the information, however, contradicts what the rest of the book has asserted, even to the point of denying that García Madero was the name of the seventeen-year-old whose diary bookends the multivocal middle. The lesson here might be that it is the critics who always have the last word; or, just as likely, the vignette might be a cautionary tale about believing any narrator at all. The third section of the book, called “The Sonora Desert,” begins on page 527, nearly at the close of the novel. Suddenly, García Madero is back writing his diary, and readers are returned to January 1, 1976, chronologically just two months after the first page of the book. The four young characters are in Sonora, looking for Cesárea Tinajero and avoiding Alberto the pimp, who follows them with murderous rage. While it has only been a short time since the quartet left Mexico City, it is clear that they are fraying. Living in the Impala half the time, driving from village to village, and always looking for the absent Cesárea takes its toll on the visceral realists. Their lives have now fully merged with the stories of their lives. The narrations that make up the middle section of the book, all of which occur chronologically after the ending section, now engender a sort of double vision in the reader, who now knows more than the characters themselves about their future. The picture of Belano and Lima as lost souls, endlessly traveling throughout the world, without ever finding peace or rest, now haunts the final section. In Sonora, the group finally finds Cesárea, and Alberto finds them. It is the consequence of these meetings that propels Belano and Lima into the future that the reader already knows awaits them. The Savage Detectives is a masterful novel, a study on the nature of truth and storytelling. The language and the format work seamlessly in a work that is a strange combination of both amnesia and nostalgia. At once funny, satiric, sad, filled with hope, and filled with failure, The Savage Detectives captures the postmodern quest, a varied and endless attempt to piece together truth from shards of text. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 47. Globe and Mail, June 9, 2007, p. D10. Harper’s Magazine 314 (April, 2007): 99-106. Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2007, p. R5.

656

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The New Republic 236, no. 15 (May 7, 2007): 53-55. The New York Times 156 (April 12, 2007): E6. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 15, 2007): 1-11. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 17, 2007, p. H5. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 49 (December 11, 2007): 42. The Washington Post, April 8, 2007, p. D1.

657

SECOND DIASPORIST MANIFESTO (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses) Author: R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 160 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Essays Locale: Los Angeles A famous modern figurative painter shares his strongly felt impressions on the correspondences between literature and art R. B. Kitaj, who died in 2007 in Los Angeles, is one of the most important American painters of the last half of the twentieth century. Less well known in the United States than in Britain, Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After studying at Cooper Union in New York City, where his earliest work resembled that of abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. This took him to Europe, where he remained after his army service; he continued his studies under the G.I. Bill in London, which became his home for the next thirty years. He befriended the painters David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, and Lucien Freud, who together with Kitaj constituted the London School, a sobriquet given to the group by Kitaj himself in 1976. Their art gradually posed a formidable challenge to the abstractionism that dominated modern art. Kitaj’s brightly colored figurative paintings impressed critics and the public with his formidable drawing. With unusual economy he could express a great range of emotions. A superb draftsman, his linear control invited comparison with European masters like Giotto and Pablo Picasso. He won many awards and honors, including appointment to the Royal Academy. He is the only American painter, other than the famous James McNeill Whistler (18341903), to receive that distinction, and “one of only a handful of American painters . . . given a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during his own lifetime.” It is necessary to know at least the above about this artist in order to overcome an initial skepticism and bemusement when confronted with the book under review, his Second Diasporist Manifesto (A New Kind of Long Poem in 615 Free Verses). This volume follows the First Diasporist Manifesto, published in 1989. These “manifestos” are fragmented, rhapsodic, repetitive, and, at first glance, superficially intellectual. They allude to countless writers, thinkers, and artists of the modern age but rarely rise above a curious nominalism. A thinker is merely cited, sometimes quoted, and the quotation is often followed by a personal comment—whimsical, unpretentious, but rarely inductive or analytical. There is the suggestion of some kind of dialectic, but it never rises to the surface. Almost any page taken at random in the Second Diasporist Manifesto will yield passages like the following:

658

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

218 “I myself am a part of Nature.” —Einstein I myself am a part of Nature and it is in my Nature to paint Jewish pictures. 219 “My views are near to those of Spinoza.” —Einstein My views are near to those of Spinoza but closer still to Kafka, Einstein (essays) and Cézanne plus Matisse and Munch, etc. And latterly, Mondrian, in a strange way (see 231).

As the reader comes under Kitaj’s spell, the impression of aimlessness gives way to a growing trust in the patterning of Kitaj’s mind, the way he is trying to impose order on the stream of his own thinking. The 615 entries seem to be journal or diary notes that Kitaj has numbered. At times they seem sequential, but their principal connection is through cross-reference. That is where the numbers come in. There is no pagination in this book. The reader must navigate by flipping back and forth and following the numbers wherever they go. In the 1989 manifesto, the pages are numbered, and the entries are longer and resemble miniature essays. In this second manifesto, the entries are much shorter, often breathless, and the only reference points are the numbers. One could argue that the painter Kitaj, as writer, is producing a kind of verbal collage. There are 613 mitzvot (commandments) to which every observant Jew must comply. To his own 613 observations, Kitaj adds two to give his manifesto the added clout it needs to live up to the code of religious laws it imitates. One has to remember that Jewish prohibition against “graven images” that represent the deity has tended to mitigate the importance of figurative art in Jewish culture. This is what makes Kitaj’s numbered entries “free verses.” Their purpose is to vindicate Diasporism as an intrinsic artistic program necessary to ensure Jewish survival in the post-Holocaust world: 614 Rabbi Emil Fackenheim declared a famous 614th commandment: “The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.” So be it! Now, paint that! 615 As I make to die, here’s my 615th: EASEL-PAINTINGS ARE NOT IDOLS, so, JEWISH ART IS OK to do without consulting your Rabbi, so do it! It’s good and universal!

What does Kitaj mean by “Diasporism”? In the manifesto of 1989, Kitaj proudly announced that he had “Jew on the brain,” a phrase he took from his friend, the celebrated novelist Philip Roth, who coined the phrase in The Counterlife (1986). Obsessed with the survival under stress that characterized the Jewish people ever since their dispersion two thousand years ago, Kitaj became persuaded that the Diasporist trauma at the core of his own ethnicity was a reliable metaphor or trope for the “groundlessness” at the heart of much of modern art as a whole. “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Diasporist,” insisted Kitaj. Any artist caught up in the “dramas of incertitude” that resonated throughout the modern world could identify with his Diasporist credo. However, unlike earlier alienated generations of modern writers and artists like W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, who felt themselves cut off from traditional religious faith and who, in Eliot’s case, reviled the marginal or culturally alien person, Kitaj finds comrades-in-arms in all those exiled, reviled,

Second Diasporist Manifesto / kitaj

659

or persecuted: “The Diasporist (Jew, Arab, Homosexual, Gypsy, Asian, émigré from des- R. B. Kitaj devoted himself to potism, bad luck, etc.) is widely despised, dis- establishing the principles for a liked, mistrusted, sometimes tolerated, even distinctively Jewish “easel painting” in taken up here and there and shown a nice the modern world. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters life.” In the Second Diasporist Manifesto, Kitaj and the Royal Academy, and awarded a is no less inclusive. It is not only the socially Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters (Paris) and the Grand Prize for or racially persecuted artist with whom he Painting (Gold Lion) at the Venice identifies but also great painters like Paul Biennale, he was also the target of Cézanne and Henri Matisse, who were so in- vindictive critics in London. novative and boldly creative that they found themselves at the edges of convention without being victims of social or political hatred. Similarly, the Jewish dimension in Kitaj’s conception of Diasporist thinking takes on an increasingly theological and mystical character. Partially because they were forced to the edges of the world by religious and racial persecution, the Jews evolved toward moments of intense visionary exploration. Kitaj alludes frequently to the writings of the great modern Jewish scholar of the Kabbala, Gershom Scholem, who made important connections between Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the growth of a new spiritualized inwardness in Jewish belief. It is here that Kitaj seems to break new ground in his own Diasporist vision. Cut off from traditional Talmudic study because of his sectarian upbringing and lack of Hebrew, Kitaj makes a daring leap and connects his talents as a figurative artist and painter, talents to which traditional Judaism pays little heed, to the visionary ideas of the Kabbala, ideas that to this day are still frowned on by many Jewish seminarians. A series of personal trials brought Kitaj to the point where the “diasporism” of his art took a sharp turn from solidarity with his Jewish identity and the marginality of the alienated artist to an existential embrace of what he called the “tragi-comic Jewish extreme”: 28 DEVEKUT! This highest idea of the mystical life, this Communion with God, seems within my reach—the reach of a Jewish Art no less! . . . Devekut, essentially a private, ascetic communion in denial of the values of this world . . . is a value of contemplative, not of active, social life, says Scholem. I have been slowly withdrawing from the social world for many years anyway.

In 1994, the Tate Gallery in London mounted a Kitaj retrospective. The reviewers brutally attacked not only the paintings but also the literary texts that accompanied them. He was called a fake, a “Wandering Jew,” whose art and ideas were foreign to British feeling and taste. Kitaj was not alone in thinking that the reviewers were driven by a combination of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Shortly after, his beloved wife, the artist Sandra Fisher, died at age forty-seven of a brain aneurysm. Convinced that the critics had caused her death, Kitaj decided to

660

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

leave England and return to America, but before leaving he exhibited a painting at a summer exhibit of the Royal Academy in 1997 that took revenge on the critics he believed had killed his wife. The painting done in a lurid red shows Kitaj and Édouard Manet (the great French artist, also viciously attacked by critics) shooting an ugly monster who represents the art critic. This brilliant and hysterical painting was accompanied by a somewhat incoherent inscription: “The killer-critic assassinated by his widower, even.” Kitaj came to believe that his Sandra was Shekhina, the female aspect of God according to Kabbalistic teaching. After settling in Los Angeles with his son, Kitaj lived in semiseclusion but returned to his painting, relying on the memory of his wife for both spiritual sustenance and artistic inspiration: 28 . . . Sandra is therefore not only made in the image of God, but as Shekhina, she’s the aspect of what is called God, to which I cleave (DEVEKUT) in painting her. (See 104.) 104 Trying to follow: Tract on Ecstasy by DOV BAER OF LUBAVITCH (17731827), contemporary of Goya. This Hasidic text is a rare understanding of mystical rapture and ecstasy says Scholem, who assigns an even higher stage than that to our old friend DEVEKUT (cleaving to God). I cleave to Sandra (as God) when I can if painting her sparks an ecstasy.

David Hockney, Kitaj’s friend from their early days as art students in London, also settled in Los Angeles long before Kitaj’s return to America. They remained close, and in the Second Diasporist Manifesto Kitaj recalls what Hockney, who is certainly one of the great artists of the later twentieth century, said to him at a crucial hour: 166 HOCKNEY TO KITAJ (in a letter during my Tate War): “How right you are to see wider perspectives in the spiritual history of your ancestors. One forgets that at one’s peril.”

Had Kitaj not made that commitment to his cultural and religious legacy, he would have been destroyed completely by the wrenching loss of his deeply beloved wife. One cannot help but reflect on great poets and painters of the past who turned to their heritage in order to sublimate a lost or unattained love. Dante and his Beatrice come to mind. William Blake, the great English painter and poet, like Kitaj also brought together painting and writing in a combined art form. Blake’s many “emanations” are not substitutes for a lost love but rather are approximations of idealized visions for emotions and feelings that arose from his connubial life. Finally, Kitaj’s struggle in his manifestos to bring about a synthesis of what he read and thought with what he found himself wanting to paint proves that no matter how intuitive or spontaneous the creative act may be, it is no less imaginative for funneling its impulses through the ideas and thoughts of artists in all forms. In entry 177, he notes the following: “The Talmud says that every passage in the Torah has 49 gates of purity and impurity. That saying is embedded among 49 stories of my life-in-art.” The 49 gates include cities like London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. There are broad categories like Painting, Drawing, Books, and Study.

Second Diasporist Manifesto / kitaj

661

There are whimsical rubrics like Kids, Jews, Sex, Death, and Enemies. The bulk of the list consists of names of artists and writers, including Franz Kafka, Cézanne, Matisse, Giotto, Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian, Vincent van Gogh, Scholem, and Edgar Degas. Readers of the Second Diasporist Manifesto are treated to some fifty illustrations of Kitaj’s paintings. These include portraits of Aharon Appelfeld, the prominent Israeli writer, Gertrude Stein nude, Peter Lorre, Kafka, and several haunting studies of his wife Sandra. There are self-portraits and a famous study of a man sitting in a railway compartment titled simply, The Jew. Peter Brier

662

THE SECRET SERVANT Author: Daniel Silva (1960) Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (New York) 385 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Amsterdam; Israel; England; France; Germany; Cyprus; Cairo; Zurich; Copenhagen; Colorado; Langley, Virginia; Washington, D.C. Israeli spy Gabriel Allon tries to rescue the daughter of the American ambassador to the United Kingdom after she is kidnapped by terrorists Principal characters: Gabriel Allon, an art restorer and Israeli intelligence agent Uzi Navot, an Israeli spy Ari Shamron, an Israeli spy Ibrahim Fawaz, an Egyptian exile in Amsterdam Ishaq Fawaz, his son Robert Carlyle Halton, American ambassador to the United Kingdom Dr. Elizabeth Halton, his daughter, a physician Solomon Rosner, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam Samir al-Masri, an Egyptian terrorist in Amsterdam Dr. Yusuf Ramadan, a history professor at the American University in Cairo Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq, an Islamic fundamentalist held by the Americans Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq, his brother Chiara Zolli, an Israeli spy and Allon’s fiancé Sarah Bancroft, a CIA agent trained by Allon

After many years as a journalist, Daniel Silva launched his highly successful career as an espionage novelist with The Unlikely Spy (1997), a World War II thriller. Beginning with The Kill Artist (2000), Silva has created one of the most popular spy series ever. After three novels focusing on the legacy of the Holocaust, the Gabriel Allon books have shifted their concern to international terrorism. In The Messenger (2006), the middle-aged art restorer turned reluctant spy and assassin tackled a billionaire Saudi suspected of financing al-Qaeda. With The Secret Servant, Allon, “the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence,” has to deal not only with terrorism but also with increasing pressure to take charge of Israeli intelligence. Allon does not want to be the boss, seeing his true calling as a restorer of paintings by Italian old masters, and longs to retire to Italy. Israeli intelligence

The Secret Servant / silva

663

considers art restoration a good cover, not an occupation for a serious man. Silva uses Allon’s other calling as more than a plot device. While art restoration figures less in The Secret Servant than in any of the previous books, it is constantly lurking in the background, an indication of the spy’s divided nature. By extension Silva uses Allon’s cover to suggest something universal about people’s impulses both to the contemplative life and a more chaotic one, the thin line be- After graduating from San Francisco tween being a destroyer or a protector. State University, Daniel Silva was a The events of The Secret Servant are set in reporter for United Press International motion by Solomon Rosner, a sociologist from 1984 to 1988. He was then an who operates the Center for European Secu- executive producer of Crossfire and rity Studies at the University of Amsterdam several other programs at CNN until he and produces reports on the rise of militant Is- left in 1997 to concentrate on writing. lam within the Netherlands’ borders. Profes- The Secret Servant is his tenth thriller. sor Rosner, whose grandparents were sent to Auschwitz, has warned in his latest book of the efforts to turn the country into a Muslim-dominated state, a view widely attacked by the Dutch press. Though Silva was once a journalist and his wife, Jamie Gangel, is a National Broadcasting Company (NBC) reporter, he presents the news media negatively several times in The Secret Servant. Of an NBC reporter, someone tells the president of the United States, “I’m not sure she has a pulse, let alone a sense of patriotism.” Rosner is murdered, in circumstances recalling the 2004 killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and Allon is summoned by Uzi Navot, chief of Israeli intelligence’s special operations unit, to Amsterdam to clean out the professor’s files so that no link with his secret employers can be found. If Rosner’s activities are revealed, Dutch Jews will be at great risk. Allon’s task is all the more difficult because he has been banned by European intelligence services for violent acts detailed in the previous novels. In Amsterdam, Allon is approached by Ibrahim Fawaz, an Egyptian exile who supplied Rosner with information about Muslim activities. From Ibrahim, Allon learns about Samir al-Masri, an Egyptian who has come to Amsterdam to foment violence. Ibrahim’s information sends Allon to London, “the epicenter of European Islamic extremism.” He alerts British authorities to a potential threat but is too late to prevent Samir from kidnapping Dr. Elizabeth Halton, the physician daughter of American ambassador Robert Carlyle Halton, during an attack killing three hundred people. As the goddaughter of the president of the United States and a vocal supporter of his war in Iraq, Dr. Halton is more than just another political hostage. If Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq, a fundamentalist political prisoner, is not released in a week, she will be killed. This demand is merely a ploy, however, by Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq, the prisoner’s brother, who wants to start a revolution in Egypt.

664

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The rest of The Secret Servant involves the effort to find out who is behind the kidnapping and where Dr. Halton is being held, as Allon unravels the complex motivations of the group called the Sword of Allah and the part played by the mysterious figure known as the Sphinx. Because the Sphinx always seeks revenge against those who arrest or kill his men, Allon is at the top of his hit list. The human side of the dilemma becomes clearer when the situation pits Ibrahim against his son, Ishaq, and when Allon is torn over having to endanger the innocent to achieve his objective. The Allon of The Secret Servant differs a bit from his previous incarnations. In the novel’s first paragraph, Silva has him declare that Rosner is more valuable dead than alive, a comment others see as “uncharacteristically callous.” The earlier Allon would also never say, “Where are they taking her, you motherfucker! Tell me before I blow your head off!” The darker, angrier Allon suggests Silva has grown more pessimistic about any effective means of dealing with terrorism. Allon explains why killing is the only recourse: “We have to kill the monsters before they kill us. . . . The killing has to take place in the shadows, where no one can see it. We have to hunt them down ruthlessly. We have to terrorize them.” Even more than in his previous novels, Silva sounds a warning about the increasing dangers posed by Islam. Silva explains the concept of takfir, which originated in Egypt in the 1970’s and gives Muslims the right to kill anyone at any time as long as such acts advance their cause. According to takfir, democracy violates the laws of God; therefore, democracies and Muslims living in democracies are the enemies of Islam. The Secret Servant opens with an epigraph from historian Bernard Lewis: “On present demographic trends, by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest, Europe will be Muslim.” Silva concisely delineates how the United Kingdom has foolishly opened itself to terrorist threats by accommodating known extremists, assuming that they would limit their actions to other Arabs. He is hardly a keepEurope-pure extremist, just a realist pointing out potential threats, nor is he saying that all Arabs are terrorists. The acts depicted in The Secret Servant are the unfortunate result of the excesses of the Hosnt Mub3rak regime in Egypt. The predicament painted by Silva is complicated. The young Muslims in the Netherlands suffer high unemployment and are angry about how they are treated. Then, religious leaders paid by Saudi Arabia stir up their hatred for the West. Silva’s terrorists are not cardboard villains but thinking, feeling individuals caught up in a situation out of their control. Ibrahim tells Allon that despite living in Holland for twenty-five years and becoming a citizen, he will always be an outsider. A professor in Egypt who came to Amsterdam seeking more opportunities for his son, Ibrahim has had to work as a laborer and has always been seen as a temporary resident. He eloquently explains the frustrations of such aliens and their families. Allon realizes that by being not quite Arab and not quite European, the children of immigrants are “lost in the land of strangers.” “When we are wronged,” explains Ibrahim, “we must seek revenge. It is in our culture, our bloodstream. Each time you kill or torture one of us, you are creating an extended family of enemies that is honor bound to take retribution.” By striving for a

The Secret Servant / silva

665

balanced view of a complicated situation, Silva tries to raise his fiction above the level of the standard thriller. Some reviewers, however, painted Silva’s views of the terrorism threat as extreme. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Richard Schickel accused Silva of overstating the danger of Islamic terrorism to sell books and of presenting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a more efficient organization than press reports make it appear to be. Warren Bass, a member of the 9/11 Commission, attacked Silva in The Washington Post for having a humorless political agenda and making a crude simplification of the issues. Molly Nixon, in The Jerusalem Post, saw Silva’s characters as mere mouthpieces for opinions more suitable to editorial pages. Too often Silva writes like a journalist rather than an artist, spelling out what needs only to be suggested. The Secret Servant is full of insight into how intelligence services work. The United States appoints politicians and party functionaries, instead of intelligence professionals, as head of the CIA, and the Israelis traditionally give the job to a general. Yet while Ari Shamron, Allon’s mentor, is not officially in charge, he actually runs the operation and is less directly influenced by political pressures. Silva also explains the sayanim, the bankers, doctors, hoteliers, and others around the world without whose assistance Israeli intelligence could not operate. Silva explains how the methods of dealing with radicals differed among Egyptian presidents, how Anwar el-Sadat’s leniency led to the spread of fundamentalism abroad, and how the torturing of political prisoners under Mub3rak worsened the situation further. The terrorists see Mub3rak as “an apostate thug . . . who grew rich while the Egyptian people slipped deeper into poverty and despair with each passing day.” The Americans have the paradoxical dilemma of keeping Mub3rak in power to prevent radicals from taking over Egypt, yet by doing so foster terrorism. The novel’s title comes from Navot’s insistence that Allon is “a secret servant of the State of Israel, and you have no right to leave the fighting to others.” Allon is deluding himself in thinking he can retire to Italy, because Europe will be the “next battleground.” The Secret Servant has a darker, more pessimistic tone than previous Allon novels. The fight for Jewish survival has turned into a war without end against terrorism, involving not just Israel but the entire world. The Secret Servant offers many detailed character studies. With just a few details, Silva is able to create complex, believable characters. The most vivid of these is Dr. Yusuf Ramadan, professor of Near Eastern history at the American University in Cairo and head of the Institute of Islamic Studies in Paris. A world-renowned intellectual and a frequent presence on French television, Ramadan succeeds as a villain because he is so adept at hiding his true motivations. Silva is occasionally guilty of bad writing: “350 acres in size.” Late in the novel, Silva gives a full identification of Ramadan as if he has not been mentioned before. Calling the main villain the Sphinx may also strike some as a bit hokey. Sarah Bancroft, a protagonist in The Messenger, is unnecessarily brought back as a CIA agent who does little. Having special operations plan Allon’s wedding to Chiara Zolli, a fellow agent, creates a jarring shift in tone.

666

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Some may complain that not enough is at stake in The Secret Servant, that the kidnapping of a single American, no matter how noble she may be, is not enough around which to build an intricate plot. Nevertheless, the Halton abduction is merely a device to explore larger issues. As a work of entertainment, The Secret Servant is much more of a procedural than its predecessors but is still well written, engrossing, and often fascinating. Michael Adams

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 18 (May 15, 2007): 5. The Jerusalem Post, September 21, 2007, p. 29. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 84. Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2007, p. R8. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 21 (May 21, 2007): 32. The Washington Post, August 20, 2007, p. C3.

667

THE SHADOW CATCHER Author: Marianne Wiggins (1947) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). Illustrated. 323 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2007 and 1868-1952 Locale: Hollywood; Las Vegas; St. Paul, Minnesota; Seattle and the Puget Sound area of Washington; Ohio This dual narrative twines the character Wiggins’s trip to investigate the illness of a man professing to be her father with the story of photographer Edward Curtis’s life, marriage, training, and work documenting Native Americans by taking their photos in tribal dress and settings in the early twentieth century Principal characters: Marianne Wiggins, a contemporary screenwriter working on the text for a biographical film based on a novel she has written about Edward Curtis’s life and work; her father has been dead thirty years at novel’s beginning Clara, a young woman from Minnesota, orphaned and destitute after her parents’ deaths, who marries Edward Curtis Hercules, Clara’s younger brother Ellen Curtis, wife of Johnson Curtis and Clara’s mother’s best friend, who takes Clara and Hercules in after their parents’ demise Edward, Raphael, Asahel, and Eva Curtis, children of Ellen and Johnson Harold, Florence, Beth, and Katherine Curtis, children of Edward and Clara Curtis Mr. Lester Shadow, a Navajo who delivers Curtis Edwards to the hospital Curtis Edwards, the true identity of the man who claimed to be John F. Wiggins, Marianne’s father Colonel Curtis Edwards, Jr., Air Force colonel, the son of Curtis Edwards

By using her name as the name of The Shadow Catcher’s main character, Marianne Wiggins immediately signals a unique approach to storytelling. Her strategy calls into question a basic maxim for reading novels: Never assume the narrator’s voice or the main character in a novel can be equated with the author. She then goes on to write a

668

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

book where the equation “writer equals character or narrator” makes no difference whatsoever. The thin slice of character Wiggins’s life the novel unveils does not make for much cross-referencing with the writer Wiggins’s life, except as it shows the actual writer’s interest in photography developing as a discipline and art form from the nineteenth century on. Her experience being married to Salman Rushdie and sharing years of his life in hiding when he was declared an enemy of Islam by Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini does not surface directly in the novel. The radical nature of the Islamic threat to their lives and their seclusion echo in the unexpected avalanche that orphans Clara and her brother Hercules, suddenly severing ties with all they know. It is a stretch to force similarities beyond an emphasis on loss, uses of memory, and an interest in photography; no easy correspondences between Wiggins and her character come to mind. Instead, the book braids the contemporary story of character Marianne Wiggins, novelist-screenwriter, with the fascinating life of Edward Curtis, photographer, entrepreneur, husband, and opportunist subject to wanderlust and infatuated with his own ambition. The novel begins with a cleverly sardonic commentary on driving in Los Angeles. At a meeting with prospective producers, screenwriter Wiggins lays out Curtis’s life, her fascination then disenchantment with him, and the unwinding of his marriage as he photographed Native Americans while employed by J. P. Morgan. She resists the fixation with Curtis as a wandering artist cowboy that the Hollywood producers want to create because it will not capture the truth of his life. It is too simple. The real story that captured her, she tells her agent, is that all four of Curtis’s adult children are buried beside him despite his desertion of them for most of their childhoods. She wrote to discover what made them crave the closeness in death they never achieved in life. The author of The Shadow Catcher narrates the lives of Los Angeles writer Marianne Wiggins and photographer Edward Curtis, both complicated by mysterious disappearances. Following the meeting, Wiggins receives a phone call informing her that her father is seriously ill in a Las Vegas hospital. The preposterous claim unsettles the writer, whose father had died some thirty years earlier. After contacting her sister to talk things over, she decides to investigate the situation. The reader knows she will be heading to Nevada in her car, the modern equivalent of Huck Finn’s lighting out for the territory. With the turn of a page the reader is in the Washington Territory with Clara and Hercules. The long chapter is not technically a flashback, because it is woven around Clara’s memories of the Curtis family mingled with her family’s life in St. Paul and

Marianne Wiggins is the author of eight novels and two collections of short stories. Her novel John Dollar (1989) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. Evidence of Things Unseen (2003), a novel about photography, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s creation, and the development of the atomic bomb, was nominated for a National Book Award in 2003 and for a Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

The Shadow Catcher / wiggins

669

descriptions of her present situation, being a charity case in the Curtis household. The reader learns about her loving home and casually elegant parents, whose indulgent and cultured approach to life introduced music, art, and people who loved them into their children’s lives. The reader also learns that Clara attends a nursing academy, expecting to pursue a career. On a Christmas shopping trip after a snowfall, her parents are tragically killed in an avalanche of snow that falls from a building while Clara and her brother are inside selecting a gift. Their disappearance alters life forever, and the siblings find that they are bankrupt. The only person Clara can imagine helping them is Ellen Curtis, her mother’s longtime friend, a woman inept at managing her own affairs and whom Clara’s parents had aided in the past. Still struggling with the shock, the sister and brother find themselves in a spartan island frontier camp where the Curtis family hangs onto existence through exhausting hard work and sheer nerve. Edward enters the novel as the wandering son of a now dead, wandering father. His mysterious comings and goings, accepted by his family, seem odd and unexplainable to Clara, who feels isolated from civilization and the prospect of finding a school for Hercules. Eventually the section becomes the story of how Edward Curtis and Clara discover their attraction for one another. Clara relishes love because she witnessed her parents’ mutually nurturing marriage. Clara offers Edward education and a wider lens on the world, and he offers her the chance for love. She discovers his passion for photography and capturing figures. They have a sexual relationship while he recuperates from an injury, and afterward he leaves abruptly. She knows then that he will always leave, that he will be a distant and demanding lover and companion. Before she can act on her resolve to leave to find work in Seattle, he returns and claims her. She takes the offer of love, giving in to the fatal vulnerability to Edward that will shape her life. The first half of the book contains imagery and commentary about the shadows of life, the landscape, and the past as well as the West as a mythic landscape. From age twelve to age twenty, Edward Curtis wandered with and cared for his itinerant father. The burden of that lost youth and the resentment against authority affected his orientation toward meeting desires and facing responsibilities for life. It influenced his ambitions and relationships with the pressure of restlessness and the need to flee. Clara’s need for vital stimulation and intelligent work drove her away from the farm where fundamental religion and rough work seemed a death sentence. Shaped by her past, she wants the humane and enlightened life she believes she can build with Edward. The events of Clara and Edward’s involvement segue into the contemporary writer’s road trip to Las Vegas. Wiggins’s plan for the book lends itself to layered treatment of the past and present. By using Curtis as a character who abandons his family and creates the illusion of Indian tribes photographed in their nineteenth century grandeur, the living Marianne Wiggins gives herself the perfect vehicle for linking her character’s past with Curtis’s and the nation’s. The wandering writer passes magnificent landscapes as she muses over Edward Curtis’s trajectory in place and life. Her thoughts about the Native Americans who once controlled the land the highway traverses lead to a collage-like interlude about American character, exploita-

670

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tion, and personal loneliness. The reader senses that the three have a deep connection that lies beneath the surface of current existence. As the Marianne Wiggins character lights out for the territory the reader learns about the childhood she left behind, the journeys her family made, and what they meant. In her travel chapter, Marianne Wiggins experiences the wide open West in a rush. “When you stand there in a place as immense as our own continental west with not another creature in your sight for miles and miles and miles around, you realize you are standing in the jaws of your existence. That the journey you make through time— where you light out to—is the only meaning you can claim.” She keeps recalling Curtis’s journey through various parts of the West as she heads to Las Vegas. Thus, even when he and Clara are not part of the novel’s action, they enliven Wiggins’s thoughts about what it means to be a single soul, an American, a person in search of meaning and connection in the American West. This technique folds the past into the present. It reminds readers that history, personal and national, coalesce in the present moments of lives—sometimes as echoes of one another, sometimes with the past enriching the experience of a place with the deeper drama of what happened to other Americans there as the nation came into being. The reader learns that the writer’s father “lit out” on a regular basis, sometimes just for a few hours, and that it was essential to “how he thought and lived.” On one of his trips he disappeared, and his family never knew where, how, or why. Wiggins’s road trip to Las Vegas is a journey to someone who may unlock the deepest secret of her past. Arriving in Las Vegas, she is confounded by discovering an African American man lying in an ICU ward. He had her father’s name, driver’s license, and some information about her family to substantiate his identity. The Navajo man who brought him to the hospital is aptly named Mr. Lester Shadow, making his appearance a convenient fit after the many musings about displacement of Native American tribes and history that readers have been privy to during the trip. His father, called Owns His Shadow, had died after a long life that included attending Carlisle Indian School and scouting sites for the photographer Edward Curtis. A handmade Navajo bracelet that Lester Shadow has brings the connection to light, and he and Marianne Wiggins determine to go to the sick man’s residence the next day to try to contact a next of kin. While there, they find the patient’s true identity, Curtis Edwards, stamped on the cover of an old Bible. The final chapters of the book detail the disintegration of Clara’s and Edward’s marriage caused by his repeated absences and the flamboyant style that took him into the White House and the homes of men as powerful as J. P. Morgan. The tragedy of Clara’s children deserting her when she divorced their always-absent but romantically charged father led to her suicide in a boat on Puget Sound after she heard of her brother’s drowning in Colorado. Her children refused to believe she had the nerve to do this, but they did not know of her plans to join her brother or the shock his accidental death gave Clara. Marianne Wiggins and Lester Shadow uncover the truth of her father’s disappearance; Curtis Edwards had come upon the hanging body of Wiggins’s father in

The Shadow Catcher / wiggins

671

Shenandoah National Park. Being an African American reporting a white man’s death in the 1950’s, he did what he thought safest—stole his identity, reported the death, and eventually left his family to start a new life out West. The novel triangulates loss via three missing fathers. Wiggins, the living writer, also weaves together the fate of Native Americans at the hands of the government, the pressure of racial intolerance, and the randomness of tragedy that can catapult lives like Clara’s and Hercules’, or anyone’s, into a crisis that starts a chain of events from which they cannot recover despite intelligence and determined effort. As the character, Marianne Wiggins burns Lester Shadow’s medicine leaves as she tells readers: “I watch the smoke braid into the tree [above Edward Curtis’s and his children’s graves], . . . and I think about . . . the way one life touches another, our lives and all the lives of others a long continuous thread—a train—of independent yet contiguous actions.” Thus, the book ends on a note that gathers reader, writer, and characters into the flow of ideas and beauty that create life and the possibility of meaning. By placing herself in the novel as a character, Marianne Wiggins erases the distance between artist, subject, and beholder. She fabricates the past to behold, performing with language the trick Edward Curtis did with photos. Karen L. Arnold

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 17 (May 1, 2007): 75. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 8 (April 15, 2007): 363. Library Journal 132, no. 8 (May 1, 2007): 77. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 1, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 16 (April 16, 2007): 29. The Washington Post, June 3, 2007, p. BW05.

672

SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD Author: Colin Thubron (1939) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 363 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Travel Time: The 2000’s Locale: China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and Kurdish Turkey Thubron describes an eight-month journey along the fabled Silk Road, from China to Antioch in Turkey Modern Central Asia is a continent in political upheaval. In Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron sets this in the context of the Silk Road’s ancient and tumultuous history as a trade route, a road along which ideas and people, as well as consumer goods, have traveled, eastward as well as westward, for thousands of years. “To follow a road,” writes Thubron, “is to follow diversity, a flow of interlocked voices, arguing, in a cloud of dust.” No road is more diverse than the Silk Road, the world’s greatest land route. The road, a fretwork of arteries and veins, begins in China and crosses Central Asia, passing through northern Afghanistan, Iran, and the Kurdish area of Turkey, before finally reaching the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. As a concept, it is a nineteenth century artifact, the creation of Ferdinand von Richthofen, but as a trading route it is centuries old, constantly shifting and transforming. Thubron, who had made the seven-thousand-mile journey once before, some twenty years ago, notes that following the Silk Road is like following a ghost. The route has “officially” vanished from the map but can nonetheless still be traced through physical remains of earlier civilizations and through the ideas and products that traveled along it, transcending what Thubron calls modern “counterfeit borders.” The effect of these counterfeit borders preoccupy Thubron throughout his journey, not only in practical terms of having to deal with border officials, who very often do not understand the visas and permissions he is showing them, but also because of how they shape the lives of the people he meets. Borders have placed artificial constraints upon them, turning land into nations and states, often in ways that do not reflect their lived experience. Standing in Xian in China’s Shaanxi province, where the Silk Road is said to begin (or end), Thubron reflects on the movement of peoples and ideas up and down the length of its route, and how they have shaped world civilization. Thubron is struck by the pace of change since he last visited this area of China. There are parts of the cities he no longer recognizes, and he comments on the way in which they seem to have embraced the “unmediated West” in terms of architectural style and consumer demands. Visiting friends, he is struck by how eager they are, how necessary it has become, to “forget” Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Those who

Shadow of the Silk Road / thubron

673

remember it forget to protect themselves from its memories, while the young have no point Colin Thubron’s travel books include of reference with which to remember it. Among the Russians (1983), Behind Thubron visits old friends who welcome the the Wall: A Journey Through China transformation, but with caution, and encoun- (1987), The Lost Heart of Asia (1994), ters many people who remain scarred by their and In Siberia (1999). He has won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas experiences. This sense of needing to forget seems to Cook Travel Book Award. His novels include A Cruel Madness (1984), haunt Thubron as he sets out on his journey. winner of the PEN/Macmillan Silver Aware of how history is being reconstructed Pen Award; Falling (1989); Turning around him, providing a seamless narrative of Back the Sun (1991); and Distance Chinese supremacy, Thubron seems to be de- (1996). His most recent novel is To the termined to dig as deep as he can into the an- Last City (2002). cient history of the Silk Road, showing how, before the borders became hardened, before the Yellow Emperor defined the nature of Chinese civilization, the area the maps now call China was a shifting landscape of peoples and allegiances. While the Silk Road was once the route by which silk, paper, printing, and gunpowder made their way west into Europe, now it is a route along which the deadly SARS virus, which breaks out in Central Asia during Thubron’s journey, is equally capable of traveling. During the first part of his journey, Thubron is constantly beset by officials solicitous of his health; he is detained in a quarantine hospital for several days before being released and allowed to go on his way. It is an early indication of the official belief in the power of boundaries and how fragile that reliance actually is. As Thubron shows, the Silk Road was always a counter to boundaries. As easily as trade goods made their way westward, so did ideas and peoples from the west make their way eastward. Thubron traces the remains of a small group of Nestorian Christians who settled in Shaanxi province in 781 and remained there for sixty years. Centuries later, European missionaries found people who still made the sign of the cross over their food, without knowing why. Later, he examines a story about the descendants of Roman soldiers, imprisoned by the Huns and made into mercenaries, who settled in a Chinese village; he meets people who are taller than is usual and who have reddish hair. It is, Thubron acknowledges, a good story, but the Silk Road has generated centuries of “genetic confusion,” and these mysterious people could be descended from any number of other races. Buddhism traveled from India into China, and Muslim travelers brought their beliefs with them. As Thubron finds, the modern Chinese authorities are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that their ancestors may have come from the west. The mummified bodies of the Tocharian people, buried in the Taklamakan Desert, provide only one more example of a truth the Chinese try to avoid. Despite the fact that their own stories of national foundation are as much a myth as anything else that Thubron encounters on the way, they cling firmly to the belief that the Yellow Emperor founded Chinese civilization and that there was nothing before. Even now they seem to be as intent on

674

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

stamping their own identity on the region, no matter what the cost might be to others. As Thubron travels eastward, he meets many groups who are struggling to maintain their own identity in the face of Chinese influence, their predicament summed up by a Uighur man who has taken Kazakh nationality, feeling his own country is occupied, and a young Tibetan Buddhist monk whose brother has already fled to India, where he also wants to go. As Thubron leaves China and crosses into Kyrgyzstan, there is a sense that he is moving into a place where borders mean less than they did just a few miles down the road. Thubron has already wondered whether the Great Wall of China was really intended to keep the Chinese people in rather than to repel invaders. Here he describes himself as being in a place where “the maps in people’s minds dissolve,” and yet politics intervenes once again. Kyrgyzstan, having rid itself of Soviet rulers, unexpectedly settled for a liberal democracy, only to find that its leader, struggling to deal with endemic corruption within the government and an ongoing failure to solve the country’s crippling poverty, transformed himself into a dictator, allying himself with the region’s great mythological story cycle, of the hero, Manas, in order to justify his actions. As he travels westward, it might seem that Thubron moves away from myth and into history as he moves into regions that have shrugged off Soviet rule and reverted to older ways of defining themselves. Here people are grouped by tribal membership and by religious belief as much as they are governed by national boundaries. The influence of Islam, noticeable even at the Chinese borders, becomes ever stronger, and the story of Tamerlane is as potent today as it ever was. Thubron meets people who identify with this fourteenth century Turkic hero as strongly as if he had died only yesterday. His supposed burial site is still a place of pilgrimage. As always, Thubron is on the lookout for the odd, the unusual, the sites off the beaten track, but there is a sense that as he travels west, the Silk Route is becoming more crowded, the ancient being overwhelmed by the modern. He has to search harder for the traces of long-forgotten travelers, but now and then he finds them. In a remote valley, a hundred miles from Tehran, where a group of builders is working on a new hospital in what was once the heartland of the Assassins, Thubron comes across evidence of the Mongols, led by the grandson of Genghis Khan, who wiped out the followers of Rukn-ad-din, the last of the Assassins’ Grand Masters. Scrambling up the cliff face, he finds himself in caves whose ceilings are blackened by Mongol fires. Alas, without a torch, Thubron can explore no further. As Thubron continues his journey toward the Mediterranean, modern history begins to come to the fore once again. In Afghanistan, he talks with survivors of the Taliban’s rule, and as he moves west toward Iran, the Iraq War comes into sharper focus. In Tabriz, he meets female students at an English-language college. They talk frankly about their experience of living in post-Khomeini Iran. They are angry with the situation, hungry for change, and unafraid to express their views to Thubron, while doubtful that they could expect change for the better. This contrasts sharply with Thubron’s experience earlier in his journey, at the eastern end of the Silk Road, where old friends felt their lives had, for the most part, improved in some measure.

Shadow of the Silk Road / thubron

675

Even the unsettled and discontented people on China’s borders felt that they could eventually change their lives. Thubron finally makes his way to Turkey and to Antioch, the end of the Silk Road. Antioch is an intruder, he suggests, “a Hellenistic island in a Semitic sea,” a latecomer in the East, but dazzled by the silks from China, which passed through it on their way to Rome. Here, at the end of his journey, Thubron reflects on the ways in which borders have become muddled, in his notes and in his memories, but also on the ground. Official boundaries rarely reflect the true natures of the peoples they supposedly enclose, and Thubron imagines “different, ghostly maps laid over the political ones: maps of fractured races and identities.” His conversations with the people he has met have shown that their allegiances often lie in unexpected places, in the past as well as in the present. No matter what the official boundaries may say, for Thubron it is clear that the Silk Route continues to exert its mysterious influence on the regions through which it passes. Maureen Kincaid Speller

Review Sources America 197, no. 12 (October 22, 2007): 25-27. The Economist 380 (September 30, 2006): 93. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 10 (May 15, 2007): 492. New Statesman 135 (September 25, 2006): 78-79. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 20 (December 20, 2007): 18-24. The New York Times Book Review 156 (July 15, 2007): 1-10. The Times Literary Supplement, November 17, 2006, p. 9.

676

SHORTCOMINGS Author: Adrian Tomine (1974) Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly (Montreal). Illustrated. 108 pp. $19.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: San Francisco Bay Area and New York City In his first full-length graphic novel, the prolific Tomine combines gritty realism and subtle humor to create a memorable, sometimes painful exploration of Asian American identity Principal characters: Ben Tanaka, a thirty-year-old manager of a movie theater Miko Hayashi, his thirty-one-year-old live-in girlfriend, a film student Alice Kim, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at Mills College, Ben’s best friend Autumn Phelps, a twenty-two-year-old performance artist and clerk at Ben’s theater Sasha Lenz, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student at Mills College Meredith Lee, a thirty-two-year-old professor at New York University

Long regarded as the illegitimate offspring of literary fiction, the comic-book story and graphic novel have come into their own during the last generation. Gifted illustrators like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman have provided visual counterparts to stories of their own and of writers like Harvey Pekar (American Splendor, 1986) and Paul Auster (City of Glass, 1985). Although there has been great interest in fantasy fiction like the Sandman stories of Neil Gaiman, published in ten separate volumes after having appeared in seventy-five comic-book numbers, much of the best fiction has approached the dirty realism of serious fiction writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. Meanwhile, thanks in part to the success of Japanese animated cartoons, known as Japanimation, or anime, American readers have eagerly bought up translated books of Japanese cartoons, or manga. The edgy illustrated stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi have found cult following among young cartoonists like Adrian Tomine, who has introduced translations of two collections and has hand-lettered the English text. Tatsumi coined the term gekiga (literally “dramatic pictures”) for the realistic cartooning that he pioneered in the 1960’s. In some ways, it seems preferable to “graphic novel,” a term coined in the late 1970’s for the illustrated fiction of Will Eisner and scorned by many actual practitioners for its connotations of “graphic sexuality” or “graphic violence.”

Shortcomings / tomine

677

Tomine gained recognition in the 1990’s with a series of the semiautobiographical A fourth-generation Japanese tales that he first self-published at the age of American, Adrian Tomine selfsixteen and then produced for the Tower Re- published his Optic Nerve comics at the cords story magazine Pulse. By the time he age of sixteen. At twenty, he was hired was a college student, at the University of to produce them as a regular series for California, Berkeley, his Optic Nerve comic Drawn & Quarterly. Early stories have books were being published by Drawn & appeared in Thirty-two Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics Quarterly, a leading firm in the new genre. (1998), more recent ones as Summer Before he turned thirty, in 2004, his stories Blonde (2002), and still others in from these comics were being reissued in Scrapbook: Uncollected Work, 1990book form. Tomine has told interviewers at 2004 (2004). He is a regular New York and other publications that early ac- contributor to The New Yorker. claim as an artist of great promise made him feel pressure to fulfill the promise. With the release of Shortcomings, it should be clear that he has done that but has also taken on new challenges as he has moved into the longer format. A graphic novel in three chapters, Shortcomings tells the story of Ben Tanaka, a disaffected young man with a liberal arts education and a dead-end job managing an independent movie theater in Berkeley. Ben has a girlfriend, the active and attractive Miko Hayashi, with whom he shares an apartment. He has a single friend, the lesbian graduate student Alice Kim, whom he has known since their freshman year in college. He also has a large collection of DVDs, including a stash of lesbian porn videos. As he enters his thirties, he is overdue for some serious self-reflection. At first glance, the book’s opening could not be less promising—the tear-jerking finale of an immigrant story that pulls all the stops and uses all the clichés. The six panels on the first page look like scenes from a bad movie at an ethnic-identity festival, and that is exactly what they turn out to be. On the second page, the film ends to general applause but for one dissatisfied moviegoer. Ben complains to Miko that he wishes people would concentrate on telling a good story rather than making a statement about race. The remark seems insensitive under the circumstances, for she was one of the festival’s chief organizers. It says something about Ben, who is ambivalent about their relationship. It also says something about the author-illustrator. Tomine wants to tell a good story first of all, and only then to say something about the issues that haunt his characters. After two years together, Ben and Miko seem like an old married couple. They argue over little things. He would rather stay up and watch videos than follow her to bed. When she discovers his stash of porn videos, she is hurt—not because he is looking at other women, but because all the women are white and she is Asian. When she is offered an internship at an Asian film institute in New York City, she decides that they are ready for some time off from each other. With Miko gone, Ben begins the serious self-reflection that he so badly needs. In conversations with the irrepressible Alice, usually at a restaurant, he obsesses on vari-

678

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ous stereotypes of race and gender. The book’s title refers not only to the inadequacy of his own reasoning but also to fears that Asian men do not measure up sexually to their Caucasian counterparts. The book’s cardbook cover, which Tomine designed, has a ruler running across the bottom edge and reaching from the back cover across the spine to the front. Having failed with two blonds, the outrageous Autumn Phelps and the sexually ambivalent Sasha Lenz, Ben follows Alice to New York, hoping to rekindle his relationship with Miko. When he finds her in the company of a tall white male who is learning Japanese, he cracks. In a telling conversation with Alice and her new lover, Meredith Lee, he rants about his disgust at the sight of Asian women with white men. Asked how he feels about seeing Asian men with white women, he says, “Good for him! Good for both of them!” At this point, Meredith, a college professor of mixed ancestry, asks: “Is your attraction to white women a sublimated form of assimilation?” When she goes on to warn that it is risky “making moral generalizations based on your own wounded ego,” he can only sigh. The story ends with Ben literally up in the air, flying back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he may or may not have a future. One expects a sequel, and indeed The New York Times has reported that Tomine’s publisher signed a three-book deal with the British firm of Faber & Faber, of which this is the first. Tomine is to some extent a breakthrough artist; like Spiegelman before him, he is among the first comicbook artists to find a serious following among the literati. With its telling insights and clever dialogue—not all so highbrow as Meredith’s—the book is a good starting point for story lovers who have never read a graphic novel. It will still find a ready audience with the genre’s connoisseurs. Over the last fifteen years, Tomine has developed a minimalist style of black-andwhite illustration. It is often cinematic, but in the retrained fashion of Ingmar Bergman rather than the epic manner of George Lucas. Each page of this novel is a grid with six to nine frames, which give it the look of a photo album. There are no thought bubbles, no stage directions, no indications of time or place other than what appears in the drawings and in the characters’ words, and relatively few sound effects. Tomine has set the characters in real places, including record stores and restaurants that will be familiar to readers in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Juan’s Place in Berkeley becomes Jose’s Place, where Ben connects with Sasha; the Park Slope in Brooklyn becomes the Hunan Delight, where Meredith makes her telling observations about Ben. Whether drawing from memory or from real life, Tomine gives just enough detail in the illustration that the feeling is absolutely true to life. Similarly, small details in the face or gestures of a character suggest a wide range of action and emotion. For Ben, the emotions range from sadness to anger, and the signs are apparent. Physically nondescript, he is usually seen with stooped shoulders and frown lines on his face and an apathetic manner. He looks as though he is trying to fit in with others, wearing contact lenses and reasonably fashionable clothes, but he gives every sign of insecurity. At five feet, eight inches, he stands on a level with his white dates, several inches above his Asian girlfriend, but several inches below her non-Asian friend

Shortcomings / tomine

679

Leon, of whom he becomes irrationally jealous. In her two years of living with Ben, Miko has learned how to push all his buttons, and she admits that she sometimes does so just to get some sort of response. That response usually leads to fits of anger. She knows that he has bought the whole American Dream of the young and beautiful blond and that he has simply settled for her. She is right; the reader can see his eyes wander after a passing blond, but he takes even the slightest suggestion that he has an ideal “type” as a personal attack, often reducing the discussion to witty absurdities while resisting any possible change. It is in such scenes that the artwork proves especially helpful. It reduces the text to pure dialogue, providing all necessary descriptions and transitions. It also enhances the dialogue, suggesting what the speakers are feeling at any given point in the discussion. Without this context, the dialogue might sometimes sound like the transcript of a group therapy session, focusing on the “relentless negativity” that Miko correctly observes in Ben. With the illustrations, Ben’s partial breakthrough, his occasional moments of self-awareness, seem far more poignant. Shortcomings appeared to generally favorable reviews. In England, the New Statesman called it a book that asks to be read and reread, noting that Miko’s early actions and expressions invite reinterpretation. The Los Angeles Times called it a playful treatment of race by a careful draftsman who has no axes to grind. Entertainment Weekly said it was as true to life as any work of prose fiction. The New York Times Book Review called Tomine’s work “meticulously observed,” with a “Philip Roth vibe.” The main complaint about the story is that, far from overdramatizing his characters, Tomine has made them unpleasant, lacking friends for good reason. The Chicago Sun-Times wondered how anyone could have been attracted to Ben. A reviewer for Paste compared reading their story to watching a car crash for one hundred pages. Along similar lines, the reviewer for Bust remarked that Tomine’s fiction loses some of its bite and sad charm when extended to the book length. Tomine’s fans—many of them Gen Xers who have grown up with him and his characters—will recognize the dilemmas that his viewpoint character gets himself into. Asian American readers may find even more, particularly in the very occasional scraps of Korean and Japanese dialogue. One need not be Asian, however, or male or thirtysomething to enjoy Shortcomings. Tomine’s accomplishment is to tell a story that people will want to read and that also happens to concern topics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Thomas Willard

680

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 43. Bust 47 (October/November, 2007): 105-106. The Chicago Sun-Times, October 21, 2007, p. B8. Entertainment Weekly, no. 958 (October 12, 2007): 79. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 12. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2007, p. R5. New Statesman 137 (September 10, 2007): 56-57. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 11, 2007): 7. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 30 (July 30, 2007): 34-36.

681

THE SLAVE SHIP A Human History Author: Marcus Rediker (1951) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 434 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1700-1807 Locale: West Africa, Atlantic Ocean, various Caribbean islands, England, and the United States A well-researched study that describes the physical structure of slave ships that transported slaves from West Africa to the New World during the eighteenth century Principal personages: Thomas Clarkson, a British author who wrote against the slave trade Edward Kimber, a captain of slave ships who was infamous for his cruelty John Newton, a captain of slave ships who later became an opponent of the slave trade and wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” William Wilberforce, a member of the British parliament who worked to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire

The Slave Ship: A Human History is a historical study of the incredible human suffering and terror experienced by slaves who were transported from West Africa to the New World on British slave ships between 1700 and 1807, the year that the British parliament approved the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Marcus Rediker, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, undertook extensive archival research in British libraries and record offices, and he based this thorough study on original documents and on important but little-known eighteenth century books on the slave trade. The solidity of his research and his fifty-two pages of footnotes demonstrate clearly his scholarly expertise in this human tragedy that caused so much avoidable suffering in Africa, on numerous Caribbean islands, and in the United States. He wisely decided to limit his investigation to the British involvement in the slave trade over just one century. His choice of the eighteenth century also makes sense because it has been estimated that almost half of the total slaves transported from Africa to the New World endured this trip in the bottom of slave ships during that century. Had Rediker also chosen to examine participation in the slave trade by France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, this book would have been three or four times longer. Rediker explains clearly that England relied greatly on the slave trade for its immense wealth and political influence in the eighteenth century. The infamous slave trade was part of the triangular trade. English merchants shipped finished goods from England for sale in West Africa or to be traded with African chiefs for slaves. Rediker

682

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

points out that most black Africans who were transported to the New World as slaves had been kidnapped by other black African leaders and tribes and then sold or traded to captains of English slave ships. This may come as news to many readers who may not have realized that black Africans had sold other black women, men, and children into slavery. Rediker describes how slave ship captains and members of their crew worked through intermediaries or directly with African leaders to get slaves. He also relates how captured Africans were taken on small boats from which they were taken in chains onto slave ships, where they were kept chained on the lower deck. Rediker illustrates the horrendous conditions that the slaves endured by reproducing a 1787 drawing of the slave ship Brooks. The ship was built in 1781; its lower deck was designed to accommodate 294 slaves. Each slave occupied a space comparable to the that which a coffin would occupy. Each adult man was allocated a space six feet long and fifteen inches wide, while adult women, boys, and girls had even less space. The height of the prison area was just five feet, and there were no toilet facilities for the slaves. Those slaves who died during the “Middle Passage” were simply thrown overboard, where their bodies were eaten by ravenous sharks. Rediker explains that captains of slave ships attempted to justify such cruelty by claiming that the slaves had to be chained in order to prevent uprisings and to protect the crew from attacks. He argues persuasively that the physical and psychological mistreatment of slaves was part of organized terror designed to transform free human beings into subservient prisoners whom the captains planned to sell to plantation owners in the New World. Other forms of physical and psychological terror were experienced by slaves when they were dragged from the lower deck to the main deck. Slaves were then ordered to “exercise” in chains; those who resisted were whipped or captains threatened to throw them overboard. Other captains went even further. A captain named Edward Kimber ordered adult and adolescent women to “dance” naked before the crew in order to bring lascivious pleasure to the sadistic captain and crew. When one modest fifteen-year-old girl refused to “dance” in front of Kimber, he ordered his crew to flog her to death. Upon his return to England, Kimber wasindicted for the murder of this slave, but an English jury had no problem acquitting him because of its racist belief that killing an adolescent black slave did not constitute murder. This outrageous acquittal made it clear to slave ship captains that they could act with impunity. No English jury was willing to endanger the wealth that the slave trade brought to England. The captains had personal financial motivation to transport as many slaves as possible because they received a commission for each slave sold in the New World. The living conditions on the lower deck of slave ships may have been much worse than the illustration of the slave ship Brooks would have readers believe. There may well have been even less space on slave ships for each slave than the dimensions

Marcus Rediker is a professor of history and head of the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh. The Slave Ship is his fifth book on the slave trade and on maritime history.

The Slave Ship / rediker

683

described above. It is not at all surprising that a very large number of slaves died from infectious diseases and dysentery. Rediker notes that it is impossible to determine how many slaves died on English slave ships during the eighteenth century because slaves who did not survive the trip across the Middle Passage were simply thrown overboard. Records were not kept for dead slaves. It is reasonable to assume, however, that the fatality rate was very high. The third part of the triangular trade was also very profitable for England. After selling slaves to plantation owners, slave ship captains purchased raw materials and brought them back to England. By a cruel irony, the lower decks of slave ships were fully cleaned after the removal of slaves. Slave ship captains were more concerned with keeping raw materials clean and dry than with the health of the human beings whom they had enchained. In this book, Rediker writes frequently of his scholarly interest in economic history. He explains that a desire to increase profits motivated all the actions of slave ship captains and their masters back in England. Allowing more space per slave in the lower decks would have reduced profits, as it would have permitted the sale of fewer slaves in the New World. Relying on less sadistic methods of control than chains, whips, and psychological terror would have required hiring more crew members, and the wealthy slave ship owners in Liverpool and Bristol, then the two major English ports for slave ships, did not want to spend any more money than was absolutely necessary to transport the slaves. Rediker does an excellent not just in describing the crass economic motivation for the English participation in the slave trade throughout the eighteenth century but also in explaining how English Protestant leaders struggled for almost two decades to persuade Parliament to abolish the slave trade. With the 2007 film Amazing Grace, the general public became acquainted with the key involvement of William Wilberforce (1759-1833) in persuading Parliament to approve the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The very title of the film reminds viewers of the famous Protestant hymn composed in 1772 by the Anglican clergyman and former slave ship captain John Newton (1725-1807). Although the film illustrates effectively how Wilberforce’s religious beliefs convinced him that Christian moral values were totally incompatible with the existence of the slave trade, this otherwise admirable film underestimates the lengthy efforts that had preceded William Wilberforce’s successful efforts in 1807. Rediker explains that it took many years of repeated efforts by a number of people to change British attitudes toward the slave trade so that the British public slowly began to pressure its members of Parliament to abolish the slave trade. Opponents of the slave trade realized that they needed to shock the public by presenting viscerally powerful images and arguments. Slave ship owners in Bristol and Liverpool had no intention of cooperating with these opponents. An Anglican lay member named Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), who had written against the slave trade while he was studying at Cambridge University, decided in the late 1780’s that he wanted to tell the British public what actually happened on a slave ship. Although slave ship owners ordered their captains not to answer any questions from Clarkson, this did

684

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

not prevent him from acquiring firsthand information on the reality of human suffering during the Middle Passage. Clarkson went to pubs frequented by former crew members of slave ships, who told him that slaves were chained under horrendous conditions on the lower decks of slave ships and were frequently whipped by sadistic slave ship captains. Clarkson described bluntly the psychological and physical torture experienced by slaves during the Middle Passage. In addition to his verbal arguments, he reproduced in a 1787 pamphlet, first printed in Plymouth, England, and frequently reissued in book form, a drawing of the lower deck of the slave ship Brooks. Clarkson wanted his readers to conclude that the slave trade was nothing more than the systematic torture and murder of human beings. Newton, a highly respected Anglican priest, wrote a treatise titled Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1788), in which he wrote of his previous work as a slave ship captain. He spoke of the mistreatment that he had inflicted on slaves before his religious conversion and his eventual repentance for the sins that he had committed. His readers came to associate his hymn “Amazing Grace” with the grace that he had received during his religious conversion experience. On their own, Clarkson and Newton could not have succeeded in persuading the British parliament to abolish the slave trade, but they successfully convinced their fellow Anglican William Wilberforce, who was also a member of Parliament, to put forth their arguments in the House of Commons. The abolishment of the slave trade required the cooperation of numerous religious and political leaders in England. Marcus Rediker has done an excellent job of describing both the very real horrors of the slave trade and its abolition. Edmund J. Campion

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 2 (September 15, 2007): 9-10. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 15 (August 1, 2007): 776-777. Library Journal 132, no. 15 (September 15, 2007): 72. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 21, 2007): 15. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 30 (July 30, 2007): 67. The Wall Street Journal 250, no. 86 (October 11, 2007): D8.

685

THE SNORING BIRD My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology Author: Bernd Heinrich (1940) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). Illustrated. 461 pp. $29.95 Type of work: Autobiography, biography, natural history, science Time: 1896-2006 Locale: Maine, Poland, and Germany Heinrich recounts his father’s life and scientific career, and his own, with emphasis on their interactions with each other and with the events and biology of their times Principal personages: Gerd Heinrich, self-taught expert on a group of parasitic wasps Bernd Heinrich, Gerd’s son, a conventionally trained zoologist and author of the book Erwin Streseman, German ornithologist and Gerd’s colleague, mentor, and friend Hildegarde Buruvna (Mamusha), Gerd’s field assistant and third wife, and Bernd’s mother Anneliese Machatchek, Gerd’s field assistant and second wife

The central theme of The Snoring Bird is the relationship between a father, Gerd Heinrich, and his son, Bernd, as seen and recorded by the son. The younger Heinrich explores the philosophy of science and a number of biological principles in the context of this relationship and the comparison of the two men’s scientific careers. He touches on the two world wars from a German perspective—his father fought on that side in both wars. He considers the Cold War, Vietnam, and the impact of all those international events on his family and their biological endeavors. Bernd Heinrich gathered much of the information about his father from letters his father wrote to, and received from, colleagues and friends, especially Erwin Streseman, a German scientist who was his father’s mentor for much of his career. Heinrich found many of the letters to his father stored in the family’s barn and stained with pigeon waste. To flesh out his father’s career, he also used the books and scientific papers his father wrote and his own interactions with his father, including stories that his father told when he and his sister were young. Heinrich describes his father, whom he calls Papa throughout the book, as a singleminded, self-taught scientist whose life centered around a group of parasitic wasps, the ichneumon wasps. With the assistance of family members and friends, he collected wasps from all over the world and wrote scientific papers on their characteristics, relationships, and natural history. He worked as a biological collector, and wherever

686

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

he went he collected and preserved ichneumon wasps as well as the specimens he was paid to collect, primarily mammals and birds. His wives, Anneliese Machatchek and Hildegarde Buruvna (Mamusha, Bernd’s mother), and Anneliese’s sister, Liselotte Machatchek, were frequent members of his field crew. Anneliese participated even after he divorced her so he could marry Hildegarde. He drew Bernd into the effort in hopes that his son would take up the research on the ichneumon wasps and continue his work. Bernd did take up a career in biology and natural history, but he worked with sphinx moths, bees, and ravens, not ichneumon wasps. Unlike his father, he obtained an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, and a Ph.D.; he embraced a new biological philosophy and methodology that paid less attention to collections of whole animals and leaned more on behavioral, physiological, and molecular methods. He was employed as a faculty member at universities and published papers in the most prestigious scientific journals. Such accomplishments were difficult for his father to achieve; some eluded him entirely, at least in part because he did not have the appropriate degrees and because his methods were those of a previous generation. Heinrich describes his father’s participation in both world wars as a member of the German military, including a number of brushes with death. Later, when Bernd decided to volunteer for the Vietnam War, his father advised against it and based his advice on the contrast between his own enthusiastic loyalty to Germany in World War I and his lack of enthusiasm for Hitler’s leadership in World War II. He suggested that, from his German perspective, Vietnam was more like World War II. The younger Heinrich volunteered anyway but was rejected because of a bad back. He eventually came to agree with his father that the Vietnam War was a mistake. At the end of World War II, the Heinrich family immigrated to the United States. The story of their journey and life on a farm in Maine is an example of the immigration experience of a number of Europeans at the time. The consideration of his family’s interaction with these and other historic events enriches both the narrative and the reader’s appreciation for the events themselves. Heinrich compares his father’s attachment to Borowke, his estate in Poland until it was confiscated by the Soviet communists at the end of World War II, with his own attachment to two properties of his youth: Germany’s Hahnheide forest, where the family stayed for several years after World War II, and the property he grew up on in Maine, were Bernd’s Borowke. He considers each man’s love of nature and of discovery to be rooted in those attachments. Heinrich describes his father’s collecting trips as great adventures full of hardships, close calls, and outstanding success. An example, from which the title of the book is derived, is his Indonesian collecting trip. A bird, a type of rail with a call that sounds like a snore, was the primary target for the trip. After two years of collecting

Bernd Heinrich is a University of Vermont emeritus professor of biology. He has written a number of popular books, most about nature, several of them best sellers. He is also author of a large number of scientific papers, some published in premier journals such as Science.

The Snoring Bird / heinrich

687

and with thousands of specimens collected, the elder Heinrich was packing to return to Germany without the snoring bird, despite many diligent searches. The team planned to return to Indonesia to search more locations after they spent some time at home. However, because World War II was imminent, they realized that they would be unable to return in the near future. The disappointment over the missing rail was deepened in the light of this realization. On a whim, just a few days before departing for Europe, Gerd grabbed his bush knife and shotgun and went looking for specimens. He collected the snoring rail on this impromptu outing, putting the final touch on an exceptionally successful collecting trip. He wrote about the Indonesian trip in a book using the German for “snoring bird” as the title, and the younger Heinrich borrowed that title for the book reviewed here. The senior Heinrich led many other collecting trips, including trips to Bulgaria, Persia, Burma, Mexico, Africa, and different locations in the United States. Everywhere he went, he collected species for his sponsors and ichneumon wasps for his own collection. However, he was seldom included as an author of the papers describing his finds—those were left to the people with degrees. He was just a paid collector. That bothered him, as did the difficult time he always had getting financial support for his trips and other scientific efforts. Gerd’s disappointments bothered Bernd as well, although he contributed to them once. He refused to help his father apply for funding to analyze an ichneumon collection from Russia. Before asking Bernd for help, Gerd submitted a grant proposal asking for one thousand dollars. It was rejected, and Bernd felt that the resubmission was unlikely to be successful and that his father would blame him for the failure, stressing the relationship even more than did his refusal to help. Important aspects of the history and philosophy of biology are explored in the context of the father-son relationship. One example involves their contrasting research methods. The father’s focus was on collecting as many specimens from as many locations as he could and studying the specimens to learn about their distribution, diversity, and other characteristics. The methodology was modeled after that of Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and other giants of nineteenth century biology and exploration. In the twentieth century, however, it was considered old-fashioned, descriptive science and not very informative. In contrast, the twentieth century biologist worked by proposing theories and then testing them. That was the modern way to do science. Ironically, in the nineteenth century, Wallace was criticized for spending too much time “theorizing” when he should have been collecting. Bernd embraced the modern philosophy and methods, but in summarizing his view of the argument he gives credit to the old ways as natural first steps in the progress of science, important background for the new biological methods. He also describes theories proposed and tested by his father. They were neither as formal nor as rigorously crafted as the new biologists prescribed, or as the tests applied by the younger Heinrich in his own work, but his father was not blindly collecting specimens with no thought given to theory. Heinrich discusses some of the biological questions of the time as well; many of them still puzzle biologists today. One example is the latitudinal gradient in species

688

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

diversity, in which the total number of species increases toward the equator and decreases toward the poles. He considers only two of the many hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the latitudinal species diversity gradient. One of these assumes that the tropical zones were unaffected by glacial advances and retreats during the Ice Age and hypothesizes that stability through time resulted in widespread, long-lasting habitats in the tropics. This stability allowed time for the evolution of more species than in the more variable temperate and polar latitudes, which were alternately impacted by cold, moist conditions and advancing glaciers and then by warmer, drier conditions as the glaciers melted. The second hypothesis suggests the opposite—that the glacial cycles did affect the tropics. In the tropics, dry periods occurred when the glaciers advanced, and moist habitats existed only in scattered patches, leading to isolation of the plants and animals in those habitat patches. Isolation led to a new species evolving in each patch. When the glaciers retreated and climatic conditions turned moist, those habitat patches expanded and fused, forming a widespread habitat throughout which the new species spread. With the next glacial advance, populations of these species were isolated in the scattered habitat patches, driving the evolution of more new species. Repetition of these events generated the high species diversity of the tropics. Collections the Heinrichs made on an African trip were designed to provide evidence to help settle this question. These and other scientific problems, presented in the context of Heinrich family history, add substance to the book. The Snoring Bird is particularly interesting for the diversity of topics integrated with its play on the universal theme of parent-offspring tensions. Bernd comments often on his Papa’s disinterest in things important to him, but it is clear that their time together was special to him. He took a year off from his undergraduate studies to help his father with a collecting trip in Africa. He hesitated to interrupt his college career, but in retrospect he was glad he went because it was his father’s last big collecting trip. It does seem that the father did little to support the son’s interests while the son was frequently involved in supporting the father’s. Though troubled by his father’s inability to fulfill all his ambitions as a scientist and hurt by his father’s inattention to things important to him, Bernd expresses the conviction that his father lived a full and successful life and that he (Bernd) derived much of value from his association with his father. The book contains a few minor errors. “Mammalogist” is misspelled as “mammologist” on page 99. On page 250, “could not to publish” should have been either “not to publish” or “could not publish.” “Streseman” is sometimes rendered “Stresseman.” A parenthetical statement at the bottom of page 305 reads as if the most recent glacial advance started twenty thousand years ago, which was actually the beginning of the last glacial retreat. On the whole, however, the book is well edited. Unfortunately, there is no index. The “Notes and References” help to make up for the missing bibliography. The numerous illustrations, which include maps, drawings, and photographs, are very helpful. Reviews of the book have been enthusiastic. Carl W. Hoagstrom

The Snoring Bird / heinrich

689

Review Sources Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 427. Globe and Mail, June 2, 2007, p. D6. Library Journal 132, no. 9 (May 15, 2007): 113. Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007, p. R6. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 24, 2007): 24. Science News 172, no. 8 (August 25, 2007): 127. Scientific American 297, no. 2 (August, 2007): 100.

690

SNOW PART Author: Paul Celan (1920-1970) First published: Schneepart, 1971, in Germany Translated from the German and with an introduction by Ian Fairley Publisher: Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York). 198 pp. $14.00 paperback Type of work: Poetry Tormented Holocaust survivor Celan’s last poems, including his unpublished ones, are ably translated Paul Celan is a strange and magical poet—a Jew who survived the Holocaust and yet did not; a writer who could use at least seven languages but could write poetry in only one, German, the language of the death camps. He was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Romania and grew up speaking German and Romanian. His parents died (his father from typhus, his mother by shooting) in work camps in the Ukraine. He himself was forced to work in labor camps between 1942 and 1944, but survived. Survivor guilt is one of his recurring themes. When the war was over, after some moving around he relocated in Paris. He was attempting to distance himself from German society, yet he taught German literature in France. He even changed his name, first to Ancel, and eventually to Celan, an anagram of Ancel that sounded more French. He is perhaps best known for his widely anthologized poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which tells of the horrors of the Holocaust with eerie rhythms and repetitions, suggesting his personal losses as well as evoking the entire machinery of destruction. In “Todesfuge,” translated into many languages, “Golden-haired Margarete” contrasts with “ashen-haired Shulamith”—the Aryan ideal woman and the canceled Jewish woman, associated with his mother. The “black milk of sunrise” that the “we” drink in the poem and the miasma of ashes that accompanies his lines re-create the nightmare landscape of the camps. There are numerous references to smoke and ashes throughout Celan’s poem, to the extent that the poems seem to bathe the reader in the ashes of his destroyed people. In Paris, Celan married the artist Gisele de Lestrange, but the poet was never able to get away from the torment of the Holocaust and his fortuitous survival in the labor camp. The wonder and delight he experienced through his son Eric appears in some of the work in Snow Part, but these emotions were not enough to outweigh his past. He committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine in 1970, after leaving in his diary the comment, “Depart Paul.” Celan’s poems are haunted and haunting. Language, death, and silence are their subjects. Celan’s earlier poems are fairly direct, but as he got older and kept on struggling with his ghosts and the German language, the poems became knotted, enclosed in themselves. It was as if he and the language were engaged in a struggle to the death. He

Snow Part / celan

691

invented words, putting together combina tions that can barely be translated because of Paul Celan published or authorized the multiple meanings of his neologisms, and seven collections of his poetry: Mohn the poems became so dense as to be almost und Gedächtnis (1952), Von Schwelle impenetrable. Still, the sense of total loss and zu Schwelle (1955), Sprachgitter absolute despair are the same in Snow Part as (1959; Speech-Grille, 1971), Die in the first poems. There is no escape for Niemandsrose (1963), Atemwende (1967; Breathturn, 1995), Fadensonnen Celan, and there is none for the reader. (1968; Threadsuns, 2000), and Snow Part contains Celan’s last work and Lichtzwang (1970; Lightduress, 2005); is very difficult indeed. The first five sec- he did not authorize the publication of tions of the book comprise “Snow Part,” Schneepart, which appeared in 1971, poems written during and around the poet’s after his death. He was awarded both breakdown in 1967. The last section, “Other the Bremen Literature Prize and the Poems,” includes some unpublished work. George Büchner Prize, Germany’s Celan’s concentrated intensity communicates most prestigious literary award. even when the poems resist paraphrase or explication. Each poem appears in German with a facing translation. The introduction is very helpful, as the translator, Ian Fairley, explains some of the historical events referred to in the poems that may not be in the reader’s frame of reference and provides some basic principles of his translation; also, Fairley places the writing of these poems in the context of Celan’s life. The conclusion, a brief biography of Celan, is useful as well as interesting and sends the reader to full biographies of this tragic figure. Most of the poems in this collection are short, some only a few lines; Celan has left behind him the expansiveness of “Todesfuge.” The themes and subjects are much the same as in his earlier poems. However, the casual reader would not want to enter Celan’s work by this gate—these poems are too compressed, too interior for those who have not followed his other work. They do have a few new directions; they include, for instance, the poems to his son Eric, which seem somewhat more positive than the others yet are freighted by the sorrow that comes with the knowledge of vulnerability. Nevertheless, the poems proclaim the miracle that his son should have come into existence. Most of these poems pit the struggle to articulate horror against silence and death. The poems are terse, brief, elliptical. Usually the lines are short, often containing only a few syllables. An example is this complete poem: TO SPEAK with blind alleys about what’s facing, about its expatriate sense—: to chew this bread, with writing teeth.

692

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The Celan conflict is encapsulated in these few lines. How is it possible to express the absolute annihilation visited on his people by the Holocaust? Only through a writing that is like consumption, like self-consumption. The black milk of “Todesfuge” becomes the dark communion, the bad bread. The original poem contains the invented word Schreibzähnen, which Fairley translates correctly as “writing teeth.” However, there are perhaps additional implications that are found only in the one-word description—the suggestion that writing teeth are a real property, that in fact the only way to face the horror is to chew over it and make it into poetry. This bad bread is the only nourishment available; chewing it with “writing teeth” is the poet’s obsession and duty. Moreover, the creation of poetry becomes a physical event, a kind of drive or instinct that gives the poet his sole reason for staying alive. Social philosopher Theodor Adorno initially claimed that there could be no poetry written after Auschwitz, but he too was caught by Celan’s enigmatic poetry of pain. By 1966, Adorno had modified his position to say, “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.” At first believing that attempting to describe the Holocaust resulted in aestheticising it, Adorno was led to believe, partly through his experience of Celan’s work, that the experience of total horror could be, and maybe needed to be, represented. In a sense, though, Celan agreed with Adorno’s initial position and saw the writing of such poetry as a deathly struggle with a central silence. The more constricted and knotted the poems are, the closer the poet comes to this silence. In this collection, there are only a few poems that are longer than half a page. In addition to their brevity, they are notable for their extreme precision about abstract things, their lack of colors or tones except for dark and light, the heaviness of each syllable. The longest poem here is probably “What Knits,” which carries its spare lines to a second page. It begins: “What knits/ at this voice?” The voice approaches silence, seems to attempt to charm it with words, to disarm it. It has a ritual feel to it that may suggest Sylvia Plath’s attempts at exorcising the ghost of her dead father. “Tumuli, tumuli,” Celan’s poem calls, “you/ hill out of there, alive,/ come/ into the kiss.” The German makes the noun Hügel (hill) into a verb, hügelst—an appropriation not easily represented in English, a language without such precise conjugations. “What Knits” is a kind of poem rare in Celan—a work in which positives seem to outweigh negatives. The “you” of the poem is webbed by worms, known by beetles, yet the “great globe” gives “safe passage.” If, as in Plath’s poem “Daddy,” the exorcism does not seem successful, this may be because we are reading the poem into the poet’s life and death. The unidentified “you” is a presence throughout this work, the shifting “you” standing for the self, the other, the silence, death, God. Its secondary effect is to pull the reader into the poem as an ear, as the listening silence. The poems suggest a wrestling with religion—an attempt to call forth an answer from the great silence, to find a word that is the Word, that makes sense of the nightmare. The dark mysticism of Celan’s work contributes to its power. Reading Celan’s work from beginning to end shows a drawing close to the silence that is also the listening, but there is no answer from the silence as Celan edges closer and closer to it in his last work.

Snow Part / celan

693

The translator’s introduction shows well some of the issues involved in the representation in English of this German work. The translation itself occasionally seems too hard or harsh—the German words assigned specific meanings when their implications are wider. For instance, Fairley translates Gelausch as “auricle”—a specific, physical part of the ear, but the invented word suggests the hearing, the listeningspace, not necessarily the ear or any part of the ear. There are a few other cases in which the translation seems to close off the poem in ways the poet may not have intended. There are some resonances that do not translate—multiple meanings that exist only in German and that cause a translator to choose among them. Also, the translator occasionally invents words when Celan has not, or chooses odd synonyms: He translates Geduld, which is something like patience or endurance, as “thole,” which is accurate but is an uncommon word that may not be in most readers’ vocabulary. Such linguistic comparisons will bother only those who scrutinize the originals. By and large, the translation does carry most of the vibrations of Celan’s cryptic, enclosed work. Paul Celan’s work is of course widely known, and many would answer only his name when asked for the names of Holocaust poets. Yet Celan’s work is only beginning to be fully explored by scholars and critics. This collection will help to fill in the gaps and define the trajectory of his thought, as will the collection of his letters recently released. Snow Part will be an essential component of his final oeuvre, showing the last effort to penetrate silence with language, to pass through horror into peace. Janet McCann

Review Source Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 95-96.

694

SOMETHING IN THE AIR Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation Author: Marc Fisher (1958) Publisher: Random House (New York). 374 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History Time: 1949 to the early twenty-first century Locale: The United States A scholarly yet readable account of changes that took place within America’s broadcast industry as rock-androll music came of age Principal personages: Todd Storz, the developer of the Top 40 formula Hal Jackson, an African American deejay Alan Freed, a Cleveland deejay who played rhythm and blues Jean Shepherd, a radio talk-show pioneer Bob Fass, a politically oriented FM host Tom Donahue, a San Francisco deejay Paul Sidney, a Long Island radio personality

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” One of many appealing things about Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation is that the author, while conceding Thompson’s points about the medium’s cash nexus, is a true fan who appreciates its potential, albeit rarely achieved, for greatness. As an adolescent, he listened to raconteur extraordinaire Jean Shepherd on a cream-colored transistor hidden under a pillow and in college hosted his own all-night show. Like the late David Halberstam, who died in an auto accident in 2007, Fisher proves himself to be an esteemed journalist, an excellent historian, and, at times, an insightful participantobserver. Based on a hundred interviews and extensive secondary research, his book contains “not a bit of dead air” (to quote from a Publishers Weekly review) and is a welcome supplement to Erik Barnouw’s three-volume A History of Broadcasting in the United States (1966-1970). In a dozen chapters about broadcast innovators, Fisher captures the vicissitudes of a nearly century-old industry adapting to technological change and defying periodic predictions of its impending demise. “As it ages,” Fisher writes, “radio absorbs the new, co-opts the rebellious, and reinvents itself every step of the way.” Big consoles quickly became affordable during the Jazz Age (a model costing $34.95 appeared in the 1927 Sears catalog). During the 1940’s, sets commonly appeared in kitchens and bedrooms. In 1949, however, a Life magazine article wondered, “Is

Something in the Air / fisher

695

Radio Doomed?” News, live drama, variety hours, game shows, situation comedies, soap operas, and other staples seemed better fitted for television. As ratings plummeted, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and other celebrities jumped ship, including former deejays Mike Wallace, Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Bill Cullen, and Soupy A columnist for The Washington Post whose Sunday column “The Listener” Sales. Even Arthur Godfrey, “Mr. Morning covers contemporary radio, Marc Radio,” telecast his show. No longer the fam- Fisher has an online chat program, ily entertainment center, radio morphed into Potomac Confidential, and a blog titled sundry niches, including the Top 40 format. Raw Fisher. He is the author of After The objective: to capture and retain a devoted the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and following. the Burdens of History (1995). In 1949, Todd Storz, with help from his family, purchased KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, for $75,000; at the time, local ads sold, as the saying went, for “a dollar a holler.” Observing waitresses putting dimes in jukeboxes to hear their favorite tunes even though they had been playing all day, Storz believed repetition to be the key to success. As one station manager told a skeptical deejay, “About the time you don’t like a record, Mama’s just beginning to learn to hum it. About the time you can’t stand it, Mama’s beginning to learn the words. About the time you’re ready to shoot yourself if you hear it one more time, it’s hitting the Top Ten.” Within two years, KOWH’s market share jumped from 4 to 45 percent. Storz sought out flamboyant personalities and had them mix in news, local doings, weather, traffic, jingles, call-in contests, offbeat sound effects, and stunts (including treasure hunts that caused maximum consternation from law-enforcement authorities). In short order he acquired half a dozen stations from Minneapolis to Miami. We all learned from Storz, one protégé admitted. Trailing behind Top 40 for market share were stations playing jazz, show tunes, classical compositions, big band standards, and so-called race records. Only the latter flourished, thanks to the growing popularity of rhythm and blues, which gave birth to rock and roll. White deejays Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles and Alan Freed in Cleveland attracted fans of all stripes, and before long African Americans such as Hal Jackson in New York and Dr. Hepcat (Lavada Hurst) in Austin carved out careers— Dr. Hepcat with a line of patter resembling rap. When Memphis executive Bert Ferguson hired a black host, he received bomb threats, but with 40 percent of the city’s population African American in 1948, WDAI’s format clicked and spawned imitators in Birmingham and Atlanta (home to the first black-owned station). Memphis residents could dig Brother Theo Wade at dawn (“Get up outta that bed, children”) and Rufus Thomas at dusk (“I’m young, I’m loose, I’m full of juice. I got the goose, so what’s the use?”). Bluesman B. B. King even had a show of his own. With the advent of rock and roll, Top 40 became more youth-oriented. Deejays such as New York City’s Cousin Bruce Morrow were pied pipers to a special sub-

696

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

culture that liked the lingo and frenetic pace. Critics predicted that sponsors would balk at shows appealing mainly to teen angst and complained that the fare was poisoning young minds and promoting sexual license and race mixing. Of course, Top 40 charts also included ballads (“Davy Crockett” was number one in 1955), novelty songs (“The Purple People Eater” topped the charts in 1958), slow standards (The Platters scored with “Twilight Time” and “Smoke Gets in your Eyes,” among others), and throwbacks like the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra’s “So Rare” (number two in 1957). Rock-and-roll bashers persuaded Congress to investigate the degree to which deejays receied money for plugging records—a practice not illegal at the time. How else, they charged, to account for such trashy music flooding the airways? The investigation led to the payola scandal, which ruined some pioneers, including Alan Freed. While pop music dominated the AM dial, an eccentric genius named Jean Shepherd invented what came to be known as talk radio. Twice fired for persistently digressing from the music, he migrated to WOR in New York, where he held forth nightly for four and a half hours. Intermittently spinning jazz records between acerbic monologues, Shepherd’s tales of festering youth had a universal appeal, as did his irreverence toward sponsors and management functionaries. His eventual successor, Long John Nebel, attracted night owls interested in UFOs, health nostrums, and conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1960’s, FM came into its own. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) forced stations to stop simulcasting AM shows, and automobile manufacturers wired their vehicles for FM. Carrying on Shepherd’s legacy in Los Angeles was John Leonard with Nightsounds, while New Yorker Bob Fass hosted Radio Unnameable on WBAI. Blatantly political, as befitting the 1960’s, Fass provided a forum for Bob Dylan and lesser folk artists, as well as counterculture activists such as yippie prankster Abbie Hoffman. The scent of marijuana ever-present, Radio Unnameable was, in Fisher’s words, “an art piece, created anew each night, an improvised mélange of sound—live music, recorded speeches, random phone calls, eyewitness reports from war zones and urban conflicts, recitations of poetry and prose, solicitations for political causes eternal and evanescent, advertisements for illegal drugs, experiments with noise and beauty and silence.” In 1969, Thunderclap Newman’s hit single “Something in the Air” captured the existing antiestablishment mood in England and America. While political revolution remained a fanciful pipe dream, technology continuously revolutionized radio in ways that fostered variety and creativity. Album sales had surpassed singles, giving rise to alternative programming targeting baby boomers. Fed up with Top 40 blandness, Tom Donahue had quit KYA in San Francisco to promote concerts before taking a job with struggling FM station KMPX. Spinning cuts from acid rock albums, Donahue was attuned to the burgeoning psychedelic scene. Head shop advertisements were acceptable, but spots for gasoline, cigarettes, fast food, alcohol, or branches of the armed services verboten. Larry Miller signed off with the quip: “May each and every one of you find a little pot at the end of your rainbow.” In 1971, the FCC attempted to ban songs that glorified drugs, but Donahue refused to trim

Something in the Air / fisher

697

his sails. When KMPX’s owner tried to stamp out illegal drug use at the station, Donahue organized the “Great Hippie Strike” before bolting to KSAN. Eventually, market researchers such as Lee Abrams at WMYQ in Miami drained much of the eccentricity and joy out of album-oriented rock programs, but noteworthy college stations such as Buffalo’s WBFO kept the faith. Launching a “superstars” format with the slogan “More music! Less talk!” Abrams had focus groups “scientifically” select cuts based on seven-second snippets from the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, and other familiar favorites. The premise, according to Fisher, was that listeners could not get enough of the songs they loved nor stand even one spin of those they loathed. Abrams resuscitated one New York station by switching from Spanish-language programs to disco, while in Chicago he boosted the ratings of WLUP (“The Loop”) by making it antidisco (shock jock Steve Dahl’s Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park became legendary). Whereas Top 40 had been, in theory, “everybody’s music,” by the late 1970’s listeners could choose from a menu that included progressive rock, hard rock, oldies, disco, country, all talk, and soul. To some, the variety signified progress; to others, ghettoization. Soul stations, usually white-owned, more than held their own, especially on AM. After The Washington Post donated WHUR to the historically black Howard University, for three years the station featured a smorgasbord of avant-garde music, culture, and politics. The highlight was 360 Degrees of Black Experience, a three-hour news block during evening drive time. Eventually, eager to attract black middle-class listeners, the station went mainstream, cutting 360 Degrees down to an hour, and then ten minutes. The ratings-driven station manager filled the sevento-midnight slot with Quiet Storm, emphasizing love songs targeted for women. Cathy Hughes, who had guided WHUR through its early days and was not about to cop out, purchased rival WOL and, adopting a talk format, started hosting a primetime slot. During the 1980’s, more and more stations were switching from Top 40 to all talk. For one thing, the FCC no longer enforced the fairness doctrine, and satellite technology made syndication inexpensive. The result was standardization in various guises, including sports talk, a genre ignored by the author. Chauvinist Tom Leykis in Los Angeles was master of the double entendre, while Rush Limbaugh rose to stardom in Sacramento mixing reactionary politics with showbiz flair. Howard Stern pushed the envelope of indecency more than most and was fired from one station after speculating about the Statue of Liberty’s masturbation technique. Hoping to attract men, the emphasis, to quote Fisher, was on “piercingly partisan politics and relentless raunch.” More edifying was National Public Radio, which commenced in 1970, but after a period of experimentation sacrificed diversity for homogeneity, thanks in part to consultant David Giovannoni, who believed that a program with a minimal audience was not providing a public service. A few public radio stations, such as KCRW at Santa Monica College, remained experimental, but most listeners favored network staples (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, A Prairie Home Companion). Also hurting local coverage was consolidation by corporations such as Clear Channel Communications (infamous for barring the Dixie Chicks from its air-

698

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

waves and staging prowar rallies in 2003). In Minot, North Dakota, for instance, Clear Channel bought all six stations. In 2002, a train derailed, causing a toxic ammonia spill. The one full-time news staffer was unavailable, so Minot stations were no help in providing coverage. Despite all that is wrong with the contemporary scene, Fisher remains upbeat. Satellite radio, for instance, offers subscribers variety (zydeco, bluegrass) not normally found elsewhere. Lee Abrams, of all people, upset over research techniques gone haywire, became programming chief for XM Satellite Radio in 1998 and told his deejays: “If you sound like FM, you’re fired.” The Internet spawned Web radio (no license necessary) and creative “podcasts” ready for downloading. Low-power FM has enabled small markets to provide local coverage despite efforts by religious zealots to monopolize the territory. For decades, eccentric Long Islander Paul Sidney has delivered old-fashioned radio to his community, doing 250 remote broadcasts a year and holding forth on a Main Street public bench gauging the public pulse. In a moving tribute to Sidney and others like him, Fisher concludes: “For a society to work, Edmund Burke said, its people must recognize what it is they have in common. Those bonds can be big concepts such as liberty and democracy, but they can also be small things, single voices that remind us of who we are and what we care about.” James B. Lane

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 8. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 21 (November 1, 2006): 1110. Library Journal 132, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 111. The New York Times Book Review 156 (January 28, 2007): 11. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 47 (November 27, 2006): 44. Wired 15, no. 1 (January, 2007): 76.

699

SOULS OF THE LABADIE TRACT Author: Susan Howe (1937) Publisher: New Directions (New York). 127 pp. $16.95 Type of work: Poetry Howe explores historical episodes, including the foundation and dissolution of the Labadist utopian community (1684-1722) in Maryland, through the lens of her experimental poetry, employing both verbal and visual elements A significant problem facing experimental writers is that of reputation. Once identified as such, the writer suffers from the reaction that “experimental,” to many readers, is nearly synonymous with “inaccessible” or “incomprehensible.” This especially holds true in poetry. Many general readers feel reluctant to open a book of poems, of any sort. Having it described as experimental only makes their reluctance the greater. Susan Howe certainly ranks among the most prominent poets of an avowedly experimental nature in the United States. In her new collection, Souls of the Labadie Tract, she adopts a strategy that seems designed to mitigate this reaction to her work. Rather than asking the reader to dive into the poems without explanation, a common practice among experimental writers, Howe opens the book with several prose pieces. Even esoteric poetry, Howe essentially acknowledges, can acquire more lucidity when original source materials are unveiled. Her poems are of an esoteric nature, to be sure, yet the reader of these prose pieces can move forward into the poetry with more assurance than would be the case had Howe offered no helpful context or explanation. In a book whose contents page lists only six items, half are prose. Two selections have identical titles: “Errand.” Another is titled “Personal Narrative.” In addition, the collection’s title poem, “Souls of the Labadie Tract,” opens with two pages of prose. Each prose section focuses on some area of personal fascination for Howe, always relating to New England history. Journeys of various kinds also figure in these accounts. The first “Errand,” for instance, discusses horseback rides taken by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) during his ministry in Northampton, Massachusetts. One particular habit seizes Howe’s attention: “As an idea occurred to him, he pinned a small piece of paper on his clothing. . . . I love to imagine this gaunt and solitary traveler covered in scraps, riding through the woods and fields of Massachusetts and Connecticut.” The second “Errand” discusses, among other matters, walks taken by American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), including his daily two-mile walk from home to office, when he, too, would jot thoughts on scraps of paper. In its dictionary sense, the word “errand” refers to a short journey, often relating to the delivery of a message—a meaning making the word a most fitting choice for title, in these two instances.

700

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The name of the longest of these prose works, “Personal Narrative,” takes on resonance because of the subject of the first “Errand.” In an essay of his own, written around 1743, Jonathan Edwards described his life in terms of his Puritan Christian awakening, and he titled it “Personal Narrative” as well. Edwards’s account progressively moved through the stages of his life, beginning with childhood. In contrast, Howe’s account begins at a moment in her adult life, when she was “a poet with no academic affiliation” in the 1970’s and early 1980’s and living near New Haven, Connecticut. While reading a narrative written by a seventeenth century Massachusetts minister and militia member, the Reverend Hope Atherton, Howe experienced a moment of awakening of her own: “I vividly remember the sense of energy and change that came over me one midwinter morning when, as the book lay open in sunshine on my work table, I discovered in Hope Atherton’s wandering story the authority of a prior life for my own writing voice,” Howe writes. Howe’s “Personal Narrative” describes her research in Yale University’s Sterling Library and her encounters with the past. Although these encounters took place within a library, the historical literature with which she engages is not of a tamed and wall-constrained nature but rather wild and natural. She cites the beginnings of Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Walking” and describes how Thoreau saw his walks out of Concord, Massachusetts, into the “impervious and shaking swamps” as a journey into a sacred place. Thoreau’s example helps give Howe words to discuss her own journey. She employs little of the diction or expansive approach of Thoreau, however, presenting her thoughts in a manner distinctively hers. Both the thoughts and the means of their expression reveal her intentions and desires as a writer. “I wished to speak a word for libraries as places of freedom and wildness,” she writes in “Personal Narrative.” “Often walking alone in the stacks, surrounded by raw material paper afterlife, my spirits were shaken by the great ingathering of titles and languages. This may suggest vampirism because while I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my life as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath.” This “library nature” reappears in the poems within this collection, and so does a contrasting nature—that of the world of society, commerce, and even the arts—which appears in recurring images and accounts relating to threads, cloth, and garments. As important as “Personal Narrative” is, “Souls of the Labadie Tract” is undoubtedly the book’s central work. Ambitious in its experimental methods, it yields meaning to the reader by several means, beginning with introductory notes on Labadist history. The Labadists were members of a utopian sect who followed the teachings of French Quietist Jean de Labadie. Quietism was a contemplative, mysti-

Susan Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961 with a degree in painting. In her art, she employed techniques of visual quotation and collage, as she would in her later poems. She held the Samuel P. Capen Chair for Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was the BainSwiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University before her retirement in 2007.

Souls of the Labadie Tract / howe

701

cal movement within the Catholic Church. The Labadie Tract of the title is an actual section of land, 3,750 acres in size, near where Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware meet. The Labadists established their community in 1684. It was dissolved in 1722. This prose introduction, placing the Labadists in a specific range of years and in specific geographic location, is paired with another introductory item on its own page: a single line by Wallace Stevens. This gesture of contrast, between prose exposition and poetic line, seems to indicate that the historical precision of the Labadist subject of the poem is to be presented through methods influenced by Stevens, whose emphasis on the evocative and musical potential of words could at times diminish and even eliminate semantic clarity and precision. “Souls of the Labadie Tract” itself is presented in a striking manner. On each page are one or two stanzas of five to eight lines total, set in a small block at the center of the paper. They are small rectangles of words framed by open space—visually echoing the note-covered scraps of paper of Edwards and Stevens. The poem displays a certain narrative movement based on the story of the Labadist community. The initial joy of the Labadists in the community’s formation is expressed, in part, with ample musical reference. In the following, as in other stanzas, music appears allied to clothing: I’ll borrow chapel voices Song and dance of treble bass for remembrance StiltWalker Plate-Spinner air piebaldly dressed heart’s content embroidered note Distant diapason delight

The opening and middle sections of the poem suggest aspects of the Labadist community and its “Millennial hopes.” The sections appear to have several speakers, with the voice at times seeming to be the poet, at other times the historical Labadist figures, who are rising from that “library nature” of the printed and written word. At times the voices seem in conversation with one another: “There it is there it is—you/ want the great wicked city/ Oh I wouldn’t I wouldn’t.” Lines toward the poem’s end point toward difficulties, perhaps even crisis, faced by the community as it comes to an end. The poem does present distinct obstacles to the reader’s understanding. Howe isolates sentences and sentence fragments from narrative context, a method that inevitably leads to loss of meaning. Some lines, moreover, include deliberately archaic elements, presumably drawn from the historic texts themselves. Her technique of sometimes slicing apart words (for instance, the name “Alciato” in one section becomes “Alciat” in the next) also serves to sever meaning from the text. In the following section, several of these difficulties appear:

702

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 To swim for sake of rhyme for meter faint letter slield in pencil after subscribeth Shorthand on it because of streights all glue for strife

In this example, the words “subscribeth” and “streights” suggest historical texts, in the former case by its archaic conjugation, in the latter by its spelling. The word “slield” may be an archaic term not preserved in dictionaries, or a word that has suffered truncation of some sort at Howe’s hand. Whatever the case, if it bears meaning, it does so only for those privileged to know Howe’s intentions; thus, it presents another obstacle to extracting meaning from the lines. Use of such a word as “slield” may give notice to the reader that something besides reading-for-meaning is being offered by these stanzas—even though a reader is obviously the one being addressed. In other words, the word may serve to direct the reader to approach the page as viewer, with the verbal-graphic element being preeminent, or as listener, in which case the verbal music is being emphasized. The use of techniques that distance the reader from the page may be taken as evidence of a sort of elitism on Howe’s part. Alternately, it may be accepted as simply part of her method: Combining the verbal color of words and names with their graphic appearance is part of her technique. That the graphic appearance of a text is of importance to Howe is stressed in several places in Souls of the Labadie Tract, not only in the obviously careful presentation of the poems but also in explicit terms, as in her statement, “Font-voices summon a reader into visible earshot,” found in “Personal Narrative.” Her reference in the title poem to “black letter,” for instance, probably refers to the common but archaic font and lettering style, not to either blackness or the alphabet. The closing poem of the volume, a paean to a piece of a garment, is dominated by its visual exploration of dissected, shaped, and graphically rearranged text fragments. Titled “Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards,” it begins with an image: a black-and-white reproduction of the square piece of cloth. The wedding-dress fragment provides an ideal focus for Howe’s attention. It not only resembles one of the squared pieces of paper on which Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens jotted notes while riding or walking but also is a piece of cloth, literally a fragment, that is preserved not in a textile museum but—much more appropriately—in a rare-book library. In “Personal Narrative,” Howe states that “Hope Atherton is lost in the great world of nature.” By offering the reader this fragment of a dress, Howe expresses much the same sentiment of another historical figure, the wife of Jonathan Edwards. The textual fragments used to create collage-like masses of words, which are in essence the stanzas of the poem, presented one per page across thirteen pages, are mostly literally unreadable, having been so chopped, truncated, effaced, and distorted that the sense to be taken from them is almost purely visual in nature. The penultimate page presents an exception, being three sentences and presented in a simple, sans serif font, with the

Souls of the Labadie Tract / howe

703

first sentence again referring to a garment: “We are all clothed with fleece of sheep I keep saying as if I were singing as these words do.” Relating words, poems, and ideas to thread, cloth, and clothing seems an essential focus—perhaps even the “errand” of the poem, and of the book. In that initial prose description of Edwards, Howe’s own jagged poetic vision erupts in stark, startling statement: “Words give clothing to hide our nakedness.” Mark Rich

Review Source Publishers Weekly 254, no. 46 (November 19, 2007): 40.

704

SPOOK COUNTRY Author: William Gibson (1948) Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (New York). 371 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: February, 2006 Locale: Hollywood; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Vancouver, British Columbia The second book in a trilogy started with Pattern Recognition in 2003, bringing a science-fiction sensibility to bear on the contemporary world Principal characters: Hollis Henry, a former member of a rock band, now defunct, trying out a new career in journalism Hubertus Bigend, a Belgian magnate with far-flung interests Tito, a young man in an extended Cuban Chinese family, based in New York City, who operates outside the law Milgrim, a slacker, trained as a Russian translator, shanghaied for a covert operation Brown, his captor, a Blackwater-style “contractor” employed by shadowy U.S. government elements, who has Tito under surveillance The old man, Brown’s antagonist, a retired U.S. national security specialist who is on a personal crusade against the direction the country has taken

William Gibson’s imagination seems to work naturally in threes. His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), the book that made him famous, turned out to be the first installment in a trilogy that also included Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). This was science fiction—Gibson was hailed as the virtuoso of “cyberpunk”—but already he was being read by people who did not hang out in that genre. With his second trilogy, comprising Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), Gibson moved much nearer to the present—Virtual Light is set in 2005—and with Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country he has dropped the conventions of science fiction altogether while maintaining the sensibility that gave us the word “cyberspace” (“the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” as he wrote in Neuromancer). Spook Country interweaves three narrative lines with three protagonists. First among equals is Hollis Henry, formerly of the Curfew, a rock band that flourished in the early 1990’s, disbanded, and still enjoys a cult following. Her post-Curfew investments having gone sour, Hollis—who has done a little writing—has taken an assignment with a magazine start-up, Node, described as a European Wired. She is supposed to write about “locative art”—a species of virtual reality that would allow a person

Spook Country / gibson

705

who had donned a “helmet” to see an image “tagged” to a specific place by the artist, such Born in Virginia, William Gibson as a re-creation of actor River Phoenix lying immigrated to Canada in 1968. His dead on the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard, first novel, the best-selling overdosed. Take the helmet off and the side- Neuromancer (1984), swept the major walk is empty. The assignment brings Hollis science-fiction prizes and introduced the world to “cyberspace,” a term he to Hollywood. The second strand centers on Tito, a Cuban had coined in a 1981 short story. In addition to his many books, he has Chinese man in his early twenties with a comwritten for magazines such as Wired, plicated family history. His grandfather was and he contributed two scripts to the involved in the founding of Fidel Castro’s in- television series The X-Files. telligence service after the revolution in Cuba and worked closely with the Russians when they came. (He spent some time in the Soviet Union himself and received extensive training there, as did Tito’s beloved aunt, Juana; Tito himself speaks Russian as well as Spanish.) Tito’s father also worked in Cuban intelligence. After he was killed, when Tito was still a boy, the grandfather put family welfare above his commitment to the cause (unlike most of the family and indeed unlike most Cubans, he remained a true believer in communism), bringing the rather improbable clan to New York, where they employ a mixture of tradecraft and Santería to pursue various enterprises outside the law. The third strand involves Milgrim, a slacker—probably in his early forties—who has worked in the past as a Russian translator but has fallen on hard times. Addicted to tranquilizers and barely scraping by, he is easy prey for Brown, a nasty fellow who kidnaps Milgrim because he needs someone with a knowledge of Russian to translate intercepted text messages in Volapuk. (The original Volapuk was an artificial language akin to Esperanto, but in this context it refers to the use of roman letters as equivalent to Cyrillic characters, so that a Russian speaker can send a message without a Cyrillic keyboard; it can function as a code of sorts.) The novel consists of a series of short chapters, eighty-four in total, shifting among these three lines of the narrative, with Hollis the most prominent but the other two strongly represented, not merely secondary characters. Also, as the book progresses, the connections linking the three become clearer and increasingly intricate. All three plotlines converge in the tale of a mysterious shipping container, which ultimately turns out to contain $100 million in cash. The money was siphoned from the nearly $12 billion in Iraqi funds—primarily oil revenue, held by the Federal Reserve under a U.N. mandate—sent by the United States to Iraq between March, 2003, and June, 2004, intended to aid in the reconstruction of the country but much of it subsequently unaccounted for. Whoever planned this heist—and that is never specified, beyond the clear implication that some government functionaries, “no one you would have heard of,” were involved—has had unexpected difficulty finding a place to launder the cash. Moreover, they have learned that someone else is trying to track the container in its passage on the seas. Brown is employed by these shadowy conspirators as a “contrac-

706

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

tor,” and he has Tito under surveillance because Tito is acting as a courier for information concerning the shipping container. Hollis, meanwhile, stumbles on the story in what seems entirely an accident in the course of her research on locative art, but she does not begin to understand what she has discovered until she meets Hubertus Bigend, a fabulously wealthy and secretive Belgian magnate who is the money behind Node. Indeed, as they talk, and it becomes clear how much he knows about Hollis, she begins to wonder if she was hired for this assignment specifically because he believes that through her he will learn more about the container and the machinations surrounding it. (It is the knowledge— the “intelligence”—that interests him.) In the climax of the action, Hollis, Tito, Milgrim (brought by Brown), and Bigend are all drawn to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the container finally comes to port. There—and again by an accident that is not quite an accident—Hollis meets an enigmatic figure described as “the old man,” whom the reader has met earlier in conjunction with Tito. The old man is a retired specialist in national security who, Hollis is told, went off the edge after September 11, 2001. He hates the direction the country has taken since then—the abuse of law, the torture, the corruption—and he has responded by calling on old friends in the trade to help him in a quixotic personal crusade. In this respect, Spook Country resembles a wide variety of novels published in the shadow of the war in Iraq and the “war on terror,” in which a plot of byzantine complexity leads in the end to the White House or somewhere in that neighborhood, and where the heart of darkness often reveals an embrace between shadowy government conspirators and Evangelical Christians. Examples include Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and Peter Abrahams’s Nerve Damage (2007). As for Spook Country, the money from the shipping container is supposed to end up at a megachurch in Idaho—“with its own television station . . . with an adjacent gated community.” That $100 million has to be laundered somewhere. This trope hardly begins to encompass what Gibson is up to in the novel, which has to be read in conjunction with Pattern Recognition. The title of that novel introduces what seems to be the overarching concern of the trilogy in the making. Human beings are inveterate pattern recognizers. The protagonist of Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard, makes her living doing just that. She is a “coolhunter,” anticipating trends in style and fashion and consumption: “What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.” Cayce remembers her father, Win Pollard, a security consultant, warning against “apophenia,” the “perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” Gibson has frequently zeroed in on what he regards as instances of this human weakness, and he does so again in Spook Country—as when, for example, a character says that the effectiveness of terrorism depends on the same human flaw that permits people to imagine that they will win the lottery. In both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, this vigilance against “an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition,” is balanced by an awareness of an opposite error: a stubborn refusal to acknowledge patterns, connections, meanings—perhaps because they violate preconceptions.

Spook Country / gibson

707

In both novels, the odd word “steganography” turns up at a crucial juncture. Steganography is a way of transmitting a message by hiding it in a larger message. Such a “carrier” message does not appear to be hiding anything. It could be—as in Spook Country—a digital music file, in which the secret message has been very thinly spread (and perhaps encrypted to boot). Reading a novel in some ways resembles reading a “stego file” with an alert eye for the hidden message (and a healthy respect for the power of apophenia to seduce the mind). In Pattern Recognition, Win Pollard—who was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—is missing and presumed dead, though on several occasions he seems to be speaking to Cayce. She recalls putting posters of him up after the attacks, hoping someone will recognize him: “Win, deeply and perhaps professionally camera-shy, had left remarkably few full-face images, and the best she’d been able to do had been one that her friends had sometimes mistaken for the younger William S. Burroughs.” In Spook Country, meeting the nameless “old man,” Hollis thinks “he looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone).” Are Win Pollard and the old man one and the same, or is this merely a coincidence? Gibson makes us think about the way in which we seek patterns, recognize them, evaluate them, find meaning in them. Gibson is also a superb observer of the everyday. Hollis may be speaking for him when she thinks about the appeal of writing: “She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write. . . . She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them.” Gibson seems to share that fascination, and he looks at all manner of things with the gaze of a visitor to a distant world. Hollywood, New York, Washington, D.C., Vancouver: All are at once familiar and passing strange, via the virtual reality of ink on a page. John Wilson

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 7 (December 1, 2007): 66. Entertainment Weekly, no. 947 (August 10, 2007): 72. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 11 (June 1, 2007): 521. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 166. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 26, 2007): 12. The New Yorker 83, no. 20 (July 23, 2007): 79. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 35. Time 170, no. 7 (August 13, 2007): 67.

708

STANLEY The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer Author: Tim Jeal (1945) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 608 pp. $38 Type of work: Biography Time: 1841-1904 Locale: Denbigh, Wales; Liverpool; New Orleans; Tennessee (Battle of Shiloh); Colorado; Turkey; Greece; Spain; London; Africa (Ethiopia, Zanzibar, East Africa, the Congo Free State, the Sudan); Brussels This biography of Henry Morton Stanley presents new information on the discoverer of David Livingstone and emphasizes his role as an explorer; though marred by excessive defensiveness about Stanley, the book raises important issues about European colonialism Principal personages: Henry Morton Stanley, born John Rowlands, an explorer Elizabeth Parry, his mother Henry Hope Stanley, his supposed adoptive father David Livingstone, an African explorer James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald Tippu Tip, an Arab slave trader Leopold II, the king of Belgium Emin Pasha, the governor of southern Sudan Katie Gough Roberts, Stanley’s fiancé Alice Pike, Stanley’s fiancé Dorothy Tennant Stanley, Stanley’s wife

The most startling thing about Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, a new biography of Henry Morton Stanley, is Tim Jeal’s claim that Stanley’s famous greeting never happened. Jeal argues that Stanley never said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” when he found David Livingstone in the African wild. For those with only a passing knowledge of African exploration, this will come as a shock. The only thing most people know about Stanley is that he was an American journalist sent out to find Livingstone and that he uttered his famous line on finding him. According to Jeal, most of that is untrue. Stanley was not an American; in fact, his real name was not Stanley. He was not primarily a journalist; at least in later life, he abandoned journalism for exploration. The famous line was an invention, albeit by Stanley himself when writing about the incident and in press interviews. Moreover, Jeal recounts that Livingstone, the renowned explorer and missionary, was not actually lost when Stanley found him.

Stanley / jeal

709

This is revisionism with a vengeance, and perhaps not all of it is to be believed. On Tim Jeal is the author of two previous the issue of the famous line, for instance, biographies, Livingstone (1973) and Jeal’s argument is mainly based on the ab- Baden-Powell (1989). He has also sence of evidence (a page torn from Stanley’s published a memoir, Swimming with diary and a lack of any confirmatory state- My Father (2004), and numerous ment from Livingstone) rather than on posi- novels, including Cushing’s Crusade tive new information. In the end, the truth (1974), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. about Stanley, as Jeal demonstrates, is that he became inextricably associated with the famous line, even mocked for it, which is ironic if he indeed never spoke it and only invented it because he thought it made him sound like the proper English gentleman he wished he were. According to Jeal, Stanley’s life was full of such ironies. He not only was mocked for saying something he only pretended he said but also was savagely criticized for doing things he only pretended to have done. Throughout his life, Stanley told lies to create a better impression of himself, lies that came back to haunt him. Most notably, he exaggerated the number of Africans he killed in order to appear strong. As a result, he was reviled for being callously cruel and in the end was denied a burial spot beside Livingstone in Westminster Abbey. All this is not to say that Jeal criticizes Stanley for telling lies. Throughout this very sympathetic biography, Jeal is at pains to defend Stanley at every turn, to justify his actions, even his lies and his killings, or at least to excuse them and understand them, in an attempt to have readers pity Stanley and to admire the way he overcame his difficult background and became a “Homeric” hero. In this way, Jeal sets himself at odds with both the debunking fashion in biography writing, in which biographers set out to condemn their subjects, and the current views on Stanley, colonialism, and African history. This aspect of his revisionism is in fact far more significant than his attempt to discredit the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” story. Jeal sets himself against the proponents of “postcolonial guilt” and attempts to justify nineteenth century European colonialism in Africa. Jeal begins by tracing Stanley’s origins as an illegitimate child named John Rowlands in Wales. Sent from relative to relative and eventually ending up in a workhouse, the young Stanley had a hard time of it, especially in Jeal’s version of events. Frank McLynn, an earlier biographer, downplays the suffering, but Jeal plays it up. McLynn, writing in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, adopted the debunking tone, painting Stanley as cruel, even sadomasochistic, and also latently homosexual. Jeal’s aim throughout is to refute McLynn and portray a humane, compassionate, fully heterosexual Stanley. Escaping from the workhouse, Stanley went first to Liverpool and then to the United States, landing in New Orleans, where he changed his name. Jeal did not discover the name change; in fact, it was included in Stanley’s own autobiography, published after his death. However, one of Jeal’s new claims is that Stanley’s account of how he came by his new name is false. Stanley was not adopted by a rich merchant

710

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

by the name of Henry Stanley who bestowed his name on the penniless refugee. Instead, young John Rowlands simply appropriated the original Henry Stanley’s name in order to create a more impressive life story for himself. Again, Jeal is understanding, summoning popular psychology to the defense of his subject by saying, “Young people who lie usually do so because they feel bad about themselves and need to enhance their self-esteem.” Jeal also defends Stanley’s desertions during the American Civil War, his threatening a U.S. Army officer with a gun after the war, and his violent attack on a Turk in an early exploration effort in the Middle East. Jeal either accepts Stanley’s version of events (he was acting in self-defense in Turkey) or calls his actions “not unforgivable.” Jeal’s book is very much the case for the defense, which mars it as much as a prosecutorial approach would. In the end, posterity cares little whether Stanley was a good or bad man; no doubt he was a mixture of the two. The real reason to write or read a biography about him is to understand his achievements. Jeal certainly thinks Stanley had achievements, primarily as an explorer. Again, this will surprise those who have heard that Stanley was a journalist sent by the publisher of the New York Herald to find Livingstone. Jeal questions that story too, suggesting that the impetus for the mission came not from the publisher but from Stanley himself, who became obsessed with Africa and Livingstone. Jeal also suggests that Livingstone was not lost at all, just as on a later mission, Emin Pasha, whom Stanley was supposedly going to rescue in the Sudan, did not really need rescuing. In the first instance, and perhaps in the second, the motivation was not that Livingstone was lost or that Emin Pasha was endangered but rather that Stanley himself sought to perform a great deed and make a name for himself. In fact, Stanley was worried that someone else would find Livingstone first and thus deprive him of the glory. Still, Livingstone, who was ill and short of supplies, was glad to see him, and the public was thrilled; it was a journalistic coup to find the famous explorer, a coup that Jeal does not make as much of as he might have, perhaps because he wants to portray Stanley as an explorer in his own right, not just as the discoverer of one. This biography makes a case for Stanley’s achievements as an explorer. On a second expedition into Africa, he helped establish the sources of the Nile and became the first person to map the whole length of the Congo River. He also mapped various African lakes and established the first settlement at what became first Léopoldville and later Kinshasa. The latter work he did in the employ of the notorious King Leopold II of Belgium, who established the so-called Congo Free State, the site of numerous atrocities perhaps best known through Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Jeal argues that Stanley became associated with the atrocities even though he left the Congo region before most of them occurred. As for the other atrocities, they were mostly committed by his subordinates. Jeal spends a great deal of time going over the accusations against Stanley, in effect describing events twice over: when they actually happened, and when controversy erupted over them. This analysis adds unnecessarily to the length of the book, as does the tedious recounting of Stanley’s marches through the wilderness.

Stanley / jeal

711

Whereas, according to Jeal, Richard Hall’s Stanley: An Adventurer Explored (1974) skimped on the details of Stanley’s exploration, Jeal’s biography certainly does not do that. He repeatedly describes the swampy terrain; men struck down by dysentery, malaria, or smallpox; men starving, being attacked by natives, attacking the natives, surviving rains and cataracts, trading with the natives, negotiating with them, fighting among themselves, and so on. The effect is probably the opposite of what Jeal intends. Instead of highlighting Stanley’s achievements, the writing drowns them in a mass of detail. Hall’s shorter, brisker book may give a better sense of the achievement, and it does so without resorting to debunking Stanley or defending him; he presents the record and lets readers judge for themselves. Hall also presents a clear discussion of the confused issue of the date of Stanley’s birth (January 28, 1841, it appears). Jeal does not even mention Stanley’s birthday, except in a late footnote, oddly beginning his story when Stanley was five years old. However, Jeal has made some discoveries, for instance about how Stanley acquired his name and about the “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” incident, and most of all he raises the important issue of how we are to look on European colonialism in Africa. Almost in passing, Jeal mentions that Stanley’s dispatches from Africa helped lead to the abolition of slavery in Zanzibar. He might have elaborated more on this; in general, he gives short shrift to Stanley’s writings, but it would be interesting to learn more about what Stanley said, what his ideas were, and whether he had an overarching philosophy. However, there is enough here to give pause to the reader with a limited knowledge of African history. Stanley was both a supporter of European colonialism and an opponent of slavery. Readers might think this contradictory, but they will learn from Jeal’s account that in East Africa at this time slavery was the province of Arab slave traders, and it was the Europeans who put an end to it. Stanley thought that opening Africa to modern, European commerce and civilization was a noble cause, and Jeal seems to agree with him. He notes of course the terrible atrocities that occurred under colonial rule, notably in Leopold’s Congo, but his point seems to be that these were aberrations or perhaps unfortunately inevitable. Jeal’s somewhat contradictory accompanying point is that Stanley did not commit atrocities on the scale of others and was against Leopold’s exploitive approach, at least once he understood it for what it was. That is, Jeal argues that others were more guilty than Stanley, but he also says that European guilt in general has been overstated and that in some respects the European entry into Africa was a good thing. A biography is probably not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of colonialism, but if Jeal’s book can inspire a new look at what is now so easily condemned and dismissed, it will perhaps have done something useful. Sheldon Goldfarb

712

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources The Economist 382 (March 17, 2007): 90-91. The Guardian, March 24, 2007, p. 10. History Today 57, no. 4 (April, 2007): 63-64. London Review of Books 29, no. 7 (April 5, 2007): 9-10. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 19 (December 6, 2007): 47-49. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 30, 2007): 1-11. The Observer, April 1, 2007, p. 27. Sunday Telegraph, March 18, 2007, p. 38. Sunday Times, March 18, 2007, p. 39.

713

THE STILLBORN GOD Religion, Politics, and the Modern West Author: Mark Lilla (1956) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 334 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History, religion An intellectual history of the separation of politics from religion during the early modern period of Western civilization and of efforts to bring the two together again Principal personages: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English political and social philosopher known for his pessimistic view of human nature John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher known as an early empiricist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), French political philosopher who saw human beings as fundamentally good but corrupted by contemporary society Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German thinker who argued that the human mind imposes a basic framework of understanding on the world Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), the most influential German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who saw human life in terms of a progressive movement of history Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), German Jewish thinker who argued that Judaism was consistent with a modern German state Karl Barth (1886-1968), one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), early twentieth century German Jewish thinker Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967), theologian and collaborator of Karl Barth who became an advocate of the pro-Nazi German Christians for a time Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), utopian German Marxist author

Most Americans and Europeans today accept the idea that religion and politics should occupy distinct places in public life and the related idea that people who follow different religions can be citizens of the same national state. There are still some debates about the relationship between these two, concerning religious displays in governmental spaces or the acceptability of encouraging expressions of faith in staterun schools, but these debates are based on variations in shared assumptions. In The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, Mark Lilla argues that these assumptions about the distinction between theology and politics are not necessary products of increasing rationality or of modernization. Instead, tensions within the

714

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Christian tradition created a Western reaction against political theology. Political theology, according to Lilla, involves thinking and talking about political authority as based on the divine. Christian political theology inherited tensions at the core of Christian beliefs about the world. The central article of Christianity, that God became man through Christ, set up questions about God’s nature and about the divine relationship to the world. In the Trinity, God is threefold, but one of the three parts is a transcendent deity and one of the parts is a human in the world. Is the world therefore good because God made it and came into it, or is it bad because it requires divine grace? The question of working in the world or rejecting the world therefore recurs throughout the history of Christian theology, as does the question of the nature of the Trinity. Christ came into the world apart from the Father, according to Christian beliefs, but he departed to a heavenly realm and is expected to return to Earth again at some point in the future, at which point both worlds will be reunited. Christians are continually in the position of living in this world but looking to another world, and expecting that this world will be ended. In addition, Christianity was historically an otherworldly religion that became the faith of a worldly empire. Struggles between religious and political authorities and disagreement about the true nature of the Christian state were therefore not only results of the development of competing institutions but also consequences of an unresolved problem at the heart of the faith. The difficulty of drawing a clear line for the descent of authority from God to humanity could and did lead to violent conflict. By the sixteenth century, the religious wars had become so violent that they were tearing Europe apart. Lilla finds in Thomas Hobbes, author of the social and political treatise Levianthan (1651), the beginning of an answer to the religious crisis of Christendom. According to Lilla, Hobbes changed the nature of the political discourse about religion. Instead of asking what kind of worldly order should be derived from the divine order, Hobbes asked why human beings seek religious belief. He shifted the focus from God to humanity. Lilla makes a helpful contribution to our understanding of Hobbes by maintaining that the early modern author’s account of religion was essentially the same as his account of political order. Hobbes famously argued that governmental authority is based on fear. The struggle of all individuals for their own ends creates an insecurity that can be resolved only by handing over power to a sovereign. Similarly, though, Lilla points out that Hobbes also based his religious psychology on fear. Fear of the power of nature leads to belief in God (the religious version of raising up a sovereign), and fear of God then leads to obedience to some set of religious precepts and to efforts to impose religious precepts on others. Hobbes, in Lilla’s view, was the author of what

Mark Lilla is professor of humanities at Columbia University. He writes about the history of ideas, focusing on how religion and politics have been influenced by the Enlightenment. His work The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001) attracted attention for its critical examination of the attraction of modern intellectuals to extremist ideologies. The Stillborn God is based on the Carlyle lectures that Lilla delivered at Oxford University in 2003.

The Stillborn God / lilla

715

Lilla calls the “Great Separation,” since Hobbes showed the way for talking about both politics and religion in naturalistic terms, in place of considering nature and politics from the perspective of theology. Even those, such as philosopher John Locke, who disagreed with the view of the nature of humanity presented by Hobbes tended to follow Hobbes in focusing on human experience rather than on divine order. After Hobbes forced faith and authority apart, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant brought them back together, but in a manner that had been fundamentally changed. Rousseau, like Hobbes, explained religion by asking why people believe, instead of explaining human institutions in terms of the sacred. However, Rousseau placed the origin of religion in the moral feelings of people and believed that similar moral feelings could guide social life. Lilla places particular importance on Rousseau’s story in the book Emile (1762) of the Savoyard Vicar, who found the answer to his own religious doubts by looking to his own sentiments. Kant took a darker view of human nature than Rousseau did, but he maintained that religion was necessary to direct human beings toward the ethical life. For Kant, belief in God and in immortality was necessary in order for a rational human being to avoid despair and pursue the highest good in life. Therefore, any rational human should believe. Both Rousseau and Kant followed the basic reorientation toward the human prescribed by Hobbes by psychologizing religious life. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel continued the human-centered reintroduction of religion into political life. Again, however, he relied not on revelation but on the role of belief in human life. Hegel conceived of religion as the historical expression of the progress of human awareness and portrayed Protestantism as the last religious stage in this progress, so that faith became an expression of a citizenship. Under Hegel’s inspiration, German thinkers of the nineteenth century created a liberal Protestantism that served the order of the day. German Jewish theologians such as Hermann Cohen attempted to bring Judaism into the liberal fold by demonstrating that Jewish beliefs had also progressed over time and served the same civic goals as Protestantism. English and American discourses about politics tended to follow directly from Hobbes by considering government solely in terms of social interactions and competing interests. German discourses, directed by the liberal Protestant heritage from Hegel, considered how religion was part of the evolution of the modern state. Neither followed the old political-theology line of deriving government from divine revelation. In Lilla’s view, Hegel and his successors had brought religion into the service of the state and progress. Following World War I, though, religious thinkers staged a revolt against this type of statist progressivism in faith. Lilla points out the Christian theologian Karl Barth and the Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig as two German authors who inspired the reaction against the Hegelian strand of religious thinking. Barth emphasized God’s radical otherness from the world and was distinctly antipolitical in his early writings. Rosenzweig saw in Judaism an impulse toward messianic utopianism that maintained the Jews outside politics and the state. Both of them emphasized a need to break dramatically with the things of the present and to look beyond the current organization of society and government toward an ultimate, other-

716

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

worldly reality. Lilla characterizes these two as gnostics, using a term from early Christian history for those who reject the material world in favor of a radically separate spiritual realm. While neither Barth nor Rosenzweig advocated extreme politics, Lilla maintains that their celebration of a dramatic break with the present led to the reintroduction of religion into politics through the messianic political religions of Nazism and Communism. Lilla connects the dramatic, millennial version of religious feeling expressed by Barth, for example, to the assumption of power by the Nazi messiah Adolf Hitler in 1933. Lilla points out that Friedrich Gogarten, a friend and close collaborator of Barth, was led by a rejection of modern liberalism and an advocacy of a new dispensation in religion to support the pro-Nazi German Christian movement. On the Left, the German Jewish thinker Ernst Bloch became almost literally a worshiper of Communism, believing that this ideology would bring about an endtime utopia. Lilla concludes that Hobbes was right about the need for the Great Separation, even if the English philosopher was wrong about finding the origins of belief in fear. The examples of Gogarten and Bloch are cautionary about the dangers that can result from introducing the sacred into civic life. Lilla sees a rebirth of political theology in our own times. He maintains that long centuries of assuming the secular nature of politics in the English and American traditions have bred a complacency, so that those within these traditions lack the vocabulary for talking about the psychological complexities of religion in social life. The Stillborn God provides a fascinating, well-written inquiry into the role of religion in modern political life. It gives fresh accounts of the thinking of some of the major authors on this topic. Lilla manages to give new views of even such foundational and widely recognized writers as Hobbes. One of his valuable contributions is to explain aspects of some of the most difficult theorists, such as Hegel. With the apparent increasing influence of religion on political life in many countries today, the questions of how the two have been connected historically and should be connected take on critical importance. The book does have its limitations. One of those is the tendency to approach religious modernity purely in terms of the history of ideas. Lilla accounts for historical developments at the level of intellectual activity alone, as if human experience were the product of disembodied theories. Reading him, one would think that Hobbes just thought up the separation of religion from politics and the anthropocentric view of faith and government and that his thinking led to widespread change throughout Western society. This ignores the part played by urbanization, the centralization of nation-states and the consequent rise of secular bureaucracies, the growing economic complexity that promoted social pluralism, and the flourishing of print media in creating both multiplicities of beliefs and governments that had to accept those multiplicities. Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel were arguably expressing the currents of their times, not creating those currents, as Lilla indicates. This question about whether the intellectuals Lilla discusses created or simply expressed the worldviews of their times raises the broader problem of causation that

The Stillborn God / lilla

717

runs throughout the book. If Hobbes did cause the Great Separation, as Lilla seems to imply, just how did he do this? Were most of the citizens and politicians who spoke and thought in secular terms directly inspired by their readings of Leviathan? More recently, what contribution did the theology of Karl Barth really make to the rise of Adolf Hitler? The Stillborn God provokes more questions than it answers. Still, it is an engaging, valuable piece of intellectual history that will appeal to a broad range of readers. Carl L. Bankston III

Review Sources Commentary 124, no. 4 (November, 2007): 60-65. Commonweal 134, no. 18 (October 26, 2007): 32-34. The Humanist 68, no. 1 (January/February, 2008): 45-46. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 16, 2007): 9. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 27 (July 9, 2007): 49-50. Weekly Standard 13, no. 14 (December 17, 2007): 39-42.

718

THE SUICIDAL PLANET How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe Author: Mayer Hillman (1931), with Tina Fawcett and Sudhir Chella Rajan (1961) Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (New York). 296 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Environment Hillman argues that drastic, rapid measures must be taken immediately to reduce greenhouse gases in order to save humans and other species from the pernicious effects of global warming, and he and his colleagues recommend a practicable, albeit civilization-altering, program Granted its basic assumption about global warming, The Suicidal Planet: How to Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe offers a rational model policy to reduce the use of fossil fuels in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. Writing a sober, earnest appeal to action, the authors, Mayer Hillman, Tina Fawcett, and Sudhir Chella Rajan, all environmental scientists, carefully avoid sensationalism while explaining the nature of the problem and its likely consequences. Nevertheless, their message is alarming. Humanity, collectively, faces a uniquely perilous threat during this century. Likewise, their remedy is alarming to all those, the vast majority of people, who want life to go on more or less as before, except better. That remedy is a new attitude toward energy consumption known as “contraction and convergence,” and it would entail a fundamental reordering of culture, at least in those industrialized societies that produce most of the harmful pollution. The book’s tone is cautiously optimistic, yet its arguments seem ill-suited to changing the attitudes of those who now most enjoy the benefits from fossil-fuel usage. The Suicidal Planet is, unfortunately, like a medicine that, while sure to effect a cure, is so unpalatable that the patient prefers the disease, however much pain it is sure to cause eventually. That is to say, the authors hope that their readers will respond rationally, responsibly, and unselfishly when for many people in developed countries, the United States above all, insouciant waste is the very basis of their present well-being. The authors develop their basic assumption about the environment’s health in the first of the book’s three sections, “The Problem.” It is an assumption well supported by recent research: Waste carbon produced by burning fossil fuels, such as petroleum and coal, creates atmospheric carbon dioxide that prevents heat from venting into outer space (the greenhouse effect), thereby warming the atmosphere. So far, the global average temperature has risen a little over 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit during the last two centuries, two-thirds of that rise occurring since 1970. That seemingly modest amount comes mostly as the result of a human-caused increase of carbon dioxide

The Suicidal Planet / hillman, fawcett, and rajan

719

from 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to about 380 ppm dur- Trained as an architect and city ing the first decade of the twenty-first cen- planner, Mayer Hillman holds a tury. Should there be another degree of tem- doctorate from the University of perature increase, the authors warn, changes Edinburgh. He is a senior fellow to climate will occur that may render much emeritus at London’s Policy Studies of the globe uninhabitable for thousands of Institute. Tina Fawcett holds a doctorate in years. The book summarizes the likely consehousehold energy use from University quences, all of which are familiar from acCollege London and is a senior counts in the news media and in films: rising researcher at the Environmental sea levels and displacement of coastal pop- Change Institute at Oxford University. ulations; more powerful and destructive exSudhir Chella Rajan heads the treme weather events, such as hurricanes Global Politics and Institutions and tornadoes; altered precipitation patterns, Program at Tellus Institute in Boston. leaving some now-fertile areas parched by He has a doctorate in environmental long-lasting drought; widespread economic science and engineering from the devastation; spread of diseases and pests out University of California, Los Angeles. of the tropics; and a wholesale loss of plant and animal species. Because greenhouse gases are accumulating at a swiftly accelerating pace, 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming is likely to come soon, perhaps by 2020. If readers accept that this constitutes a “tipping point” that will trigger rapid, irreversible climate change, then the authors’ subsequent recommendations are cogent and urgent. Therein lies a problem, however. Unacknowledged in their succinct, lucid explanations, the question of a tipping point, or at what temperature it may come, remains in some dispute. While scientists overwhelmingly agree that danger lies near and is potentially lethal, prognostications differ, albeit not by much. Really, it should not matter whether the point of no return comes after a rise of 2 degrees Fahrenheit or 4 degrees, within twenty years or fifty nears. It should matter no more to a sane person than the question of whether to slow a speeding car before entering a blind curve just because the exact sharpness of the curve is not yet apparent. However, the credibility of the science does matter. It matters because whenever experts disagree, however slightly, or even appear to disagree when they do not, that “controversy” is seized upon to defend the status quo until “there is better science” (to paraphrase one prominent American mentality). To continue the analogy, it would be as if the speeding car’s driver decides not to reduce speed, despite all traffic signs, until after entering the curve, when its shape becomes completely visible. That is suicidal. The authors are well aware of the nuisance of politicized science. Most unfortunately, their references to scientific consensus, environmental ethics, social justice, and crusading politicians like former vice president Al Gore do little to attract the attention of those people who do not want to pay attention and do not think that they have to yet. The authors do much better in exposing the rationalizations that encourage a comfortable complacency among the people who do nevertheless accept that a

720

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

problem exists: that climate change will be ephemeral; that advances in technology will solve the problem; that there is nothing that can be done about it; or that climate change actually may be beneficial, providing only that one lives in the right area. Those readers who are willing to acknowledge the book’s cogency then are confronted with a somber assessment in the second major section, “Current Strategies.” Those measures now being undertaken to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and to mitigate their environmental impact are all insufficient to stave off catastrophe. One by one the authors explain why these measures have either only modest effect, no real net effect, or an unintended deleterious effect. The measures include renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power; nuclear energy; innovations, such as hydrogen as fuel, electric motors, or fuel cells; energy efficiency in general; and carbon sequestration (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping it underground). Here the authors explain tellingly and fault even “green” political action organizations for promoting measures that are little more than wishful thinking. They show that even if all current methods that are being promoted were used to their greatest projected capability, only 12 percent of the needed reduction could occur by 2020 and only one-third by 2050. Do not depend on these measures, the authors insist. They also insist that individual action alone, however well-intentioned and wisely implemented, will fall short. Nor do the authors countenance the belief, advanced by President George W. Bush, that a free market economy and economic growth will supply a solution. Business as it is currently practiced exacerbates the problem. Their remedy to carbon dioxide accumulation is austere. They delineate it in the book’s third section, “The Solution.” To avoid catastrophe, carbon dioxide levels must be stabilized at no higher than 450 ppm sometime between 2020 and 2050, only 70 ppm more than the level as of 2007. To achieve this a staggering 80 percent decrease in worldwide fossil fuel consumption is essential, starting at once. It would indeed, as they write, “require a fundamental reevaluation of the character and quality of our life.” In nations long accustomed to high levels of consumption, like the United States, much would change. Gone, for instance, would be cars powered solely by gasoline engines and most air travel, drastically altering one of the nation’s most prized freedoms, mobility. Moreover, since these are primary transportation modes for tourism and since tourism accounts for 11 percent of the global economy, the consequences of just these two types of reduction would be dire. When one considers the effects on goods and services even if cleaner transportation eventually becomes available, as well as dependency on coal-fired power plants for electricity, it is clear that the authors do not understate the challenge. They never claim their proposed solution will be easy, only possible and drastically needed. However disruptive and complicated in execution, contraction and convergence is simple in concept. Contraction is the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions to a safe level by a given date; convergence means an equitable per capita share of the burden of reduction. Two problems are evident at once. The first lies in the phrase “safe level,” which almost surely will be controversial. Second is their contention that emissions policy must be mandatory, enforced by governments, and strictly

The Suicidal Planet / hillman, fawcett, and rajan

721

adhered to everywhere in the world all the time. Wealthy, industrialized, highconsumption countries would have to sacrifice much more than low-consumption countries. To make the idea more attractive, the authors recommend that a “cap-andtrade” system of some sort be instituted. Wealthy countries, to mitigate the impact on their styles of life, could buy carbon emissions rights, as tradable credits, from low-emissions countries that do not use up their “cap” allotment. (European countries began a version of this system in 2005.) The same might be feasible at an individual user level, such as a person or corporation. Even despite incentives, however, a binding international agreement would be difficult to negotiate. The history of past environmental treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol, does not encourage optimism for a speedy outcome. The Suicidal Planet treads lightly over many practical issues integral to any global agreement. How would contraction be enforced internationally and locally? What body would set the value of emissions credits? How would cheaters, exploiters, and gougers be dealt with? What of war, disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or social collapse? Obviously a short book such as this one cannot provide specific recommendations to answer every possible worry, and this one is concerned with a general conception, not formulated policies. Nevertheless, it seldom even nods at such large potential problems, and that is unnerving. How can a fundamental reevaluation of quality of life occur in the face of these concerns, not to mention the ongoing conflicts that obsess humanity’s many factions, and how can it be done in time to be practicable? It is true, as the authors claim, that climate change is not taken seriously enough by most people or by most governments, and the urgency of the problem makes it tempting to ask more of a book like The Suicidal Planet than it is designed to deliver. While reading, one cheers for the authors’ thoughtfulness and sense of justice but wishes for greater guidance and gusto. To avoid sensationalism and to be plain and clear, the book reads like a PowerPoint presentation, complete with bulleted main points, much repetition, and commercial prose. While there are a few helpful charts to help readers comprehend the occasional statistics, the authors make few concrete gestures to reader engagement. Their attempt to be sobering is altogether too sober to engage enthusiasm. Enthusiasm will become important. If contraction and convergence, or any worthwhile policy, is to be implemented in time, popular sentiment will force it. The authors rightly call on government action, not individual volunteerism, and that requires political leadership. Putting the right leaders—provided they can even be found— in power will in turn require electorates focused on global warming as the central issue of the next half century. Wisdom, lasting commitment, and global unity: That is asking a lot. Of course, the alternative is to do nothing or too little. Then humanity will have to adapt to climate change, which will surely cost far, far more in wealth, peace, and life. Roger Smith

722

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 9-10. Future Survey 29, no. 7 (July, 2007): 4-5. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 6 (February 5, 2007): 49-50.

723

SUNDAY A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl Author: Craig Harline Publisher: Doubleday (New York). 450 pp. $26.00 Type of work: History A lively account of the rise and development of a day that has been both dreaded and beloved, focusing especially on England, Holland, France, Belgium, and the United States and showing that the way Sunday has evolved in these settings says much about what is unique to them Trained in European religious history, Craig Harline practices his craft with breathtaking skill. Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl has exactly the right balance of overview and contextual detail. Intriguing “close-ups” offer the reader tangy characters and vivid situations, breaking up denser explanatory and technical material into more appropriable units. Both specialized and general audiences are bound to profit from this fine work. Harline’s first chapter, “Prologue: Sunday Ascendant,” helps one understand how Sunday came into Western culture, becoming both a blessing and a problem. While the ancient world employed diverse calendars and schemes (many of them lunarbased) for determining weeks, the modern system comes from the Hellenistic Greeks and Judaism by way of Rome. In pre-Christian, Ptolemaic Alexandria, astronomers fixed the distance from Earth of the seven known planets. Saturn was the furthest away; then came Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon—these names, of course, are Anglicized versions of the Latin variants. Each of these heavenly bodies exerted its particular influence on the earth and became associated not only with days of the week but particular hours within that week. Curiously, their distances did not correlate with a planet’s place in the scheme of days. Rather, “Saturn Day was the first day, Sun Day the second, then Moon Day, Mars Day (Tuesday), Mercury Day (Wednesday), Jupiter Day (Thursday), and Venus Day (Friday).” Significantly, at this point no day enjoyed a privileged status. In 587 b.c.e., the Babylonians conquered the Jewish kingdom and carried many of its inhabitants into exile. According to Harline, one cannot determine whether the Babylonian fascination with the number seven influenced the pattern of the Jewish week or a preexistent Jewish scheme influenced the mental habits of the captors. In any case, by the second century c.e. Jews and their rigorous Sabbatarian practices had exerted tremendous influence on surrounding cultures. Christianity only deepened this influence, though for a variety of reasons the followers of Jesus of Nazareth moved the special day to the first day of the Roman week—which had earlier become Sunday instead of Saturday. One reason for this change was the increasing prestige of Sunday in pagan religion—especially the cult of the Invincible Sun, favored by a

724

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

succession of emperors, and Mithraism, the influential religion of the Roman soldiers, which honored Sunday with special rituals and rest. Constantine’s proclamation in 321 declaring Sunday as the official holy day for Roman citizens may have been made to benefit the huge number of Christians now under his rule. “More likely, Constantine, like many Roman aristocrats of the time, was simply trying to find common ground for his mixed pagan and Christian subjects, especially his soldiers,” observes Harline. Herein resides one of the great problems of Sunday, however. By setting aside a day for a general cessation of normal activities, a society doubtlessly benefits most people and thereby elicits greater loyalty, but how should “cessation” be handled? Inevitably a tension is established between those who “understand the true meaning” of Sunday—“it is the Lord’s Day”—and those who follow other (or no) traditions. How the meaning of Sunday gets worked out in the European West is the subject of Harline’s six major chapters. Behind his account is a vast literature, but he eschews point-by-point documentation, providing instead fifty-three pages of bibliographical notes at the end of the book. He also uses several focusing devices to give narrative power to the book—discussing a typical Sunday in a particular village, drawing on personal journals, memoirs, short stories, novels, and even film. The result is a satisfyingly detailed work that still manages to sustain several conversations about scholarly disputes and interpretive problems. Chapter 2, “Sunday Middle-Aged,” is set in a fictional village in the south of England around the year 1300. Following a renowned essay by the historian H. S. Bennett, Harline traces out the events of a single Sunday in June from the standpoint of “houselings” or common villagers. While medieval theologians stressed with utmost clarity the need for Sundays to be worshipful and restful, the realities of agricultural life meant that plenty of work still had to be done before Mass. Haying and harvest season pressed peasants into Sabbath labor, much of it for the lord of the manor of which the village was a part. As the lord’s word carried more weight than that of the priest, such work met with little criticism. Moreover, poor vicars usually led village churches, and they too had to labor in barns and fields. However, attendance at Mass was a paramount duty and, as Harline presents it, a singularly meaningful one because of the miracle that occurred at Eucharist. Also, by this period, substantial Norman (Romanesque) churches were available to most villagers, who rejoiced in their beauty and learned from their sculptures, murals, and decorated rood screens. After Mass, the best meal of the week waited at home, with afternoon and evening bringing the festal character of the day to full expression. Meeting in the churchyard and at taverns, the houselings drank, gossiped, sang, danced, played games, wagered, and held competitions and fairs. Naturally, “depravity” or “concupiscence” might beckon at such times. Harline points out that the official Christian prohibition of sex on the Sabbath had spread to other days too—

Craig Harline is the author of A Bishop’s Tale (2000), The Burdens of Sister Margaret (2000), and Miracles at the Jesus Oak (2003). He is a professor of history at Brigham Young University.

Sunday / harline

725

Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, all of Advent and Lent, and numerous other days and seasons. “This left fewer than one hundred days in the year for licit sexual relations—as long as the woman was not lactating or menstruating, of course, which were also proscribed days,” he explains, adding dryly: “How many Christian villagers kept to such a schedule is unknown.” “Sunday Reformed,” Harline’s third chapter, develops a complex and surprising picture of the Sabbath in The Hague in 1624. Recalling that the rigorous Pilgrims sojourned in Holland before sailing for the New World, Americans might assume that the Protestant Reformation had triumphed there, but while the followers of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and others transformed many of the churches in the Low Countries, the old “permissive” Catholic culture remained a vital force. Further, having fought a war of independence against militantly Catholic Spain, the Dutch Republic refused to install a regime of religious conformity. Thus, the Puritan Separatists’ emigration was motivated by the perceived laxity of their fellow non-Catholics. In any case, Luther and Calvin disagreed on the meaning and significance of the Sabbath, with Luther taking the position that, just as all vocations could be occasions for serving God, so too were all days of the week holy. Therefore, the Sabbath had no intrinsic significance. Calvin upheld the Sabbath as a “perpetual” institution, “established at Creation for all peoples and times.” Calvin advocated a “moderate” Sabbath, and this view was echoed in The Hague by Dutch Reformed preachers. Drawing on diary materials, Harline shows how such moderation looked by following widower and schoolteacher David Beck on a typical Sunday. Beck indeed attends two long Sunday services, replete with biblical- and creedal-centered preaching, but he also gets in plenty of walking, visiting, eating, and drinking, relishing the opportunities for Sunday pleasure offered by one of Europe’s richest cities. “Sunday à la Mode,” the book’s second-longest chapter, begins with a summary of the opening scene of Louis Morin’s humorous Parisian Sunday: Notes of a Decadent (1898). This work is the perfect vehicle for Harline’s exploration of the “Continental Sunday,” long celebrated by painters like Georges Seurat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Édouard Manet. The aristocratic protagonist and his lady, “Pompon,” decide that their lives have become boring. What better way to gain new amusement than to stay in Paris for the year and make every Sunday an exploration of the legendary dimanche? They would even turn their adventures into a book. There would be more than enough material to sustain their “research,” for Paris’s population had exploded after 1800. After 1830, church and state were separate; thus, blue laws did not exist. Also, while the urban working class outnumbered the bourgeoisie in France, the latter dominated cultural and political life. Both classes needed their Sunday outings, and renowned institutions had developed to make that possible. Morin’s “decadents” therefore sample a cornucopia of delights: promenading on the city’s wide boulevards, listening to singers at a café-concert, dancing at the Moulin Rouge on Montmartre, attending horse races—and even the occasional Mass. Throughout, they remain fastidious and snobbish observers, reflecting their breeding and status. In the end, however, they concede that “the people’s Sundays were not necessarily more vulgar . . . than ‘our own.’”

726

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

As Harline makes clear in his concluding “A Word After,” the country whose Sundays most agree with him occur in Belgium. This gives special poignancy to Chapter 5, “Sunday Obscured,” set in that country “on the last Sunday before the Great War.” Relying on the Flemish writer Ernest Claes, Harline limns a lovely portrait of the old Catholic Sunday in this nation of villages. Attendance at Mass and afternoon catechism, dove racing, marvelous food, brass bands, cafés, singing, storytelling, and amenable drinking—these were some of the ingredients of a day looked forward to by most citizens. With the war, everything changed. Belgium was mostly occupied and experienced the full horror of trench warfare. The Hun-like Germans who have long dominated American imagery about this period do not show up in Harline’s account. Like everyone else, they seem more victims of the elaborate plans of distant generals and new battlefield technologies. Belgian priests in the occupied territories conducted services for German Catholic soldiers. As they rested behind the lines, Bavarians “often worshipped alongside the Belgian locals at Sunday Mass, where they made a big impression.” Still, warfare did not cease on the Sabbath. Thus, for most Belgians, the fighting became nightmarish in its totality. Days blended into other days so that many simply lost track of the calendar. Church bells could not sound, and in any case, many churches were damaged or in ruins. In “Sunday Still,” Harline resumes a narrative begun in his treatment of the Dutch Reformed Sunday in Holland. While proponents of a moderate Sunday prevailed there, many clergy advocated “the English Sabbath.” Even before the Reformation, the English had become quite strict about Sunday observance. The publication of Nicholas Bownd’s The Doctrine of the Sabbath in 1595 strengthened this tendency. Here Sunday becomes the specific choice of Christ as the day of celebration for a redeemed humanity. It is to be entirely devoted to worship and therefore include no work—and no play. If hailstorms threatened a harvest, the farmer should simply wait it out. Harline depicts Sundays in London in the 1920’s and 1930’s, a time of transition when the influential Lord’s Day Observation Society (LDOS; founded in 1831) had to cope with such novelties as cinema, golf, soccer, and “the weekend.” The shortening of the workweek throughout Europe meant the LDOS could claim that, as recreation now took place on Saturday, Sundays could again become truly restful, including “merely reading, light walking, music, contemplation of nature, and time with family and friends.” If that seemed restrictive, Englishmen could look northward to Scotland to find the strictest Sundays in the Western world. The English preference for a quiet Sunday remained, if considerably modified by novel opportunities for amusement. Harline compares a working-class Sunday with that of the middle class, finding much overlap. Both included church and Sunday school, although at different times of the day. Working-class men were drawn to the pubs. Middle-class homes generally set out an elegant tea, and families might sing hymns around the piano afterward. The afternoon “lie-down” was a national institution, giving real meaning to the phrase “a sleepy English Sunday.” Reading was exceptionally important, with surveys showing that a quarter of the adult population read three or more Sunday papers. Founded in 1922, the commercial-free British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) gained an enormous following, despite its rather

Sunday / harline

727

stultifying Sunday programming. As elsewhere, the English debated the relative value of particular recreations. Particularly favored were gardening, cycling, park visiting, and walking and hiking. While English professional football (soccer) was not played on Sunday, amateur teams abounded, and the same was true of cricket. As in medieval times, the pubs beckoned, but in deference to Sunday their hours were shorter, and there was a greater attempt to accommodate the entire family. “Sunday All Mixed Up” is how Harline titles his treatment of the United States in the 1950’s. In some ways, the topic is too vast for a book surveying two thousand years of cultural history. Readers might be better advised to consult Alexis McCrossen’s fine Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (2002), to which Harline often refers. To do so, however, would mean missing several interesting arguments. First, for Harline, the United States is unique in the way it has come to blend business, play, and religious observance. By the 1950’s, the vaunted service economy had already emerged, and it required Sunday to be profitable. Americans started to regard shopping as a form of recreation, ultimately feeling little anguish about visiting a supermarket after church. What about the people who therefore have to work on Sundays? The economic abundance that characterized this period allowed almost everyone to have two days off a week—if not the same days. The commercialization of the Sabbath might appear to represent yet more secularization, but Harline is impressed by the fact that “while at the founding of the republic not even two in ten Americans belonged to churches, by 1956 six in ten did.” The 1950’s were, of course, a high tide in religiosity. America therefore developed a “hybrid Sunday”—where “holy day,” “holiday,” and “sales day” became melded. Second, the 1950’s saw the rise of television and professional football. Harline shows that this combination brought to the surface certain questionable cultural tendencies. Foreign visitors often comment on the brutality of this sport, thus raising the question of how football could have escaped condemnation by the church. Like so many other Sunday activities, football therefore had to become became “sacralized,” he argues. Amos Alonzo Stagg and Vince Lombardi figured importantly in this development. Trained by Jesuits at Fordham University, Lombardi brought religious fervor to the game. At Green Bay, in an intensely Catholic part of Wisconsin, Lombardi cultivated local priests and nuns, went to Mass before every game, and insisted that “football and religion were interchangeable in their promotions of sacrifice, discipline, obedience, and more.” Ironically, this view of the sport also appealed to players and coaches from the Protestant South. It made for a potent combination, as the growth of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (founded in 1955) shows. Craig Harline is a practicing Mormon and as a youth in Southern California kept a rather strict Sabbath. He is thus aware of the extraordinary perversions that the American Sunday is capable of. At its furthest extreme, this day becomes an expression of an essentially pagan American civil religion—described well by sociologist Will Herberg in 1955. Now, “Super Bowl Sunday” culminates its ritual season— having become an ultrapatriotic event wherein America celebrates its achievements, remembers its fallen, revels in its consumptive lifestyle, and calls upon its no-

728

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

particular God. Whether that deity has any relation to the Lord of the Sabbath is a question worth much discussion. Leslie E. Gerber

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 43. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 102. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 26, 2007): 17. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 7 (February 12, 2007): 83. U.S. Catholic 72, no. 7 (July, 2007): 49. Washington Monthly 39, no. 5 (May, 2007): 70-72. The Wilson Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 96-97.

729

THE TEMPTATION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE Victor Hugo and Les Misérables Author: Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) First published: La tentación de lo imposible: Victor Hugo y “Los Miserables,” 2004, in Spain Translated from the Spanish by John King Publisher: Princeton University Press (Princeton, N.J.). 196 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Literary criticism Vargas Llosa explores Hugo’s endeavor to write a novel enveloping a complete fictional world and by so doing to change the real world Mario Vargas Llosa states that Victor Hugo attempted two impossible goals in Les Misérables (1862). Hugo set about creating a complete fictional world that contained its own fictional reality independent of the real world. Moreover, he wanted to effect positive change in the real world. In a brief introduction to The Temptation of the Impossible, Vargas Llosa looks at Hugo the man and Hugo the creative novelist. Then he analyzes Les Misérables in terms of the novel’s various components in order of importance: narrator, setting, characters, and language. Finally, he examines Hugo’s intention for the novel. In the introduction, Vargas Llosa describes his experience reading Les Misérables as a student at the boarding school of Leoncio Prado Military Academy. He affirms that the novel made his life better, as the novel’s fictional world gave him refuge from the boring, dreary reality of his own life, yet he admits that it also made reality even more colorless. He then turns to the questions of who Victor Hugo was and what he believed about literature and himself. Vargas Llosa profiles Victor Hugo as a man of immense talent, energy, and appetite for life. He discusses Hugo’s knowledge of Spanish, his capacity for sexual activity, his enormous literary output, and his social concerns, particularly his desire for reform of the justice and prison systems and opposition to the death penalty. He reminds the reader of Hugo’s great popularity during the nineteenth century. He was admired as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, as well as a political leader and social reformer. Hugo believed in the power of literature to make the world a better place by improving human beings and by making God known to them. Vargas Llosa proposes that Hugo envisioned Les Misérables as a religious tract and actually had come to consider himself as more than a novelist. Hugo was excessively concerned with the afterlife and held séances resulting in what he believed to be communication with the dead. In Vargas Llosa’s opinion, Hugo wished to fulfill the role of a seer who revealed the truth of life after death. His novel was intended to go beyond the redemption of humankind to the forgiveness of Satan.

730

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In chapter 1, “The Divine Stenographer,” Vargas Llosa introduces the narrator as the most important character and the real hero of the novel. This narrator is endowed with omniscience, exuberance, and omnipotence, and while he does not actually participate in the story, he is always present. He switches from first-person to third-person narrative as he wishes. He attempts to convince the reader that he is Victor Hugo. Of course, the narrator is a fiction, a creation of Hugo’s mind; he is Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian not the author but rather the first character novelist, essayist, and literary critic. that the author must create. Vargas Llosa His first novel was La ciudad y los points out that the way in which an author perros (1962; The Time of the Hero, handles the narrator is one of the major dis1966). He won the Rómulo Gallegos tinctions between the classical novel and the International Novel Prize for La casa modern novel. With its ever-present narrator, verde (1965; The Green House, 1968) and the National Book Critics Circle authoritarian and judgmental, Les Misérables Award for Making Waves (1996). is a great classical novel. Vargas Llosa also emphasizes that it is through the narrator’s monologues that Hugo lengthened his novel in the 1862 version. The narrator digresses for chapters on various subjects, such as the sewers of Paris when Jean Valjean carries the wounded Marius through them. According to Vargas Llosa, this is an essential part of the fictional reality of the novel. The fictive society is obsessed with wordiness. It is not only the narrator who is given to monologue but also the characters. The chapter concludes with a refutation of the idea that the novel is a children’s book. Vargas Llosa believes that it is precisely the visible, controlling narrator who refuses to let the reader participate in the novel that has caused the work to be seen in this fashion. He stresses that the nineteenth century reader did not view it this way. Next in importance to the novel’s creation is its setting, which includes not only the places and time period but also the controlling force of the events and of the characters’ lives. In chapter 2, “The Dark Vein of Destiny,” Vargas Llosa looks at how Hugo uses chance and coincidence to regulate the lives of the characters and to move the plot forward. Hugo uses three important scenes to connect and bring together the various stories within the novel: the ambush at the Gorbeau tenement, the barricade at La Chanvrerie, and the Paris sewers. Vargas Llosa refers to these scenes as “active craters,” emphasizing that these incidents are fraught with danger and death for the characters. In each scene, characters whose fictional realities to that point appeared to be separate are suddenly inescapably intertwined. Their interactions affect each others’ lives from there forward. In this way, Vargas Llosa states, Hugo creates a tension and emotional flow that not only reaches forward to future happenings in the novel but also reaches back to past episodes. Thus, destiny controls the fictional reality and carries the characters along to their unavoidable fate.

The Temptation of the Impossible / vargas llosa

731

In chapter 3, “Touchy Monsters,” Vargas Llosa considers the nature of Hugo’s characters. The main characters are, as the chapter title implies, monsters in that they are superior beings governed exclusively by either good or evil. Each character behaves in an extreme and unusual fashion. They are archetypes of the saint, the hero, the villain, the just man, the fanatic. Vargas Llosa points out that nineteenth century readers saw them as real people possessed of extraordinary humanity. Such characters represent what the nineteenth century readers, imbued with Romanticism, believed they were or wanted to be. For instance, M. Bienvenu, the priest of Digne, is the saint who is responsible for the conversion of Jean Valjean from a criminal to a good man; Jean Valjean represents the just man; Javert, who never wavers from following the law, is the fanatic. In contrast to these super characters, Marius, whom Vargas Llosa calls a character without qualities, is the most realistic one in the novel. His actions are not predictable. He does not fit the Manichaean scheme of characters who populate the novel. Marius is like the monsters, however, in his lack of sexual desire. Vargas Llosa suggests that Hugo, out of a nostalgia for his own chaste youth and of rejection of the carnal desire that filled his adult life, has created a fictional world in which chastity is the ultimate virtue. Contrary to the example of his own life, he portrays the characters in Les Misérables as endowed with physical and moral strength and health as a result of their asexuality. Jean Valjean loves duty that leads him to God; Javert loves the law and justice. The young revolutionary Enjolras loves his country. They have no lovers, no wives, no mistresses. Among the myriad characters in the novel, Vargas Llosa identifies Gavroche, the street urchin who lives in the Elephant of the Bastille, as one of Hugo’s most memorable characters. Unruly and marginal, he is reminiscent of the picaresque heroes of Golden Age Spanish literature, yet he lacks their callous attitude toward life. Gavroche is kind, witty, good, and courageous. Vargas Llosa feels that his death is one of the most tragic events in the novel. Hugo also populates his novel with what Vargas Llosa refers to as collective characters. The bohemians, the seamstresses, the revolutionary students of the ABC (until they are at La Chanvrerie), the Patron-Minette gang, and the nuns of Petit Picpus have no real individuality. They serve to provide a backdrop for the main characters. In chapter 4, “The Great Theater of the World,” Vargas Llosa discusses the theatricality of the novel. In regard to the control exercised over the characters, he compares the novel to the allegorical religious plays of Calderón de la Barca. The characters are actors who follow a script prepared by the narrator. In the tradition of the popular farces, the characters of Les Misérables constantly change names, take on disguises, and play roles. The language of the novel is made theatrical both by Hugo’s choice of excessive, colorful adjectives and by the characters’ and the narrator’s penchant for monologue and soliloquy. The settings—extraordinary, sinister, and totally unexpected—are also theatrical. The Paris sewers, which represent Hell, are the most theatrical of these. For Vargas Llosa, the life presented in the novel is a fiction, and the theatricality with which it is presented extends beyond the fictive life of the novel to suggest that all earthly life is a fiction and that reality exists only in the afterlife.

732

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In chapter 5, “Rich, Poor, Leisured, Idle, and Marginal,” and chapter 6, “Civilized Barbarians,” Vargas Llosa discusses the social issues addressed in the novel. He reviews the criticism that Hugo received from his contemporaries for lack of realism and for exaggeration in his depiction of poverty, ignorance, and working conditions. Vargas Llosa then reiterates that the world in the novel is fictive. While Hugo wished to remedy social injustice, the novel was not intended to be a mirror of the actual situation in France. In addition, Vargas Llosa emphasizes that Hugo’s politics changed many times during the writing of the novel, resulting in certain contradictions in the sociopolitical aspects of the work. Furthermore, Vargas Llosa states that both history and fate control the fiction of the novel. What fate controls is unchangeable and must be accepted. On the other hand, history controls social injustice, which can be changed. Among the issues of social injustice, Hugo was obsessed with the injustice of the law, the penal system, and the death penalty, which he consistently opposed during his entire life. According to Vargas Llosa, these are the great social issues of Les Misérables. In chapter 7, “From Heaven Above,” Vargas Llosa discusses the importance of the“Philosophical Preface” that Hugo intended to add to the novel for understanding the meaning and purpose of the work. In view of the preface, he states that the novel cannot be understood as a work of social criticism. It is rather a religious tract with a godlike narrator who can leave nothing out. The story must be total. In Vargas Llosa’s view, Hugo is recounting the battle between good and evil and reaffirming humanity’s redemption and the triumph of good. In his final chapter, Vargas Llosa returns to the idea of the “temptation of the impossible.” Using Alphonse de Lamartine’s severe criticism of the novel as a starting point, he proposes that all great fiction convinces the reader that its fictive world is reality. Les Misérables convinces the reader, whom it takes on a journey to find the impossible. Vargas Llosa’s book is a significant addition to the criticism of Les Misérables and of Hugo as a novelist. Vargas Llosa makes Hugo accessible to the reader as an author who was not fettered by the time period in which he wrote. He also presents valuable insights into the genre of fiction and what “reality” means in a fictional work. Since Vargas Llosa is himself a highly respected novelist, his book has been particularly welcomed by critics in the field. Shawncey Webb

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 17 (May 1, 2007): 64. Library Journal 132, no. 8 (May 1, 2007): 81. Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2007, p. R7. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 11 (June 28, 2007): 52-54. The Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 2007, pp. 12-13.

733

TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS Author: Jane Smiley (1949) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 449 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: March 24, 2003-April 2, 2003 Locale: Hollywood Hills, California In her latest novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Smiley uses Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1351) as a template for her tale of ten days in the Hollywood Hills, where ten characters try to make sense of things during the conflict in Iraq Principal characters: Nathan “Max” Maxwell, an aging director whose home in Hollywood becomes the staging area where ten interrelated persons converge Elena Sigmund, Max’s girlfriend of several months, who takes the Iraq War personally Stoney Whipple, Max’s current agent and longtime but surreptitious lover to his daughter Isabel Maxwell, Max’s twenty-three-year-old daughter Charlie Mannheim, Max’s friend since childhood, who has a conservative voice in the household discussions Simon Sigmund, Elena’s son, who is known for his good looks and anything-goes attitude Zoe Cunningham, Max’s former wife, Isabel’s mother, and famous actress and singer Paul Schmidt, Zoe’s latest in a series of men who serve as her companion Delphine Cunningham, Zoe’s mother, a Jamaican immigrant who continues to live near Max Cassie Marshall, Delphine’s best friend, who lives next door to Max and runs an art gallery in town Mike, a Russian millionaire who wants Max to write and direct a movie

Beginning Ten Days in the Hills with an epigraph from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galeotto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620), a collection of one hundred stories told by ten persons escaping the plague at a queen’s villa in the countryside around Florence, Italy, Jane Smiley encourages her readers to make comparisons between her novel and the earlier medieval text. Like The Decameron, Smiley’s text includes ten people who are brought together and end up telling stories. In Ten Days in the Hills, however, the convening of friends and relatives of Nathan “Max” Maxwell occurs rather arbitrarily one morning at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Though he and his new girlfriend Elena Sigmund are expecting a visit from Max’s boyhood friend Charlie Mannheim, they soon find that Max’s

734

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

daughter, Isabel; Elena’s son, Simon; Max’s former wife, Zoe Cunningham; Zoe’s current lover, Paul Schmidt; Max’s agent, Stoney Whipple; and Max’s former mother-in-law’s best friend, Cassie Marshall, all show up for breakfast one morning. Fortunately, his former mother-in-law Delphine Cunningham lives in a guest house on the premises and has helped welcome the guests. The group members make themselves at home in Max’s house for a few days, then, at Stoney’s urging, they eventually retreat to an even more luxurious home owned by a mysterious Russian known Jane Smiley has published several only as Mike, who wants Max to write and diworks of fiction and nonfiction, rect a movie about fifteenth century Cossacks including the memoir A Year at the in the Ukraine. Races (2004) and a biography of Though The Decameron features a conCharles Dickens. Her novel A Thousand Acres (1991) won the trived situation in that the ten Italian visitors Pulitzer Prize and was made into a are required to tell stories on assigned subfilm. She was inducted into the jects such as love and death, Smiley’s characAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters ters are not obliged by their host to entertain in 2001. In 2006, she received the PEN with a tale. Given their close proximity and USA Lifetime Achievement Award for talkative natures, however, each member of Literature. the group finds it impossible to keep quiet. At the beginning of the novel, each day seems to be tied directly to an individual character, and the consciousness of that character serves as a filtering agent for the action of that day. Thus, while readers learn particular details about that person, they are also exposed to the multitude of stories told by others in the presence of that person. For example, day one opens with Max and Elena in bed, but Max notes the subtleties of the room and the woman, meets the guests, and relays important character information to Elena. Throughout the first part of the novel, Smiley loosely follows this pattern, giving many of the main characters specific focus, but by the time the characters move to Mike’s house for the final four days, the narration becomes more omniscient and fragmentary, allowing stories and storytellers to alternate narratives quickly without a clear focus on one character. In both Max’s and Mike’s houses, characters divide themselves into different sleeping arrangements: Known couples such as Elena and Max share a bedroom, and others sleep alone or with another character, unbeknownst to the rest of the house. Isabel, for example, has been having a sexual relationship with Stoney, who is fifteen years her senior, since she was a teenager. During the ten days chronicled in the novel, he spends every night in her bedroom, though others in the house are not aware of this arrangement until the two purposefully choose a room together at Mike’s house. Because of the intimacy of the bedroom scenes, the characters often reveal private sto-

Ten Days in the Hills / smiley

735

ries when they are with a partner. These stories relay personal philosophies, childhood dramas, hopes, dreams, and fears. Later, the group meets for meals and a movie in the evening, thus opening the possibilities for more embedded stories within the larger narrative. In these larger gatherings, Elena argues against the Iraq War, Cassie recounts unusual events she has heard from others, and the group generally discusses broader topics. When the group moves to Mike’s house, however, the novel moves more quickly, generally relying on bedroom scenes to reveal what is happening inside the house and the minds of its inhabitants. Because much of the action and conversation in the later fourth of the book occurs in bedrooms, these vignettes are often more eroticized. In keeping with Boccaccio’s focus in The Decameron on both the bawdy and the romantic, Ten Days in the Hills demonstrates a wide spectrum of intimate relationships— from Max and Elena’s tender lovemaking to Simon Sigmund’s ménage à trois with two of Mike’s house staff. Because the novel is set during the first few days of the Iraq War, Ten Days in the Hills uses this conflict and other political, environmental, and cultural issues of the time period as pivotal centers for many of the tales. Both Elena and Isabel are deeply troubled by the war and what they feel is a sense of impending doom, a dramatic downturn in America’s position in the world. Elena in particular feels threatened by the events and obsessively talks about her position. Though the other characters do not necessarily share Elena and Isabel’s convictions—particularly Max’s friend Charlie, who repeatedly argues with those who speak negatively of America’s military position—they all begin to enjoy a sense of isolation away from the concerns of the world, first in Max’s house, and then even more so in Mike’s house, where there are no televisions or newspapers. Just as the visitors to the queen’s villa in The Decameron flee Florence, Italy, to escape the plague, so too do the ten characters in this novel flee Hollywood to escape the war. This not-so-subtle comparison allows Smiley to indict political policies in the larger frame of the novel, as well as within individual characters’ political diatribes. This political thread, however, is only one of many that make up the tapestry of the novel. Another of Smiley’s overarching themes that is highlighted by the Hollywood setting and many of the characters’ direct involvement with the movie industry is the importance of stories and storytelling to the self and the group. At the beginning of the novel, Max decides he wants to make a movie with the dialogue-rich structure of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). He wants to title his movie “My Lovemaking with Elena” and feature not the pornographic aspects of such an enterprise but rather the dialogue between the two lovers, a concept that his agent Stoney says “has every single thing that American audiences hate and despise—fornication, old people, current events, and conversation.” This kind of storytelling contrasts sharply with Mike’s idea of remaking the epic Taras Bulba, a 1962 film starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis and adapted from the 1842 novel by Nikolai Gogol. This multilayered epic depicts the Cossacks facing a variety of sixteenth century opponents, yet Mike urges Max to let the movie give voice to each group’s story, each perspective of the struggle.

736

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

These two kinds of film methods illustrate the way Smiley uses stories and storytelling in the novel. The intimate stories become critical in developing relationships in the cases of Elena and Max and of Stoney and Isabel, and in devastating relationships in the case of Paul and Zoe. When the intimate groups gather, everyone benefits from telling stories in that each person’s perspective can be honored within the larger framework of the topical or familial issue. When the characters tell their stories, the others in the group begin to understand their situations. For example, Max does not want to make Mike’s film until he hears Mike’s account of the movie’s importance. Thus, in the context of the novel, stories build consensus, develop intimacy, convince, and entertain. One could also argue that Stoney’s original indictment of Max’s movie about Elena has some validity as a criticism of Smiley’s text. One has to care about the characters and their stories in order to care about what those characters have to say. Max illustrates this principle to some degree when he describes problems he might have while making a movie: “Even when I try to make it as compelling as possible, I know they are stories and the audience knows they are stories and the actors know they are stories. The thing about a story is that if affects you if you want it to, but you can take it or leave it.” Each person in Ten Days in the Hills has his or her own story and wants to be understood. Isabel, for example, wants desperately to bond with her mother. On the other hand, Zoe wants Isabel to understand where she comes from and why she cannot be anyone but herself. Stoney wants to live up to his father’s ideals. Paul wants to reach a path to enlightenment. Unless others recognize the value of these individual stories, no one will feel compelled to care about the narrative. As Charlie Mannheim puts it, “My own story is very big to me—the marriage and the kids, and the house we built, and the separation, and now my cholesterol levels and how far I can run on the beach and getting my supplement business going, but coming out here puts it in perspective and makes me know it’s just a story. You know, eight million stories in the naked city.” Just as the individual story can seem so important to the self, stories have to be larger than the self to spark others’ interest. By creating so many stories embedded within stories, all encased in the larger frame narrative, Smiley risks losing an audience that wants to focus on an individual character’s development and an overarching plot that can bring the disparities of the fragmented group together. Characters in the novel are often underdeveloped. Though another character suggests that Cassie Marshall and Delphine Cunningham may be lovers, their background and motivations for their behavior are largely unexplored. Because so much of the text relies on dialogue, many of the more important plot shifts in the text seem too sudden because of a lack of exposition. Despite these issues, Ten Days in the Hills has a kind of fairy-tale-like quality, offering the characters respite from a real-world conflict, just as Smiley’s novel and its attendant stories offer its readers an entertaining fictional world. Rebecca Hendrick Flannagan

Ten Days in the Hills / smiley

737

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 8 (December 15, 2006): 5. Books & Culture 13, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 40. Entertainment Weekly, no. 921 (February 16, 2007): 80. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 24 (December 15, 2006): 1241-1242. Library Journal 132, no. 3 (February 15, 2007): 115. New Statesman 136 (March 12, 2007): 59. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 7 (April 26, 2007): 29-30. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 48 (December 4, 2006): 33. Time 169, no. 8 (February 19, 2007): 66. The Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2007, p. 23.

738

THINKING IN CIRCLES An Essay on Ring Composition Author: Mary Douglas (1921-2007) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). 169 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Anthropology, literary criticism A distinguished anthropologist explains a technique of composition widely used in oral societies but little understood in the modern print culture In 1905, Dwight Terry established an annual lectureship at Yale University. Under the terms of his bequest, the lectures were to explore the relations of science and religion or, in Terry’s words, to build “the truths of science and philosophy into the structure of a broadened and purified religion.” The lectures were to be given by “men eminent in their respective departments,” and for the first fifty years all the eminent thinkers (including such giants as the American educator John Dewey and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung) were men. The British novelist and suffragist Rebecca West became the first woman to lecture in the series, in 1955, and she was followed by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1957. After that, nearly a half century elapsed before another woman was invited to deliver the famed Terry Lectures. Mary Douglas gave four lectures in October, 2003, under the general title “Writing in Circles: Ring Composition as a Creative Stimulus.” At age eighty-two, she was looping back to subjects she had worked on at the outset of her career and was consciously bringing her work full circle. Since completing a three-part study of the Old Testament’s Pentateuch, or Torah, she had been giving lectures on what she claimed to be the organizational principle that held the five books of Moses together: the principle of ring composition. She offered a summation in the first of her Terry Lectures, “How to Recognize a Ring Composition.” The term “ring composition” was coined in 1948 by W. A. A. van Otterlo, a Dutch scholar working on the Homeric epics. Throughout the previous century, classicists had broken down the Iliad and Odyssey into smaller poems, suggesting that they derived from a vast oral tradition. Van Otterlo asked how the fragments were stitched together and suggested that the basic principle was the “ring”: a circular pattern based on repetition and balance. In a simple frame, a narrative might have an introduction that somehow anticipated the central event and a conclusion that harkened back to the introduction. In a full-scale ring composition, there would be a careful balance of elements. To explain the ring composition, it helps to use a visual illustration. Douglas provides fifteen figures, eight tables, and three editorial boxes. In lieu of a visual aid, one might use the analogy of a clock face. If the narrative begins and ends at 12:00, the

Thinking in Circles / douglas

739

action has its turning point at 6:00. In a simple tale, the closing action may have certain par- Mary Douglas established her allels to the opening action. Cinderella must reputation as an interpreter of cultural return home, and the prince must come to find patterns with Purity and Danger (1966), her. However, in a ring composition there is a for which she earned the Rivers Medal. quite exact set of correspondences, so that the She turned her attention to the Old events of 7:00, 8:00, and 9:00 echo those of Testament while teaching religious 5:00, 4:00, and 3:00, respectively. There may studies at Princeton and Northwestern Universities and pointed out new even be a ring within the ring, so that the patterns in three books, the last of which events of 7:00 and 8:00 are echoed, respec- won the Bernal Prize. She was made a tively, in those of 11:00 and 10:00. dame of the British Empire in 2006. Presented in this clockwork analogy (which is not Douglas’s), the ring composition seems a highly unlikely proposition. In fact, however, the ring is a type of a rhetorical figure known as chiasmus (from the Greek letter Chi, which is written χ), the inverted relationship of two parallel phrases. A good example of chiasmus is the famous sentence from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Chiasmus can happen on the level of the letter, notably in a palindrome like “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” It can also occur at the level of the image or event in a story. Thus, in the story of the binding of Isaac, in Genesis 22, the 6:00 turn is the angel’s call to Abraham, just after the pious father has raised his knife against his own son. The angel instructs Abraham to substitute a ram for the human sacrifice. The burning of the animal sacrifice at 9:00 echoes the gathering of wood for the sacrificial fire at 3:00, and the whole chapter forms a perfect ring. All of this may seem a mere curiosity until one comes to the age-old question of Abraham’s sanity in preparing to kill his beloved son—or God’s in demanding the sacrifice. Douglas suggests that readers who recognize the ring composition will see that Isaac’s life is never seriously at risk, only Abraham’s faith, and that the happy outcome is predicted from the beginning. Having identified the salient features of a ring composition, Douglas turns to the book of Numbers, widely considered a grab bag of Old Testament narratives and laws. She suggests that it is in fact a carefully constructed ring, a case she first made in her 2001 book In the Wilderness. She suggests further that Numbers was written for an audience with established patterns of thinking, patterns that show up in the narratives and laws. In 2003, Douglas followed the lectures on ring composition and the book of Numbers with observations about the difficulty facing scholars from a linear print culture and speculations about the reasons that humans have thought in circles. In preparing the lectures for publication, she has added material from two other series of lectures that she gave, in London and Edinburgh, so that the published “essay” has eleven numbered sections. Moreover, she has turned the original project into a full-scale ring composition. Lest any linear reader miss this feature, or feat, the contents page of Thinking in Circles is followed by a diagram showing “contents in a ring”: the eleven numbered

740

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

sections in a circular pattern where the section on “How to Construct and Recognize a Ring” is directly across from another on “How to Complete a Ring.” This is very clever, of course, but it serves the larger purpose of showing that the ring is not an esoteric device available only to the initiated but a feature of human thought. It also reinforces her suggestion—never quite an assertion—that writers in societies from India to Israel have consciously created rings to give their creations shape. Western cultures today tend to think negatively about “circular reasoning,” and there is a gentle, self-effacing humor in Douglas’s title. Nonetheless, Douglas offers reasons to rethink our cultural prejudices. One way to recognize a ring composition, says Douglas, is to look for a repeating element. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, there is the repeated answer to God’s call: “Here I am.” Douglas uses as her own recurring motif a statement by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Commenting on the use of parallelism in language, Jakobson said that it occurred with remarkable frequency and served to give the parallel lines “both clear uniformity and great diversity.” He added that it was so universal as to be based, most probably, on the functioning of the human brain. Douglas mentions this observation in the first section of her essay, returns to it at the turning point (6:00 in the clock analogy), and devotes the final section to reflection on “Jakobson’s conundrum”: “that writing in parallels comes to everyone naturally—but we do not understand why we are slow to recognize it.” She explains this conundrum by “resorting to cultural theory,” which has been an important aspect of anthropology for the last generation. In doing so, she comes back to her own intellectual beginnings. As a doctoral student in the 1940’s, Douglas did her fieldwork in what was then the Belgian Congo. While studying traditional African religions, she wanted to understand why different groups feared different risks. After writing an ethnographic study of the Lele peoples, she developed a full-scale theory, which she termed the “cultural theory of risk.” In the now-classic Purity and Danger (1966), she argued that societies generate “cultural biases” in order to create cohesion. Some biases allow more individual choice; others demand more group solidarity. She found parallels between Western systems like the taboos in the Old Testament and non-Western ones like those she had studied in the field, thus beginning a process of pattern-seeking that would mark the rest of her career. Douglas suggests that the ring composition served the needs of more hierarchical societies, where it was important for members to recognize boundaries, and that the very concept is difficult for members of a postmodern culture that distrusts clear-cut categories. In a footnote, she observes that anthropologists have now published more than seven hundred books and articles on what they commonly call Cultural Theory (uppercase). She is too modest to note that most of these are footnotes to her own work. Her original audience at Yale would have known this, however, and readers of this deceptively simple essay should keep it in mind. In a circular story, there is both a journey out (1:00-5:00 on the clock face) and a return home (7:00-11:00). In the ring story, there is a parallel between events in the journeys out and home. In order to meet the rules of a ring composition as she has identified them, Douglas creates a parallel discussion of the Iliad toward the end of

Thinking in Circles / douglas

741

the essay to reinforce the discussion of the book of Numbers near the beginning. In the biblical work, she has found a recurring movement from law to narrative, which serves to organize the book; in Homer’s epic, she finds alternating stories of night and day that, while fragmentary in themselves, are arranged in such a way as to create the unity in diversity that critics have long cherished in works of literary art. In a circular story, there is also a turning point (at 6:00), at which one is furthest from the beginning but still affected by it. Douglas finds her turning point in modern literature. She takes as her test case Laurence Sterne’s wildly digressive novel Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), but she also discusses works of detective fiction like the Poirot novels of Agatha Christie. Her findings are perceptive, even ingenious, but admittedly inconclusive. There would seem to be no modern ring compositions in modern literature, and one has to wonder if she has deliberately avoided or simply overlooked such carefully organized works as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927) and indeed such highly symmetrical plots as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611). Although well aware that poets of Shakespeare’s day were attracted to circular structures found in works of antiquity, such as Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.), she is most interested to see whether a ring structure can be found in works as apparently disorganized as the book of Numbers. It would be difficult to find a work as apparently random as Tristram Shandy, or an analysis of Sterne’s plot as orderly as Douglas’s. In the first major review of this book, Edward Rothstein of The New York Times admired Douglas’s ability to spot patterns but found her book more suggestive than conclusive. He recognized that audiences always look for meaning and order, whether they are attending a concert, an art opening, or a poetry reading. He wondered whether perception of the symmetries in the ancient epics does not amount to a sort of rite, engaged in by a limited community. Mary Douglas died a few weeks after the book’s publication. At eighty-six, she had outlived her husband of fifty years, the anthropologist James Douglas, and had completed all her projected research. Among the glowing obituaries, The Guardian’s pointed out that this final essay is a summation, continuing her long-running effort to apply discoveries from non-Western civilizations to her own cultural milieu. Thomas Willard

Review Sources Choice 45, no. 2 (October, 2007): 277. The Guardian, May 18, 2007, p. 44. The New York Times 156 (March 26, 2007): E1-E6.

742

THOMAS HARDY Author: Claire Tomalin (1933) First published: 2006, in Great Britain Publisher: Penguin Press (New York). 512 pp. $35.00 Type of work: Literary biography Time: 1840-1928 Locale: England Tomalin examines the life of the renowned writer who began his career as a novelist at the end of the Victorian era but became one of the leading Modern poets Principal personages: Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet Jemima Hardy, his mother Emma Gifford Hardy, his first wife Florence Dugdale Hardy, his second wife Florence Henniker, socialite and friend of Hardy Edmund Gosse, editor and friend of Hardy

For the 1912 centennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, the editors of Bookman sent out a questionnaire to hundreds of writers asking them to explain how Dickens had influenced their work. Quite a few wrote extensively about the impact of the most celebrated Victorian novelist on their work. George Bernard Shaw, by then recognized as the foremost English dramatist of the time, went so far as to claim that Dickens was influential in ways not even imagined by his Victorian contemporaries in revising attitudes toward society. The response submitted by Thomas Hardy was hardly so effusive. In his laconic two-line reply, he said he supposed he was influenced in some way by Dickens—he suspected everyone was—but he was unable to say how or why. That comment speaks volumes not only about Hardy’s attitude toward Dickens but also about his own approach to novel writing. By his own admission, he cared little for the fiction he turned out over nearly three decades. He wrote novels, he often said, as a way to earn a living so he could practice the craft for which he had a deep and abiding love: poetry. Although by the end of the century he was among the country’s most successful novelists, according to legend (a legend Hardy endorsed), when public opinion turned against him after the publication of Jude the Obscure in 1895 he turned his back on fiction and devoted the rest of his life—another three decades—exclusively to writing verse. That story and many others are retold in Claire Tomalin’s well-written and engaging Thomas Hardy, a biography that humanizes the man whose private life was often a well-guarded secret from his contemporaries. The facts of that life contain no spectacular secrets. Born in 1840 of working-class parents, Hardy was apprenticed as an architect at age fifteen and took up novel writing before he was thirty. He fell in love

Thomas Hardy / tomalin

743

with and married Emma Gifford, a woman above his social station, at nearly the same Claire Tomalin, a graduate of time. Encouraged by friends, such as the edi- Cambridge University, is a veteran tor and writer Edmund Gosse, he spent three journalist and biographer who has decades cranking out stories in which he tried published a dozen books, including to explain something about people’s passions, studies of Jane Austen, Mary while constantly battling censors who were Wollstonecraft, and Katherine unwilling to let him speak freely lest he bring Mansfield. Her biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002) was a blush to the cheek of some young unwed the Whitbread Book of the Year. maid by alluding to anything that might re motely suggest there was a sexual side to human relationships. While he was battling to become more open about sexuality in his fiction, he was undergoing a gradual estrangement from his wife, who eventually moved into the attic of the country home Hardy had built with the profits from his novels. In the 1890’s, he flirted seriously with an attractive socialite named Florence Henniker, but nothing came of the affair. In 1905, he began a relationship with a much younger woman, Florence Dugdale, whom he married shortly after Emma Hardy died in 1912. He lived until 1928—long enough to be hailed as one of the foremost writers England ever produced. These events have been told before—in fact, in greater detail than Tomalin provides. Hardy himself completed a two-volume autobiography—The Early Life of Hardy (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), together as The Life of Thomas Hardy (1962)—that was published after his death, with his second wife listed as author in order to give the story a facade of objectivity. Several scholars have taken up the story during the twentieth century, and lengthy accounts by Robert Giddings and Michael Millgate are just two of a rather imposing group of biographical studies that attempt to get at the man behind the work. Additionally, just before Tomalin’s book appeared, Picador Press and Yale University Press issued Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2006) by Ralph Pite, professor at the University of Cardiff and an accomplished poet in his own right. One might have wondered, then, if there would be anything left for another biographer to say. Tomalin proves that, indeed, there is. Without resorting to outlandish speculation, and often restating information provided by other sources, Tomalin nevertheless manages to create a portrait of the writer that is sympathetic, well developed, and filled with details that bring Hardy to life for her readers. Throughout the narrative, she contrasts Hardy’s rather well-ordered, conservative lifestyle with those of the characters he creates. It must have been surprising to his friends and relatives to discover that the man who rose from very modest roots to become a diligent if not inspired architect could have boiling inside him the passions that emerge in his fiction. Certainly Hardy the man would never have thought to defy convention in the ways his heroes and heroines do. Tomalin does provide clues to Hardy’s inner discontent, though, especially his fondness for the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and other Romantics. Unfortunately, the age into which he was born did not permit Hardy the freedom to explore the possibilities of self-expression that his Romantic heroes

744

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

enjoyed. By the time he reached adulthood, the conventions of behavior and expression that characterized the Victorians had reached their zenith. The tug-of-war in Hardy’s personality is the central subject of Tomalin’s story. Urged by his mother to advance beyond the limits of the class into which he was born, Hardy struggled to become a writer in a period when frank discussion of many forms of human relationships were strictly taboo. Worse for him, the rather limited opportunities he had to interact with women left him unfulfilled, and his experiences in marriage were not entirely satisfactory. Much of that frustration emerges in his fiction, and Tomalin’s brief commentaries on individual novels hint at the biographical genesis of much of Hardy’s fiction. While she acknowledges Hardy’s oft-stated dismissal of his novel writing, Tomalin takes pains to point out how carefully Hardy crafted his work, often preparing different versions for serial publication and hardcover release, and working incessantly to revise novels in second and subsequent editions. While she never states it directly, Tomalin is clearly convinced Hardy was much more devoted to the craft of fiction than he wished to let on. She is forthright in her admiration of his ability, claiming novels such as The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure are masterpieces, but she is also willing to concede that works like The Hand of Ethelberta (1875-1876) and A Laodicean (1880-1881) are failures. She concludes that the story of Hardy abandoning fiction because he received bad reviews is half right, but a bit disingenuous. By 1897, Hardy had become wealthy enough not to have to work at all, so he turned his attention to what he truly loved, writing verse. If Tomalin is competent in her handling of Hardy’s life as a novelist, she is truly impressive in her analysis of his work as a poet. In fact, she finds much evidence about Hardy’s character in his verse. For example, much of what is known of Hardy’s first marriage comes from information in The Life of Thomas Hardy—a book Florence Hardy altered to present her predecessor in the worst possible light. Compounding the problem is that Hardy led a very private life. He entertained few friends at his home, and although he spent some time in London mingling with the social elites once his novels brought him notoriety, he was not a regular among the set whose lives would have been the subject for gossip spread in private correspondence. To compensate for a relative dearth of reliable information, Tomalin looks to the poetry Hardy wrote during his lifetime, but especially in the two years following Emma’s death, to fill in the gaps. Because much of Hardy’s poetry has an autobiographical basis, her task is not as difficult or as unscholarly as might be imagined. Always careful not to draw conclusions too freely, Tomalin is still able to explain as well as anyone has why Hardy fell in love with the rather spinsterish, educated sister-in-law of the parson at St. Juliot’s Church in the far reaches of the countryside, and what kept the couple together through three decades during which any real sense of passion completely disappeared from the relationship. Tomalin does not subscribe to the theory that Emma Gifford went mad. Instead, she ascribes her unusual behavior quirks— including her decision to move to the attic at Max Gate and spend most of her time there—to mere eccentricity. What concerns Tomalin is not so much why Emma behaved as she did but rather what effect the estrangement had on Hardy.

Thomas Hardy / tomalin

745

Tomalin quotes extensively from the poetry, including entire poems or long segments that demonstrate not only how Hardy intertwined his personal feelings with larger social themes but also how carefully he constructed his verses. The rather spare, understated quality of the poems may surprise some, since his favorite poet was helley and since both he and his wife enjoyed reading the work of their older contemporaries Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. The outpouring of excessive emotion that one finds in Shelley and Tennyson, or the complicated patterns of versification and language structure characteristic of Browning, are notably absent from Hardy’s work. There is, as Tomalin points out repeatedly, a distinctly modern cast to the verse. Although she clearly admires Hardy’s poetry, even Tomalin has difficulty making a case for The Dynasts (pb. 1903, 1906, 1908, 1910; pr. 1914), Hardy’s philosophical epic. This is no surprise, however, seeing that the work has not attracted a large readership even among scholars. Tomalin has read widely about both Hardy and the period in which he lived; her extensive (though not exhaustive) bibliography attests to her care in researching both the man and his times. That research is carefully woven into a seamless narrative designed to engage the reader’s interest in her subject. As a consequence, there emerges from the pages of Thomas Hardy a well-rounded portrait of a man who thought deeply about human relationships and spent considerable time and energy attempting to communicate his insight through his fiction and verse. One might quibble over some of the rather brief summaries of the novels, or wonder why Tomalin did not delve deeper into certain aspects of Hardy’s character or his relationships with publishers or other literary figures who crossed his path. For Tomalin to have done so, however, would have required her to write a considerably longer book—something twenty-first century readers may have balked at picking off the shelf. What Tomalin presents seems just right: As a biography designed for her own contemporaries, Thomas Hardy is a first-rate piece of scholarship that reveals the character of one of the late nineteenth century’s most enigmatic literary figures. Laurence W. Mazzeno

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 17. The Economist 381 (November 11, 2006): 96. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 21 (November 1, 2006): 1119. Library Journal 131, no. 19 (November 15, 2006): 72. London Review of Books 29, no. 1 (January 4, 2007): 25-29. The New Republic 236, nos. 8/9 (February 19, 2007): 29-33. The New York Times Review of Books 54, no. 3 (March 1, 2007): 21-24. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 48 (December 4, 2006): 47. The Spectator 302 (October 21, 2006): 46-48. The Washington Post, January 21, 2007, p. BW15.

746

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS Author: Khaled Hosseini (1965) Publisher: Riverhead Books (New York). 370 pp. $25.95 Type of work: Novel Time: 1964-April, 2003 Locale: Kabul and Her3t, Afghanistan; Murree, Pakistan The second novel by this Afghan American author recounts the woes of two very different Afghan women in their homeland during a time of violent political upheaval, bloody civil war, and foreign invasions by Soviet as well as U.S. and NATO troops Principal characters: Mariam, illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man from Her3t Laila, daughter of a middle-class family in Kabul Rasheed, brutal shoemaker husband to Mariam and Laila in Kabul Nana, Mariam’s unwed, epileptic mother Jalil, Mariam’s wealthy father, living in Her3t Hakim (Babi), Laila’s gentle, uxorious father, a teacher in Kabul Fariba (Mammy), Laila’s high-strung mother Tariq, Laila’s childhood playmate and lover in later life

Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), was also the first novel by an Afghan American writer, and it became a runaway success. It remained for more than two years on American best-seller lists, sold 8 million copies worldwide, and was made into a film, released in December, 2007. When Hosseini revisited Afghanistan after its publication, he had been living in political asylum in California for almost twenty years. On that visit, as he wandered his bombed-out boyhood haunts in Kabul and conversed with its war-scarred people, he felt impelled to tell an Afghan story different from The Kite Runner’s. That book had been about men—fathers and sons, male friendship, male treachery. Hosseini now felt drawn to tell a contemporaneous story about Afghanistan’s women. The brilliant result is A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel about two women protagonists, Mariam and Laila. The trajectory of their lives forms the double plot of the book, and although the narrative is in the third person, the point of view itself shifts to that of the character whose plotline is being developed. One is reminded of Leo Tolstoy’s management of the double plot in Anna Karenina (1875-1877). Indeed, the two women’s narrative points of view structure the novel with intricately wrought symmetry. Part 1 is told entirely through Mariam’s point of view, part 2 wholly through Laila’s. In part 3, however, the viewpoint alternates between the women with each chapter. Then, just as Mariam’s part 1 begins the novel, the concluding part 4 of the novel is told through Laila’s point of view.

A Thousand Splendid Suns / hosseini

747

A Thousand Splendid Suns can also be read as a female bildungsroman, and the growth of these two girls into maturity, marriage, and maternity aptly illustrates the travail of Afghani women. Hosseini’s two women are strategic contrasts physically, socially, and psychologically. Socially, Mariam is from the rural lower class; Laila, the urban middle class. Psychologically, Mariam is accustomed to humiliation; Laila, to consideration. Physically, Mariam’s features are “un- Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul in shapely,” “flat,” “unmemorable,” “coarse,” 1965. His family took political asylum while Laila is a green-eyed blond beauty. in the United States in 1980 following Their common fate is to become co-wives the Soviet invasion. Hosseini earned a of the same misogynistic, brutal man. As medical degree in 1993 and practiced Hosseini spins out their fate, their sharp indi- medicine in Northern California, rising vidual differences only serve to demonstrate early in the morning to write his first the breadth of commonalty among Muslim novel, The Kite Runner (2003). In women in Afghani society during the drastic 2006, he became an envoy to the political upheavals of the 1970’s to 2003— United Nations High Commissioner for a king deposed, a communist coup, a Soviet Refugees (UNHCR). invasion, a civil war, a faith-based Taliban dictatorship, an invasion by American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces. In Mariam, Hosseini presents a being at the lowest link of the Afghan social chain. She is poor, female, and illegitimate. She lives in a shack (kolba) beyond the pale of Her3t, itself a city on the border with Iran, far from the center, Kabul. Clearly Hosseini locates Mariam on the periphery of society. Mariam’s mother, Nana, is an unmarriageable epileptic. She works as a maid until impregnated by her wealthy employer, Jalil. It is rather unaccountable that Jalil, proprietor of the town’s cinema, owner of a Mercedes, husband to three wives, and father to nine children, would dally with the unlovely Nana. To assuage his Muslim conscience, Jalil sets up Mariam and Nana in their shack, provides for Qur$3nic instruction from Mullah Faizullah (the sanest and most positive influence in Mariam’s young life), and visits her every week, regaling Mariam with stories of what her life might be if she were legitimate. Mariam idolizes Jalil. For her fifteenth birthday, Mariam asks Jalil to take her to his cinema to see Pinocchio (1940) and eat ice cream with her siblings. She is in fact asking for legitimation and distancing herself from her mother. Jalil sighs ambiguously. Nana pleads with Mariam not to go, or she (Nana) may suffer a mortal epileptic fit. When Jalil does not appear at the appointed hour, Mariam, in a rare act of selfassertion and initiative, makes her way to his home. Refused admission, she stubbornly spends the night at its gates. The next day, Jalil’s chauffeur forcibly escorts her back to her shack. There she is confronted with the grisly spectacle of her hanged mother.

748

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

This defining trauma, then, teaches Mariam that to assert oneself, to dare, to take the initiative is to suffer pain, cause hurt to others, and precipitate tragedy. Better to bear and forbear. Hosseini thus prepares the psyche of this character for the almost incredible burden of abuse and suffering that she has to bear in her marriage. Hardly a week after this traumatic experience, the fifteen-year-old Mariam is hurried into an arranged marriage with a forty-five-year-old shoemaker and widower from Kabul named Rasheed. He is smelly, “thick-bellied,” “broad-shouldered,” and “heavy-footed,” with nails the color of “the inside of a rotting apple.” In Kabul, after a 650-kilometer bus journey, Mariam is made to don a head-to-toe burka (Hosseini reportedly tried one out himself to experience its confinement—and odd comfort), and Rasheed exercises his connubial rites painfully and lovelessly. When Mariam conceives, Rasheed is joyful in anticipation of replacing his dead son, who had drowned because of Rasheed’s drunken negligence, but when Mariam has the first of several miscarriages, Rasheed turns cold and brutal. Once, when Mariam’s rice is not to his liking, he stuffs her mouth with pebbles and makes her chew until two molars break. Growing up in Mariam’s Kabuli neighborhood is Laila, nineteen years her junior, born on the date of the communist coup in 1978. She is the apple of her loving father’s eye. Laila’s is a close-knit, middle-class, monogamous Muslim family with three children. Laila’s father, Hakim (Babi), is a mild-mannered man who was proposed to by his wife, Fariba (Mammy), his childhood playmate—and who is now the family’s decision maker. Babi is a university-educated teacher who was reeducated by the communists into a bread factory laborer, but he bears no grudges, only becoming more of a ditherer. However, he firmly believes in education for women as well as men and wants Laila, her school’s star pupil, to continue her schooling even though her teacher is a blatant communist sympathizer. It is notable that although Babi is but a cameo character, Hosseini has admirably conceived him as a foil to Jalil (who is weak like Babi, but selfish) and to Rasheed (who is far from weak, and also selfish). Mammy is more forceful than her husband, but she is moody (perhaps even bipolar)— sometimes partying euphorically, sometimes taking to bed for weeks on end. She blesses her sons’ joining the mujahideen to fight the Soviet occupation, but she predictably spirals into deep depression when they become martyrs. There are moments of brightness in Laila’s life. One such occurs when Babi takes her on an outing to marvel at the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan—but all the world knows with dramatic irony that this moment of brightness will soon be extinguished permanently when the Taliban destroy the statues in 2001. Another source of brightness is her friendship with Tariq, a neighborhood boy who has lost a leg to a land mine; it is a friendship that blossoms into love. After the mujahideen defeat the Soviet troops in 1989, however, civil war breaks out between the victorious factions, turning Kabul into a battleground. Tariq’s family leaves to seek refuge in Pakistan, but not before Tariq and Laila have consummated their love. Ironically, when Mammy finally emerges from her depression and decides to leave also, a shell hits their home, leaving Laila the lone survivor. Part 3 of the novel opens with Mariam discovering Laila amid the rubble of her home and nursing her back to health. To Mariam’s and the reader’s dismay, Rasheed,

A Thousand Splendid Suns / hosseini

749

now in his sixties, has his eye on Laila as a marriage prospect. A traveler from Pakistan comes with an eyewitness account of Tariq’s death. (Later it is revealed that Rasheed had suborned him into concocting this story.) Laila is heartbroken and destitute, and suspects that she is carrying Tariq’s child, so when Rasheed proposes, Laila reluctantly accepts—causing Mariam great pain. Hosseini skillfully and credibly develops the relationship between these two co-wives, one feeling resentful, the other feeling like a usurper, but both constrained to coexist under the tyrannical regimen of a brutal husband. Their enmity turns toward amity after Laila’s daughter, Aziza, is born, and Mariam’s frustrated maternal nature comes to the fore. They bond as they share household chores, then personal grooming, then their most intimate secrets. Fearing for Aziza’s safety should Rasheed discover her paternity, the women plot an escape to Pakistan, but they are detained at the bus depot (women unaccompanied by male relatives are suspect), Rasheed is informed, and he thrashes them mercilessly. Some time after this, Laila realizes that she is again pregnant. She almost aborts herself but desists, giving birth to a boy on whom Rasheed dotes. Meanwhile, the fundamentalist Taliban has taken over from the fractious warlords, making life even more restrictive for the women. Events take a dramatic, even a melodramatic, turn after Rasheed confronts Laila with his suspicions about Aziza and forces her into an orphanage. Then Tariq suddenly returns from Pakistan. Hosseini’s concatenation of the concluding action is as violent and bloody as that of a Renaissance revenge tragedy when the women are forced to rise up against their common oppressor. In part 4 of the novel, Hosseini attempts to provide a coda of calm for the survivors, albeit in the fragile unquiet of post-9/11 Afghanistan. A Thousand Splendid Suns, then, is indeed a splendid successor to The Kite Runner. Though some may carp at the melodramatic quality of some of Hosseini’s episodes, his protagonists are flesh-and-blood women who are wrenchingly sympathetic, and their plight of living on the front line of political, fundamentalist, and domestic terror may be closer to home than many Western readers would like to think. Besides, Hosseini’s prose is clear and unpretentious, his narrative urgent and compelling. He has written another page-turner. C. L. Chua Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 5 (November 1, 2007): 74. The Economist 383 (May 26, 2007): 99. Entertainment Weekly, nos. 971/972 (December 28, 2007): 83. Financial Times, June 9, 2007, p. 36. The New York Times 156 (May 29, 2007): E1-E8. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 3, 2007): 58. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 52-53. The Spectator 304 (June 2, 2007): 42. The Times Literary Supplement, June 1, 2007, p. 23.

750

TIME AND MATERIALS Poems, 1997-2005 Author: Robert Hass (1941) Publisher: Ecco Press (New York). 88 pp. $22.95 Type of work: Poetry In this long-awaited, award-winning collection of poetry from a celebrated California poet, Hass explores the subjects of art, nature, and social issues Robert Hass ranks high among America’s academic poets, winning admirers for his transparent language, the verbal music of his lines, and his earnest political sensibility. His work wins admirers even among those who care little for the trappings of academia or the intellectual gamesmanship that preoccupies many university writers. This places him among the few who are able to straddle the divide splitting contemporary American poetry. Poets of the academy stand in opposition to those of everyday life, in an uneasy relationship whose roots may be traced back two hundred years. In the early 1800’s, the division noticeably widened between the writers of New England and those of the rest of the young United States. While many New England writers aspired to fit into the British and European tradition, those elsewhere, notably in the South, dreamed of producing an indigenous American literature. The European-leaning writers tended to lead lives of relative ease; New England’s European-style institutions of higher learning, such as Yale and Harvard Universities, in aiding the spread of colleges across the Old West, planted the seed for Americans’ continuing association between comfortably placed university poets and an academic milieu that seems removed from everyday American life. Long associated with the University of California, Hass has built his substantial reputation with works in the traditional mold. Through his translations, especially those cotranslated with Polish poet Czesuaw Miuosz, he has conspicuously emphasized a connection to the European example. In his own poems, moreover, his concerns take a decidedly academic turn. His objects of contemplation are often exterior, formal, and aesthetic—and frequently European. In this new collection, for instance, notes about the poverty-stricken life of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provide subject matter for the lyric “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle.” Similarly, contemplation of a painting by Dutch artist Jan Vermeer gives rise to the long poem “Art and Life.” The volume also includes translations and imitations of works by Roman poet Horace, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, and Hass’s longtime literary friend and cotranslator, Miuosz. This is not to say Hass avoids American subjects, or subjects taken from the other side of the “town-gown” divide. Words by American poet John Ashbery provide the initial impetus for the long poem “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name is

Time and Materials / hass

751

Dmitri”—even if Russian author Fyodor Dos toevski takes an equally important role as Robert Hass is a professor at the literary stimulus as the meditative poem goes University of California, Berkeley. U.S. on. In a like manner, a quotation from Ameri- poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, Hass can poet Richard Eberhardt opens the strongly is a MacArthur Fellow and two-time political work “A Poem,” concerned with the winner of the National Book Critics impact of American military actions overseas, Circle Award. His translations from the works of Czesuaw Miuosz have from the Vietnam War to the present day. appeared in seven volumes. Time and The poet most frequently mentioned in Materials was awarded the National Time and Materials, moreover, is the one typ- Book Award. ically considered the most American of all: Walt Whitman—a telling choice, given that Whitman’s work stood in stark opposition to the work of the intellectuals of his day. Even a poem initially concerned with an intimate moment between lovers can transform into a meditation upon Whitman—as occurs in the short lyric “Futures in Lilacs,” in which Hass visualizes the nineteenth century poet studying etchings in the Library of Congress. The striking irony is that Whitman, the poet of experience, has become for Hass an object of academic knowledge—even though he puts this knowledge to poetic use. The emphasis Hass places in his poems upon knowledge neither dampens the verbal music of his lines nor derails the essential artistic aim of his poems. In the previously mentioned “Art and Life,” he establishes his initial focus upon the Dutch painting almost conversationally: “You know that milkmaid in Vermeer?” Subsequent lines vividly establish the poet’s impressions of the painting. A string of associations then leads to a moment of more personal immediacy, when the poet finds himself contemplating the people around him in the museum cafeteria and considering the curious act of painting restoration. Surrounded by suggestive facts and elusive notions, he concludes: “Something stays this way we cannot have,/ Comes alive because we cannot have it.” Ironically, it is at his most personal, and least academic, that Hass’s words take on a heavier, less musical tone. Examples may be found in “Three Dawn Songs in Summer” or “The Distribution of Happiness,” both short lyrics. In both cases the verses make no reference outside the moment described. They are poems of immersion in experience, free of the trappings of knowledge that so heavily decorate others. Still, the melodic ease of those other poems seems less easily achieved in these more purely experiential works—as may be seen in this, the entire first section, or song, from “Three Dawn Songs in Summer”: The first long shadows in the fields Are like mortal difficulty. The first birdsong is not like that at all.

The conception is powerful. The introduction of the notion of “mortal difficulty” is effective as a means of transforming the reader’s idea of those “first long shadows.” The subsequent progression of ideas also operates successfully, for, to the reader’s

752

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

mind, that opening sense of struggle, suggested by sight of the shadows, is followed by a contrasting suggestion of ease, as heard in the rising birdsong. The phrasing, however, has a flatness akin to that of an equation. The linking-verb structure of the first two lines, “Are like,” is reemphasized by an opposite echo, “is not like,” in the third—an echo that then ends in mundane statement. That song of the bird “is not like that at all,” it asserts. The language falls short of displaying the balanced and melodious verbal sense evident in Hass’s countless lines not concerned with direct experience but rather with indirect experience, and with knowledge. Hass seems to have some awareness of this distance being crossed, from his direct experiences to the expression of those experiences on the page. In the short poem “The Problem of Describing Trees,” he begins with two lines reflecting experience (“The aspen glitters in the wind/ And that delights us.”) followed by lines that render the opening images into scientific terms: The leaf flutters, turning, Because that motion in the heat of August Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf Of the cottonwood.

How strange it is, for the reader of poetry, to find that word “likewise” serving no poetic function, but only to indicate botanical similarity. That something has gone awry in the progress of the poem, in terms of traditional poetic effect, seems directly affirmed by the single-line fourth stanza: “It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.” As if in proof, the poem then ends with a dulled and deadened echo of the opening lines: “The aspen doing something in the wind.” Among the liveliest works in Time and Materials are those in which the rational connection loosens its firm hold on Hass’s pen—as in “A Swarm of Dawns, a Flock of Restless Noons.” In this stanzaic poem, thoughts succeed one another with seeming recklessness, pushed along by means of verbal association and the accidental conjoining of thoughts. The associations are engendered at least in part by the poet’s alert reactions to the words being brought into play—as occurs with “haywire” in the following lines: while I sliced a nectarine for Moroccan salad And the seven league boots of your private grief. Maybe The syntax is a little haywire there. Left to itself, Wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil. Hay Is the Old English word for strike. You strike down Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown. The field mice Devastated the monastery garden. Maybe because it was summer

Even in this gently wandering and inventive poem, fraught with the trappings of knowledge but also enlivened by flashes of radiant imagery, some sense of the trou-

Time and Materials / hass

753

bles suggested in “The Problem of Describing Trees” recurs, in speaking of the character of “the elderly redactor”: “He has no imagination, and field mice have gnawed away/ His source text for their nesting.” Similar to the struggle between experience and knowledge in the poems of Time and Materials is the conflict between poetic truth and political awareness. The balance, or imbalance, is explicit in “Winged and Acid Dark,” a poem that skirts around a moment of violence between a man and a woman, apparently during the waning days of World War II. Interposed in the middle of the poem—and in the middle of the action—is reference to Japanese poet Matsuo Bashf, with his advice concerning the writing of poetry, “to avoid sensational materials”: If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it and no one to say it to.

The poem’s narrative then returns to where it left off—a return that serves to emphasize that the poem’s weight has shifted toward “the horror of the world.” Poetic attention to the political comes to the foreground in several poems in Time and Materials. In the longer poem “Bush’s War,” Hass pursues a string of associations that aim to “Set the facts out in an orderly way.” Where they lead is toward enumerations of death and destruction: Firebombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand In a night. Flash forward: forty-five Thousand Polish officers slaughtered By the Russian army in the Katyn Woods, The work of half a day. Flash forward: Two million Russian prisoners of war Murdered by the German army . . .

More striking in its enumeration of war horrors is the shorter poem “On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjom: A Haibun,” with its opening line, “The human imagination does not do very well with large numbers.” In the next twenty-four lines, Hass aggressively emphasizes those same large numbers: “Five hundred thousand Chinese soldiers died in battle, or of/ disease. A million South Koreans died, four-fifths of them civilians./ One million, one hundred thousand North Koreans.” He breaks the litany with lines addressed to the reader: “The terms are/ inexact and thinking about them can make you sleepy.” The poem as a whole, which mixes the enumeration of horrors with both commentary and snippets of experience, ends on a note returning to, or perhaps establishing for the first time during the poem, an actually poetic vision: The flurry of white between the guard towers —river mist? a wedding party? is cattle egrets nesting in the willows.

Even when invoking uncomfortable political realities, the poems of Hass are, above all, expressions of a self comfortable with its place and position in the world.

754

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

They are poems that rise easily and pleasantly from the page and into the reader’s eye, ear, and mind. Only a dull ear would fail to respond to their music, which rings as truly in Hass’s translations from other poets as they do in his original evocations of the natural and social worlds surrounding him. If these lines have an overriding quality, it might be pinpointed as that of appreciation. Hass seems appreciative: of happenings, surroundings, and memories. Rare is the bewailing moan, the strident regret, the angry raising of voice. Even in his political moments the voice continues sounding reasonable, intelligent, and even satisfied. While the satisfaction expressed never quite descends into self-satisfaction, it also never quite ascends to joy—which may suggest why Whitman, whose works spanned both passionate self-absorption and unfettered joy, so fascinates this important American poet of our own time. Mark Rich

Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 4 (October 15, 2007): 21. The New York Times Book Review 157 (October 7, 2007): 11. The New Yorker 83, no. 36 (November 19, 2007): 92-96. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 30 (July 30, 2007): 57. San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 2007, p. M3. The Seattle Times, November 18, 2007, p. J9. The Washington Post, October 7, 2007, p. BW11.

755

THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN Author: James Lee Burke (1936) Publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York). 373 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 2005 Locale: New Orleans and Iberia Parish, Louisiana In his sixteenth Dave Robicheaux novel, Burke weaves a New Orleans tale of death and destruction wrought by small-time criminals with the horror of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath Principal characters: Dave Robicheaux, New Iberia police detective Clete Purcell, bounty hunter and Dave’s best friend Molly Robicheaux, ex-nun and Dave’s wife Alafair Robicheaux, Dave’s adopted daughter Father Jude LeBlanc, junkie priest from New Orleans Bertrand Melancon, small-time criminal Eddy Melancon, Bertrand’s brother Courtney Degravelle, Clete’s love interest Otis Baylor, New Orleans insurance adjuster Thelma Baylor, Otis’s daughter Melanie Baylor, Otis’s wife Sidney Kovick, mobster who owns a flower shop Ronald Bledsoe, psychopathic private eye Helen Soileau, New Iberia sheriff

James Lee Burke’s sixteenth novel in the Dave Robicheaux series opens as Hurricane Katrina churns its way through the Gulf of Mexico, homing in on its target of New Orleans. In The Tin Roof Blowdown, New Iberia police detective Dave Robicheaux finds himself in the heart of the Hurricane Katrina disaster when his department is temporarily assigned to rescue and response duty in the Big Easy. Burke once again assembles a large cast of characters whose lives inevitably collide, causing chaos and death. The story of Father Jude LeBlanc sets the novel in motion. A priest who has prostate cancer and is addicted to drugs, Jude serves the poorest and most desperate people in New Orleans, residents of the Ninth Ward. His greatest fear is that the shaking of his hands will cause him to drop the chalice during communion. Father Jude decides to stay with his parishioners in spite of repeated warnings that everyone should leave; the poorest of the poor have nowhere to go and no way to leave. When he finds himself trapped in a church attic full of people about to drown in the rising water, he heroically breaks out a window, finds a boat, and tries to help his flock escape. It is at this

756

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

moment, however, that he encounters four young thugs. He does not give up his boat without a struggle; however, he sustains a blow to the head and presumably drowns. The boat thieves, Andre Rochon, a kid named Kevin, and the Melancon brothers, Bertrand and Eddy, next appear as looters in a wealthy white neighborhood. They ply the flooded streets, looking for a darkened house to rob and destroy. Their troubles begin when they enter the house of Sidney Kovick and in their rampage find wads of money behind the walls. They also find a sack of diamonds. After destroying the interior of the house and stealing everything they can carry, they return to the boat, only to find themselves out of gas. Bertrand finds fuel in a carriage house belonging to Otis Baylor, an insurance adjuster, who has chosen to ride out the storm at his home along with his wife Melanie and daughter Thelma. The Baylor family can clearly see the looters with light provided by their larger generators, and, in a twist of fate, Thelma recognizes Eddy and Bertrand as the two men who raped her months earlier, after her senior prom. With their boat refueled, the young men cannot believe their good luck. They have more money than they have ever seen. Their luck immediately turns sour, however, when Eddy flicks a cigarette lighter, giving someone from the Baylor household a target. Gunshots ensue, killing Kevin immediately and simultaneously turning Eddy into a quadriplegic. Bertrand Melancon’s troubles are only beginning. He does not realize that the diamonds he has stolen are blood diamonds and that flower shop owner Sidney Kovick is also a ruthless gangster, someone who is rumored to have cut up a neighbor with a chain saw in his basement. Even worse, Kovick has double-crossed other villains to obtain the stones, placing Bertrand in double jeopardy. Ironically, Kovick is a greater threat to Bertrand than the police. As a New Orleans policeman tells Bertrand, “Hey, kid. If you stole anything from Sidney Kovick, mail it to him COD from Alaska, then buy a gun and shoot yourself. With luck, he won’t find your grave.” Burke’s portrayal of Bertrand Melancon is masterful. Bertrand is a serial rapist, a thief, and the murderer of a priest, the kind of lowlife that Burke uses to populate his books and for whom Dave generally can find little sympathy. Nonetheless, there is some moral ambiguity in Bertrand’s creation. Burke allows him to be penitent for his actions; Bertrand attempts to write a letter of apology to Thelma and her family for the crime he perpetrated on her. He believes that if he gives the family the blood diamonds that somehow he will be redeemed. He is a dreamer, trying to fantasize his way out of the terrible mess that is his life. He is a sick man, suffering from bleeding ulcers that will kill him even if Kovick’s goons do not find him. Last, he is a failure, never able to achieve what he sets out to do. It is not that Burke (or Dave) forgives him for the series of events he sets in motion; there is, however, some recognition of the circumstances that would lead a young person to such a terrible place. As Dave says at the end of the book, “I didn’t like Bertrand Melancon or, better said, I didn’t like the

James Lee Burke has written more than two dozen novels, sixteen of which feature Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux. The winner of two Edgar Awards for crime fiction, Burke lives with his wife, Pearl, in New Iberia, Louisiana, and Missoula, Montana.

The Tin Roof Blowdown / burke

757

world he represented. But as I have to remind myself daily, many of the people I deal with did not get to choose the world in which they were born. . . . Bertrand was able to perform a couple of noble deeds before he disappeared. That’s more than we can expect from most men who started off life as he did.” There are other bad guys trolling New Orleans whose stories fit into the evertightening plot line of The Tin Roof Blowdown. Private detective Ronald Bledsoe, with his smashed-in face and sadistic nature, undertakes a series of increasingly aggressive actions against Dave’s daughter Alafair in response to humiliation he has suffered at her hands. Dave’s response is predictable: “I didn’t want revenge against Ronald Bledsoe. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to do it close up, with a .45, one loaded with 230-grain brass-jacketed hollow-points. . . . I wanted to smell the good, clean, head-reeling odor of burnt gunpowder and feel the jackhammer recoil of the steel frame in my wrist. I wanted to see Ronald Bledsoe translated into wallpaper.” Several familiar minor characters also make cameo appearances. Helen Soileau, Dave’s former partner and now the sheriff of New Iberia, leads her department’s efforts in New Orleans. Likewise, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Betsy Mossbacher comes through with some crucial information for Dave. Their roles are small, however, overshadowed by the power of Hurricane Katrina. Clete Purcell, Dave’s best friend, is present as well. As a jail bondsman, he has been tracking Andre Rochon. Once again, Clete falls in love, only to be destroyed when Courtney Degravelle, the woman he loves, is kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in connection with the missing blood diamonds. In addition, Alafair Robicheaux, now an adult and budding young novelist, demonstrates her courage under fire. There is no doubt about the hero of the novel, however. Dave Robicheaux’s stature has grown over the years since his first incarnation in The Neon Rain (1987), and his presence in The Tin Roof Blowdown is quietly controlled. Longtime readers of the Dave Robicheaux series will once again encounter Dave’s struggles with his alcoholism and morality, his problems with his hapless friend Clete, and his love for his daughter and wife. Nevertheless, while this is familiar territory, never has Burke handled a story or a character so lyrically. Dave’s demons, while still present, are quelled in the face of the larger tragedy of the Katrina disaster, and his humanity is never more evident than in his response to the poor people displaced and damaged by the water and politics. While the human characters of The Tin Roof Blowdown are well drawn and alternately tragic and amusing, it is in the characterization of Katrina that Burke is at his very best. The enormity of the Katrina experience for Burke was hinted at in his last Dave Robicheaux book, Pegasus Descending (2006); his description in that novel of riding out Hurricane Audrey (1957) on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico was excruciating in its poetry and verisimilitude. It is therefore not surprising that Burke chose for his next novel to focus on the experience of Hurricane Katrina. Burke spelled out his views on Katrina and the disgrace of the national response in an op-ed piece he wrote for the Los Angeles Times shortly after the event. Many of these views are also shared by his main character, Dave.

758

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In the opening chapter, Burke has Dave revisit his worst nightmares, the killing fields of the Vietnam War. In poetic language, he re-creates the crash of a helicopter carrying wounded, and the agony of the men as they die “incrementally—by flying shrapnel and bullets, by liquid flame on their skin, and by drowning in a river.” To calm himself back to sleep, he says, he tells himself that this terrible killing of innocents is in the past and that he will not have to experience it again, nor will he have to witness “the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us the most.” The last paragraph, however, reveals Dave’s (and Burke’s) judgment on Katrina: “But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face of southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.” Both the beauty of Burke’s language and the bitterness he feels are nowhere more clear than in the epilogue. Dave, as is his habit, is wrapping up the events of the novel, trying to make sense of the long and twisted tale that he has just told readers. “New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea. . . . Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves. . . . But the reality is otherwise. Category 5 hurricanes don’t take prisoners and the sow that eats its farrow doesn’t surrender self-interest in the cause of mercy.” The Tin Roof Blowdown is filled with many such moments; it is likely that this novel will be remembered as much for the immediacy and potency of Burke’s writing about Katrina as it will be for its tightly constructed plot. In either case, the novel is Burke’s best in several years, and perhaps the best he has ever written. Readers will find themselves haunted by Burke’s images long after turning the final page. Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Review Sources The Boston Globe, August 13, 2007, p. C5. Entertainment Weekly, no. 944 (July 20, 2007): 78. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 568. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 72. The New York Times 156 (July 23, 2007): B1-B7. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 21 (May 21, 2007): 32. USA Today, August 2, 2007, p. D1. The Washington Post, July 23, 2007, p. C3.

759

TOUCH AND GO A Memoir Author: Studs Terkel (1912) Publisher: New Press (New York). 288 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1912-2007 Locale: Chicago Terkel looks back on the astonishing ninety-five years of his life Principal personages: Louis “Studs” Terkel, writer, activist, and Chicago radio and television personality Annie Finkel Terkel, his mother Ida Goldberg Terkel, his wife from 1939 to her death in 1999 Sam Terkel, his father, a Polish immigrant and a tailor

Although he has enjoyed successful careers as a radio and televison host, a soap opera actor, a playwright, and an activist, Louis “Studs” Terkel is best known as a compiler of oral histories. With the aid of a tape recorder and a keen ear for narrative, Terkel has interviewed scores of common and uncommon folk and stitched together seamless first-person accounts in their own voices for best-selling books, including Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) and Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992). In what he has declared to be his last book, Touch and Go: A Memoir, Terkel has attempted an approximation of the method that enabled him to capture the memories and voices of hundreds of others, interweaving excerpts from earlier works with new material dictated over the phone to longtime friend, assistant, and amanuensis Sydney Lewis, herself an accomplished compiler of oral history. Alert and curious, Terkel has been witness to many of the most significant events in the past century. As he often retells it, he was born only two weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, “Make of it what you will.” One of his earliest memories is of sitting on his father’s shoulders in New York City, where the family lived until he was two or three, watching an Armistice parade pass by. He listened to parts of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” and the arguments of attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over the radio. He served in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, did desk duty in the Air Force in World War II, organized unions, knew the singers and activists Mahalia Jackson and Pete Seeger, and was blacklisted during the Joseph McCarthy anticommunism era. He was a pioneer actor and broadcaster in the early days of radio and television. Through more than a dozen books, he has helped common Americans tell their own

760

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

stories about what it was like to live through the Depression, the Great War, and the country’s struggles to find new ways to deal with work, with race, and with faith. For Terkel, so closely associated with Chicago, life began in 1912 in New York City, where his parents Sam and Annie, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, worked hard to support a growing family that eventually included four sons. Sam Terkel, who ran a tailoring business, was an admirer of the socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs (18551926), instilling in his sons a respect for unions and for “Gene’s style of speech, easy as well as fervent.” In 1920, the family moved to Chicago, where Terkel made his home for the rest of his life. His mother ran the Wells-Grand Hotel, a rooming house, for ten years, and Terkel loved to argue with the tenants hanging out in the lobby. These conversations, and the almost daily chance to hear radical speakers (some rational, some not) declaiming from soapboxes at Washington “Bughouse” Square, taught Terkel to listen well. “Perhaps none of it made any sense,” he writes, “save one kind: sense of life.” He graduated from the University of Chicago with a law degree in 1934 and worked in Chicago radio and television into the twenty-first century, parlaying his skills as a speaker and a listener into a career. In one of the book’s first extended history lessons, Terkel interrupts the narrative of his family’s move to introduce Jane Addams (1860-1935), founder of Hull House in Chicago and the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Decades later, Terkel remembers, he interviewed a woman named Jessie Binford, who lived in Hull House from 1906 until the mid-1960’s, shortly before her death. Binford spent the last years of her life fighting, unsuccessfully, against plans to raze the settlement to provide space for the growing University of Illinois. In the story of Hull House and its eventual relocation, Terkel finds the central tension that informs his love for the city of Chicago: the compassionate and brave activists who work for the common good, and the mercenary, corrupt aldermen and other politicians who throw hurdles in their way. Both groups emerge in Terkel’s tales as the main characters in the drama that shapes the city he loves. Terkel’s career has really been two careers, with largely different audiences. Terkel the writer has kept to the background, and those who know him primarily through his oral histories—a large readership—may stop to realize that they know very little about the man whose name appears on the covers of his books. Clearly, the man who would choose to write about how average people feel about their jobs, or how the American Dream has failed as many as it has helped, or how race shapes the way neighbors live together is a man with a strong social conscience and an affinity for the voiceless. Still, his aim in books like Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995) is to help others tell their stories, not to comment or

Studs Terkel is the author of more than a dozen books, many of them, including Division Street: America (1967) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War (1984), based on oral histories of average Americans. Terkel was also a Chicago radio host for almost fifty years. In 1999, he was awarded the presidential National Humanities Medal.

Touch and Go / terkel

761

sermonize, although he too experienced many of the things his subjects describe. As he explains, his goal when interviewing is to not to put himself center stage, but to “recreate in my mind exactly what it was like to be with that person, to get as much as possible of what was in that person’s mind at that particular moment.” Terkel did not write his first book of oral history, Division Street: America (1967), until he was fifty-five years old. Before that, he had established himself as a public figure whose personality, character, and opinions—his physical and his metaphorical voices—were in no way concealed. In retracing that parallel life, Touch and Go will be a revelation to many readers outside Chicago. Terkel’s first job after earning his law degree was in Washington, D.C., where he worked in a civil service job for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and where he performed in the Washington Civic Theater Group’s production of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a cautionary tale of fascism in America. By this time, Terkel had already drawn the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) because of his radical politics, a fact Terkel learned decades later when he obtained copies of his FBI files. Returning to Chicago after a year in Washington, Terkel attended plays frequently and soon became an actor with the Workers’ Theater, a labor theater group that performed in small theaters and “at picket lines and soup kitchens.” His gravelly voice led to work as a gangster in soap operas on Chicago radio stations—his first opportunity to earn real money. Piecing together an income to help support himself and his wife, Ida, he also worked as a writer with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Radio Division and later as a commentator with his own radio show. Ida, a social worker, had also worked for FERA, and with Terkel’s influence she too joined the Workers’ Theater, by then renamed the Chicago Repertory Company. Terkel continued to combine his passions for theater, leftist politics, and the new media of radio and television. For a time, he was a sportscaster on station WBBM, and later a disc jockey on WENR on a show he called The Wax Museum, after the wax record albums he played. Terkel notes that in the 1940’s he was able to play good music of many types on a single show, “not just jazz, but all kinds: classical, folk, blues, opera.” From 1949 to 1951, he hosted a nationally popular television show, Studs’ Place, combining musical performances and short plays, and from 1952 to 1997 he hosted The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT radio, a one-hour weekday program on which he interviewed Chicagoans about a wide range of topics. During all these years in Chicago media, he supported progressive causes, including the labor movement and the Civil Rights movement, and gave activists a voice by reading their work, playing their music, or interviewing them. He was unable to work on television for a time after being blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but he retained his loyal fans and ultimately was recognized with city, state, and national awards for his courage and insight. This very public side of Terkel’s career, and the dozens of fascinating figures he encountered over the years, is the focus of this book. Touch and Go is Terkel’s second memoir. His first, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977), is a more straightforward memoir, more linear and deliberate.

762

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

In it, as in Touch and Go, Terkel’s emphasis is not on himself but on the quirky and influential people he has encountered. In Touch and Go, however, he also reveals welcome details about his family, and the style is conversational and meandering, the wandering reminiscences of an old sage nearing the end of his career. When he does mention his own accomplishments, he is self-deprecating, as when he reveals that he has never learned to drive a car or use a computer, and that he is even rather helpless when it comes to the machine with which he is most identified, the tape recorder. Terkel’s erudition is evident on every page. His own nickname, “Studs,” was taken from the fictional Studs Lonigan, the protagonist in three novels by James T. Farrell. (Terkel took the name when he was acting in a play with two other actors also named Louis.) The title of this memoir, Touch and Go, is from Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood (pr. 1953), and Terkel reprints the appropriate quatrain as the book’s epigraph. In the first three paragraphs after his prologue, Terkel mentions Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Theda Bara, Flannery O’Connor, and the Cincinnati pitcher Eppa Jeptha Rixey, with only the barest hints for those who cannot identify the names. Occasionally through the book he will make an unattributed allusion to Edgar Allan Poe or a popular song. It seems that he has read everything, seen everything, met everyone, and forgotten nothing. This makes some passages difficult to get through. A reader whose attention drifts away for a second is apt to miss an important but tiny detail that reveals the meaning or the importance of an anecdote, and sometimes even careful attention is not enough: Keeping an encyclopedia handy for reference is both necessary and rewarding. For the countless readers who have come to know Terkel only through his books of oral history—those unlucky enough to have missed the opportunity to hear the author in his countless radio and television appearances—this book is the closest they will come to hearing Terkel the raconteur in his own voice. The Terkel they will meet in this memoir is charming, irascible, radical, insightful, and brave—a true American treasure. Cynthia A. Bily

Review Sources Harper’s Magazine 315 (November, 2007): 81-82. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 17 (September 1, 2007): 915-916. Library Journal 132, no. 20 (December 15, 2007): 129-130. Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2007, p. R3. The New York Times Book Review 157 (December 9, 2007): 17. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 34 (August 27, 2007): 70.

763

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE A Biography Author: Madison Smartt Bell (1957) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 333 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Biography Time: Primarily 1791-1803 Locale: The French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) A scholarly and balanced account of ToussaintLouverture’s life, with an emphasis on his struggle against slavery and for Haitian autonomy Principal personages: Toussaint-Louverture (François Dominique Toussaint Bréda; 17431803), dominant leader of the Haitian revolution Jean-Jacques Dessalines (c. 1758-1806), black general and first emperor of Haiti Henry Christophe (1767-1820), black general and later president of the state of Haiti Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), French first consul, r. 1799-1804, and emperor, r. 1804-1814 Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc (1772-1802), French general and Napoleon’s brother-in-law Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763-1813), member of the French commission to Haiti André Rigaud (1761-1811), leading mulatto general who opposed Louverture in 1799

The introductory chapter of Madison Smartt Bell’s biography describes the culture and economic conditions in the French colony of Saint Domingue during the late eighteenth century. Although contemporary Haiti is commonly characterized as the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, Saint Domingue was for many years the richest European colony in all of the Americas. The large sugar and coffee plantations enriched both the landowners and the French nation as a whole. Unfortunately, this prosperity was built upon slave labor, with conditions that were “extraordinarily severe.” Although the Black Code of 1685 set minimum conditions, Bell writes that they were “more often honored in the breach than in the observance.” Flogging was common, and amputation of an arm or a leg was sometimes the punishment for attempted escape. The colony was composed of three ethnic groups: about 500,000 slaves of African ancestry, 40,000 white Europeans, and 30,000 mostly free “mulattos” of mixed African-European ancestry, commonly called gens de couleur (colored persons). The

764

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Europeans were divided into two groups: the wealthy, conservative property owners, called grands blancs, who usually opposed the French Revolution, and persons of limited economic resources, called petits blancs, who tended to support the Revolution. Although the official religion of the colony was Catholicism, a large percentage of the Africanancestry population combined the official religion with a variety of traditional animistic Madison Smartt Bell is a professor of beliefs and practices called Voodoo. PractiEnglish at Goucher College and the tioners of this syncretism believed that the author of twelve novels, including an spirits (lwa or zanj) of the dead remained acclaimed trilogy about the Haitian nearby and were capable of having contact revolution. One volume of the trilogy, with living persons, often with the aid of hypAll Souls’ Rising (1995), was a finalist notic chanting and drumming. for the National Book Award. As the most prominent leader of the only successful slave revolution in recorded history, Toussaint-Louverture was a person of great historical significance. The grandson of an African chieftain, he was born a slave on the large Bréda Plantation in 1743. He never showed an inclination to rebel until about the age of fifty. As a young man, in fact, he fully cooperated with his owner, distinguishing himself as a dependable supervisor of the other slaves. He also demonstrated an unusual ability to work with domestic animals. After gaining his freedom about 1774, he acquired considerable wealth in land and slaves, an unusual accomplishment for a former slave. He fathered at least eleven children (eight out of wedlock). Because so little information has been preserved about the first fifty years of his life, Bell writes that he “walked so very softly that he left next to no visible tracks at all.” There is no evidence that Louverture expressed any opposition to the institution of slavery before 1791, when large numbers of slaves rebelled in the northern plain. That year, he joined a band of rebel slaves led by George Biassou, but he opposed widespread bloodshed and even helped his former master’s family to escape. By 1793, he was a recognized leader when he wrote in the Camp Turel Proclamation: “I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint Domingue. I am working to make that happen.” This proclamation is the earliest surviving record that he had changed his last name from Bréda to Louverture (which means “opening,” frequently misspelled “L’Ouverture”). The reasons for his name change are unclear. Some historians have written that the new name was based on a gap between his two front teeth, while others believe that it referred to his ability to find openings for surprise military attacks. Without definitely rejecting such suggestions, Bell suggests that the name was probably a reference to a Voodoo spirit named Legba, the spirit of the gates and crossroads, a spirit believed to open the gateway between the living and the dead.

Toussaint Louverture / bell

765

From the beginning, the revolt was complicated by the fact that the three ethnic groups were attacking each other, even murdering women and infants, in a violent orgy that Bell characterizes as a “three-way genocidal race war.” In addition, rival groups of angry slaves frequently fought with one another. It is not known how many people died in the mass slaughter, but certainly they numbered in the thousands. Louverture recognized that violence was an inherent part of warfare, but unlike his associate, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, he was reluctant to order the mass slaughter of persons because of their race or economic class. The government of the French Revolution, despite the announced principles of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood,” was very hesitant to end slavery in the colonies. It was not until May, 1791, the third year of the revolution, that the French National Assembly passed a law recognizing some civil rights for the free gens de couleur, and it was not until the next year that the assembly decreed full civil rights to all free persons in the colonies, including blacks. In 1793, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, chief representative for France in Saint Domingue, took the initiative in proclaiming the end of slavery in the colony, and the French Convention finally voted to abolish slavery in 1794. Louverture’s constantly changing goals, alliances, and enemies can be rather confusing. Initially he called for the restoration of the French monarchy, and when France and Spain went to war in 1793, he fought on the side of the Spanish. After France decreed an end to slavery, however, he switched sides and played a major role in driving Spanish and British troops out of Saint Domingue. He then was victorious over General André Rigaud’s largely mulatto army in an ugly civil war, called the War of Knives (1799-1800). In this effort, Louverture had the support of American president John Adams, who hoped to promote the movement toward Haitian independence in order to weaken France. By 1801, Louverture was governor-general of the colony as well as the de facto ruler of the entire island. Bell writes that he managed the colony in a way that would “prove to the whole European world that slavery was not necessary to the success of the plantation economy.” However, Bell alsonotes that he established a labor regime based on “raw authoritarianism,” in which former slaves took charge and coerced other former slaves to work as hard as they had in the days of slavery. Bell observes that historians, novelists, and politicians “have constructed whatever Toussaint Louverture they require,” usually presenting him as either an idealistic martyr for the cause of freedom or as a savage, fanatical tyrant. Bell’s account makes it clear that he conformed to neither of these stereotypes and that his complex personality and belief system contained many inconsistencies. While he denounced the cruelty of slavery, his oversight of free agricultural workers was tyrannical and oppressive. He wrote in 1793: “We receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly.” Still, Bell believes that some of Dessalines’s bloody atrocities were committed either with his tacit approval or under his secret orders. He was also inconsistent in the area of sexual morality, expressing views that were strict to the point of “prudery,” forbidding his soldiers to practice extramarital relations, and insisting that women

766

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

in his presence dress modestly. When he traveled, however, his residence was a “bachelor’s paradise,” with numerous liaisons with women from all three ethnic groups. In 1801, Louverture was at the pinnacle of his power when he convened an assembly to formulate a constitution. Within a few months, he announced a constitution that contained progressive features; it prohibited slavery, forbade distinctions according to color, and promised equal protection of the law. On the other hand, the document named Louverture as the governor of the colony “for the rest of his glorious life” and even recognized his right to name a successor. Of greater consequence was its proclamation of a semiautonomous status for Saint Domingue, a provision that infuriated Napoleon Bonaparte, who was determined to consolidate and expand France’s empire and at the same time to restore slavery. Napoleon therefore commissioned his brother-in-law, General Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, to the island with a large army. Although Louverture’s soldiers were badly outnumbered with inadequate weapons, their determination and guerrilla tactics prevented the French from winning the quick and decisive military victory they needed in order to prevail. Even more, the French experienced deadly outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever, which eventually resulted in the death of some fifty thousand of the eighty thousand French troops who had been sent to put down the black rebellion. Before the French were forced to withdraw, however, Louverture uncharacteristically walked into a trap that Leclerc had prepared. Following his arrest, he declared: “In overthrowing me, you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty of the Blacks in Saint Domingue: it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.” He was shipped to the Jura Mountains of France, where he was held in a cold medieval castle, the Fort de Joux, without adequate nutrition or medical care. In vain, he protested to Napoleon that he had been imprisoned without any due process. He died of pneumonia in 1803, and his body was thrown into an unmarked grave. When Napoleon was later exiled, he acknowledged that he had made a terrible mistake in not cooperating with Louverture and the other black generals of the colony. If this had happened, Bell speculates that Louverture’s army of thirty thousand might have spread the abolition of slavery throughout the Caribbean region and perhaps even into Louisiana. While such a crusade was highly unlikely, there were many long-term consequences of Louverture’s revolution. The abolition of slavery in Saint Domingue represented the first massive achievement of its kind in the New World. Often an inspiration to opponents of slavery, the mention of Saint Domingue evoked terror and alarm among slaveholders in the Southern states. The revolution also made it possible for Haiti in 1804 to become the first independent country in Latin America. The catastrophic failure of the French intervention, moreover, convinced Napoleon of the impracticality of restoring a French empire in North America, which motivated him to sell Louisiana to the United States. Unfortunately, Louverture failed to establish a workable constitutional system, and thus he is arguably in part responsible for Haiti’s subsequent experience with tyrannical and unstable government. Nevertheless, given the colony’s social divisions, widespread poverty, and lack of constitutional tradi-

Toussaint Louverture / bell

767

tions, it is unlikely that a wiser and more democratic leader would have been able to establish a secure foundation for anything approaching a stable democracy. In writing this biography, Bell has utilized both primary and secondary sources. Louverture left a large collection of correspondence and other documents, most of which has never been translated from French into English. A few of the letters were written in his own hand in the Haitian Creole patois, but most were dictated by him to secretaries who often edited the ideas and translated them into standard French. Although the vast majority of Bell’s reference notes refer to published works, he made some limited use of the French National Archives, and he managed to discover a few unknown sources in private hands, in particular those belonging to a man named Gérard Barthélemy. In addition to the rich French writings about Louverture and the revolution, Bell also took advantage of several important English-language works, including those of Laurent Debois, Gordon Brown, Carolyn Fick, and David Geggus. Bell’s account of Louverture is the first serious biography to appear in the English language in more than half a century. A balanced work of historical synthesis, its purpose is not to present information that is particularly original, although it does contain numerous facts and insights not readily available to English readers. A few of his interpretations are questionable, as when he suggests that the grands blancs helped to stir up the black insurrection with the idea that it would frighten the petits blancs into submission. Readers unfamiliar with Haitian history should be forewarned that the book’s large number of military leaders and other persons can be confusing, and Bell does not always identify them when first mentioned. Taken as a whole, nevertheless, the biography is a pleasure to read, and it will likely become recognized as the standard work on Louverture in the English language. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Summer, 2007): 433-434. Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 21. The Nation 284, no. 15 (April 16, 2007): 32-34. The New Republic 237, no. 5 (September 10, 2007): 41-47. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 9 (May 31, 2007): 54-58. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 25, 2005): 7. The New Yorker 83, no. 3 (March 12, 2007): 85. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 44 (November 6, 2006): 50. The Times Literary Supplement, March 16, 2007, p. 4. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 15 (January 19, 2007): W4.

768

A TRANQUIL STAR Unpublished Stories Author: Primo Levi (1919-1987) Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 164 pp. $21.95 Type of work: Short fiction Light, darkness, and shadows permeate this collection of stories, echoing the Holocaust and exploring the beauty and ugliness of which humans are capable Divided into early and late works written between 1949 and 1986, the seventeen short stories assembled in Primo Levi’s A Tranquil Star, originally published in Italian magazines and books, are here collected and translated into English for the first time. Though Levi is known primarily for his testamentary works written as witness to the Holocaust and its aftermath, these short stories are not overtly or nominally Holocaust-themed, although shadows and echoes of Auschwitz eerily reverberate throughout them. Most literary critics have appreciated A Tranquil Star’s varied themes and images that inform and are informed by Levi’s stunning, major works. While a few critics have viewed these valedictory stories as tainted by Levi’s probable suicide, most have seen them as praiseworthy reflections of his broad imagination, deep conscience, and brilliant literary talent. About some of his stories, Levi wrote, “all interpretations are true . . . a story must be ambiguous.” Levi’s multilayered writings, filled with images of good and evil, are “painted” either in chiaroscuro (the juxtaposition or overlapping of light, dark, and shadow) or in darkness alone; both “shadings” are used naturalistically, ironically, or ambiguously and as incisive and insightful commentary on human behavior and experience. Light and dark exist literally and metaphorically in “The Death of Marinese,” the earliest of the stories and redolent of Levi’s experience as a freedom fighter in 1943 (during which he was sent by the Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp). Marinese and another Italian partisan are captured under a gray sky on a snowy, icy road. Light and dark are in conflict too, for while he contemplates his imminent death by the Germans, Marinese finds himself in virtual darkness, “submerged in a long, narrow tunnel . . . like the light that penetrates closed eyelids.” When he notices a grenade attached to the belt of one of the Nazis, Marinese’s light, “gentle soul” bursts into an upsurge of shame and rage, “dark and primeval,” and he detonates the grenade, killing four Nazis and himself. Clearly, light and dark overlap here, for Marinese does kill the Nazis, but at the cost of his own life. In “Knall,” the dichotomy between light and dark is not literal but rather a schism between tone and meaning. The narrator’s light, informal tone masks the dark, ugly

A Tranquil Star / levi

769

reality that a knall is a weapon that kills quickly and efficiently, leaving no mess. The narrator casually describes this Germansounding “handy device” as unique, clever, and neat, the perfect tool for quiet, up-close mass murder that “does not spill blood.” It is a tool to activate that need of humans, “acute or chronic, to kill their neighbor or themselves.” The ambiguous tension between the detached tone and very dark topic evokes the shadows of Auschwitz, where Nazis used the insecti cide Zyklon B to commit genocide “neatly,” without messy bullets or blood. “One Night” begins in the gray half-light at dusk and continues until dawn, although daylight reveals a more sinister darkness. With echoes of the chugging deportation trains containing their “cargo” of Jews en route to the death camps, a train stops in a dark forest. From the woods come swarms of men and women who dismantle the train and destroy the rails. This potentially hopeful story ends in shocking darkness, however, for after tearing apart the train and tracks, the people turn on each other and themselves. The story echoes loudly the diabolical way in which the Nazis in the camps forced Jewish Kapos to torture other Jewish prisoners so as to blur the line between the innocent Jews and the nefarious Nazis. In “The Magic Paint,” an industrial chemist in a paint factory (Levi’s own profession for many years) creates a Teflon-type paint that, when applied to oneself, allows one to experience great fortune, protected from all harm. However, its protective qualities vanish in water. It is almost as if the “magic paint” of the good life experienced by deportees before Auschwitz was cruelly washed away by the obligatory shower that preceded their slow death in the camp. Metaphoric darkness takes the shape of bleak, absurdist bureaucracy in “Fra Diavolo on the Po,” in which Levi writes about his first notice to report for induction into the Italian military. When he reports as scheduled, he is screamed at, called a deserter by “a giant in a Fascist uniform,” and sent away. Like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in Germany that stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship, Fascist laws in Italy prohibited Jews from carrying guns, and Levi, after enlisting on his own, was therefore thrown out of the Italian military. Insane darkness culminates when, after his survival from Auschwitz and his eventual repatriation to Italy, he is ordered, despite his obvious physical weakness, to appear for a military preinduction physical, during which the doctor scolds him for having no written documentation of his time at the concentration camp, other than the tattoo of 174517 on his arm. The story is reminiscent of those surviving offspring who were refused release of their murdered parents’ money by Swiss banks because they lacked their parents’ death certificates. In “Bureau of Vital Statistics,” another absurdist story with an unstated Holocaust link, Arrigo’s job in this government agency is to add a cause of death to index cards

An industrial chemist who bore witness to the Holocaust, Primo Levi wrote short fiction, poetry, and essays, as well as Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959); La tregua (1963; The Reawakening, 1965), covering his repatriation to Italy; and I sommersi e i salvati (1986; The Drowned and the Saved, 1988), dealing with the emotional legacy of Auschwitz.

770

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

printed with a person’s name and date of death. Bureaucrats like Arrigo “were all sheep . . . and no one dared protest and no one took the job seriously” because they were insulated from death itself. Arrigo is a prototype of the Nazi bureaucrats of the Aktion T-4 eugenics program, through which, by 1941, some seventy thousand mentally retarded, deformed, and disabled people, “undesirables” termed “life unworthy of life,” were placed in state-run institutions and then murdered. The Nazis covered their crimes by reporting to the victims’ families such bogus causes of death as pneumonia or influenza. In the science-fiction story “The Molecule’s Defiance,” a frustrated industrial chemist creates a batch of synthetic resin that turns inexplicably bad, with dire implications. It is as if nature itself has gone berserk, rebelling against humanity at the molecular level as a “monster molecule” evolves from this tainted chemical soup, “a yellow mass full of lumps and nodules.” The chemist calls this “deformed but gigantic” molecule an “obscene message and symbol . . . of other ugly things . . . that obscure our future . . . of unseemly death over life.” It is clear that Levi experienced the penultimate, darkly “obscene message” in the sadistic brutality—“the derisiveness of soul-less things”—in Auschwitz. “The Sorcerers,” a story based on a real South American tribe, is the darkest human answer to “The Molecule’s Defiance.” Two ethnographers study the dialect and culture of the primitive Sirionó people in the rain forests of Bolivia, who once had the knowledge to light fires and make canoes but now have regressed to the point that their only skill is carving bows for hunting. Levi concludes, “not in every place and not in every era is humanity destined to advance.” As a victim of the Holocaust, he is justifiably suspicious about the human desire and capacity for progress. For Levi, civilized society is frozen in place or is backsliding. A story suffused with light, but dark around the edges, is the ambiguous “In the Park,” in which famous authors and literary characters inhabit an alternative universe. Writers like François Villon and François Rabelais coexist with such characters as Moll Flanders, Holden Caulfield, and Leopold Bloom. In this well-lit literary heaven, the spectacular sunsets “often . . . last from early afternoon until night,” yet the lightfilled sky turns the “color of lead” when characters from the World War I-era antiwar novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on the Western Front) are spied. With chilling, foreboding darkness, Levi writes, “Who knows how many of them would . . . take up arms again twenty years later, and lose either their skin or their soul.” How can one tell the tortured, untellable tale at all? No language exists to encapsulate, let alone approximate, the inexpressible darkness of the Holocaust. “It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working,” avers the narrator in the last story in the collection, “A Tranquil Star.” We are also severely limited in our comprehension of human motivation: “We understand only—and approximately—the how, not why.” For Levi, the Holocaust was not an anomaly but a horrific yet unsurprising example of the human capacity for evil. Clearly, for Levi, the human instincts to create and transcend will always war with and be overshadowed by powerful instincts for violence and destruction. The triumph of survival, transcending the unendurable (as Levi did at Auschwitz), is at the heart

A Tranquil Star / levi

771

of the initiation story “Bear Meat.” Bathed in a dusklike half-light, the narrator experiences great danger and fear while mountain climbing, only to discover “at the first ghostly light” that the ultimate human achievement is “being your own master . . . to feel strong,” to transcend. Levi paints destructive human instincts in unrelenting darkness. In “Gladiators,” a reticent young man under “a shadow of reluctance” is persuaded by his girlfriend to attend a Friday night’s weekly gladiatorial spectacle. The gladiators use cars and forklifts to destroy their opponents, accompanied by spectators’ cheers. As the rage of sadistic and senseless destruction darkens, the young man and woman depart early and go home separately, both feeling revulsion and guilt at the insanity they have witnessed and that their presence helped make possible. Shadowy half-light has become full darkness. In between light and darkness, “The Fugitive” is bathed in ambiguous shadow as Levi explores the human capacity to create beauty, however elusive and temporary. Pasquale composes the most beautiful poem ever written. His success is thrown into dark shadows, however, when the poem mysteriously disappears. He tries in vain to find or re-create it, but the poem is irretrievably gone, a victim of human transience: “To compose a poem that is worth reading and remembering is a gift of destiny.” Human-created beauty is always elusive, but Levi’s varied and provocative, light and dark short stories of A Tranquil Star are his posthumous “gift of destiny” to the world. As in some of Levi’s stories, the question of whether the human race is presently at the shadowy half-light of dawn or dusk remains ambiguous. By exploring the human need to create, which wars with the propensity to destroy—coequal parts of our destiny—Levi uses light, shadow, and darkness to create in each story “a fable that awakens echoes and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.” Howard A. Kerner

Review Sources The Guardian, May 5, 2007, p. 17. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 189. London Review of Books 29, no. 11 (June 7, 2007): 35-36. Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2007, p. 5. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 12 (July 19, 2007): 51-52. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 27, 2007): 14-15. The Spectator 303 (May 5, 2007): 59. The Times Literary Supplement, July 13, 2007, p. 17. The Washington Post, July 1, 2007, p. BW06.

772

TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS Author: Ryszard Kapukci½ski (1932-2007) First published: Podró/ez Herodotem, 2004, in Poland Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 275 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Essays, travel, memoir Time: 1950-1980 Locale: Poland, India, China, Egypt, Sudan, Belgian Congo, Iran, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Algeria, Senegal, Greece, and Turkey A journalist parallels his early travels to Asia and Africa as a foreign correspondent to the life and times of Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian Principal personages: Ryszard KapuKci¼ski (1932-2007), a Polish journalist Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 b.c.e.), Greek writer, commonly called “the father of history”

As one of the twentieth century’s most notable journalists, Ryszard Kapukci½ski often brought a personal element into his writing, especially in his essay collections Wojna futbolowa (1979; The Soccer War, 1990), Imperium (1993; English translation, 1994), and Heban (1998; The Shadow of the Sun, 2001). In Travels with Herodotus, his final book of essays, he reveals more about his life and approach to writing than in any of his previous works. In Travels with Herodotus, Kapukci½ski returns to his origins as a foreign correspondent, describing many of his early assignments, as well as his devotion to Historiai Herodotou (c. 424 b.c.e.; The History, 1709; also translated The Histories) by Herodotus, a work Kapukci½ski carried along on his journeys to cover coups, wars, and revolutions in places few other writers would go. For Kapukci½ski, Herodotus—with his love of travel, his appreciation of a good story, his fascination for the unusual, and his broad understanding of disparate civilizations—was both a literary companion and role model. The writings of Herodotus reinforced the Polish journalist’s reportorial instincts, helping Kapukci½ski become a writer who combined informed journalism, multicultural knowledge, vivid prose, and surreal imagery to create true literature. At the time of his death, Kapukci½ski’s books had been translated into twenty-eight languages, and critics favorably compared his work to the wide-ranging novels of Joseph Conrad and the Magical Realist writings of Gabriel García Márquez. The opening essay of Travels with Herodotus, “Crossing the Border,” establishes the book’s central motifs—Kapukci½ski’s desire to encounter the world and his admiration for the ancient Greek historian. With this essay, Kapukci½ski also begins the book’s parallel structure, with events in Herodotus’s history echoing Kapukci½ski’s

Travels with Herodotus / kapuKci¼ski

773

experiences. For example, Kapukci½ski ex plains that a scholar named Seweryn Hammer Polish author Ryszard Kapukci5ski translated Herodotus in the mid-1940’s, yet was born in 1932 and became a the Polish government kept The Histories off journalist in 1955. For the next forty the shelves until 1955, after Joseph Stalin had years, he traveled extensively in Africa, died and the Soviet bloc could breathe easier. Latin America, and Asia, writing a Kapukci½ski intertwines this discussion of number of world-renowned books, Communist censorship with Herodotus’s de- including Jeszcze dzie5 /ycia (1976; Another Day of Life, 1986) and scription of King Thrasybulus’s advice to Szachinszach (1982; Shah of Shahs, Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, on how to 1985). He died in 2007. keep one’s kingdom under absolute control by killing off all the outstanding subjects, thereby creating a mediocre populous that would be easier to rule. In this passage, Kapukci½ski comparatively links Stalin to Periander, a technique he used in Cesarz (1978; The Emperor, 1983), a portrait of Ethiopia’s King Haile Selassie I, which Poles read as an allegory criticizing Soviet totalitarianism. In “Crossing the Border,” Kapukci½ski recounts landing his first job in 1955 with Sztandar Muodych (The Banner of Youth), a newspaper based in Warsaw. When on assignment in the Polish countryside, he occasionally goes near the borders, and he becomes obsessed with the desire to cross national boundaries. Finally, summoning his courage, he asks his editor if he could be sent abroad. She assigns him to India, a country he knows nothing about. Before he leaves, she gives him a copy of Herodotus’s The Histories to accompany him. Thus, the pattern of the book’s essays is set—Kapukci½ski travels to exotic and often dangerous places he knows little about, and Herodotus helps him to survive these journeys and to thrive as a top-shelf foreign correspondent. However, what Kapukci½ski calls his “first encounter with otherness” is not very successful. As he travels across India, he finds its complex tapestry of ethnicities, religions, gods, castes, landscapes, and histories overwhelming. Its vastness and mystery humble him, and he realizes the need extensively to prepare when entering an alien culture. Also in India, Kapukci½ski discovers the need for a lingua franca to get around in the world. In this, he envies Herodotus, whose native Greek was widely spoken in the fifth century b.c.e. As a citizen of the twentieth century, Kapukci½ski must learn English, which he begins to do by crawling word by word through Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). It is also on his assignment to India that Kapukci½ski experiences his first serious problem in crossing borders. On his return flight to Poland, he is detained in Kabul for not having a visa. Dressed for the tropics, Kapukci½ski must spend a frozen night camped out on the runway with only a wan fire and a guard’s overcoat to keep him warm. Next, Kapukci½ski travels to China, a largely unsatisfying voyage since he is always in the presence of his guide and keeper, Comrade Li, and except for some brief trips to the Great Wall and Shanghai, he remains largely in his hotel room. With a lot of time to wile away, Kapukci½ski reads the works of Mao Zedong, Confucius,

774

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

and Laozi. Kapukci½ski finds much to consider in the two sixth century b.c.e. Chinese sages, with Confucius calling for social engagement and an adherence to form, and Laozi for a departure from social structures and an embracing of nature and spontaneity. Despite these differences, Kapukci½ski notes that they both promote humility, as did their contemporary philosophers in India and Greece. Abruptly, the Chinese authorities send Kapukci½ski home, and he returns to Warsaw, where he leaves The Banner of Youth to join the Polish Press Agency. In the essay “Memory Along the Roadways of the World,” Kapukci½ski describes reading Herodotus late at night when the agency’s offices are empty. With this essay, the parallels between Kapukci½ski and Herodotus go beyond experience to include motivations, beliefs, and methods as well. Herodotus writes that his purpose in writing The Histories is “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time.” Kapukci½ski’s enthusiasm for this statement makes it clear that this is also his motivation for writing. Just as there is an allegorical correspondence between Haile Selassie and all autocrats in The Emperor, so too is there a connection between Herodotus and Kapukci½ski in Travels with Herodotus, so that when Kapukci½ski describes Herodotus’s characteristics as a writer and historian, he is essentially revealing his own literary and reportorial approaches and precepts. In the next essay, “The Happiness and Unhappiness of Croesus,” Kapukci½ski begins an extended digression through The Histories, describing the defeat of Croesus, king of Lydia, by Cyrus the Great, king of Persia. In turn, Cyrus meets his nemesis in Queen Tomyris of the Massagetae, who defeats the invading Persians in a bloody encounter that devastates both armies and leaves Cyrus dead on the field of battle. Kapukci½ski sees in these battles the epic conflict between East and West, Asia and Europe, that continues into the twenty-first century. After Cyrus’s violent end, Kapukci½ski explores Herodotus’s fascination for Africa, especially Egypt. Herodotus proposes that the Greek gods originated in Egypt, and Kapukci½ski argues that this belief supports the concept that European culture derived from Egypt, and that Africa is the cradle of the West. Like Herodotus, Kapukci½ski felt a deep fascination for Africa, and he made the first of many journeys there in 1960. The Polish journalist finds Africa to be a kaleidoscope of joys and terrors, wonders and horrors. In Cairo, he is robbed in a minaret of an abandoned mosque. In the Sudan, he smokes hashish with two strangers from the desert in a Land Rover and later joins them at a Louis Armstrong concert in Khartoum. The Congo he finds in a state of bloody anarchy, as it transforms from a Belgian colony into an independent nation (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo). Describing a stateless land infested with gangs of former policemen preying on bands of refugees, Kapukci½ski writes, “One could see clearly how dangerous freedom is in the absence of hierarchy and order—or, rather, anarchy in the absence of ethics.” He makes his way across hazardous stretches of Ethiopia’s outback with a driver who knows only two phrases in English—“problem” and “no problem.” When he goes to Algeria, he witnesses the overthrow of its first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, precipitating the struggle between a modern Islam open to contemporary ideas and a fundamentalist Islam that turns inward, toward the past. In his most

Travels with Herodotus / kapuKci¼ski

775

hopeful note, Kapukci½ski describes the first World Festival of Black Art held in Senegal in 1963, with its masked dancers, impromptu street theater, and exhibits of sculpture ancient and modern. As a narrative counterpoint to his African journeys, Kapukci½ski weaves together his recollections of that continent with Herodotus’s accounts of Persia’s wars. After recovering from the defeat by the Massagetae, and subduing an internal revolt by the Babylonians, the Persians, under the leadership of King Darius the Great, turn on the Scythians, who occupied what is today southern Russia. With modern-style guerrilla tactics, the Scythians, whose warriors scalp their foes and drink their blood, force Darius to withdraw from their lands. The Scythian victory inspires the Ionians to revolt, and though they fail to break from Persia, the aid the Ionians receive from Athens leads Xerxes I, son of Darius, to invade Greece and wreak revenge. Now the stage is set for the great conflict between Persia and Greece, a conflict that for Kapukci½ski epitomizes the struggle of East and West. Darius sets off with an army that may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. All of his vast realms, stretching from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to India, gave troops to the effort. He builds a bridge across the Hellespont made from connected ships, and his horde pours unchallenged into Europe, crossing Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly. Then, Xerxes’ army encounters a small Greek force at Thermopylae, a narrow strait of land between the Aegean Sea and the mountains. The Greek force, massively outnumbered, nevertheless slaughters a great portion of Xerxes’ men, and may have ultimately won the battle if it were not for treachery. Despite overwhelming odds in its favor, Xerxes’ fleet also loses at the Battle of Salamis. Xerxes, in despair at seeing his incredibly massive armies defeated by a comparative handful of Greek soldiers, retreats to his palace at Persepolis, where he will devote his remaining fifteen years to his harem. By alternating between Herodotus’s The Histories and his own African and Asian encounters, Kapukci½ski emphasizes the universality of human experience across time and space. The full range of human reactions—from bravery to cowardice, kindness to cruelty—along with a breathtaking array of cultural paradigms, have been present for thousands upon thousands of years. At the same time, Kapukci½ski explores the eternal verities of a writer’s craft, especially the writer of travel literature, which have not changed since the days of Herodotus, who traversed the known world to gather stories, witness events, and see new places and peoples. As authors, Kapukci½ski and Herodotus share much—a passion for journeying, a desire to understand the world, a strong narrative instinct, an attention to detail, an eye for the unusual, and an ability to penetrate the causes of violence. Most important, Kapukci½ski, like Herodotus, expresses a compassion for humanity, along with a desire to share its grief and its joys, and to celebrate its nearly infinite variations. In the essay “Herodotus’s Discovery,” Kapukci½ski describes Herodotus’s most important insight about humanity and its multitude of cultures: “That there are many worlds. And that each is different. Each is important. And that one must learn about them, because these other worlds, these other cultures, are mirrors in which we can see ourselves better—for we cannot define our own identity until

776

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

having confronted that of others, as comparison.” As shown by Travels with Herodotus, one could say the same for Ryszard Kapukci½ski. John Nizalowski

Review Sources The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 17, 2007, p. 5L. Booklist 103, nos. 19/20 (June 1, 2007): 31. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 7 (April 1, 2007): 316-317. Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2007, p. R8. The Nation 285, no. 9 (October 1, 2007): 25-32. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 10, 2007): 18-19. The Spectator 304 (July 14, 2007): 39. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 134 (June 9, 2007): P8. The Washington Post, June 24, 2007, p. BW08.

777

TREE OF SMOKE Author: Denis Johnson (1949) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 614 pp. $27.00 Type of work: Novel Time: 1963-1983 Locale: Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Arizona, the Philippines, and Hawaii An ambitious novel that chronicles a CIA intelligence operation gone awry during the Vietnam War Principal characters: William “Skip” Sands, CIA agent for psychological operations, first in the Philippines, and then in Vietnam Colonel Francis X. Sands, mythical war hero who initiates the Tree of Smoke intelligence operation Father Thomas Carignan, a Catholic priest who lives in a small town in the Philippines Kathy Jones, Canadian missionary and Skip’s love interest Bill Houston, Navy seaman from Phoenix, Arizona James Houston, Bill’s younger brother, who joins the Army at age seventeen Nguyen Hao, a Vietnamese businessman who attempts to help the CIA Sergeant Jimmy Storm, one of Colonel Sands’s colleagues Trung Than, a Viet Cong double agent Terry Crodelle, Regional Security officer who investigates Skip Sands’s undercover activities Cadwallader, a one-legged G.I. who goes boating with James

Mostly known for his collection of short stories Jesus’ Son (1992), author and journalist Denis Johnson writes well of drug addicts, drifters, and delinquents struggling to keep themselves from jail or complete destitution, yet he also looks for the visionary potential of such deprivations. With Tree of Smoke, his first full-length novel in nine years, Johnson blends together multiple story lines of the Vietnam War and leaves it up to the reader to make connections between them. The main strand concerns the misadventures of a deluded young American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. As Johnson ironically associates him with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), William “Skip” Sands believes in his country’s stated goal of fighting communism by taking on the Viet Cong, and he looks to his uncle Colonel Francis X. Sands to guide him to a successful mission gathering intelligence. Tangentially, Bill and James Houston from Phoenix, Arizona, join the military to escape their working-class existence and their mother’s fundamentalism. Skip’s erstwhile love interest, Kathy Jones, turns to Calvinism to help explain her missionary

778

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

experiences working for the International Children’s Relief Effort. By moving yearly from the Kennedy assassination (1963) through the Tet Offensive (1968) and the evacuation of Saigon (1975), Johnson depicts an increasingly deranged war until the final coda in 1983 when a disillusioned Skip is executed for gun-running in Malaysia. Throughout the novel, whatever narratives Americans bring to the war, they are inevitably undermined by the surreal realities on the ground. The novel consistently depicts the heavy psychological and environmental toll of the conflict. Johnson begins with an emblematic scene in which eighteen-year-old recruit Bill Houston absentmindedly shoots a monkey in the jungle of Grande Island in the Philippines. In a kind of parody of the Ernest Hemingway manly ideal, Houston initially seeks wild boar, but when he kills the monkey, he picks it up to find it crying as it dies in his hands, so he weeps in turn at what he has done. This scene is the first of many in which Americans learn of their destructive potential in foreign lands. Johnson then cuts to a later scene in 1967 where Bill meets his just-enlisted brother James at a Peanut Bar in Yokohama, Japan. They get drunk together and eventually admit that they never liked each other. Bill spills his beer on a Japanese woman and then tells her “I came across this ocean and died. They might as well bring back my bones. I’m all different.” The rest of the first half of the novel goes on to explain how Bill reached this state. To help show how the madness of the war got started, Johnson introduces the reader to the Colonel Francis X. Sands, a deliberately mythological character with strong echoes of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford’s Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). The colonel conveys an old-fashioned assurance and masculinity because of his background that includes playing football for coach Knute Rockne at Notre Dame and barely surviving as a Japanese prisoner of war in Burma in 1941. After he has his cousin work in the Philippines for awhile, Colonel Sands moves Skip to the South Vietnamese countryside to the home of a former French doctor so that he can help organize data for the “Tree of Smoke” project. Since Skip had dreams of being more of a James Bond than a clerk drearily collating files away from all of the action, he comes to resent his uncle’s directives even as he continues to believe in the myth of his macho prowess. As the colonel claims, “War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter.” The colonel also has plans of mapping the Cu Chi tunnels, which proves another myth-laden maze that they never really explore. Instead of gaining an understanding of the war, the CIA agents entangle themselves in their own labyrinth. Johnson finds multiple ways to represent what one soldier calls the “Disneyland on acid” random nature of the war. The colonel’s psychological operation, titled “Tree of Smoke,” works as an evocative symbol both of a biblical portents of the apocalypse,

Author and journalist Denis Johnson has written several novels, one book of reportage, three collections of poetry, and one influential short-story sequence, Jesus’ Son (1992). Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for 2007.

Tree of Smoke / johnson

779

the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and of the heedless American poisoning of the Vietnamese countryside. At one point, the colonel brings in a generator to show a film about John F. Kennedy to some Vietnamese villagers. No Vietnamese arrive, naturally, but the colonel still solipsistically watches it himself as the generator spreads smoke pollution through the local countryside, thereby alerting the Viet Cong of the American presence. Repeatedly, the intelligence community seems more concerned about reinforcing their own myths than in actively understanding the country in which they are at war. To try to get a sense of the large picture of the operations, the colonel repeats a quote from St. Paul: “There is one God, and many administrations.” The biblical passage at least acknowledges the disjointed nature of an American campaign on a foreign country that operates under different laws, but no one has fully foreseen the violent corruption of the soldiers. Some worry about creating bad karma, but once the Tet Offensive begins and American soldiers start to die in larger quantities, all of the nobler aims tend to disappear. As one G.I. discovers, “You realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.” In the midst of the general drift into “the cutting edge of reality itself,” right “where it turns into a dream,” some characters try to retain some perspective of the war. Canadian Kathy Jones works for the International Children’s Relief Effort and other charitable organizations, so she sees the effects of the war on the young and the poor. She also loses her husband, Timothy, in the jungles of the Philippines, so, in despair, she strikes up a relationship with Skip Sands as she meditates on John Calvin’s bleak theological writings. After they separate, Skip receives letters from her proclaiming that all of the earth is a hell and everyone is damned. Since Skip likes to retain his patriotic cheerfulness, at least at first, he neglects their correspondence, but later, once he is imprisoned, he repents of his callous treatment of her. Once Skip faces execution for running guns in Malaysia, he finally writes her back and professes his love for her. By letting her have the last scene in the novel, Johnson shows how Jones’s righteous outrage had validity all along. In terms of structure, Tree of Smoke reads like a free association of scenes depicting the points of view of a bewildering array of characters, but they are arranged mostly sequentially from 1963 through 1970, and Johnson finds ways to have elements reappear in different contexts throughout the novel. For instance, the opening scene involving the dead monkey finds its echo later during the year of the monkey and again when Kathy Jones visits a Biomedical Centre that lost many monkeys in a military attack. A long trip by foot across the Philippine countryside early in the novel finds its parallel late in the novel when Sergeant Jimmy Storm works his way across Vietnam to the Thai border in search of the colonel or his burial remains. Johnson places the Tet Offensive, a major cross-country uprising of the Viet Cong, near the exact center of the novel so that the rest of the narrative can play out both the expectations of and the aftereffects of the violence. In the midst of the fighting, Johnson sketches the extremes of joy and grief of the soldiers. For the Houston brothers, the attacks are exhilarating at first, clearing out the

780

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

everydayness of military routine. As Kathy realizes, “The war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment.” However, when soldiers they know are killed or badly wounded, the American soldiers respond by torturing a captured Viet Cong man by gouging out his eyes. Fed up with their cruelty, the colonel finally shoots the prisoner to put him out of his torment. Soon after, James goes to visit his sergeant, Harmon, who has sustained paralyzing injuries across his intestines and spine, and weeps when he sees him. Then James goes AWOL for awhile, eventually spending time with a one-legged man named Cadwallader who likes to play with his nine-millimeter pistol and make cryptic remarks like “We all die. . . . I’ll die high” and “You can’t just paint everything with your mind to make it look like it makes sense.” Scenes like these show how a lackadaisical, seedy encounter between two AWOL soldiers suits a novel about Vietnam so well. Without military direction, they both become momentarily humanized by their camaraderie. Whimsically, James and Cadwallader head out on a small boat until the latter cries out metafictionally, “We’re lost at sea! . . . My head is swimming from the symbolism of it.” Though James and his kind know that they are at sea, the higher officials in the CIA take much longer to figure out the misguided nature of their intelligence operations. Skip gets befuddled as he tries to sift his way through his uncle’s files, which prove as labyrinthine as the tunnels they are supposed to be mapping. As the colonel increasingly comes under suspicion, Regional Security officers send out men to investigate Skip, so he finds himself abruptly at odds with his superiors, eluding capture and dropping out of the agency altogether. His actions make sense, because there is never any indication in the CIA that real data is being applied in any practical way. As portions of an essay that the colonel wrote for the journal Studies in Intelligence come to light, the reader learns how data can be used to serve as “justification for political policy” and then corrupted still further: “The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government.” This last impulse, to make up narratives, calls to mind the evidence used to start the Iraq War, and even though Johnson never explicitly brings up more recent American foreign policy decisions, the novel invites the reader to tease out correspondences between the idealistic beginnings and the unforeseen destructive effects of both wars. By writing Tree of Smoke, Johnson gives shape to the war even as it retains its bewildering and chaotic feel. Before his execution, Skip concludes his impressions of his misspent career by claiming, “This Asian war . . . failed to give away any romances outside of hellish myths,” but Johnson also acknowledges the war’s excitement and the way it can unleash new mysteries to ponder. Roy C. Flannagan

Tree of Smoke / johnson

781

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 8. Esquire 148, no. 3 (September, 2007): 80. Harper’s Magazine 315 (October, 2007): 110-118. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 69-70. New Criterion 26, no. 3 (November, 2007): 86-87. The New York Times 156 (August 31, 2007): E25-E28. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 1-8. Publishers Weekly 247, no. 26 (June 25, 2007): 30.

782

THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction Author: Patrick Anderson (1936) Publisher: Random House (New York). 272 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Literary criticism Time: 1840’s to the early twenty-first century Locale: Primarily various regions of the United States A breezy overview of contemporary thriller writers by an engaging thriller novelist and book reviewer that is nevertheless weak on the history of the genre and provides no guide to other studies Patrick Anderson is a reviewer of thrillers for The Washington Post. He has also written thrillers. As critic and practitioner, he is in an excellent position to provide a survey of the best work in the genre. He is not much interested in judging his contemporaries—although he does chide popular authors who have become too formulaic— such as James Patterson (machining plots of violence and gore), John Grisham (who forsakes the grittiness of his early work), and Tom Clancy (too mechanical and lacking in character development). Anderson’s main concern is to highlight the best-written thrillers and to account for their dominance of the best seller lists, especially in the last three decades. His argument is not simply that thrillers are, on the average, better written and more widely read than ever before. Rather, he believes that the genre at its best has become a part of mainstream American fiction. Though he cites important English writers, he clearly suggests that the most important development of the thriller has occurred in the United States. Indeed, he believes it is time to consider certain thriller writers as just great writers deserving of the elite literary awards that have been reserved for so-called mainstream fiction. His main candidates for honors are Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, and Michael Connelly. Anderson’s definition of the thriller is quite elastic. It encompasses writers as various as Wilkie Collins and Mickey Spillane. Indeed, Anderson is short on definitions and explorations of what precisely the thriller is. Although it has emerged as a dominant category in contemporary fiction, he still seems to regard the thriller as a subgenre evolving out of the mystery story as pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. It seems quite a stretch to trace contemporary thrillers to these writers rather than, say, the eighteenth century gothic novel or an early crime novel such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Rather than evolve a theory of the thriller or ground his definition of the genre in carefully chosen works that comprise its history, Anderson prefers to describe what thriller writers do while taking a rather ahistorical view of literature. Thus, Poe, for example, is faulted for drawing out the story in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842),

The Triumph of the Thriller / anderson

783

as if he should be judged by the lean and mean prose of more recent thriller writers such as Patrick Anderson, who for several years Elmore Leonard, one of Anderson’s touch- has written a weekly book review for stones. Even a classic writer like Raymond The Washington Post, is the author of Chandler gets a drubbing when compared to nine novels and three previous books of nonfiction. He served as a speechwriter later novelists such as James Ellroy. Part 1 of The Triumph of the Thriller is in the John F. Kennedy and Bill divided into four chapters, the first introduc- Clinton administrations and in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. ing Anderson’s brief for the superiority of the contemporary thriller, the second presenting a swift and rather superficial examination of Poe, Doyle, and Christie, the third presenting their hard-boiled, tough-guy counterparts created by Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Chandler, and the fourth presenting the postwar grouping of Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, and Charles Willeford. Willeford, known mainly by devotees of the genre, has been rediscovered—much to Anderson’s pleasure. Willeford’s 1955 novel, Pick-Up, is included in the Library of America’s collection Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950’s (1997). Originally published in cheap paperback editions, his novels now seem destined to surpass the reputation of Ross Macdonald, whose Freudianism, Anderson suggests, has become dated. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, on the other hand, seems timeless to the critic, a detective who has become the epitome of a certain male confidence that Anderson admires. In part 2, chapter 5, Anderson claims that the year 1981 represents a “tipping point” in the history of the thriller. Mainstream writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were employing the true crime reportage in In Cold Blood (1966) and The Executioner’s Song (1979) that had earlier been the province of genre writers. James Dickey produced the “quintessential literary thriller” in Deliverance (1970). Soon a new generation of writers like Scott Turow, Connelly, and Pelecanos were combining their serious interests in literature with the format of the thriller. In effect, the thriller was reborn in this cross-fertilization between mainstream and genre fiction. While Anderson’s argument has merit, its force is dissipated in chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 as he conducts surveys and provides plot summaries—exposing Clancy’s “literary offenses” in a takeoff of Mark Twain classic essay on James Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses, and grouping such disparate writers as Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Patricia Highsmith under the unilluminating rubric “Dangerous Women.” Grafton and Paretsky are very polished genre writers, but Anderson does not seem to recognize that they are in a lower class of achievement than Highsmith’s sophisticated and daringly amoral books. Certainly Turow and John Lescroart have brought honed literary sensibilities in legal thrillers, whereas Grisham has merely used the law to titillate, but in the absence of a unified argument the chapters in part 2 read like patched-together book reviews and guides to good reading. Chapter 9, “Spy Masters,” perhaps because the subject matter of novels by Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, Daniel Silva, and Alan Furst is the same, seems more coherent than other chapters in part 2. These authors write with a literary elegance that

784

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

rivals the best of John le Carré. Chapter 10, however, is Anderson at his worst, presenting a potpourri of “Literary Thrillers, Killer Clowns, Barroom Poets, Drunken Detectives, Time Travel, and Related Curiosities.” Anderson seems to forget his own argument—that thrillers should be considered “literary” the same way other mainstream books are. If so, what is it that unites them as a form of literature different from earlier thrillers? It is a question Anderson never pauses to ask, let alone explore with any care. Anderson redeems his argument in part 3, “Four Modern Masters,” which provides a persuasive brief for Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, Pelecanos, and Connelly. Harris, best known for his Hannibal Lecter series, is perhaps the most strikingly original because he constantly overturns the expectations inherent in genre fiction. Lecter, for example, shifts from villain to hero, putting the reader in the uncomfortable position of identifying with a serial killer. Not only has Harris raised the level of violence in the contemporary thriller to unprecedented heights (Anderson has his qualms about this), he also has influenced a legion of new writers that Anderson features for a page or so each. Although Barry Eisler, the author of the John Rain series, a provocative and sympathetic study of a professional assassin, is not yet in the same league as these writers, it is odd that Anderson does not mention him here or in other chapters devoted to novels that are breaking the conventional patterns of the thriller. Part 4 looks suspiciously like a series of chapters in which Anderson crams his enthusiasms for a miscellaneous grouping of writers, including a chapter on “Brits,” and another on the pitfalls of creating series characters who do not develop from one novel to the next. In this regard, he might have written more about John Lescroart, who has devised a subtle series of novels featuring a homicide detective, Abe Glitsky, and Dismas Hardy, a defense attorney. Both men become extraordinarily complex characters in novels that test their friendship and their convictions as they deal with crimes that expand and challenge their views of the world. On the other hand, Anderson does full justice to Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, presenting a paragraph of analysis that is one of the critic’s best: The tormented wild man of the early novels has been replaced by the avenging angle, a kind of saint. We see now that the series has an arc; the Bosch novels have become a classic story of rebirth and redemption. At the end of The Closers, Harry vows “to carry on the mission . . . always to speak for the dead.” His vow is a dramatic reminder of how far the crime novel has come. In the drawing-room mysteries of the early twentieth century, no one really cared about the corpse on page one. It was a formality, the starting point of the puzzle that would allow author and detective to demonstrate their brilliance. That’s no longer true in modern crime fiction, and nowhere is it less true than in the Bosch novels.

This passage, unfortunately, is rarely equaled elsewhere. It is a pity that in a book that seeks to extol the thriller’s literary qualities Anderson’s own style is often shoddy. The flabbiness of his prose is especially evident in his use of clichés such as “the mind boggles” and “all things being equal, reality is the place for a novelist to be.” A long quotation is given no introduction other than “I want to quote at length.” Anderson

The Triumph of the Thriller / anderson

785

writes about his guilt over having become a “middle brow,” forsaking the modernist literature he was taught to revere. Sadly, his own style seldom achieves the kind of distinction he claims for the best thriller writers. It is a puzzle as to why Anderson has not made his book more useful. There is no index or bibliography, no acknowledgment of other important reviewers and critics who are also treating the thriller as an important literary genre. Otto Penzler, for example, writes a weekly column for The New York Sun, drawing on his vast experience as a critic and publisher of mystery fiction, but Anderson gives no hint that his views are in fact gaining considerable currency in the work of other reviewers. This failure to provide sources for further study suggests a certain lack of rigor. Even a work written not mainly for critics but for a lay audience ought to respect certain basic requirements of literary criticism. Despite these drawbacks, The Triumph of the Thriller is an indispensable guide to the contemporary thriller. It is hard to believe that any critic has read more of what is valuable in this genre. Anderson’s enthusiasm for the genre is infectious. He provides, as well, a list of his favorite novels. Certainly Anderson has to be consulted for anyone beginning a study of the thriller, and his book should appeal to fans of the genre who want to make sure they have not missed any gems. In the main, Anderson is a generous critic, and even where he finds fault—as in his discussion of Tom Clancy’s novels—he also finds strengths in which he wishes the author would build. A less mean-spirited work of literary criticism would be hard to find. Carl Rollyson

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 2007): 40. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 24 (December 15, 2006): 1249-1250. Library Journal 131, no. 20 (December 1, 2006): 124. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 18, 2007): 12. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 45 (November 13, 2006): 42. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 34 (February 10, 2007): P8.

786

TWENTY-EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS Author: Joan Acocella (1945) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). 524 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Essays, fine arts, literary criticism Time: 1900-2006 Locale: New York City, London, and Paris A collection of essays that are representative of Acocella’s literary, dance, and art criticism originally published primarily in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books The thirty-one essays in Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints fall into several categories that bring together Joan Acocella’s interests and expertise in literature and literary criticism, dance and dance criticism, psychology, and women’s studies. Eighteen of the essays are on literature. They are primarily about literary figures of the twentieth century, both well known, such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, and Susan Sontag, and less known, such as Italo Svevo, Stefan Sweig, and Marguerite Yourcenar. One of the essays in this group is about Andrea de Jorio, a nineteenth century Neapolitan priest, who wrote a study of the meaning of hand gestures used by natives of Naples. The other essay in this literary group, the only essay that does not focus on a particular person, is titled “Blocked,” about writer’s block. Another group of nine essays is about dance. Most of these essays are “portraits” of dancers and choreographers in ballet, Broadway dance, and modern dance. They include Vaslav Nijinsky, Frederick Ashton, Suzanne Farrell, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, and Twyla Tharp. There is also an essay on Lincoln Kirstein, who was responsible for bringing George Balanchine to the United States and was the founder and manager of the New York City Ballet. An additional essay related to dance is on Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce who, before her descent into insanity, tried to be a modern dancer. Of the three remaining essays, one is on the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The other two are about “saints,” Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc. Both of these essays are more about the cultural reception of these saintly females in the twentieth century. The springboard for the essay on Mary Magdalene is the popular interest in her cult arising from the 2003 novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. The essay on Joan of Arc focuses on the way her story was treated in films of the twentieth century. In such a diverse group of talented people working with various forms of artistic expression, the question arises about whether any themes recur that in some way serve to unify this collection of essays. Acocella addresses this point in her introduction. The theme that she chooses is “difficulty, hardship.” By this she does not mean the artists’ background in trauma and its attendant psychological difficulties

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints / acocella

787

but rather “the pain that came with the art making, interfering with it, and how the artist dealt with this.” She points out that many brilliant artists and writers have not had the inner strength, tenacity, and courage to persevere in the face of the many difficulties, rejections, and disappointments that are inherent in the artistic process and in remaining true to an artistic vision and purpose. Acocella wants Critic Joan Acocella has published to examine the “ego strength” that makes it books on psychology, such as possible for an artist to rise above the ob- Abnormal Psychology: Current stacles to creating and practicing his or her Perspectives (1977), and on literature, particular art. including Willa Cather and the Politics In reading these essays, several problems of Criticism (2000). She is well known emerge with Acocella’s thesis about the ego for her writings on dance history and strength of successful artists. One difficulty is criticism, which include a study of the that a number of the essays demonstrate just modern dancer Mark Morris and an the opposite, the fact that many artists lack edition of the diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. this personal quality. The first essay on Lucia She covers dance and books for The Joyce, for example, shows how the burdens of New Yorker. being the child of a famous writer limited her own artistic inclinations in dance. Joyce became so mentally ill that she ended up being institutionalized. The case of the dancer Nijinsky differs in the specific aspects of his life story, but the result was the same. Nijinsky had a phenomenal but very short career as a dancer before psychosis overtook him. The essay on writer’s block is filled with writers who never were able to realize their creative potential. Another problem with the ego strength thesis is that Acocella never really analyzes what it is and especially how it operates in the case of the more successful artists and writers. When the artists do overcome obstacles, the key seems to be turning inward to draw on themselves. Acocella says of Baryshnikov, who survived the suicide of his mother when he was twelve years old and dealt with the creative restrictions placed on him by the policies of the former Soviet Union by defecting to the West, “Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself. Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.” In addition, the price of ego strength in many instances is paid in the cost of the artists’ health and especially in their relationships and the treatment of others. Alcoholism is rampant through many of these profiles. Graham and Tharp, both modern dancers and choreographers, and Fosse, a Broadway dancer and choreographer, are examples. Fosse drove himself to death, collapsing on a street with his second heart attack at age sixty. Many of these artists can be cruel to those who support them in various ways or who want to learn from them. Acocella reports that at Sunday salons mainly for younger artists held by Bourgeois, “people have been known to exit . . . in tears, but if you can take it the dynamics are interesting.” Numerous marriages and

788

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

divorces are commonplace. The children inevitably suffer. Penelope Fitzgerald, the British writer, admits some of the toll on children in a roundabout way. When Acocella asked Fitzgerald if Fitzgerald’s children were like the children in her novels who are “outspoken, tough-minded, frighteningly precocious,” Fitzgerald replied affirmatively saying: “I think if your mother isn’t very grown-up you have to be very grown-up yourself.” Another problem is that although Acocella states in the introduction that she is not interested in the “unhappy-childhood theory” and its cousin, “that art was born of neurosis,” almost all of her essays present glaring examples of the effects of trauma on the artists and therefore on their art. Some of the trauma comes from the tremendous dislocation and horror of war. Her essay on Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, focuses on how this inhuman experience affected the course of his life and his writing. None of the subjects of the essays had anything close to a normal childhood with secure attachment to parents or caregivers. Tharp’s father threw a hatchet at her mother. Sontag was only briefly told of her father’s death in China and then endured life on the move with her mother’s series of boyfriends and eventually her stepfather. Sontag has called her childhood “a long prison sentence.” Sybille Bedford’s father was sixty years older than her mother. Much of her childhood was spent in the chaos of her mother’s numerous liaisons and finally in trying to deal with her mother’s addiction to morphine. Yourcenar’s mother died when she was born. Her nursemaid would take her to “houses of assignation.” Yourcenar’s first sexual encounter was with a woman when Yourcenar was eleven years old. Baryshnikov’s mother hanged herself when he was twelve. One of the most striking cases is Bourgeois. The third daughter in a family of French artisans who restored tapestries, Bourgeois was dominated by her father. “She hated him, and she loved him like crazy.” One of the many traumas that she suffered as a child included the betrayal of her English governess, who became her father’s mistress. Acocella’s essay states that Bourgeois has had “crushing anxiety attacks” that have occurred four times a day “for as long as she can remember.” Her sculptures bear titles such as The Destruction of the Father. Her photo that accompanies this essay shows her holding one of her famous sculptures, a disembodied penis. Fear and anger are the key themes of her work. She has written that her art “is a form of therapy, a way of preventing herself from going out and killing someone, or herself.” Trauma of this magnitude is serious, and even when not immediately obvious it leaves deep wounds and scars. Recent trauma work that incorporates insights from neuroscience demonstrates the profound effects of trauma, loss, and attachment patterns on the brain and therefore on the mind. Rather than dismissing such profound trauma as simply an “unhappy childhood,” it would be more compelling if Acocella had provided a more thoughtful view of how trauma interacts with ego strength to find expression in various art and literary forms. It may, however, be somewhat artificial to try to impose unifying themes on a group of essays that were written separately and published in several journals over a period of about fourteen years between 1992 and 2006. Indeed, one value of this collection is that it brings together these essays in a format that makes them accessible

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints / acocella

789

to more readers. As Acocella says in her introduction about her choices: “I thought I was simply choosing the pieces that I liked best, and wanted to send out into the world again.” Looking at the essays from this perspective, taking each one individually and savoring the insights that it has to offer, readers will recognize that this collection is filled with ideas, information, and viewpoints that enhance their understanding of both the artists and the various works of literature, dance, and art. Two of the essays that are most interesting are not really about personalities at all. The essay titled “The Neapolitan Finger” discusses a recent edition of a book on hand gestures of the Neapolitans published in 1832 by de Jorio. This essay not only explains some of the fine art of these gestures and the nuances of their meaning but also brings out some of the intriguing aspects of gesture as a nonverbal form of communication. The essay “The Saintly Sinner” presents an excellent overview of recent “reception history” of Mary Magdalene and especially her recent revival in the study of primitive Christianity as well as in feminist Bible scholarship. Acocella’s essay enlivens this body of scholarly material and makes the intriguing questions about Mary Magdalene’s place in the history of Christianity accessible to readers. The essays on dance are especially illuminating. In various ways, Acocella’s writing examines the inner processes of dance in ways that help the reader to “see” and understand what dance is all about. The essay on Farrell is more about her transformation from a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet to a teacher and head of her own ballet company. Farrell talks about the importance of space in dance and the relationship between that space and the music. “‘There’s sound in movement,’ . . . and space in sound. The dancer’s job is to show—or make—the relation between the two.” Several of the essays touch on the opposition of order and disorder in dance. With classical ballet there is a sense “that experience has order, that life can be understood.” The dances by Tharp are often about that precarious balance between order and disorder. This collection of essays presents many ideas to explore. They raise issues about the relationship of the creative personality and the work, about permanence and preservation of artistic creations, especially with dance, and about how artists challenge established boundaries and conventions. The variety of topics and perspectives makes this collection a valuable resource. Karen Gould

Review Sources Dance Magazine 81, no. 8 (August, 2007): 54. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 24 (December 15, 2006): 1249. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 4 (March 15, 2007): 31-33. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 18, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 2 (January 8, 2007): 47-48.

790

TWO HISTORIES OF ENGLAND Authors: Jane Austen (1775-1817); Charles Dickens (1812-1870) First published: Jane Austen’s The History of England, wr. 1791, in Great Britain; Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, 1851-1853, in Great Britain; together as The History of England, 2006, in Great Britain Introduction by David Starkey Publisher: Ecco Press/HarperCollins (New York). 157 pp. $16.95 Type of work: History Time: 1399-1649 Locale: Mainly England, but also Scotland, Ireland, and briefly France Sixteen-year-old Austen’s highly subjective tongue-in-cheek history of England from Henry IV to Charles I parodies subjective eighteenth century histories for young ladies, while Dickens’s lively, dramatic children’s tale of England from Elizabeth I to the death of Charles I provides personal insights into how England acquired democratic freedoms Principal personages: Charles I (1600-1649), king of England, r. 1625-1649, whom Austen defends as an amiable Stuart but whom Dickens attacks as a master deceiver, committed to the absolute right of kings to wage wars, tax citizens, and plunder their nation as they please and to the idea that a king can do no wrong Elizabeth I (1533-1603), queen of England, r. 1558-1603, whom Austen finds wicked and mischievous, surrounded by bad ministers, but whom Dickens sees as a crafty monarch James I (1566-1625), king of Scotland (as James VI), r. 1567-1625, and king of England, r. 1603-1625, whom Austen says she cannot help liking despite his faults, but whom Dickens loathes and despises, calling him by the nickname a favorite chose, “his Sowship” Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587), queen of Scotland, r. 1542-1567, ill-fated and sorely abused by Elizabeth I, and a noble-minded heroine steadfast in her faith, asserted Austen, but a murderous schemer, the center of plots against the throne, according to Dickens Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), English military and political leader who was a necessary counter to Charles I, says Dickens, one who nearly lost his life early in the English Civil War Robert Devereux (1565-1601), second earl of Essex, the hero of Austen’s comic narrator, noble and gallant, but unfortunate, tormented, and executed by the scheming Elizabeth, who used him in her power plays, says Dickens

Two Histories of England / austen/dickens

791

Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540-1596), English navigator whose glory will be outshone, asserts young Austen, by her eldest sister’s husband; Dickens focuses on his plundering Spanish vessels Sir Walter Ralegh (c. 1552-1618), English writer and explorer who flourished under Elizabeth but of whom Austen has nothing good to say because he was the enemy of her hero, Lord Essex; Dickens praises Ralegh for finishing off the Spanish fleet at Cadiz

The title Two Histories of England invites comparison of these very different works, neither of which fits the modern idea of approaching history with distance, objectivity, and cultural context. Though they share the same purported subject matter, the history of England, and a similar premodern assumption that history is by nature subjective, an anecdotal account to defend personal values and biases, they diverge greatly in highly interesting and diverting ways that David Starkey’s insightful introductory remarks push readers to discover for themselves. Starkey observes that both Jane Austen and Charles Dickens came from Hampshire. While Austen enjoyed the security of a clerical family’s middle-class respectability, Dickens enjoyed the pleasures of rural life until apprenticed in a London boot-blacking factory near the strand when his father went to debtors’ prison. The two histories reflect this difference in class experience, politics, and values. Both writers developed a keen eye for satire, with Austen focusing on the society amid which she spent her entire life, but with Dickens exploring the Jane Austen wrote six novels: Sense full range of society from top to bottom. Both and Sensibility (1811), Pride and were buried in Westminster Abbey, a tribute Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park to their accomplishments as satiric novelists. (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Austen’s The History of England: From the Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818); Reign of Henry the Fourth to the Death of she never completed The Watsons Charles the First, a thirty-four-page manu- (1871) and Sanditon (1925). Charles script containing her sister Cassandra’s thir- Dickens wrote far more, including teen watercolor miniatures of the monarchs Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Oliver discussed, was a precocious adolescent’s idea Twist (1837-1839), Nicholas Nickleby of how to provide her family with evening (1838-1839), The Old Curiosity Shop entertainment. It was not intended for pub- (1840-1841), A Christmas Carol lication, and, in fact, remained unpublished (1843), David Copperfield (1849until 1922, 131 years after its completion. 1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities Dickens’s A Child’s History of England is a (1859), and Great Expectations (1860solid work published over a three-year period 1861). and containing thirty-eight chapters, of which only three are excerpted here (“England Under

792

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Elizabeth,” “England Under James the First,” and “England Under Charles the First”). The work was a product of his maturity, its goal being the education of English schoolchildren. In fact, it became a popular educational tool, a history textbook that Starkey says was used well into the twentieth century, declining in popularity only after World War II as the concept of how one retells history changed, and not disappearing totally from the English classroom until the 1950’s. Austen intended her history to be read aloud, archly and dramatically, for the amusement of her household. She assumes their knowledge of the sentimental excesses and the contrived moral lessons of the “histories” provided young eighteenth century ladies; she parodies these, calling herself a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian” and intentionally muddling facts and forcefully asserting ill-supported biases. Her chosen stance is that of a Yorkist, contemptuous of all Lancastrians, enamored of Charles I, and most disdainful of Elizabeth I. She asserts her partiality to Roman Catholics but regretfully confesses that under James I the English Catholics failed to behave “like Gentlemen” toward Protestants, and were, in fact, quite “uncivil.” Her Henry IV ascends the throne “much to his own satisfaction,” then retires to Pomfret Castle, “where he happened to be murdered,” while his son Henry V thrashed Sir William Gascoigne as a prince but gave up doing so as king, though he had Lord Cobham “burnt alive,” though she forgets why. She dismisses Henry VI as Lancastrian and warns readers that she intends to vent her “Spleen” and show her “Hatred” to anyone whose principles vary from her own. Since Richard III was of York, she asserts his high respectability and counters rumors about his killing his nephews with rumors about Henry VII, whom she labels “as great a Villain as ever lived.” She gives Henry VIII short shrift since it would be unfair to her readers to assume that they know less about this famous personality than she. She asserts Anna Bullen’s (Anne Boleyn’s) innocence and declares that Henry’s dissolution of religious houses was probably intended to improve the English landscape, asserting, “Otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for Ages been established in the Kingdom.” Her duke of Northumberland performed his trust to protect Edward VI so well that “the King died and the Kingdom was left to [the Duke’s] daughter in law the Lady Jane Grey.” At the end of her text, Austen, tongue-in-cheek, asserts that her principal reason for undertaking this history was special pleading: to prove Mary Queen of Scots innocent and to abuse Elizabeth (though she fears she has fallen short in that part of her plan, she proclaims). Thus, Austen employs her facetious narrative “I” to mock the partisanship, hyperbole, and clichéd sentimentality of historical biographies. Dickens’s history is to some degree the type of history Austen mocked, with significant names capitalized, historical figures, battles, conspiracies catalogued chronologically, villains and heroes described colorfully, and prejudices and personal theories asserted firmly. Dickens is quite negative about Scotland, which he describes as a half-savage country of sullen people and small miserable horses where murder and rioting were common and where rigid Protestant reformers destroyed much of value. He condemns Puritans as “uncomfortable people,” who found it “meritorious”

Two Histories of England / austen/dickens

793

to wear hideous attire, “talk through their noses,” and denounce “harmless enjoyments.” He balances this image with a description of the horrific Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which Catholics killed ten thousand Protestants in Paris and fifty thousand throughout France, and then had a commemoratory medal struck. Dickens expresses a practicality and a moral sensibility of which Austen would probably have approved (the Victorians certainly did). Dickens explores history in far greater depth than does Austen, for his goals are quite different. He seeks to make history accessible to young people in clear, plain language. He also seeks to bring it to life with vivid details and memorable anecdotes that will stick in children’s minds for a lifetime—for example, the image of Mary Queen of Scots’ small dog cowering with fear under her dress during her execution, of Elizabeth I’s red-wigged ladies-in-waiting appealing to her vanity, or of Archbishop William Laud’s predilection for slicing off the ears and slitting the nostrils of recalcitrant Roundheads. Furthermore, Dickens seeks to counter some of the biased, unrealistic images of historical figures who were much admired, like the popularizing of Henry V as a fun-loving, spirited young Hal or the defense of Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries as a determined effort to free England from papal plots. Thus, for all his positive statements about Elizabeth I, who was greeted with great enthusiasm after the atrocities committed during Mary’s reign and who fostered letters, learning, and exploration during her reign, he seeks middle ground, showing her as cunning, manipulative, hot-tempered, and obsessed with her public image (particularly the image of Maiden Queen, which Dickens finds contrived and trite). This attempt at balance includes his observation that decent people with good motives swelled the ranks of both Cavaliers and Roundheads. Ultimately, Dickens’s goal is sectarian: He wants his youthful readers to understand that sometimes the best of monarchs infringed on the rights of citizens and got away with doing so because of their popularity, while sometimes the worst of monarchs brought about major improvements in the rights of citizens as a public reaction against the atrocities and outrages they inflicted upon ordinary people. He is particularly concerned for ordinary citizens, whose lives the historical strengthening of Parliament improved, and he admonishes his young readers not ever to trust monarchs, whom he repeatedly describes as wily, devious, two-faced, and self-centered. Among his moral lessons is an admonition against torture, as he describes what happened on the rack, and observes that anyone would confess to any absurdity to end such terrible pain. He designates Sir Philip Sidney a perfect example of nobility and humanity, for when wounded to death himself, he gave his badly needed water to a suffering, wounded foot soldier. Dickens attacks James I as the worst monarch ever, calling him “cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on earth”—and that is only the beginning of his diatribe, as he points to James’s open fawning and slobbering over male favorites, his disdain for Parliament, his unifying Catholics and Puritans in conspiracies against him, and his transformation of decent citizens into servile, corrupt, lying hypocrites. Charles I’s life may have been cut short, but Dickens asserts that his despotic twelve-year reign was more than long enough.

794

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Intriguingly, Austen’s satiric history makes readers appreciate Dickens’s highly personalized history. Gina Macdonald

Review Sources Publishers Weekly 254, no. 32 (August 13, 2007): 58. The Indianapolis Star, November 11, 2007, p. D2.

795

TWO LIVES Gertrude and Alice Author: Janet Malcolm (1934) Publisher: Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.). Illustrated. 229 pp. $25.00 Type of work: Literary biography, literary criticism Three essays, originally published in The New Yorker, explore Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s relationship, works, and lives Principal personages: Gertrude Stein, the expatriate American writer Alice B. Toklas, her companion Bernard Fay, a French professor, official, translator, and Nazi collaborator who was their protector in occupied France during World War II Edward M. Burns, Ulla E. Dydo, and William Rice, Stein scholars Leon Katz, a Stein scholar who conducted extensive interviews with Toklas about Stein’s unpublished notebooks

American culture has always shown a particular fondness for eccentrics and iconoclasts, inventors and innovators. Although most of Gertrude Stein’s writing is so experimental that it is impenetrable to all but a few devotees, her name and image are familiar to many people who have never read her work because she was all of these things and more. She is known for a few phrases—“A rose is a rose is a rose,” “Pigeons on the grass alas”—that, like Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, seem to epitomize the popular idea of avant-garde modern art as a confidence game built on praise of work that any child could do. She is recognized through iconic images in photographs and a famous portrait by Pablo Picasso that present her as a kind of massive American Buddha. She is associated with tales of the expatriate “lost generation” of the 1920’s and remembered for the salon she hosted in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus where friends such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Ernest Hemingway were frequent guests. She is even recalled by some of the disappearing generation of World War II veterans as somehow a part of the American liberation of France. Over the past forty years, she has also become a leading member of the feminist and lesbian pantheons of neglected women artists. Criticism and scholarship—including biographies such as James R. Mellow’s Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (1974); memoirs, beginning with W. G. Rogers’s When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (1948); and critical studies, from Edmund Wilson’s influential chapter on Stein in his pioneering

796

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

study, Axel’s Castle (1931), to Richard Bridgman’s indispensable Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970)—long ago went beyond these popular images to seriously examine her life, her work, and her importance to the history of American modernism. In 1998, she was officially canonized in two volumes of the Library of America series. Since the publication of In the Freud Archives (1984), Janet Malcolm has combined journalism, psychological analysis, and skep ticism about the nature of biography in fascinating and elegantly written examinations of psychoanalysis, journalism, and the arts. In Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, the third in a series focused on writers that also includes The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994) and Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001), she sets out to reconsider Gertrude Stein. The book consists of three related essays that, like much of Malcolm’s work, first appeared in The New Yorker. Although the book’s three chapters have been described by reviewers as treating Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’s experiences during the war, the composition of The Making of Americans (1925), and Toklas’s years “staying on alone,” they are, in fact, far more meandering and fragmented than this clear division suggests. Malcolm does not really have much to add to the critical and biographical scholarship that already exists, but her work is not intended for scholars. Instead, she draws on previous scholarship to present the general reader with a study of the character, writing, and relationship of her two principals. Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive part of Two Lives is its attentive and provocative readings of Stein’s work and artistic evolution rather than its biographical elements or journalistic discoveries. Beginning with her initial observation that Stein wrote “stories, novels, and poems that are like no stories, novels, and poems ever written but seem to be saturated with some sort of elixir of originality,” when she is talking about Stein’s writing itself Malcolm is consistently at her most original and engaging. In Three Lives, Stein’s collection of stories written in 1909 that inspired her own title, she says for example, “Stein is still writing in regular, if singular English, but by 1912 she had started producing work in a language of her own, one that uses English words but in no other way resembles English as it is known.” Malcolm precisely captures the appeal of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein’s only commercially successful book, when she notes that Stein’s “playful egomania pervades” it, “as does the optimism that gives the story of her life the character of a fairy tale.” The highlight of Malcolm’s analysis of Stein’s writing is her discussion—in the first half of the second essay and in other passages throughout the book—of what caused Stein’s style to change between 1905 and 1912. The underlying question is how the unhappy, insecure, directionless young woman who began her life as an expatriate in Paris in 1903 in the shadow of her older brother Leo came to think of herJanet Malcolm first gained fame with Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981). A regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, her best-known books also include In the Freud Archives (1984), The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994).

Two Lives / malcolm

797

self as a literary genius by 1912. Malcolm’s answer lies in her examination of the making of The Making of Americans, completed in 1911, and the beginning of her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas in 1907. Like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1930-1969), The Making of Americans is consistently alluded to as a modern classic but seldom actually read, even by scholars. In fact, its 925 pages of densely packed and sparsely punctuated text are pretty much unreadable by anyone except confirmed Steinophiles like the professors Malcolm consults in the course of her research. Malcolm decided to join the small group of the book’s readers, but only, she comically explains, after she took out a kitchen knife and cut the massive Dalkey Press volume into six easily portable sections—thereby “unwittingly [making] a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness.” What she found in these pages is both a fascinating autobiography and “a text of magisterial disorder,” “something so monstrously peculiar that although it is possible to finish, it is impossible to sum up.” It is, she discovers, a “dark, death-ridden work,” but after Stein completes it “this atmosphere lifts, and never again descends on her” writing. It is also an antinovel that seems to turn into “a kind of nervous breakdown,” whose main subject is the author’s inability to write it. In fact, “the jolts and lurches of her engagement with writing are the book’s plot,” and words—rather than the family she initially sets out to write a nineteenth century novel about—are its real characters. (“Stein’s vocabulary is small and monotonous,” Malcolm writes, in an observation that most readers of Stein’s work have made. “When she uses a new word,” she then adds in an insight that is very much her own, and characteristically astute, “it is like the entrance of a new character.”) Since Stein cannot invent characters, this novel that is not a novel consists of “a kind of literal translation of what is going on in her mind” each day as she sits down to write. Stein wrote in longhand and dropped the pages on the floor next to her desk as she finished them. As she wrote page after page, she constantly wondered whether anyone would ever actually read what she was writing, and wrote about that. “Bear it in your mind my reader,” she says near the beginning of The Making of Americans, “but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such creature.” Then, apparently just in time, Alice B. Toklas entered her life. Toklas not only read but liked what Stein was writing, finding it “more exciting than anything had ever been,” and she soon began to pick up the scraps of paper and type them out every day. As Malcolm describes it, “the transformation of dirty scraps of paper into clean pages of typescript was surely a pivotal event in the life of the work, which might well have floundered on Stein’s anxiety about the maddening complexity of what she had undertaken.” Instead, “Toklas’s belief in Stein’s genius, made manifest by the growing pile of typed pages, emboldened Stein in her excruciating endeavor.” The impact of Toklas’s love, admiration, and support suffuses the extraordinary passage from The Making of Americans from which Malcolm drew the title of the second of her essays when it appeared in The New Yorker: “Someone Says Yes to It.” “It is a very strange feeling,” Stein writes, when

798

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

you like something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then some one says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.

Unfortunately, not all of Two Lives demonstrates either the originality or the finesse of its discussion of The Making of Americans. “Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world,” Malcolm wrote in The Silent Woman in words that describe her own biographical approach here. “The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.” The reader and the biographer collude and tiptoe “down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.” Too much of this book is devoted to such investigations and sinks into a kind of celebrity gossip, complete with its characteristically exaggerated tone of revelation. “Why did Toklas omit any mention of her and Stein’s Jewishness (never mind lesbianism)?” Malcolm disingenuously wonders out loud on the book’s fourth page, when she is well aware that the times make the answer obvious. “Has the book dropped from the reader’s hand?” she melodramatically asks after reporting that some men found Stein sexually attractive. Two Lives is also marred at times by writing that is surprising from an author who is usually so eloquent. “Every writer who lingers over Stein’s sentences is apt to feel a little stab of shame over the heedless predictability of his own,” Malcolm points out. Ironically, just such heedlessness weakens parts of Two Lives. There are too many clichés—characters “pull their punches,” “toil in different parts of the Stein vineyard,” bring back “trophies of great worth.” There is too much slang—characters face a “scary moment of decision” and “bad-mouthings,” are “sucking-up” or “ripped off.” There is also too much awkwardness—revisions are “clear disimprovements,” the handful of scholars who have actually read all of The Making of Americans are “non-shirkers,” Leon Katz is “the winkler-out of Toklas’s secrets,” and an episode demonstrates Stein’s “ultra-importance.” If Janet Malcolm’s biography and writing are sometimes disappointing this time— like the quality of the reproduction of most of the book’s photographs—Two Lives is still well worth reading by anyone who is interested in Stein for the truly original observations, insightful readings, and acutely expressed insights scattered within it. Bernard F. Rodgers, Jr.

Two Lives / malcolm

799

Review Sources The Boston Globe, October 14, 2007, p. E4. The Chicago Sun-Times, October 14, 2007, p. B11. The Chicago Tribune, October 6, 2007, p. 3. London Review of Books 29, no. 24 (December 13, 2007): 10-16. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 16 (October 25, 2007): 4-8. The New York Times Book Review 157 (September 23, 2007): 7. Newsweek 150, no. 19 (November 5, 2007): 62. The Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2008, pp. 7-8. The Washington Post, September 30, 2007, p. BW09.

800

UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939 Author: Katie Roiphe (1968) Publisher: Dial Press (New York). 344 pp. $26.00 Type of work: Literary biography, women’s issues Time: 1910-1939 Locale: London Roiphe examines seven couples in literary London in the opening decades of the twentieth century and reveals the difficulties they had in trying to redefine marriage for modern times Principal personages: H. G. Wells, the world-famous novelist Jane Wells, his wife Rebecca West, a young writer and feminist who became Wells’s lover Anthony West, the son of Wells and West who suffered a troubled childhood Katherine Mansfield, the short-story writer John Middleton Murry, her husband, an editor and critic Elizabeth von Arnim, author of The Enchanted April (1922), among many books Frank Russell, her overbearing husband Vanessa Bell, an artist, the sister of Virginia Woolf, the novelist and essayist Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, an art and literary critic Duncan Grant, a painter and one of Vanessa’s many lovers Ottoline Morrell, a literary hostess and magnet for many men Philip Morrell, her husband, who maintained affairs of his own Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness (1928) Una Troubridge, her partner for eighteen years Evguenia Souline, a nurse and Hall’s lover for half of that time George Gordon Catlin, a professor and politician Vera Brittain, his wife, a successful writer Winifred Holtby, a writer who completed their extended family

Ottoline Morrell was the most famous literary hostess in England before and during World War I. Her “Thursdays” at her house on Bedford Square in London were matched only by the weekends at Garsington, the country estate where Ottoline and her husband, Philip, entertained some of the most famous artists and writers of the day, including W. B. Yeats, Charlie Chaplin, and T. S. Eliot. D. H. Lawrence parodied Ottoline in the character Hermione in his novel Women in Love (1920), and Aldous Huxley did the same in his novel Crome Yellow (1921). She had an affair with a gardener at Garsington in 1920 (which may have influenced Lawrence’s 1928

Uncommon Arrangements / roiphe

801

Lady Chatterley’s Lover), and another, longer affair with the brilliant philosopher Bertrand Katie Roiphe has written The Morning Russell, author of Principia Mathematica After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), (1910-1913). Her husband was not idle: He Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals propositioned the novelist Virginia Woolf, at the Century’s End (1997), and the among others, and in March of 1917 an- novel Still She Haunts Me (2001), as nounced to his wife that he had not one but well as articles in The New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, two pregnant mistresses on his busy hands. and other journals. She lives in New The story of the Morrells is just one of York and teaches in the Cultural seven fascinating narratives Katie Roiphe Reporting and Criticism Program at weaves together in Uncommon Arrange- New York University. ments: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939. Her focus is less the scandals and the sexual adventures of these couples—and the triangles of various sizes and configurations they all maintained—than their attempts to forge something new, marriage based on equality, freedom, and honesty. This period was one of incredible social instability. The Great War decimated a generation of British men at the same time that it propelled women into new roles and a new consciousness of the power they possessed, as in both the pacifist and the feminist movements of the time. The period also saw immense artistic experimentation and production. The major modernist artists—Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, among many others—were at work in this period redefining the very substance and structure of literature and art. Lovers were trying to shed outdated Victorian mores at the same time that writers were discarding inherited forms, in order to carve out something new, for literature as well as for human interaction. Roiphe focuses on seven famous “families” in England in this intense period, from before World War I until just before World War II. She chooses writers and artists, plus one literary hostess, and uses their letters, diaries, and memoirs to reveal what they thought, wrote, and said about marriage and married life. This may have been the most writerly generation on record, for psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis had taught them the importance of feelings, especially sexual feelings, and their expression. They wrote voluminously about their feelings and about their relationships. Roiphe mines this library (her selected bibliography is a dozen pages long) and comes up with revealing glimpses of some of the most creative artists the twentieth century would see, people who were trying to figure out intimate relations in imaginative ways. Every chapter begins with a crisis in a marriage and shows whether it was resolved or not, and, in the process, Roiphe shows how successful these people were at forging something new in human relations. H. G. Wells, for example, was the author of popular scientific romances (The Time Machine, 1895, The War of the Worlds, 1898) and in 1914 was settled into a comfortable country house in Essex with his open-minded wife, Jane, who had tolerated the series of sexual liaisons he carried on, when his current mistress, the writer and feminist Rebecca West, one hundred miles away, was giving birth to their son, Anthony. Roiphe spends her first chapter describing how these people managed their decade-

802

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

long ménage à trois. West was a feminist and, like Wells, believed that not acting on one’s sexual attractions was hypocritical, but Roiphe concludes that, in spite of their radical ideas, West and Wells fell into a life of traditional marital hypocrisy anyway. In the end, she feels, they succumbed to fairly outmoded, Victorian notions of marriage. Wells remained in his family and maintained his string of sexual affairs, and West married banker Harry Andrews in 1929 and went on to write Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia in 1941, among other works, and to be featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1948 as the world’s single most famous woman writer. Their son Anthony would go on to write a bitter account of his childhood. Roiphe’s remaining portraits are equally intriguing. The short-story writer Katherine Mansfield—who would write “Bliss,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” and “The Garden Party,” among other famous stories—married the editor and critic John Middleton Murry, but their marriage seemed almost childish, and they spent much time apart. In her battle with tuberculosis and early death, when Murry was unable to stand by her, it was her intimate friend Ida Baker who would nurse her. Ironically, editors would consider her one of the experts on “Modern Love,” but her own marriage appears both restless and irresponsible. Elizabeth von Arnim was another famous writer, the author of the instant sensation and best seller Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898). Her feminist novels urged women to abandon their domestic responsibilities for greater freedom and travel, but she ended up marrying a controlling tyrant, Frank Russell. In the end, in what sounds like the plot of a Evelyn Waugh comic novel, she had to flee the marriage to California but still ended up in court, fighting a suit by her husband that she stole his possessions—including his tennis balls. The overlapping ironies in Roiphe’s narratives are rich and recurring: Von Arnim was herself at one point a mistress of H. G. Wells, and her cousin, Katherine Mansfield, had early envied her “what she saw as the ease and lightness of her life— Elizabeth had somehow managed to live a full domestic life with children and husbands, and achieve literary success.” Roiphe’s centerpiece in these seven portraits is her chapter on Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive, and her fellow painter Duncan Grant, and their complex emotional arrangements. This triangle was close to the center of the Bloomsbury Group, that famed artistic and intellectual circle of friends that included Vanessa’s sister, the novelist Virginia Woolf; the social critic Lytton Strachey; and the economist John Maynard Keynes, among others. Vanessa and Clive felt themselves “part of a sudden, liberating break from the last remnants of Victorian propriety,” and in 1918 Vanessa was living with him in an open marriage that included her current lover, Duncan Grant, and his lover David Garnett. Her former lover, the art critic Roger Fry, called their arrangement, in apparent seriousness, “an almost ideal family based as it is on adultery and mutual forbearance. . . . It really is rather a triumph of reasonableness over the conventions.” Vanessa managed to maintain this complicated emotional family for some time, through the death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and even the marriage of her daughter Angelica (by Grant) to David Garnett in 1942.

Uncommon Arrangements / roiphe

803

The ménage of Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, and Evguenia Souline appears rather traditional by contrast. Hall and Troubridge were together for nearly two decades, which included the obscenity trial over Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)—“the first serious chronicle of a lesbian’s life to appear in print,” and a novel advertised as “the most controversial book of the century.” Troubridge maintained her firm support of Hall’s career, even during the period when Hall drew her new love Evguenia into what the French called their “trio Lesbienne,” but Troubridge had the last word when Hall fell sick. She nursed Hall through a long illness until her death and cut Evguenia out of the will. Likewise, there was the triangle of professor George Gordon Catlin; his wife, the writer Vera Brittain, author of the best-selling 1934 The Testament of Youth (an autobiographical account of the war years that brought back both the physical and psychological violence); and the friend who supported her through much of her adulthood, the novelist Winifred Holtby, author of the popular novel South Riding (1936). In their case, a ménage in which they were physically if not emotionally separated from each other seems to have worked best, and this final chapter is certainly less impassioned than Roiphe’s earlier accounts. In her postscript, Roiphe returns to the questions she sketched out in her introduction, “Marriage à la Mode”—“How does one accommodate the need for settled life with the eternal desire for freshness?” and “why do people drift apart? Why do they stay together?”—and concludes that these seven couples “were torn as we are torn: between tradition and innovation, between freedom and settled life, between feminist equality and reassuring, old-fashioned roles.” Roiphe’s study is valuable for what it tells modern readers about the abiding institution of marriage, its strengths and inherent pitfalls. As she shows, “those tattered, sentimental, Victorian images of marriage that they were so eager to cast off proved more stubbornly entrenched than they would have thought possible,” and, in spite of their progressive ideas, some of these writers “were at the same time constantly reproducing traditional structures of female dependence.” Like other examples of a new literary form of writing biography—and Roiphe credits Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983) among other recent works—her study is lateral rather than chronological, linking together like (and unlike) entities so that their juxtapositions often reveal something startlingly new. Her writing is itself fresh and inviting, and the stories she relates make literary history come alive again. David Peck

Review Sources Booklist 103, nos. 9/10 (June 1, 2007): 28. The Christian Science Monitor, July 10, 2007, p. 13. The Gazette, August 18, 2007, p. J5. International Herald Tribune, June 23, 2007, p. 15. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 8 (April 15, 2007): 378-379.

804

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2007, p. E4. The New York Times 156 (July 24, 2007): E7. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 24, 2007): 11. People 68, no. 6 (August 6, 2007): 46. The Wall Street Journal 250, no. 5 (July 7, 2007): P9.

805

THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF THE SEA Author: Callum Roberts (1963) Publisher: Island Press/Shearwater Books (Washington, D.C.). 436 pp. $28.00 Type of work: Environment, natural history, science Time: The eleventh century to the early twenty-first century Locale: The oceans of the world By examining the thousand-year history of fishing and hunting of marine life, the author shows how increasingly sophisticated technologies have facilitated depleting once superabundant oceans of more than 90 percent of their fish and mammals, but marine reserves offer a hope for resurrecting these vanished ecosystems In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin provided a name for a phenomenon that, for centuries, had plagued humankind and its interaction with the environment. Wherever such common-property renewable resources as lands, lakes, and forests existed, humans overused them to the point of total exhaustion or degradation. Hardin called this overuse of free-access resources “the tragedy of the commons,” and a principal theme of Callum Roberts’s The Unnatural History of the Sea is that ocean resources, as limited as those of land, have also been appallingly squandered. Because humans occupy a water planet, with more than 90 percent of its surface covered by water, those who have plied their livelihood on the seas developed a conviction that its riches were inexhaustible. For five years, Roberts collected a wide variety of evidence from the writings of explorers, travelers, and fishers as well as from books and articles by scientists to convince general readers that the oceans of today are dangerously empty compared to the plenitude of the past. Although most of his book depicts in heartrending detail how human greed and lack of foresight have resulted in the extirpation of a significant portion of the world’s sea life, Roberts nevertheless insists that his purpose is not to spread the word of the sea’s demise but to galvanize fishers and ordinary people to transform their relationship to marine life in ways through which the lost abundance of the oceans may be recovered. Because of a long-standing and deeply held conviction by fishers and scientists of the inexhaustible bounty of the seas, Roberts traces how this belief developed and how unfettered commercialization has revealed its falsity. In part 1, “Explorers and Exploiters in the Age of Plenty,” Roberts argues that marine life began to disappear along European shores as early as the Middle Ages, when fishermen shifted from dwindling freshwater varieties to such saltwater species as herring, cod, and haddock. Overfishing along England’s coast led to serious declines in catches, forcing fishermen to seek these species along the coasts of other countries.

806

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The commercialization of ocean fishing and hunting accelerated after the European discovery of the New World. Fishermen from several countries then began withdrawing gigantic numbers of cod from the coastal waters of New England and Canada. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ships so overfished these waters that cod sizes and numbers were driven to deleteriously low levels. In the eighteenth century, on the west coast of North America, Russian hunters drastically reduced the numbers of sea otters, seals, and sea cows. In Caribbean waters, where millions of sea turtles once existed, most species are now on the endangered list. Roberts calls whaling “the first global industry,” and from the eighteenth to the twentieth century whales were hunted and killed in ever greater numbers as sailing ships evolved into large, steam-powered vessels. Onboard factory ships, thousands of workers processed whale oil that, during the nineteenth century, lit European and American homes and streets. As whale numbers diminished in the North Atlantic, whalers discovered “hot spots” in the South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Even in these new locations, whales were soon overhunted to the point of commercial and actual extinction. Cetologists have estimated that, before whaling, 360 million fin whales and 240 million humpbacks existed, but, by the end of the twentieth century these numbers had declined to 56,000 fin whales and 9,000 humpbacks. Because of extinctions of several other species, an international ban on all whaling was instituted in the 1980’s, though such countries as Japan, Norway, and Iceland defied the ban. Roberts tells analogous stories about walrus, otter, and seal hunting in which millions of animals were slaughtered to meet the demand for skins and ivory. In 1911, the first international environmental treaty was signed in an attempt to save the pelagic seal, but harp seal hunting continues in Newfoundland, despite annual protests. New technologies contributed to the decline of not only sea mammals but also such fish as the herring, once called “the lord of fishes.” In the spring, off the coasts of Great Britain and Holland, schools of herring were caught in drifting gill nets. Even more destructive to fish numbers was modern beam trawling, which, in the nineteenth century, revolutionized commercial fishing. When steamships used steam engines to draw beamed bag nets across seabeds, huge numbers of fish were caught, and with the mid-century technique of ice preservation, millions of Europeans and Americans could purchase inexpensive fresh fish. When some fishermen complained that trawling was destroying their livelihood, a British commission studied the problem. Despite the expertise of such distinguished scientists as Thomas Henry Huxley, the commissioners overwhelmingly rejected the fishermen’s contention of dramatic fish declines. Instead, when, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Sea Fisheries Act became law, sea trawlers felt encouraged to expand their operations. Roberts

Callum Roberts is a marine conservation biologist at the University of York. He has been awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation (2000) and a Hardy Fellowship in Conservation Biology at Harvard University (2001). He has also served on a U.S. National Research Council Committee on Marine Protected Areas.

The Unnatural History of the Sea / roberts

807

claims that sea trawling has destroyed most habitats of the world’s seabed, annihilating webs of life that had existed for millions of years. Roberts devotes the second part of his book to the “Modern Era of Industrial Fishing.” From the end of the nineteenth to the start of the twenty-first century, fishing and hunting methods became so productive that neither the extinctions of many species nor the collapse of many industries was able to halt the overexploitation of the sea. Even such a sensitive environmentalist as Rachel Carson praised diversification as the industry’s solution to overfishing. When haddock numbers plummeted, cusk, a deepwater cod, served as a substitute. Furthermore, commercial fishing and hunting were interrupted by the two world wars, during which some species were able to increase their numbers. Nevertheless, in the 1950’s and 1960’s declining catches, particularly in coastal areas, became the rule rather than the exception. Bluefin tuna had become so depleted that, in Japan, a single fish sold for $100,000. Some countries extended their coastal zones to twelve, then fifty nautical miles, and in 1973, at a United Nations conference on the law of the sea, more than a hundred nations agreed to the creation of a two-hundred-mile “Exclusive Economic Zone.” However, these and other regulations did little to stop overfishing. For example, they could not prevent the collapse of cod fisheries during the final decades of the twentieth century. Through several case studies of Chesapeake Bay, coral reefs, and the Sea of Cortez, Roberts demonstrates how a variety of marine ecosystems experienced their own “tragedy of the commons.” When English colonists settled around the shores of Chesapeake Bay, its waters were teeming with life, but during the nineteenth century oyster fisheries kept expanding until numbers inevitably declined, resulting in an “oyster war” between police and pirate fishers during which several lives were lost. It was not until 1967 that concerned citizens and scientists formed a foundation to study the bay’s problems and seek solutions. Similarly, coral reefs around the world were once habitats for many varieties of sea life, but by the 1970’s most reefs had lost their largest and most valuable species, and many had become “ghost reefs,” nearly empty of any flora and fauna. The Sea of Cortez was once a favorite destination for sportsmen from around the world, including the writer Zane Grey, but dams along the Colorado River reduced the flow of freshwater into the Gulf of California, precipitating a massive loss of spawning areas and a consequent decline of many game species. Examples could be multiplied, but the conclusion remains the same: Today’s oceans are much less diverse and productive than the oceans before commercial fishing. In the third and shortest part of his book, Roberts analyzes possible futures for the world’s oceans. In one scenario, he considers what would happen if past trends continue. With faster boats, larger nets, and more sophisticated fish-detecting devices, fishers will be able to catch the remaining creatures of rapidly declining populations. In the end, this will mean that, with the fish of most species gone, humans will be reduced to consuming jellyfish. On the other hand, humans are capable of developing new ways of managing ocean fish and mammals. Roberts admits that, in the past, marine management has been an ineffectual competition between fishers and

808

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

regulators in which the fishers have usually been able to discover ways around regulations. Roberts’s suggestions are to decrease fishing and increase marine reserves. These reserves, such as the recently created Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument, will help fish to live longer and produce more offspring, which will then spread beyond the reserves to replenish the seas. Since most of Roberts’s book has depicted fishers, scientists, and citizens behaving myopically or selfishly, some critics have found his optimism Pollyannaish, but he defends his optimism by arguing that commercial fishers, conservationists, and citizens have vested interests in resurrecting ocean habitats and life. Other critics have called attention to his ignoring global warming in his book, and note that since oceans have been absorbing mammoth amounts of carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of seawater has also been increasing, posing yet another danger to sea life. Roberts has responded to this criticism by pointing out that the consequences of increased acidity are still unknown, whereas the consequences of overfishing are very well known. He encourages fishing industries to curtail their catches, governments to establish more reserves, and citizens to purchase seafoods that have been sustainably produced. In short, his book is an eloquent plea for all people on Earth to work together to save the seas, because it is in the best interest of all life—fish, mammalian, and human—that this important task be accomplished. Robert J. Paradowski

Review Sources Audubon 109, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 108. Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 30. Chicago Tribune, October 17, 2007, p. 7. Issues in Science and Technology 24, no. 1 (Fall, 2007): 91-95. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 116. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 44. Science News 172, no. 9 (September 1, 2007): 143. The Washington Post, July 29, 2007, p. BW15.

809

THE UTILITY OF FORCE The Art of War in the Modern World Author: Rupert Smith (1943) First published: 2005, in Great Britain Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 430 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Current affairs A British general argues that the era of conventional interstate industrial war is over and that the world has entered a period in which wars will be limited, long, and fought among the people General Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force is a compelling analysis of war in the present era. Smith begins boldly; his first sentence declares, “War no longer exists.” By this he does not mean that international law and institutions have rendered state-sanctioned violence obsolete. Smith is much too hardheaded for that. Forty years of service in the British army, including stints commanding British troops in Operation Desert Storm and Northern Ireland, and U.N. forces in Bosnia, immunized him from any sort of illusions about humanity’s nature or institutions. What Smith means is that the type of military operations that most people associate with war—main-force engagements between formally constituted armies, leading to a victory and subsequent peace settlement—no longer have utility in a world where conflict is characterized by ethnic cleansing and terrorism. War has changed, and Smith believes that most people, including political and military leaders, have failed to notice the new reality. The consequences, in Iraq and elsewhere, have been deadly. Smith’s work is a theoretical treatise firmly grounded in experience. Though the book is not a memoir, Smith illustrates many of his points with examples drawn from his long career as a soldier. He also devotes much of his book to historical analysis, to provide context for his thesis that war as it was once known is dead. The Utility of Force in many ways echoes the writings of a man Smith quotes respectfully and often, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist whose writings prefigured the rise of mass, industrial war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like Smith, Clausewitz was a professional soldier. He observed the dramatic changes that came over war in the Napoleonic era. No longer was war a limited struggle fought for limited aims by monarchs employing limited, and hence expensive, mercenary armies. War became instead a struggle of nations, with the rise and fall of dynasties at stake. As a result of what he saw, Clausewitz voiced the great insight that war is an extension of politics. War could no longer be waged in a strategic vacuum. A military operation had to be both an expression and fulfillment of a political aim. Thus, a military had to be attuned to and in constant communication with its government. Further, Clausewitz believed that this government, even the absolute monarchy that he himself served,

810

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

had in an increasingly democratic age to be sensitive to the will of the people. The days were gone when people were disinterested bystanders to their monarchs’ wars. Kings now had to turn to their people for men and money. For Clausewitz, only the effective coordination of this trinity of military, government, and people could lead to victory. Smith sees himself playing a role similar to that of Clausewitz. He is describing a revolution in warfare and reminding his readers of the connection between politics and warfare, but the nature of this politics is different. The balance between the military, government, and people has changed since the great wars of the twentieth century. His message is that people must accommodate themselves to an era in which battle no longer brings decision. The modern era of war began with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Smith calls this interstate industrial war. The armies of the French Revolution, inherited by Napoleon, were armies of the people, citizen soldiers, fighting for the new political ideal of the nation. What these armies at first lacked in training and discipline they more than made up for in numbers and ideological enthusiasm. Reorganizing this force, Napoleon created a redoubtable military machine that dominated Europe for a decade and a half. He made and unmade kings and brought a terrifying new decisiveness to warfare. Great battles like Austerlitz and Waterloo ended wars with stunning finality. Napoleon’s brand of war bred up a reaction among his enemies. In Spain, Germany, and Russia, nationalism spurred resistance. In Prussia, initial defeat inspired military reforms that led to the creation of a general staff, an elite corps of officers whose mission it was to plan intensively for war, developing a common doctrine that could be communicated to an entire army. This was the nursery of Clausewitz’s ideas on warfare. By the end of the Napoleonic period, war had become a massive enterprise, drawing on the resources of both state and people. The foundations had been laid for total war. Technological changes accelerated both civilian and military life in the nineteenth century. The telegraph made communication almost instantaneous. The railroad revolutionized transportation, making it possible to shift great numbers of people rapidly over great distances. The American Civil War saw the first application of these new technologies to war. This conflict also saw the introduction of all-metal warships and new and more deadly firearms and artillery. True to form for industrial war, the Civil War ended only when the resistance of the South had been crushed both militarily and politically. Although some Europeans studied the lessons of the Civil War, it was the comparable exploits of the Prussians that brought home the new military reality wrought by technology. The Prussian general staff, led by its brilliant chief Helmuth von Moltke, mastered the art of railroad mobilization. In three short, sharp wars, the Prussian army swiftly concentrated and defeated less nimble and organized foes.

General Sir Rupert Smith is one of Britain’s most distinguished soldiers. He commanded the U.K. Armored Division in the Gulf War and U.N. forces in Bosnia in 1995. He was general officer commanding in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998 and served as deputy supreme allied commander of NATO from 1999 to 2001. He retired in 2001.

The Utility of Force / smith

811

The world wars saw the fulfillment of interstate industrial war. In August, 1914, the European Great Powers believed that the war that they were embarking on would be brief, decided by a few decisive battles, but the mass armies and new technologies that they had inherited this time thwarted their goal. The tremendous firepower now available drove the armies underground for shelter. For more than four years, the contending powers struggled for a way to break the deadlock of the trenches. The tremendous demands for men and munitions entailed by this form of war compelled states to mobilize the economic and social life of their nations. Total war was born. World War II saw offensive power restored by a marriage of tanks and airpower. The German Blitzkrieg harnessed these technologies with devastating results. However, the new tactics did not shorten the war. Once again, whole populations were harnessed to the war effort. The logic of total war was carried to a grim, if logical, conclusion when civilians became acceptable military targets. Strategic bombing gutted city after city. Civilians overwhelmingly paid the price when the United States ended the war by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Smith believes that the employment of these weapons, the products of a massive scientific and engineering effort, simultaneously marked the culmination and the passing of interstate industrial war. Once the atomic bomb was dropped, all the great militaries of the world, with their fleets of ships, tanks, and planes, suddenly lost their ability to achieve decisive results. Conventional weaponry was naked before the nuclear threat. Smith argues that the sudden advent of the Cold War helped mask this new reality, as the alliance systems that grew up around the United States and the Soviet Union began a confrontation that would last for almost fifty years. Great militaries endured; those of the two superpowers proliferated, but as bargaining chips in a nuclear standoff that inexorably led to the strategy of mutually assured destruction. Major conflicts abounded in the shadow of the Cold War. Some, like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, were enormously costly and destructive. Invariably, Cold War restraints kept them from being waged to a decisive end. Even the spectacular victories of the Israelis in the Middle East resulted in the frustrations of the intifadas, and borders that are still unsettled. The end of the Cold War left the superpowers and their allies heavily armed for a war that they never had to fight. Many in the 1990’s hoped for a peace dividend that would enable governments to cut back drastically on funding. Many governments did so, but peace did not come. Instead, the post-Cold War world saw the outbreak of a number of brutal wars that shocked world opinion and stretched dangerously depleted military resources. Smith writes that these wars revealed the hitherto obscured new paradigm for postatomic conflict. Wars are now fought among the people. Decision cannot come from military means alone. Many of these conflicts are fought against or between guerrilla groups sheltering within a civilian population. In such struggles, the armor and airpower amassed for industrial war have no utility because a traditional military victory is impossible to achieve. Militaries must now fight for a political settlement. They must wage an essentially psychological struggle for the hearts and minds of the people, even at the cost of sacrificing conventional military advantages. They also must do so while endeavoring to protect as much as

812

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

humanly possible the increasingly expensive and limited forces at their disposal. Smith’s vision of war among the people will disturb both the supporters and critics of contemporary wars. He scoffs at the notion that traditionally organized militaries can be effective instruments of nation building, but he argues that national interests will have to be defended, even though the consequent struggles will inevitably be long and ugly, something especially painful for impatient democracies. Smith illustrates his points about the new face of war by drawing on his experiences on a variety of fronts in the 1990’s. In 1991, he commanded the British armored division in Operation Desert Storm. Already the British were taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to draw down their forces. Smith learned that, because of the high maintenance required by desert conditions, he controlled virtually all the tank engines of the British army. Had he lost them all, British armor would have been immobilized for the foreseeable future. He did not lose them, but he notes that the glittering battlefield success of Desert Storm merely set in motion more years of confrontation and conflict. In 1995, Smith was appointed to command the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia. This was a motley collection of battalion-sized units that were supposed to protect the civilian population during the murderous Bosnian civil war. Because of political confusion over the mission of UNPROFOR and the determination of the sponsoring nations that no casualties be incurred, the U.N. peacekeepers soon became as much hostages as the people they were supposedly protecting. U.N. troops ended up standing helplessly by as Bosnian Serbs massacred seven thousand Muslim men in Srebrenica. Only after the world learned of this outrage, and the United States decided to act, did Smith get authority to strike back at the Serbs. A formal peace treaty would be signed at Dayton, but outside troops remained as peacekeepers in the region into the early twenty-first century. As commander of British forces in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998, Smith had to respond to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with the most minimal force possible to avoid derailing a delicate peace process. Finally, as deputy supreme allied commander in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Smith helped oversee an armed intervention in Kosovo that was confined to air strikes because of a fear of risking allied casualties. Once again, the campaign proved a success, but European peacekeepers remained still on the ground in Kosovo. Smith never enjoyed a Napoleonic triumph during his career as a commander. Arches of victory will not be erected in wars among the people. Smith had to work within rigid constraints set by governmental policy and scarce resources. None of his wars achieved decisive results; the political disputes that inspired them remain unresolved. Smith does not despair at this. The world has entered a period where limited and long-lasting conflicts will be the norm. Smith’s sage advice is to learn to live with and manage this new reality. Daniel P. Murphy

The Utility of Force / smith

813

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 11 (February 1, 2007): 10-11. The Economist 377 (December 24, 2005): 117-118. Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (March/April, 2006): 193. Harper’s Magazine 314 (June, 2007): 83-87. Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 6 (December, 2006): 1151-1170. Library Journal 132, no. 3 (February 15, 2007): 133. New Statesman 134 (November 14, 2005): 55. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 4, 2007): 14-15. The Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 2005, pp. 3-6. The Wilson Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 86-88.

814

VACCINE The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver Author: Arthur Allen (1959) Publisher: W. W. Norton (New York). 523 pp. $27.95 Type of work: History of science, medicine, science Time: 1721-2006 Locale: The United States An account of the development and use of vaccination as a means to control disease; political, industrial, and medical controversies associated with vaccination have all played their respective roles in the subject Principal personages: Cotton Mather, eighteenth century Massachusetts minister who was instrumental in introducing smallpox variolation to America Edward Jenner, late eighteenth century British physician who developed vaccination as a means to prevent smallpox Louis Pasteur, nineteenth century French chemist noted for development of the first anthrax and rabies vaccines Almroth Wright, late nineteenth century British physician who developed a typhoid vaccine, one of the first such measures used for widespread immunization in the military Joseph McFarland, American bacteriologist who, by demonstrating the role of smallpox vaccines in an outbreak of tetanus, produced an awareness of possible dangers inherent in vaccine “quality control” Jonas Salk, mid-twentieth century American physician who developed the first effective poliovirus vaccine using killed virus Albert Sabin, American physician and Salk antagonist who developed an oral poliovirus vaccine which replaced that developed by Salk Barbara Loe Fisher, Virginia parent who, following the diagnosis of “mental regression” in her son, became a significant figure in the movement to associate vaccination with autism and other side effects in children Dan Burton, Indiana congressman who was one of the most powerful supporters of the lobby arguing the danger of vaccination

An item of trivia noted by another reviewer of Vaccine created an immediate interest in the subject addressed by Arthur Allen. Like many parents, I had a child whose favorite plaything at one time was an old Raggedy Ann doll. As described by Allen, Raggedy Ann originated as a rag doll created by New York City illustrator Johnny Gruelle, made for his daughter who became fatally ill following a smallpox vaccination. Indeed, Vaccine is filled with items for the trivia buff, ranging from the origin of the medical phrase “guinea pig” (George Bernard Shaw) to the

Vaccine / allen

815

method of delivering fresh smallpox vaccine to city residents—“cattle drives” consisting Arthur Allen is a former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press of infected animals. Allen begins his story with the history of and has been a frequent contributor to the earliest use of inoculation—the term “vac- major newspapers and popular cination” was not yet applied—in a wide- magazines such as The New York spread manner to immunize a population. Times Magazine, The New Republic, Human civilization is ripe with epidemic dis- and The Atlantic Monthly. ease, and smallpox certainly ranks among the most-feared diseases. Its reputation was deserved. Two forms of the disease have long been known: Variola major and a less virulent Variola minor. The molecular basis for the difference is still not understood, but those infected with the more virulent form, if they survived—and 20-30 percent did not during most outbreaks—frequently suffered lifelong scarring. Helplessness in facing a smallpox epidemic began to change in the early eighteenth century, the result in large part of observations on the part of Lady Mary Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Herself once a victim of the disease, Lady Montagu became aware of the process of variolation, a medical procedure in which material from a drying pock was inoculated under the skin of a patient. When the procedure worked, the patient suffered only a mild illness but became immune to the disease. Sometimes the procedure failed, and the patient actually developed smallpox. Variolation made its way to America, where in Boston two unlikely allies began the widespread use of the procedure: the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston, who despite his deserved reputation as an intolerant minister, was surprisingly literate, even liberal, in the ways of science, and Zabdiel Boylston, a physician in the city. Overcoming opposition within the Church as well as the medical establishment of the day, the two men were instrumental in evolution of the idea that disease was not a punishment for sin but rather a challenge that could be overcome. Allen concludes this first section with the discovery and application by Edward Jenner, that material prepared from lesions of a similar disease, cowpox, was a safer measure than variolation for immunization against smallpox. The very word “vaccination” is a testament to the procedure, being derived from vacca, Latin for “cow.” Even as the disease began to recede in the early twentieth century, the direct result of the widespread use of vaccination, controversies began to appear. Indeed, a significant portion of Vaccine deals with the arguments, pro and con, associated with vaccination against childhood disease in general. Some arguments were of course political: Should the state have the power to force vaccination on its citizenry? The author describes how in Philadelphia in 1903, patrol wagons carrying both physicians and police would suddenly appear at job sites, where mass inoculation of immigrant workers would take place. Even the first Raggedy Ann doll was made by the father of a child who died shortly after receiving forced inoculation at school. (The actual cause of death was unclear. Health authorities argued a heart defect was the reason.) Eventually the decision was made by the Supreme Court: The individual was indeed a

816

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

free man and could not be forced to undergo vaccination on that basis. However, if public health was the factor at risk, the Court ruled that vaccination could be made compulsory. The issue was more than political. Allen provides numerous examples of the tragic results from vaccine poorly made, of nonexistent quality control, and even contamination by bacteria of vaccine stocks. Controversies over vaccination represent a running theme throughout the book, and contamination, either inadvertent or through neglect, is a common factor. Many of the most tragic examples are associated with smallpox vaccination; it is no surprise that the antivaccine movement came to the forefront during these first years of the twentieth century. All that was needed by the movement was funding, and with Philadelphia-area oil baron John Pitcairn, the movement found its backing. When the Anti-Vaccination League of Pennsylvania failed in its efforts in Pennsylvania state courts as well as attempts at legislation, it went national, eventually joining together a conglomeration of vaccine opponents, homeopaths, and the occasional charlatan. While the movement eventually came to naught, it played a key factor in forcing health departments to provide better oversight for vaccine production and vaccination policies. Smallpox was certainly not the only target for modern medicine, and Vaccine moves into the history behind the fight against rabies, though never a major problem in terms of actual numbers, and diphtheria, which was a major killer of children. It was through the effort to control diphtheria that Herman Biggs, chief medical officer for New York City, and his associate, William Park, director of the city’s Bureau of Laboratories, developed not only a swab test for detection of the diphtheria bacillus but also the large-scale manufacturing of an effective antitoxin. Unfortunately, since guinea pigs were one of the few nonhuman animals in which the antitoxin could be tested, thousands of the furry creatures were killed in the process. It was in the extension to human experimentation that writer George Bernard Shaw coined the epithet, human “guinea pigs.” What worked for diphtheria would seemingly work against other diseases. As noted by the author, typhoid fever was long a bane of marching armies, as well as the civilians in their paths. Spread through poor disposal of sewage, typhoid could decimate an army. (As a side note, many of the early laboratory tests developed to monitor the presence of Escherichia coli in drinking water were actually using the organism as a surrogate marker for sewage contamination, E. coli being significantly more easily detected than the typhoid bacillus.) The first typhoid vaccine was developed by British physician Sir Almroth Wright—called “Almost Right” behind his back—and tested on British soldiers during the Boer War around 1898. It “almost worked,” but side effects were often so severe that it never found widespread use; better sanitation was the answer for typhoid, as events later proved. As described in Vaccine, the soldier frequently made the ideal “guinea pig”: trained to take orders, the soldier too frequently suffered from the carelessness in vaccine production. Yellow fever vaccine was a prime example. Millions of doses were provided, but by 1942 it became increasingly clear that something in its production was wrong. Tens of thousands of soldiers were being hospitalized with jaundice.

Vaccine / allen

817

Eventually it was discovered that certain lots of vaccine had been contaminated with what later was known as hepatitis B virus, the result of the addition of contaminated human serum as a stabilizing agent. Much of this was forgotten in the most important medical triumph of the midtwentieth century: the development of an effective vaccine to prevent polio. Poliomyelitis was largely a twentieth century disease. Ironically, epidemics occurred only after public health measures had reduced the exposure of young children to the virus while still possessing a measure of protection from maternal antibodies. Versions of a killed vaccine had been developed in the 1930’s, one by William Park, but they had proven worse than useless: Children had received live virus, and several died. A number of timely discoveries came together in the late 1940’s, including the ability to grow the virus in cell cultures instead of animals, and providing a means to monitor immunity. The first effective, and largely safe, polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in the early 1950’s. When the results of the field trial were released in April, 1955, Salk became a household name. Shortly afterward, an attenuated vaccine was developed and tested by Albert Sabin. While controversies surrounded both vaccines—largely based on which was safer or provided better long-term immunity—the result was that polio ceased to be a public health problem. The issue of vaccine safety covers most of the second half of Vaccine and could easily represent a book unto itself. As noted above, arguments over safety were never far from the surface. With the elimination of most childhood killers—the result of a combination of factors ranging from proper public health practices to herd immunity, the inability of disease to spread if a proportion of the public is immune—parents developed concerns about whether the sheer number of vaccines, booster shots, and so forth could overload the immune system. Of particular concern was the DPT or DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis) vaccine series. While there had been some suggestion that medical problems such as autism or “mental regression” might have been associated with DTP shots, the issue came before the general public in a television documentary, DPT: Vaccine Roulette, which aired in April, 1982. The prevailing images in the show were those of babies showing evidence of brain damage, convulsions, and even death. The implication was that such tragedies were the result of the DTP vaccine. The show provided the impetus for a national movement against vaccination in general, and DTP specifically. Barbara Loe Fisher, an Alexandria, Virginia, mother whose son had allegedly exhibited brain damage after a shot, became one of the more strident voices for the antivaccine movement. Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, with a grandson later diagnosed with autism, provided one of numerous political faces to the controversy. Was vaccination potentially harmful, in particular the DTP immunization? Certainly there was gist for the vaccination opponents: the 1976 swine flu debacle, which ultimately forced the government to pay out some $100 million to persons who allegedly developed neurological illnesses as a result; the use of thimerosal, a mercurycontaining organic material sometimes used as a preservative in some vaccines; and the “explosion” in the number of children diagnosed with autism. At some point, it hardly mattered whether “defects” appeared in children who were never exposed to

818

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

thimerosal or whether the increase in autism was as much the result of a changing definition and subsequent governmental funding as a possible cause associated with vaccination. Much of the public thought so, and often juries did as well. The cost of litigation drove many pharmaceutical companies out of the vaccine business, and diseases such as whooping cough and even polio showed a resurgence. Regulation, while necessary, has almost reached the point of overkill, as exemplified by the shutting of an entire Merck, Sharpe and Dohme factory—the name itself an example of “merger mania”—by an inspector on a filling line, endangering the country’s supply of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Is there a solution? The author both begins and ends Vaccine with the same example: the fear of biological terrorism as the driving point for immunization against—something. Richard Adler

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 12-14. Kirkus Reviews 74, no. 19 (October 1, 2006): 997. The Lancet 369 (April 28, 2007): 1421-1422. Library Journal 131, no. 19 (November 15, 2006): 87. Nature 448 (July 12, 2007): 137. The New England Journal of Medicine 357, no. 6 (August 9, 2007): 628. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 4, 2007): 12. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 40 (October 9, 2006): 46. The Wall Street Journal 249, no. 26 (February 1, 2007): D6. The Washington Post, February 11, 2007, p. BW06.

819

VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE Author: Lydia Davis (1947) Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York). 219 pp. $13.00 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The twentieth century A brilliant, opaque writer’s seventh collection, a gathering of fifty-seven stories that range from one-sentence jolts of recognition to forty-page faux case studies Lydia Davis has built a reputation for explicating the inner territory of daily life with the stylistic approaches of minimalism and postmodernism. Irony, dispassionate observation, interior monologue, and elliptical analysis are among the tools she brings to the predicaments and concerns of ordinary people. Often nameless, they are characterized largely by their preoccupations and quirks. Davis admits that her stories never paint a fair or a complete picture of a situation; their material comes from life, but she makes it “safely fictional” by turning one mood, or one afternoon’s events, into something strong enough to stand by itself. Throughout adulthood, Davis has pursued a parallel career as a translator of French literature. Her translating credits include works as disparate as those of social observer Alexis de Tocqueville and scientist Marie Curie, as well as those of more purely literary writers. Her aim in translation appears to be shared by the central character of the present volume’s “The Walk,” who is also a translator: “accuracy and faithfulness to the style of the original.” This granted, a primary virtue of the translator becomes invisibility. This quality carries over into Davis’s original work in a curious way: The line between authorial voice, narrator’s voice, and character voice is either blurred or invisible. Time and place in most of her stories is left deliberately vague also, yet the characters do seem frozen in a sort of mid-twentieth century time warp. The two long “case study” stories actually establish a partial setting that frames the book. The hospitalized boy of “We Miss You,” sends a reply to his teacher dated “Feb 20 1951.” Helen and Vi of the health study grew up, respectively, in Connecticut and Virginia, and their long lives span most of the twentieth century. However, the prevailing outlook of other stories’ narrators reflect a similar, circumscribed worldview that predates many commonplaces of the era after approximately 1975. Typewriters are common, but computers are unknown; tuberculosis is treated by long stays in a sanitarium; HoJos and gas stations are frequent highway features. It is difficult to tell whether this subliminal “dating” effect stems from the author’s fascination with a recently bygone era or whether it is simply an artifact of the stories having been written at an earlier time (those previous-publication credits that cite a date range from 1989 to 2006). However, this feature lends the collection a certain old-fashioned

820

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

resonance, which may jar readers drawn by its more avant-garde “flash fiction” formats. The title story originally appeared in A Little Magazine and was reprinted in the not-solittle Harper’s Magazine of April, 1993. It deals with the implications of a white lie told by the narrator’s mother to discourage her son (the narrator’s brother) from coming to help out while she convalesces from a hospital stay. The lie itself is of little moment, and the real reason for inventing it was to avoid “disturbing”—perhaps angering—her husband, but it becomes the source of a whole array of further “disturbances.” These spiral around the family constellation in a dizzy display of hurt feelings and self-justification. Although the specifics are left vague, the narrative uncannily resembles those flaps-over-nothing that flare up in so many families. Critic Thad Ziolkowski has praised its “sestinalike effect,” which he characterizes as “High Analytical Vertigo.” In less rarefied terms, it could as easily be called “The Woman Who Thinks Too Much.” Indeed, the daughter-narrator may be the only one giving more than a passing thought to “the disturbances.” In either case, the story is a unique example of attempted domestic logic. “How She Could Not Drive” starts out as a catalog of circumstances that prevent a nameless, presumably neurotic woman from being able to drive. The hypnotic effect of the run-on listing segues into a surrealistic scene where the reader realizes that she is indeed driving, possibly vision-impaired, and battered by the onrushing montage that the night casts onto her path. Precise details give way to evocative images: “the massive airship of motel lights floating across the highway.” A rare flash of vicarious experience, of being able to live for a moment in the driver’s skin and mind, results. Three short pieces are concerned with death. “How Shall I Mourn Them” approaches it sideways, as a numbered list of the eccentricities that survivors adopt. “Burning Family Members” juxtaposes two deaths, both of which raise quietly horrifying moral questions. One reviewer believes that “‘They’ burned her thousands of miles away from here” refers to the Iraq War. It is possible; the references are opaque enough to support several different meanings. “Grammar Questions” is an indirect, but more understandable, cry from the heart. The narrator, presumably his daughter, is on deathwatch at her father’s bedside, trying desperately to distract herself from what is happening. Her way involves worrying about how to speak of his selfhood when he is dead. The story is one of Davis’s understated masterpieces, offering absolute emotional truth on a serious subject. “The Walk” is among the few Lydia Davis stories that takes place in a defined location—in this case, Oxford, England. It tells of a translator (female) and a critic (male) who linger there the evening after a conference closes. Both are stranded until morning. They dine together, chat about their work and opinions, then decide

Even before her 1970 graduation from Barnard College, Lydia Davis published a translation of French poetry. Subsequently, she has drawn acclaim for both her translations and short fiction, with several story reprints appearing in the Pushcart Prize anthologies. She has won many awards, including a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.

Varieties of Disturbance / davis

821

to stroll through the quiet, twilight-shadowed streets. The story is notable for its sets of opposites. The first paragraph opposes the grandeur of a great university town to the shabbiness of their lodgings. Later, there is the clash of their differing opinions on the translator’s art, and the woman’s simultaneous pleasure at the critic’s charm and resentment of his disapproval of her work. After the walk, she sits quietly in her quarters, letting images from the walk fill her mind. With these, she tries to convince herself that she is not disappointed by the conference. Throughout the story, there is an unspoken hint that the evening might include a romantic encounter. Of course, the two people being the people they are, it does not happen. The material about the translator’s craft reflects Davis’s other intellectual pursuit. Even academics may be surprised to learn that there are people who make their living as translation critics. “Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality” is the collection’s longest story. It examines the life trajectories of two elderly women. Vi, an African American, was brought up along with her siblings by her grandparents in rural Virginia. Helen, a Swedish American, grew up on a dairy farm in Connecticut. Their work experiences, living conditions, recreation, religious practices, and health are all described in the plain, objective prose of a case study. The two women have much in common. The narrator attributes their long lives to their sensible diets and active habits, along with an outgoing quality hard to quantify—they are genuinely interested in other people. Despite the story’s flat tone, its subjects “come alive” more fully than any of the volume’s other characters. They are also the only characters shown acting as members of an ongoing community. Perhaps the two facts are connected. The vagaries of fourth-grade writing skills are displayed in “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth Graders.” The story is purportedly a study of letters rediscovered, sixty years later, and analyzed, in order to draw some conclusions about the children’s daily lives and the ways their minds worked. After some background information about the boy Stephen’s accident and the school’s neighborhood, twenty-seven letters are given an exacting content analysis. Paper quality, penmanship, the form and content of sentences, and the varying way “miss you” sentiments are expressed are all described and quantified. The style is plodding and humorless. The bulk of the “study” resembles an academic article written under publish-or-perish pressures and submitted to a second-rate education journal. Davis seems to have written the story in a bout of secret amusement, perhaps as a tongue-incheek parody of a colleague’s work. Only at the very end, in a long passage evoking the childhood pleasures of sledding and moviegoing in the darker shadows of the hospital, does the author speculate on the children’s “other life” or their emotions. An addendum paragraph gives a sort of closure, with its update of Stephen being out of the hospital and recovered. If gentle parody is the subtext of “We Miss You,” the snarky tone of “Mrs. D and Her Maids” hints at a darker message. The collection’s third long piece, it chronicles the many maids who have worked for the D family, and their deficiencies. Mrs. D needs a maid to relieve her of household and child-care duties so she can do her other work as a writer. She readily sells the stories she writes to “ladies’ maga-

822

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

zines.” What she needs is uninterrupted time to work on them. The narrator makes a point of her pride at selling her stories, subtly contrasting it with some other, finer motive that Mrs. D lacks. However, the parade of maids cuts into her attention to writing. Some maids are so conscientious that they never get caught up with their work. One maid strews diapers all over the bathroom. Another is great with the baby but unpredictable about showing up. Many maids “don’t work out.” Mrs. D is fated to have more than a hundred maids in her lifetime. The storyteller’s suppressed rage sometimes seems directed at Mrs. D, for her assuming that she is entitled to have a maid. At other times it appears to be directed at the system, where some women are professors’ wives with private incomes, and others, for lack of other life choices, have to go into domestic service. If, as the level of detail about Mrs. D’s fashion sense and writing routine seems to confirm, the story is about Lydia Davis’s mother, another layer of speculation emerges. In any case, the story reflects a simpler era, when potential maids were plentiful and could be hired for $20 a week. “Cape Cod Diary,” near the end of the book, is a refreshing blast of sea air after the morose self-examination of some of the other stories. The narrator is taking a solitary August vacation, but she ignores her internal states to concentrate on the sensory treats of beach, harbor, village, and stormy weather. Some snippets could adorn a travel brochure. Other passages document her occasional ventures into the social realm by attending parties or wandering into a church service. She still works during vacation, translating the work of a French historian, but despite some snags in this project, she maintains her bemused attitude of well-being. The reader glimpses a different Lydia Davis in this story, one not so haunted by the existential discomfort shown by many of her narrators. “Cape Cod Diary” may make even casual readers want to try more of Davis’s works—it is that accessible. This volume’s fifty-odd stories show surprising diversity of form and style. They have in common an almost total concentration on domestic life, the world of words, and the small disturbances of head and heart. Within these boundaries the author creates little story gems, shot through with a unique bolt of perception. Emily Alward

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 17 (May 1, 2003): 71. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 6 (March 15, 2007): 242. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 80. New York 40, no. 19 (May 28, 2007): 81. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 27, 2007): 25. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 8 (February 19, 2007): 146.

823

VICTORY OF THE WEST The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto Author: Niccolò Capponi Publisher: Da Capo Press (New York). Illustrated. 412 pp. $27.50 Type of work: History Time: 1571 Locale: The Mediterranean Sea Capponi presents a meticulously researched and brilliantly written account of the Battle of Lepanto, which saved the West from domination by the Ottoman Turkish Empire Principal personages: Pius V, pope and sponsor of the Holy League Don Juan of Austria, commander of the Holy League’s fleet Selim II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire Muezzinzade Ali Pasha, commander of the Ottoman fleet

The naval engagement fought near Lepanto (Návpaktos), Greece, in 1571 was a military rarity; it was a genuinely decisive battle. It marked a turning point in the long war between Islam and Christianity in the Mediterranean region. Up to this point, the triumphant jihad of the Ottoman Turkish sultans had carried all before them. After Lepanto, the tide would begin to turn. Though the Turks remained a formidable threat to Christian Europe, and as late as 1683 would be besieging Vienna, their empire slipped into a long decline. The power of the West grew rapidly as its fractious inhabitants embraced the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. These intellectual revolutions laid the foundations of a global dominance that would last for four centuries. Indeed, it was the Europeans’ employment of new technologies that made possible the great victory of Lepanto. Niccolò Capponi, a distinguished Italian historian of the Renaissance, is well aware of the modern resonance of a history of this famous clash between the West and Islam. He makes a gentle allusion to the multicultural orthodoxies of present times in his preface. His title, Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto, is a rebuke to such moral equivalence, but Capponi goes no farther than that. His work is a history, not a commentary on current events. What he gives his readers is an epic story of conflict and heroism. Capponi brings a novelistic flair for the dramatic to his work. This is a tale of men and their struggles, not a dry analysis of impersonal and hence inscrutable forces. Capponi reminds readers that the future of a civilization can hinge on the wisdom and courage of a very few people. Context is all-important in history. Capponi devotes the first third of his book to describing the dangerous Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century. The great

824

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

destabilizing power of the day was the aggressively militaristic Ottoman Turkish Empire. For centuries, the waning force of the ancient Byzantine Empire had held the Turks at bay, acting as a shield for medieval Europe. However, in 1453 the Turks breached the walls of Constantinople; the last Byzantine emperor died fighting. Soon the Turks were probing deep into the Balkans. Other Ottoman armies took control of Egypt and much of North Africa. Muslim corsairs harassed shipping and raided the exposed coastline of southern Europe for slaves. Under the great Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire reached the pinnacle of its glory. Süleyman hammered the Christians. He captured Rhodes from the crusading Knights of Saint John in 1522. Four years later, he invaded Hungary and killed the Hungarian king and most of his army at the Battle of Mohács. Süleyman ruled an empire that stretched from Hungary to Algiers. Europe was being encircled. Ottoman armies were within marching distance of its heart. Fortunately for the Europeans, wars with the Persians and internal disturbances kept Süleyman from concentrating all his forces on the west. Ottoman expansionism was driven by a combination of religious zeal and economic necessity. The Turkish sultans arrogated to themselves the role of commanders of the faithful, associated with the traditional Islamic caliphate. By waging jihad against the infidel, they legitimized their claims to be the champions of Islam. The sultans also had pressing practical reasons to take lands from the Christians. Although elite units like the janissaries garnered the most attention from European observers, the bulk of the Turkish army was made up of horsemen who served the sultan in exchange for land. The feudal foundation of Ottoman military force constrained sultans to acquire new land with which to reward and maintain their troops. Thus, in the empire’s heyday, ideological and financial imperatives kept the Ottoman military machine in perpetual motion. In the face of the Ottoman juggernaut, Europe was divided politically and religiously. These differences kept the Europeans from uniting and effectively resisting the Ottomans. The kings of France battled first the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire, then the Habsburgs of Spain. The French were even willing to ally with the Turks at the expense of their hereditary enemy. When the wars with France subsided, Philip II of Spain showed more interest in battling Protestant rebels in the Netherlands than Muslim enemies in the Mediterranean. Italy paid the price for being weak and became a prize in the rivalry between greater powers. Foreign armies beset the peninsula. In 1527, a Habsburg army sacked Rome itself. Religious hatreds born of the Reformation envenomed many of these wars. The history of the sixteenth century was darkened by the atrocities perpetrated by Catholics and Protestants upon each other. A few Westerners kept up the fight against the Ottomans. The Knights of Saint John retained their old crusading fervor. In 1565, an Ottoman army besieged their new base at Malta. After a heroic defense, the knights broke the siege, inflicting grievous losses on the Turks. Also on the front line was the mercantile republic of Venice.

Niccolò Capponi is a distinguished Italian historian of the Renaissance. He is curator of the Capponi Archive. He lives in Florence, Italy.

Victory of the West / capponi

825

The Venetians would have preferred to trade with the Turks; Constantinople historically had been a major entrepôt for their traders. Unfortunately, the sultans coveted Venetian outposts in the Aegean. In 1570, Sultan Selim II launched an assault on Cyprus, a Venetian possession that he believed posed a strategic threat to Ottoman shipping lanes. He assembled a massive fleet and army to take the island. Once Cyprus fell, he intended to push his conquests west. The Venetians resisted fiercely but were hard-pressed in an unequal combat. The threat to Cyprus and the prospect of a Turkish onslaught in the Mediterranean attracted the attention of the chancelleries of Europe, but councils were divided. Few had the stomach to challenge so dangerous a foe. The Venetians became the most vociferous Western advocates of taking the offensive against the Ottomans. They could not afford the deadly illusion of appeasement. The Venetians found a formidable ally in Pope Pius V. An exemplary pontiff of the Counter-Reformation, Pius V was a saintly man, determined to root out the abuses that had divided the Church. He recognized that the reforms promulgated at the Council of Trent would mean nothing if the crescent rather than the cross flew over Rome. The pope threw himself into organizing a coalition to launch a counterattack against the Turks. The pope’s fervor, combined with the obvious danger posed by the Ottoman offensive, finally overcame diplomatic doubts. He became the animating spirit of the Holy League, founded on May 25, 1571, composed of Spain, Venice, and a number of Italian states. This was a fragile alliance, with the participating powers riven by deep-seated suspicions and conflicting goals. It would hold together just long enough to justify the labors of Pius V. The allies of the Holy League began gathering ships to relieve Cyprus. Because Spain was the leading Christian power, Philip II’s illegitimate half-brother, Don Juan of Austria, was given command of the fleet. Don Juan was a dashing young man, imbued with chivalric ideals; he would prove to be a capable soldier. Unfortunately, it took time to equip and organize his forces. In the meantime, the Ottomans, alerted to the creation of the Holy League, responded vigorously. They gathered another large fleet and pressed the conquest of Cyprus. Stronghold after stronghold fell, amid scenes of carnage that shocked Europe. Last to surrender was the town of Famagusta. The defenders were massacred after their capitulation; the governor was tortured and then skinned alive. The savagery of these atrocities hardened the resolve of the Christians. The Venetians vowed revenge. Capponi provides his readers with a detailed description of the naval forces that clashed at Lepanto. The standard warship was the galley, a shallow draft, oar-driven ship that had dominated Mediterranean waters since antiquity. The galleys of the sixteenth century were equipped with cannon and complements of soldiers to engage in hand-to-hand fighting when the ships closed with an enemy. The Turks were famous for their skill with the sword and bow. The Christians countered this by providing their soldiers more body armor and firearms. The Christian ships also carried more artillery. Although outnumbered in ships at Lepanto, the Christian fleet had twice as many guns. The Venetians brought with them six galleasses. These were large merchant vessels converted into portable batteries. A typical galley might only carry three

826

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

guns. A galleass could support more than ten times as many. The greater stability of the galleass allowed cannon to be fired in every direction, giving it deadly firepower in a sea fight. The fleet of the Holy League reached the eastern Mediterranean in early October. It numbered around 240 ships. Facing it was an Ottoman fleet of 300 ships under Muezzinzade Ali Pasha. On October 7, the two fleets encountered each other off the Curzolaris islands on the Ionian coast of Greece. Muezzinzade Ali was confident of victory. The Ottoman fleet had dominated these seas for years. He knew that the Holy League was a fragile coalition. He was, however, concerned that the many Christian slaves rowing in the Turkish galleys might rebel; confident of acquiring many new slaves that day, he promised his Christian rowers their freedom. Despite this promise, during the battle many rose up anyway to aid their coreligionists. Don Juan deployed his fleet into line. Ahead of his main force he placed the six Venetian galleasses. Muezzinzade Ali was puzzled by the exposed position of what looked like six transports. Reassured by prisoners that they possessed few guns, and anyway contemptuous of the Venetians after their many defeats, Muezzinzade Ali ordered his fleet to attack in the traditional crescent formation, expecting to encircle and overwhelm the Christians through force of numbers. The Ottoman fleet was a formidable sight as it advanced to the accompaniment of drums and horns. Muezzinzade Ali’s galley flew a great banner on which the name of Allah was embroidered 29,800 times. When the Turkish armada came within range, the batteries on the galleasses opened up with devastating effect. The surviving Ottoman galleys increased speed to try to escape the Venetian’s galling fire. Their formation was thrown into disorder. Despite this, the Turkish ships drove into the Christian line. What followed was a fierce melee. Capponi brilliantly evokes the close-quarters brutality of the fight. Here Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; Don Quixote de la Mancha, 1612-1620) had his left hand shattered by a Turkish bullet. Don Juan was in the thick of the fight and received a wound from a dagger. Muezzinzade Ali was killed, and his severed head was raised on a pike. In the end, Christian firepower proved decisive. The Ottoman fleet was shattered. Ninety Turkish galleys were sunk and 130 captured. 35,000 Turks were killed, wounded, or captured. Between 12,000 and 15,000 Christian slaves were liberated. The price of victory was steep; 7,650 Christians were killed and 7,800 were wounded. On the afternoon of October 7, Pius V was talking to a group of officials. Suddenly the pope went to a window and looked out for a time. He turned back to the others and declared ecstatically: “It is no time for business. Let us go and thank God, for this very moment our fleet has defeated the Turks.” The victory at Lepanto was worthy of the pope’s miraculous vision. In the short run, the Ottomans would rebuild their fleet, and the Holy League would fall apart amid mutual recriminations. Nevertheless, the pope’s joy was justified. Europe had been saved. The technological superiority displayed at Lepanto would grow only greater over the years. For good and ill, Europe’s destiny would be its own to decide. Daniel P. Murphy

Victory of the West / capponi

827

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 14 (March 15, 2007): 17. Journal of Military History 72, no. 1 (January, 2008): 223-224. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 3 (February 1, 2007): 75. Military History 24, no. 5 (July/August, 2007): 70-72. New Criterion 25, no. 10 (June, 2007): 75-79. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 76.

828

THE WATER CURE Author: Percival Everett (1956) Publisher: Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minn.). 216 pp. $22.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Taos, New Mexico, and Southern California One man’s exploration of sanity, rationality, humanity, and justice as he transforms himself from victim to assailant after he captures the monster that brutally murdered his eleven-year-old daughter Principal characters: Ishmael Kidder, narrator, author, and father of murdered Lane Lane, Ishmael and Charlotte’s eleven-year-old daughter, who is abducted from her mother’s front yard Charlotte, Ishmael’s ex-wife and Lane’s mother Charley, Charlotte’s boyfriend Reggie, Lane’s murderer and Ishmael’s captive Sally Lovely, Ishmael’s agent, who attempts to save not only his writing career but also Ishmael himself Estelle Gilliam, Ishmael’s pseudonym Bucky Paz, Taos sheriff

In a nonlinear novel that asks what circumstances could push a law-abiding citizen to become a criminal captor and torturer, Percival Everett’s The Water Cure explores one father’s quest to avenge his daughter’s murder and to bring sanity into his suddenly insane life. Ishmael Kidder’s eleven-year-old daughter Lane’s body is discovered in a park by two schoolboys after she had been missing for two days. One minute Lane was standing on her mother’s lawn playing with her bike, and the next minute she vanished from her parents’ lives forever. The totality and the quickness of the act, as well as the fact that no one saw anything, causes a grieving father to contemplate: “And so a longstanding philosophical question was answered for me: if your child screams in the forest and there is no one around to hear, does she make a sound? It turns out she does not.” Lane’s premature and brutal death elicits unquenchable desires for revenge. Lane’s rapist and murderer is apprehended, but he is released after questioning and later captured by Ishmael, who follows him out of the police station. The capture allows Ishmael to have his revenge, to which he confesses, “I am guilty not because of my actions, to which I freely admit, but for my accession, admission, confession that I executed these actions with not only deliberation and premeditation but with zeal and paroxysm and purpose, above all else purpose, that I clearly articulate without apology or qualification.” So opens The Water Cure, setting the pace for a thrilling

The Water Cure / everett

829

and hypercerebral novel that explores uncon ditional love and hate, motivations for revenge, human thought processes, and the fundamental factors that determine one’s actions and communication. The protagonist’s life has changed against his will, both through the death of his daughter and through the capture of her assailant, whom Ishmael refers to as Reggie or W. Ishmael no longer defines himself by the life he created for himself and his family but rather Percival Everett has written more than by determining the fate of the prisoner in his twenty novels and poetry collections. basement. Although he wishes that the man He has received the PEN Center USA tied to a board in his house meant nothing to Award for Fiction, the Academy Award him, he reluctantly admits, “You are also, in literature from the American sadly, importantly, necessarily . . . the exis- Academy of Arts and Letters, and the tential proof of the sincerity of my so-called Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for convictions, among other things. I believe it Fiction. He published his first novel, is true, and this might be one of the ills of Suder (1983), while pursuing his our culture, that no judge among us really has M.F.A. at Brown University. Everett is the courage of his convictions.” As Ishmael a distinguished professor of English at slowly tortures Reggie mentally and physi- the University of Southern California. cally, Ishmael changes from victim to perpetrator and transforms Reggie as well: “You were the sinner, but now you are the punished, someone new altogether. The question is, are you the same man?” The question can also be posed to Ishmael himself, although the reader might ask if there is any man left in Ishmael at all. Ishmael, in fact, has lost all sense of self, for his former self died with his daughter. He lives alone in Taos, New Mexico, after divorcing his wife, Charlotte. He trusts no one, to the extent of bringing his own food to restaurants. Ishmael supports himself through the publication of romance novels under the pseudonym of Estelle Gilliam, further removing Ishmael from reality, but knows that “I simply am of course who I am, Ishmael Kidder, but I am better known as Estelle Gilliam, the romance novelist.” His agent, Sally Lovely, the closest semblance of a friend he has, visits Ishmael to review his writing (which has ceased) and to check on his well-being. She hears noises emanating from the basement that Ishmael passes off as the normal sounds old houses make. Satisfied, but still concerned for him, Sally leaves, and Ishmael is once again alone. Of course, Ishmael is far from lonely. In addition to Estelle, his alter ego, and his captive in the basement, Ishmael has marijuana-induced conversations throughout the book with historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Socrates, Aristotle, and Samuel Beckett. Through these conversations, Everett sheds light on the motivating factors and beliefs that Ishmael relies upon to justify his actions, be they religious, cultural, moral, or legal. In one such conversation with Benjamin Franklin, Franklin

830

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

asks Ishmael if he intends to kill his victim, and if so, does he approve of cruel and unusual punishment, to which Ishmael replies, “I suppose I’d have to know first what is not cruel and what is usual. If not cruel is kind, then is it in fact punishment? And it seems to me that kind punishment sounds a bit unusual,” giving the reader insight into the logic of the protagonist and the wordsmith talents of Everett. At times, Everett reveals a tender, human side to Ishmael in between his bouts with insanity and his moments of torture. It is the tenderness and introspection of his character, the relentless torture Ishmael lives under, that is revealed when he laments, “Daily, I slice away at my love for my daughter, at my guilt for surviving, at my resolve for revenge and slice away at merely myself, and it remains painfully obvious that I’m all still here, always big enough to be cut a million more times. And so, no matter how small I become I remain infinitely, miserably, painfully, laughably, eternally, and interminably large.” The passage reminds the reader what horrific events have shaped the protagonist, having lived through something no one should ever have to face. He remarks that survivors, no matter what they have endured, always have to battle to survive, and feel the guilt of doing so. Survivors must work to make it through every day while “the dead are still dead. No matter who lives or dies, the dead remain dead. That is all the dead have to do, all that is required of them, to stay that way.” Ishmael learned of life through his daughter’s death even though “she had been too young to truly imagine death, too young to have understood enough of life to cherish it, but old enough to have taught me to do so.” Throughout The Water Cure, Everett cryptically shares Ishmael’s revelations on life, what defines a person, and what motivates his or her actions. Everett displays Ishmael’s mental anguish and grief not only through his thoughts and speech but also through the very letters and type he employs. In an E. E. Cummings fashion, Everett plays with words, their meanings, and their physical structure, misspelling them, repeating certain letters, spelling words phonetically, and finally deconstructing language down to its basic elements and turning it into random strings of characters. The grammar and syntax cause confusion and frustrate the reader at times as the chapters become increasingly difficult, and at times impossible, to decipher. As this linguistic confusion grows, Ishmael’s insanity also increases, allowing the reader to experience his mental breakdown through a schizophrenic writing style. Everett jumps from one chapter (consisting of a few paragraphs) describing memories of Lane, to another chapter that describes the torture being inflicted on her murderer, to another chapter in which Ishmael is within a philosophical debate with Aristotle, to another chapter where Everett spells all words phonetically, making it difficult for the reader to decipher the intended meaning at times, to another chapter in which Everett literally strikes random keys with no hope of construing any words or meaning whatsoever. The constant jumping from style to style is hard on the reader and at times takes away from the overall cohesiveness of the novel. In the few moments of clarity sprinkled throughout the novel, Everett expresses his discontent with the George W. Bush administration as the narrator openly examines the administration and its influence on American culture and society, claiming that the United States has become an amoral, unquestioning, and bloodthirsty, revenge-

The Water Cure / everett

831

driven country. Everett uses Ishmael, a law-abiding citizen turned torturer, as a symbol of what American society as a whole has devolved into and how the world sees this society. Ishmael takes the method of torture he inflicts upon his prisoner from one of the torture methods the Central Intelligence Agency condoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—the water cure, or waterboarding. The practice of waterboarding was once referred to as the water cure. The subject is bound (as in tied up not headed for) in my case with duct tape . . . to a board . . . with his head positioned lower in elevation than his feet, taped up tight so that he cannot move and then a rag . . . is tied tightly over his face, and then water is slowly poured onto the cloth. The subject, I prefer the term victim, has trouble breathing and becomes fearful . . . that he will drown, that he will die of asphyxiation.

Ishmael justifies his torture by claiming to be patriotic, claiming that Americans have all become war-loving, pain-inducing, and vengeful for personal reasons or no reason at all. Everett takes a bold and controversial position, as Ishmael questions the difference between his child’s murderer and a United States soldier, “Not a popular thing to say, but they are trained killers. Just because they are our young men doesn’t make them good young men, not down to a man, not every single man. After all, they have chosen to carry guns.” While Everett makes extremely insightful glimpses into grammar and linguistics— as well as into the effect the Bush administration has had on the American psyche and international image—the lack of structure within certain passages, and the attacks toward, and disregard of, the reader, at times detracts from the novel on the whole. Everett sums up his novel when he writes, The words on these pages are not the story. The words on these pages are not this story. The words on these pages are the words on these pages, not more, not less, simply the words on these pages, one after the another, one at the beginning and one at the end, bearing possibly some but probably no relation to each other, but they can, if you desire to find a connection, need to, or if it irresistibly, axiomatically, ineluctably reveals itself to you.

Everett places a tremendous responsibility on readers not only to comprehend but also to construct the story themselves. Basic foundations and clues are laid down, but the reader must construe the story, its past and future, from an almost nonexistent plot. Sara Vidar Review Sources Booklist 104, no. 1 (September 1, 2007): 57. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 14 (July 15, 2007): 683. Library Journal 132, no. 16 (October 1, 2007): 58-59. Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2007, p. R6. San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 2007, p. M1. The Washington Post, August 26, 2007, p. BW04.

832

THE WELSH GIRL Author: Peter Ho Davies (1966) Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (New York). 338 pp. $24.00 Type of work: Novel Time: The final months of World War II, 1944-1945, notably D day Locale: Mostly Cilgwyn, a village in North Wales A first novel by Davies chronicling the wartime convergence of three young people: a sheep farmer’s seventeenyear-old daughter who must live a devastating lie, a German POW who falls in love with her, and an Anglicized German Jew, an interrogator assigned to break through Rudolf Hess Principal characters: Esther Evans, the seventeen-year-old girl of the title, a part-time barmaid who longs for a larger world Arthur Evans, Esther’s fiercely nationalistic father, a sheep farmer, opposed to the war Karsten Simmering, a guilt-ridden, eighteen-year-old German POW perilously involved with Esther Rotheram, a half-Jewish German who works as British interrogator of Rudolf Hess and Karsten Rhys Roberts, Esther’s childhood friend; Cilgwyn’s only war casualty Jim, an intelligent, young evacuee for whom Esther is caretaker Rudolf Hess, a real-life former deputy to Adolf Hitler who fled Germany in 1941, landing in Scotland, perhaps in a botched attempt to negotiate peace with Britain; held in a Welsh safe house and interrogated by Rotheram in the novel’s prologue and epilogue

A good case could be made for regarding World War II as anchored to temporal chronology, and yet, by the larger-than-life emergence of its leaders and campaigns, the war resists boundaries. The archive is inexhaustible, the tide of Holocaust memory alone, oceanic. In astonishing ways, such cataclysmic events change not only history but also the geography of individual minds. As World War II recedes in time and its survivors dwindle, patriotic movies like The Longest Day (1962) and They Were Expendable (1945) seek to keep alive Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” reminding viewers and readers how hallowed—and halo-ed—the “good war” was compared to any since. The novelists who chronicled that war—such as Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones—left a distinguished legacy. In recent years, several novelists not alive in the 1940’s are reviving, reinventing, and (most crucially of all) rescuing World War II from the overlay of history. Peter Ho Davies is one such writer. The Welsh Girl is his first novel. Davies,

The Welsh Girl / davies

833

born in Wales of a Welsh father and a Malay sian Chinese mother some two decades after Peter Ho Davies, hailed as one of the war, is not interested in the conflict itself. Granta‘s “Best of Young British Although he sets The Welsh Girl in the region Novelists,” is the author of two awardof North Wales called Snowdonia during the winning short-story collections: The time of the Allied landings in Normandy and Ugliest House in the World (1997) won employs military artifacts and at least one his- the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the torical figure from the war, he is much more PEN/Macmillan Award in Britain, and Equal Love (2000) was a New York concerned with the split between local and Times Notable Book. Davies lives in national identities, between personal history Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he teaches and history itself as it plays out on the world in the graduate program in creative stage. writing at the University of Michigan. For his debut novel, Davies utilizes a con vention of stories from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) to Sebastian Brant’s Das Narren Schyff (1494; Ship of Fools) and Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables (pr. 1954)—a fixed arena in which persons who would not ordinarily meet can be gathered together: an ocean liner, an inn, or, as here, a prison camp. The author chose Cilgwyn, a hamlet in North Wales—not only because young evacuees from London, for safety’s sake, have been interned there but also because the town has lately been filled with sappers, English soldiers who are building a mysterious new camp against the hillside. Germans who surrendered during the invasion will be imprisoned there. Esther Evans, the seventeen-year-old title character, lives on a farm with her father, Arthur. He, in common with most of the townspeople, is passionately opposed to “Churchill’s war.” He looks no further than his sheep for a guiding philosophy—cynefin, a Welsh term embracing his flock’s unerring sense of where they belong, their home turf. It is a word for which, he boasts to the recalcitrant Esther, the empire-building British have no equivalent. “But how do the new-born know?” she asks her father after her mother’s early passing. “The males teach each other,” he replies. Esther knows the wethers (males) are sold for meat each year. Whatever was passed down—however cynefin was preserved—she knows it had to be from mother to daughter. Cynefin becomes Davies’s dominant metaphor. This is not so dramatic until the second half when the other two young protagonists—Karsten Simmering, an eighteen-year-old German prisoner of war (POW), and Rotheram, a half-Jewish German émigré, now a bilingual captain of British intelligence, cross paths in Cilgwyn. The three young people are forever trying to fathom where they belong. Esther is not content to sit out—or, more accurately, since she is a barmaid—to stand out the war and life. She inclines to a young soldier wearing the uniform her father hates. Karsten is guilt-ridden because he, the only English-speaking soldier in his outfit, was spokesman for its surrender. Accused of cowardice by his fellow prisoners, he had given up to save the life of a terrified underage boy in his unit. Rotheram, the most shadowy of the three, is difficult to formulate. He will occupy center stage before either of the others, in a prologue whose main goal may be to

834

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

connect the reader with World War II via one of its unsolved mysteries, the strange odyssey of a henchman of Adolf Hitler named Rudolf Hess, who in 1941 landed a plane in Scotland in what may have been a botched try to negotiate peace. Readers find him late in the war confined in a Welsh safe house, being interrogated by Rotheram in hopes of learning whether the ex-Nazi is fit to stand trial with Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and others at Nuremberg. Esther is a part-time barmaid at the Quarryman’s Arms, one of the two pubs in her small, proud, nationalist village. As much as her father and his cronies deplore the English army, Esther does not care. If she cannot see the world, she will settle for the world coming to her. She secretly steps out with a handsome sapper named Colin, who rapes her. She becomes pregnant, and Colin leaves when he and his buddies have built the POW camp. At this point, Karsten enters the story. As Esther guards her secret, even from her father, as long as she can, Karsten endures an enforced indolence that gives him too much time to mull over the unheroic surrender. Karsten finds some inner peace in memories of his innocent Bavarian childhood; in the construction of toy airplanes and ships in bottles for the local youths who come to the camp gates every night to jeer; and in the arms of Esther—a sublime experience for both. He can forget the French whore he bedded during a leave in Paris, his erotic dreams often coalescing into the face of his mother. Esther will invent a relationship with Rhys Roberts, a boy she knew who has become the village’s only war casualty. Only her confidant-lover Karsten knows who the father is. The romance between Karsten and Esther is predictable from the moment they lay eyes on each other through the prison-camp fence. That it takes Davies half the novel to affirm a foregone conclusion may doom the book with some of the same readers who gave up on another extraordinary World War II novel, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), but adored the Oscar-winning film version. As the novel’s chapters alternate between Esther and Karsten, the barbed wire that separates the prisoner inside the camp from the woman inside her tyrannical father’s home becomes, as one reviewer puts it, “metaphor-thin.” Of course, Karsten escapes, and the two come face to face. After hiding out in Esther’s father’s barn for a few days, eating food she prepares for him, Karsten decides to give himself up and is returned to camp. While the two have been lovers, Esther’s emotions are mixed, but, with a baby on the way, she is mostly relieved. What are readers to make of Hess, who was spared at Nuremberg and whom, fictively, Davies exploits as both a “reference” character and as a buffer for his interrogator’s—for Rotheram’s—conflicted sense of his Jewish side? The reader first encounters him in a private, smoke-filled room, hounded by British intelligence officers, being forced to watch footage of himself ranting at a Nazi rally. Among the group is Rotheram, who studies Hess’s blank face in the light refracted from the film screen for a giveaway sign of complicity in the so-called final solution. Writing in London’s New Statesman, Sebastian Harcombe cogently finds the Hess-Rotheram prologue “an appropriate entrée into a novel whose focus is unstintingly microscopic, whose prevailing preoccupation is the way in which obligations to family, community and country shape one’s sense of identity, honour, destiny,

The Welsh Girl / davies

835

and personal purpose.” It is through Rotheram, in the book’s twenty-three-page epilogue, that the reader learns the fate of all the characters, including Esther’s baby. It would not be appropriate to disclose their postwar fortunes except to say they are good. The reader even follows Hess to his cell in West Berlin’s Spandau Prison, where he hanged himself in 1987 at age ninety-three, a puzzle to the end. Richard Hauer Costa

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 6 (November 15, 2006): 6. The Boston Globe, February 11, 2007, p. E4. The Daily Telegraph, May 26, 2007, p. 26. The Guardian, May 5, 2007, p. 16. London Review of Books 29, no. 10 (May 24, 2007): 25. Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2007, p. R9. The New York Times Book Review 156 (February 18, 2007): 10. Newsday, February 11, 2007, p. C30. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 42 (October 23, 2006): 27-28.

836

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Author: Daniel Walker Howe (1937) Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York). 904 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1815-1848 Locale: The United States A comprehensive narrative account of the United States from the end of the War of 1812 until the end of the Mexican War, with a good balance among political, military, cultural, technological, and economic components When Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated his invention of an electric telegraph in 1844, his famous message, “What hath God wrought,” expressed the attitude, quite common at the time, that divine providence was responsible for the nation’s territorial expansion as well as its technological and scientific developments. When later transcribing the message, Morse added a question mark, which unintentionally changed the affirmation of a providential faith into a question about whether the United States was a divine blessing to humanity. Daniel Walker Howe explains that he uses Morse’s statement without punctuation in his book’s title because he “seeks both to affirm and to question the value of what Americans of that period did.” While emphasizing the theme of economic and social progress, he also recognizes that “American history between 1815 and 1848 certainly had its dark side: poverty, demagogy, disregard for legal restraints, the perpetuation and expansion of slavery, the dispossession of the Native Americans, and the waging of aggressive war against Mexico.” What Hath God Wrought is the most recent addition to the prestigious series The Oxford History of the United States. Another historian, Charles Sellers, had earlier been commissioned to write the book for the period, but Sellers’s work, which was published in 1991 under the title The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, was rejected by the late C. Vann Woodward, the series editor at the time, reportedly because of its lack of balance and controversial point of view. According to Sellers, the United States during this period changed profoundly from an agrarian to a capitalistic society, which benefited a small capitalistic class to the detriment of the working-class majority. Rejecting Sellers’s influential “market revolution” thesis, Howe concludes that the weight of historical evidence shows that an active market economy already existed in the eighteenth century. He further argues that the early nineteenth century was first and foremost a period of technological revolutions in communications, transportation, manufacturing, and farming, just as most contemporaries recognized at the time.

What Hath God Wrought / howe

837

Sellers and Howe have fundamentally dif ferent views about the developing capitalism Daniel Walker Howe is professor of of the period. Whereas the former empha- history emeritus at both Oxford sizes its costs and inequalities, Howe tends to University and the University of focus on its benefits and efficiencies. Sellers California, Los Angeles. His previous holds that the majority of Americans living in books include Unitarian Conscious: the agrarian society of the preceding century Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 were happier and better off than those living (1970), The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1984), and Making in the more modern, urbane society of the the American Self: Jonathan Edwards nineteenth century. In contrast, Howe sees to Abraham Lincoln (1997). evidence of real progress and improving con ditions—a glass that was at least half full. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, commodities became cheaper and more accessible to the average person. A mattress that sold for fifty dollars in 1815, for instance, was selling for five dollars thirty years later. Although uncertain about whether the disparity between the rich and the poor increased during these decades, he writes that if inequality did grow, it was likely caused primarily by the arrival of large numbers of poor immigrants. Acknowledging that workers resented the inequality that existed, he finds that the small scale of antebellum manufacturing permitted many opportunities for social mobility and “thus blurred the line between capitalist and working classes.” Looking upon technological innovations as the motor force behind most historical changes, Howe discusses the efforts and accomplishments of many innovators, including Eli Whitney’s interchangeable parts, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, John Deere’s steel plough, and Peter Cooper’s improved locomotive. Howe’s treatment of the communications and transportation revolutions goes far beyond the information to be found in most historical syntheses. The building of turnpikes was of considerable significance, even though they were slow, undependable, and often called “shun-pikes” because of the ease of avoiding the tollbooths. Steamboats provided a dependable way of traveling against the current on powerful rivers like the Mississippi, although they were quite dangerous, with forty-two exploding boilers killing 273 people between 1825 and 1830. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 allowed New York to become the “Empire State,” with the number of ships in New York harbor growing at least 500 percent from 1820 to 1850. Railroads, beginning with the B & O Railroad in 1828, had an even greater impact. By end of 1830, there were 450 locomotives and 3,200 miles of track, twice the number as in Europe. Ten years later, the United States had 7,500 miles of track. Before railroads, it took Henry Clay three weeks to travel from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., whereas he could make the trip in four days by 1846. Howe writes: “If the railroads did not initiate the industrial revolution, they certainly speeded it up.” Despite the numerous technological and social changes of the period, Howe observes that living standards remained quite low. As in previous centuries, it was difficult to earn a living wage, and agriculture continued to be the sources of livelihood for the vast majority of Americans. Howe summarizes: “Life in America in

838

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

1815 was dirty, smelly, laborious, and uncomfortable. People spent most of their waking hours working, with scant opportunity for the development of individual talents and interests unrelated to farming.” Many historians have focused on the extent to which representative democracy, particularly the right to vote, was expanded during the period. Howe argues that this thesis has been greatly exaggerated. The great majority of white males in most states (outside of South Carolina) had already been granted the legal right to vote before 1815. While it is true that the popular vote tripled in size from 1824 to 1828, this was primarily because of heightened public interest and organized efforts to turn out the voters. Howe concedes, nevertheless, that many states were still in the process of removing the few remaining property qualifications and that the period saw a new development, “the emergence of mass political parties offering rival programs for the electorate to choose.” Increasingly, the majority of Americans perceived their country as a democracy that offered an example for the rest of the world. Howe does not hesitate to express moral judgments about particular individuals and their deeds. When discussing President Andrew Jackson, he is particularly critical of Jackson’s strong support for slavery and his policy of coercing the “five civilized tribes” to move west of the Mississippi River. Rather than referring to Jackson as the candidate of the “common man,” he suggests that Jackson is more accurately called the candidate of the white man. Despite being a lawyer, moreover, Jackson “did not manifest a general respect for the authority of the law when it got in the way of the policies he chose to pursue.” However, in contrast to some left-wing historians, Howe does not automatically make an unfavorable analysis of all “dead white males.” He believes that John Quincy Adams, for instance, was a man of integrity and noble principles, even writing that Adams’s “intellectual ability and courage were above reproach, and his wisdom in perceiving the national interest has stood the test of time.” Since many of Howe’s previous publications have been devoted to the field of intellectual history, it is not surprising that What Hath God Wrought contains a wealth of material about the beliefs, ideas, and publications of the period. Chapter 5, titled “Awakenings of Religion,” deals with the revival that is commonly called the Second Great Awakening, with in-depth discussions of emotional preachers like Charles G. Finney and theologians like Nathaniel William Taylor. Chapter 8, “Pursuing the Millennium,” provides fascinating information about utopian projects, both religious and secular, including William Miller’s prediction of the world’s end, Robert Owen’s brand of socialism in Indiana, Joseph Smith’s establishment of Mormonism, and John H. Noyes’s founding of a free-love community. Chapter 16, “American Renaissance,” is an excellent account of literary and philosophical giants, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Taking a critical perspective of westward expansion under the doctrine of manifest destiny, Howe does not hesitate to utilize the label of “imperialism,” and he asserts that the movement “derived from the domination and exploitation of the North Amer-

What Hath God Wrought / howe

839

ican continent by the white people of the United States and their government.” The emergence of an American empire did not occur spontaneously, but “like all empires, the American one required conscious deliberation and energetic government action to bring it into being.” Despite his critical stance, Howe maintains as much objectivity as possible in attempting to tell what happened. It would be difficult to find more interesting accounts of the Lone Star Revolution in Texas, James K. Polk’s strategies, and the Mexican War. Other notable topics in Howe’s richly textured book include Jackson’s victory of New Orleans in 1815, the Missouri Compromise, the “Bank War” between Jackson and Henry Clay, the emergence of the Whig and Republican Parties, the Supreme Court under John Marshall’s leadership, and the challenges of Irish immigrants. Rather than making a dichotomy between social history and the study of elites, Howe holds that the transformation of America was the result of the decisions and actions of both the common people and their leaders. He observes: “History is made both from the bottom up and from the top down, and historians must take account of both in telling their stories.” What Hath God Wrought concludes with a discussion of the exceptionally large number of revolutionary events that occurred in 1848. Conservatives and liberals reacted differently to the democratic and nationalist uprising taking place in Europe that year. Howe goes into great detail about the frustrating work of American diplomat Nicholas Trist in negotiating the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war with Mexico. Just after John Quincy Adams voted against expressions of appreciation for the generals who fought the war, he lost consciousness and expired. Within a few months of the discovery of gold in California, people began streaming into the area hoping to make their fortunes, thereby making it almost impossible for California to become a slave state. The election of 1848 was the first time that all the states in the country chose their electors on the same day. Still, the year’s most momentous revolution for the future was the holding of the world’s first feminist convention in Seneca Falls, New York, which resulted in the influential Declaration of Sentiments, asserting that men and women were created equally. As a work of synthesis, Howe’s historical sources appropriately consist almost entirely of published works. His copious footnotes make it clear that he has been reading and thinking about the period for many years. He utilizes his impressive knowledge of modern scholarship to describe and explain the trends and developments that were establishing a distinctive national identity during this age of transformation. The book concludes with a twenty-page bibliography essay that includes succinct commentary about the immense body of historical writings available for further study. Even though What Hath God Wrought is filled with stimulating interpretations, Howe’s primary goal is to present a balanced narrative of the events, controversies, ideas, and achievements of the period. He writes that his book “tells a story; it does not argue a thesis.” Unlike some contemporary historians, he clearly appreciates the value of narration, and he is a skillful storyteller who knows how to choose relevant anecdotes and revealing quotations. Both general readers and professional historians can benefit from this large book of nine hundred pages. It can be read

840

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

with pleasure from cover to cover, and it also provides an excellent reference for looking up concise but rather detailed historical information that cannot be found in standard textbooks and encyclopedias. Thomas Tandy Lewis

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 5 (December, 2007): 114-115. Library Journal 132, no. 8 (November 1, 2007): 83. The New Yorker 83, no. 33 (October 29, 2007): 88-92. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 45.

841

WHAT THE DEAD KNOW Author: Laura Lippman (1959) Publisher: William Morrow (New York). 376 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Novel Time: The early twenty-first century Locale: Baltimore Thirty years after two adolescent sisters mysteriously disappeared from a Baltimore mall, a woman stopped by police following a hit-and-run accident on the Baltimore Beltway claims to be one of them Principal characters: Heather Bethany, a fortysomething woman Sunny Bethany, her older sister Kevin Infante, a Baltimore police officer Nancy Porter, Infante’s coworker Kay Sullivan, a social worker Gloria Bustamante, a high-powered defense attorney Chet Willoughby, the original police detective assigned to the Bethany sisters’ case Dave Bethany, the girls’ father Miriam Toles Bethany, the girls’ mother Sergeant Lenhardt, Infante’s superior Stan Dunham, a former Baltimore police officer and the girls’ alleged abductor Tony Dunham, Stan’s son Penelope Jackson, the owner of the car Heather was driving at the time of the accident

The first of Laura Lippman’s some dozen novels to make The New York Times best seller list, What the Dead Know is an intriguing mystery centered on the disappearance thirty years earlier of two sisters from a Baltimore mall. Sunny and Heather Bethany, aged fifteen and eleven, took the city bus on March 29, 1975, to Security Square Mall, where they were going to shop for a few hours, then be picked up by their father, Dave—except that they were never seen again. The novel starts in the present day, as a woman driving a car on the Baltimore Beltway hits an oil patch on the road and causes another car to lose control. As the woman attempts to leave the scene, she is stopped by a police officer. He questions her, but she is injured and apparently disoriented. The car she is driving is registered to a Penelope Jackson of South Carolina, but the woman denies being Penelope. She eventually blurts out that she is one of the Bethany girls—and so the story begins. The author swerves back and forth between past and present, feeding the reader details—but Lippman chooses what to tell, and when. The woman claims to be the

842

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

younger sister, Heather, who was within a week of her twelfth birthday when she disap- Laura Lippman worked as a newspaper peared, but she has no identification and ad- reporter for twenty years and has won mits that she has assumed many names over numerous major mystery awards, the last three decades. She will not provide including the Gumshoe Award for Best the one she currently uses, as she has finally Novel for To the Power of Three achieved a stable career and does not want to (2005), the Anthony and Barry Awards endanger it. Because of the possibility that for Every Secret Thing (2003), and the Nero Wolfe Award for The Sugar she may be one of the missing girls in a case House (2000). that was never solved, she avoids jail and in stead is placed in the care of a social worker, Kay Sullivan. Kay introduces her to a highpowered defense attorney, Gloria Bustamante, who agrees to take her case. The mystery woman is hesitant to talk, however, only giving out bits and pieces of information over the next few days, most of which lead nowhere. She claims that a former Baltimore police officer named Stan Dunham abducted the girls from the mall and that he killed Sunny but kept Heather in his Pennsylvania home, sexually abusing her until she turned eighteen. At that point, she says, he put her on a bus and sent her away. Since then, she has roamed from one place to the next, assuming new names and new identities along the way. Stan Dunham is now senile and living in a nursing home. His wife is dead, as is his only son, Tony. Their house is gone, sold to developers, and so is Sunny’s grave, which Heather claims was on the property. In addition, the girls’ father, Dave, is dead, and their mother, Miriam, has left the country. Penelope Jackson, owner of the car involved in the accident and who, as it turns out, had been living with Tony Dunham, has disappeared. Hence, police officer Kevin Infante keeps running up against brick walls in his investigation. Even the original investigating officer, Chet Willoughby, now retired, is unable to shed any additional light. Instead, he shoots down Infante’s hope of finally resolving the woman’s identity with DNA testing when the girls’ mother is located in Mexico: Chet reveals that he had removed a vital piece of information from the case files years ago in deference to Dave—that the girls were, in fact, adopted. Lippman has done a masterful job of telling this story. Her omniscient narrator takes the reader inside the minds of the characters as well as into the past. As Heather slowly yields information, what she says has the ring of truth, yet there are moments that raise red flags for Infante—and the reader. Lippman drops hints suggesting that not all is as straightforward as it seems: Early on, the woman admits to herself that the tricky part of being Heather was “not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn’t know.” When the police ask whether she saw anyone she knew at the mall that day, Heather says no. The police know that Sunny’s music teacher was playing the organ at the mall’s music store that day, and he claimed he saw her watch him perform. In addition, he claimed that a man grabbed Heather from behind and spoke to her angrily, but upon seeing her face, appeared to realize he had made a mistake and subsequently left. Heather makes no mention of any of this. Also, Heather

What the Dead Know / lippman

843

had had a large sum of money saved that was gone from her room when the police searched it, yet when asked what she had taken to the mall, the woman says only a small amount of cash. She did, however, describe Heather’s purse, found empty in the parking lot after the abduction, to perfection. After starting off in the present day, the author cuts back to the day of the girls’ disappearance, depicting a very ordinary morning with their dad making pancakes for breakfast and singing along to the songs on the radio. Sunny’s petulance at having to take Heather with her to the mall that day seems true to form. Heather both adores her older sister and drives her crazy by following her around, sneaking into her room, and reading her diary—a fairly common sisterly dynamic. Sunny feels put upon by her father’s insistence that she take Heather with her that day—and the reader sees their interaction as they take the bus together. The seemingly innocent events of that day at the mall, as fed to the reader in flashback, turn out to hold the secret to the girls’ disappearance. Lippman has established herself as a mystery writer over the last ten years with her series of Tess Monaghan books—Tess being a former newspaper reporter turned private detective. Lippman herself was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun for twelve years. She alludes in the narrative to several real-life child abduction cases and even mentions in an author’s note that this story was inspired by the real abduction of two teenage sisters from Wheaton Plaza in 1975, although any resemblance to that case ends there. What the Dead Know is one of the author’s several stand-alone mysteries, although several of its secondary characters have appeared before in her other novels, such as Kevin Infante, Sergeant Lenhardt, Nancy Porter, and Gloria Bustamante. Throughout the novel, the author strings the reader along just as Heather does the police. The reader instinctively dislikes the protagonist from the moment she causes the accident and drives away. She cannot (or will not) produce identification; she weasels her way out of jail time, finagles herself into the private home of a kindly social worker, then sneaks onto the social worker’s computer. She deceives the wellmeaning officials who are all trying to help her. Still, the reader is intrigued by her at the same time. She obviously has been abused, her concern for the child she injured in the accident seems genuine, and she appears to be honestly afraid of something or someone. She plays the victim well, but she is also conniving and devious. The reader constantly questions what this woman stands to gain by claiming to be Heather Bethany. Her family has disintegrated; there is no money, no property. She may be simply trying to avoid facing charges in the hit-and-run accident, yet she knows so much about the 1975 case. She provides so much detail about the day of the girls’ disappearance: how Sunny tried to lose her at the mall, bought a ticket for Escape to Witch Mountain but snuck into the R-rated Chinatown instead, and then refused to buy Heather the Karmelcorn she promised when Heather spoils the day by sneaking into Chinatown after Sunny. Her claim to be Heather seems genuine, yet she also seems to give an inordinate amount of thought to playing the part. The reader does not question Heather’s allusion to sexual abuse by her captor— after all, what other reason could there be to kidnap two young girls from a middleclass family with no ransom possible? The story Heather spins rings true to the reader’s

844

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ear, yet the man accused was a beloved former Baltimore police officer. Although Infante did not know Stan Dunham personally, he knew of him and his standing in the community. Other questions also arise, such as, where has the woman been these past thirty years, and what has she been doing? The author provides a few intriguing tidbits, in flashback. One such insight is that the woman claiming to be Heather worked for a while under the name of Barb as technical support for a newspaper but was fired after an amusing scene in which she pours a Diet Pepsi over the head of a persnickety reporter. Lippman’s years of newspaper work add verisimilitude to scenes such as this one. The reader will identify with Infante’s skepticism. He distrusts Heather from the moment he meets her, and she makes no effort to win him over. Social worker Kay Sullivan plays good cop to Infante’s bad cop: She takes Heather’s word at face value, believing her implicitly. The two characters provide a nice counterbalance. Another contrasting pair is the girls’ parents, Dave and Miriam, shown in flashback scenes at the time of the girls’ disappearance, one year later, and then in 1983 and again in 1989. They each deal with their grief very differently: Dave is dogged in his insistence that they must never give up the search for the girls, while Miriam yields to the probability that the girls are gone forever. Dave is frustrated by Miriam’s lack of faith, whereas Miriam realizes that she needs to let go in order to move on with her life. Sadly, Dave hangs himself in despair a decade after the girls’ disappearance. Much the way the character claiming to be Heather has done, Miriam changes her name (reverts to her maiden name) and relocates several times in her attempt to distance herself from the tragedy. Fortunately, the author does a masterful job of pulling all these seemingly disparate pieces of information together into a satisfying whole. As the reader comes to learn, every detail and event that the author supplies is important and key to solving the mystery. The answer, when it finally comes, is simple and logical. What the Dead Know is the type of book readers will want to read twice: once to find out the ending, and then again, more slowly, to see how Lippman managed to hoodwink the reader. C. K. Breckenridge

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 68-69. Library Journal 132, no. 5 (March 15, 2007): 61. The New York Times 156 (April 5, 2007): E9. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 4 (January 22, 2007): 156. School Library Journal 53, no. 5 (May, 2007): 174. The Times Literary Supplement, June 8, 2007, p. 23.

845

WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN A Memoir of Africa Author: Peter Godwin (1957) Publisher: Little, Brown (New York). 341 pp. $24.99 Type of work: Memoir Time: 1996-2004 Locale: Zimbabwe A poignant memoir of the African-born author’s return visits to Zimbabwe, where he strove to protect the welfare of his aging parents in the midst of deteriorating political and economic conditions; while looking after his parents, he made a startling discovery about the true origins of his father that moved him to see his own life from a radically new perspective Principal personages: Peter Godwin (1957), the author, a freelance writer who was born and raised in what is now Zimbabwe George Godwin (1924-2004), his father, a retired engineer who immigrated to Africa from England after World War II Helen Godwin (c. 1923), his English mother, a retired medical doctor who practiced in Zimbabwe for nearly fifty years Georgina Godwin, his younger sister, a radio broadcaster who resettled in England Robert Mugabe (1924), the aging president of Zimbabwe, who came to power in 1980

This remarkable book defies simplistic categorization. On its surface, it is a narrative account of an African-born white man’s return visits to his African homeland between 1996 and 2004. The author, journalist Peter Godwin, is a keen observer and compelling writer who has an extraordinary ability to convey powerful emotions without resorting to sentimentality. He is that paragon of the journalist, a true reporter who observes almost everything, writes so that his readers see with his eyes, and allows his readers to find their own emotional responses. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun tells several stories, each of which is powerful in its own way. On one level, the book is a straightforward memoir of Godwin’s many return trips to look after his retired parents in Zimbabwe. As a travel account, the book is full of interest, with details of the complications of getting in and out of that troubled country and fascinating anecdotes about the rigors of everyday survival inside Zimbabwe. On another level, the book is a sober journalistic account of the descent of one of Africa’s most promising countries into poverty and repression under President Robert Mugabe, the nation’s only head of government since independence in 1980. Zimbabwe’s awful decline is one of the most important and ominous developments in

846

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

recent African history, and Godwin’s book is a valuable firsthand document of that decline. There is, however, still more to When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, and that is the author’s moving voyage of rediscovering his father, who kept secret his true origins throughout most of his life. After Godwin learned his father’s secret, he had to reevaluate his views about his own African background and about white settlers in Africa generally. Having been born and raised in Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin knows the country intimately and has a deep affection for it that shines through his objective and almost entirely unsentimental prose. During the eight years and approximately ten return trips that his narrative covers, Zimbabwe fell ever deeper into a steep economic decline. That country had been one of Africa’s most prosperous and self-sufficient nations at the time of its independence in 1980. However, by the mid-1990’s, it had reached the bottom of world scales in virtually every economic and quality-of-life index, becoming what Godwin calls “undisputed leader of the comparative economic decline,” with “the world’s fastest shrinking economy.” By 1996, when Godwin paid the first return visit described in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Zimbabwe’s once strong agricultural industry was nearly ruined; basic goods, such as food and fuel, were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain; modern health services were disappearing; and the population’s life-expectancy rates— particularly among black Africans—were dropping to among the lowest in the world. Meanwhile, hyperinflation was making the national currency nearly worthless, and, as Godwin points out, the country’s foreign reserves were so low that it could not even pay to have new currency printed abroad. These and other factors were causing commerce to regress into barter trade. In some ways, Zimbabwe’s precipitous economic decline resembles those of Weimar Germany during the early 1920’s and post-World War II Hungary, when hyperinflation nearly destroyed those countries’ economies. However, two things make Zimbabwe’s case different from those of the European nations. First is the fact that much of Zimbabwe’s decline is attributable to the systematic dismantling of the national economic structure by Mugabe’s government, which almost seems intent on self-destruction. The second difference is that Zimbabwe lacks the kind of solidly entrenched infrastructure needed for recovery after Mugabe’s regime is gone. This is a tragedy of a large order. Before its independence, Zimbabwe had the most diversified economy, most fully developed infrastructure, and most productive agricultural system of any tropical African nation. This was true despite the fact that the nation made its transition to independence almost directly from a devastating civil war and a decade of living under international economic sanctions that had severely

Born and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Peter Godwin relocated to England and began traveling the world as a foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker. He later became an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His other books include Rhodesians Never Die: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, 1970-1980 (1993; with Ian Hancock) and Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996).

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun / godwin

847

restricted external trade. Indeed, sanctions had actually helped make the country more self-sufficient than it would have been otherwise by forcing it to produce goods it could not import. However, the industrial base built up before independence was created and managed by white settlers—the very people whom Mugabe’s government has targeted for removal. At independence, the population of Zimbabwe included about 220,000 white settlers, most of whom were at least second-generation residents of the country. These people controlled the overwhelming bulk of the modern economy—from factories and mechanized farms to banks and retail stores. Moreover, they also accounted for disproportionate numbers of high-level government bureaucrats, engineers, physicians, and other professionals. By the mid-1990’s, the settler population had dwindled to about half its preindependence level and was significantly shrinking every year. Not surprisingly, the flight of this segment of the population left gaping holes in the economic infrastructure and health services that could not be readily filled by educated black Africans. Indeed, many of Zimbabwe’s most highly educated Africans were fleeing the country to escape political repression. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is a revealing firsthand account of Zimbabwe’s frightening decline. In each chapter in which Godwin describes another return to the country, it is evident that things are worse than they were during his previous visit. Many of his chapters are taken up with moving stories about ousters of the Godwin family’s friends and neighbors from their farms, along with descriptions of his growing concern for his parents’ security, the increasingly desperate condition of unemployed Africans, the runaway prices of ordinary goods, the scarcity of desperately needed medications, the rising crime rates, and the increasingly intense political atmosphere. Although much of Godwin’s attention is focused on his parents and their settler friends, his book is not merely an account of the woes of white Africans. Godwin also devotes a great deal of space to the problems of Zimbabwe’s black citizens, whose material losses may not be as great as those of their white compatriots, but whose suffering is far worse. Many of his most moving passages are about the hardships of black Africans. Although Godwin provides chilling details of Zimbabwe’s decline, what has gone wrong with the country and who is responsible are not his primary concerns. In this book and in his other writings, Godwin always remains an extraordinarily objective observer. It is impossible for him not to be appalled by the conditions he observes in the country he so clearly loves, but When a Crocodile Eats the Sun wastes few words expressing dismay or objections. The book is better seen as a personal exploration of the effects of Zimbabwe’s deterioration on its citizens, particularly his own parents, who steadfastly refused to consider leaving the country. Godwin’s parents had come to Southern Rhodesia from Great Britain after World War II. His father, George, was an engineer with diverse skills, and his mother, Helen, was a medical doctor. One need not look far to understand why people with their professional skills immigrated to Africa when they did. Britain’s settler colonies in Africa attracted thousands of immigrants after World War II. Slow to recover from the war, Britain was to many of its people a cold, dreary, and dank place with an uncertain economic future. Its rapidly developing overseas colonies had much to offer

848

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

British subjects worn out by their homeland’s climate and postwar hardships. They offered sunshine, exotic scenery, and higher standards of living that invariably included cheap servants. Among Britain’s settler colonies, Southern Rhodesia was the crown jewel. It attracted more immigrants than any other territory in Africa, except its much larger southern neighbor, the independent Union of South Africa. Although Southern Rhodesia lay entirely within the tropics, its eastern mountains and high central plateau gave much of it a comparatively salubrious climate. That advantage, along with abundant and fertile agricultural land, rich mineral resources, spectacular scenery, and a settler-friendly colonial regime, made Southern Rhodesia unusually appealing to settlers throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. George Godwin initially went to Nyasaland (now Malawi) but soon relocated to Southern Rhodesia, where he was joined by Helen. There he held a series of important posts in public works departments, and Helen had a long career in medicine, working mostly among black Africans. When the Godwins arrived in the colony, its white population was small, but its members enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy from the imperial government. Since 1923, when Britain had taken formal administrative control of Southern Rhodesia away from the chartered company that had created the colony three decades earlier, the settlers had been virtually self-governing, despite their small numbers. After World War II, they aspired to lead Southern Rhodesia to independence under white rule. To achieve that goal, they needed to increase their own numbers and encouraged more European immigration. Of the three children born to the Godwins in Southern Rhodesia, Peter was the second. He was born in 1957—the same year in which Britain’s Gold Coast in West Africa became the first black African colony to win its independence, as Ghana. It would be nearly a quarter century more until Southern Rhodesia followed suit, but other major changes would happen there during the intervening years. At the moment Peter Godwin was born, Southern Rhodesia was part of the Central African Federation, which loosely united it with its northern neighbors, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Britain had created the federation at the urging of the Southern Rhodesian government in the hope of accelerating the development of all three colonies. However, the African populations of the other territories refused to acquiesce to the domination of Southern Rhodesia’s white settlers and opted to go their own ways. Not long after the federation collapsed in 1963, Northern Rhodesia became independent as Zambia and Nyasaland as Malawi. Britain balked at granting independence to Southern Rhodesia, however, without guarantees that its African peoples would have an equal voice in its future government. That was something that the white settlers were not prepared to concede in the colony that by then they were calling simply Rhodesia. Under Prime Minister Ian Smith, the settler government declared Rhodesia unilaterally independent in late 1965. Peter Godwin was not quite eight years old at that moment. Through the next fifteen years of his life, he would grow up in a political anomaly: a white-ruled state in the midst of a black continent with a vast African majority of its own. Moreover, it was a state that claimed to be independent but which no other state in the world recognized. As African nationalism developed within Rhodesia, the

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun / godwin

849

political dynamics changed. While Britain and the rest of the world pressured Rhodesia to renounce its independence and give full voting rights to all its peoples, the country’s own nationalist movement turned to violent resistance. By the mid-1970’s, the country was immersed in a full-scale civil war that was unresolved until the Rhodesian regime conceded defeat, and Britain formally recognized Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Robert Mugabe, one of the primary leaders of the nationalist movement, has ruled the country ever since. Faced with growing pressure from former freedom fighters for material improvements in their lives, he has tried to satisfy their demands by redistributing the businesses and farms of the long-resented white settlers, awarding the cream of the seized properties to favored henchmen. While these distribution schemes have benefited some Africans, they have also had the pernicious effect of lowering productivity and raising unemployment among vastly larger numbers of people. Godwin grew up in the midst of the tumultuous changes leading up to the civil war, in which he served as a reluctant member of the government’s army—an experience that he calls being on the wrong side of the war. However, that interesting period of his life is not his subject of his present book. He tells the story of his youthful years in his earlier work, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1996), a powerfully evocative memoir that makes an apt companion volume to When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. Indeed, anyone intending to read the latter book would do well to read Mukiwa first. One of the most interesting questions raised in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is why Godwin’s parents so adamantly resisted suggestions that they leave Zimbabwe, despite the fact that the comfortable life they had built for themselves was steadily eroding away. Their closest friends were leaving or dying off, their income was shriveling to next to nothing in the face of hyperinflation, their physical security was diminishing, their political rights were constricting, and all these changes were gradually transforming them into prisoners within their own home. Remarkably, through all these negative developments, they seem to express no bitterness or rancor. A first key to understanding Godwin’s parents can be found in Mukiwa, which recalls their rewarding, earlier life in Africa. A second, more poignant key can be found within When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, in which Godwin recounts his startling discovery that his father was not, as he had always believed, an Englishman. His father was, in fact, a Polish Jew originally named Goldfarb who happened to be studying in England when World War II began. He never returned to his homeland; after serving in the British military during the war and completing his education, he married an Englishwoman, changed his name, and shed his Jewish identity—a transformation made easier by the loss of his mother and sister in the Holocaust and his relocation to Southern Africa. When his son finally asked him why he had concealed his Jewish identity for so long, he answered, “Why? . . . for my children. For you. So that you could be safe. So that what happened to them,” he nods toward the photo of his mother and his sister, “would never happen to you. Because it will never really go away, this thing. It goes underground for a generation or two, but always reemerges.”

850

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The younger Godwin uses the middle chapters of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun to recall his reactions to the news of his Jewish heritage and to explore his father’s early history. He does not dwell on the subject of his Jewishness, but the revelation also changed his thinking about his own place in Africa as a white man. Parallels between the condition of Jews in Europe during the 1930’s and that of white settlers in Africa seven decades later are too obvious to require overt comment. Godwin’s father had been driven from his original homeland because of his ethnic identity; he was clearly unwilling to let that happen a second time. It was thus entirely appropriate that he died in Zimbabwe and not in yet another alien land. R. Kent Rasmussen

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 20. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 3 (February 1, 2007): 89. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 20 (December 20, 2007): 30-36. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 17, 2007): 21. Newsweek 149, no. 23 (June 4, 2007): 69. People 67, no. 17 (April 30, 2007): 51. The Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 2007, p. 29. Washington Monthly 39, no. 7 (July/August, 2007): 54-55.

851

THE WHISPERERS Private Life in Stalin’s Russia Author: Orlando Figes (1959) Publisher: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt (New York). 740 pp. $35.00 Type of work: History Time: 1917 to the early twenty-first century Locale: Russia and the Soviet Union An account of the private lives of ordinary Russians that focuses on the totalitarian Soviet Union from the Revolution of 1917 until Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 Principal personages: Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator, 1928-1953 Konstantin Simonov, Soviet writer Zhenia Laskina, Konstantin’s first wife Aleksei Simonov, their son Valentina Serova, actress, second wife of Konstantin

In The Whisperers, Orlando Figes, author of the prize-winning A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996) and Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002), explores the private lives of mostly ordinary Russians from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and beyond. Many studies of Soviet Russia focus on the Communist Party leadership, or they examine particular groups within Soviet society who were, for example, victims of the regime, such as the kulaks or the supposedly wealthier peasants, or those incarcerated in the tentacles of the gulag prison system. Figes attempts to concentrate on specific individuals and their families who were caught up in the Soviet utopian dream, or nightmare, tracing what he calls “the moral sphere” of families through several generations. Approximately twenty-five million Russians were repressed in the quarter century after 1928, when Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union. Many were executed, others sent to the gulag, others to “special settlements” to be worked as slave labor, and still others were deported to far corners of the Soviet empire. Figes claims that one person for every 1.5 families was subjected to such repression. However, it was not only those officially repressed who were affected; other family members were affected by the stigma attached to the “guilty” and were forced to hide their familial connections by creating fictional backgrounds and by hiding family histories from their children and grandchildren. Even after being released from confinement, former inmates were often unable to restore the wholeness of their families; parents and children as well as wives and husbands remained estranged for decades, often until their deaths.

852

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

One consequence was the resulting conformity by Soviet citizens to the regime’s demands. Fear was one cause. Most Russians knew someone—a family member, a friend, an acquaintance—who had been arrested, and even ordinary citizens kept a suitcase packed under the assumption that at any time they could be arrested. Also, in totalitarian states like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, the entire society was conditioned to give unquestioning alle giance to the state as represented by its leader. How deep the conditioning went varied, and individuals might conform outwardly but not inwardly. To survive in that environment, where most Russians lived in close proximity, sharing communal kitchens, common living areas, and thin wall partitions, whispering among family members and between friends was necessary for survival. No work that encompasses several decades and millions of people can be exhaustive, and The Whisperers only samples a small fraction of the total Soviet population. Reluctant to rely on the memoirs of Russia’s intelligentsia, in part because dissident intellectuals do not fully represent the ordinary Russian, the author relied on contemporary diaries and letters and particularly on oral testimony. The recipient of several monetary grants, Figes employed experts who interviewed numerous Russians, usually more than once, on their personal experiences and their family memories. He then chose what he considered to be a cross section of Russian society. The Whisperers begins in the period of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the costly civil war that followed. Vladimir Ilich Lenin died in 1924, with Stalin emerging as the new leader by 1928. The Bolsheviks demanded the abolition of private life for the collective good, which necessitated the destruction of the bourgeoisie family structure, including affection between parents and children. New collective values were to be inculcated by public schools and youth organizations such as the pioneers and the Komsomol, whose young members were encouraged to denounce their parents. To be excluded because of family background, as were the kulaks, could bring intense shame to a child. Some families tried to maintain their older beliefs, as in religion, and conformed outwardly, but parents kept their traditional beliefs private even from their children, who were encouraged to adopt the ideology and practices of the Soviet state. If the model for repression and the practice of whispering began in the 1920’s, it became more extensive by the 1930’s, with Stalin’s Five-Year Plan for rapid industrial development and the transformation of Soviet agriculture into giant, collective farms. The poorest peasants were supposedly equivalent to the urban proletariat, while the richer peasants, or kulaks, were its class enemies. The term “kulak” was imprecise and subject to abuse. The kulaks were generally the harder-working and most Before accepting a chair in history at London University’s Birkbeck College, Orlando Figes was a lecturer at Cambridge. His book A People’s Tragedy (1996), about the Russian Revolution, was awarded the Wolfson History Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He also writes for The New York Review of Books and other publications.

The Whisperers / figes

853

productive members of the community, and collectivization led to extensive famine. Under the slogan of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” at least ten million kulaks were displaced. Many were tortured, many imprisoned in “special settlements” or forced labor camps, and millions died. The new collectives were failures, ruining Soviet agriculture for generations. Those who survived became “whisperers,” inventing new identities and thus leading double lives, always fearful of being discovered. There was a retreat from the rigors of the Five-Year Plan in 1932. Consumer goods were emphasized, but the beneficiaries were mainly the expanding number of Soviet bureaucrats who were replacing the old Bolshevik cadres. For most there continued to be shortages of consumer goods, and living space was at a premium, with a dozen people inhabiting two or three rooms. For almost everyone, party members and nonmembers alike, it was whispering as usual. Fearful about losing control to elements in the Communist Party, in 1937 Stalin instituted a purge that brought about the arrest and imprisonment of at least 1.3 million people, about half of whom were subsequently executed. Probably one-fifth of all office workers officially informed on their colleagues. Many informers were opportunists and feared being arrested, but others fervently believed in the purge campaign, having unquestioning faith in Stalin. One who did was Konstantin Simonov, an aspiring writer in the late 1930’s and the central personage among the many hundreds who populate The Whisperers. Many turned their backs on friends and relatives who were arrested, refusing even to mention their names in the confines of their own family. Children were taken away, given new names, and sent to Dickensian-type orphanages, while others survived on the streets. Born in 1915, Simonov’s mother was of aristocratic descent, and his father was a general in the czarist army during World War I who later fled to Poland. His mother refused to leave the motherland, and later married another military officer, the son of a railroad worker. Because of his problematic background, Simonov pursued a vocational education in order to appear to be a member of the proletariat, but this move was not just an attempt to hide his old identity: Like many others, Simonov was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet dream. When his stepfather was arrested, Simonov assumed it was just a mistake, and he remained an ardent Stalinist even as his aunts were sent into internal exile, with one eventually executed and another dying in a labor camp. In the mid-1930’s, he turned to writing, composing a series of poems glorifying Soviet accomplishments, and was admitted to the state’s Gorky Literary Institute. In 1939, he married Zhenia Laskina, a daughter of Samuil Laskin, a nonreligious Soviet Jew who supported the revolution because of the increased opportunities it supposedly gave the Jewish community. Zhenia gave birth to a son, Aleksei. As the threat of war loomed in the late 1930’s, Stalin agreed to a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, an agreement that was a great shock to fervent antifascist Stalinists like Simonov. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet armies suffered disastrous defeats, in large part due to Stalin’s purges. However, Stalin was still the Soviet icon; his decisions were unchallenged, and when he stressed Russian patriotism rather than Soviet ideology, the Russian people rallied to their

854

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

country. Simonov’s marriage to Zhenia failed, and in 1943 he married a film actress, Valentina Serova. By then, Simonov was a major literary figure, largely because of the fame of his poem “Wait for Me,” a work that captured the spirit and sacrifice of wartime. Written for Valentina, it was a personal love poem, far from the Socialist Realism demanded by the party, but “Wait for Me” was used by the government in boosting morale. Simonov received the Stalin Prize in 1942 and 1943, becoming a rich member of the ruling elite and a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army. Patriotism united the Russians, but the victory over Germany came at great cost: Twentysix million Russians lost their lives, of which two-thirds were civilians, and during the war more than a million citizens were shot, imprisoned, or served in penal work battalions. Stalin refused to reform the Soviet system. Victorious generals were written out of the historical record, potential opponents were imprisoned and executed, and economic reconstruction relied on forced labor: By 1949, there were 2.4 million people in the gulag. A new elite of engineers and managers emerged, less ideological than the old Bolsheviks, and there were new educational opportunities, but most still hid their nonproletariat backgrounds. In 1946, during the early Cold War, Simonov visited the United States, where he was something of a celebrity because of his writings. He became a high official in the Soviet Writers’ Union, reaping material rewards, but he had to serve the state in propaganda activities, during which writers and composers had their works repressed or censured. An anti-Jewish campaign was launched after the founding of Israel, a campaign Simonov reluctantly supported. The Laskins, the family of Simonov’s first wife, had one of their other daughters sentenced to twentyfive years at hard labor. Even Simonov, the loyal Stalinist, was accused of being a Jew. He survived, but Stalin did not, dying of a stroke in March, 1953. Most Soviet citizens, including Simonov and members of the Laskin family, were shocked and depressed by the dictator’s death, not knowing what might follow. In the gulag there was more joy, and often uprisings when prisoners were not immediately released. In the two years after Stalin’s death, only four percent of the prisoners were freed, but many of those who were allowed to leave the camps were often unable to overcome the psychological and physical damage that they had endured, and family relationships never healed. In spite of all that they had experienced, there were those who continued to believe in the correctness of the Stalinist regime’s actions. It was not until 1956 that Simonov began to reject his Stalinist past. He was shocked by Nikita S. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in that year, a turning point in Soviet history. Even then, as editor of the journal Novy mir, he refused to publish Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago (1957). A few began to question the Soviet structure, but most remained cautious and cowed. Simonov divorced Valentina in 1956, marrying Larisa Zhadova, an art historian. After adjusting to Stalin’s death, he reunited with his son, but Aleksei was quicker to embrace the dissident reform movement than Simonov, who more easily adapted to the conservative policies of Leonid Brezhnev than to the Khrushchev era of mild reform. World War II had been the defining event in his life, and history was passing him by. He spent the last decade of his life—he died in 1979—collecting memoirs, diaries, and letters from the war,

The Whisperers / figes

855

increasingly regretting his complicity in Stalin’s rule. His literary reputation declined with the demise of the Soviet Union. Figes notes that myth and memory were intertwined in post-Stalin Russia. Much was repressed by both the victims and the victimizers. Memoirs appeared, often masking, consciously or not, the reality of experiences. There was even nostalgia for Stalin after the fall of the Soviet Union that coexisted with a fear that the time of whispers might again return. The Whisperers is a groundbreaking work, with its reliance on oral history, portraying as it does the costs of totalitarianism on ordinary people. It also implicitly suggests that authoritarianism in Russia might not have permanently ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eugene Larson

Review Sources The Atlantic Monthly 300, no. 5 (December, 2007): 115. Booklist 104, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 10. The Economist 385 (October 20, 2007): 115-116. Foreign Affairs 86, no. 6 (November/December, 2007): 197. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 16 (August 15, 2007): 836. New Statesman 137 (December 10, 2007): 54. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 25, 2007): 26. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 29 (July 23, 2007): 53.

856

WHITE WALLS Collected Stories Author: Tatyana Tolstaya (1951) Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and Antonina W. Bouis Publisher: New York Review Books (New York). 404 pp. $16.95 Type of work: Short fiction Time: The Soviet era Locale: The Soviet Union A collection of twenty-four stories, including all those from the author’s first two books, as well as previously uncollected stories It is impossible to ignore the family heritage that Tatyana Tolstaya’s name evokes. She is the granddaughter of the Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy, who wrote historical novels about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and the great-grandniece of the even more famous author of Voyna i mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886), Leo Tolstoy. However, as many of the best of her stories indicate, her true literary ancestors are Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin, for her tales are tightly built explorations of the disillusionments of little people, not the expansive socialist realism of her grandfather, nor the epic history of her great-granduncle. There are few references in her short fiction either to the nobility of the pre-Soviet era or to the political upheavals that have occurred in the Soviet Union since the revolution. For the most part, she avoids the lengthy political rhetoric common to earlier Soviet writers, insisting that she is glad Mikhail Gorbachev does not seem to care about literature and therefore has no desire to control it; she says she asks no more from a political leader. Her one political conflict has not been with the Russian government but with the Moscow Writers’ Union, which refused to admit her, even after the success of her first book, because she dared to criticize one of the union’s most beloved authors. She has since been admitted and has called the controversy an awful joke. Tolstaya was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1951 and earned a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, after which she worked for several years at a Moscow publishing firm. She began publishing her own stories in the mid-1980’s in literary magazines. An English translation of her first collection, On the Golden Porch, was published in 1989 to great acclaim. The original Russia edition, Na zolotom kryl’tse sideli, published in 1987, sold out immediately in Moscow bookstores. An English translation of her second collection, Sleepwalker in a Fog, appeared in 1992. Her first novel, Kys (2001; The Slynx), was published in English translation in 2002.

White Walls / tolstaya

857

The tone of most of Tolstaya’s stories is es tablished by the opening tale in White Walls, Tatyana Tolstaya’s first collection “Loves Me, Loves Me Not,” in which a child of short stories established her as tells how she hates her governess, preferring one of the leading Russian writers of instead her beloved Nanny. Told from the lit- the Mikhail Gorbachev era. She tle girl’s point of view, the story mixes fan- taught at several U.S. universities tasy and reality, as a child, who is learning during the late 1980’s and 1990’s how frightening and hostile the world can be, and has hosted a Russian cultural interview television show. would be most apt to do. The lushly lyrical “Okkervil River” ultimately undercuts the romanticism of an aging bachelor named Simeonov, who listens to old records of love songs by a singer named Vera Vasilevna. The story ends predictably, but nonetheless pathetically, with his discovery that she has turned into a vulgarian, white, huge, and rouged, paid court to by other aging suitors. Simeonov tries to console himself by insisting that the Vera Vasilevna he has loved must have died and been eaten by this horrible old woman. He continues to escape his dreary life by losing himself in the divine voice of his dream woman. Similarly in “The Circle,” Vassily Mikhailovich, a man of sixty, for whom fur coats get heavy and stairs get steep, longs for a six-winged seraph or some other feathery creature to come and carry him away from his drab and loveless life. Like Simeonov in “Okkervil River,” he too dreams of another woman whom he has transformed in his imagination, a woman named Isolde, who he hopes can bring him out of the cramped little pencil case called the universe, a woman who can shatter the ordinary world like an eggshell. However, what he ultimately discovers is a horriblelooking, wrinkled old hag, blowing beer foam on her cloth boots. Like many of Tolstaya’s characters, Vassily Mikhailovich is a victim of the relentlessness of time and the sadness of missed chances and misplaced romantic fantasies. In “Peters,” a librarian fantasizes about all the lovely young women he will impress once he learns the German language, but when he overhears a woman call him a wimp and a sissy, he feels he has been run over by a trolley and sticks his head in an oven, only to discover that the gas has been off all day because of repairs. Seeing life as a chain of dreams and a charlatan’s store, he furiously considers killing the women who have tricked, seduced, and abandoned him, thus revenging all the fat and tonguetied men who are locked in dark closets and never invited to the party. Accidentally, as if in passing, he marries a cold, hard woman with big feet and, finally, wanting nothing and regretting nothing, he looks out his window and smiles gratefully at treacherous, mocking, meaningless, and ultimately marvelous, life. The same disillusionment occurs to young boys in Tolstaya’s stories. In “Date with a Bird,” young Petya, spending the summer in the country, fantasizes about a neighbor woman named Tamila, a beautiful teller of fabulous stories with a magical name who lives on a blue glass mountain with impenetrable walls. He dreams that when he grows up, he will marry her and lock his hated Uncle Borya in a high tower. However, as might be expected in a Tolstaya story, the dream ends when he finds his

858

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

uncle in bed with his beloved Tamila. As usual in Tolstaya’s stories about children, “Date with a Bird” combines fairy-tale motifs with gritty reality in an indissoluble way. Tolstaya’s women are not immune to hopeless fantasies either. In “Sweet Shura,” Alexandra Ernestovna, now in her nineties, having survived three husbands, wonders still if she had not made a mistake sixty years before in staying with one of her husbands and leaving her lover standing on a train platform. The narrator of the story ponders about the passing of time, how the invisible layer of years get thicker, and thinks there must be a door somewhere way back there on that fateful day when Alexandra decided not to leave. The narrator holds on to the futile hope that even though everything must have been shut up, a crack in some old house was missed and that if one pulls back the floorboards in the attic one will find a passage to the past. The stories included in White Walls from Tolstaya’s second collection, Sleepwalker in a Fog, focus on some of the same defeated dreamers as in her first. However, her mistaken sense that she must expand her stories to short novel length, complete with numerous extraneous details and clever asides, results in a weaker group of stories overall. Tolstaya’s first collection was so well received because of her stories’ tight lyrical structure and folktale sense of universality. In this second collection, she tries to show she can sustain her fiction over a longer span, but with limited success. The title story is an obvious example. “Sleepwalker in a Fog,” appropriately titled for Tolstaya’s typical character, begins with the kind of hopeless fantasist that she drew with such poignant success in her first book. Denisov, who is at the midpoint of his life, begins to think he should make some contribution; he tries inventing things, but nothing gets invented; he tries writing poems, but they refuse to be written. He finally begins writing a treatise on the impossibility of the existence of the continent of Australia, for it seems so utterly improbable to him, and he hopes by proving the country’s nonexistence he can find his own path to immortality. The character Denisov is a clever invention, typical of a figure out of Nikolai Gogol or Vladimir Nabokov, certainly suitable for a brief exploration of absurdity and the grotesque, but Tolstaya belabors his silly fantasies of making a name for himself for more than forty pages until the reader grows quite tired of the satiric fun she makes of him. In the longest story in the collection, “Limpopo,” which runs to sixty pages, Tolstaya turns more completely to comic satire, moving even closer to the discursive novel form. The rambling tale focuses on Judy, a young, black African woman who comes to the Soviet Union to study veterinary medicine and falls in love with an intellectual and idealistic young poet named Lyonechka, a union opposed by the poet’s Uncle Zhenya. However, when Zhenya, who is appointed to a diplomatic post in an African country, is torn apart by a wild animal, other relatives hope that Judy and Lyonechka will have a child who will become a new Alexander Pushkin. The story ends with the narrator, largely responsible for the comic tone of the overlong tale, who takes Uncle Zhenya’s widow to the grave of Pushkin. Aunt Zina whispers that if the couple had made a little more effort, the new Pushkin would have been born, but the narrator tells her they had better leave before the police chase them off.

White Walls / tolstaya

859

Tolstaya is more effective when she returns to the shorter and tighter structure of her earlier stories in which the life of one of her typically misguided and underappreciated dreamers is created by poignant poetry. “Most Beloved” shows how brilliantly Tolstaya writes when she sticks to the lyrical short story form that she does best. The story centers on Zhenechka, a governess who has spent her entire life teaching Russian grammar to young children, but time, the constant enemy of so many of Tolstaya’s characters, passes, and she finds herself more and more alone, ignored by both her relatives and the students she has so lovingly instructed. The narrator describes her as a woman of honesty, simplicity, and truth but acknowledges that she has a mouth not made for kissing, a woman with a soul like a smooth, straight pipe, with no dead ends or secret places. Nina, a doctor in the story “The Poet and the Muse,” is convinced that as she nears the age of thirty-five she needs a wild, true love, an animal passion. During an epidemic of Japanese flu, she meets and cares for a frail young poet named Grishunya, whom she later marries and decides to transform into a successful man of the real world. She throws out the poems she thinks are not decent for a married man to write and urges him to write things that will make it possible for him to publish a book, hounding him until he dies. The few uncollected stories included in White Walls also return to the tightly compressed structure and lyrical style of Tolstaya’s earlier works. The title story is a lyrical piece about a summer house owned by a family, who in 1997 decide to scrape off all the old wallpaper and repaper it. They find layers of old newspapers charting the history of Soviet life since the revolution, ripping off layers of time until they get down to the naked boards. They then replace it all with plain, white wallpaper with no pattern, nothing superfluous, just welcoming, white walls. Thus, metaphorically, they remove the last traces of the previous owner that had covered the walls for half a century, accepting the fact that his history is no longer needed in the new bleached and disinfected world in which they live. Charles E. May

Review Sources Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 2 (January 15, 2007): 49. Library Journal 132, no. 7 (April 15, 2007): 80. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 6 (February 5, 2007): 39.

860

WHY KEROUAC MATTERS The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think) Author: John Leland (1959) Publisher: Viking Press (New York). 205 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Literary history, literary criticism, literary biography Leland presents a compelling argument for the enduring value of Jack Kerouac’s novel as a guide to growing up and leading a responsible life Principal personages: Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the author of On the Road (1957) Neal Cassady (1926-1968), his friend and road companion

John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters is an attempt to come to terms with the legacy of Jack Kerouac on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece On the Road. This is a necessary task. While Kerouac’s place is firmly ensconced in the American popular imagination as the leading figure of the Beat generation, his literary reputation is much less certain. His books are far more often taught as cultural or historical documents than as works of art. Leland believes that Kerouac’s work needs to be taken seriously. He wants to challenge the popularly held notion that On the Road (1957) is an ode to escapism, with its two protagonists prolonging their adolescence in a wild search for kicks. Instead, Leland argues that Kerouac’s most famous novel is a story about growing up, a quest for a meaningful, responsible life. To do this, Leland provides an insightful rereading of On the Road. Each chapter of his book is a meditation on a lesson to bedrawn from the novel. Along the way, he examines Kerouac’s life, his famous friendships with Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and the origins of the legendary Beat movement. The effect of this is to distinguish the fleshand-blood Kerouac from the hipster image that he came increasingly to resent. Kerouac in Leland’s pages is a writer far more complex and interesting than the icon he came to be. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 to working-class French Canadian parents. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic, and a mystical religiosity would color all of Kerouac’s writings. Athletics gave him a ticket out of his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. He won a football scholarship to Columbia University, but an injury sidelined his career on the gridiron. Then came the war, and service in the merchant marine. Back at Columbia, Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together they became the core of a group of literary friends alienated from Middle American values and eager to explore new artistic forms. Kerouac began work on his first novel, The Town and the City, an autobiographical work that was published in

Why Kerouac Matters / leland

861

1950. In 1946, Kerouac met Neal Cassady, a young drifter from Colorado with an insatia- John Leland writes for The New ble appetite for life. Together they embarked York Times and lives in New York on a series of road trips across the United City. He is the author of Hip: States and down to Mexico City. Cassady was The History (2004). a con man and a thief, but his irrepressible energy and unmediated awe at the wonder of life made him an example and inspiration for Kerouac. Given the name Dean Moriarty, he became the emotional center of On the Road. The myth of the origins of On the Road is that in April, 1951, Kerouac sat down, swallowed some Benzedrine, and in three weeks typed out the novel. Kerouac did hammer out a draft of the novel in a frenzied burst of writing, fueled by coffee, not amphetamines. This, however, was the culmination of years of pondering and experimenting with drafts of a picaresque tale of two friends traveling the country. Kerouac first began to work on what became On the Road in 1948; he spent the next three years searching for the right characters and the right voice for his novel. It was a letter from Cassady that finally crystallized for Kerouac the qualities that he wanted to capture: Cassady’s breathless, rapturous embrace of experience, expressed in prose that had the immediacy of stream of consciousness yet an evocative descriptive power that captured the sad beauty of life. Kerouac hammered out his book onto sheets of tracing paper that he taped together into a great roll. It was this unwieldy manuscript that he carried to his publisher Robert Giroux of Harcourt Brace. Giroux read and rejected the book. Giroux’s refusal of the novel devastated Kerouac. He believed his novel was the best writing that he had done, better than anything that he had seen published that year. After a short period of demoralization, Kerouac began rewriting the book in an even more unconventional form that eventually became Visions of Cody. For the next six years, Kerouac wrote more books that nobody wanted to publish. By the time a revised version of On the Road was finally published in 1957, Kerouac had been living with it for nine years. He was a thirty-five-year-old writer, with one other published book to his credit, who lived with his mother. Success had not come easily to him. When it arrived, seemingly overnight, he would not know how to deal with sudden celebrity. Leland observes that the long gestation of On the Road left Kerouac disoriented when he was discovered by an inquisitive media. The book was a product of the immediate postwar years, the America of Harry S. Truman, a world before interstate highways, rock and roll, and the pervasive influence of television. The drivers bureaus, small-town diners, and hobo customs that he described had been consigned to obsolescence by streamlined roadways dominated by sleek, tail-finned automobiles, Howard Johnsons, and new fast-food outlets. On the Road was already a period piece when it was published. Kerouac was never comfortable appearing on television to promote his book. He was disgusted when the media labeled him “the King of the Beats” and tried to make him into a lonely voice of a new lost generation. He did not understand or have any sympathy with the facile marketing that merged “beat” and “Sputnik” to create a new subculture of “beatniks,” goateed, bongo-playing, beret-

862

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

topped hep cats that were soon parodied by Bob Denver’s character of Maynard G. Krebs on the situational comedy The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The mass media won in its appropriation of Jack Kerouac. The man disappeared behind a myth. Kerouac became an icon of cool. On the Road became a talismanic accessory for wannabe rebels. Leland wants to rescue Kerouac and his novel from the hype. He does this by exploring themes in the book that have long been hiding in plain sight, obscured by the effervescent energy of the story. At the center of the book is a friendship. Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s fictionalization of himself, meets Dean Moriarty/Cassady, and the pair set out on what become journeys of discovery. They are seeking many things. It is Leland’s conviction that many of the answers that they find are fundamentally traditional. In the original scroll version of On the Road, Kerouac has Sal Paradise declare: “I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle-class philosophy out of it.” This passage was dropped from the published book. For Leland, this credo reflects the real Kerouac. It is notable that most of the wild times in On the Road are associated with Moriarty/Cassady. Kerouac’s alter ego is much more subdued and reflective. While hardly a paragon of bourgeois rectitude, willingly going along with the mad antics of his friend, Sal Paradise consistently yearns for something more stable and enduring in his life. Kerouac was highly critical of the glossy, consumerist culture that emerged following the war, and he worried about the parlous nature of life in the shadow of the atomic bomb. What he never did was reject the hard-working, religious world that he had known in his youth. In the novel, Sal Paradise always ends up returning to the home of his aunt, just as in reality Kerouac lived for years with his mother. In some ways, the paradoxical message of On the Road is that you can go home again. The novel can be read as a quest to capture an idealized domesticity. An unfulfilled mission of Sal and Dean is to find Dean’s long-lost father, who has become an alcoholic hobo. Over and again, they try to create families for themselves. Dean does this literally with his marriages, even becoming a father. Sal, in an extended passage of the novel, settles down with a Mexican American woman named Terry and her son. He works picking cotton and enjoys for a time the sensation of being a breadwinner for his improvised family. Sal and Dean see each other as brothers. Inside various cars, and with various companions, they form a sort of family on wheels. The tragedy for Kerouac, as for Cassady, was that they could not live up to their ideal. In the book, Dean routinely abandons his wives and children. Sal leaves Terry and her son behind. Dean and Sal even betray each other. Dean ditches Sal while he is sick in Mexico City. Sal ultimately turns his back on Dean on a cold street in New York City. Despite this, Kerouac ends the novel with Sal meeting his second wife. He does not record that the marriage broke up some months later. Kerouac’s hope of settling down becomes a triumphant dream in the final pages of On the Road. Sal gives up the road for the love of a good woman. The fact that it was not true does not sully the aspiration.

Why Kerouac Matters / leland

863

In his own way, Kerouac was deeply religious. Raised a Catholic, he flirted with Buddhism, and ended up an idiosyncratic Catholic mystic. A religious sensibility permeates On the Road. It is often overlooked by people more interested in the partying and driving. In what would become a famous photograph of Kerouac and members of the San Francisco Beat literary renaissance, he wore a crucifix conspicuously outside his shirt. When the photograph was reproduced widely after he became famous, the crucifix was routinely airbrushed out. Such an open display of religious feeling did not fit with the media’s conception of “the King of the Beats.” In the novel, Kerouac repeatedly resorts to religious imagery. Sal sees God in the sky and in the faces of Mexican peasants. He comes to regard Dean as a kind of mad saint, a “HOLY GOOF,” a figure having the same effect on his circle as Fyodor Dostoevski’s “idiot.” Sal and Dean agree that there is no reason to doubt the existence of God. Part of the intoxication the characters experience on their journeys is a result of their openness to the beauty and miraculousness of Creation. Kerouac and Cassady shared a Roman Catholic vocabulary and ethos that enabled them to easily communicate their spiritual insights. Their view of the world, and that of On the Road, is essentially sacramental. The cross-country quests were a form of worship. Leland believes that in grappling with such themes, Kerouac was endeavoring to embrace, not escape, adulthood. He sees On the Road as a bildungsroman, a comingof-age story. Profoundly traditional at heart, always his mother’s son, Kerouac wanted to have what the media image-makers made it seem that he wanted to escape. He failed to achieve his dream. This and the grotesque misrepresentations by the media ate away at him. He drank himself to death at the age of forty-seven. In his last years, he was back with his mother and a caretaker wife, grumbling about hippies and praising conservative commentator William F. Buckley. He had long since left behind the counterculture that acclaimed him as an inspiration. Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters reminds readers that Jack Kerouac was much more than a rebel poet. He addressed fundamental issues in a way that can continue to speak long after most books published in his day have grown dated and stale. Leland’s book is a fitting tribute to a writer whom he admires deeply. Daniel P. Murphy

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 22 (August 1, 2007): 25. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 12 (June 15, 2007): 593. Library Journal 132, no. 13 (August 1, 2007): 87-88. National Review 59, no. 17 (September 24, 2007): 59-60. The New York Times Book Review 156 (August 19, 2007): 13. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 25 (June 18, 2007): 46. USA Today, August 21, 2007, p. D1.

864

THE WORLD WITHOUT US Author: Alan Weisman (1947) Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (New York). 336 pp. $24.95 Type of work: Environment, natural history, science, sociology Weisman imagines an Earth from which all people suddenly vanish and traces what might then happen to the homes, factories, and farms left abandoned, as well as the natural world as it begins to regenerate and reshape itself for post-human existence In 2005, journalist Alan Weisman published in Discover magazine an article titled “Earth Without People,” in which he speculated on what might happen to the structures supporting human civilization if the humans who built and maintain them were suddenly to vanish. In researching the article, however, he discovered there was far more material than he could use—enough, in fact, for a whole book, and so he began work on The World Without Us. In the book’s brief introduction, he addresses and dismisses the nagging issue of how such a human disappearance might occur. Among the means he suggests are “a Homo sapiens-specific virus—natural or diabolically nano-engineered,” “some misanthropic evil wizard,” or even that “Jesus . . . or space aliens rapture us away, either to our heavenly glory or to a zoo somewhere across the galaxy.” His point, of course, is that, though people may be troubled by the specter of the sudden departure of their entire species, in the end, the means by which people might vanish from the planet makes no difference to the elaborate thought experiment that follows. What matters is merely that readers of the book accept its initial premise: Humans are here one day and gone the next. Weisman is deeply fascinated by the natural world, and it is there that The World Without Us begins, in Poland and Belarus’s Biauowie/a Puszcza, the last old-growth primeval forest in Europe. Only a tiny fragment remains of this forest, which once swathed large sections of the continent, and Weisman ponders the question of to what degree, given sufficient time without human interference—say, five hundred years— the old forest might return. In a later chapter, the author asks a similar question about the potential for reforestation in Africa, were the agricultural lands that now fragment the continent left untended for a few generations. Despite the tantalizing suggestion of these chapters, however, this is not a book that dwells on those portions of the planet still relatively untouched by human endeavor, nor does it suggest that a posthuman world would closely resemble the prehuman one. Rather, the majority of the book takes a hard look at those parts of Earth people now inhabit, stripped suddenly of them. Much of what it reveals, therefore, revolves around what would become of human artifacts, from plastic bags to skyscrapers.

The World Without Us / weisman

865

Perhaps the single artifact that carries the most emotional weight for people is their Journalist Alan Weisman’s articles houses, so Weisman briefly explains how rel- have appeared in many of America’s atively quickly all the houses on the planet leading magazines and have been would dissolve were it not for the constant heard on public radio. His previous maintenance their owners bestow upon them. books include An Echo in My Blood From here, he moves on to the single most (1999), Gaviotas: A Village to discussed chapter in the book, in which he de- Reinvent the World (1998), and La Frontera: The United States Border scribes the process by which nature—albeit a with Mexico (1986). nature changed by now-absent humanity— would reclaim New York City. Weisman chooses New York for his focus because, as he writes, its “sheer titanic presence . . . resists efforts to picture it wasting away,” but wasting away is precisely what is described, beginning with the flooding of subway tunnels that would relatively quickly undermine the foundations of roads and buildings above, even while cycles of freezing and thawing, unmitigated by human-made heat sources, would weaken these structures still further. Meanwhile, as centuries of toxins slowly flushed out of the soil, native plants would return in some numbers, but probably not sufficient to hold their own against an invasion of exotic plant species escaping from gardens and parks. Coyotes and bears would be among the original fauna able to return and take up residence in a disintegrating Manhattan. Interestingly, rats and roaches, which seem to so many city dwellers the most hearty of species, would not fare so well. As Weisman points out, it is people’s refuse and central heating that allow these creatures to thrive now; soon after humankind’s departure, their numbers would plummet to the brink of extinction in New York’s harsh climate. Leaving the city behind, later chapters of the book look to other evidence of human habitation, some of which would evaporate more readily than others, but none of which would fail to leave behind evidence of humanity’s onetime dominion over the landscape. The human-cleared land of farms would, for the most part, be gradually replaced by the forests, grasslands, or swamps that were themselves tamed to make way for human agriculture. In intensively farmed areas, though, this reabsorption would be slowed considerably by decades’ worth of residue from agrochemicals. Even more problematic for an Earth recovering from the shock of human habitation would be the remnants of the petrochemical and nuclear industries. Indeed, both petroleum processing plants and nuclear weapons and power facilities require the presence of human monitors to keep their toxins contained. When lack of monitoring and maintenance eventually led to the collapse of these structures, the resulting explosions and leaks could leave behind highly contaminated zones that would remain nearly free of life for hundreds or even thousands of years. One of the more chilling chapters in The World Without Us examines a phenomenon of relatively recent vintage: humanity’s ever-increasing reliance on plastics. It is sobering to read Weisman’s enumeration of the myriad ways modern humans employ this substance unheard of until the middle of the twentieth century, from containers to furniture to a cosmetic ingredient. The problem with plastics, though, is not their

866

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

ubiquity but their longevity. Most plastics do not break down into component chemicals that can then be reabsorbed by nature. They simply break apart into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic, which become toxins and choking hazards for smaller and smaller creatures on land or, more often, in the ocean, where most of the plastic that humans lose or throw away eventually ends up. The substance has not been around long enough for anyone to know when it might genuinely degrade, but the best scientific guesses assume hundreds or thousands of years. A world without people, then, would be drowning in waste plastics for a long while, even those watery parts of the world where humans have never lived. In addition to examining the detritus of human societies, Weisman also devotes chapters to topics whose connection to humanity is less immediately evident. He devotes many pages, for instance, to a discussion of the evolution of large animals in Africa, which, he posits, remain abundant because they evolved alongside humans and developed strategies for either avoidance of or coexistence with them. A similar variety of large animals—both herbivores and predators—existed in North America at one time, but the extinction of many of them coincides rather neatly with the arrival of humans on this continent, suggesting habitat destruction and hunting played a hand in their demise. While these discussions seem to be less about a world after human habitation than before it, Weisman does return to his principle theme. He stresses that even if humans were gone, much of the earth would not return to its prehuman state, in part because people have killed off so many of the creatures (such as the North American megafauna) that were crucial to maintaining the ecosystem before humans arrived. A whole chapter of The World Without Us is devoted to birds and the surprising variety of ways in which they are killed, from habitat loss to hunting, from high-tension power lines to predation by pet cats. Though extinction is a phenomenon that long predates humanity, people have contributed to the rapid loss of many species, particularly of large animals and birds. Of course, once gone, these animals would remain gone, even in a world without people. Though people do not inhabit the book’s imaginary world, they inhabit its pages in the form of the passionate scientists, ecologists, and others who serve as Weisman’s guides to his imagined human-free world to come. It is their stories—their passions, worries, and sometimes disagreements with one another—that animate The World Without Us and create much of its appeal and readability. The book is also brimming with fascinating facts and accidental case studies that keep readers turning pages. Weisman explains how the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, a swath of land bound by barbed wire and heavy armaments, has been gradually returning to nature since the end of the Korean War in 1953. He also visits Varosha, Cyprus, a town suddenly abandoned during civil strife in 1974, and describes its state of decay after more than thirty years without human caretaking. Parts of the book are written in a purely speculative, subjunctive mood, with plenty of words like “might” and “perhaps” reminding the reader of the provisional and exploratory nature of Weisman’s project. In many places, however, the author writes in simple present tense. In the chapter on New York, for instance, he writes that after a few years “pipes burst all

The World Without Us / weisman

867

over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate.” There is undeniable power in that straightforward language suggesting not a possibility but a reality. Though Weisman seems to begin by taking on the scientist’s role of the dispassionate observer, meaning only to inquire into an important question, his objectivity is short-lived. Fairly early in The World Without Us, another agenda begins to emerge in tandem with the stated one. Between frequent asides about climate change and laments about the residue of manufacturing and a disposable society, it becomes clear that the author wishes to alert his readers to what he sees as the negative impact the human species has on the planet it inhabits. The book, in fact, ends with the hopeful suggestion that a smaller human population might have a less devastating effect, followed by a proposal—sure to be unwelcome in some quarters—that women voluntarily restrict themselves to bearing one child each, thus bringing the population down to perhaps a quarter of its current total in a matter of a few generations. Such social and political analysis is certainly tangential to the original intent Weisman declares for his book. Still, for those who either agree with the author or are willing to read past his occasional rallying cries, as well as to buy into the rather unusual premise of the book as a whole, The World Without Us amply rewards reading, both as a source of information and as stimulating food for thought. Janet E. Gardner

Review Sources America 197, no. 16 (November 19, 2007): 23-24. The Humanist 67, no. 5 (September/October, 2007): 46. Library Journal 132, no. 15 (September 15, 2007): 99. Mother Jones 32, no. 4 (July/August, 2007): 76-77. Nature 448 (July 12, 2007): 135-136. New Statesman 137 (October 1, 2007): 53-54. The New York Times Book Review 156 (September 2, 2007): 12. The New Yorker 83, no. 23 (August 13, 2007): 85-86. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 20 (May 14, 2007): 43. Science News 172, no. 6 (August 11, 2007): 95.

868

A WORLDLY COUNTRY New Poems Author: John Ashbery (1927) Publisher: Ecco Press (New York). 76 pp. $23.95 Type of work: Poetry The twenty-sixth collection by a prolific and preeminent American poet The fifty-eight lyric poems in John Ashbery’s A Worldly Country are consistent with his twenty-five earlier volumes of verse. Written when he was almost eighty years old, the poems continue to focus on the limits of language and the difficulty of expressing meaning, but the poems also concern aging and impending death. They progress not logically but by associative leaps that are almost impossible for readers to follow. Mixed with arcane language and philosophical ideas are chatty asides, interruptions (“Wait!”), and flippant comments. Time is the subject of “A Worldly Country,” the title poem of the volume. At the end of the poem, “the time we turn around in/ soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.” The skiff, not a ship, is life fated to run aground, to fail to reach its goal; and it is time, the repetition of events, that destroys life and meaning. Earlier in the poem the speaker states, “In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon,” but “By evening all was calm again.” The afternoon is “wide” because it is long-lasting and replete with negative images like “insane clocks,” “the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,” and “the scent of manure.” The images are not powerful but banal and pathetic, and those of the evening are equally trivial and pedestrian. Nevertheless, the circle continues, for tomorrow produces “the great ungluing,” when things are not destroyed, but merely fall apart. As the speaker gazes at the “quiet rubble,” he wonders “What had happened, and why?” The “rebelliousness” and “hellishness” was replaced by peace, but that peace is far from pleasant and life-affirming; it is more like quietude, inertia, and stagnancy. It is “worldly” in the worst sense of that word; the speaker’s world is more likely to end with a “whimper” than a “bang.” In “Old-Style Plentiful,” the speaker describes lost love from the perspective of several years. “It’s so long ago/ now, yet some of it makes sense, like/ why were we screwing around in the first place?” Now only some of it makes sense, and the speaker is uncertain about why the affair ever happened. Regardless of the lack of connection between the past and the present, “something” matters, even though there were many indications that the relationship was far from perfect. The flood of time obliterates where they sat, and the breeze and the light ignore the “unkindness” and pretend that “it was all going to be OK some day.” Of course, it never was “OK,” and only being “drunk on love” enabled them to ignore the problems. The last

A Worldly Country / ashbery

869

line, “That sure was some summer,” is vin tage Ashbery, an enigmatic comment more suggestive of ennui than wistfulness. Unlike John Donne’s romantic poem of the same name, Ashbery’s “The Ecstasy” provides a cynical view of a relationship. During the winter, the speaker and his mate go skiing, but their vision of the future is incomplete; they see just to the “margin” but no more. His statement, “I want out now” comes as an abrupt switch in mood, which John Ashbery has published twenty-six he goes on to explain in detail as having trav- volumes of verse in addition to a novel, eled in this country (or relationship) too long. literary criticism, and art criticism. His He desires “a little sweetness” to balance his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) “hunger” for the winter when “friendships won the Pulitzer Prize, the National come unknotted/ like tie-dyed scarves.” Then Book Award, and the National Book there is another switch to describe their at- Critics Circle Award. Ashbery is a tendance at a boring reception; then another member of the American Academy of switch, the revelation that when he went out Arts and Letters and the American the next morning on some pretext, he stayed Academy of Arts and Sciences. away for twenty years. Asked if he had forgotten something when he returned, he said “no, only the milk.” If this were not uncaring enough, he adds, “Which was the truth,” reiterating not only his distance but also his unwillingness to soften the blow. “Forwarded” involves another leave-taking. The “consequences” (an even more negative word than “result”) of his having fallen in love with her include “bright lights, lit sea,/ buttered roofs, dandelion breath,” largely positive descriptors, albeit a bit unusual. The speaker states, however, that “Next year let’s live in harm’s way,” suggesting a more daring, less conventional relationship; but this relationship will be “under the big top,” a circus reference that implies repetitive performances and negates the idea of “harm’s way.” The antithetical “blue” (blues) and sun will “find us” there. The concluding comparison is to the “growl of a friendly dog” that retreats (“shivers itself/ out of here”). The italicized conclusion, “Never heard . . . anymore,” suggests indeed that the relationship has been “forwarded.” “Ukase” features another leave-taking, this time from the country. The poem begins with language (“thesaurus,” “word-rabbits”) in an upbeat way, but as dusk approaches “it was time to mold the analytical/ to the time-sensitive,” to admit that they had survived something that had happened during the summer. In his farewell to the farm, the speaker abruptly switches gears (“What a chump! Excuse me . . . ”) and describes what has gone before as “afterthoughts.” He admits that he is digressing, perhaps because he is unwilling to pursue what happened, and speaks of being able to “finesse” everything through language as the couple is “incurably, undeniably aging.” That comment is undercut by a qualifier (“only I can’t tell what that feels like”), which is followed by “Not when, but if”—as if the aging were not part of the

870

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

picture. Then the speaker writes, “But we’ll know it before it happens—we’ll/ recognize us from the way we look at each other,/ not from any urgent movement forward/ or anything like that.” They will see in each other the aging process, but not as a result of any dramatic change in them or their situation. As with the other poems, “Ukase” changes directions and lacks dynamic images and action. Many of Ashbery’s poems deal not only with language but also with the writing of poetry. “For Now” is concerned with “who does the illuminating?” After discussing how a writer would deal with “the victimhood of all those years,” the speaker declares, “We brought something else—/ some enlightenment,” though the claims for that illumination are modest: “the meaning of dreams” and “how hotel rooms/ can become the meaningful space one has always lived in.” While explaining dreams is important, the second aim is ridiculous at best, and the speaker’s admission that the enlightenment is “only a shred,” “a fragment of life/ no one else seemed interested in” denies the importance of the insights. “Seemed” might suggest that there were some people interested in the speaker’s enlightened poetic offerings, but clearly the speaker realizes that his work cannot “be carried away,” cannot be applied to one’s life, or, even more devastating, cannot be carried away in the sense that it cannot be deciphered. It belongs, like “décor” or “dance,” art forms whose meaning is determined by the individual spectator or reader. “One of His Nature Poems” is more about poetry than nature. The speaker’s “Painted truths” and “unvarnished arabesques” refer to his poetry, which is certainly not “lively” or “straightforward and cool.” The “purity” he seeks is paradoxically in the “room of lost steps,” false starts, unfinished endings, and confusing associative leaps. Then the speaker pulls in an old adage: “Everything has a silver lining.” To get to that silver lining the reader must engage in “turning it over,” interpreting it, and then “scrubbing some sense into it,” attempting to find the essence of what Ashbery wrote. The “last few spectators” (readers) will give up after dealing with the “rude wind, mud, and chaos” of Ashbery’s poetry. They will be “literate for a day but otherdirected.” This poem suggests that Ashbery is well aware of the problems his poetry poses for his readers but may also delight in their problems. Ashbery’s poems contain many images of water (often floods that obliterate), shoals (designed for people to run aground on), time (usually running out), and the cinema. “To Be Affronted,” one of the early poems in the volume, contains a reference to “a movie that is the same/ as someone’s life, same length, same ratings.” The speaker asks the “you” (in this case the reader) to imagine playing the “second lead,” which is “more important than the principals’.” The question becomes, “How do you judge when it’s more than/ half over?” Again, the focus is on time and aging: Everything is happening “too late,” and things are “running out” before certainty about the “wizard” and “charlatan” can be established. “Now I’m not so sure,” the last line of the poem, could apply to many of Ashbery’s poems. “Yes, ’Señor’ Fluffy,” on the other hand, is a rarity in this volume; it is an amusing poem about attending a thriller. It is replete with references to “reaction-shots” and “credits,” describes the silly yet dense plot, and puts the speaker in the situation of being labeled as the killer. “Pavane pour Helen Twelvetrees” also contains cinematic

A Worldly Country / ashbery

871

references such as “starlets,” “process shot,” “casting call,” and “rushes,” but in this poem God, who will also write the sequel, is the director. Reading a huge volume, He admits that “that one might have turned out/ differently, if I’d been paying attention.” An inattentive God, a plot (the Fall of Man?), and a casting call that might produce a different ending—these are the ingredients for an interesting opening night, but at the last minute God suggests that they not attend the premiere, perhaps the only performance of this alternative plot, before the world returns to “the chain of living and dying,/ pleasing and ornery.” In “The Recipe,” which has an introductory quotation from the 1942 film The Palm Beach Story, the speaker compares his relationship with his lover to two actors who are “on the wrong set,/ at the wrong time, even as the cameras rolled.” The tone is lighthearted as the speaker says that he can be anything she wants, can play any role she desires, and will make the wedding arrangements. Near the end of A Worldly Country, Ashbery begins “Objection Sustained” with a comparison between a French king and himself: “I/ know and do not know what it is I am./ Suffering aimlessly, pointlessly,/ I think I’m on the spot right now.” The quotation unfortunately seems an apt description of some of the poems because there are so many abrupt shifts in subject, so many qualifiers, and so many enigmatic comments that the poems resist easy or even thorough readings. That said, his images, his themes, and his less-than-thoroughly articulated views make for interesting, challenging reading, and some of the lines remain with the reader. As one critic noted, there is in the poems a “restlessness to express something that won’t quite come out.” Thomas L. Erskine

Review Sources American Book Review 29, no. 1 (November/December, 2007): 19-20. Booklist 103, no. 12 (February 15, 2007): 25. Library Journal 132, no. 12 (July 1, 2007): 96. New Criterion 25, no. 10 (June, 2007): 61-68. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 5 (March 29, 2007): 20-22. Publishers Weekly 253, no. 50 (December 18, 2006): 43. World Literature Today 81, no. 6 (November, 2007): 68-69.

872

THE WORLDS OF LINCOLN KIRSTEIN Author: Martin Duberman (1930) Publisher: Pantheon Books (New York). Illustrated. 792 pp. $37.50 Type of work: Biography Time: 1907-1996 Locale: New York City Duberman’s monumental biography reveals for the first time the fascinating public and private worlds of the brilliant man responsible for bringing George Balanchine to America, for helping to create the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center, and for founding the New York City Ballet Principal personage: Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), American writer and patron of the arts

Anyone who has ever attended one of the spectacular performances of the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center in New York, viewed an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), or performed research on dance at the New York Public Library owes a tremendous debt to Lincoln Kirstein. In the same way, anyone who has read Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, or W. H. Auden owes a debt to Kirstein. Kirstein gained his greatest fame from his commitment to ballet—the art he most cherished and the art to whose beauty and splendor he capitulated at the age of ten—and he is most often remembered as the man who brought the choreographer George Balanchine (Georgi Balanchivadze) to America. Thanks in large part to his family fortune—his father owned the Boston-based department store Filene’s—and to his own generosity and commitment to fostering and preserving the arts in society, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center and City Center in New York City, as well as founding the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Kirstein started the famous literary magazine Hound and Horn, publishing writers like Pound and Eliot, Stephen Spender, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Edmund Wilson, and carrying the early photographs of Walker Evans (who later gained fame for his photographs of southern sharecroppers in his and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941). He also founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, largely viewed as the precursor of MoMA in New York City. Because of his devotion to dance, he founded Dance Index, the major scholarly journal of dance in America. Consumed by his passion for the arts and his desire to make them an integral part of modern society, Kirstein worked frenetically and tirelessly in his efforts to accomplish this.

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein / duberman

873

Duberman, whose previous biographies of James Russell Lowell and Paul Robeson and Martin Duberman is distinguished whose study of the Black Mountain poets professor emeritus of history at the City have intimately captured their subjects, here University of New York. He is the prizesplendidly captures Kirstein’s energy, his winning author of numerous books, majestic writings, and his often tortured per- including Paul Robeson (1989), James sonal life. Drawing primarily on Kirstein’s Russell Lowell (1966), and Black own diaries, journals, letters, and books, as Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972). well as interviews with Kirstein’s friends and colleagues, Duberman provides not only a magisterial biography of Kirstein but also a first-rate cultural history of mid-twentieth century New York. Duberman’s biography probes Kirstein’s ambivalence toward his Judaism, his homosexuality, and his family, thereby creating a portrait of a man whose private life and public lives often overlapped but whose energies were directed to the greater good of the community. As Duberman points out, Kirstein’s frenetic pace caught up with him later in life when his bipolar disorder resulted in mental breakdowns, for which he underwent electric shock. Lincoln Kirstein was the second of two children born to Louis and Rose Stern of Rochester, New York. His parents named him after Louis’s idol, Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln’s older sister, Mina, (who was ten when Lincoln was born) first saw her baby brother, she proclaimed that he looked like a lobster; when Lincoln’s younger brother, George, was born two and a half years after Lincoln, Lincoln tried to bash his newborn brother’s head in with a tin of talcum powder. Lincoln almost died as a result of a botched circumcision, leaving him with both physical and psychological scars. When he was twelve, he tried to hack off the scar tissue on his groin with his mother’s scissors. As a preteen, Kirstein discovered music and began writing verse. Every day after school, he went to the YMCA, where there would be a short religious service. He disliked the impassionate and reedy music of his temple, but at the YWCA he discovered how passionately music could be sung when the ringing voices of the children were accompanied by the majestic chords of the grand piano. He developed a love for the symphony and the theater and at age twelve went to his first ballet, The Dance of the Hours, from Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. Although that performance left him unmoved, he was swept off his feet the following year by Anna Pavlova’s wonderful performances, attending them five nights in a row and discovering in ballet the consuming passion of his life. Sometime earlier, Kirstein had begun to keep a drawing book—which revealed the significance of visual imagery in his life—and when he was twelve, he began to keep a diary. Kirstein’s early passion for the arts developed into a lifelong devotion to the development of major artistic institutions and organizations. In 1927, Kirstein entered Harvard University and quickly became involved in efforts to introduce the literary avant-garde and modernism to the campus. At Harvard, Kirstein also discovered his homosexuality and engaged in relationships with class-

874

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

mates as well as one-night stands (a trait that was to follow him throughout his life). At the same time, however, Kirstein could not classify himself as a “fairy,” a term then used to describe homosexuals, because he was also attracted to women and often dreamed of lying on a beach filled with girls waiting for him to fondle them. Kirstein’s greatest accomplishment at Harvard was the founding of Hound and Horn. Kirstein, along with his classmate Varian Fry (who became the first literary editor at The New Republic), hoped to secure a place on the board of Harvard’s literary magazine, the Advocate. Rejected by the Advocate, the two began their own small magazine, determined to introduce some of the best new American writers in its pages. Through the financial support of his father, and with the intellectual support of the poet and essayist R. P. Blackmur, the magazine began to flourish and gained significant recognition. James Agee published his first piece in the magazine, and writers as diverse as Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter (whose story “Flowering Judas” was published there), Kenneth Burke, and William Carlos Williams published their work in the magazine. In his junior year at Harvard, Kirstein helped create the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a forerunner of MoMA, where he would become an adviser before he turned twenty-three. Once he left Harvard, Kirstein launched into the life of patron of the arts in great earnest. Until he inherited his father’s money, Kirstein himself never had the financial means to support his various passions. As late as 1948, the New York City Ballet was running more than $47,000 under budget, and Kirstein’s mother wrote a check to make up the deficit. Even so, his charmed life had thrust him into monied circles, and he developed a genius for raising funds to support various artistic endeavors. Among Kirstein’s many triumphs were bringing George Balanchine to America and establishing a great national ballet company built on the model of the Russian ballet. In 1929, Sergei Diaghilev died, and his company, the Ballets Russes, split into several competing companies. One of the smaller ones, Les Ballets 1933, featured Balanchine as choreographer, and Kirstein, an admirer of Diaghilev, quickly became an admirer of the young Balanchine. Kirstein valued the classicism of Balanchine’s ballets; when the two met at a party in the summer, Balanchine told Kirstein that he would like to go to America. Kirstein arranged for the choreographer to make the trip, though Balanchine insisted that Kirstein include return fare in the event he did not like America. Although the School of American Ballet opened in 1934—where students performed Balanchine’s first American-made piece, Serenade—the New York City Ballet did not make its debut until 1948, after years of financial wrangling and periods of Balanchine’s bouts of illness. Not until 1954, with the success of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, would the New York City Ballet gain secure financial footing. Duberman’s exhaustive biography also provides glimpses of Kirstein’s personal life. In 1941, Kirstein married Fidelma Cadmus, the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus. Neither set of parents seemed to approve of the union, so the marriage took place at city hall. In spite of his marriage, Kirstein continued to have affairs with both men and women. Kirstein had an ongoing romance with the dancer José Martinez, and he spent many nights in male bordellos, sailors’ hangouts, and gay baths. Kirstein never tried to hide his sexual liaisons from Fidelma, but in the early years of their marriage she

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein / duberman

875

apparently seemed to be too enamored of the art world (she had learned some of this world from her brother’s exploits) to be too exhausted or shattered by Kirstein’s exploits. However, she did truly love Kirstein—ironically, her name means “faithful soul”—and as the years progressed her husband’s affairs were harder and harder to bear. She retreated to the kitchen to prepare elaborate meals or she would involve herself in packing and unpacking for their trips. On a trip to Japan in 1961, though, exhausted by his sexual activities and his leaving her to search for yet another sexual escapade, she had a nervous breakdown and had to be taken back at once to New York. She eventually retreated to a country house in Connecticut where she could enjoy the outdoors and taking care of her animals. In the later years of his life, Kirstein was not involved in starting up new ventures, but he remained as involved as ever in the arts through his writings. He did participate in the march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. He wrote an elegy for Balanchine, “A Ballet Master’s Belief,” that was published in 1984, a year after Balanchine’s death. Between 1987 and 1994, he published five books: The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein (1987), Memorial to a Marriage (1989), Puss in Boots (1992), Tchelitchev (1994), and Mosaic (1994), a memoir up through 1933. He also published a beautifully illustrated book, Nijinsky Dancing (1975), a paean to the Russian dancer. In 1995, Kirstein developed a series of debilitating physical problems: phlebitis, bedsores, and an enlarged prostrate for which he had surgery. He died, likely of heart failure, on January 5, 1996. Duberman’s spectacular book provides insights into the man who almost singlehandedly established ballet in America. This richly layered book chronicles the genius, the financial power, and the tenacious commitment to the arts that drove Kirstein’s life and work. Duberman pulls no punches in describing Kirstein’s shortcomings, though Duberman clearly demonstrates that his sometimes unlikeable traits were often overshadowed by his generosity and his warmth. Duberman’s epic biography matches the epic story of this American genius. Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 14. Chicago Tribune, April 15, 2007, p. 4. Dance Magazine 81, no. 10 (October, 2007): 76-77. The Nation 285, no. 2 (July 9, 2007): 28-34. The New Republic 236, no. 15 (May 7, 2007): 39-45. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 10 (June 14, 2007): 8-12. The New York Times Book Review 156 (April 29, 2007): 9. The New Yorker 83, no. 8 (April 16, 2007): 142-152. Publishers Weekly 254, no. 9 (February 26, 2007): 71-72.

876

THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 Author: Saul Friedländer (1932) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 870 pp. $39.95 Type of work: History A multifaceted account that includes analysis as lucid as it is complex, the second volume of Friedländer’s history of the Holocaust covers the years of World War II and achieves distinction by continuing the author’s insightful integration of narratives about the German perpetrators and their Jewish victims The first volume of Saul Friedländer’s two-part history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Jewish people, concentrated on what he called “the years of persecution,” the period from 1933 to 1939. Analyzing Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power and its increasingly disastrous but not yet fully murderous impact on German and Austrian Jews, Friedländer advanced his thesis that a “redemptive anti-Semitism” characterized Nazi ideology. He also showed that sound historical investigation of the Holocaust depends on integrating the experiences of the German perpetrators, their Jewish victims, and many other groups and individuals who were also involved in that catastrophe. Friedländer’s emphasis on “redemptive anti-Semitism” clashed with so-called functionalist interpretations of the Holocaust, which contended that Nazi Germany was not necessarily a genocidal regime from the beginning but evolved toward its “final solution” when other options for solving the Nazis’ “Jewish question” proved unworkable. Friedländer disagreed, contending that Nazism early on harbored potentially genocidal intentions. Hitler and his followers saw “the Jew” as the worst threat to civilization. The world’s redemption required the elimination of that menace. This analysis did not mean, however, that Nazi leadership in the 1930’s already had a blueprint for mass murder, let alone specific designs for killing centers such as Treblinka and Auschwitz. Friedländer maintained that the decisions to commit mass murder, the attention to detail needed to implement them, did evolve over time, eventually involving persons and places scattered far and wide in the Holocaust’s vast continental scope. Nevertheless, as Friedländer shows in The Years of Extermination, his chronologically organized account of the wartime period from 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany’s fervent, indeed fanatical, commitment to those decisions and details cannot be adequately understood absent the implicitly genocidal “redemptive anti-Semitism” that motivated them. Much Holocaust analysis has focused primarily either on the Germans and their collaborators or on the Jews and other victim groups who were trapped in Nazi Germany’s lethal web of racism. Indispensable though this work continues to be, it is

The Years of Extermination / friedländer

877

one-sided insofar as it neglects, for example, the fact that German and Jewish actions Saul Friedländer lived in Naziand reactions were under way at the same occupied France during World War II; time. Neither the perpetrators nor their vic- he survived the Holocaust by hiding in tims acted independently; they were always a Catholic monastery, while his parents related and intertwined. As obvious as that died in Auschwitz. His awards include point may be, the attempt to write the Holo- a prestigious fellowship from the John caust’s history with that convergence in the D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Notable among his books foreground is herculean because too much are the memoir When Memory Comes happened all at once. Arguably, no Holo- (1979) and Nazi Germany and the caust scholar knows that predicament better Jews, 1933-1939 (1997), the first of a than Friedländer, who, more than any histo- two-volume history of the Holocaust. rian thus far, has written a profoundly inte grated history of the Holocaust. No photographs are reproduced in The Years of Extermination, but to see what Friedländer’s prodigious work required, consider that he begins the book by describing what happened in a picture that was taken at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands on September 18, 1942. A medical student named David Moffie is receiving his medical degree. Surrounded by his professors, family, and friends, the young doctor wears a tuxedo. On its left side is a star, the word Jood upon it. “Moffie,” Friedländer explains, “was the last Jewish student at the University of Amsterdam under German occupation.” Unearthing such details is indispensable for Friedländer’s narrative. They contain the interrelationships that he finds so important for documenting and delineating the Holocaust’s years of extermination. There is much that the Moffie photograph does not reveal. It is silent, for example, about the words that were spoken at his graduation. Probably they are completely lost, and no history of the Holocaust will ever contain them. Further research indicates, however, that shortly after Moffie’s graduation, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His survival put him in the 20 percent of Dutch Jews who lived through the Holocaust. Most of the Jews in the Moffie photo, Friedländer observes, were among the other 80 percent of Dutch Jewry, those killed, one way or another, by the Germans and their collaborators. Friedländer helps his reader to see that the window on the Holocaust provided by the Moffie photograph opens still wider if one pursues key questions implicit in that image. How, for instance, was it possible that a Jewish medical student could receive a degree at a Dutch university in September, 1942? German forces had occupied Dutch soil since the spring of 1940. By 1942, the Nazis’ continental “final solution” was under way. Deportations of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz and other places of death in the East had started on July 14 of that year. Later, on September 8, a German decree excluded Jews from Dutch universities. Nevertheless, Moffie’s graduation took place in an official ceremony ten days later. It did so, Friedländer’s meticulous research shows, because the calendar provided a loophole that allowed some Dutch and Jewish resistance against German power. In Dutch universities, the 1941-1942 academic year ended on Friday, September 18. The 1942-1943 academic year started on

878

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Monday, September 21. The exclusionary decree of September 8 was not effective until the beginning of the new academic year. In conferring Moffie’s degree, the Dutch university took an action that was clearly contrary to the spirit if not the letter of German intentions. The photograph, says Friedländer, “documents an act of defiance, on the edge of the occupier’s laws and decrees.” In receiving his degree, Moffie, his family, and their Jewish friends were going forward with their lives as best they could. For the Dutch Jews in the early autumn of 1942, as Friedländer’s analysis also shows, living as best they could was immensely precarious. With deportations already in full cry, Jews were regularly rounded up by Germans and the Dutch police who helped them to fill the weekly transport quotas. Amsterdam’s Jewish Council, leaders required to comply with German orders, were also implicated in the deportations. Moffie and the Jews who attended his graduation ceremony would not have been there if they had not received certificates that exempted them, albeit only temporarily, from deportation. According to Friedländer, there were seventeen thousand of these special certificates for Amsterdam’s Jews—by no means enough to go around. Thus, deep probing of the Moffie photograph reveals the gray zone in which some Dutch Jews found themselves. German authority gave Jewish leaders the opportunity to reprieve, if only for a time, some but not all of their fellow Jews from slave labor and death in the East. Saving a few meant condemning others. In the end, however, there were no exemption certificates, because while Moffie received the degree that certified him to be an individual trained to restore health and entrusted to save life, German authority had affixed a Jew-labeling star to his chest. That emblem stole Moffie’s individuality and virtually sentenced him to death because “the Jew” had to be wiped off the face of the earth. The Moffie photograph illustrates what an integrated history of the Holocaust entails. It has to include much more than German decisions and measures alone. It has to go beyond a singular focus on Jewish perceptions, initiatives, and reactions. In addition, such history writing requires attention to what was happening concurrently and simultaneously as well as concentration on intermediate and long-term relationships of cause and effect. Still further, Friedländer’s project reaches overwhelming proportions when one realizes how many Holocaust-related artifacts await the same careful scrutiny that he gave to a single photograph. Just as the words spoken at Moffie’s commencement ceremony are unlikely to be retrieved, there are countless documents pertaining to the Holocaust that are lost forever. The number that remains is large, however, and more documents and artifacts are still being recovered. They include German records that chronicle the years of extermination and Jewish diaries that recall the onslaught day by day. The amount of Holocaust-related evidence is matched by its complexity because these sources cover vast geographical terrain and more places than any single map can identify. Interpreting these Holocaust data also involves understanding of the cultural and religious differences that contextualize them, as well as expertise in the diverse languages in which Holocaust-related experiences are recorded. No matter how extensive, Friedländer’s attention could never encompass all the important moments, their inter-

The Years of Extermination / friedländer

879

relationships and juxtapositions. To some extent, Friedländer’s project was destined to be self-defeating. Odds in favor of that outcome even increased as he tackled other integrative problems—narration, contextualization, and comprehension—that are related to but beyond detail gathering. No history of the Holocaust, especially an integrated one, can be only a collection of episodes, even if they are interpreted as well as Friedländer handles the Moffie photograph. Friedländer had to put the episodes together so that a sustained narration resulted. This work required careful and difficult decisions about where to start and stop a particular thread, such as the one about Moffie. It entailed complicated judgments about how to connect Holocaust moments in ways that show accurately, not for literary effect, how one thing led to another in the destruction process. Putting the episodes together was not enough. To get the compelling narrative he wanted, Friedländer had to keep context in mind as well, for just as one Holocaust moment relates to others, these events unfolded in social, economic, political, and religious settings that were larger than the individual episodes and arguably more than the sum of their parts. Assuming that all of these tasks could be handled satisfactorily, there would still be the problem of what, if anything, to conclude about the Holocaust, how to end an integrative and integrated two-volume work that is well over a thousand pages in length. In this area, Friedländer had to decide what, if anything, to do about lingering questions that elude closure and that further historical analysis may not be able to answer. Friedländer’s best accomplishment is that his Holocaust history brims with integrated detail. Friedländer’s project was self-defeating, but his refusal to give up produces significant light that has never before been shed on the Holocaust. The Years of Extermination ends without a definitive summing up or conclusion. As though exhaustion intervened, Friedländer’s account stops rather abruptly with events in May, 1945. While he has little to say about the Holocaust’s aftereffects, his final paragraph concentrates on the few hundreds of thousands of Jews who stayed in Nazi-occupied Europe and survived the Holocaust. Probably with his own experiences in mind, he notes that the years of destruction “remained the most significant period of their lives. . . . Recurrently, it pulled them back into overwhelming terror and, throughout, notwithstanding the passage of time, it carried along with it the indelible memory of the dead.” Friedländer’s conclusion is no more—or less—than that. If it leaves his reader wanting still more, perhaps the author’s wisdom, and his appropriate modesty about the all-but-impossible task he set for himself, is simply to recognize that while one can know much about the Holocaust, how and why it happened, there is no closure for an event that leaves one staring into an unacceptable abyss. Friedländer’s nonconcluding ending circles back to the beginning and, in particular, to the book’s governing epigraph, whose sense is more intense and ominous after one reads The Years of Extermination. Stefan Ernest, the epigraph’s author, lived in Warsaw, Poland. Like Friedländer, he was a Jew in hiding in 1943. Ernest wrote his version of Holocaust history, hoping that the narrative would survive although he would not. Ernest imagined readers asking him whether his account was the truth. “I

880

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

reply in advance,” he says. “No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth. . . . Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.” With those words, Friedländer’s awesome research and mighty pen find a fitting place for study of the Holocaust to stop momentarily, but not end, and then to begin again. John K. Roth

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 16 (April 15, 2007): 18. First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life 177 (November, 2007): 62. Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007, p. F6. The New Republic 237, no. 5 (September 10, 2007): 51-55. The New York Times Book Review 156 (June 24, 2007): 16-17. Newsweek 149, no. 17 (April 23, 2007): 52-54. The Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2008, pp. 3-5.

881

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION Author: Michael Chabon (1963) Publisher: HarperCollins (New York). 432 pp. $26.95 Type of work: Novel Time: An alternate 2007 Locale: An alternate Sitka, Alaska In this alternate history, in which surviving European Jews settled in Alaska instead of Israel after World War II, Meyer Landsman is a detective who investigates a murder, discovers the victim was the estranged son of a local crime boss, and uncovers an international conspiracy to destroy an important religious shrine Principal characters: Meyer Landsman, homicide detective, forty-four years old Berko Shemets, Landsman’s partner and younger cousin, half-Jewish, half-Native American, member of the Tlingit nation Bina Gelbfish, Landsman’s ex-wife and superior in the homicide squad Menachem-Mendel Shpilman, also known as Emanuel Lasker and Frank, murder victim and heroin addict Heskel Shpilman, Mendel’s father, rabbi, leader of the local Hasidic Jews, and organized crime boss Hertz Shemets, Meyer’s uncle, Berko’s father, and disgraced FBI agent Ester-Malke Shemets, Berko’s wife Isidor Landsman, Meyer’s father Freydl Landsman, Meyer’s mother Naomi Landsman, Meyer’s sister

The premise of the alternate history genre is that changing certain key events will radically alter the course of history. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), a faction of isolationist Republicans succeed in securing the party’s 1940 presidential nomination for Charles Lindbergh. He then goes on to defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election and adopts a pro-Axis foreign policy and an anti-Semitic domestic one. In The Man in the High Castle (1962), Philip K. Dick postulates that an attempt to assassinate Roosevelt in 1933 was successful. Therefore, the United States was unprepared for and loses World War II. By 1962, the United States is divided into three countries, one neutral, one pro-Japan, and one pro-Germany. The premise of this alternate history novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is that a proposal made by Roosevelt’s Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes in the late 1930’s became law. He had offered to settle Alaska with European Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. The key event was that the nonvoting congressional delegate from Alaska, who opposed the proposal, died in an automobile accident. Millions of

882

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Jews accepted the invitation and settled in and around Sitka, a small town of fewer than ten thousand people in the Alaskan Panhandle. There was still a Jewish Holocaust, but “only” two million were killed rather than six million, and it is called “The Destruction.” Although it is not clear how these events followed, Nazi Germany defeated the Soviet Union in World War II. Presumably, the resources used against the Jews were applied against the Russians instead. Germany was itMichael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize self defeated when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946. The state for his 2000 novel The Amazing of Israel only lasted three months before the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the Arabs destroyed it in 1948, so the Jews were Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for granted a sixty-year lease on what is officially Children’s Literature for his 2002 young adult novel Summerland, and the called the Federal District of Sitka and unoffiAga Khan Award and the National cially “Alyeska.” The lease is only a few Jewish Book Award for his 2004 months from expiring, so the Sitka police deSherlock Holmes pastiche The Final partment is under pressure to close its open Solution. cases, and most people are making plans to stay or move to other countries such as Madagascar, voluntarily or not. By 2007, more than three million people, sometimes called the “Frozen Chosen” or “Sitkaniks,” live there, and Yiddish rather than English or Hebrew is the official language. Instead of the Palestinians, the Jews displaced a Native American nation known as the Tlingits, who lived in the land surrounding Sitka. However, there were only fifty thousand Tlingits, and, unlike the Palestinians, none of the other Native American nations were in any position to support them. The main point-of-view character is Meyer Landsman, a detective in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Sam Spade. (There is a minor character in the novel named Spade, and the local crime boss is an even more obese version of the actor Sidney Greenstreet, who played the Fat Man in the best film version of The Maltese Falcon, 1930.) Having moved out of the house he shared with his former wife, for the last nine months Meyer has been living in the seedy Hotel Zamenhof when the night manager informs him that a dead body has been found in one of the other rooms. Although Meyer is off duty, he investigates. Known as Emanuel Lasker, the murder victim had a chess set in his room as well as two books on the subject. Meyer knew enough about chess to tell that he was in a complex endgame. He also knew that Emanuel Lasker was the name of a famous Jewish chess player in the early twentieth century and concluded that it was not the victim’s real name. The victim was also a heroin addict, as evidenced by needle marks and devices. He must have been a devout Jew at some point in his past, because he used a tefillin, a leather strap attached to a box containing passages from the Torah used in prayer, as a tourniquet. Lasker was

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / chabon

883

shot in the back of the head, and the killer used a pillow to muffle the sound, so Meyer concludes that it was a professional hit. Meyer has the feeling, correctly as it turns out, that the arrangement of the chess pieces is an important clue. Meyer’s father, Isidor, and uncle Hertz Shemets were both serious chess buffs, but their attempts to teach him the game only resulted in his hating it. Hertz and his sister Freydl had arrived in Sitka in 1941 and Isidor, a survivor of a concentration camp, in 1948. Isidor and Freydl were married in 1953. Freydl worked for a local newspaper while Isidor wrote articles on chess and drew a pension from the German government. Besides Meyer, they had one daughter, Naomi, who grew up to be a bush pilot. Isidor committed suicide when Meyer was a teenager, Freydl died of cancer while Meyer was in college, and Naomi died when her plane flew into a mountain under mysterious circumstances the year before. Meyer eventually discovers a connection between Naomi and Lasker. Hertz Shemets attended law school in Seattle after the war and then joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He eventually rose to head their counterintelligence program in Alaska but was forced into retirement because of a scandal. A newspaper reporter discovered that he had been working on a private agenda to secure permanent status for Sitka as a homeland for the Jews and had been using illegal means such as bribing and blackmailing congressmen. Years previously, Hertz had had an affair with a Native American woman, a member of the Tlingit nation whose family claimed descent from their raven god, and the result was their son, Berko, whom Hertz adopted after she died. Berko, known as Johnny “the Jew” Bear to the Tlingits, converted to Judaism, became a police officer, and married EsterMalke Taytsh, a Jewish woman. They have two sons, and Ester-Malke is pregnant with their third child at the beginning of the book. They provide Meyer with the closest thing he has to a family, although the elder Shemets is still alive and married to another Tlingit woman. Berko and Meyer’s relationship is reminiscent of the one between the title characters in Michael Chabon’s earlier novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Not only are they cousins but they are also partners in their professional lives and best friends. As teenagers, Meyer was supposed to teach chess to Berko, but his hatred of the game stopped him, so Berko has little knowledge of it. Berko’s Native American ancestry also suggests a connection with Chabon’s young adult fantasy Summerland (2002). Meyer was married to Bina Gelbfish for twelve years, and they had been dating for five years before that. They also worked in the homicide squad together for four. However, they were partners on only one case, which they failed to solve, and they aborted their only child, a boy, after the doctor informed them he might have birth defects. After their divorce, she left for a year to train as a supervisor. When she returned, she became Meyer’s boss. It makes for a complicated relationship, to say the least. Because of the impending reversion of Sitka back to Alaska, she wants Meyer to flag the Lasker investigation as a cold case. He does not so much refuse as ignore her. The investigation leads Meyer to the Einstein Chess Club, which meets regularly at the Hotel Einstein. The players recognize the man from his picture, but to them he is

884

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

known as Frank. Meyer and Berko eventually identify the victim as Mendel Shpilman. He was the estranged son of the Hasidic rabbi and organized crime boss Heskel Shpilman. Mendel was a child prodigy at chess, Torah studies, and foreign languages. Healing miracles were associated with him, so many people hoped he was the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the one man in his generation with the potential to become the Messiah. Another of his peculiarities was that his body temperature was two degrees warmer than normal. Twenty-three years previously, he angered his father when he refused to marry the nice Jewish girl his parents had chosen for him, and he disappeared. Meyer and Berko’s interview with the elder Shpilman goes badly, and they suspect the gangster already knew that Mendel was dead. Meyer eventually discovers a conspiracy to destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This is the third holiest shrine in Islam and, according to tradition, the place where Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. More important, it is known to be on the site where Solomon’s Temple stood. In Judaic tradition, the temple must be rebuilt before the Messiah can come. Furthermore, according to the book of Revelation in the New Testament, the temple must be rebuilt before the second coming of Christ. The conspirators, Meyer learns, are an alliance of fundamentalist Jews and Christians. While the fundamentalist Jews are very richly characterized, the fundamentalist Christians are poorly and thinly drawn. Some readers might be put off by the Yiddish slang, inspired by the 1958 phrase book Say It in Yiddish by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and the jargon Chabon has invented for the novel. However, such language usually can be understood from the context. Uniformed police officers are called “latkes,” and plainclothesmen are called “nozes.” “Black Hats” refers to Hasidic Jews, who also control organized crime in Sitka, “rebbe” to rabbi, “yids” to Jews living in Sitka, “Mexicans” to Jews living in the continental United States, “shtarkers” to muscle men, and “schlossers” to contract killers. They have cell phones, which they called “shoyfers,” cigarettes are called “papiroses,” and guns “sholems.” Despite the convoluted plot, Chabon explores the issues of identity and assimilation in a world where people are not what they seem. The most devout ones are among the most corrupt, and the sleaziest are the ones with the most integrity. Many of the Sitkaniks want to become Americans, but the most they can hope for in the coming year is a green card. Meyer is more alienated than most, because he does not believe in God, which puts him at odds with the Orthodox Jews who compose most of the Sitkaniks. The reader will also see that he will have trouble becoming an American, if that is what he is allowed and chooses to do after Sitka reverts back to the United States, because he has trouble belonging to anything. Thomas R. Feller

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / chabon

Review Sources Booklist 103, no. 13 (March 1, 2007): 38. Commonweal 134, no. 16 (September 28, 2007): 26-27. Esquire 147, no. 5 (May, 2007): 44. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 5 (March 1, 2007): 185. Library Journal 132, no. 4 (March 1, 2007): 68-69. London Review of Books 29, no. 16 (August 16, 2007): 26-27. The New York Times Book Review 156 (May 13, 2007): 10. Time 169, no. 19 (May 7, 2007): 85. USA Today, May 1, 2007, p. D4. The Washington Post, May 13, 2007, p. BW03.

885

886

YOUNG STALIN Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore (1965) Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York). 496 pp. $30.00 Type of work: Biography, history Time: 1878-1953 Locale: Primarily Georgia, Russian Empire New sources revise the understanding of Joseph Stalin’s early years and, hence, his personality Principal characters: Joseph Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), known in his youth as Soso and Koba Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze Dzhugashvili, his mother Simon “Kamo” Ter-Petrosian, a psychopathic gangster who was Stalin’s right-hand man Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s first wife Ludmila Stal, fellow Bolshevik and girlfriend, from whom he may have taken his alias Vladimir Ilich Lenin (Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), founder of the Bolsheviks Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Stalin’s principal rival Nadya Alliluyeva, daughter of old friends from his youth and his second wife

Historians have often deplored the lack of information available regarding people and events in the Soviet Union, especially about the early life of Joseph Stalin. The gap was filled with myths and speculations, some provided by Stalin’s enemies (Leon Trotsky foremost among them) and some by Stalin himself. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Simon Sebag Montefiore had access to police records and political archives in Russia and Georgia, and to prepare Young Stalin he was able to interview persons previously unreachable or unwilling to talk. It is surprising that Stalin survived his childhood. He was born with two toes webbed together, suffered numerous bouts of illness, was twice badly injured by carriages racing down the narrow streets of his hilly hometown, and was periodically beaten by his father. These left him with a pock-marked face, a slight limp, and a crippled arm. Nevertheless, he had impressive physical strength and even more powerful psychological skills that made him the center of whatever group he entered. His mother was important in many ways but not those normally associated with mothering. Her voracious sexual appetite undoubtedly hurt her husband’s selfesteem, worsening his tendency to drink excessively and to beat her. Seeing that her son was exceptionally bright, she determined that he would be more than a cobbler like his father. Believing that he might even become a bishop in the Russian Orthodox

Young Stalin / montefiore

887

Church, she sought his admission into a semi nary; since entry was reserved for the children Simon Sebag Montefiore is a British of priests, she arranged for one of her lovers journalist and historian. He is the to claim Stalin as one of his illegitimate chil- author of Stalin: The Court of the Red dren. Later, Stalin benefited from the aid of Tsar (2004), one of the most widely praised biographies of recent years. another of his rumored fathers. This background prepares readers, in a way, for Stalin’s own sexual adventures. Not up to Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin’s standards, perhaps, but in both macho Georgian culture and the world of radical politics, lax standards were accepted and expected. Stalin indulged himself freely, laughingly taking away the mistresses of close friends, using them, abandoning them, then indulging in high-spirited drinking bouts with both the women and the men. There were no hard feelings, and no thought of caring for the illegitimate children. The one exception, to the extent it was an exception (his gangster politics always came first), was his wife, Ekaterina Svanidze Dzhugashvili, known as Kato. He was so distraught at her death that he threw himself into her grave for a last embrace of her coffin. He ignored his son so completely that even when Yakov was captured by the Nazis, he refused to contemplate any kind of exchange. No one doubts that Stalin, a master of underhanded and secretive maneuvers, could have arranged something discretely. One of the most enduring stories of Stalin’s early life is that he was a police spy. Montefiore sorts through the contradictory evidence to refute the rumors in their baldest form, but since Stalin was trying to infiltrate the police himself, he undoubtedly had close ties to many policemen. It is easy to imagine that he used these contacts to dispose of rivals, just as they sought to have him arrested. This would not be the only time in world history that gangsters and policemen have made mutually comfortable arrangements. His personal life was irregular. He kept in contact with his mother, his former lovers, and his friends, but Marxism always came first. In a world of transitory relationships, only the inevitable triumph of the revolution could be counted on. He sometimes dressed like a dandy, sometimes like a bum, but he always enjoyed having his photo taken, especially with groups of revolutionary friends. He moved around the Caucasus easily, avoiding arrest, extorting capitalists and encouraging kidnappings, setting fires, robbing banks, and perhaps even taking over ships carrying money. Unlike other political gangsters, he did not take much for himself, only enough for one lavish party. Then it was back to Communist Party work, borrowing money from friends (never repaying them), and living in their homes and apartments. This behavior was apparently never resented, even when he seduced the women of the house or provoked police raids. He was arrested numerous times but usually talked his way out of custody. In 1902, however, he was sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. Wherever he was, he quickly made himself the head of the most violent criminal elements; he disliked the political exiles, suspecting them of ratting out true revolutionaries. Three years later he escaped.

888

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

The carefully organized 1907 bank robbery in Tblisi (Tiflis) was bloodier and more chaotic than expected, but Stalin’s gang came away with enough loot to finance Bolshevik activities. With the police long unable to determine who was responsible, it was the perfect crime. It also brought Stalin to Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s attention. Stalin was more widely traveled than most realize. He was in London, Paris, Berlin, Kraków, Vienna (at the same time as Adolf Hitler and Tito), Stockholm, and Finland. He was not much of a tourist, though he seemed to have visited the Louvre, and he was more interested in party business than in soaking up local culture. However, with Stalin’s intense study of English and German, it seems likely that he made his way around easily. Between 1905 and 1912, he met Lenin (instant mutual admiration), Trotsky (instant mutual detestation), and all the Bolsheviks who became important later. He became friends with some, his blunt manners offended others, but all recognized that he had genuine talent and was willing to work hard. It was not true, as was later alleged, that he had few abilities beyond intrigue, but few people recognized that he was, at heart, a gangster. For these reasons, he was underestimated by those Bolsheviks who later went to the firing squad; those who recognized what he was, and approved, later became his closest associates. After years of dealing with secret police spies, either to avoid their clutches or to bribe them, Stalin became cynical and mistrustful. Still, he was unready for the terrible betrayal of Roman Malinovsky, a member of the central committee and one of the party’s two deputies in the Duma. Malinovsky was a paid informer for the secret police, responsible for arresting the party’s key members (including Stalin, whom in 1912 he lured to a public entertainment where Stalin was easily captured) or causing them to flee abroad. If such a trusted man could be an agent of the enemy, who could not be? This story goes far to explain Stalin’s later paranoia about spies and wreckers, but it is perhaps less important than Stalin’s realizing that revolutions spawn people just like himself. This time, the secret police finally found a place from which he could not escape— a tiny remote village north of the Arctic Circle. Stalin managed to adapt. He was an entertaining guest, singing, telling stories to the children, seducing a thirteen-year-old girl and fathering two children (one of whom survived), fishing, hunting, making long trips over the ice to visit friends, and thinking, planning, plotting. When the war came in 1914, he was sure it would bring down the monarchy, but that did not happen quickly. At length, however, the bloodletting in the army became so extreme that in 1917 an offer was made to the exiles—amnesty for military service. Stalin volunteered, knowing that his crippled arm would exempt him from service. That, however, was not discovered until he took the physical exam, and the police were too busy to return him to the north. Instead, he was assigned to a new location, near Petrograd (later St. Petersburg). When the February Revolution freed all political prisoners, he hurried to the capital and quickly made himself one of the principal figures in the Bolshevik Party. His principal responsibility was to publish Pravda. In this period, as earlier, he advocated working with the Mensheviks, Julius Martov’s rival faction to Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Lenin, out of touch in distant Switzerland, was outraged; he demanded

Young Stalin / montefiore

889

immediate efforts to overthrow the new democratic government. When Lenin finally reached Petrograd, he dismayed his comrades by urging an armed uprising. Quickly, however, he realized that the situation was not yet favorable for success; by July, he disapproved when overly eager comrades rose against Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky, and the latter’s leadership was confirmed when their effort was utterly crushed. All the Bolshevik leaders went into hiding. It seemed that the party had no future, except for Stalin, who had been so confined by the democratic political process. In underground activities, he was in his element again. The July debacle was not the total catastrophe it had appeared, however, but led directly to the revival of the Bolshevik Party. Kerensky had called on a courageous but stupid general, Lavr Kornilov, to put down the rising. Kornilov began reading books on Napoleon, decided that he fit the role, and ordered his troops to Petrograd. Kerensky called on the Soviets to stop the coup, after which the Bolsheviks had both an important political role and arms. The October Revolution, in Montefiore’s telling, was not much of a revolution. Kerensky’s government melted away much as the czar’s had. The cadets guarding the Winter Palace went off to find something to eat, the Cossacks left in disgust, the women’s battalion panicked at the sound of the first shells, and Kerensky’s government surrendered. However, there had been such disorganization in the Bolshevik ranks that any resistance might have been successful. In short, it had no resemblance to the climatic moment immortalized by director Sergei Eisenstein. The handful of Bolshevik leaders then laughingly divided up the ministerial posts among themselves. Stalin reluctantly accepted responsibilities for nationalities, but his main concern was to win the war that followed. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin shared responsibilities in the great struggle—Lenin directing politics, Trotsky commanding the Red Army, and Stalin employing his gangster skills to consolidate the party’s power. Almost as an afterthought, Stalin took up with Nadya Alliluyeva. He had known her family in Tblisi before 1905, after which they had moved to St. Petersburg. In 1912, while hiding in their apartment, he had become attracted to the lively daughters; in 1917, he became Nadya’s lover. It was a long-term mistake. The entire family was borderline bipolar, and Stalin never changed his habits: Marxism came first, his numerous short affairs second, his friends next, and his family last. It should not have come as a surprise when she committed suicide in 1932. Stalin’s importance grew during the revolution, and that of the moderates diminished. Just as the czarist and democratic forces had abdicated power, their poorly coordinated military efforts eventually confirmed the Bolsheviks’ victory, and Lenin achieved an iron control of the country that he could perhaps not have attained otherwise. Montefiore’s Young Stalin is not only a “must read” but also a good read. William L. Urban

890

Magill’s Literary Annual 2008

Review Sources The Economist 383 (May 19, 2007): 88. History Today 57, no. 8 (August, 2007): 63-64. Kirkus Reviews 75, no. 17 (September 1, 2007): 911-912. Library Journal 132, no. 17 (October 15, 2007): 74. London Review of Books 29, no. 21 (November 1, 2007): 27-29. The New York Review of Books 54, no. 17 (November 8, 2007): 36-38. The New York Times Book Review 157 (November 25, 2007): 21. The Times Literary Supplement, August 17, 2007, p. 10.

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008

BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS BY SUBJECT

2008 BAH#DUR SH#H ZAFAR II Last Mughal, The (Dalrymple), 415 BEAH, ISHMAEL Long Way Gone, A (Beah), 455 BERNSTEIN, HARRY Invisible Wall, The (Bernstein), 376 BEWICK, THOMAS Nature’s Engraver (Uglow), 524

GRASS, GÜNTER Peeling the Onion (Grass), 578 HEINRICH, BERND Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 HEINRICH, GERD Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 HIRSI ALI, AYAAN Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR Friendship, The (Sisman), 282 COLTRANE, JOHN Coltrane (Ratliff), 169 COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE James Fenimore Cooper (Franklin), 384 CUNARD, NANCY Nancy Cunard (Gordon), 519

JAMES, HENRY Henry James Goes to Paris (Brooks), 326 KAPUKCI%SKI, RYSZARD Travels with Herodotus (Kapuk ci5ski), 772 KESHAVARZ, FATEMEH Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz), 388 KINGSOLVER, BARBARA Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver), 27 KIRSTEIN, LINCOLN Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, The (Duberman), 872 KISSINGER, HENRY Nixon and Kissinger (Dallek), 533 KOZOL, JONATHAN Letters to a Young Teacher (Kozol), 434

DANTICAT, EDWIDGE Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat), 114 DAY, DORIS Considering Doris Day (Santopietro), 182 DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 216 DONNE, JOHN John Donne (Stubbs), 392 DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN Arthur Conan Doyle (Doyle), 36

LATUS, JANINE If I Am Missing or Dead (Latus), 344 L’ENFANT, PIERRE CHARLES Grand Avenues (Berg), 296 LINCOLN, ABRAHAM Land of Lincoln (Ferguson), 406

EINSTEIN, ALBERT Einstein (Isaacson), 236 GODWIN, PETER When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Godwin), 845 GORDON, MARY Circling My Mother (Gordon), 156

MAO ZEDONG Nixon and Mao (MacMillan), 538 893

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 TERESA, MOTHER Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa), 491 TERKEL, STUDS Touch and Go (Terkel), 759 TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE Alexis de Tocqueville (Brogan), 13 TOUSSAINT-LOUVERTURE Toussaint Louverture (Bell), 763

NIXON, RICHARD M. Nixon and Kissinger (Dallek), 533 Nixon and Mao (MacMillan), 538 NUREYEV, RUDOLF Nureyev (Kavanagh), 552 OSBORNE, JOHN John Osborne (Heilpern), 397

WATERS, ALICE Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (McNamee), 18 WAUGH, ALEXANDER Fathers and Sons (Waugh), 263 WAUGH, BRON Fathers and Sons (Waugh), 263 WAUGH, EVELYN Fathers and Sons (Waugh), 263 WHARTON, EDITH Edith Wharton (Lee), 232 WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE Notebooks (Williams), 543 WOLLSTONECRAFT, FANNY Death and the Maidens (Todd), 203 WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM Friendship, The (Sisman), 282

PICASSO, PABLO Life of Picasso, A (Richardson), 442 REAGAN, RONALD Reagan Diaries, The (Reagan), 619 RIEFENSTAHL, LENI Leni (Bach), 429 SHELLEY, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT Death and the Maidens (Todd), 203 SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE Being Shelley (Wroe), 68 Death and the Maidens (Todd), 203 STALIN, JOSEPH Young Stalin (Montefiore), 886 STANLEY, HENRY MORTON Stanley (Jeal), 708 STONE, ROBERT Prime Green (Stone), 605

894

CATEGORY INDEX

2008 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS . . . . . BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES . . . . . . . . . . ECONOMICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . EDUCATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . ESSAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FICTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC . . . HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LITERARY BIOGRAPHY . . . . . . LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY. . . . . . . . . . . .

NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT . . . PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION . . POETRY and DRAMA . . . . . . PSYCHOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE. . . . . . . . . SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY . . . . TRAVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WOMEN’S ISSUES . . . . . . . .

895 895 896 896 896 896 896 897 897 898

. . . .

. . . .

898 898 898 899

. . 899 . . 899 . . 899 . . 899

898

Reagan Diaries, The (Reagan), 619 Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 Touch and Go (Terkel), 759 Travels with Herodotus (Kapuk ci5ski), 772 When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Godwin), 845

ANTHROPOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY ARCHAEOLOGY. See SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY

BIOGRAPHY. See also LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Alexis de Tocqueville (Brogan), 13 Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (McNamee), 18 Being Shelley (Wroe), 68 Coltrane (Ratliff), 169 Considering Doris Day (Santopietro), 182 Death and the Maidens (Todd), 203 Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 216 Einstein (Isaacson), 236 Grand Avenues (Berg), 296 Land of Lincoln (Ferguson), 406 Last Mughal, The (Dalrymple), 415 Leni (Bach), 429 Life of Picasso, A (Richardson), 442 Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa), 491 Nancy Cunard (Gordon), 519

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver), 27 Arthur Conan Doyle (Doyle), 36 Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat), 114 Circling My Mother (Gordon), 156 If I Am Missing or Dead (Latus), 344 Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366 Invisible Wall, The (Bernstein), 376 Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz), 388 Letters to a Young Teacher (Kozol), 434 Long Way Gone, A (Beah), 455 Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa), 491 Notebooks (Williams), 543 Peeling the Onion (Grass), 578 Prime Green (Stone), 605 895

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 Cultural Amnesia (James), 195 Curtain, The (Kundera), 199 Due Considerations (Updike), 228 Other Colors (Pamuk), 565 Second Diasporist Manifesto (Kitaj), 657 Travels with Herodotus (Kapuk ci5ski), 772 Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Acocella), 786

Nature’s Engraver (Uglow), 524 Nixon and Kissinger (Dallek), 533 Nureyev (Kavanagh), 552 Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 Stanley (Jeal), 708 Toussaint Louverture (Bell), 763 Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, The (Duberman), 872 Young Stalin (Montefiore), 886

FICTION Abstinence Teacher, The (Perrotta), 1 After Dark (Murakami), 5 Angelica (Phillips), 22 Assistant, The (Walser), 40 Away (Bloom), 55 Bad Girl, The (Vargas Llosa), 59 Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The (Mengestu), 64 Big Girls, The (Moore), 76 Boomsday (Buckley), 101 Bridge of Sighs (Russo), 106 Broken Shore, The (Temple), 110 Careful Use of Compliments, The (McCall Smith), 122 Castle in the Forest, The (Mailer), 131 Cheating at Canasta (Trevor), 139 Children of Húrin, The (Tolkien), 143 Christine Falls (Black), 147 Complete Stories, The (Malouf), 178 Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (Handke), 190 Divisadero (Ondaatje), 220 Exit Ghost (Roth), 245 Falling Man (DeLillo), 253 Finn (Clinch), 268 Five Skies (Carlson), 273 Free Life, A (Jin), 277 Gentlemen of the Road (Chabon), 287 Gravedigger’s Daughter, The (Oates), 300 Gum Thief, The (Coupland), 308 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling), 312 Heart-Shaped Box (Hill), 321 House of Meetings (Amis), 331 In the Country of Men (Matar), 352 Indian Bride, The (Fossum), 357

CURRENT AFFAIRS and SOCIAL ISSUES Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream (Quinones), 32 Big Con, The (Chait), 72 Blackwater (Scahill), 92 Deep Economy (McKibben), 208 Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366 Legacy of Ashes (Weiner), 424 Lucifer Effect, The (Zimbardo), 463 Novels in Three Lines (Fénéon), 548 Poor People (Vollmann), 592 Power, Faith, and Fantasy (Oren), 600 Regensburg Lecture, The (Schall), 623 Russian Diary, A (Politkovskaya), 647 Utility of Force, The (Smith), 809 DIARIES. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS DRAMA. See POETRY and DRAMA ECONOMICS Big Con, The (Chait), 72 Deep Economy (McKibben), 208 Farewell to Alms, A (Clark), 258 EDUCATION Letters to a Young Teacher (Kozol), 434 ENVIRONMENT. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT ESSAYS At the Same Time (Sontag), 50 Case for Literature, The (Gao), 127 896

CATEGORY INDEX Indian Clerk, The (Leavitt), 361 Last Summer of the World, The (Mitchell), 420 Linger Awhile (Hoban), 447 Lost City Radio (Alarcón), 459 Maias, The (Eça de Queirós), 473 Making Money (Pratchett), 477 Maytrees, The (Dillard), 482 Museum of Dr. Moses, The (Oates), 500 Nada (Laforet), 509 Naming of the Dead, The (Rankin), 514 New England White (Carter), 528 On Chesil Beach (McEwan), 561 Out Stealing Horses (Petterson), 569 Overlook, The (Connelly), 573 Pesthouse, The (Crace), 587 Post-Birthday World, The (Shriver), 596 Ravel (Echenoz), 615 Religion, The (Willocks), 627 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid), 631 Returning to Earth (Harrison), 639 Run (Patchett), 643 Savage Detectives, The (Bolaño), 652 Secret Servant, The (Silva), 662 Shadow Catcher, The (Wiggins), 667 Shortcomings (Tomine), 676 Spook Country (Gibson), 704 Ten Days in the Hills (Smiley), 733 Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini), 746 Tin Roof Blowdown, The (Burke), 755 Tranquil Star, A (Levi), 768 Tree of Smoke (Johnson), 777 Varieties of Disturbance (Davis), 819 Water Cure, The (Everett), 828 Welsh Girl, The (Davies), 832 What the Dead Know (Lippman), 841 White Walls (Tolstaya), 856 Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The (Chabon), 881

Life of Picasso, A (Richardson), 442 Musicophilia (Sacks), 505 Nature’s Engraver (Uglow), 524 Nureyev (Kavanagh), 552 Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Acocella), 786 HISTORY Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream (Quinones), 32 Big Con, The (Chait), 72 Biography (Hamilton), 80 Cigarette Century, The (Brandt), 151 Coldest Winter, The (Halberstam), 160 Contested Waters (Wiltse), 186 Door of No Return, The (St. Clair), 224 Farewell to Alms, A (Clark), 258 Grand Avenues (Berg), 296 Head and Heart (Wills), 317 Inventing Human Rights (Hunt), 371 Ivan the Fool (Sinyavsky), 380 Land of Lincoln (Ferguson), 406 Last Harvest (Rybczynski), 410 Last Mughal, The (Dalrymple), 415 Legacy of Ashes (Weiner), 424 Magnificent Catastrophe, A (Larson), 468 Murder of Regilla, The (Pomeroy), 495 Nixon and Kissinger (Dallek), 533 Nixon and Mao (MacMillan), 538 Pentagon, The (Vogel), 582 Power, Faith, and Fantasy (Oren), 600 Slave Ship, The (Rediker), 681 Something in the Air (Fisher), 694 Stillborn God, The (Lilla), 713 Sunday (Harline), 723 Two Histories of England (Austen/ Dickens), 790 Victory of the West (Capponi), 823 What Hath God Wrought (Howe, D.), 836 Whisperers, The (Figes), 851 Years of Extermination, The (Friedländer), 876 Young Stalin (Montefiore), 886

FILM. See FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC Coltrane (Ratliff), 169 House That George Built, The (Sheed), 335 897

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 HISTORY OF SCIENCE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

MEDICINE. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

LETTERS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

MEMOIRS. See AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIRS, DIARIES, and LETTERS

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY Edith Wharton (Lee), 232 Fathers and Sons (Waugh), 263 Friendship, The (Sisman), 282 Henry James Goes to Paris (Brooks), 326 James Fenimore Cooper (Franklin), 384 John Donne (Stubbs), 392 John Osborne (Heilpern), 397 Life of Kingsley Amis, The (Leader), 438 Ralph Ellison (Rampersad), 610 Thomas Hardy (Tomalin), 742 Two Lives (Malcolm), 795 Uncommon Arrangements (Roiphe), 800 Why Kerouac Matters (Leland), 860

MUSIC. See FINE ARTS, FILM, and MUSIC NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver), 27 Of a Feather (Weidensaul), 556 Suicidal Planet, The (Hillman, Fawcett, and Rajan), 718 Unnatural History of the Sea, The (Roberts), 805 World Without Us, The (Weisman), 864 PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION Charisma (Rieff), 135 God Is Not Great (Hitchens), 292 Head and Heart (Wills), 317 Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366 Inventing Human Rights (Hunt), 371 Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa), 491 Regensburg Lecture, The (Schall), 623 Stillborn God, The (Lilla), 713

LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY At the Same Time (Sontag), 50 Buried Book, The (Damrosch), 118 Curtain, The (Kundera), 199 Energy of Delusion (Shklovsky), 241 Henry James Goes to Paris (Brooks), 326 Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz), 388 Prime Green (Stone), 605 Temptation of the Impossible, The (Vargas Llosa), 729 Thinking in Circles (Douglas), 738 Triumph of the Thriller, The (Anderson), 782 Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Acocella), 786 Two Lives (Malcolm), 795 Why Kerouac Matters (Leland), 860

NATURAL HISTORY. See NATURE, NATURAL HISTORY, and the ENVIRONMENT POETRY and DRAMA Age of Huts, The (Compleat) (Silliman), 9 Asylum in the Grasslands (Glancy), 45 Biplane Houses, The (Murray), 84 Blackbird and Wolf (Cole), 88 Book of Psalms, The (Alter), 97 Collected Poems, 1956-1998, The (Herbert), 165 Complete Poetry, The (Vallejo), 173 Devils and Islands (Cassity), 212 Expectation Days (McPherson), 249

LITERARY HISTORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY LITERARY THEORY. See LITERARY CRITICISM, HISTORY, and THEORY 898

CATEGORY INDEX Green and Gray (O’Brien), 304 In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus (Kennedy), 348 Kitchen Sink, The (Goldbarth), 402 Little Boat (Valentine), 451 Miyazawa Kenji (Miyazawa), 486 Snow Part (Celan), 690 Souls of the Labadie Tract (Howe, S.), 699 Time and Materials (Hass), 750 Worldly Country, A (Ashbery), 868

Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 Unnatural History of the Sea, The (Roberts), 805 Vaccine (Allen), 814 World Without Us, The (Weisman), 864 SOCIOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY, and ANTHROPOLOGY Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream (Quinones), 32 Charisma (Rieff), 135 Contested Waters (Wiltse), 186 Deep Economy (McKibben), 208 Thinking in Circles (Douglas), 738 World Without Us, The (Weisman), 864

PSYCHOLOGY Charisma (Rieff), 135 Lucifer Effect, The (Zimbardo), 463 Rethinking Thin (Kolata), 635

TECHNOLOGY. See SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE

RELIGION. See PHILOSOPHY and RELIGION SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and MEDICINE Einstein (Isaacson), 236 How Doctors Think (Groopman), 340 Musicophilia (Sacks), 505 Of a Feather (Weidensaul), 556 Rethinking Thin (Kolata), 635

TRAVEL Shadow of the Silk Road (Thubron), 672 Travels with Herodotus (Kapuk ci5ski), 772 WOMEN’S ISSUES Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366 Uncommon Arrangements (Roiphe), 800

899

TITLE INDEX

2008 Children of Húrin, The (Tolkien), 143 Christine Falls (Black), 147 Cigarette Century, The (Brandt), 151 Circling My Mother (Gordon), 156 Coldest Winter, The (Halberstam), 160 Collected Poems, 1956-1998, The (Herbert), 165 Coltrane (Ratliff), 169 Complete Poetry, The (Vallejo), 173 Complete Stories, The (Malouf), 178 Considering Doris Day (Santopietro), 182 Contested Waters (Wiltse), 186 Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (Handke), 190 Cultural Amnesia (James), 195 Curtain, The (Kundera), 199

Abstinence Teacher, The (Perrotta), 1 After Dark (Murakami), 5 Age of Huts, The (Compleat) (Silliman), 9 Alexis de Tocqueville (Brogan), 13 Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (McNamee), 18 Angelica (Phillips), 22 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver), 27 Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream (Quinones), 32 Arthur Conan Doyle (Doyle), 36 Assistant, The (Walser), 40 Asylum in the Grasslands (Glancy), 45 At the Same Time (Sontag), 50 Away (Bloom), 55 Bad Girl, The (Vargas Llosa), 59 Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The (Mengestu), 64 Being Shelley (Wroe), 68 Big Con, The (Chait), 72 Big Girls, The (Moore), 76 Biography (Hamilton), 80 Biplane Houses, The (Murray), 84 Blackbird and Wolf (Cole), 88 Blackwater (Scahill), 92 Book of Psalms, The (Alter), 97 Boomsday (Buckley), 101 Bridge of Sighs (Russo), 106 Broken Shore, The (Temple), 110 Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat), 114 Buried Book, The (Damrosch), 118

Death and the Maidens (Todd), 203 Deep Economy (McKibben), 208 Devils and Islands (Cassity), 212 Diana Chronicles, The (Brown), 216 Divisadero (Ondaatje), 220 Door of No Return, The (St. Clair), 224 Due Considerations (Updike), 228 Edith Wharton (Lee), 232 Einstein (Isaacson), 236 Energy of Delusion (Shklovsky), 241 Exit Ghost (Roth), 245 Expectation Days (McPherson), 249 Falling Man (DeLillo), 253 Farewell to Alms, A (Clark), 258 Fathers and Sons (Waugh), 263 Finn (Clinch), 268 Five Skies (Carlson), 273 Free Life, A (Jin), 277 Friendship, The (Sisman), 282

Careful Use of Compliments, The (McCall Smith), 122 Case for Literature, The (Gao), 127 Castle in the Forest, The (Mailer), 131 Charisma (Rieff), 135 Cheating at Canasta (Trevor), 139 900

TITLE INDEX Long Way Gone, A (Beah), 455 Lost City Radio (Alarcón), 459 Lucifer Effect, The (Zimbardo), 463

Gentlemen of the Road (Chabon), 287 God Is Not Great (Hitchens), 292 Grand Avenues (Berg), 296 Gravedigger’s Daughter, The (Oates), 300 Green and Gray (O’Brien), 304 Gum Thief, The (Coupland), 308

Magnificent Catastrophe, A (Larson), 468 Maias, The (Eça de Queirós), 473 Making Money (Pratchett), 477 Maytrees, The (Dillard), 482 Miyazawa Kenji (Miyazawa), 486 Mother Teresa (Mother Teresa), 491 Murder of Regilla, The (Pomeroy), 495 Museum of Dr. Moses, The (Oates), 500 Musicophilia (Sacks), 505

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling), 312 Head and Heart (Wills), 317 Heart-Shaped Box (Hill), 321 Henry James Goes to Paris (Brooks), 326 House of Meetings (Amis), 331 House That George Built, The (Sheed), 335 How Doctors Think (Groopman), 340

Nada (Laforet), 509 Naming of the Dead, The (Rankin), 514 Nancy Cunard (Gordon), 519 Nature’s Engraver (Uglow), 524 New England White (Carter), 528 Nixon and Kissinger (Dallek), 533 Nixon and Mao (MacMillan), 538 Notebooks (Williams), 543 Novels in Three Lines (Fénéon), 548 Nureyev (Kavanagh), 552

If I Am Missing or Dead (Latus), 344 In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus (Kennedy), 348 In the Country of Men (Matar), 352 Indian Bride, The (Fossum), 357 Indian Clerk, The (Leavitt), 361 Infidel (Hirsi Ali), 366 Inventing Human Rights (Hunt), 371 Invisible Wall, The (Bernstein), 376 Ivan the Fool (Sinyavsky), 380

Of a Feather (Weidensaul), 556 On Chesil Beach (McEwan), 561 Other Colors (Pamuk), 565 Out Stealing Horses (Petterson), 569 Overlook, The (Connelly), 573

James Fenimore Cooper (Franklin), 384 Jasmine and Stars (Keshavarz), 388 John Donne (Stubbs), 392 John Osborne (Heilpern), 397

Peeling the Onion (Grass), 578 Pentagon, The (Vogel), 582 Pesthouse, The (Crace), 587 Poor People (Vollmann), 592 Post-Birthday World, The (Shriver), 596 Power, Faith, and Fantasy (Oren), 600 Prime Green (Stone), 605

Kitchen Sink, The (Goldbarth), 402 Land of Lincoln (Ferguson), 406 Last Harvest (Rybczynski), 410 Last Mughal, The (Dalrymple), 415 Last Summer of the World, The (Mitchell), 420 Legacy of Ashes (Weiner), 424 Leni (Bach), 429 Letters to a Young Teacher (Kozol), 434 Life of Kingsley Amis, The (Leader), 438 Life of Picasso, A (Richardson), 442 Linger Awhile (Hoban), 447 Little Boat (Valentine), 451

Ralph Ellison (Rampersad), 610 Ravel (Echenoz), 615 Reagan Diaries, The (Reagan), 619 Regensburg Lecture, The (Schall), 623 Religion, The (Willocks), 627 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid), 631 901

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 Triumph of the Thriller, The (Anderson), 782 Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Acocella), 786 Two Histories of England (Austen/ Dickens), 790 Two Lives (Malcolm), 795

Rethinking Thin (Kolata), 635 Returning to Earth (Harrison), 639 Run (Patchett), 643 Russian Diary, A (Politkovskaya), 647 Savage Detectives, The (Bolaño), 652 Second Diasporist Manifesto (Kitaj), 657 Secret Servant, The (Silva), 662 Shadow Catcher, The (Wiggins), 667 Shadow of the Silk Road (Thubron), 672 Shortcomings (Tomine), 676 Slave Ship, The (Rediker), 681 Snoring Bird, The (Heinrich), 685 Snow Part (Celan), 690 Something in the Air (Fisher), 694 Souls of the Labadie Tract (Howe, S.), 699 Spook Country (Gibson), 704 Stanley (Jeal), 708 Stillborn God, The (Lilla), 713 Suicidal Planet, The (Hillman, Fawcett, and Rajan), 718 Sunday (Harline), 723

Uncommon Arrangements (Roiphe), 800 Unnatural History of the Sea, The (Roberts), 805 Utility of Force, The (Smith), 809 Vaccine (Allen), 814 Varieties of Disturbance (Davis), 819 Victory of the West (Capponi), 823 Water Cure, The (Everett), 828 Welsh Girl, The (Davies), 832 What Hath God Wrought (Howe, D.), 836 What the Dead Know (Lippman), 841 When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Godwin), 845 Whisperers, The (Figes), 851 White Walls (Tolstaya), 856 Why Kerouac Matters (Leland), 860 World Without Us, The (Weisman), 864 Worldly Country, A (Ashbery), 868 Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, The (Duberman), 872

Temptation of the Impossible, The (Vargas Llosa), 729 Ten Days in the Hills (Smiley), 733 Thinking in Circles (Douglas), 738 Thomas Hardy (Tomalin), 742 Thousand Splendid Suns, A (Hosseini), 746 Time and Materials (Hass), 750 Tin Roof Blowdown, The (Burke), 755 Touch and Go (Terkel), 759 Toussaint Louverture (Bell), 763 Tranquil Star, A (Levi), 768 Travels with Herodotus (Kapuk ci5ski), 772 Tree of Smoke (Johnson), 777

Years of Extermination, The (Friedländer), 876 Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The (Chabon), 881 Young Stalin (Montefiore), 886

902

AUTHOR INDEX

2008 ACOCELLA, JOAN Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, 786 ALARCÓN, DANIEL Lost City Radio, 459 ALLEN, ARTHUR Vaccine, 814 ALTER, ROBERT Book of Psalms, The, 97 AMIS, MARTIN House of Meetings, 331 ANDERSON, PATRICK Triumph of the Thriller, The, 782 ASHBERY, JOHN Worldly Country, A, 868 AUSTEN, JANE Two Histories of England, 790

BROGAN, HUGH Alexis de Tocqueville, 13 BROOKS, PETER Henry James Goes to Paris, 326 BROWN, TINA Diana Chronicles, The, 216 BUCKLEY, CHRISTOPHER Boomsday, 101 BURKE, JAMES LEE Tin Roof Blowdown, The, 755 CAPPONI, NICCOLÒ Victory of the West, 823 CARLSON, RON Five Skies, 273 CARTER, STEPHEN L. New England White, 528 CASSITY, TURNER Devils and Islands, 212 CELAN, PAUL Snow Part, 690 CHABON, MICHAEL Gentlemen of the Road, 287 Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The, 881 CHAIT, JONATHAN Big Con, The, 72 CLARK, GREGORY Farewell to Alms, A, 258 CLINCH, JON Finn, 268 COLE, HENRI Blackbird and Wolf, 88 CONNELLY, MICHAEL Overlook, The, 573 COUPLAND, DOUGLAS Gum Thief, The, 308 CRACE, JIM Pesthouse, The, 587

BACH, STEVEN Leni, 429 BANVILLE, JOHN (as Benjamin Black) Christine Falls, 147 BEAH, ISHMAEL Long Way Gone, A, 455 BELL, MADISON SMARTT Toussaint Louverture, 763 BERG, SCOTT W. Grand Avenues, 296 BERNSTEIN, HARRY Invisible Wall, The, 376 BLACK, BENJAMIN See BANVILLE, JOHN BLOOM, AMY Away, 55 BOLAÑO, ROBERTO Savage Detectives, The, 652 BRANDT, ALLAN M. Cigarette Century, The, 151 903

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 FRANKLIN, WAYNE James Fenimore Cooper, 384 FRIEDLÄNDER, SAUL Years of Extermination, The, 876

DALLEK, ROBERT Nixon and Kissinger, 533 DALRYMPLE, WILLIAM Last Mughal, The, 415 DAMROSCH, DAVID Buried Book, The, 118 DANTICAT, EDWIDGE Brother, I’m Dying, 114 DAVIES, PETER HO Welsh Girl, The, 832 DAVIS, LYDIA Varieties of Disturbance, 819 DeLILLO, DON Falling Man, 253 DICKENS, CHARLES Two Histories of England, 790 DILLARD, ANNIE Maytrees, The, 482 DOUGLAS, MARY Thinking in Circles, 738 DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN Arthur Conan Doyle, 36 DUBERMAN, MARTIN Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, The, 872

GAO XINGJIAN Case for Literature, The, 127 GIBSON, WILLIAM Spook Country, 704 GLANCY, DIANE Asylum in the Grasslands, 45 GODWIN, PETER When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, 845 GOLDBARTH, ALBERT Kitchen Sink, The, 402 GORDON, LOIS Nancy Cunard, 519 GORDON, MARY Circling My Mother, 156 GRASS, GÜNTER Peeling the Onion, 578 GROOPMAN, JEROME How Doctors Think, 340 HALBERSTAM, DAVID Coldest Winter, The, 160 HAMID, MOHSIN Reluctant Fundamentalist, The, 631 HAMILTON, NIGEL Biography, 80 HANDKE, PETER Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, 190 HARLINE, CRAIG Sunday, 723 HARRISON, JIM Returning to Earth, 639 HASS, ROBERT Time and Materials, 750 HEILPERN, JOHN John Osborne, 397 HEINRICH, BERND Snoring Bird, The, 685 HERBERT, ZBIGNIEW Collected Poems, 1956-1998, The, 165

EÇA DE QUEIRÓS, JOSÉ MARIA Maias, The, 473 ECHENOZ, JEAN Ravel, 615 EVERETT, PERCIVAL Water Cure, The, 828 FAWCETT, TINA, MAYER HILLMAN, and SUDHIR CHELLA RAJAN Suicidal Planet, The, 718 FÉNÉON, FÉLIX Novels in Three Lines, 548 FERGUSON, ANDREW Land of Lincoln, 406 FIGES, ORLANDO Whisperers, The, 851 FISHER, MARC Something in the Air, 694 FOSSUM, KARIN Indian Bride, The, 357 904

AUTHOR INDEX KOZOL, JONATHAN Letters to a Young Teacher, 434 KUNDERA, MILAN Curtain, The, 199

HILL, JOE Heart-Shaped Box, 321 HILLMAN, MAYER, TINA FAWCETT, and SUDHIR CHELLA RAJAN Suicidal Planet, The, 718 HIRSI ALI, AYAAN Infidel, 366 HITCHENS, CHRISTOPHER God Is Not Great, 292 HOBAN, RUSSELL Linger Awhile, 447 HOSSEINI, KHALED Thousand Splendid Suns, A, 746 HOWE, DANIEL WALKER What Hath God Wrought, 836 HOWE, SUSAN Souls of the Labadie Tract, 699 HUNT, LYNN Inventing Human Rights, 371

LAFORET, CARMEN Nada, 509 LARSON, EDWARD J. Magnificent Catastrophe, A, 468 LATUS, JANINE If I Am Missing or Dead, 344 LEADER, ZACHARY Life of Kingsley Amis, The, 438 LEAVITT, DAVID Indian Clerk, The, 361 LEE, HERMIONE Edith Wharton, 232 LELAND, JOHN Why Kerouac Matters, 860 LEVI, PRIMO Tranquil Star, A, 768 LILLA, MARK Stillborn God, The, 713 LIPPMAN, LAURA What the Dead Know, 841

ISAACSON, WALTER Einstein, 236 JAMES, CLIVE Cultural Amnesia, 195 JEAL, TIM Stanley, 708 JIN, HA Free Life, A, 277 JOHNSON, DENIS Tree of Smoke, 777

McCALL SMITH, ALEXANDER Careful Use of Compliments, The, 122 McEWAN, IAN On Chesil Beach, 561 McKIBBEN, BILL Deep Economy, 208 MacMILLAN, MARGARET Nixon and Mao, 538 McNAMEE, THOMAS Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, 18 McPHERSON, SANDRA Expectation Days, 249 MAILER, NORMAN Castle in the Forest, The, 131 MALCOLM, JANET Two Lives, 795 MALOUF, DAVID Complete Stories, The, 178

KAPUKCI%SKI, RYSZARD Travels with Herodotus, 772 KAVANAGH, JULIE Nureyev, 552 KENNEDY, X. J. In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus, 348 KESHAVARZ, FATEMEH Jasmine and Stars, 388 KINGSOLVER, BARBARA Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 27 KITAJ, R. B. Second Diasporist Manifesto, 657 KOLATA, GINA Rethinking Thin, 635 905

MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2008 QUINONES, SAM Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, 32

MATAR, HISHAM In the Country of Men, 352 MENGESTU, DINAW Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, The, 64 MITCHELL, EMILY Last Summer of the World, The, 420 MIYAZAWA, KENJI Miyazawa Kenji, 486 MONTEFIORE, SIMON SEBAG Young Stalin, 886 MOORE, SUSANNA Big Girls, The, 76 MURAKAMI, HARUKI After Dark, 5 MURRAY, LES Biplane Houses, The, 84

RAJAN, SUDHIR CHELLA, MAYER HILLMAN, and TINA FAWCETT Suicidal Planet, The, 718 RAMPERSAD, ARNOLD Ralph Ellison, 610 RANKIN, IAN Naming of the Dead, The, 514 RATLIFF, BEN Coltrane, 169 REAGAN, RONALD Reagan Diaries, The, 619 REDIKER, MARCUS Slave Ship, The, 681 RICHARDSON, JOHN Life of Picasso, A, 442 RIEFF, PHILIP Charisma, 135 ROBERTS, CALLUM Unnatural History of the Sea, The, 805 ROIPHE, KATIE Uncommon Arrangements, 800 ROTH, PHILIP Exit Ghost, 245 ROWLING, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 312 RUSSO, RICHARD Bridge of Sighs, 106 RYBCZYNSKI, WITOLD Last Harvest, 410

OATES, JOYCE CAROL Gravedigger’s Daughter, The, 300 Museum of Dr. Moses, The, 500 O’BRIEN, GEOFFREY G. Green and Gray, 304 ONDAATJE, MICHAEL Divisadero, 220 OREN, MICHAEL B. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 600 PAMUK, ORHAN Other Colors, 565 PATCHETT, ANN Run, 643 PERROTTA, TOM Abstinence Teacher, The, 1 PETTERSON, PER Out Stealing Horses, 569 PHILLIPS, ARTHUR Angelica, 22 POLITKOVSKAYA, ANNA Russian Diary, A, 647 POMEROY, SARAH B. Murder of Regilla, The, 495 PRATCHETT, TERRY Making Money, 477

SACKS, OLIVER Musicophilia, 505 ST. CLAIR, WILLIAM Door of No Return, The, 224 SANTOPIETRO, TOM Considering Doris Day, 182 SCAHILL, JEREMY Blackwater, 92 SCHALL, JAMES V. Regensburg Lecture, The, 623 906

AUTHOR INDEX SHEED, WILFRID House That George Built, The, 335 SHKLOVSKY, VIKTOR Energy of Delusion, 241 SHRIVER, LIONEL Post-Birthday World, The, 596 SILLIMAN, RON Age of Huts (Compleat), The, 9 SILVA, DANIEL Secret Servant, The, 662 SINYAVSKY, ANDREI Ivan the Fool, 380 SISMAN, ADAM Friendship, The, 282 SMILEY, JANE Ten Days in the Hills, 733 SMITH, RUPERT Utility of Force, The, 809 SONTAG, SUSAN At the Same Time, 50 STONE, ROBERT Prime Green, 605 STUBBS, JOHN John Donne, 392

TREVOR, WILLIAM Cheating at Canasta, 139 UGLOW, JENNY Nature’s Engraver, 524 UPDIKE, JOHN Due Considerations, 228 VALENTINE, JEAN Little Boat, 451 VALLEJO, CÉSAR Complete Poetry, The, 173 VARGAS LLOSA, MARIO Bad Girl, The, 59 Temptation of the Impossible, The, 729 VOGEL, STEVE Pentagon, The, 582 VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T. Poor People, 592 WALSER, ROBERT Assistant, The, 40 WAUGH, ALEXANDER Fathers and Sons, 263 WEIDENSAUL, SCOTT Of a Feather, 556 WEINER, TIM Legacy of Ashes, 424 WEISMAN, ALAN World Without Us, The, 864 WIGGINS, MARIANNE Shadow Catcher, The, 667 WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE Notebooks, 543 WILLOCKS, TIM Religion, The, 627 WILLS, GARRY Head and Heart, 317 WILTSE, JEFF Contested Waters, 186 WROE, ANN Being Shelley, 68

TEMPLE, PETER Broken Shore, The, 110 TERESA, MOTHER Mother Teresa, 491 TERKEL, STUDS Touch and Go, 759 THUBRON, COLIN Shadow of the Silk Road, 672 TODD, JANET Death and the Maidens, 203 TOLKIEN, J. R. R. Children of Húrin, The, 143 TOLSTAYA, TATYANA White Walls, 856 TOMALIN, CLAIRE Thomas Hardy, 742 TOMINE, ADRIAN Shortcomings, 676

ZIMBARDO, PHILIP Lucifer Effect, The, 463 907