By John Stubbs
Publisher Norton
ISBN 0393062600
565 pages
$35
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
In 1619, shortly before his election as dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the most distinguished clerics in England
sent some of his youthful, and now rather embarrassing, writings to a friend. Included, for instance, was a tract called "Biathanatos,"
which defended suicide. "Publish it not," the eminent churchman insisted, and yet "burn it not." As for the notorious love
poems, well, manuscript copies of those had been circulating for years. They, he pointed out, had been "written by Jack Donne,
and not by Dr. Donne."
For many readers, John Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" and "Elegies" are the earliest English poems to sound wholly modern.
The poet literally shouts at us, "For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love." He can be cynical about casual sex --
"I have lov'd, and got, and told" -- and even ecstatically pornographic: "License my roving hands, and let them go,/ Before,
behind, between, above, below."
A real human voice is always pushing against the constraints of meter, while the poetic similes are drawn from science,
technology and contemporary history. Donne once compared true lovers to the legs of a draftsman's compass -- inseparable,
no matter how far one wanders, and happiest when brought back together again. Even his most mystical speculations are grounded
in the human and physical: "Love's mysteries in souls do grow/ But yet the body is his book."
Since Donne's virtual rediscovery around the time of World War I -- largely through the efforts of the scholar H.J.C. Grierson
and the poet T.S. Eliot -- this great poet has usually been associated with the 17th century. Yet John Stubbs reminds us that
much of his finest poetry was written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Donne (1572-1631) was only eight years younger
than Shakespeare. As a Londoner, born and bred, he drank at the Mermaid tavern, applauded the famous plays we now study in
school, served as one of the Earl of Essex's men in naval operations against Spain. The swagger and vitality of Donne's poetic
voice makes better sense as part of the roistering 1590s.
But whenever poets write about Eros, you can be sure that Thanatos -- Death -- is also on their minds. Donne imagines his
skeleton disinterred (with a love token still intact: "a bracelet of bright hair about the bone"); he takes us to their bedside
"as virtuous men pass mildly away"; in his best-known "Holy Sonnet" he trumpets the celebrated phrase: "Death be not proud."
This obsession with mortality in a plague-stricken era carries over into his most popular prose work, the "Devotions Upon
Emergent Occasions," a kind of sickroom diary. Its pages crackle with the stark immediacy we associate with the early poems:
"Variable, and therefore miserable condition of Man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surpriz'd with
a sodaine change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name." In later sections of these
somber meditations, Donne widens his vision from the particular to the universal, his language rising gloriously to one of
the most famous passages in all of English literature:
"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed
away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
According to Stubbs, the importance of community, even of nation, was central to Donne's thought. Apart from his poetic
originality and rhetorical magniloquence, he was surprisingly conventional, even something of a jingoist and occasionally
a toady. He was born a Roman Catholic at a time when the Church was persecuted in England, when Jesuits acted as spies as
well as priests, and the entire nation was riven with suspicion, hatred and fear. But by his 20s, Donne had rejected his natal
religion, at least in part because it gave him no way to advance in life. Donne's family wasn't poor -- his father had made
a good deal of money as an ironmonger -- and he attended Oxford and the equivalent of law school at the Inns of Court. But
unless you were willing to conform to the Church of England, you might easily end up like Donne's brother -- dying in prison
for aiding enemies of the state. Surely, what really mattered was simply to be a good and loving Christian.
After Donne had conformed to the English church, he started his climb up the rungs of the Elizabethan bureaucracy, starting
very well indeed as the legal secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal. Then he made what his first biographer,
Izaak Walton, called the mistake of his life: In his late 20s, the young go-getter fell in love with the teenaged Ann More,
the daughter of Sir George More. They married secretly, and when the truth came out, Donne lost his job, Ann was turned out
by her father, and the two lovebirds were faced with utter poverty. (As the epigram had it: "John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone.")
The couple were taken in by a relative of Ann's, and for 10 years Donne scraped and bowed to regain his lost position in society.
To no avail. After all, he had committed a serious act of theft, depriving the More family of a valuable commodity, for in
those days a marriage was based on money and social position, not something as silly as love. And then there were those naughty
poems! So Donne took on freelance legal work, studied theology and languages on the side, and gave his wife baby after baby.
Because he was a fundamentally serious man, but also because he was an increasingly desperate one, the priesthood began
to make more and more sense. By now the harried husband and father was in his 40s, James I was on the throne and some of his
youthful indiscretions had been forgiven. Once ordained in 1615 -- no one seems to have bothered about special training --
Donne learned to preach brilliantly, to employ his skillful pen as a tool of the king and to tread carefully in theological
contests between the austere Puritans and what we might now call the more ritualistic Anglo-Catholics.
Ann died only a few years into his new career -- she was just 33 and had borne him a dozen children, only half of whom
survived to adulthood -- and he never married again. Indeed, in his later years Donne inveighed against the snares of the
flesh, reminding us with his wondrous eloquence that we are just "a volume of diseases bound together" and that "all our life
is but a going out to the place of execution, to death." He added, driving home the point, "Nor was there ever any man seen
to sleep in the cart between Newcastle and Tyburn -- between prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we
sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake." Open your eyes, sinner, and look to your salvation.
The author of "The Extasie" and "On His Mistress Going to Bed" may be the first English poet about whom a true and relatively
full biography can be written. We possess volumes of letters, sermons, verse and lots of secondary material. In "John Donne:
The Reformed Soul," the young English scholar John Stubbs employs all these, focusing resolutely on the life rather than the
work. Sometimes he presumes, a little rashly, to quote lines from the poems as registers of actual events and feelings. In
the end, he also suggests that we understand the mature John Donne as a figure of moderation at a time of increasing religious
fanaticism. Fair enough. But most of us will still prefer the bravado of rakish Jack Donne -- "I can love both fair and brown
... I can love her, and her, and you, and you" -- or the hellfire eloquence of St. Paul's Dr. Donne:
"God is the Lord of Hosts, and he can proceed by martial law; he can hang thee upon the next tree; he can choke thee with
a crumb, with a drop, at a voluptuous feast; he can sink down the stage and the player, the bed of wantonness and the wanton
actor, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell; he can surprise thee, even in the act of sin."
Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda(at symbol)gmail.com.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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POET'S CHOICE
ISBN NA
Reviewed by Robert Pinsky
Sometimes poetry makes things happen. In a large, resonant example, a poem by Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) about Stalin,
caused the poet's imprisonment in 1934. In the translation of Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, "The Stalin Epigram" and its
story have had great importance for many people:
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can't hear our words.
But whenever there's a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
Mandelstam's poetry caused his arrest and exile, and eventually his death in a hard labor camp, in the winter of 1938.
But his poetry continues to make things happen: effects large though immeasurable.
The Web site of the PEN American Center (pen.org) provides some idea of how many writers around the world today are threatened,
penalized, silenced, imprisoned and even murdered. The journalist Olga Politkovskaya, a vigorous opponent of the former Secret
Police officer Putin and his government, was shot dead in a Moscow elevator last October. The range PEN traces is wide, from
relatively mild curbs on freedom of expression to extreme ones, all over the world.
It is impossible to say how many writers and organizations have been inspired directly or indirectly by Mandelstam's struggle
and his work. The power of his example seems related to the fact that he is not a polemical or essentially political writer.
He is above all a great artist, who happens to have acquired political meaning as well. The idea of a Poetry Month shouldn't
include turning away from such meaning, toward mere marketing. Though the earth may be "forsworn" and the feeling of sustenance
in springtime may be a "mirage," the poet celebrates, in one of Mandelstam's late poems, written in April of 1937:
I raise this green to my lips,
this muddy promise of leaves,
this forsworn earth,
mother of snowdrops and of every tree.
See how I'm blinded but strengthened,
surrendering to the least of the roots?
Are my eyes not blown out
by the exploding trees?
The little frogs are rolled up in their voices,
drops of mercury, huddled in a ball.
The twigs are turning into branches, and the fallow ground
is a mirage of milk.
Written in circumstances of exile and terror, the poem triumphantly makes a home of the Earth.
Osip Mandelstam's poems "The Stalin Epigram" and "I raise this green to my lips ..." are from "The Selected Poems of Osip
Mandelstam," translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. New York Review of Books. Translation copyright 1973 by Clarence
Brown and W.S. Merwin.
By Gary Marmorstein
Publisher Thunder's Mouth
ISBN 1560257075
602
pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Richard Harrington
Now that they may all be history, we're accumulating notable record-label histories, including those of Atlantic,
Chess, Elektra and the Warner Music Group. The latest addition, Gary Marmorstein's "The Label," is about Columbia, the grandest
label of them all, the oldest brand name in recorded sound, the first to promote recording as an entertainment medium.
Lineal ancestor of Sony BMG, the label dates back to 1889, its name derived from the District of, where the Columbia Phonograph
Company initially sold and distributed Edison phonographs and cylinders. Columbia began its march to glory with such wax cylinder
stars as Eddie Giguere, a yodeler and an officer in the Washington Police Patrol, and John Y. Atlee, a whistler who by day
clerked at the Treasury Department. Monologist Len Spencer became America's first recording star; the U.S. Marine Band under
John Philip Sousa was the country's most prolific and most celebrated band, even after Columbia moved its operations to New
York in 1897.
On the far horizon: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman,
Leonard Bernstein, Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson and hundreds more, constituting
an essential, unmatched musical legacy.
Marmorstein chronicles Columbia's influence from wax cylinders to 78s to the LP (introduced by the label in 1948), from
tapes and CDs to the emerging digital world. But he seems most interested in the inner machinations of corporate Columbia
and its myriad subsidiaries. "The Label" becomes an exhaustive and exhausting catalog of mergers, acquisitions, restructurings,
staff shake-ups and shakeouts. It's fun to chart the poaching of talent, the clash of egos and the sometimes nefarious deal-making
that made Columbia the industry giant, but Marmorstein seems to have started out to write a biography of Goddard Lieberson,
the two-time president of Columbia (1956-71 and 1973-75), who, as the first true musician/executive, certainly deserves his
prominence in "The Label." Educated, erudite and adept as critic, composer and producer, Lieberson turned Columbia Masterworks
into the premier American classical label and was responsible for Columbia's development and domination of original cast Broadway
recordings. Lieberson was succeeded by Clive Davis and Walter Yetnikoff -- both lawyers, the one venal, the other vulgar --
and less interesting than their illustrious predecessor.
Marmorstein is at his best in an expansive telling of the stealth creation and marketing of the "33 1/3-rpm long-playing
microgroove record." Under the stewardship of Hungarian-born engineer Peter Goldmark, Columbia developed the LP before there
were machines to play it, for a public not especially clamoring for it, then saw it become the industry's gold-and-platinum
standard for the next half-century. When CBS president Frank Stanton unveiled it at a corporate powwow with chief rival RCA,
RCA'S president, David Sarnoff, turned to his stunned engineers and said, "You sonsabitches got caught with your pants down
again!" RCA, a year late in manufacturing LPs, carried on the battle of brands by pioneering color television and the 45-rpm
single.
The author, who seems most comfortable dealing with label history from the 1940s through the '60s, is strong at recounting
Columbia's pioneering of album cover art, its technological advances and assorted trademark, copyright and patent wars. But
for many, there will simply be too much about Masterworks and Broadway, as well as overly expansive coverage of pop centrists
Ray Conniff, Andre Kostelanetz and Mitch Miller, who embodied Columbia's longtime antipathy to rock 'n' roll, or the "three-chord
pestilence."
Acclaimed producers such as John Hammond and George Avakian get their due, along with the artists they worked with. While
there is a decent level of discussion of Columbia's remarkable jazz legacy, Marmorstein, like Miller, seems disdainful of
or uninterested in rock, which Columbia was late to embrace before becoming a dominant force in the field. Marmorstein recounts
some pop and rock history, from young Frank Sinatra in the '40s to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in the early '80s, but he
shows little interest in the label's achievement in country or black music.
Columbia's fascinating early history shows that the hardships faced by today's music industry -- dramatically declining
sales, format wars, accelerated technological obsolescence -- are nothing new. Even the dilemma of digital downloads, at once
the industry's salvation and curse, recalls the doom-saying in the 1920s and '30s, when the record industry seemed convinced
it would not withstand the rise of radio and its free music.
Even as the business models crumble, Columbia's legacy remains unassailable, whether it's found in the grooves or as digital
bytes. But "The Label" lacks the passion of the late Ahmet Ertegun's Atlantic Records photo-rich memoir, "What'd I Say," and
the insights of Nadine Cohodas' Chess history "Spinning Blues Into Gold," much less the hilarious yet profound mix of business,
social and musical threads that make Stan Cornyn's "Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music
Group" the very best corporate music chronicle. "The Label" expands the field without particularly enriching it.
Richard Harrington writes about popular music for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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LUDLOW
By David Mason
Publisher Red Hen
ISBN 1597090832
230 pages
$18.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles
The publicity director at a major New York publisher once told me there probably aren't more than 80,000 regular readers
of literary fiction in America.
A well-received book of poetry might sell 2,000 copies.
What sort of reception, then, awaits a new verse-novel, a rare hybrid of these two endangered forms? Consider: Even though
you're one of the fit but few who have wandered this deep into the pages of (Washington Post) Book World, you're as likely
to have read such a novel as to have gone sky diving. That's a shame because, while publishing long narrative poems may be
as wise as jumping from a plane, reading them isn't nearly so demanding.
One of the many pleasures of David Mason's "Ludlow" is a brief afterword in which he acknowledges readers' prejudice against
books such as his: "Anyone who writes narrative verse will confront a version of the following question: Why didn't you
just write it in prose?" His answer invokes Seamus Heaney's best-selling translation of "Beowulf" and the continued popularity
of Homer, but he also makes several practical arguments about the accessibility of this form: "Narrative verse is not inherently
harder to read than narrative prose. In the right hands, verse actually has more clarity, drive and economy than prose, and
it can offer literary pleasures of a sort unavailable in other genres."
The evidence is right here in his powerful story about the 1914 massacre of coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colo.
Yes, it's told in more than 600 eight-line stanzas of nonrhyming iambic pentameter, and if those poetic technicalities excite
you, you'll be dazzled by the feats Mason can perform within that structure. For the rest of us, though, what really matters
is this beautiful, wrenching tale. "Imagination's arrogance is all/ I bring to this," Mason writes, "a storyteller's hope/
of touching life in others, a poet's love/ of tropes and cadences, the sway of words."
"Ludlow" blends fact and fiction to recreate one of the most tragic events in American labor history. Much of the story
follows a noble, endearing young man named Louis Tikas, an actual person who emigrated from Crete, lured here by promises
of easy women. "Money flows like water," he hears, "rivers/ of money. A President named Rockefeller/ gives you a job the moment
you disembark." Alas, things don't work out quite that way. He flounders around before finally taking work as a scab in the
Colorado coal mines, which have been slowed by a violent strike. The men are essentially slaves: Their wages never cover the
cost of room and board; they're surrounded by barbed wire and violent, armed guards.
"In hell/ or, as he muttered to his fellow Greeks/ crouched in the dark, digging in its direction," Tikas quickly decides
to strike, and when he does, he takes more than 60 others with him to the union hall. So begins his quick rise through the
ranks of the local leadership. Sympathetic and alert, he's adept at keeping the peace in this explosive situation that eventually
involves 1,300 people who speak 20 different languages. The logistics of managing all these laborers and their families living
in tents in brutally cold weather with sporadic supplies (often held up by railway executives) would tax anyone's management
skill. It's an exhilarating, dangerous career that brings him into contact with Mother Jones (marvelously recreated here)
and several other real-life figures. We also meet Colorado's bungling governor, a vicious National Guard lieutenant named
Karl Linderfelt, and crafty John Rockefeller, calmly boasting about his support for every man's right to work (i.e., management's
right to break the union).
"These are the facts," Mason writes, "but the facts are not the story." Running parallel to this recreated history is his
invented tale of a beautiful young woman named Louisa, who's orphaned in the opening chapter when her father dies in a mining
accident. "Some company lackey came to tell her/ she would have to leave," but other miners care for her until she finally
gets work as a maid with a kindly family in town. These sections don't generate the excitement of Tikas' adventures, but they're
moving, and they provide a valuable shift in perspective as the strike reaches its horrific climax.
In the most wistful stanzas, Mason details his long attraction to this story, his trips to Ludlow as a boy and his return
as an adult, hoping to write "a tale in verse about the immigrants/ ... the dodge/ of truth among arroyos where the fighting/
razed all hope of prospering." Ultimately, this isn't just a story about a brave labor activist, a "footnote nearly lost/
from the pages of the history books." Instead, in these stirring lines, Mason has written something far more personal: "We
piece together Tikas as we make/ our own past from what evidence we find." Here's a chapter of our lives in cadences that
will resonate with anyone who gives them a chance.
By Masha Hamilton
Publisher HarperCollins
ISBN 0061173487
308
pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Masha Hamilton has been a journalist in Moscow and the Middle East and is the author of two previous books. In an Internet
interview she seems to be responsible, sensible, serious in every way. I should also say that some pre-publication reviews
of her first novel, "The Camel Bookmobile," have been both favorable and respectful and that there really is a camel bookmobile
operating out of Garissa, a town in Kenya -- a caravan carrying donated volumes to tribes so remote that some of them have
never seen a book. Also, in her photograph, Hamilton looks like the nicest person in the world.
But I read "The Camel Bookmobile" with grinding embarrassment. Why didn't somebody save the author from this? For all her
previous experiences with foreign cultures, how could she have managed to appear to be so -- for lack of a better phrase --
culture-bound?
Here is the story. Fiona Sweeney, a spunky, "whimsical" 36-year-old librarian, gets sick to death of her job and her boyfriend
in New York City and decides to go to Kenya to be part of the Camel Bookmobile project. She will be working for an African
librarian, Mr. Abasi, who likes neither books nor people and took this job because it keeps him indoors and allows him to
do little work. He scorns the remote villages that he and Fiona are supposed to be serving, and hates to ride on a camel.
Already there is an implicit and shiveringly creepy assumption that Fiona, an American woman, knows how to do this job far
better than the African allegedly in charge.
One of the tribes they visit includes three significant families: Neema, a wise grandma and her teenage grandchild, Kanika;
Matani, who has done some studying in Nairobi, and his vain, self-serving wife, Jwahir; and Abayomi the drum maker, a widower
who lives with his two sons, Badru, who's a handful, and Scar Boy, who was hideously mauled as a child by a hyena. Conveniently
for the Bookmobile, Grandma Neema can read (she read the Bible until she got sick of it), and so can Matani. He has tried
to teach the tribal children their letters but has no pencils, no paper, and gets little respect for his efforts. On the romantic
front, Jwahir, Matani's wife, has denied him sex for months, aborted his child because she didn't want to spoil her figure,
and although it's stated repeatedly that adultery means execution for a woman if she's caught, has been making brazen advances
to Abayomi.
So, in comes the Camel Bookmobile. It has books in Swahili, but they don't figure in the narrative. The ones that do are
mostly in English: "The Cat in the Hat," "Project for Winter," "The Pearl" and something called "Baby's First Five Years."
"Tell them," Fiona says to Mr. Abasi, as she tries in vain to urge that volume on a couple of impassive indigenous matrons,
"this is loaded with simple games for a child's early development." Frankly, I'm baffled by the tone here. I just don't know
what the author is getting at. Fiona behaves in every way like the proverbial ugly American. She barges into huts where only
men are living, she goes out walking alone with Matani and (literally) turns cartwheels for him, she teaches the kids to sing
"Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes," all in the bland assumption that Western culture, even its most debased forms, simply must
be superior. When a couple of books go missing, she returns alone to the village to find the culprit (much of the plot turns
on these missing books) and moves right in with Neema and Kanika, never considering that another mouth to feed in a poverty-stricken
tribe might be an imposition. She gets her hair braided in the African way and, well, you know what's coming.
This is the Tribe That Acts According to the Author's Wishes. Consider "female circumcision," for example. "They held me
down and hewed away at my private flesh with a broad-bladed knife," Neema tells Kanika, but Kanika, although she's a nubile
teenager ready for marriage, never gets around to having it done. And remember those strict rules about fooling around? When
Abayomi tells Matani that his wife actually "loves" him, the drum maker, does Matani complain to the elders and invoke the
law? No, he throws up a couple of times and in a few pages takes Fiona Sweeney to a hut outside the village where they do
something called "drinking honeyed rain." Meanwhile, Matani's wife, who despite her own circumcision entertains lustful thoughts,
complains about recipes in the library books when she can't even read the title of "The Cat in the Hat" correctly. And why,
in a tribe where children mean everything, would she choose to (a) remain childless to keep her figure, and (b) make a move
that would turn her into the stepmother of the abominably deformed Scar Boy?
This is a novel where the word "exotic" occurs at least eight times; where people think thoughts like "Where in the name
of a camel's ass had that feisty spirit gone?" But readers can talk about that in discussion groups, along with what "drinking
honeyed rain" out in the bush might actually be like. Embarrassing.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE LAST EMPRESS
By Anchee Min
Publisher Houghton Mifflin
ISBN 0747578508
308
pages
$25
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who reviews fiction frequently for The Washington
Post
Anchee Min's historical novels about China have a clear purpose beyond entertainment or instruction. Beginning with "Becoming
Madame Mao" (2000) and following with a two-volume epic about the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, the author has set out to reject
traditional caricatures of female Chinese rulers as power-mad dragon ladies in favor of more nuanced, sympathetic fictional
portraits.
"The Last Empress" is the second of the two novels about Tzu Hsi, who ruled China from the mid-19th century to 1908, during
the waning years of the Ch'ing dynasty. It continues the story after "Empress Orchid" (2004), in which Min described how the
woman rose from among thousands of imperial concubines to become the mother of the emperor's only son. The first novel ended
in 1861 with the emperor's death. Because her son was 5 years old at the time and would not assume full power for years, Tzu
Hsi, also called Orchid, governed the empire as co-regent along with the late emperor's childless senior wife.
Both the country and the imperial court were undergoing catastrophic changes. China's humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars
forced the opening of its ports to the West, easing the way for European, American and Japanese invasions, and allowed missionaries
to introduce foreign religion and culture while remaining exempt from Chinese law. The court, plagued by corruption and the
constant threat of coups, was straining to pay stupendous war debts and to control widespread peasant uprisings.
"The Last Empress," a more impatiently written novel than its stately, evocative precursor, begins under these inauspicious
circumstances. It is Orchid's job to raise the young emperor, Tung Chih, who has few father figures among the contentious
schemers in the imperial court, and to rule a vast, increasingly besieged country while avoiding various efforts to depose
her. Tung Chih grows into a recalcitrant adolescent, more interested in debauchery than responsibility, and Orchid's hopes
of retiring after her son officially ascends to the throne are crushed when he dies of venereal disease. Devastated by this
loss and stung by false accusations that she caused his death, Orchid is forced to name a new heir, her nephew Guang-hsu,
and to begin the process of educating yet another emperor. In the meantime, China remains "like a mulberry tree nipped away
at by worms," vulnerable to continuing attacks by the Japanese, who invade Formosa in 1871, and the British, who annex Burma
a few years later.
"Future critics, historians and scholars would insist that Guang-hsu had led a normal life until I, his aunt, wrecked him,"
sighs Orchid, who goes to great lengths to combat this view. Eager to please but fearful, the young man is easily manipulated
by power-grabbing advisers and proves incapable of facing the continuing crisis he has inherited. More and more territory
falls out of imperial control: In the mid-1880s Vietnam is ceded to the French, Korea declares independence, and peasants
known as Boxers launch the beginnings of a long rebellion that would reach its apex at the turn of the century.
Forced to intervene in every conflict both inside and outside the court, Orchid continues to long for an ever-infeasible
retirement. "The burden of arbitration was left solely to me," she declares, "not because I had any special competence but
because nobody else could do any better." Meanwhile, the exiled ringleaders of a foiled assassination plot convince the international
press that Orchid is an evil dictator, hoping that the slander will urge foreign powers to unseat her. The year 1898 brings
further ruin in the form of famine, floods and widespread rioting. When the emperor falls ill, Orchid's enemies claim that
she has tried to poison him; when he retreats into solitude after a nervous collapse, it's widely assumed that she has placed
him under house arrest. Forced to flee Peking when the Boxer Rebellion and invasions of foreign troops ravage the country,
the royals eventually return home to a much-diminished city, saddled with a permanent foreign military presence.
"The ship sinks when a female goes on board," goes an old Chinese saying that the empress tries manfully to disavow. While
Orchid's dedication to her country is so absolute that she sacrifices her entire personal life, including a great love for
her army commander, many times in Min's narrative she seems more interested in what the Western press and "future critics"
will say than in how her own people regard her. Orchid's reign, after all, coincides with the first significant Western interaction
with China, which for centuries had been a closed society.
For every generation's dream of China there seems to be a corresponding dream of Tzu Hsi. She was a dragon lady for late-19th-century
Westerners who considered that image useful for their colonial aspirations. Today's Tzu Hsi, as Min's revisionist pair of
novels imagines her, suits a contemporary Western audience as the vision of an empress who very nearly had it all: vulnerability
and strength, motherhood and power, earthiness and dignity, compassion and ambition.
By T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Publisher New York Univ.
ISBN
0814740146
185 pages
$22.95
Reviewed by Amy Alexander, whose reviews appear monthly in The Washington
Post Style Section
Here is a cultural paradox for you: Young, smart, seemingly self-confident women of color who put up with even the most
raunchily misogynistic rap and hip-hop music. We're all familiar with the commercial and cultural trajectory of the music
and how, since its emergence in gritty New York neighborhoods 25 years ago, it has become a global phenomenon, generating
billions of dollars in sales and spawning fashion, linguistic and sociopolitical trends that have entered the mainstream.
Along with all the bling and snap, the rise of the Hip-Hop Nation also has earned negative attention for its more unsavory
behavioral byproducts, including violence in the name of "keeping it real" and a normalization of a "get rich or die trying"
ethos.
But more troubling than the mainstreaming of violence and acquisitive values has been the rise in misogynistic attitudes
among performers and their acceptance by fans of both sexes, according to "Pimps Up, Ho's Down," by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting.
Director of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University, Sharpley-Whiting argues, with mixed results,
that a general coarsening of hip-hop culture -- in its lyrics and the videos and marketing built around the music -- claims
women as its biggest victims. She observes that some of the women who subscribe to the culture do so willingly, even as they
are denigrated and abused onstage and off. It is not a new observation, but in this slim volume, she gets at the heart of
the paradox.
"As much as the sexploitation of young black women is necessary to the 'keep it real' mantra of hip hop artists, corporate
bottom lines, and marketing strategies, we must acknowledge our own role in this troubling relationship."
Short of flat-out blaming the victim, Sharpley-Whiting fingers several interlocking factors contributing to this social
phenomenon, including the proliferation of hip-hop in mass media, the "complex contradictions and complicity" among black
women themselves and a historic reluctance among African Americans to go public about domestic violence and sexual abuse.
On this last point, Sharpley-Whiting tosses off an incendiary notion that requires more exploration than she provides.
"While it is undeniable that blacks have been used in various ways to further our national dialogues on sex and violence,
sociological and crime studies have found that young women, regardless of race, are more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted
and young black women are least likely to report such violence. The usual racial defensiveness or protectiveness of black
communities minimizes the negative impact of sexual violence within black communities, especially when the perpetrator is
a celebrity."
In other, less professorial, words, the young black women you see shaking their nearly naked rumps in all those videos
or who serve as groupies to male rappers or who appear in increasingly popular underground hip-hop porn films are willing,
if misguided, participants in their own debasement.
They are not alone, Sharpley-Whiting argues, in falling into the cesspool of rot that is laying waste to many aspects of
American pop culture. It's just that few of them believe they have other options for artistic or commercial success, and fewer
still see themselves as taking part in third-wave feminism, the "sex-positive" movement that has made public displays of sexuality
more acceptable for white women. In stating her case, Sharpley-Whiting cites a wide range of sources, from the black intellectual
Frantz Fanon to journalists Greg Tate and Stanley Crouch to Pamela Des Barres, author of "I'm With the Band: Confessions of
a Groupie." But, like many academics who write about pop culture, Sharpley-Whiting fails to connect with readers in clear,
layman's language:
"And even more mind-bending than the length, girth, and bland performances of the churlish cabal of male hip-hop stars
are the motivations articulated by the women in 'Groupie Confessions,'" she writes, all but defying readers to make sense
of that sentence. The result is a frustratingly enigmatic discussion that encapsulates a grand theme without coaxing forth
the emotional punch that might allow readers to grasp it.
Surprisingly, it is left to a rap performer to point out the paradox that underlies Sharpley-Whiting's premise -- how successful,
"respected" black women like Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice and Halle Berry exist on the same continuum with Karrine Steffans,
author of the best-selling roman a clef, "Confessions of a Video Vixen," and her numerous nubile counterparts who are seen
shaking their moneymakers in videos. In a 1989 interview, former 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell said, "Traditionally
black people are really conservative. They're more conservative than whites are, in my opinion. ... With this whole tradition
of sexuality (in hip-hop) most black people are nervous about that."
So how do black female hip-hop consumers reconcile their love of the genre? And what can be done to bring these girls to
a healthier place, in terms of their own self-image and to erase their vulnerability to hip-hop's less savory side? Sharpley-Whiting
doesn't have the answers, and maybe no one does, but at least she's put the discussion on the turntable.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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FAKING IT: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music
By Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor
Publisher Norton
ISBN 0393060780
375
pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Chrissie Dickinson, a writer, musician and songwriter based in
Chicago
Back in my punk youth of the late 1970s, the harshest dismissal of all for a punk performer (or an audience member, for
that matter) was to be slagged as a "poser." That withering label was frequently slung at anyone who dressed in the trappings
of punk rock but was perceived as not living the life "for real."
That was just one aspect of the bitter debate over authenticity back then. Though the performers and musical battlegrounds
have changed in the years since, the topic has hardly gone away, whether it's rappers insisting on street credibility, world-music
devotees searching for musical "purity" or hard country fans mistily yearning for the days when country music was "real."
In "Faking It," Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor -- a musician and music writer, respectively -- take on the complex and fraught
subject of authenticity.
Largely drawing on examples from popular music of the 20th century, their analysis begins in the 1920s and comes up to
contemporary times. The authors skillfully navigate a complicated musical past, emphasizing that rigid distinctions between
"authentic" and "inauthentic" music have always been a slippery, contradictory business.
Early folklorists and record labels often segregated musicians along racial lines, but the musicians themselves often created
music from a melange of influences. Early record labels marketed accomplished country and blues artists as rustic primitives
deemed all the more authentic because of their perceived lack of commercial aspirations.
From Mississippi John Hurt to John Lennon's primal-therapy-inspired songs to the Replacements' "cult of failure" and Kurt
Cobain's cover of an old Leadbelly tune, Barker and Taylor tackle the many-headed Hydra of the authenticity question: the
chasm between public persona and private reality; the triumphs and debacles that occur when artists attempt to reinvent themselves;
the shaping of myths to fit audience conceptions.
Barker and Taylor note that although the desire to make heartfelt music has produced important work, great and lasting
music also has come from such critically dismissed genres such as disco and bubblegum pop. When it comes to determining whether
a piece of music is authentic, the authors conclude that it's ultimately an impossible task: "Every performance is to some
degree 'faked' -- nobody goes out on stage and sings about exactly what they did and felt that day. Authenticity is an absolute,
a goal that can never be fully attained, a quest."
Despite its potentially highfalutin topic, the book avoids the prose pitfalls of dry academic work and is not without humor;
a chapter on Neil Young's raw classic "Tonight's the Night" begins with the wry observation: "The 1970s was the decade in
which all of rock music's potential -- for both greatness and awfulness -- came to fruition."
The early chapters set the historical context, but the book really picks up steam in its later chapters. Among the most
notable essays is a bracing consideration of Donna Summer and her disco hit "Love to Love You Baby," the hypnotic epic of
simulated female orgasm. In this chapter, Barker and Taylor nicely fuse a brief history of early disco with a larger contemplation
of the tensions between authenticity and artifice in the disco era.
As good as the authors' defense of disco is, it's topped by a riveting analysis of the career of John Lydon, who first
blasted into the world's consciousness as Johnny Rotten, frontman for the notorious British punk band the Sex Pistols. In
this finely nuanced chapter, Barker and Taylor penetrate the core contradictions within the punk scene, a genre rife with
internal debates over authenticity and fakery.
That Lydon -- who jettisoned his Rotten moniker and reverted to his real name after the demise of the Pistols -- was able
to weather the heavy burden of punk expectation and create groundbreaking music with his next band, Public Image Ltd., was
a nearly miraculous feat. Contemplating nearly a century of popular music, the authors make a strong case that, "authentic"
or not, music is best listened to with an open mind, as well as open ears.
By Nuruddin Farah
Publisher Riverhead
ISBN 1594489246
419
pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Uzodinma Iweala, the author of the novel "Beasts of No Nation"
I was 11 when Somalia became a place that people beyond its borders cared about, or in many cases even heard about. I was
24 when I read Nuruddin Farah for the first time. In between, I am loath to admit I completely bought into the idea of Somalia
as the model failed state. Who wouldn't when every newscast mentioning it has the words "suffering," "warlord" and "al-Qaeda"
attached? Somalia may indeed be a dysfunctional state, but that hardly makes it hopeless, as the news media would have us
believe. Rather, as Farah's latest novel, "Knots," suggests, there is hope for Somalia and its people.
"Knots" is Farah's 10th novel and the sequel to "Links" (2004). The two books share characters and themes and should be
read together for full effect. Whereas "Links" focused on a man who returned to Mogadishu to honor the spirit of his dead
mother, "Knots" tells the story of Cambara, a middle-aged Somali woman who has spent much of her adult life in Canada. She
returns to Somalia's scarred capital to reclaim her family house from a squatting warlord.
Cambara's scheming but endearing mother calls her effort "a hare-brained ruse ... downright suicidal," but Cambara wants
to put distance between herself and her unfaithful husband, whose carelessness during one of his liaisons led to the drowning
death of their son. Cambara, Farah writes, has come to Mogadishu "in the hope of chancing upon a noble way of mourning her
loss, not in anger but while recovering the family property to devote herself to the service of peace."
As we follow her through the city, we encounter loss on a grand scale. Men and women walk streets lined by "buildings leaning
in in complete disorder, a great many of them boasting no roof. ... The road -- once tarred and good enough for motor vehicles
-- is in total disrepair." The Somalia to which Cambara returns is a society where "men prefer starting wars to talking things
over," where unproductive self-pity and hopeless mourning are the order of the day. Zaak, Cambara's overweight, unhygienic,
qaat-chewing and cowardly cousin, is perhaps the best example of how not to live with the loss of the country one holds dear.
Farah's novel suggests that this kind of moral and spiritual lethargy invites more destruction and decay, albeit of a slower
nature than the rage of war.
Cambara's hyperactivity and openness stand in contrast to this general malaise. From the moment she sets foot in Mogadishu,
she bustles from place to place, creating her own reality in which things work and people have motivation to help beyond clan
affiliations and money.
At the same time, Farah stresses Cambara's naivete by contrasting her impulsiveness with the steadiness of other characters,
her female friend Kiin or the men Bile, Dajaal and Seamus -- introduced in "Links" -- who have lived through Mogadishu's worst
and still managed to maintain the skeleton of a civil society. These people, the concerned returnees with dollars and resources,
working in conjunction with those permanently on the ground who have not lost their vision, provide a "noble way of mourning"
that leads to a narrative of hope. Their individual stories may not be as exciting as Ridley Scott's blood-driven film adaptation
of the book "Black Hawk Down," but they are infinitely more important.
That said, "Knots" could benefit from a little more spark. It's narrated in a flat, matter-of-fact style that even Farah's
use of the present tense cannot invigorate. Characters plod along, dragging their descriptions with them. In addition, the
plot is somewhat predictable; it is all but obvious that things will resolve to Cambara's benefit. A fairy-tale ending is
fine; however, the lack of serious obstacles for Cambara to navigate drains energy from what could be a thoroughly exciting
story.
But perhaps this is one of Farah's points: Not all war and recovery narratives are dramatic stories. Perhaps we are so
used to media sensationalism, especially in descriptions of war in Africa, that we overlook the importance of the mundane
aspects of life that must continue during times of conflict. We forget that societies persevere and eventually flourish after
war because people struggle to preserve normalcy in the face of dramatic violence and chaos.
Farah expertly tackles the violence of civil war, choosing instead of guns and bombs the claustrophobic environment of
disintegrating personal relationships, marriages disturbed by verbal strife and domestic violence. Reading about these little
battles allows us to understand the intense emotions that fueled and still fuel the war in Somalia without the usual imagery
of vacant-eyed, bloodthirsty Africans.
This is not to say that "Knots" does not speak of the atrocities of war or employ violent characters and imagery. However,
Farah downplays such images in favor of those that suggest rebuilding a collapsed state is no big drama. Rather it is a mass
of small dramas performed by otherwise unimportant people such as Cambara.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE GOD OF ANIMALS
By Aryn Kyle
Publisher Scribner
ISBN 1416533249
305 pages
$25
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Some people seem fated to live in untenable situations. In this beautiful first novel, Alice Winston, 12 years old, has
grown up in one. She lives in a town in the Western American desert, which -- although it can be exquisite -- doesn't always
take kindly to the existence of humans. Her mother has been a victim of something like postpartum depression for as long as
Alice can remember, and stays in a back bedroom for weeks on end. Her father, Joe, whom some would call a dreamer, maintains
a stable for show horses, except that not many customers want to share in the show horse dream. Joe dwells in an imagined
world where he gets to do exactly what he wants to do: purchase horses, breed them, break them, train them, then wait for
a steady stream of wealthy little girls to ride them in shows. It should make him rich. It worked, more or less, for his father
and grandfather.
But Joe lives in a real world where ends don't meet. There's that wife, for instance. And Joe's older daughter, champion
rider Nona, has just run off and married a 19-year-old cowboy. There's nobody left to help him but Alice, and -- unlike her
sister -- she's no horsewoman. All she can do is work like a galley slave, helping her dad to keep up the enterprise, hoping
to make those ends meet.
They pin their hopes on pipe dreams. When Sheila Altman, a rich girl just Alice's age, is brought over by her mother to
take lessons and help out with the horses, Joe is overjoyed, but Sheila turns out to be a terrible rider. Quite a few of the
stalls in the stable end up occupied by boarders, horses owned by affluent women who by and large have given up on the men
in their lives and turned back to a girl's best friend, the horse. These women seem goofy and childlike. They drink champagne
from thermoses; they groom their horses and gossip their time away. The loneliness in the barn is endemic, sickening. The
Winstons are dirt-poor; the whole town knows it. They barely scrape along.
Alice sees all this. She's smart but uninformed, close cousin to the little girls in "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Member
of the Wedding." She adores her dad, but she can see that while on the one hand he's been taking care of his invalid wife
and children, on the other hand he's knavish. He charges his rich ladies three times as much as he should for sawdust and
fills up their filtered-water containers from the hose; he flirts shamelessly with them and uses all his considerable charm
to get what he wants -- again, the dream life of a horse baron. He's like a self-absorbed kid, obsessed with having his own
way.
Which is probably why Nona has run off with her cowboy -- she wanted to be the star of her own life, instead of just playing
a supporting role to someone else. Alice, even though she loves her dad, can't possibly take up the slack. Then other things
happen. A girl Alice barely knows drowns in a nearby canal. A teacher attends the girl's funeral; he's someone else Alice
barely knows, but because she is drowning in loneliness, she takes to calling him in the middle of the night.
This is only half the cast of characters here. Horses are everything in this novel. There's Yellow Cap, spirited and terrific;
he used to belong to Nona, but Joe sells him to the inexperienced and dorky Sheila. There's the fiendish mare Darling Peaches
and Cream; she's bought by Joe for way too much money. He's mad for her. He wants to break her, train her, sell her for a
fortune, but anyone can see it's not going to turn out the way he wants.
Out back, there's a group of ancient and wretched geldings that Joe has bought from "kill sales," saving them from the
glue factory, pampering them, bringing them back to something like their old life. And there are the broodmares, whose existence
consists of constant, unspeakable suffering -- pregnancy after pregnancy, and then their foals are taken from them. Their
teats crack and bleed; they hear their foals wailing, heartbroken. And there's Toy Boy, aptly named, the handsome plaything
of Patty Jo, one of the women who hang out at the stable to forget their soured lives.
What does it mean to "domesticate" an animal, to subvert it to the wishes and whims of humankind? Joe's horses serve as
diversion and amusement, but also something far stranger. They are there to submit to the will of people who want to feel
better about themselves, more godlike. In his arena, Joe rules like a king. Under his rule, the broodmares get pregnant on
demand. The barn stud is shunned and demeaned. One of the poor maimed geldings -- the "old men," as Joe calls them -- has
been hammered almost to death by someone we have been led to believe is a sympathetic character.
And, of course, the horses are used equally here by the women, as charming substitute lovers. Alice's mother puts up with
"women's lot," embracing it, in fact, to be spared from a brutal life. Nona runs away -- but there's nowhere to go. Darling
Peaches and Cream deals her stud a kick that will keep him less than virile for a while, but she's due for a bad end.
Alice's dad seems terrific at first, but their life is untenable, an existence based on cheesy lies and petty crime. Joe
is not the amazing dad of "To Kill a Mockingbird" or the absent one of "The Member of the Wedding." He's a seriously flawed
human, trying hard to be God. Readers whose daughters yearn for horses when they're reaching puberty might do well to give
those daughters this thoughtful, heartsick book. It may not be right to use animals to act out your fantasies! Maybe -- contrary
to conventional wisdom -- the greasy-haired boy in the leather jacket with the cigarette dangling from his chapped lips is
the wiser, kinder, less dangerous, and in the end, more discreet choice.
By Kurt Andersen
Publisher Random House
ISBN 0375504737
622
pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Louis Bayard, whose "The Pale Blue Eye" has been nominated for
an Edgar Award for best mystery novel
Sooner or later, every novelist in Washington, having divulged his trade at some drink-laden function, will learn, if he
hasn't already, that a significant chunk of this city considers novels a grand waste of time. Because they're made up, for
God's sake!
The upholders of truth very occasionally will open the door just a crack to let in historical fiction -- but only because
it allows them to do what they consider most essential in reading: harvest facts. And more facts. These Gradgrinds are consequently
the ideal audience for Kurt Andersen's "Heyday," a book so relentlessly pedagogical that, for long stretches, you can forget
you're reading anything so base as fiction. Over the course of its 600-plus pages, the diligent reader can acquire such 19th-century
arcana as the contents of a brothel's prophylactics cabinet, the time-zone difference between Buffalo and Detroit, the number
of steerage passengers on a standard transatlantic vessel, and the scarification rituals of Maidu Indians.
Above all, the reader will glean a full month's salary of facts about New York City. Not the wireless modern metropolis
that figured in Andersen's previous novel "Turn of the Century," but the much earthier 1848 version, where designated "pizzle-holders"
assist gentlemen with their urination, and aborted fetuses are consumed by the local hog population, and the dining saloons
of the Astor House proudly serve calf's head in brain sauce. Indeed, this "stinking, skimble-skamble" town is so much to Andersen's
liking (and, God knows, it's alluring) that he whiles away roughly 300 pages there before he even bothers to set his main
plot in motion -- or, for that matter, get all his principals in the same room.
Better late than never: Ben Knowles, a 26-year-old baronet's son who travels from Britain to America "craving vulgarity
and strangeness." Timothy Skaggs, a daguerrean and journalist but, more to the book's purposes, an acid commentator on America's
"great experiment." Duff Lucking, a Mexican War veteran, physically and psychically scarred, and an arsonist who, in true
symbiotic fashion, works with local engine companies to put out the blazes he himself started.
And then there's Duff's adored sister, Polly, a rising actress (about to star in the stage version of "Dombey and Son")
and a thoroughly modern Millie: In the midst of entertaining gentlemen at Mrs. Stanhope's brothel, she nurtures dreams of
socialist bliss. When events force her hand, she travels westward seeking her Arcadia. Duff, Skaggs and the besotted Ben follow,
and the second half of the book tracks them through "the heart of our national bedlam," bouncing from one visionary community
to the next. Until Polly reaches the following epiphany: "Why should we not proceed to a wholly new place? A place
far beyond what is, beyond the Mormons and the anti-Mormons, beyond the priests, beyond the upper-ten snobs and the
revolutionist shouters, beyond the Whigs and the Democrats, beyond this world, a place of plenty where we might fashion
our own world."
California, for want of a better word. Unfortunately, this promised land has already been transformed by a chance discovery
in the American River Valley. "Gold by the ton, gold sand and gold pebbles and hefty gold rocks, glittering in the water and
dirt and all free for the grabbing by anyone with the luck or pluck to get himself to the California hills right now."
Andersen's story at last kicks into life, and so does his true theme: the quintessentially American tension between Utopia
and El Dorado. Even as they wrestle with that dialectic, the pilgrims of "Heyday" are being (implausibly) pursued by the Old
World: a murderous French municipal guard officer who blames his brother's accidental death on Ben and is now tracking the
"English demon" as if he were "a panicking boar in the swelter of a Corsican August." As harassment goes, that's nothing next
to the real-life historical figures who insist on horning in: George McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Kit Carson, John Fremont, the
Donner party. Skaggs, in his peripatetic career, has already met Frederick Douglass, covered Abraham Lincoln and witnessed
the death throes of Joseph Smith. Ben, in addition to reading philosophy with Prince Albert, is related to Tocqueville and,
at one overtly symbolic juncture, receives missives from both Friedrich Engels and Charles Darwin (who, in a not-uncharacteristic
Andersen touch, enters the book farting).
How could any fictional being escape such a web of determinism? At every signpost, Andersen ensures that his creations
are doing exactly what Encyclopaedia Britannica would have them do: listening to a new piece by Johann Strauss, dancing quicksteps
and quadrilles, reading "Omoo" and "Vanity Fair" and "The Communist Manifesto." Even the simplest exchanges are primed to
edify:
"Ben looked at Ashby. 'Saxophones?'
"'An hilarious new horn,' Ashby explained, 'invented by a Monsieur Sax.'"
One more fact duly registered. Two more characters becoming less real. Nor do they turn appreciably more human when they
serve as mouthpieces for Andersen's insights: "I've just realized now that (Newton's Third Law of Motion) explains the political
events of this past year as well. ... 'For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.' You see? A season of revolution,
a season of counter-revolution."
One could argue that any historical novel blossoms or withers between the dueling imperatives of telling a story and re-creating
a lost age. That's why Henry James believed the whole genre was condemned to "a fatal cheapness." "You may multiply the little
facts that can be got from pictures, and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like -- the real thing is almost impossible
to do," he wrote. Yes. But to the right of my computer sits (by way of random example) Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith," which
so potently tells its story and evokes its Victorian period that it achieves what James thought such a novel couldn't: a "palpable
present-intimate." By contrast, "Heyday" reads, as Ben Knowles himself describes it, "like an account in a history book."
Surely that's not how history is actually experienced, in the living of it. Surely every novelist must, at some crucial point
in his book's genesis, commit the rash, the almost suicidal act of throwing out his research.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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CHRISTINE FALLS
By Benjamin Black
Publisher Henry Holt
ISBN 0805081526
340
pages
$25
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com
Most writers are plodders, not poets. We struggle to put one simple declarative sentence after another, with Hemingway
our hero and clarity our goal. Only a few writers are true stylists, dazzling the reader with word-magic. Among this blessed
few, in their different ways, are the likes of Fitzgerald, Updike, Styron, Capote and Chandler. The Irish novelist John Banville
is also a member of the fraternity. Banville, who is in his early 60s, is recognized as one of the most stylistically gifted
novelists at work today, a status reinforced when he won the Man Booker Prize in 2005 for "The Sea." Now, changing directions,
he has written, under the pen name Benjamin Black, a crime novel, "Christine Falls." If there is such a thing as a literary
thriller -- if that is not an oxymoron -- this surely is it.
But what is it?
It's a brilliant but sometimes frustrating hybrid in which style is every bit as important as plot -- sometimes competing
with it for our attention. It may be churlish to complain about luminous prose, but in fiction, as elsewhere in life, it is
possible to have too much of a good thing. Style aside, Banville's plot is one that takes us deep into the Irish culture.
In Dublin, in the 1950s, two doctors who were raised as brothers -- one was adopted -- come into conflict over a woman who
has died in childbirth. Their names are Quirke and Mal, and the dead woman's name is Christine Falls. A lesser writer who
served up those all-too-meaningful names (and called himself Black) might be accused of putting on airs, but since this is
Banville we will excuse them as a bit of erudite fun.
Quirke does have his quirks, although ones common in crime fiction. For one thing, he drinks and smokes more or less constantly.
For another, he refuses to stop searching for the truth about Christine Falls' death, even after the police have deserted
him, his brother has warned him off, and some thugs have beaten him half to death. Undeterred, he soldiers on and learns about
a scheme whereby illegitimate Irish babies are taken from their helpless mothers and shipped to America. Quirke himself journeys
to the United States -- Boston, of course -- and deep into his family's darkest secrets before the story is done.
I want to quote Banville's prose at length because to a great degree it is what the novel is about. "Mal had a way of bulging
out his eyes and drawing upward sinuously his already long, thin form, as if to the music of a snake charmer's flute." A priest
is "bog-Irish to the roots of his oily red hair ... all smiles and stained teeth but the little yellowish-green eyes cold
and sharp as a cat's." "A gust of wind caught the skirts of the detective's overcoat and made them flap around him like furling
sails, and for a moment it was as if the man inside the coat had vanished, vanished entirely." An amorous nurse helps Quirke
down the corridor and lets "her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve." "The high bogs were hidden under snow
but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork
tails." An old Irish American mobster, "his frail head wobbling on its stringy stalk of a neck," is kept alive by "a thin
bitter gruel of memories and imaginings, of malice and vindictive amusement." A dying man's "breaths came in long, laborious
rattlings, as if he were hauling on a chain inside him, link by painful link." Foghorns sound like "the forlorn and hopeless
calls of great wounded animals crying in pain far out at sea."
I admire fine writing as much as the next fellow, but there are hundreds more lines as rich and distracting as these, and
sometimes I felt overwhelmed by them. And sometimes Banville is just too literary. He gives us a rape scene beside the ocean
and -- just as "a big head of blue-black water with a flying white fringe along the top of it was surging in" -- well, you
can guess what's happening in the back seat of the Buick as the tide crashes in. Banville's stylistic fireworks are most obtrusive
early in the book, where perhaps he was feeling his way. In the final chapters, when his plot has taken hold, his writing
quiets down and his story becomes fast-moving and exciting. Readers who love gorgeous prose and aren't in any rush to find
out whodunit will savor this novel. Others, of the just-the-facts-ma'am school, will be happier with more conventional writers.
Banville has said in interviews that he was moved to write "Christine Falls" by his admiration for writers like Chandler and
Simenon, and that this is the first of a series about Quirke. It will be interesting to see if he tones down his prose along
the way.
By Tova Reich
Publisher HarperCollins
ISBN 0061173452
326
pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Melvin Jules Bukiet
Your mom's a drunk; your dad's a slut. Big deal! Your little sister has cancer. You have cancer. Your whole family has
cancer. So what?
They drove you off your land, enslaved your people; your shoes are too small. Cut that whining and consider the Holocaust.
According to Tova Reich's passionately parodic new book, "There's no contest. We Jews win this one hands down!"
In fact, everyone in "My Holocaust" does little but consider the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the 1930s and '40s.
Well, that and the benefits they derive from keeping lit the eternal flame of remembrance. For Maurice Messer and his nebbishy
son Norman, genocide is the gift that keeps giving. Maurice is chair of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, and Norman
runs a company called Holocaust Connections that will grant the coveted H-word seal to any catastrophe, ranging from the Native
American Holocaust to the Middle Passage Holocaust to the Fur Holocaust to whatever private Holocaust its customers prefer.
The only problem that Maurice and Norman have is that Nechama, the sole Messer of the so-called third generation, has just
changed her name to Sister Consolatia of the Cross and entered the Carmelite monastery at Auschwitz as a nun. Then we get
to page 2.
An innocent eye -- if such a thing exists anymore -- might assume that this is shock for shock's sake, yet Reich is not
trivializing. Precisely the opposite; she's writing about trivializing. Turns out that Norman's got a law degree and
is quite willing to stipulate with breathtaking self-righteousness, "The simple fact is, we're more human than other people
because of what our parents went through," while Maurice "never met a microphone he did not want to make love to." No less
than divine justice makes it "the obligation of the world to listen to him now, an old survivor with a chopped-liver accent
and gefilte-fish grammar" who proudly waves his (dubious) partisan credentials to prove that Jews did not "go like sheep to
the shlaughter."
Serious and hilarious and utterly scathing -- no, lacerating; no, disemboweling -- "My Holocaust" takes no prisoners in
its two short, bookended chapters and its two lengthy set pieces, one inside the museum's hallowed walls and another on a
special donors' tour of Auschwitz. Reich knows this territory intimately; her husband, Walter, used to be the head of the
D.C. institution she now pillories.
As for plot, Maurice wants money from Gloria Bacon Lieb, a serial wedder of wealthy men, while Gloria wants a job for her
moronic, P.C. daughter Bunny, who says, "I really really appreciate it that Auschwitz is wheelchair-accessible. ... Was it
always that way -- I mean, even at the time of the Holocaust?"
Unfortunately, it's high season at "this miserable tourist town with mass murder as its main and sole attraction," so we
meet characters ranging from camp hustler Tommy Messiah, who sells fake cans of Zyklon B, to Palestinian sexpot Leyla Salmani,
who's there to film "The Triumph of the Traumatized." There's also a Buddhist -- read: formerly Jewish -- contingent led by
Mickey Fisher-roshi omming, "Oneness to all of our Holocausts, oneness in honoring our Holocaust diversity. So deep. So deep!"
There's something in "My Holocaust" to offend everyone, not merely the old folks of Zion, who, post-Goebbels and Roth,
should know how to take a joke by now, but also Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, seekers and strivers of all persuasions. But
note that although I've used words like "character" and "plot" to describe elements of Reich's book, I've avoided the word
"novel." "My Holocaust" is not a traditional narrative aiming for either 19th-century verisimilitude or 20th-century inner
consciousness. It's a more ancient form: satire. In satire's extremity, there's no need for the characters to grow and change,
interact in any human way, or for the author to justify, for example, the reappearance of virtually everyone we met at Auschwitz
at the book's climax during an attempted takeover of the museum. Never mind. They're all welcome to the circus. These include
the Elie Wiesel-like "High Priest" of the Holocaust as well as Abu Shahid, "minister of jihad of the extremist Palestinian
organization From the River to the Sea," who's there as part of the "Teach a Terrorist program." And we're willing to accept
-- if not precisely believe -- that poor Abu Shahid's son was "on track to become the world's greatest jihad martyr for Allah,
a hero of Islam. But then the rabbis got hold of him when he was on holiday in Ukraine." Now the schmuck sports earlocks and
a gaberdine. "Chabad, Hamas -- what's the difference?"
Throughout the book, Reich goes too far, a clear strategy to spark attention after reams of authentic or sanctimonious
tears have drowned many people's capacity to feel genuine grief. Reich accomplishes this by turning tragedy into a farce of
greed and phony redemption and cheap moralism in which "everyone wants a piece of the Holocaust pie." Still, Reich reserves
her most brutal commentary for the so-called "universalists" who use empathy and spuriously heartfelt identification to exterminate
the particular, historical tragedy of the Jewish people.
As usual, unknowing Maurice says it best. The purpose of the Holocaust is "to make lessons, of course, to make memorials
mit morals." Yet there's almost -- dare I say it? -- faith at work in Reich's willful outrage. Faith that evil is at large
in the world. Also faith that we're too stupid to see it for more than a blink in time. "Who," she cries, "would ever have
imagined that this ... would metastasize into a fatal plague of persecutees, an epidemic of victims, a pestilence of freelance
and copycat Holocausts?"
Beneath the humor lies the pure fury that once animated thoughts about the original atrocity. Tova Reich is the master
of fury's return.
Melvin Jules Bukiet is the author of seven books of fiction and the editor of three anthologies. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence
College.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK
By James Robertson
Publisher Viking
ISBN 067003844X
387
pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Does He or doesn't He? Judging by the religion books on the best-seller list, Americans are up in arms about the existence
of God: not so much a Great Awakening as a Great Arguing. It's become an article of faith that the United States is the most
religious nation in the developed world, but "The God Delusion," by atheist Richard Dawkins, is racking up heavenly sales.
At the same time, we're fascinated by a 2nd-century Gnostic fragment that claims Judas was the best disciple and a book about
two archaeologists who have found The Jesus Family Tomb(so much for the Ascension). Sam Harris has written "A Letter to a
Christian Nation," but Stephen Prothero says our Religious Literacy has gone to hell. It's as though the whole country --
or at least that part of it still buying books -- is crying, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
Into this anxious cultural moment, "The Testament of Gideon Mack" has arrived like an answer to some demonic prayer. James
Robertson's provocative novel claims to present the memoir of a hardworking Presbyterian minister who never believed in God.
It's a deeply unsettling story that will prick the faith of the devout, shake the confidence of atheists and haunt those of
us who hover uneasily in-between.
Part of the novel's disruption of our sense of what's real and what's not is an introduction by "the editor" -- one of
Robertson's clever poses -- who disavows any claims about the story's authenticity. It may be "outlandish enough to attract
a cult readership," he speculates, or it may be "a genuine document with its own relevance for our times." He wouldn't presume
to judge one way or the other, but he does mention the strange events that recently brought this story to public notice: Gideon
Mack, the minister of a small Scottish village, fell into a gorge while trying to rescue a friend's dog. Although presumed
dead, he was found alive three days later in what doctors and journalists termed "a miracle." He seemed in good health, but
soon after the accident he announced that he had never believed in God, had slept with one of his parishioners and had been
rescued from the gorge by the Devil. During the ecclesiastical trial that followed, he vanished, but his body was found many
months later in the mountains, and the police recovered the "testament" that constitutes the bulk of this novel.
Gideon begins with a line from St. Paul that quickly slides into his own intense voice: "When I was a child I spoke as
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: yet I was already, in so many ways, the man I would become. I think
back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire."
The son of a severe, Calvinist minister and a hollow, frightened mother, Gideon grew up in a dreary home divorced from
time. While his schoolmates were "listening agog to 'Sergeant Pepper,'" he was reading "children's classics deemed suitable
because they were at least half a century old and their authors dead." When his father catches him watching "Batman" (on the
Sabbath!), he thunders, "You have betrayed me and you have betrayed God," and then promptly suffers a stroke right there in
front of the TV.
His father survives, but that calamity pushes Gideon -- at the age of 12 -- to question and finally reject the stalking
God who would set up such traps and punishments. "I didn't want that spooky figure hovering behind me and touching
me whenever I tried to make a decision. I wanted to be left alone." But unable to declare his unbelief or leave the church,
he develops "hypocrisy down to a fine art," and, in a tragic act of revenge, he follows his father into the ministry. "For
nearly forty years," he writes, "I have let the world assume that I believed in God when I did not."
John Updike wrote about a Presbyterian minister who lost his faith in "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996), but Updike
never quite captured the sticky quality of belief. For his Rev. Wilmot "the sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender,
a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. ... His thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition
that ... there is no such God." Robertson is far more attentive to the prolonged and violent tension between faith and doubt
in the mind of a person who once really believed. Gideon fancies himself an effective minister despite his secretly rationalist
mindset. He's busy with charity work, handy with an inclusive sermon. But he never can find any peace or love.
And then his world is overturned by a supernatural intercession. You must meet Robertson's droll Devil. He's "suave and
fit-looking" but also a little sad. "I used to have a purpose," he tells Gideon with a sigh. "We both had a purpose, God and
me. Now? ... My heart's not in it. Basically, I don't do anything any more. I despair, if you want the honest truth. I mean,
the world doesn't need me." This is an arresting encounter, a wry addition to the line of stories that stretches from Jesus'
temptation in the wilderness to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Like God, the Devil never leaves anyone where
he finds him, and Gideon returns to his church aflame with a truth he never preached before. What he now knows -- or thinks
he knows -- forces everyone to consider the fragile foundation of what they believe.
There's devilry for sure in a story this disquieting. You won't find Robertson blessing the devout or the atheists. But
before Gideon departs this world, his testament will affirm your faith in the power of fiction.
Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World.
I'VE GOT A HOME IN GLORY LAND: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad
By
Karolyn Smardz Frost
Publisher Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 0374164819
450 pages
$30
ESCAPE ON THE PEARL: The Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad
By
Mary Kay Ricks
Publisher Morrow
ISBN 0060786590
432 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by James T. Campbell
New York recently unveiled plans for a memorial to Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who became 19th-century
America's most eloquent proponent of racial equality. The project was immediately engulfed in controversy -- not about Douglass
but about the monument's granite pedestal, which features carved replicas of African-American quilts. Inspired by a popular
1999 book, "Hidden in Plain View," the pedestal includes explanatory panels describing how patterns stitched into such quilts
were used to convey coded messages to black fugitives fleeing north along the Underground Railroad.
The problem, as several prominent historians of slavery have noted, is that no contemporaneous evidence proves that such
a code ever existed. There are certainly no references to quilts in the voluminous writings of Douglass, who escaped to freedom
by train and steamship, disguised in the kerchief and broad-brimmed hat of a sailor.
Welcome aboard the Underground Railroad, a world in which history and folklore, memory and myth, have become so interwoven
as to be inextricable. To be sure, there were covert networks to assist fugitive slaves -- a "railroad," in the inevitable
metaphor of the era -- but the system was less organized and extensive (and distinctly less white) than most Americans today
imagine. The countless white Northerners who point proudly to the basement or the old barn where their forebears sheltered
escaped slaves are, more often than not, engaging in wishful thinking.
At its best, the abiding national fascination with the Underground Railroad honors the memory of courageous men and women
who challenged a violent and inhumane system. But there are perils here. Focusing on the flight from slavery rather than on
slavery itself not only indulges our appetite for celebratory history -- Americans love nothing more than stories of righteous
individuals overcoming insuperable odds -- but also contributes to the myth that slavery and racism were exclusively Southern
matters. Much as exaggerated tales of the Resistance have long obscured French complicity in the Holocaust, so have stories
of the Underground Railroad helped Northerners evade any sense of responsibility for slavery and its abiding legacies.
Karolyn Smardz Frost's "I've Got a Home in Glory Land" and Mary Kay Ricks' "Escape on the Pearl" are the two latest contributions
to the burgeoning literature on the Underground Railroad. Both authors operate within the celebratory tradition, recounting
"heroic bids for freedom" by fugitive slaves, aided by courageous abolitionist allies. Fortunately, both authors are careful
scholars who write with a due sense of proportion and historical context. If their books do not completely dispel the popular
mythology swirling around the Underground Railroad, they at least invest the subject with much-needed historical specificity.
Frost, the executive director of the Ontario Historical Society, meticulously reconstructs the story of Thornton and Lucie
Blackwell, an enslaved couple who escaped from Kentucky in 1831. Lucie's owner had recently died, and the couple apparently
feared that she would be "sold down the river" to feed the voracious demand for slave labor in the lower Mississippi Valley.
Armed with forged freedom papers -- how the pair, who were both illiterate, came by the papers is unclear -- they took a ferry
across the Ohio River to Indiana, boarded a Cincinnati-bound steamship and proceeded by stagecoach to Detroit, where they
settled.
The Blackwells might have passed their lives in anonymity but for a chance encounter with an old acquaintance from Kentucky,
who alerted their erstwhile owners to their whereabouts. The owners successfully appealed to have them arrested and returned
to Kentucky, in conformity with federal law. But no one had reckoned on the determination of the local black community, which
sprung Lucie from jail and rescued Thornton by force of arms. Spirited away to Canada, the pair became the subject of a diplomatic
imbroglio between the United States and Canada, which ended with the Canadian government declaring itself unwilling to extradite
fugitives unless they were guilty of a capital crime.
Ricks, a local historian, examines a more spectacular event. In April 1848, more than 70 enslaved African-Americans boarded
a schooner, the Pearl, in Washington, D.C., and sailed for freedom. Unfortunately, a storm on Chesapeake Bay forced the Pearl
to seek shelter, allowing a posse on a pursuing steamship to apprehend the ship and its passengers.
The sheer scale of the venture made the Pearl episode a cause celebre. While Sen. John C. Calhoun pressed for new fugitive-slave
legislation to stem "these atrocities, these piratical attempts" to steal legal property, invigorated abolitionists such as
Harriet Beecher Stowe raised money to purchase freedom for some of the fugitives and to provide a legal defense for the ship's
captain (who appears to have taken the job chiefly for financial reasons). Ricks devotes the bulk of her engaging book to
the aftermath of the escape, focusing in particular on the travails of two teenage girls, Mary and Emily Edmonson, whose passage
from the Pearl to the New Orleans slave market to Oberlin College is as dramatic as anything in Stowe's best-selling "Uncle
Tom's Cabin."
To read these books is to be struck anew by "the courage, ingenuity, and, above all, the immense craving for freedom that
characterized the fugitive slave movement." Yet it is also worth pondering why we find such stories so compelling. Does our
national fascination with the Underground Railroad provide a means for Americans to confront the reality of slavery or to
evade it? What of the courage and ingenuity of those millions of enslaved men and women who never traveled the Underground
Railroad, who lived, struggled and died in the prison house of American slavery? Perhaps someday we will erect a monument
to them.
James T. Campbell's most recent book is "Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005." From 2003 to
2006, he chaired Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE HELLENISTIC AGE: A Short History
By Peter Green
Publisher Modern Library
ISBN 067964279X
199
pages
$21.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Speak of Greek antiquity, and most people will call to mind the golden age of 5th century B.C. Athens -- the time of Socrates,
Plato, Thucydides, Sophocles, Pericles. Without question, these intellectual titans decisively influenced western thought
and culture. For centuries, their noble brows and visages, sculpted in mottled white marble, adorned the reading rooms of
university libraries and the leather-chaired lounges of gentlemen's clubs. They were, after all, paragons, and later generations
were required to look up to them. Little wonder, then, that after a while these overly revered Grecians started to seem more
than just a trifle smug and self-satisfied. We're so smart, and you're not.
In recent years, the periods just before and after the Athenian miracle have grown increasingly attractive to modern readers
and scholars. The surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets -- Heraclitus, Archilochus, Sappho -- now
seem to capture more feelingly the relentless mutability of life, whether the ups and downs of the suffering human heart or
the ceaseless shocks of an inherently unstable world. This sense of familiarity is even more pronounced in the three war-torn
centuries bracketed between the Asian conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) and the naval battle at Actium (31 B.C.),
which hastened the downfall of Ptolemaic Egypt and assured the triumph of imperial Rome.
After Philip of Macedon made himself the master of Greece following his great victory in the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.),
his son waited impatiently for a chance to display his own mettle. Once he inherited the throne at 20, Alexander immediately
launched a seemingly never-ending campaign to conquer the known world. In part he wished to outdo the achievements of Heracles
and Achilles but, as Peter Green tells us in "The Hellenistic Age," he also desperately needed the riches of Asia to support
his overextended and debt-laden government and to pay off the soldiers in his army. The stocky, clean-shaven warrior, who
personally led his men into battle, cared little for the trappings of wealth; what really mattered to him was kleos, the Greek
term for glory. For 11 years, he consequently fought his way across modern-day Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to the frontiers
of India, where he defeated the army and elephants of King Porus. But then his own battle-weary troops refused to go any farther,
and Alexander was forced to turn back toward Europe. In the city of Babylon, he fell ill with a high fever and died at the
age of 32.
On his deathbed, the conqueror reportedly willed his spear-won empire "to the strongest." As a result, he set in motion
three centuries of conflict, starting with a power struggle among his generals, today called the Diadochoi, or Successors.
Eventually, three kingdoms emerged: one in Europe, composed of Macedonia and greater Greece; another in Asia, reigned over
by the Seleucids; and the Egypt of the Ptolemys. All these then jockeyed for total domination through "the well-tried Hellenistic
blend of diplomacy, aggression, intermarriage and murder," not to overlook outright war. Being so intently focused on one
another, these incestuous and ruthless monarchs -- they seldom hesitated to murder their own children when necessary -- shortsightedly
neglected "the cloud from the West." But once Rome had defeated Hannibal and destroyed Carthage, it began to extend its political
hegemony into Successor-held territories. Battles ensued, and nearly always the Roman legion defeated the Greek phalanx. By
the time Cleopatra ensnared first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony, that "serpent of old Nile" was playing a desperate game
to preserve Egypt from becoming a satrapy of Rome. To no avail. "Finish good lady, the bright day is done,/ And we are for
the dark."
"The Hellenistic Age" is subtitled "A Short History," but to sum up the period's complexity and richness in under 200 pages
requires a draconian conciseness. More often than not, enlivening anecdote and detail have been sacrificed, leaving an overly
schematic outline (and an overuse of colons in the sentences). For instance, Green tantalizingly refers several times to the
mass marriages at Susa but never explains what these were (Alexander and his Macedonian officers married Persian women, in
theory to cement the unity of East and West). Moreover, as the political history grows increasingly bloody and frantic, it
also grows difficult to keep clear who's who, since the names Demetrius, Antigonus, Alexander, Philip, Ptolemy and Cleopatra
recur from generation to generation. At one point, four women gamely, if vainly, distinguished as Cleopatra the Sister, Cleopatra
the Wife, Cleopatra Thea and Cleopatra Tryphaena vie with one another for power. After a while, one hungers for a more leisurely
and expansive narrative. In his defense, Green does underscore that "The Hellenistic Age" is simply an introduction, and he
duly offers a prefatory overview of "backgrounds and sources," as well as an up-to-date guide to further reading.
As it happens, that guide to further reading includes a magnificent (if occasionally contrarian) account of this fascinating
period titled "Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age," (1993) by none other than Peter Green.
The poet Callimachus famously observed, "Big book, big mistake," but not in this case. In its nearly 1,000 pages, replete
with illustrations, "Alexander to Actium" explores every aspect of these three racked centuries. By contrast, this short digest
for Modern Library Chronicles can mainly just assert a point and move on. For instance, in "The Hellenistic Age" Green notes
that literature and culture are characterized by escapism from a brutal reality, an antiquarian reverence for the Greek past
(this is the heyday of the scholiast and the Library of Alexandria), a widespread belief in Tyche (chance or fortune), and
a preference for the personal, introspective and fantastical over the patriotic, public-spirited and pragmatic.
All these assertions are examined with supporting evidence in Green's full-length account: There he offers entire chapters
on the Epicureans and Stoics, on the mystery religions surrounding Dionysus, Isis and Cybele, on the plays of Menander, the
mimes of Herodas, the epigrammatic verse of Callimachus, the vastly influential pastoral idylls of Theocritus, and the epic
"Argonautica" by Apollonius of Rhodes. Rather than merely refer to them, he discusses the achievements of Euclid and Archimedes
and Diogenes. Art receives a similarly in-depth treatment: This is, after all, the era that produced such sculpture as the
Aphrodite of Melos (aka the "Venus de Milo"), the winged Nike or Victory of Samothrace, the languorous Barberini "Faun" and
the once rabidly admired, now rather despised, Laocoon.
Despite the superiority of "Alexander to Actium," there's no gainsaying its enormous length. (I haven't even mentioned
its author's related biography, "Alexander of Macedon.") So readers with other calls on their attention should, faute de mieux,
still spend a couple of evenings with "The Hellenistic Age." Green doesn't approach the past by kowtowing to it. He writes
with strong views, avoids jargon and isn't afraid of arguing with received opinion. In his youth this emeritus professor of
classics at the University of Texas worked as a journalist and reviewer, published novels ("The Laughter of Aphrodite") and
even a biography of Kenneth Grahame (author of "The Wind in the Willows"); he lived by his pen. In his scholarly work, he
has brought to bear the same kind of panache. The Alexandrian "Museum and Library, like the J. Paul Getty Center (which in
many ways they much resemble), never seem to have had payroll problems, and their resident scholars enjoyed permanent appointments."
He pointedly notes that slaves fueled the economy of the ancient world as oil does ours. With even greater daring, he berates
the Stoics and countercultural Cynics for their quietism, despite "the dilemma that faced a thinking man in a world where,
no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul." Most tellingly
of all, he repeats that the lot of a slave or peasant (in this or almost any other era) did not improve until the late 18th-century
Industrial Revolution, when machine power finally replaced manpower.
Fragmented, insecure, ivory-towered, obsessed with sex and celebrity, the Hellenist era is, as all historians agree, the
period of classic antiquity that most resembles our own. This isn't a happy thought, but it does add another reason for exploring
these troubled and often sleazy centuries between the age of Athens and the age of Rome.
By Michael Frayn
Publisher Metropolitan
ISBN
0805081488
505 pages
$32.50
Reviewed by Colin McGinn
Michael Frayn, renowned playwright and novelist, has written a long and ambitious book on the relationship
between the objective world and the human mind. His question, central to philosophy, is to what degree, and in what ways,
is the world dependent on the mind? Do we construct the world, or is it thrust upon us? He contends that reality has neither
substance nor form without the constructive activities of the knowing subject, that space, time, causality and matter are
all mental products, the results of our "traffic" with the world, not antecedent realities. He admits that the universe must
exist independently of us in some way, but only as a kind of "undifferentiated mass." This is, he thinks, the basic paradox
of philosophy: that we both create and are created by the world.
Frayn covers a lot of ground in a chatty, avuncular style designed to appeal to the general reader.
But his amiable ramble makes no serious contribution to philosophy, is quite unconvincing in its main thesis and seems to
rest on some obvious errors. The book begins, ominously, with quantum theory, and Frayn reiterates the popular, but misguided,
view that this branch of physics demonstrates the dependence of the material world on the consciousness of the observer. That
has certainly been one interpretation of it, but it's by no means the only interpretation, and I side with those physicists
and philosophers who regard quantum theory as having no such implication. In brief, although measurement can change the state
of what is measured, it simply does not follow that the state has no reality independent of the act of measuring.
Frayn also claims that the selectivity of attention shows that what we perceive depends on us, as when
you focus on a bird in flight and ignore the sky behind it. But this rests on confusing the world as it appears to us with
the world as it is in itself, a confusion that runs through the entire book. It is quite true that we contribute to the way
things appear to us, but it doesn't follow that we construct the world that thus appears.
It is also a mistake to suppose that because we must always be aware of the world through the medium
of our own consciousness, we cannot think of the world except as represented by our consciousness. I cannot refer to things
without using words to do so, obviously, but it is wrong to conclude that objects cannot exist without words. Frayn is here
committing the same fallacy as the idealist philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, who reasoned that objects had to be ideas,
since no one can conceive of an object without having an idea of it.
Frayn's subjectivism is also self-refuting. If everything depends on the observer, what about the observer
herself? Isn't she at least a determinate reality? We can't confer form and substance on the world, resolving its inherent
indeterminacy, unless we have it to begin with. Frayn goes so far as to suggest that reality is just a projection of our stories
about it, with the line between fact and fiction erased. But isn't it at least an observable fact that we construct fictions?
It may sometimes be hard to decide what is factual and what is fictional, but it doesn't follow that there is no distinction
between the two.
Once these points are kept clear, Frayn's putative paradox disappears. He writes: "This is what it
comes down to in the end: the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form
or substance without the world to provide them in its turn. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas -- and
we are standing on the globe we are supporting." But this is simply an outright logical contradiction, generated by Frayn's
own misunderstanding of the issues, not an interesting and inescapable conundrum. Frayn confides that his philosophy tutor
at Cambridge, Jonathan Bennett, having read his manuscript, told him he was guilty of rampant anthropocentrism. He should
have listened to his old teacher.
Colin McGinn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and the author, most recently,
of "Shakespeare's Philosophy."
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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WHO ARE YOU?: Identification, Deception, and
Surveillance In Early Modern Europe
By Valentin Groebner. Translated by Mark Kyburz and John
Peck
Publisher Zone
ISBN 1890951722
349 pages
$30
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Valentin Groebner, who teaches history at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland, opens "Who Are
You?" with a story. During the early Renaissance, a group of well-to-do Florentines -- including the sculptor Brunelleschi
-- decided to play a prank on a fat woodworker named Manetto. They arranged for everybody he met to act as if he were someone
else. Friends, brothers, government officials, the local priest -- everyone treats the woodworker as Matteo. A judge tells
the thoroughly confused woodworker that these cases, though unusual, do crop up with some regularity. It might be a kind of
amnesia. And why, for heaven's sake, is he fighting the truth, especially since Matteo is fairly well off, and Manetto isn't?
Slowly but surely, Manetto accepts that he is Matteo and begins to answer to that name.
Every day we read about identity theft on the Internet. Since 9/11 the government surveillance of every
aspect of our lives has skyrocketed. Popular films such as "The Matrix" and "Total Recall" reveal the world as a theater of
illusion, and novels, like those of Philip K. Dick, suggest that paranoia makes perfect sense. Are people really who they
appear to be? How can you be sure? For that matter, how do you know that you are who you think you are? After all, our identities
are largely "constructed" by others and by the documents in our wallets.
Groebner reminds that, when challenged to "prove" who we are, we depend on external objects -- passport,
credit card, driver's license. As the German border guards and leather-coated SS officers in old movies used to say, "Your
papers, bitte." We are what and whom they certify, as long as they are "in order." For security and immigration personnel
"do not check whether we are authentic or not -- we all are -- but whether our passports bear certain signs of authenticity."
"Who Are You?" finds the origins of our identity-obsessed culture in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
In quick-moving chapters, Groebner examines how portraits, badges, seals, clothes, tattoos, letters of safe conduct, and paper
certificates helped people to recognize others whom they had never seen before. Such insignia would also be used to indicate
inclusion or exclusion. Former prisoners and slaves might bear special tattoos, but so did charismatic religious leaders:
Crosses branded on foreheads were common. Beggars had to be as identifiable as foreign envoys.
Technology and the culture of identification developed in tandem. When courier services spread throughout
Europe, so did the wanted poster. As governments used various badges to distinguish their agents, so, too, the members of
robber bands took up their own secret insignia. "Clandestine conspirators have always been the doppelgangers of the representatives
of real political institutions."
Despite language that sometimes grows academic and theoretical, Groebner's study is grounded in the
realities of human life:
"All written forms for registering identification (lists, wanted circulars, descriptions) faced the
same dilemma: what was committed to writing was immutable, whereas the person described continued to change, not least through
the process of registration itself: once a personal description was out in a search warrant, that person had to change."
"Who Are You?" offers some fascinating historical tidbits. It briefly touches on the famous story of
the con artist Arnaud du Tilh who "passed himself off as the absentee soldier-adventurer Martin Guerre, taking his place as
a returnee to Guerre's village and marriage bed." We learn that the identification of dead soldiers -- especially when searching
for one's slain leader -- was difficult because the victors would always strip the clothes and weapons from already battered
bodies. In the Middle Ages the Gypsies were the equivalents of our illegal immigrants. They eventually fell into a double
bind that still makes perfect bureaucratic sense:
"The imperial jurists drew a remarkable conclusion from the long-standing and largely unsuccessful
endeavor to curb and monitor the movement of Gypsies in the different parts of Europe and to dispose of such undesired traveling
people. The royal order of 1551 and subsequent regulations obliged all authorities to confiscate and destroy all letters of
conduct and identification documents that Gypsies produced. So deceitful were these people, according to the jurists, that
any documents they carried had to have been forged. In short, the authorities refused to recognize papers bearing their own
signs and marks."
During the 16th century -- an age of "dissimulation," according to Montaigne -- governments increasingly
strove to "register everyone and everything." But what was the historical outcome? "The rise of the con man and the impostor,
together with their official counterparts, the diplomat and the spy equipped with authentic counterfeit papers. Their careers
in dissimulation took place not in spite of, but through the expanding systems of bureaucratic control." Before long, "the
scribes of early modern Europe produced mountains of paper abounding with forged attestations, false details, and invented
names."
Why was such documentation so important to governments? For the same reasons it is today. In 1796,
the German philosopher and historian Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote:
"The chief principle of a well-regulated police state is this: That each citizen shall be at all
times and places ... recognized as this or that particular person. No one must remain unknown to the police. This can
be attained with certainty only in the following manner. Each one must carry a pass with him, signed by his immediate government
official, in which his person is accurately described. ... No person should be received at any place who cannot thus make
known by his pass his last place of residence and his name."
Whether you are offended or comforted by such practices, their effectiveness has always been questionable.
As Groebner stresses, "surveillance achieves its effects not through administrative perfection, but through arbitrariness,
unpredictability, intimidation, and particularly through the collaboration of neighbors and selfish informers." That hardly
seems the kind of culture most of us long for. So it's both reassuring and disturbing to be reminded how flawed the system
can be. Near the end of "Who Are You?" Groebner relates a modern story that is, in some ways, a counterpart to that of Manetto,
the fat woodworker.
"Identification," Groebner first reminds us, "means presentation" and then asks us to look at the illustration
of a modern passport, complete with photograph and stamps:
"That stylish traveler whose passport is reprinted here ... was obliged to present his identity papers
at several embassies and border checkpoints. In 1998 he applied for an Austrian tourist visa for three months, then for its
Swiss counterpart, which was also valid for three months, and finally for a German one. He looks respectable in the photograph,
doesn't he? So does his passport, complete with its official registration number in the top left corner and the signature
of the passport officer certifying the document in the bottom right. The document bears security marks in the shape of small
keys, as well as the 'Seal of Authenticity' imprinted in numerous places, reassuring us that the seal is 'secure' and 'valid,'
embellished by signatures. In medieval categories, this document refers to itself in a most eloquent manner. Its holder was
granted the visa for which he applied and subsequently toured Germany, Austria, and Switzerland unhindered for nine months.
I hope he enjoyed himself, because it wasn't until he presented himself at passport control in the Zurich airport that an
official noticed that 'British Honduras,' the state that had allegedly issued the document, does not exist."
Currently, Groebner notes, efforts are underway to develop unfoolable methods for documenting who we
are. So far, the equipment for these has proved unreliable, and the systems readily tricked. As recently as 2002, "facial
recognition systems and iris scans were duped by photographs, and fingerprint scanners accepted reproductions made with the
aid of cellotape and gelatin."
Groebner closes by underscoring that "identity constitutes the attempt to control how others define
us." Social inequities are thus part of this history, too. In his early chapters he discusses what "complexion" means in a
description, notes that the wealthy and VIPs have long swanned through checkpoints while the rest of us waited impatiently
in long lines, and reminds us that "those whose rights are safeguarded dispose of much greater liberties in their self-representation
and their social role playing than groups with lower social status."
All too often, in fact, "identification as surveillance means putting the person being checked in a
position where he or she has already done wrong, only to feel obliged to conceal or make up for the contravention. ... Some
aspects of how European countries deal with illegal immigrants today bear witness to the longevity of this principle. Their
passports are of little use to them, however genuine they are. They are identified only in order to expel them again as illegal
subjects."
In "Who Are You?" Valentin Groebner shows us that the surveillance and security culture of the 21st
century has a long history, as does that of its counterculture of fakes, forgeries and impostors. According to Groebner, you
can now buy a high-quality counterfeit U.S. residence permit for around $10,000 on the black market.
Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda(at)gmail.com.
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Publisher Basic
ISBN
0465002528
234 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by James M. Lindsay
The Iraq war has America's foreign policy mavens waxing nostalgic. Partisans of the elder George Bush
long for the days when realism and caution reigned in the White House. Bill Clinton's fans fondly recall an era when presidential
trips overseas drew admiring crowds rather than angry protesters. U.S. foreign policy, it would seem, should go forward by
going backward.
Zbigniew Brzezinski will have none of that. In his engaging and briskly argued new book, Jimmy Carter's
national security adviser sees little worth emulating in the past 15 years of U.S. foreign policy. He asks how Washington
has led since becoming the world's first truly global leader after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His answer? "In a word,
badly."
To make that case, Brzezinski grades the performance of presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush -- or, to
use the ungainly terms he prefers, Global Leaders I, II and III. "Second Chance" even comes complete with a full-blown report
card. (You can guess which president gets an F.) Brzezinski's unsparing assessments will warm the heart of anyone worried
about grade inflation.
George H.W. Bush, Brzezinski argues, was a superb crisis manager who missed the opportunity to leave
a lasting imprint on U.S. foreign policy because he was not a strategic visionary. He earns a solid B. On the other hand,
Bill Clinton had the intellect to craft just such a post-Cold War strategy but lacked the discipline and the passion, leading
to eight years that produced more drift than direction. He gets an uneven C. Finally, the younger Bush offered "catastrophic
leadership" after 9/11 that has already stamped his "presidency as a historical failure."
These portraits will strike many readers as conventional -- and others as unfair, particularly to the
first Bush. Yes, Bush 41 famously foundered with the "vision thing." But then again, less than a year passed between the Soviet
Union's demise and his re-election defeat -- not much time to devise, let alone institutionalize, a new world order. And it
goes beyond unfair to argue, as Brzezinski does, that had the elder Bush deposed Saddam Hussein when he had the chance in
1991, "a subsequent U.S. president might not have gone to war in Iraq." The younger Bush chose to wage war on Iraq; he was
not forced into it by the choices his father made.
So much for the grades. So what does looking backward tell us about going forward? Brzezinski believes
that George W. Bush's choices have been calamitous but not fatal. There's still no other country that can play the role of
global leader. So America will get a second chance -- but not a third -- to reclaim the mantle of global leadership.
As much as "Second Chance" criticizes Global Leaders I, II and III for failing to devise a sensible
geopolitical strategy, it does not offer one of its own. The few specific policy recommendations it does offer are unconvincing.
Brzezinski wants to establish an executive-legislative planning mechanism to inject greater coherence into foreign policy.
But this proposal fails to realize that consensus can produce bad policies as well as good ones. After all, we plunged into
Iraq in 2003 because Congress followed rather than resisted the White House's lead.
Brzezinski also wants "stricter lobbying laws" because ethnic lobbies have too tight a hold on Uncle
Sam's ear. But this exaggerates their importance. Yes, lobbying groups favoring countries such as Israel, Armenia, Greece
and Taiwan complicate the lives of policymakers, but they seldom prove decisive on major issues. When they do -- as in the
case of the Israel lobby, which Brzezinski believes distorts U.S. policy in the Middle East -- it is not because they mobilize
narrow interests but because they can mobilize a broad swath of public opinion. That, for better or worse, is what democracy
is all about.
What "Second Chance" does offer is a wise insight that should guide any effort to fashion a strategy
to restore American leadership. We are in the midst of what Brzezinski rightly calls a "global political awakening." Technology
has made global "have-nots" painfully conscious of their relative deprivation. It has also given them the tools to punish
those they see as blocking their aspirations. If the United States is to avoid becoming the target of their resentment, its
foreign policy must be seen as serving their interests as well as its own. That means exercising self-restraint rather than
pressing every advantage that comes to a superpower; it means listening to others and not just working to preserve our own
peace and prosperity but helping others to build their own. The Global Leader IV who can find a way to translate these precepts
into practical policies should be able to impress even the redoubtable Prof. Brzezinski.
James M. Lindsay is director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at
the University of Texas at Austin. He is the co-author, with Ivo H. Daalder, of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign
Policy."
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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YELLOWCAKE
By Ann Cummins
Publisher Houghton Mifflin
ISBN
0618269266
303 pages
$24
Reviewed by Ron Charles
The plot of Ann Cummins' first novel, "Yellowcake," seems to suggest that we're in for a pretty shrill
experience: Native Americans dying from chemical exposure at a shuttered uranium mine. Regardless of your politics, that looks
like a beam of white guilt that will irradiate all subtlety. Discovering that Cummins delivers something far more nuanced
is just one of many surprises in this rich and touching story.
Yellowcake is the powdery substance produced while milling uranium ore, but it's also a compromise
between chocolate and vanilla cake. Both definitions show up in these pages, which suggests something about the novel's ability
to span industrial and domestic concerns. Cummins grew up in Shiprock, N.M., where her father was a mill worker, and she demonstrates
an intimate familiarity with the labor and the laborers -- Navajo and Anglo -- who toiled away in this dangerous business.
The story opens decades after environmental warnings closed the uranium mine on a Navajo reservation
in New Mexico. Ryland Mahoney, who was a manager when the mill shut down, is looking forward to his daughter's marriage in
a few weeks, but he's being pulled back into the past. With every breath, the oxygen tank he drags along reminds him of the
mining chemicals that may have compromised his lungs. And then there's the arrival of Becky Atcitty, the daughter of a Navajo
worker who's dying of cancer. Becky wants him to help a group of ex-employees sue the government for compensation for their
medical problems. But joining that crusade would involve admitting that he poisoned his friends and co-workers, that he poisoned
himself, that he's dying. Why spoil the wedding festivities with all that, and besides, who's to say what was really responsible?
"Maybe it was the uranium exposure. Maybe it was something else, like cigarettes," Ryland thinks. "As far as I'm concerned,
half the people creating a stir want compensation for getting old. We're not young. Things go wrong."
There's a dramatic showdown set up here, a la "Erin Brockovich," but Cummins never lets that take over
the novel. While the workers' protest rumbles away in the background, she's far more interested in the small personal dramas
among these characters -- conflicts of life and death, love and disappointment, that no court could ever sort out. The central
relationship is the long marriage between Ryland and his super-competent wife, who's trying to manage his illness without
turning him into a child. There's nothing romantic about dying from lung failure, and Cummins portrays that struggle with
clear-eyed realism, but she's also attentive to all the other moments of comedy and romance that keep right on flowing between
two people in love.
And she's particularly sensitive to the quandary of young Navajo men and women who hover in the cloudy
atmosphere of assimilation, enjoying the benefits of modern life but still aware of the riches of their parents' traditions.
Becky wants to help her dying father, but she's reminded again and again that she can't even speak his language. The medicine
men her father consults can't supply the technical records she needs to pursue his case in court, but is it worth violating
his faith to confirm her own beliefs? Watching her grandmother pray, "she feels entirely foreign, out of place."
Many likable people move through this novel, but my favorite subplot involves Delmar, the "crossbreed"
son of Ryland's best friend. Recently released from prison for stealing cars, Delmar is trying to stay out of trouble, even
as he thinks about "what a bummer the straight and narrow is." The humiliation of weekly drug tests and picking up after rich
white folks would be enough to test anyone's resolve, but he just might have enough determination and humor to make it. The
chapters that show him struggling to stay clean are marvels of insight and sympathy.
Cummins, who teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University, published a well-received collection
of short stories called "Red Ant House" in 2003. In some ways, "Yellowcake" is a collection of stories, too, but she's knit
them together to reflect the messiness and continuity of real life, a marvelous blending of crises and blessings and a fair
share of wondering and worrying. In the end, Cummins rather bravely leaves all her loose ends loose -- none of that Anglo
obsession with closure. That could have been frustrating, but here the effect is poignant. It leaves space that you can't
help but fill with your own hopes for these tender, resilient people.
Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World.
By Gene Wilder
Publisher St. Martin's
ISBN
0312360576
178 pages
$18.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
At the end of this novella, Gene Wilder -- yes, Gene "Young Frankenstein" Wilder -- thanks, perhaps
tongue in cheek, Ernest Hemingway for the example of his "simplicity of language." In fact, you can easily see that "My French
Whore" owes a great deal to "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (along with, in another context, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty").
One of the dumber but endearing ongoing jokes here is the correct use of the word "whom." But that's just one basis for comparison
between Hemingway and Wilder's fiction debut.
Instead of the terminally brave Robert Jordan in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -- who is sent up into the
mountains to blow up a bridge in the Spanish Civil War and finds a lifetime of love in a few days with the terminally passionate,
raped-by-the-enemy girl with the embarrassing nickname of Rabbit -- Wilder gives us Paul Peachy, a terminally timid train
conductor in the year 1918 who occasionally dabbles in Milwaukee community theater. (He's asked to play a coward but is so
shy that he nearly botches even that.) Rebuffed by his boring wife, he impulsively leaves her, joins the Army and ends up
fighting on the Western Front. Because Pvt. Peachy speaks fluent German, he is almost immediately sent to interrogate Harry
Stroller, a legendary, arrogant German spy who has deserted because he sees the end of the war coming.
The next day, during his very first battle, Peachy sees his two best friends killed, bursts into tears
and realizes he's more of a coward than even he knew. Maybe he's no more than a train conductor at heart, destined to shuttle
back and forth on the Milwaukee-Chicago run, muttering "Tickets, please" to passengers who appear, at least, to be living
far more intensely than he.
Then Peachy gets captured by the Germans. Something comes over him. He screams, he shouts, he bullies,
he blusters -- and he announces that he is the famous but elusive spy Harry Stroller. And because he's an actor at heart,
he gets away with it. (Much of this rests on the fact that almost no one has ever seen Stroller; they only know his reputation.)
Like Walter Mitty in his wistful dreams of heroism, like Robert Jordan in his romantic interlude, Pvt. Peachy, now the elegant,
swaggering Stroller, begins to live a life he has been unable even to dream about. He is taken to a castle where a German
officer, Col. Viktor Steinig, graciously offers him the most splendid hospitality -- a beautiful bedroom from which he can
glimpse deer gamboling on the castle grounds, a feather bed of exceptional softness and champagne, which he has drunk only
once before -- on the occasion of his wedding. That evening, Peachy attends a party filled with aristocrats and officers and,
as a courtesy, is offered the services of Annie Breton, a French woman of the night. She's pretty and fragile, but her face
is plastered over with a whore's makeup.
Much is made of this makeup; I don't know if it's meant to be allegorical or if Wilder is simply enchanted
by the concept (like the subtle difference between who and whom), but when Paul goes home with her that evening, he asks,
"Would you take your makeup off?" When she asks why, he rather tactlessly answers, "It makes you look like a whore." Not surprisingly,
she kicks him out.
But of course, the romance -- and Peachy's evanescent, transcendent life -- is only beginning. He ad-libs
his way through this life, parroting what he's heard and seen from likely and unlikely sources. He does a Shakespearean monologue
for a set of German bigwigs and is hailed as a genius. He is called upon to inspect some troops, manages to hearten the frightened
ones and take the bullies down a peg or two. He sees Annie again, still wearing her makeup. He mentions it; she slaps him.
(Yes, this is a pastiche of every Hollywood melodrama and/or screwball comedy you've ever seen, but what else would you expect?
Wilder is a goofy comedian with a melodramatic streak.) Annie soon enough reveals that she's been raped by a German sadist.
"I act like a whore, Monsieur Harry, because I am a whore. But I don't take money -- I take revenge." That sounds a little
obscure to me, but Peachy, a.k.a. Stroller, buys it. They go out for a dinner of roast duck, she takes off her makeup and,
well, voila!
But don't expect sex from this book. The sex takes up exactly two lines. "My French Whore" is all about
adventure and heroism and goofiness and role playing. Peachy finds not only love but also two loyal friends who replace the
two he lost. He performs extraordinary deeds of derring-do. You can imagine how this ends; just remember Robert Jordan's stirring
last speech to his beloved Rabbit. This is just fluff, but it's sweet fluff. If you loved "Young Frankenstein," you'll be
awfully fond of this.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Tom Bissell
Publisher Pantheon
ISBN
037542265X
407 pages
$25
Reviewed by Marc Leepson
Recent years have brought an avalanche of first-person memoirs from veterans of the Vietnam War. But
what we hadn't seen, until very recently, were sons and daughters of those veterans offering their own insights on the war's
continuing personal and political legacies.
Nowcomes Tom Bissell's "The Father of All Things," a powerful and unusual take on the war, his father
and their often turbulent relationship. How unusual? No other book in the enormous Vietnam canon combines a modern Vietnam
travelogue, a history of the war and a rumination on its fallout in the psyches of a father and son.
Former Marine Capt. John Bissell fought in Vietnam in 1965-66. His hazardous tour of duty has haunted
him ever since, and he has spent decades trying to come to grips with it. Since childhood, Tom Bissell also has been affected
by his father's wartime experiences. John Bissell's particular case of postwar emotional trauma included alcohol abuse, a
turbulent marriage (and divorce), and obsessive rantings to his young sons about the life-and-death decisions he was forced
to make in Vietnam.
"While growing up, I had associated nearly everything about my father with the Marine Corps and Vietnam,"
Tom Bissell writes. "This strange, lost war, simultaneously real and unimaginable, forced (children of Vietnam veterans) to
confront the past before we had any idea of what the past really was. The war made us think theoretically long before we had
the vocabulary to do so. Despite its remoteness, the war's aftereffects were inescapably intimate. At every meal Vietnam sat
down, invisibly, with our families."
Born in 1974, after his father returned from Vietnam, Tom Bissell graduated from Michigan State, served
in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan and went on to travel the globe and to carve out a notable literary career. A previous book,
"God Lives in St. Petersburg," brought him a Rome fellowship from the American Academy of Letters.
Throughout his life, Bissell says, it sometimes "felt as though Vietnam was all my father and I had
ever talked about; sometimes it felt as though we had never really talked about it." Bissell remedies that failure in his
well-crafted book, the heart of which is his account of the life-changing trip he and his father made to Vietnam in 2003.
"I was almost thirty years old, my father just past sixty," Bissell writes. "It staggered me, suddenly, how little relative
time we still had left together. I knew that if I wanted to find the unknown part of my father I would have to do it soon,
in Vietnam, where he had been made and unmade, killed and resurrected."
Bissell goes on to write eloquently about what happened on the trip. He also provides a surprisingly
in-depth look at the history of the war and offers thoughtful assessments on just about every aspect of the conflict, from
Gen. William Westmoreland's incompetent leadership to the abilities of the largely "corrupt, spineless, and endlessly inept"
South Vietnamese military and political leadership.
"The Father of All Things" is a one-of-a-kind accomplishment that provides ample evidence of the long-lasting
impact of the Vietnam War among the families of the 2.8 million Americans who took part in it. Wars, in general, Tom Bissell
says, wound "everyone right down the line. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six
-- and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war had done."
Marc Leepson is book editor and columnist for the VVA Veteran, the newspaper published by the Vietnam
Veterans of America.
By Amiri Baraka
Publisher Akashic
ISBN
1933354127
221 pages
$14.95
Reviewed by James A. Miller, professor of English and
American studies and chair of the American Studies Department at the George Washington University
For more than four decades of public life, writer-activist Amiri Baraka has distinguished himself not
only by his dazzling literary talent but also by his penchant for lobbing verbal hand grenades -- most recently in his poem
"Somebody Blew Up America," which, among other things, echoed the rumor that Israeli workers at the twin towers had been warned
to stay at home the day of the 9/11 attacks. The ensuing uproar led then-New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey to eliminate the
post of state poet laureate rather than allow Baraka to continue to occupy it. In the introduction to "Tales of the Out &
the Gone" Baraka signs off as "The Last Poet Laureate of New Jersey."
Now in his early 70s, somewhat grizzled, somewhat stooped but unbowed, Baraka is still feisty and irrepressible
-- to judge from the publication of his most recent collection of short stories. In the introduction, Baraka places himself
within a line of literary descent that springs from "Pushkin, de Maupassant, Poe, Dumas, Kafka, Sembene, Bradbury, etc.,"
but these stories, composed from the 1970s to now, many of them unpublished, bear the hallmarks of his distinctive voice and
politics.
Roughly the first half of the collection, gathered under the rubric "War Stories," consists of stories
thematically connected because they are, in Baraka's words, "taken from a life lived and experienced, from one kind of war
or another. It could be the USAF in Puerto Rico, it could be the later Greenwich Village skirmishes, the Black Liberation
Movement, or the Anti-Revisionist Communist Movement (we used to call it). Or what became post- all that."
Readers familiar with Baraka's earlier work, such as his first collection, "Tales," or the innovative
and fragmentary prose of "The System of Dante's Hell," will be struck immediately by the thematic range and coherence of the
stories he tells in this section. Often an intensely autobiographical writer, Baraka steps outside of himself here to create
more or less linear narratives that skillfully evoke specific times, places, moods, characters. His home town of Newark has
always occupied a central place in his political activities and in his literary imagination, and several of these stories
track the trajectory of black nationalist/revolutionary politics during the peak years of the 1970s.
"New & Old" succinctly captures the internecine struggles among various factions of black activists,
while "Neo-American" and "From War Stories" skillfully convey the disillusionment that set in among black radicals in the
aftermath of the euphoria that accompanied the historic elections of black mayors in Newark and other cities. The narrator
of "From War Stories" sardonically sums up the mood of his contemporaries: "A few of us believed that democracy for the assorted
groups of colored, Negroes, and blacks could be won by refraining from eating meat and jogging, plus karate. An even smaller
group of us thought that it might take more than that -- maybe a little Malcolm, a little Che, a little Mao, some Ron Karenga,
Carmichael, and pinches of some other folk, living and dead."
But the radical transformation did not occur. Set in the 1970s, "Neo-American" follows a day in the
life of Tim Goodson, the black mayor of Finland Station, N.J. (an ironic reference; the Finland Station is where Lenin arrived
in 1917 to assume the leadership of the Russian Revolution), as he prepares for a visit to his city by President Gerald Ford.
Through his fictional alter ego, Ray Sloane, Baraka castigates the rise of a black elite, spawned by the momentum of the civil
rights movement and the Black Power era. They're more preoccupied with the trappings of political power and the symbols of
upward social mobility than with addressing pressing social and economic conditions: "And what we got here in this town? ...
black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whippin' your heads,
the same unemployment and junkies in the hallways muggin' your old lady. What is it? What is it? We strained to elect this
nigger mayor, and what we got to show for it? Nothing but a burpin' black bastard slippin' his way around the city, sleepin'
with fat ladies."
The second section of the collection, "Tales of the Out & the Gone," has its roots in what the
literary critic Werner Sollors calls Baraka's "populist modernism," particularly his abiding interest in science fiction.
Baraka describes his preoccupations in these stories this way: "In specific contexts, anything can be Out! Out of the
ordinary. ... The 'Out' is out, even if in plain sight. ... The 'Gone' could be seen or unseen or obscene."
And so they are. Baraka abandons any pretense of linear fiction as these short sketches often careen
toward the surreal, the hallucinatory, the apocalyptic. Their organization is apparently random; this is a fictional world
that reveals itself in fragments, a world populated by ghosts, spirits, weird occurrences and "out" technology -- such as
sneakers that run on thought waves: "Yeh, yeh! You just focus on rising up, and zip, you rise. You focus on splitting
-- you split!" Or Rhythm Travel: "You can disappear & reappear wherever and whenever that music played."
At their best, these are playful sketches that stretch language and imagination in unexpected ways
but still maintain some connection to existing social reality. Other pieces in this section, however, are so "out" and convoluted
that they leave readers dangling. But that's Baraka for you: He either takes you along with him or leaves you far behind,
but he seldom looks back.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Sheridan Hay
Publisher Doubleday
ISBN
038551848X
354 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who reviews fiction frequently
for The Washington Post
An uneasy blend of mystery, love story and literary history, Sheridan Hay's first novel aspires to
the sophistication of scholarly romances such as A.S. Byatt's "Possession" (1990) or Martha Cooley's "The Archivist" (1998).
Like Hay's, those genre-mixing novels played at merging far-flung elements -- the past with the present, fiction with fact,
contemporary researchers with long-buried texts of dead authors -- but with far greater finesse.
"The Secret of Lost Things" follows the fortunes of 18-year-old Rosemary Savage, tall and red-haired,
freshly transplanted to New York from her native Tasmania after her mother's death, with the identity of her father unknown.
Wasting no time upon arriving in Manhattan, Rosemary lands a job at the Arcade, the city's largest secondhand bookstore. Readers
might recognize the Arcade as an imaginative facsimile of the Strand, the enormous 80-year-old institution at Broadway and
12th Street, where Hay herself once worked.
Employed as a "floater" among the Arcade's many sections, Rosemary quickly acquaints herself with the
gaggle of misfits who run the place. There's the owner, George Pike, an irritable miser who conducts business on a raised
platform and speaks in an orotund shout, always referring to himself in the third person. There is the oversize idler Arthur,
who spends much of his day examining volumes of photographs of naked men; Oscar, a fussy dilettante who perches on a stool,
forever writing in a mysterious notebook; and the store manager, Walter Geist, a nearly blind, vaguely malevolent albino for
whom Rosemary develops a simultaneous fascination and repulsion.
It's always welcome news when a novel promises abundant displays of eccentricity. But with the exception
of the cashier, an opera-singing preoperative transsexual named Pearl, and the avuncular rare-books specialist Mr. Mitchell,
this bunch turns out to be a disappointingly dour gallery of grotesques. Geist in particular is a limp and spongy creature,
reminding Rosemary of "a flounder on the ocean floor" and "a crustacean drying outside its shell" -- images that don't suggest
enough vigor for the acts of villainy and sexual ardor that the book's plot will require from him.
That plot, which takes nearly 200 pages to get up to speed, involves the purported reappearance of
a lost novel called "The Isle of the Cross" by Herman Melville, the 19th-century literary master of all things maritime and
leviathan. When word gets around that Geist has received a letter from a mysterious figure who's interested in selling the
valuable work -- which Melville assumed was lost in a fire in 1853 after being rejected by his publisher -- the hunt is on
for the great white manuscript.
Having just read "Moby-Dick" and decided that Melville is her favorite author, Rosemary spends a lot
of time in the library copying pertinent correspondence between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, his friend and fellow novelist.
(All the historical details Hay provides about "The Isle of the Cross" are true.) Rosemary's interest, however, is not purely
scholarly. She is nurturing a crush on the poetic but deceitful Oscar, who's trying to get his hands on the manuscript, and
hopes that any help she can give him will win his affection.
Geist also has a more personal than intellectual interest in "The Isle of the Cross." Panicked by the
debilitating effects of his albinism, he has concocted a plan to acquire the manuscript and sell it to a collector. He's convinced
the windfall will be large enough for him to retire comfortably and enough to persuade Rosemary, for whom he's developed an
obsessive infatuation, to look after his various physical needs.
Hay makes some strenuous demands of her readers here, not least in asking them to believe that a pretty
18-year-old girl would fall for someone as unlikable as Oscar, or tolerate, even briefly, the advances of so thoroughly repellent
a figure as Geist. (And tolerate them she does.) Yet the internal and external loathsomeness of nearly every main character
-- in what is, at its heart, a story about bartering for love -- is far from the book's least tolerable aspect. Nor is it
the clumsy dialogue, the stagy climax, the humorlessness or the repetitive exposition, all of which can be forgiven as first-novel
growing pains.
What's most insufficient about "The Secret of Lost Things" is that, as its title suggests, the tale
only comes alive when it concerns itself with books as things, as objects for sale. There is far too much discussion about
their provenance and acquisition and not enough convincing evidence of the intangible power of literature -- of the vital
partnership between a writer and a reader that can't be bought or traded or even fully shared. Hay depicts the Melville manuscript
as a historical artifact, a coveted trophy, a love token, a collector's curio, even as a wishful chimera. But she never persuasively
presents it as something we might actually want to read.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Michael Wallis
Publisher Norton
ISBN
0393060683
328 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Robert Wilson,editor of the American Scholar
and author of "The Explorer King," which will appear in paperback in the fall
After Sheriff Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid to death on a hot July night in 1881 in Fort Sumner, New
Mexico Territory, the Santa Fe Weekly Democrat reported that the moment Billy died "a strong odor of brimstone" filled the
air, accompanied by the appearance of "a dark figure with the wings of a dragon," which hovered over the body and let loose
a fiendish, proprietary laugh. As Michael Wallis points out in his new biography of the infamous outlaw, the fictionalization
of the Kid's life and death was well underway.
Wallis estimates that hundreds of works have been written about Billy the Kid, most of them "exaggerated
or embroidered with sensational lies." The yellow press came up with the enduring nickname only eight months before his death
at the age of 21, and a combination of the press and the dime novels of the day quickly turned his short brutal life into
myth. Wallis, who has written a book about Route 66 and a biography of another American outlaw, Pretty Boy Floyd, sets himself
the difficult but worthwhile task of separating the truth from the fiction.
Nobody knows for sure when and where Billy was born or who his parents were. Most reliable historians,
Wallis says, believe he was born in 1859 in New York City to an Irish woman named Catherine McCarty. His name was Henry, and
he had a brother named Joseph, but who his father was is less clear. The mother and two sons probably moved to Indianapolis
at the end of the Civil War, and there Catherine met William Antrim, a man 12 years her junior. The two were together for
eight years before they married in 1873 in Santa Fe, having moved with the boys to Wichita, then possibly to Denver in search
of a cure for the tuberculosis Catherine had picked up somewhere.
The four of them ended up in Silver City, N.M., where Catherine died of her illness in 1874. Henry
and Joseph, who had taken their stepfather's surname, were placed with families in the town while William went off to mine
for riches. Henry, only 15, went to school before and after Catherine's death and was remembered as a mischievous, fun-loving
boy who liked to dance and sing; he was good-looking but almost girlishly slight of build, a reader and a student of Spanish.
But he fell in with a group of boys with whom he developed a taste for petty theft and gambling at cards.
Before long, he was jailed for larceny and escaped by wriggling up a chimney. The first of several
dramatic escapes, it made the local newspaper, so that his legend and his life on the lam began at the same time. Henry soon
became known as the Kid or as Kid Antrim. By 1877, he had picked a new name altogether -- William H. Bonney. The William probably
came from his stepfather and the H from Henry, but although there are theories about where the Bonney name arose, Wallis concludes
that it "has never really been explained."
Billy graduated from larceny to horse theft, a capital offense often punished without benefit of judge
or jury. As he kicked around New Mexico and Arizona, he inevitably killed a man in a bar fight, and in the last few years
of his life he shot other men dead with no sign of remorse. During the infamous Lincoln County War, Billy rose from gang member
to gang leader, as others around him either died or wisely slunk away.
He was a violent man in a violent time and place, and yet one aspect of his myth is that of an Old
West Robin Hood, a man who stood up to corrupt commercial interests. He was a hero among many Hispanics because of his love
of their language, culture and people -- especially their young female people. But based on the facts that can be known, it's
hard to romanticize the real man.
"Billy the Kid" reads in places like a first draft, which is a shame, because Wallis seems to have
put in the time on his research. He never loses his determination to separate Billy from the smell of brimstone, and yet he
never forgets that the myths contain truths that go beyond the facts.
By Rebecca Walker
Publisher Riverhead
ISBN
1594489432
210 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff
Rebecca Walker comes to her ambivalence by birth. The biracial daughter of divorced parents, she spent
her childhood moving between two households on opposite coasts -- and between two radically different ways of life. She is
also a product of 1970s feminism, a member of "the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional."
Her mother, the novelist Alice Walker, has written of her own mixed feelings about having a child; now it is Rebecca's turn.
Her new memoir is a thoughtful and amusing play-by-play of pregnancy and birth, investigating the difference between the theory
surrounding motherhood and the scary, messy, snuggly practice of it.
She barely got beyond the theory phase. During her eight-year relationship with the musician Meshell
Ndegeocello, the two women had asked a male friend to serve as birth father -- "the natural way, no turkey basters." They
considered moving as a group to Europe, "where I could write and be cared for by the thriving holistic midwifery and healing
network. I could learn French, and the baby could be bilingual, and we could live in one of those charming villages in Switzerland."
The arrangement fell apart after a first failed try at conception.
But that's just back story. The 30-something Walker who learns she is pregnant on page 1 of "Baby Love"
is somewhat more grounded, no small thanks to her new partner, Glen, the baby's father, seemingly a model of well-adjusted,
nurturing manhood. He rejects her "polytheistic fiesta" childbirth fantasy, in which "everyone I know and love will climb
into the hot tub-cum-birthing pool with me," massaging her scalp with lavender oil and feeding her organic chocolate cake.
But mostly she worries about the usual stuff: What kind of hospital? Amnio or no? And can they even afford a kid? Consulting
an array of health professionals (homeopath, Tibetan doctor, birth doula, et al.), she decries the medicalization of pregnancy
and society's lack of support for pregnant women but delights in buying haute maternity wear. Ultimately, the actual birth
brings her further down to Earth: "I retract my judgment of every woman who has had or will have a scheduled C-section," she
declares. Yes, the pain is that bad.
"Baby Love" never mentions Alice Walker by name, and some readers may not infer the connection. Regardless,
Rebecca's mother does not come off well. For years, she kept a sign over her desk comparing her young daughter to the obstacles
faced by great women writers -- Virginia Woolf's madness, Zora Neale Hurston's poverty and ill health. "You have Rebecca,"
the sign reminded her, "who is much more delightful and less distracting than any of the calamities above." Walker had the
right to say that (she concludes one important essay by quoting that sign in full), but for her daughter, there were consequences
to being considered a "calamity," no matter how prettily it's put.
When Rebecca told her mother she was pregnant, Alice was hardly effusive. Later in the pregnancy, she
suddenly threatened to denounce Rebecca in a letter to the online magazine Salon, which had recently quoted a passage from
her memoir ("Black White and Jewish") that criticized her parents. "She called me a liar, a thief ... and a few other completely
discrediting unmentionables," reports Rebecca. Alice backed down, but there were more confrontations via e-mail: "She writes
that she has been my mother for thirty years and is no longer interested in the job."
By the time Rebecca's son was born, they were no longer in communication. Perhaps because of the book's
journal format, which puts big and small events on an equal footing, these developments don't get the attention they deserve.
Nor do we know for sure what Alice's side of the story is -- though to be fair, this isn't her book.
Rebecca has lived most of her life similarly to her mother, valuing personal independence over all
else. Getting pregnant changed that. "Until you become a mother, you're a daughter," Rebecca writes. In her case, that also
means a chance to be the parent she wishes she'd had. But lest she hold herself to too high a standard, it's worth considering
that motherhood is, by nature, a bifurcating force: Childbirth threatens to split you literally in two, but good parenting
does it emotionally, again and again. Ambivalence goes with the territory.
Sara Sklaroff is a Washington-based writer and editor.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Andrew Wilson
Publisher Atria
ISBN
0743293975
306 pages
$24
Reviewed by Michael Collins
"Wherever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city." This evocative opening line, which
begins Andrew Wilson's "The Lying Tongue," provides a telling metaphor for an extraordinary work of imaginative genius, meshing
Dickens' gothic atmosphere with Hitchcock's suspenseful creepiness.
The novel opens in Venice with a travelogue of shimmering historical description dappled with poetic
detail. The narrator, Adam Woods, a recently graduated and troubled student, tells us he has taken leave of England to start
anew after an unseemly end to a relationship with his girlfriend. He has a job offer to tutor a 16-year-old boy and aspirations
to write a novel.
The tutoring job falls through before Woods even starts his new life. But good fortune strikes, and
he is informed that a reclusive English author living in Venice, Gordon Crace, is in need of a personal assistant. Woods applies
for and secures the job, describing his employer's liver-spotted hand during their initial handshake as feeling like the "lifeless
body of a tiny bird."
What unfolds, in three discreet parts, is Woods' initial fascination with the aged Crace, whose first
and only novel, published in the 1960s, was an international best-seller. Crace is loath to mention his life as a writer and
warns Woods against transgressing onto the subject, though he knows Woods aspires to be a writer. Their relationship is tenuous,
claustrophobic and downright unnerving, underscored by a sublimated sexual tension as Crace, in his infirmity, comes to depend
entirely on Woods as a surrogate companion.
The gothic noir of the isolated relationship, set against the silent movement of gondolas and fog,
is eerie. Failing in his attempt to write his own novel, Woods begins secretly writing a biography of Crace. As he sifts through
Crace's personal correspondence, we are led through the enthralling process of how a biographer goes about resurrecting a
buried life with the power to shape and define a subject's reputation and immortality. Early on, Woods hits pay dirt: a blackmail
letter seemingly alluding to the death of Crace's one-time lover.
The intensity heightens as Woods' disgust for Crace deepens, and he becomes determined to unearth his
subject's past. Under the pretext of leaving to attend a funeral, Woods departs for England. Equally at home in exploring
the rain-sodden British Isles, Wilson demonstrates his true scope as a writer. The novel takes on a breathtaking pace as Woods
uncovers disturbing details related to Crace's tenure at a boys' school. Armed with sufficient evidence to force Crace into
helping him publish the biography, Woods returns to Venice and a surreally violent denouement.
With an intriguing climactic twist that borrows from the esoteric coded messaging made famous in "The
Da Vinci Code," Wilson pulls off a mesmerizing tale that seeks to answer the question "Who are we really?"
Michael Collins is the author of six novels, including, most recently, "Death of a Writer."
By Kevin Sessums
Publisher St. Martin's
ISBN
0312341016
305 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Even as a very small boy, living in small-town Mississippi in the late 1950s and '60s, Kevin Sessums
sensed that he was different. The son of the high-school basketball coach "in a friendly hick-filled hamlet in the middle
of the state called Pelahatchie," he didn't like sports (though he had "inherited an innate athletic ability from my father"),
loved the movies, was infatuated with Arlene Francis (a panelist on the television show "What's My Line?") and was often called
"sissy" to the point that, he thought, he was "the sissiest boy in Mississippi."
That was bad. What was worse was that within a year, he lost each of his parents. In 1963, when he
was 7, his father was killed in an auto accident at the age of 32; his mother died a year later, at the age of 33, of esophageal
cancer. He and his younger brother and sister, Kim and Karole, were reared by their maternal grandparents as well as a host
of uncles, aunts and other relatives. They were given plenty of attention and love, but it was never the same as having their
own parents, and it had lasting effects on all three of them. As adults, they have thrived -- Karole is deeply involved with
the arts in Mississippi, Kim is a physician as well as an artist, and Kevin writes celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair and
other glossy magazines -- but the memory of being what the Mississippi newspapers called "The Sessums Orphans" has stayed
with them.
"Mississippi Sissy" is Kevin Sessums' attempt to come to terms with this complex and burdensome legacy.
It's a strange book. It vividly recreates Mississippi in the 1960s and '70s, with bitter, brutal racism in the rural areas
yet tentative steps toward change and acceptance in Jackson; its portrait of the Mississippi cultural underground is detailed
and, so my own limited acquaintance with the phenomenon tells me, accurate; it is candid about Sessums' awakening to his homosexuality
and his uncertain attempts to practice it in a place where it was anathema. But it also is filled, just about to overflowing,
with dialogue. Though Sessums acknowledges that this narrative is "my own invention," albeit "as true to these people and
events and what was said around me as my memory can possibly make it," the reader is likely to feel that there's just too
much of it: long talks with his mother and grandmother (some dating to when he was 3 years old), a sermon by a preacher who
eventually seduced him, an endless late-night bull session among the Jackson illuminati -- it's just too much, and it seems
to cross the line between memoir and fiction.
This may be as good a moment as any to acknowledge that memoir is essentially a creative rather than
a reportorial act; inevitably, it involves some degree of conscious or unconscious fictionalizing. The memoirist interprets
his or her own life, making choices about what to include and what to omit, when to interpret and when to shun speculation.
This can turn the memoirist into something close to a novelist (see, for example, Nabokov's masterly "Speak, Memory"), but
a compact with the reader must be maintained. In the case of "Mississippi Sissy," I too often found myself doubting that the
author could have recalled conversations in anything close to the detail he sets down, especially those that ostensibly took
place when he was very young; this raises suspicions that detract from the book's credibility.
It is in broad terms rather than specific ones that "Mississippi Sissy" is most convincing. The state
really was, in the time of Sessums' boyhood, "a confusing brew of chicanery, malevolence, and kindheartedness." Blacks mostly
were treated unspeakably -- Sessums' account of the indignities heaped upon his family's maid is especially poignant -- yet
there were moments of understanding and kindness on both sides of the divide, a useful reminder that human beings and the
society they inhabit can rarely if ever be summed up in stark generalizations. Sessums' account of the gleeful reaction among
white Mississippians to the terrible events of the time -- the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers nearby in Neshoba
County, the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. -- is faithful to historical truth. His portrait
of the incestuousness and random cruelty of small-town life is also accurate.
That cruelty of one sort or another was frequently visited on a little boy who looked and acted different
scarcely comes as a surprise. (I remember being mercilessly teased in the fifth and sixth grades of a small town in Southside
Virginia around 1950 because my family had moved from the Northeast and I sounded like a "Yankee.") Small towns can be cruel
wherever they may be, but the South in those years was especially isolated, defensive toward outsiders and intolerant of deviation
in any form. It's clear that people (his father included) suspected that little Kevin was what used to be called a girly boy
long before he was old enough to find himself more attracted to boys than to girls.
From the beginning, though, he was more comfortable with women than with men, and his sympathies were
more readily extended to them. Here, for example, he describes his mother and her friend, the wife of the football coach:
"They weren't much more than girls, barely past thirty and stuck in a small Mississippi town with husbands that hadn't taken
them out to eat on a Friday night since the men had put the word Coach in front of their names and the two women had to live
their lives feigning interest while seated on the backless bleachers of muddy ball fields and half-filled gymnasiums."
His mother told Kevin, "I know people call you a sissy," but she argued that the word written on paper
looks "pretty" and that he should stand behind it, and himself. She seems to have been quite a woman -- strong, independent-minded,
funny, smart, kind -- and her early death is heartbreaking. As for his father, he was "a sports celebrity of local renown,"
a basketball star at Mississippi College who'd been drafted by the New York Knicks but forsook them for his home state at
his wife's request. If he was bitter about this, he doesn't seem to have dwelled on it, but he looked at his first-born son
with doubt and discomfort. He called him a sissy or "you girl." He tried to push Kevin into doing the things boys were expected
to do and got angry when he didn't. Yet there were times when his love for the boy showed. It must have been a very confusing
relationship, for father and son alike.
Eventually, inspired perhaps by his mother's words, Kevin decided just to be Kevin. One Halloween,
he dressed up very fancily as a witch, earning near-universal scorn. He played sports for one year in high school and did
well, but "I quit every one of them when I was a sophomore and concentrated on graduating from high school early, especially
after I consciously admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, saying the four words silently to myself: 'I am a homosexual.'"
He says that he was assaulted by an older man in a movie-theater restroom and that a much older preacher lured him into assignations
that he mostly loathed but slightly liked. Not until he got to Millsaps College in Jackson did his sexual life take turns
with which he was comfortable, though I wish he'd been a bit less graphic in his accounts of how this came to pass.
It was in Jackson that he encountered the Mississippi underground, homosexual and intellectual, sometimes
both at the same time. He was taken under the wing of Frank Hains, the arts editor of the Jackson Daily News, a semi-closeted
homosexual who never made a pass at him but introduced him to his close friends Eudora Welty, the writer Charlotte Capers
and others who passionately if privately resisted the Mississippi status quo. Hains "was a father figure to me, but it was
my mother's absence I was aware of when I was in his presence," and when Hains was savagely murdered in July 1975, it was
as great a blow to Sessums as the death of either of his parents.
All in all, a tough start to a man's life, but Sessums seems to have landed squarely on his feet. Too
bad that his prose is clunky and his memory suspect because "Mississippi Sissy" doesn't make as much out of his story as seems
to be there.
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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THINGS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME: A Howard Waldrop Reader
Selected Short Fiction, 1980-2005
Publisher 311 pp
ISBN 1882968360
311 pages
$15
HOWARD WHO?
By Howard Waldrop
Publisher
Small Beer
ISBN 1931520186
253 pages
$14
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Howard Waldrop is not only admired and loved for his brilliant short stories, he is also deeply envied
by a sizable percentage of the male population. Forty or more years ago, Waldrop simply decided to live a life where he could
do what he most enjoyed -- write strange and original fiction, watch B-movies, listen to music, spend time with friends and
do a whole lot of fishing. While the rest of us were busily sacrificing ourselves and our dreams to the bitch-goddess Success,
Waldrop was sipping a beer and enjoying an old Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoon or standing happily in a cold river with
a fly rod in his hand. Sometimes, of course, he might toddle over to the University of Texas library to read up on the dodo,
Piltdown Man or some other odd byway of learning or popular culture. Then, when the time was right, he'd sit down at somebody's
kitchen table and produce -- usually in just a few intense days -- a story like "God's Hooks!" in which Izaak Walton and John
Bunyan go angling for the monster Leviathan in the Slough of Despond.
Since the 1960s, Waldrop has written dozens of short stories, appeared multiple times in anthologies
of the year's best science fiction or fantasy, won and been nominated time after time for major awards in the field. And yet
he's not anyone's conception of a typical sf writer. If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once
said), then Waldrop is our own very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better
yet, Italo Calvino. For, like the Italian fabulist, Waldrop never repeats himself and is a pasticheur par excellence. He can
sound like a Texas cracker or a graduate student in ornithology, like an aging '60s dropout or a young boy in Africa, like
a broken-down robot in the far future or an antique Roman. In one tour de force, "Heart of Whitenesse," he actually channels
Christopher Marlowe, Philip Marlowe and Joseph Conrad's Marlow all at once.
Over the course of his career, Waldrop's annual income has broken into five figures exactly twice.
(As he notes ruefully, but without self-pity, $4,000 doesn't go as far today as it once did.) For eight years, he lived in
a shack in Washington state without a telephone -- for the first three of those years without a stove or refrigerator. After
all, he was there for the fishing. He doesn't use the Internet, though fans maintain a Web site for him. He still types up
his stories and mails them to editors in an envelope. To some people, Waldrop has sacrificed too much for his simplified way
of life, never marrying or having children or being able to afford health insurance. Yet glance at his photograph in "Things
Will Never Be the Same" or meet the easygoing author himself at a science fiction convention, and you can't help but think,
"This is one happy guy."
In "Things Will Never Be the Same," Waldrop has chosen 16 of his best short stories and written a new
afterword to each. The book opens with the multiple award-winner "The Ugly Chickens," in which a chance remark on a bus leads
a young researcher into backwoods Mississippi to discover the real fate of the dodo. It closes with a tale of alternate realities,
"The King of Where-I-Go," somehow combining the polio epidemic of the early 1950s, the famous ESP experiments at Duke, and
a man's love for H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine." As usual, Waldrop generates a lot of his narrative electricity by conjoining
seemingly unlikely thematic material. In "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll," he blends UFO scares, the 1965 New York blackout and
a singing competition between two doo-wop groups, the Kool-Tones and Bobby and the Bombers. "The Sawing Boys" retells the
Grimm Brothers' fairy tale "The Bremen Town Musicians" in the style of Damon Runyon, setting the story in the Kentucky backwoods.
"The Lions Are Asleep This Night" imagines an alternate Africa in which young Robert Oinenke composes an Elizabethan-style
drama about the "tragicall death of King Motofuko."
The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful. What if robotic versions of Mickey, Donald
and Goofy, designed for an amusement park, were the last creatures on Earth? What if the Martians landed in Pachuco County,
Tex., back in the late 19th century, and a kind of Slim Pickens character was the sheriff in charge of keeping the peace?
What if Chiron the centaur grew old and during the reign of Julian the Apostate needed help to make his way back to his original
homeland, the as yet undiscovered America? (In a neat touch, Waldrop's narrator refers to Christians and their idiotic schism
as being a danger to "decent gods-fearing folk.") In "French Scenes," he even reveals how young Parisian filmmakers, such
as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, interpreted American gangster movies. When Neville Brand in "Riot in Cell Block
11" gets shot at with a Thompson submachine gun, he yells: "Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!" But what the
Cahiers du Cinema people hear is "Steady, mon frere! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams."
In "Heart of Whitenesse," which Waldrop himself seems to view as his most compacted and densely allusive
work, Christopher Marlowe is sent up the frozen Thames on a secret mission to kill Dr. Faustus. Following a few preliminaries,
it opens:
"I'd come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in,
then dressed as best I could, and made my way out into this cold world.
"Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn't it."
My own favorite story is "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?," which manages to capture what life was like
for a teenager in the 1960s -- and then caps this by depicting members of the high school class of 1969 as they prepare for
their 20th reunion. This anthem for a lost generation climaxes with the band Distressed Flag Sale reuniting, for one night
only, to play the legendary "Life Is Like That." Years before, a riot broke out at a mammoth concert in Miami and the band
members were busted -- just before the song's world premiere. It was never heard by anyone. "We were gonna play it that night,
and the world was gonna change," says a now middle-aged and very drunk band member, "but instead they got us, they got
us, man, and we were the ones that changed, not them." But now on an evening suffused with mono no aware -- and
Waldrop uses the Japanese term for nostalgia and the sad passage of the years -- the band finally launches into "Life Is Like
That" and brings this story to a thrilling, perfect '60s climax.
That recurrent sense of what might have been pervades Waldrop's fiction, though his most famous excursion
into alternate history, "Ike at the Mike," isn't included in "Things Will Never Be the Same." For that -- and for "God's Hooks!"
and the amazing post-holocaust Indian tractor-pull story "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" -- you'll need to pick up "Howard Who?,"
the author's first collection now reprinted by Small Beer Press. In truth, you really do need both these books. Why? Because
in "Ike at the Mike," Sen. E. Aaron Presley, mulling over whether to make a bid for the presidency, attends a White House
dinner honoring the great old jazzman Ike Eisenhower. Later that evening, sipping whisky alone in his study, the charismatic
young senator wonders about the course of his own life and what might have been.
Italo Calvino once said that he was "known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next.
And in these very changes you recognize him as himself." Much the same could be said of Howard Waldrop. You never know what
he'll come up with next, but somehow it's always a Waldrop story. Read the work of this wonderful writer, a man who has devoted
his life to his art -- and to fishing.
By John Lanchester
Publisher Marian Wood/Putnam
ISBN
0399153004
370 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray
Mourning the death of a loved one, Sigmund Freud once argued, must be looked on as a hard, slow process
that demands far more time and effort than contemporary society allots to any ritualized grief. "Family Romance," an often
engaging new memoir by John Lanchester, is an elegy for his utterly extraordinary, pathologically secretive mother, who died
eight years ago. In Freud's terms, Lanchester, a gifted British novelist particularly known for his novel "The Debt to Pleasure,"
is an A-plus mourner, the opposite of a Hamlet-style griever who lives in a folly of denial.
His subject is irresistible: His mother, nie Julia Gunnigan, was a brilliant, eccentric former nun
who defected from the monastic life not once but twice and often suffered from the psychic disarray that such patterns of
desertion can cause. In view of Lanchester's narrative accomplishments and his deep, obsessive love for his mother, it is
striking that this new book does not communicate his grief with any great artistry. His habitually nimble prose has turned
sodden, and he too readily indulges in annoyingly simplistic pop psychology. My hunch is that the author has not yet gone
far enough into what Freud called the "slow, long drawn-out, and gradual work of severance" that mourning entails: He seems
not to have metabolized his grief enough to share it eloquently with the world.
If Lanchester rushed into this memoir too hastily, it may be because much of his youth was tainted
with the sense that both his parents tended to shy away from the truth and that his mother in particular was an inveterate
liar. This is a realization that might propel many of us to the analyst's couch, where the author eventually ended up, suffering
from severe panic attacks and near breakdowns. In his family, the author tells us, "The things that were felt most strongly
are precisely the things that were never said." His mother "was very, very, very good -- a genius -- at not bringing things
up." "Her psychic territory was marked with 'Keep Out' signs."
Lanchester traces his mother's furtiveness to three basic sources: The oldest of eight children, she
hated her own harsh, prying mother and knew no love as a child; her 14 years of convent life were "a training in lying" that
would force anyone "to have secrets and privacies of your own"; and the treacherous conformism of the lower-middle-class Irish
society she was born into placed an exalted premium on religious respectability -- the author compares it to "Afghanistan
under the Taliban."
Upon joining the first of her orders, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, whose harshness came to public
attention in the movie "The Magdalene Sisters," Julia, for the first time, enjoyed her parents' love and attention and was
treated like a star. But after two years as a postulant, she left the order, became instead the disgrace of her family and
was forced to leave home for Coventry, the nearest city. There she became a nurse, worked in a TB ward, contracted the disease
and met her first great love, a handsome patient from a well-to-do Protestant family. But Mr. Dreamboy died of the ailment,
and what was Julia's reaction to her life's central sorrow? She became a nun again, joining this time the Presentation Sisters,
which sent her to teach in one of the order's schools in Madras, India. There Sister Eucharia (the name she took in her second
monastic incarnation) soon became the head of her institution, teaching English, earning awards and medals for her good works
and even getting a master's degree by correspondence from the University of London.
If Lanchester's chapters about Madras are his finest, it's perhaps because the exotic liveliness of
the site offers welcome relief from the repetitive monotony of the author's principal narrative tool -- Julia/Eucharia's numerous
letters to her younger sister Peggie. Unduly burdening the chronicle, they gain emotional impact only when the incomparably
complex Eucharia, chafing all the more at the restrictions of her religious order as she rises in its hierarchy, decides to
defect a second time. At the age of 38, confiding her decision solely to Peggie, a former nun who was happily married in Tipperary,
she takes a plane to London, finds employment as a teacher and even writes two essays that are accepted by the BBC.
Lanchester's narrative falls into roughly four parts, concentrating on Julia's life as a nun; on the
origins of his father, Bill Lanchester, a sympathetic but colorless man who will become a mid-management official with the
Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp.; on the nomadic couple's "family romance" as spouses and parents as they are assigned
by Bill's bank to various locations in the Far East; and on the author's struggle to come to terms with his mother's stealth.
As Bill courted Julia, the author will learn after his parents' death, he often expressed his desire
for a large family, which led Julia to engage in her biggest lie to date. In order to have Bill believe she was a fertile
31, she pretended she was nine years younger than she really was; she indulged in an outrageous act of identity theft, getting
a passport under the name of her younger sister Dilly, who had never traveled beyond her hometown. Already pregnant when she
married Bill, she engaged in another major lie, hiding from the world the birth of her child -- the author -- for three months
and pretending he was born nine months after her wedding. (She had four later pregnancies and miscarriages, never apprising
her husband of any of them.) This profusion of deceits leaves the author with only one consolation: If his mother had not
lied, he might never have been born.
Bill Lanchester died at the age of 57, having spent 30 years working at a job he loathed. If we use
her real birth date, Julia lived on until she was 77, still consternating her author son with her propensity for evasion and
deceit and leading him to believe that "one of the main reasons I am a writer is that she couldn't be one. And the reason
she couldn't be one is that she couldn't tell the truth." But these phrases about writing-as-truth-telling present another
hurried, annoyingly simplistic view that is at the heart of this book's failings: Literature, to the contrary, succeeds as
a subtle network of lies that creates a higher reality than the one presented by the world as we know it. Surely a novelist
as fine as Lanchester knows that better than the average person and could have infused his knowledge into this occasionally,
but only occasionally, winsome memoir.
Francine du Plessix Gray is the author, most recently, of "Them: A Memoir of Parents." She is currently
working on a biography of Madame de Stael.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Jonathan Lethem
Publisher Doubleday
ISBN
038551218X
224 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Joe Heim
Lucinda Hoekke plays bass in a Los Angeles rock band that doesn't have a name, has never played a gig
and whose songwriter can't come up with any new songs. To make matters worse, the central character in Jonathan Lethem's peculiar,
funny and occasionally surreal new novel has just broken up with her boyfriend, Matthew (the band's singer), and lost her
job as a barista. Her future is not so bright that she needs to wear shades.
To make ends meet, Lucinda agrees to answer phones for the Complaint Line, an art project where anonymous
callers register their unhappiness about anything and everything: "The complainers spoke of their husbands and wives and lovers
and children, from cubicles of their own they whispered their despair at being employed, they called to disparage the quality
of restaurants and hotels and limousines, they whined of difficulties moving their bowels or persuading anyone to read their
screenplays or poetry. They fished for her sympathy." Adding a playful touch, Lethem includes the complaint line number on
the back cover. Feeling whiny? Call 213-291-7778. Trust us, it works.
Lucinda quickly tires of all but one caller, "the brilliant complainer, who interested her entirely
too much." For Lucinda, there is just something about what happens when they talk that she can't shake, and soon she is clinging
to his every word, replaying and dissecting every conversation, discerning meaning and import in his odd phrases and unintentional
aphorisms. Whether it's love or confusion is difficult to gauge, but Lucinda quickly sheds anonymity and begins an affair
with the Complainer.
At the same time, she also begins feeding the strangely inspirational things he says to her to the
band's songwriter. He, in turn, adds his own lyrics, works out arrangements, and -- voila -- the band is finally going places.
This may seem the makings of a fairly flimsy plot for a novel, and in many respects it is. But then
this is less a novel than a cultural manifesto about plagiarism. You see, just as the band's fortunes seem set to take off,
the Complainer -- an older, slovenly and bloated figure who is somehow rich though he doesn't have a job and somehow appealing
despite his misanthropy -- decides that the band's songs are really his and that he wants in on the action.
When the band's drummer asks about his intentions, the Complainer responds, "I want what we all want.
To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced." As he insinuates
himself into the band, the Complainer's passive-aggressive demands hasten the group's destruction. By insisting on what are,
at best, tangential claims to the songs, by claiming that he is being plagiarized, he kicks the band in its creative kneecap
and sends it tumbling before its artistry can be realized.
Plagiarism is on Lethem's mind these days. Far from decrying it, he embraces the dirty word, making
the case that it is an essential part of the artistic process. "It becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation,
allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and
genres in the realm of cultural production," he writes in a devilishly clever essay on plagiarism titled "The Ecstasy of Influence"
in Harper's February issue.
Lethem puts forward the arguments for plagiarism more elliptically in this novel, but the questions
are the same: Do artists own their creations, or is the creative process a never-ending collage, a cut-and-paste of conscious
and subconscious influences that is by its very nature plagiaristic? As if to emphasize his thesis that all art is in some
sense borrowed, Lethem begins his book with lyrics from songs by the Vulgar Boatmen and Roky Erickson. Both songs share the
same title: "You Don't Love Me Yet."
Joe Heim, the assistant editor of The Washington Post's Sunday Source section, would like to acknowledge
appropriating lines from songs by Timbuk 3, Lucinda Williams and Jimi Hendrix in this review.
Thanks to the Internet, information is speeding around the world faster than
ever. When the information contains facts you can use, that's good; but when it's myths and urban legends, that is the last
thing you need. To help clear up the confusion, here are ten common beliefs about pregnancy. Test yourself to see if you can
tell fact from fiction.
1. You can hurt your baby by having sex while pregnant.
Having sex does not harm your
baby. There are seven layers of skin from the abdominal wall to the amniotic sac, so your baby is fully protected.
2.
When you're pregnant, you're eating for two, so it's fine to have double portions.
No, your baby doesn't need many
calories to develop. Just 300 extra calories a day meets your pregnancy needs. This is the equivalent of a 6 oz. piece of
skinless grilled chicken or 24 almonds.
3. You lose a tooth for every baby you have.
This old wives' tale
started back in the days when women didn't get enough calcium and iron during pregnancy. By taking prenatal vitamins and eating
healthy, there is no reason why a mom should lose any teeth at all.
4. If you're used to drinking coffee, it's okay
to continue while you're pregnant.
The caffeine in a cup of coffee is a large dose for your tiny baby. If you're used
to drinking coffee, gradually cut down and replace it with a caffeine-free beverage.
5. You can tell a baby's sex
by how high or low you're carrying the child.
False, how you carry your baby is determined by your baby's size, your
own torso shape and size, and how much body fat you carry in your abdomen.
6. You can tell a baby's sex by how fast
the heartbeat is.
This is another legend. Everyone has a story about how their friend's baby's heartbeat was fast,
and sure enough, it was a girl. But a fast heartbeat could just as easily be a boy. Since the odds are 50/50 of having a girl
or boy, some of those legends are going to seem to come true-but they have no basis in scientific fact.
7. It's unsafe
to take baths while pregnant.
Unless your amniotic sac has burst, there is no medical reason why you cannot enjoy
a bath while you're pregnant.
8. It's safer to have an episiotomy than to tear.
Most tears are small and involve
tissue only, not muscle. Therefore, most natural tears heal up faster than episiotomies that may be deeper and involve cutting
of the muscle. Today doctors prefer to avoid episiotomies as much as possible.
9. Pregnant women should not swim.
False. Swimming is a wonderful aerobic exercise. The water helps your buoyancy and keeps strain off other parts of
your body.
10. You should not wear nail polish while pregnant.
Nail polish does not penetrate the nail bed;
therefore, there's no medical reason not to wear nail polish during your pregnancy. If it helps make you feel beautiful, then
enjoy.
All ten of these are false. If you hear other "tips" that sound suspicious, chances are they're myths. For
example, there's a silly old wives' tale that says eating spicy food causes labor. If that were the case, the women in some
cultures would be in real trouble!
Pregnancy is a natural process and doing normal things like making love does not
cause harm. So, the next time you hear an urban legend, set the record straight, and don't pass it on.
*About the
Author: Jennifer Polimino is the author of the book "Slim Mom Secrets: How to Have a Happy, Healthy Pregnancy and Baby." She
also has a FREE Healthy Pregnancy Coaching Club at www.SlimMomCoach.com and she publishes a FREE online Healthy Pregnancy Tips newsletter, available at www.SlimMomSecrets.com.
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By Tracy Chevalier
Publisher Dutton
ISBN
052594978X
311 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Nicholas Delbanco
"Burning Bright" derives its title from the opening phrase of William Blake's great poem: "Tyger, tyger,
burning bright/ In the forests of the night. ..." When one learns that this novel's author is Tracy Chevalier, it follows
as the night the day that we will enter the world of Blake's London and find "fearful symmetry" there. If not precisely formulaic,
Chevalier has by now established a formula for her process and success: Take a historical period with a recognized figure
or work of art, add some invented families and an engaging young person or two, do the research with specificity, and invite
the reader in. Chevalier made her reputation with "Girl With a Pearl Earring," the best-selling evocation of an artist's model,
Griet, a 16-year-old servant in the house of Johannes Vermeer.
Chevalier, herself an American expatriate, now lives in London and takes full advantage of her knowledge
of topography -- evoking the Lambeth of King George III's reign with gusto and, it would seem, precision. There are the teeming
streets and bawdy chat and excursions to Soho and Westminster Abbey, the publicans and whores and pinch-faced landladies.
We read of hardworking craftsmen and those who cut corners for profit; we meet the blooming country maiden whose maidenhead
will not survive the rapacious courtship of a dandy. There's "Cutthroat Lane" and a city grown jittery with rumors, in 1792
and 1793, that revolutionary fervor will be imported cross-channel from France; there's the actual figure of Philip Astley,
an "oversized colorful character" who created the modern circus. He swaggers persuasively through the neighborhood -- as does
the corrupt Lothario on horseback, his son John. In Chevalier's list of dramatis personae, the principal players include young
Jem Kellaway (fresh from Piddletrenthide and come to the big city with his parents and guileless sister) and streetwise Maggie
Butterfield (who takes them under her wing but soon needs shelter herself).
Stock figures all, cut from the cloth of Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens, and stitched together with
platitudes for attitude and a scrap of song. But one of the yields of this sort of read is the vein of data mined: We learn
how to make Dorsetshire buttons and Windsor chairs, and it doesn't matter all that much if the artisans who fashion them are
less than three-dimensional. The language is alternately casual ("Anne Kellaway snorted, trying to mask the laugh that had
begun to bubble up") and forced ("He turned his intense gaze on Jem, who looked back at him, though it hurt, the way staring
at the sun does, for the man's glittering eyes cut through whatever mask Jem had donned to go this deep into London").
At the novel's center stands the poet and painter of the "intense gaze," William Blake. His is a difficult
presence to parse, though we do learn of his habit of lying naked in the garden with his wife, of his pleasure in reciting
Milton and his skill with printing press and etcher's plate. We hear him talk to his dead brother and watch him while he draws.
A recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd, reports on Blake's argument with Philip Astley (who had attached a log to a boy's leg
and made him drag it on parade), and Chevalier brings that scene to fictive life. But she is somewhat less clear as to why
Blake would engage the children in long colloquies on the nature of perception and existence, then press upon them his own
copies of "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience." Implausibly, predictably, young Jem and Maggie agree at tale's end
that London and Piddletrenthide belong together:
"'So if I'm on this side o' the fence, and you're on t'other, what's in the middle?'
"Jem put his hand on the stile. 'We are.'"
If you believe in urchins happily united in the country dusk and reciting Blake to each other, then
this book will persuade. Chevalier's villains are deep-dyed villains, her good people blindingly good; they go from innocence
to experience with scarcely a hitch in their stride.
Nicholas Delbanco teaches writing at the University of Michigan. His most recent novel is "Spring and
Fall."
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Elizabeth Jacoway
Publisher Free Press
ISBN
0743297199
477 pages
$30
Reviewed by Juan Williams
Fifty years after the national crisis sparked by the integration of Little Rock's Central High School,
this book makes the case that all the headlines about rioting, political feuds and the arrival of the 101st Airborne hid a
deeper truth.
Elizabeth Jacoway, an academic who has spent 30 years researching Little Rock, argues that the fear
of black men having sex with white women was the hidden yet powerful dread that inspired much of the opposition to enrolling
nine black students at Central. Jacoway argues that Southern resistance to integrated schools was rooted in white men's insistence
on controlling white women and white bloodlines by keeping them away from black men. "In the mannerly, distinctly southern
environment of Little Rock, such sexual concerns rarely rise to the level of verbal discourse, and almost never in the company
of women, then or now," Jacoway notes.
The author -- the niece of Virgil Blossom, Little Rock's school superintendent at the time of the 1957
crisis -- was in the ninth grade when the city's schools were ordered shut by the state, then integrated by a reluctant President
Eisenhower. At the time, she recalls not understanding and not caring about the racial turmoil taking place in the city, involving
her uncle and several family friends who were leading Arkansas political figures. She then went off to college where, by her
account, she "majored in sorority life" and heard the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" twisted into a parody that began,
"We Shall All Be Beige." But after doing graduate work on Southern history at the University of North Carolina, she began
to research her hometown's defining moment.
Her theory about white sexual anxiety acts as a spicy subplot to a generally scholarly book. At its
best, this is a comprehensive, sometimes overly detailed telling of the Little Rock crisis. Armed with five decades of books
written by the principals in the drama, as well as interviews, newspaper accounts, letters, legal briefs and legal rulings,
Jacoway offers a sometimes stilted, character-driven narrative that moves the accepted telling of the tale from the world
of segregationist politics to the world of personal failings and insecurities.
Jacoway's theory that the "subtext of the whole experience was ... a white fear of miscegenation" is
not new, of course. The historian Winthrop D. Jordan famously explored the idea in his 1968 classic "White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812," in which he described white men with split emotions, mixing desire and repulsion and
craving sex across racial lines. Jordan concluded that, most often, white men had sex with black women as a "ritualistic re-enactment
of the daily pattern of social dominance," looking to such real-life cases as Thomas Jefferson and such cultural touchstones
as "Othello."
"Turn Away Thy Son" superimposes such theories on the Little Rock crisis. Jacoway notes that the city's
school board wanted to start integration at the high-school level, assuming that mature white girls, aware of the rules of
Southern society, would be better trained to handle relationships with black boys. She recounts opponents to school integration
playing an audio tape at mass meetings with a male voice, falsely identified as a black Howard University professor, saying
that white men prefer black women and that the white woman is "violently dissatisfied with the white man." Amis Guthridge,
a leader of the Little Rock chapter of the segregationist group White America Inc., tells one audience that school integration
is all about black men having white wives: "They want in the white bedroom."
In this version of the Little Rock story, only one black person comes to life as a compelling actor
on the stage of history: Daisy Bates, the young president of the Arkansas branch of the NAACP. Meanwhile, the nine black students
at the center of the commotion are portrayed almost as extras, sympathetic victims of circumstance caught up in a psychosexual
drama. The sexual angle seems to have had its impact on them, though; Jacoway reports that at least four of the Little Rock
Nine married whites.
Beyond her theory about the sexual roots of the crisis, Jacoway tries to break new ground with her
unconventional description of Arkansas' Democratic governor, Orval Faubus. Most histories of the crisis conclude that Faubus,
facing pressure from a segregationist opponent as he campaigned for a third term, cynically decided to appease racist elements
in the state by calling out the National Guard to prevent the black students from entering Central High. But Jacoway's retelling
gives the governor less control over events; she casts Faubus as a weak leader trapped under the weight of well-organized
resistance to school integration from the White Citizens' Council and other groups determined not to have Arkansas become
the first Southern state to comply with the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Jacoway's version of events is a deliberate -- and convincing -- counter to the way the story was told
by Arkansas' top journalist of the time, Harry Ashmore. But she dismisses Ashmore -- the editor of the Arkansas Gazette who
won a 1958 Pulitzer Prize for his editorials on the crisis -- as an indifferent journalist who became a darling of Northern
parlors for bashing white Southerners as "rednecks." Jacoway blames Ashmore for portraying the fight over Central High as
a crisis manufactured by Faubus; in her telling, Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep black children out of Central
High School because he was frustrated by the success his political opponents were having in using segregationist rhetoric
to stir white voters.
"Turn Away Thy Son," then, offers a different view of the governor and a sexy angle on the entire Little
Rock crisis. There is no discovery here that will require us to rewrite the drama's history, but this book is a reminder of
the sexual tension behind many of the nation's debates about race.
Juan Williams is a senior correspondent for NPR's "Morning Edition" and a contributing political analyst
for the Fox News Channel. His books include "Thurgood Marshall," and, most recently, "Enough."
By Tommie Smith with David Steele
Publisher Temple
Univ
ISBN 1592136397
268 pages
$27.50
Reviewed by Elliott Vanskike, a writer living in Silver
Spring, Maryland
Even if you don't know who Tommie Smith is, you probably recognize the photograph that made him famous.
That's his black-gloved right fist thrust into the night sky during the medal ceremony for the 200-meter race at the 1968
Olympic Games in Mexico City. Smith's and teammate John Carlos' wordless protest during the playing of the national anthem
seared the nation's consciousness and still packs a righteous wallop today. Smith was 24 years old and at the peak of his
athletic abilities when he accepted the gold medal. For good and ill, his life has been defined by his iconic act of resistance.
With that bold gesture, he burned his bridges with many in track and field, forfeited future jobs and endorsements and brought
on decades of death threats.
It takes nothing away from his brave stance to say that Smith's autobiography is shot through with
bitterness. He criticized the United States' shameful record on race with the whole world watching and returned to a country
that largely resented him. And his life since he took his stand at the Olympic Games shows the strain of living under that
resentment. He is death-haunted -- he continually fears a rifle shot aimed at his head -- and paranoid. Among many other slights,
insults, lost jobs, ruined relationships and missed opportunities, Smith believes that the aftermath of his 1968 protest sent
his mother to an early grave and prevented him from running a sub-19-second 200 meters (something no athlete has done to this
day).
A dismayingly large proportion of Smith's "Silent Gesture" is devoted to score settling. His fourth-grade
teacher was a tedious martinet; his first wife was a gold digger; George Foreman, who waved tiny American flags when he won
his gold medal at the 1968 games, has a "weak mind"; John Carlos doesn't deserve to be in the Track and Field Hall of Fame;
and on and on. Pointing out Smith's peevishness may seem petty, but the sour tone pervades the book.
When this tone lifts, the book offers insights into Smith's athletic prowess. He was the rare runner
who excelled at the 200- and 400-meter distances and remains the only track athlete to hold 11 world records simultaneously.
He learned to propel his body at a peak speed of 28 mph despite a 6-foot-4 frame more suited to basketball than sprinting.
When he describes the physical sensations of running -- the paradoxical relaxation of muscles required to explode out of the
blocks, the adrenaline that floods the body as a sprinter takes the get-set position and the stride-by-stride account of the
1968 gold medal race -- Smith's narrative surges to life.
A major aim of the book is to explain the motivation behind the silent gesture, but Smith isn't interested
in trenchant political analysis. He invokes "the system" dozens of times to explain everything from personal affronts to historic
atrocities, but the concept remains a cipher. Smith signals his interest in how personal experience begets political consciousness
when he observes, "I don't want this to be the Jesse Owens story -- Jesse was great ... he ran a race against Germany and
he beat Nazism and Hitler. I don't want to hear that bull ... I want to hear a humanistic point of view."
The animus toward Owens may be misplaced, but Smith makes it clear that he's more interested in the
events that led Owens to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and how the experience affected him than he is in the athletic showdown
with the Third Reich. This is a curious approach to personal history from a man who, like Owens, is known for a defiant political
act. But it yields some of the book's richest passages.
Explaining how his childhood experiences primed him for protest is a strength of Smith's book. He grew
up in a family of sharecroppers in Texas and California. Working to plant, tend and harvest cotton or grapes, only to see
most of the crop turned over to the white landowners, or watching his father pull their family wagon -- loaded with 10 kids
-- to the side of the road so a lone white man could pass taught Smith most of what he needed to know about the place of black
people in American society.
Readers of "Silent Gesture" will be left with a stark impression of the toll Smith paid for speaking
out against racism. He views his autobiography as his last, desperate chance to pull himself out of the "muck and mire (he's)
been stuck in since the Mexico City Olympics." Smith never expresses regret for having taken his controversial stand. But
when he says that a childhood race in which he beat his older sister for the first time is the biggest race of his life --
bigger than winning the gold medal -- one can sense his yearning for the unburdened life that was impossible after 1968.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Allan M. Brandt
Publisher Basic
ISBN
0465070477
600 pages
$36
Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
Recent years have seen a flurry of what might be called "inanimate" biographies -- that is, books devoted
to the life of a thing rather than a person. Salt got one, cod, too, even some naughty words. While I admire the scholarship
that goes into these studies, they tend to leave me a bit flat. I mean, it's the rare cod that battled the Boers alongside
Winston Churchill or ate fried eggs off Ava Gardner's chest. And while I love a heaping spoon of Morton's as much as the next
guy, no matter how you shake it, salt will simply never own up to losing its virginity to the upstairs maid. By their very
nature, these books can come off as bloodless digests of minutiae. Given a choice between Kitty Kelley's latest and "A Brief
History of the Booger," I'd hold my nose and pick the Kelley. You'd have to.
Next up: the cigarette. In "The Cigarette Century," Allan M. Brandt, a Harvard Medical School professor
with a very long and impressive job title, does a nice job of putting Kools and Salems on the couch. The tobacco industry
has become well-worn territory for authors and journalists, but Brandt, an expert witness in a number of anti-tobacco lawsuits,
enlivens a familiar story by scanning with the widest possible lens, easily unbundling and reassembling the narrative threads
of the cigarette's rise and mid-career flameout.
It's all here: the Marlboro Man's drug-fueled orgies with Ravi Shankar, Joe Camel slapping Elizabeth
Taylor that night at the Palm. OK, OK, I made those up. The book actually doesn't go anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor, which
is too bad, but Brandt manages to weave all the diverse elements of the cigarette's history -- medical research, advertising,
lawsuits, public relations, corporate intrigue -- into a surprisingly unified narrative. It's a good story, well told.
Because mapping the crucial life passages of your workaday cod requires the unique analytical insights
that only Gail Sheehy can boast, most inanimate biographies score or flop on their success at delivering two things: memorable
minor characters -- the president who downed 17 cod every morning for breakfast, the sultan who built an empire on salt --
and especially the "Honey-you've-got-to-read-this" detail. In my experience, you need at least one of these forehead-slapping
factoids every five pages to keep the cod-curious reader interested. By and large, Brandt rates an A-minus on the detail,
maybe a C-plus on the minor characters. His people, from the turn-of-the-century tobacco monopolist Buck Duke to the latter-day
apologists who sweat before Mike Wallace, could use more flesh on their bones.
The modern cigarette, Brandt reminds us, was born in the late 19th century but for the longest time
remained the industry's neglected stepchild. Chewing tobacco (also known by its technical name, God This Stuff Is Gross) and
even pipe tobacco sold better. Hand-rolled cigarettes cost too much to make and sold for too little to justify greater investment.
Besides, the dowdy matrons bustling around the country decrying the use of alcohol tended to moonlight at decrying cigarettes
as tiny engines of filth, sexual depravity and downward mobility. All in all, the death merchants of yore judged cigarettes
more trouble than they were worth.
But then came rolling machines. For the first time, cigarettes could be made for pennies apiece, and
at that point no one much cared about the naysayers -- the "antis," as they're called today. (Did you know that 16 states
briefly outlawed cigarettes in the 1920s? Liar.) In the 1910s, Big Tobacco all but created national advertising to peddle
Lucky Strikes and other brands. Still, cigarette use didn't catch fire until -- bing! memorable detail! -- World War
I, when American soldiers found a cheap smoke the perfect way to unwind after a tough day in the trenches. Doughboys so craved
cigarettes that -- bing bing bing! -- the YMCA handed them out for free. By the Great Depression, an avalanche of ad
campaigns had transformed the cigarette into an easily recognized symbol of both male virility and female liberation.
The rest, as they say, is cancer. The golden age of the cigarette during the 1930s and '40s -- think
Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca," Lauren Bacall in anything -- was followed in short order by the downbeat news that rates
of lung cancer, a heretofore all-but-unknown malady, were skyrocketing. Here Brandt confronts the elephant in his narrative
kitchen. The outrage many Americans felt during the 1990s, when internal industry documents exposed Big Tobacco's Machiavellian
strategies to subvert the science of lung cancer, is no longer fresh. If Brandt can't make the reader feel that outrage again,
he's headed to the showers.
Well, he does it. Big time. I defy anyone to read the middle chapters of "The Cigarette Century," the
ones that detail the foundation of the Tobacco Institute and the industry's efforts to muddy scientific waters, and not come
away with a burning need to drive down to North Carolina and find someone to throttle. Or Madison Avenue. Among the many villains
Brandt skillfully waterboards are executives at the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton, which during the 1950s single-handedly
orchestrated Big Tobacco's campaign to undermine anti-smoking advocates and scientists up to and including the surgeon general.
No lie was too big to tell, no bit of pseudo-science too ridiculous to pass off as legitimate. Parents, if you have teenagers
considering a career in p.r., have them read this first. I can't remember the last time I read a more scathing indictment
of corporate malfeasance.
One thing that surprised me about "The Cigarette Century" is how well it's written, given that the
author is, well, a college professor. Whether he's describing laboratory work or the intricacies of a lawsuit, Brandt seldom
lets the story drag; he has a fine sense of what detail to use and when to stop using it. The worst that can be said is that
the book feels "textbooky" in spots, which is probably to be expected given that Brandt is a Harvard lecturer and not Christopher
Buckley. "The Cigarette Century"
isn't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in tobacco, public relations, medicine or law,
I promise you won't miss Ravi Shankar. Well, maybe a little.
Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of four books, including "Barbarians
at the Gate."
By Peter Abrahams
Publisher Morrow
ISBN
0061137979
304 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who is mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World
Not every thriller writer has a trademark theme -- mostly they just want to scare the reader's pants
off, any way they can. But the talented Peter Abrahams keeps returning to a fairly well-defined situation: a family in which
one member reveals hidden depths.
The other members have been taking this spouse or sibling for granted, but clearly they have sold their
relative short -- for better or worse. In "A Perfect Crime" (1998), the exceptional one is a husband whose once-attractive
braininess has morphed, over the years, into homicidal arrogance. In "The Tutor" (2002), it's a troublesome 11-year-old girl,
underestimated by all, who is the only one to notice and react to the very dark side of the young man hired to help out with
schoolwork. And now, in "Nerve Damage," it's a deceased woman whose husband discovers how little he really knew her.
The mortality of that underestimating husband, Roy Valois, sets the plot in motion. A successful sculptor
living in rural Vermont, Roy has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. (It goes
back to a boyhood incident in which he and a buddy were paid to demolish a building riddled with asbestos, at a time when
nobody knew how toxic the stuff was.) His oncologist tells him he's got between four months and a year to live but offers
him the chance to participate in the clinical trial of a new drug cocktail. Naturally, Roy accepts.
Although in his late 40s, Roy still plays hockey for fun, and his curriculum vitae includes a game-winning
goal scored against Harvard long ago. With death very much on his mind, he hopes that his New York Times obituary will include
that highlight from his sports career. He recalls that newspapers prepare obituaries ahead of time. After hiring a feckless
but computer-savvy teenager named Skippy as his boy Friday, Roy has an inspiration. What if Skippy were to hack into the Times'
system and afford Roy the same kind of experience that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn once enjoyed: finding out how you'll be remembered
after you're gone? Skippy comes through, and suddenly Roy is reading about his own life -- and discovering a mistake. The
obit writer, one Richard Gold, has got Delia, Roy's wife, working for the United Nations when she was killed in a helicopter
crash 15 years ago, whereas Roy knows she was employed by a Washington think tank.
Roy telephones Gold, himself a resident of Washington, asking for a correction. Once Gold gets over
his annoyance at being hacked, he agrees to check his sources. A few days later, Roy picks up the Times looking for Gold's
byline. "And Richard Gold's name was there," Abrahams writes, "although not as a byline, instead in a context that made (Roy)
feel very strange." Rather than reporting the news, Gold made it: killed in what the police believe was a robbery. Roy smells
a rat, and so will you.
It's an ingenious start, both sinister and plausible. Roy is an appealing hero, and Abrahams writes
well about his disease and its progression: Roy gets relief from his persistent cough because it "had finally lost interest
in him." And to fill one's last days with dashing back and forth between New England and the District on a dangerous quest
to find out the truth about a long-dead spouse -- what a way to go!
But in the end, "Nerve Damage" lets the reader down. That bravura first act gives way to a humdrum
conspiracy-unraveling tale of skulduggery at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The problem may be that Abrahams strays
too far from the domestic milieus in which he excels, or perhaps by now a writer needs to be more original when venturing
into Ludlum Country. "Nerve Damage" has some good things in it, but if you haven't made the author's acquaintance yet, I would
let this one go and start with "The Tutor" or "A Perfect Crime" instead. They are Peter Abrahams at his best, and that is
very good indeed.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Robert Crais
Publisher Simon & Schuster
ISBN
0743281632
292 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com
Twenty years ago, after a successful career writing for television, Robert Crais published his first
novel about the Los Angeles investigator Elvis Cole. Since then the Cole novels, notable for the precision and intensity of
Crais' writing, have won more than their share of prizes and started turning up on best-seller lists. One of their strengths
has been Cole's formidable sidekick, Joe Pike. Cole is plenty tough, but he's a jovial fellow who finds time to woo the ladies
and toss off wisecracks. By contrast, Pike, ex-Marine and ex-L.A. cop, is a man of few words and lethal actions. Cole calls
him a samurai. Now, in "The Watchman," the sidekick becomes the star.
In a lyrical opening scene, a rich, spoiled, sexy girl of 22 named Larkin Barkley is speeding along
the deserted streets of Hollywood in her Aston Martin at 3 in the morning. "Light poles flicked past; red or green, it didn't
matter and she didn't care. Honking horns were lost in the rush. Her long hair, the color of pennies, whipped and lashed."
Her joy ride ends when she clips a Mercedes. Seeing that the people in it are injured, Larkin offers to call 911. Within days,
gunmen are trying to kill her, because one of the men in the Mercedes was a mobster who now wants her dead. After FBI protection
fails, perhaps because of leaks within its organization, Pike is called upon. The rest of the novel involves small armies
of gunmen trying to find and kill Larkin, with Pike, backed by Elvis Cole, trying to fight them off and kill their boss.
Along the way, we learn more about Pike's background than the earlier novels revealed. When Joe was
a child, his father brutally beat him and his mother until the boy was big enough to fight back. We see Pike as a young LAPD
officer who began his career by killing a man who was about to stab his partner. Later he quit the force when loyalty to a
friend demanded it: "He had loved that badge and everything it represented, but he had loved Wozniak's family more. Families
needed to be protected."
Larkin resents Pike's no-nonsense manner and alternately insults and flirts with him, but Pike cares
only about his duty to keep her alive. At one point, when he finds a lead to the gangster he thinks is behind the attacks,
we have a moment of pure Joe Pike: "If Pike could ever know bliss, it filled him now, but he showed nothing. He had them.
... All these bastards trying to kill this girl, this one girl, all of them ganged against her, and he would clear the field,
but not for justice. It would be punishment. Punishment was justice." That's Pike: tough, pure, relentless and unforgiving.
The FBI, the police, even the girl's craven billionaire father can't be trusted; only Pike, the warrior, truly cares for her.
This is Crais' 11th Cole-Pike book, and he's also written three stand-alones. They're all engrossing
reads; he's a stylish writer, and no one choreographs violence with more skill. Still, I don't think this is one of his better
efforts; "The Last Detective," four years ago, offered much the same plot but handled it better. One problem is Joe Chen,
a foolish LAPD officer who variously worships and fears Pike. Chen is apparently intended as comic relief, but he's a mistake;
when Pike is on top of his game, we don't want comedy or relief.
Pike's relationship with Larkin is also problematic. It's to be expected she will fall for this strong,
silent samurai who's risking his life for her, and Crais makes the most of will-they-or-won't-they tension. Without giving
that one away, I'll say only that her transition from spoiled rich girl to "one damn fine young woman" is too pat. Beyond
that, it's way too touchy-feely when Pike shares thoughts like these about her tormentors: "He wanted to punish them badly
enough that he would become his father to do it, and they would be him." I'm not sure we needed to know that Pike's father
beat him. Is that motivation or a cliche? You can be a righteous dude who wants to kill evil men without having been an abused
child.
I liked Pike better in his original role of sidekick, lethal and silent, with an aura of mystery about
him. Less is more. Giving him a novel of his own was a worthy experiment, but Crais has done better in the past and almost
certainly will in the future.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Jill A. Davis
Publisher Ecco
ISBN
0060875968
246 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Emily Rhode is 30. She's attractive and lives in happenin' New York. Her father left when she was 5
years old, she's hardly seen him for 25 years, but he'll soon turn up in this story. Her mother is needy, manipulative, lonely,
shallow and narcissistic. Her sister, Marjorie, is shallow and narcissistic, married, expecting a baby and so willfully incompetent
that she hires someone to buy all her clothes. Emily thinks she may be in love with Sam, but he only turns up in a few scenes.
There's also Will, a man at work who asks her out; Perry, a gay friend; and her shrink, who asks her penetrating questions
as she tries to find herself. Oddly, she doesn't have a girlfriend. And only Emily is fleshed out in any way here. This is
a form of classic chick lit.
Those are the characters; here is the back story: Since her attorney-father has been so neglectful
and conspicuously absent, Emily goes to law school and gets a job at a prestigious law firm, where she works like a galley
slave. Her sister, remember, has taken the other path and presumably spends life on a chaise-longue eating bonbons. Then Emily's
mother gets breast cancer and announces she's dying. She tells this to everybody she's ever known.
Emily quits the job where she's on track to be partner. She moves in with her mother to take care of
her and help her through this crisis. Unexpectedly, her dad drops by to check on his ex-wife after he hears the alarming news,
and offers Emily a job at his own firm -- as a receptionist. The inquiring reader might want to know why he doesn't hire her
on as a regular attorney or why the eternally lolling Marjorie doesn't lend a hand taking care of her mother, but the author
may well be setting up a fictional triad of the possibilities for women: Get a traditionally male job and work until you're
dizzy, stay home and reproduce the species, or work at a low-pay, dead-end job until you get old and die. It really doesn't
matter, because -- again -- this is chick lit.
"Ask Again Later" is by Jill A. Davis, who used to write for David Letterman and published a bestseller
called "Girls' Poker Night" in 2002. Reading her new novel, I believe I can say I've unlocked the secret of this astoundingly
popular genre (and the correlative secret of why the highly hyped "Lad Lit" lasted about as long as a raw oyster under a sunlamp).
If you were to line up Marjorie, the sister; Wendy, the office manager; Perry, the gay guy; Will, the bad date; Sam, the love
of her life; and Emily's mom and dad, you couldn't tell them apart because they have no distinguishing features. They all
talk alike and -- aside from that elusive father -- have dispositions that range from bad to disagreeable. They don't appear
to dress in any particular way, except for Emily's mom, who irritatingly dolls up in silk pajamas and matching slippers after
her operation or, before she goes into the hospital but after she's made her death announcement, sports "jeans, a blue cashmere
sweater, and matching driving moccasins. Her hair is up. She's wearing lapis teardrop earrings and a lapis beaded necklace.
Her nails are freshly painted with a shade of red called I'm-Not-A-Waitress." So, yes, you could recognize her mom.
Think about chicks for a minute. They are the nameless girls who wait for boys to finish their interminable
rehearsals in awful garage bands. They are the wives who accompany their husbands to business dinners and the next day someone
ducks into the husband's cubicle and asks, "How's the missus?"
They are the young honeys who get whistled at on the street and get mad about it, and then the workers
stop whistling and they get sad about it. Chicks will grow up to be old ladies who send supermarket greeting cards and newspaper
clippings that aren't relevant to anything. Chicks never get to have it their own way. Go to a dinner party, even now, and
see who does the talking. Every woman's magazine or self-help book still tells a young girl to learn to be a good listener.
The reason for this is that, unless she exerts herself mightily, she may easily go through her whole life and never get a
word in edgewise.
But not in chick lit! Because these stories belong to the chick. Everyone else in the cast of characters
exists only to glorify and valorize the chick. Here, everyone who isn't Emily has the moral compass of a beanbag. Sam, the
supposed love of her life, is so sensitive that, hearing about her mother's cancer, he says, "Cancer? Oh, Emily, I'm so sorry.
How is she coping?" And a page and a half later: "We're almost finished with this project. Let's go skiing. Maybe Vermont
or Lake Placid?" Her father, after he's hired Emily to work at his firm, suggests, regarding her mother's cancer: "Have you
considered turning this hiatus into something really special? ... You could stay in some wonderful old hotels. The lake region
of Italy is fabulous." Marjorie totally brushes off the cancer thing (and another very tough event). Even her mother, as soon
as she recovers from her surgery, thoughtlessly sends her daughter packing. Emily is used, abandoned, manipulated, misunderstood
and, above all, never recognized. She says it all on the first page here: "I am Emily. Emily Rhode. When I was in second grade,
I experimented with changing my identity by misspelling my last name. ... Almost no one ever noticed the way my name was spelled."
Being a chick means you have a shelf life from about 13 to 30. Then it's anonymity forever.
"Ask Again Later" is about a first-rate person (at least in her own eyes) learning to live in a world
that, no matter what she does, accords her no importance, no value, but at least she gets her say.
So-called "Lad Lit" never got off the ground because, to paraphrase the musical group, males go from
boys to men. They write coming-of-age-books, tales of how they got to be so wonderful. Chick lit seems light but takes a more
jaundiced view, where the girl-in-question is surrounded by a set of second or third choices, but at least the girl is the
star, and only girl friends are granted emotional parity. (That's probably why there isn't one here.) These books are greedily
bought and ravenously read by "chicks," who, contrary to the thinking of condescending, derisive bigwigs at various publishing
houses (the ones who coined the term "chick lit" in the first place), are actual human beings who live their lives as authentically
as anybody else: who can think, read and write, and muster up enough money to purchase books that reflect existence as they
see it.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By Ron McLarty
Publisher Viking
ISBN
0670034746
280 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Rodney Welch, who frequently reviews books for the Columbia, S.C., Free-Times
"Actors spend an awful lot of precious time sizing themselves up," says Jono Riley, the narrator of
Ron McLarty's mystery/fictional memoir, and he speaks from experience. At 51, he has all the bitter self-consciousness of
an actor who tends bar between gigs. A veteran of bit parts, voice-overs, commercials and industrial shows, his most notable
success came from a semi-regular stint as an autistic orderly on a hospital show, which saved the producer from having to
pay for a speaking part. Since then, he's marked time in a variety of nutty off-off-Broadway "one-handers," or one-character
plays. Sometimes, he performs all the parts in a play, such as one that casts him as the famous cannibal Alfred Packer and
his victims. ("That's right," he notes dryly. "I eat myself.")
Jono doesn't need help thinking about how dreams shrivel, but he gets a cold reminder when he learns
of the death of his childhood sweetheart, Marie D'Agostino, due to the delayed effect of a freak accident. As a child, Jono
had been playing in the snow with Marie when she was inexplicably struck in the shoulder by a stray bullet; although she survived,
the bullet, which had been too precariously located to remove, "traveled" nearly 40 years later, pinching an artery and triggering
a fatal heart attack at age 52.
Marie's death brings Jono back to his home town of East Providence, R.I., where his memories do a lot
of traveling of their own, as he recalls growing up in the late 1960s in a tough community, Irish, Italian and Catholic. As
the kind of actor who "relies on fleeting moments of clarity," he suddenly remembers there were other unexplained deaths and
disappearances. While delving into these mysteries with the help of a retired police detective, he also recalls his hockey-playing
youth, close family ties, male bonds formed over Marlboros and swiped Narragansetts, and the usual rites of passage involving
jobs, cars, girls and the recognition of mortality.
Although Marie sparked this look backward, she gradually recedes from view; Jono's main concern is
how he and others have been shaped by their experiences. In his case, that means the contrast between an adolescence full
of promise and an adulthood full of compromise.
McLarty was a regular on "Spenser: For Hire," has appeared on numerous TV shows and in movies, written
plays and read many audiobooks up to and after his first novel, "The Memory of Running" (2005). "Traveler" has an acuteness
about acting, aging and failure that I can only hope isn't completely autobiographical. This deeply personal reflectiveness
gives some much needed balance to a narrative that, while often funny, threatens to be sidelined by nostalgia for the old
days. Jono's girlfriend says at one point that she wants him to replace his reticence "with a dose of sentimentality," and
at times he succeeds too well.
If the story tends to drift, however, it never does so for long; McLarty keeps the tension up as short
chapters shift between then and now, unresolved and irresolvable, each feeding the other.
You know that guy in ninth grade who was always reciting "Monty
Python" skits to himself? Somewhere, in his parents' basement, he's now committing chapters of Matthew Sharpe's "Jamestown"
to memory. This hilarious, poignant and often annoying novel reimagines the first permanent English settlement in America
as a modern-day dystopia, an absurd hybrid of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and Walt Disney's "Pocahontas." Sharpe calls "Jamestown"
"an ahistorical fantasia on a real event," which seems as good as any description we might devise for his psychedelic tribute
to the 400th anniversary.
The more you know about the actual history, the more you'll be
amused (or horrified) by Sharpe's weird transformations, but there's plenty of broad, scatological humor here even for those
who couldn't find Virginia on a map. In Sharpe's zany version, the United States has collapsed, the environment is dead, and
the survivors are starving. The ruler of Manhattan -- in the midst of a ruinous bombing campaign against Brooklyn -- sends
a group of settlers (half of them "early release convicts") down highway I-95 to Virginia to search for food and fuel on the
Autobus Godspeed, a bulletproof vehicle that "differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse,
and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies."
The story comes to us through a series of short entries by different
characters, such as the group's craven leader, John Ratcliffe; the indefatigable, often chained, frequently condemned-to-death
Jack Smith; and even "A Couple of Fops" who are dying of their wounds. But the primary narrators are "the irreverent scamp"
Pocahontas and the settlers' communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe. In real life, they eventually married and had a son.
But here they fall in love at first sight, and their letters, e-mails, IMs and telepathic communications make up most of this
story of disastrous cultural contact.
Despite the incongruous elements of modern technology, the old
chestnuts of the Jamestown story are here: Pocahontas interrupting Smith's execution, a couple of horny settlers lured to
their deaths by Indian girls, and negotiations collapsing into deadly skirmishes again and again. But it's all run through
the meat grinder of Sharpe's freaky sense of humor. He plays with the names like a naughty, brilliant child: "Rat Cliff,"
"Poke-a-huntress,""Jacks Myth." Native American customs and language are subjected to the kind of politically incorrect comedy
that could get a writer who cared burned at the stake. Pocahontas is a linguistic acrobat whose feminist wit skewers Indian
pretensions as readily as it punctures Anglo cliches. Watching one of her friends prepare for the hunt, she writes, "If a
man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, (he) would resemble that man." Later, spotting
the settlers' bus, "I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones."
But the settlers come off far, far worse. Beneath a torrent of
sophomoric vomit jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes, "Jamestown" is an anguished lament for the whole bloody history of Western
conquest, the stupidity and cruelty of invaders then and now. Back in Manhattan, their crime boss, Jim Stuart (think King
James of the house of Stuart), lays waste to the city and tortures his mistress with bad erotic haiku after sex. One of the
most vicious (and therefore successful) settlers survives having his legs hacked off and an arrow shot through his head, which
he keeps there, a la Steve Martin, while being carried around through the rest of the novel by two muscle-bound bodyguards
in their underwear.
Sharpe's wit relies primarily on the juxtaposition of profundity
and silliness, tragedy and absurdity, a kind of "Catch-22" about the 17th century for the 21st century. "Jamestown" is packed
with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative, but Sharpe is determined to cram the pages with allusions
and fragmented quotations till you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with Dennis Miller: Here's Plato, Tennyson, Beethoven,
Whitman, Kant, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-ming, William Morris, Otis Redding, Judy Garland, even Gary Coleman -- it's enough to
make you stop googling and cry "OK! OK! You're the cleverest writer in the universe, but just stop it, for God's sakes!"
Another thing that may try your patience is passages of inane,
staccato dialogue such as this between two injured men:
"Shall we contemplate the end of civ, then?"
"I've always like you."
"I've always liked you too."
"How shall we contemplate it?"
"Don't know."
"How shall we honor it?"
"Not sure."
"It's nice to talk."
"It feels good to talk. Talk takes the edge off
the want."
"When it doesn't put it on."
"Indeed, it sometimes puts it on."
"Mostly puts it on."
"Causes it."
"Maybe."
"Maybe."
"It feels good to agree."
Needless to say, a little of this goes a long way, but Sharpe
is a consistently surprising writer, who puts as many crazy demands on the English language as it's ever endured. Like those
original profiteers and thieves, if you venture into "Jamestown," you'll find more than you could have imagined -- some of
it ghastly, some of it marvelous. Beware and Godspeed.
Ron Charles is senior editor of The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright
2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By
Gao Xingjian. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
Publisher Yale Univ.
ISBN 030012421X
178 pages
$25
Reviewed
by Michael Dirda
For Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese writer to be honored with
the Nobel Prize (in 2000), literature is supremely the realm of the individual. A true artist resists all political or ideological
constraints and strives to free himself from what Gao labels "isms." He or she must "say no to power, custom, superstition,
reality, other people and the thinking of other people." For literature should never be "contrived as the hymn of a nation,
the flag of a race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group"; otherwise, one ends up with nothing
but propaganda. Ideologies, after all, just want "decorations for their various agendas."
Such views can hardly surprise anyone familiar with the cultural
oppression during the Maoist era when self-sacrifice rather than self-expression was the norm. A Chinese writer conformed
to the uplifting socialist ideals set forth in Mao's famous Talks at the Yenan Forum -- or else. During the Cultural Revolution
of the 1960s -- a period of fanatical thought policing -- the young Gao Xingjian actually burned a suitcase of his plays,
stories and essays rather than risk being incriminated by them. He then fled Beijing to spend five years in seclusion in a
remote mountain village. When he finally returned to the city, Gao cautiously published some new stories and eventually saw
three of his dramas produced before enthusiastic audiences. But then "Bus Stop" (1983) -- in which a group of people wait
years for a ride that never comes -- was described by a senior cultural official as "the most poisonous play written since
the founding of the People's Republic of China." Wisely, Gao again disappeared into the hinterlands. This time he wandered
along the Yangtze River, slowly working out the complex structure of a novel, the now celebrated "Soul Mountain" (published
in Chinese in 1990), which blends a spiritual journey with a panorama of contemporary Chinese life and mores. In "Literature
and Metaphysics," one of the essays in "The Case for Literature," Gao explains his book's most noted innovation -- the fragmenting
of the semi-autobiographical narrative voice into various personal pronouns:
"I had succeeded in working out the primary structure of the book,
involving the first-person pronoun `I' and the second person pronoun "you," in which the former is travelling in the real
world while the latter, born of the former, is making a magical journey of the imagination. Later, `she' is born of `you,'
and later still the disintegration of `she' leads to the emergence of `he,' who is the transformation of `I.'"
This intense interest in who is speaking and the consequent notion
of testimony characterizes Gao's general aesthetic. To Gao, the "writer would do well to revert to the role of witness and
simply put effort into presenting the truth." In particular, he insists on the importance of conviction, that what one writes
must pulse with life and a "surging of (the) blood in the writer's own heart": "Imagination that is divorced from authentic
feelings, and fabrications that are divorced from life experiences, can only end up insipid and weak. Works that fail to convince
the author will not be able to move readers." Yet personal witness doesn't necessarily mean a strict adherence to impartial
truth:
"As long as authentic human feelings are captured, where is the
boundary between fact and fiction? While that boundary may be useful for verifying an author's biography, as far as literature
is concerned, it is of no significance. What is of significance is the depth to which human nature is probed and whether or
not truth in human life is revealed." For, in the end, "all literature, from ancient times to the present -- not only literature
that takes real people and historical events as its material -- is a testimony to the existential predicament of human life."
That existential seriousness characterizes all the essays in "The
Case for Literature." For Gao, art is a matter of life and death, and he has nothing but scorn for commercialism and trendiness.
"Modernism ... has already succumbed to the dynamics of commodity
marketing in postmodern consumerist society. Fashions are continually created yet have no impact on society, and the principle
that only the new is good has become meaningless and fails to generate any fresh thinking." After all, "literature loses its
life if nonstop changes in form result in a loss of connection with the real world. I attach importance to form, but I attach
more importance to reality." He adds that "for me, literary creation is a means to salvation; it could also be said that it
is a means to life. It is for myself, not to please others, that I write. And I do not write to change the world or other
people, because I cannot even manage to change myself. For me, what is important is simply the fact that I have spoken and
the fact that I have written."
Gao recognizes that to realize any highly personal vision generally
means to resist the allures of the marketplace and refuse to "stoop to the manufacturing of cultural products by writing to
satisfy fashions and trends." Instead of hoping to crank out a best-selling property, the real artist should aim to create
"cold literature," unconnected with whatever is hot, but distinctly his own, original, sui generis. A poet or novelist should
consequently expect to be lonely and either to live on the margins of society or to earn a living by means other than his
pen. Only by repudiating the easy, meretricious and commercial can a writer gain at least the possibility of producing works
that are "actually worth reading" and are not just "pandering to readers."
Other essays in "The Case for Literature" discuss the character
of the Chinese language (which "prizes spirituality and instinct" over logic and reason); Gao's key notion that we are all
"fleeing" from something (he himself now lives in exile in Paris); and his career in the Chinese theater. Along the way, we
learn that Gao composes his books and plays by first speaking them into a tape recorder, while listening intently to the music
of his sentences, and that he is as devoted to his ink drawings as he is to writing.
At once provocative and pontifical in themselves, the essays in
"The Case for Literature" also provide a good overview of Gao Xingjian's career, especially when supplemented with the perspicacious
"contextual" introduction by Gao's translator, Mabel Lee. Anyone who has enjoyed the much-acclaimed "Soul Mountain" or would
like to learn more about one of the least well-known Nobel laureates should start with this book.
By
Jonathan Raban
Publisher Pantheon
ISBN 0375422447
258 pages
$24
Reviewed
by Wendy Smith, author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940." Her essay on Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
appears in the spring issue of the American Scholar.
In the year 2010, the Department of Homeland Security hires actors
and homeless people to perform in disaster drills staged on the roadways of Seattle with actual vehicles and explosions. Concrete
barriers, barbed wire, spycams and roadblocks are among the measures the government has taken to counter the terrorist menace.
Congress has just passed a law instituting a biometric national ID card. In his home on Puget Sound, August Vanags, author
of a best-selling memoir about his childhood during World War II, serves a wild salad made of dandelion leaves, chickweed
and nettles to the freelance journalist writing a profile of him for GQ. "You've got to scavenge now," he tells Lucy Bengstrom.
"You rely on supermarkets for your food, you're going to go hungry any day now. Do you have any idea how incredibly fragile
the infrastructure of this country is -- how easily it can be paralyzed by the enemy?"
Yet "Surveillance" is not an exercise in dystopian fiction --
or at least not the kind that sends stick figures wandering through a post-apocalypse landscape. Seattle, where English-born
Jonathan Raban has lived since 1990, is still standing in his third novel; indeed, the nicely detailed, realistic narrative
describes engaging, three-dimensional characters with old-fashioned attention to their personal histories and individual psychologies.
Better known as a nonfiction author, Raban views his imaginary protagonists with the same sharp-eyed yet compassionate understanding
of human foibles that enriched "Old Glory" and "Bad Land," chronicles of his encounters with the people and places of these
United States.
Vanags may talk like a Montana survivalist or (more often) a hard-line
neoconservative, but he's also a garrulous charmer who tells Lucy to call him Augie and takes her 11-year-old daughter, Alida,
kayaking. Alida, a math whiz who wishes people were as comprehensible as equations, alternately holds her mother at bay with
preteen sullenness and rushes toward Lucy with childlike effusiveness -- a vertigo-inducing seesaw familiar to any parent.
Lucy is a warmhearted, generous woman, kind to Augie's slightly dotty wife, yet shrewd enough to employ her abilities as "a
good listener, a human sponge" to her advantage as a journalist.
Tad Zachary, an actor who reluctantly makes his living performing
in disaster scenarios, irritates best friend Lucy when he spouts left-wing cliches ("You think you're living in a democracy,
then one morning you wake up and realize it's a fascist police state."), but he's more than a sloganeer. Still grieving over
the death of his partner, Tad becomes uncomfortably aware that his righteous outrage is beginning to feel more like "demonic
possession"; late in the story, he consults long-neglected Buddhist texts in an effort to tame his anger.
Even Tad and Lucy's horrid landlord, Mr. Lee, an illegal Chinese
immigrant intent on gentrifying their ramshackle apartment house with the profits squeezed from his parking lots, prompts
our reluctant sympathy in a single, squirm-inducing scene. He proposes marriage to Lucy, twice his age, who responds with
incredulous laughter instead of gratitude. Humiliated and infuriated, he makes plans to destroy the building that he dreamed
would transform him into the "elite player" beloved of the self-help guides he devours.
Raban wisely chooses to focus on his characters' personal conflicts,
leaving the creepily plausible near-future world they inhabit to simmer as a backdrop to their confusions, disappointments
and resolutions to do better. Instead of dire warnings about impending doom, he offers unnerving snapshots: Alida reacting
with 11-year-old glee to the news that her sixth-grade classmate is responsible for a worldwide computer virus ("We're all
getting counseling! It's amazing!"); a baseball stadium evacuated after "a man 'of Middle Eastern appearance' had been
spotted hurrying out at the start of the seventh-inning stretch." There isn't much actual plot here, aside from Lucy's halfhearted
pursuit of clues that Augie's memoir may be a fake, and the author will undoubtedly infuriate some readers by leaving every
story line in midstride as the book ends.
Not this reader, however. The final pages of "Surveillance" are
scarily beautiful, and it's possible that the forces Raban has unleashed will overwhelm these characters. Yet the primary
emotion this oddly touching novel inspires is not fear but satisfaction, the sense of completion bestowed by a gifted writer
who explores the human condition with tenderness, empathy and rueful wit.
Copyright
2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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ISBN NA
Reviewed
by Robert Pinsky
"A blizzard of bloodstained paper" amid "raging fires."
This image comes not from some poet's overwrought fantasy but
from a news story about the recent suicide-bombing at "a popular book market" in Baghdad.
Blood and fire, in phrases quieter than these, appear in the sixth
poem of "Meditations in Time of Civil War," by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The poem contrasts its blood
and fire with the idea of domestic shelter, embodied by a bird's nest (the stare, related to "starling"), by a bee's hive,
by "a house burned" -- and by the poet's own study window:
THE STARE'S NEST BY MY WINDOW
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
Yeats' poignant phrase "my wall is loosening" refers not only
to the fragility of all the shelters we construct; a figurative or psychological wall seems to be loosening as well, possibly
a demarcation of certainty or a protection from the violent realities of Ireland's civil war in 1922-23. Yeats refrains from
saying for which side the "dead young soldier in his blood" fought in that war. The poem does not say if the soldier was Protestant
or Catholic, as is also true of "A man is killed, or a house burned." The minimal information, the understatement, expresses
the terrible "uncertainty" of the historical moment.
The lines of this poem that are often quoted, and that recall
the murderous bombing of a book market, are the first two lines of Yeats' final stanza. They bear repeating:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
Contrary to the notion of the poet as a dealer in fantasies, while
politicians must deal with reality, this poem deplores the brutal fantasies of rhetoric. It speaks sadly from the world of
books, regarding the world of sectarian rhetoric and of actual blood and fire.
Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States from 1997
through 2000.
W.B. Yeats' "Meditations in Time of Civil War" can be found in
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," edited by Richard J. Finneran. Collier. Copyright 1989 by Anne Yeats.
By
Peggy Orenstein
Publisher Bloomsbury
ISBN 1596910178
228 pages
$23.95
Reviewed
by Anne Glusker
The book business loves a niche, especially a profitable one.
So it's easy to understand the burgeoning category of what might be called Repro Lit, fueled perhaps by delayed parenthood
or by the increased incidence -- or is it heightened awareness? -- of infertility. Some of the books in this category treat
adoption, others miscarriage; some address gay parenthood, others single motherhood. And while some are serious investigative
studies, many more are personal narratives. The real challenge, especially for the literary memoir writer, comes when she
(or sometimes he) wants to transcend the obvious rubric and appeal to a wider audience.
This, I suspect, is Peggy Orenstein's ambition for "Waiting for
Daisy," and she succeeds in places. In spite of her book's histrionic subtitle -- you can almost hear the agent or editor
whispering in her ear, "More! Worse! Farther! Bigger!" -- she treats her efforts to become a mother with intelligent skepticism
and a brazen sense of humor (a quality not often found in Repro Lit). It takes chutzpah to begin a chapter: "I married a man
who is far better looking than I. It's not that I'm a candidate for a dogfight, exactly, but no one's ever going to confuse
me with Adriana Lima."
Unlike many women who have written about the experience of trying
and failing to have a baby, Orenstein doesn't leave her feminism at the door. She writes frankly about her initial reluctance
to become a mother and traces the complicated evolution of her feelings from "no! never!" to single-minded passion. Once launched
on the all-consuming path, she makes stops that will be familiar to many of her readers: joyless "fertility sex"; miscarriage
after miscarriage; fertility test after fertility test; expensive, uncaring reproductive-medicine specialists; adoption near-misses;
attempts at the brave new universe of surrogacy. But her voice makes all the difference in the world. Far from the anguished,
often reverential, super-serious tone of Internet discussion groups is this passage on her introduction to the world of fertility
medicine:
"Clomid was my gateway drug; the one you take because, (BEG ITAL(Why
not -- everyone's doing it. Just five tiny pills. They'll
give you a boost, maybe get you where you need to go. It's true, some women can stop there. For others, Clomid becomes infertility's
version of "Reefer Madness." First you smoke a little grass, then you're selling your body on a street corner for crack. First
you pop a little Clomid, suddenly you're taking out a second mortgage for another round of in vitro fertilization (IVF). You've
become hope's bitch, willing to destroy your career, your marriage, your self-respect for another taste of its seductive high."
In addition to her slightly skewed stance, Orenstein engages in
some interesting cultural peregrinations. Traveling to Tokyo on a research grant while pregnant, she visits a doctor who tells
her that her fetus may have a chromosomal abnormality and then quickly adds that there is an 80 percent chance all will be
well. But Orenstein doesn't buy the optimistic outlook: "Japanese doctors lie to protect their patients' feelings. It's considered
legitimate, for instance, to withhold a cancer diagnosis from a woman even after a mastectomy so that she won't fall into
a suicidal funk. So I didn't believe Dr. Makabe."
And she was right not to. While still in Japan, she experiences
both a miscarriage and a D&C (dilation and curettage). For solace, she turns to the practice of Jizo, in which women who
have had miscarriages, stillbirths or abortions leave offerings at the feet of statues. She realizes that there is no American
term for a fetus that doesn't become a child, whereas the Japanese have a word -- "mizuko," water child. She explains that,
historically, Japanese Buddhists thought that "existence flowed into a being slowly, like liquid." Children aren't considered
completely in the human realm until they're 7, and a mizuko exists in "that liminal space between life and death but belonging
to neither." Beautifully said.
Although much has been written on many facets of the fertility
quest -- the medicines, the miscarriages, the adoption process -- surrogacy is less discussed, still more veiled and verboten
than other aspects of the experience. Orenstein does a great job with her chapter on "Fish," the young girl who began a correspondence
with her after reading her book "Schoolgirls" and who eventually became her surrogate. She wonderfully describes surrogacy
as another stop on the slide down fertility's slippery slope -- one of "perpetually raised stakes and overly inflated expectations."
As she and Fish go through the surrogacy process together, Orenstein gives both of them a humanity that enables the reader
to see why each would enter this not terribly well-charted territory.
One of the best things about this book is that when she succeeds
in her quest (the baby's name is Daisy), Orenstein refuses to take refuge in the smug pieties so prevalent in fertility discussions.
When a friend tells her that everything happens for a reason, Orenstein bristles (bless her!):
"That's not something I believe, not when women I love die leaving
babies behind, not when children are starving, when adults are tortured. Nor do I like its corollary: 'God only gives you
what you can handle.' If so, God is a sadist. I refuse to view life through such a simplistic, superstitious lens, whether
it's held up by religion or by New Age. ... My infertility was not a result of my ambivalence about motherhood."
As Daisy moves on through life, and her mother and father move
with her through the parenting maze, it would be interesting to hear Orenstein's intelligent, skeptical voice ruminate on
the next stages. For if any writer has the verve and tenacity to supersede the typecasting of Mommy Lit, it's Orenstein.
Anne Glusker, a writer living in France, has written on fertility
issues for The Washington Post and other publications.
Copyright
2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By
Glasgow Phillips
Publisher Black Cat
ISBN 0802170285
374 pages
$14
Reviewed
by Jonathan Yardley
Thirteen years ago, when Glasgow Phillips was in his mid-20s,
he published an engaging first novel, "Tuscaloosa." It was very much a coming-of-age novel, about a young man who returns
home to the Alabama city that provides the book's title, and it got deservedly respectful attention. Still, it steered Phillips
into a classic case of writer's block. Over and over again he tried to get into a second novel, over and over again he failed.
Finally he just gave up. "No more," he decided, "of what I thought of as `real' writing -- no more of this literary fiction
... with which I had been making myself miserable for the entirety of my middle twenties." Instead he "would write some screenplays
or something." Books, he decided, were toast:
"Film and television were the only types of authorship that mattered.
... Books can matter in the big, cultural way -- if they're on television. Or are made into movies, which is pretty
much the same thing. You, reader, know who Don DeLillo is, but that dude across from you, on the bus, would probably guess
that he was that fat sidekick guy in Burt Reynolds movies. Hey, I don't like it, either, but QED."
As Phillips readily admits, this may sound a little odd coming
from someone who's now publishing a book about no longer writing books, but, hey, that's just how certain people instinctively
believe the message must be gotten across, and Phillips obviously is one of them. He's also, as it happens, a very good writer
who has written, in "The Royal Nonesuch," a very good book: funny (at times laugh-out-loud funny), smart, self-mocking, very
much of the moment. After an absolutely hilarious 50 or so opening pages, it settles into a somewhat more sober, and certainly
sobering, account of the author's experiences during the dot-com bubble and in the media-consulting business. There's a bit
of Ken Kesey to it as Phillips and his own merry pranksters roam through golden California and frantic Utah (where Sundance
holds its annual self-congratulatory rites) in search of ...
Well, it depends on whom you ask. Though Phillips himself had
sworn off drugs in high school after an especially unfortunate binge, others were still looking for weed and other pleasures
and finding plenty of them. Phillips' preternaturally gifted best friend, Jason McHugh, "with his utilitarian attitude toward
fun, endlessly plotting how the most could be had by the largest number of people," was game for just about anything, though
"at full bore he was good for only about five days of nonstop no-sleep networking, weed smoking, beer drinking, coke snorting,
and psychedelic eating." As for Phillips himself, he knew exactly what he wanted:
"One thing I am afraid I am glossing over here is the overwhelming
sense of belief we had in ourselves and in what we were doing. We didn't just believe what we were doing was right or fun,
but that it would work. The raconteur's false modesty I have adopted in order to tell this story belies a very real
confidence I had in myself -- confidence that I would be not just a player, but a singular, distinctive force in American
media. I had spent my twenties toiling in the wrong medium -- an irrelevant one in which harder work paid smaller dividends.
Now we would make the world ours."
However foolishly, Phillips imagined himself not just the "famous
writer" he had once hoped to be but "something far grander, far mightier, the new breed of enfant terrible: the brash
young Chief Executive Officer of a New Media Empire." So he teamed up with McHugh: "We were friends who wanted to do something
together. In other times or other circumstances we might have started a magazine, a social club, a religion, or a gang. It
was the late 1990s, so we started an Internet company." One idea was to "sell merchandise derived from ... intellectual properties"
McHugh had created, such as movies called "Cannibal! The Musical" and "Orgazmo," but "what we really wanted to do was make
new movie and television properties of our own," to "tap into, and provide a platform for, the media underclass that had thronged
uninvited" to Sundance.
Like many smart, ambitious, hip young people, Phillips, McHugh
and their friends felt "alienated from most of what could be seen on TV or in theaters. ... What was available on television
and in theaters simply did not say what we felt. ... What was more distressing was that it was also true of purportedly alternative
and independent media, where we might hope to find our values echoed and amplified." Now, at a time when "the cost of production
was becoming absurdly low," was the moment for pushing envelopes. A couple of their closest friends had provided "the perfect
example of how something small and weird, provided it had a genuinely unique voice, could break big overnight." It was called
"South Park."
So Phillips, McHugh and company went to Sundance, which "had been
completely co-opted by mainstream entertainment companies that were using `independence' as a marketing angle," not as participants
but as merry pranksters. They set up their own alternative festival, in "a mining museum called the Park City Silver Mine
Adventure," and called it Lapdance. In the spirit of the media underclass, they named their company Certified Renegade American
Product (CRAP), and the spirit behind it was that "you should ... make your dissent into a commodity," a notion at once calculatedly
irreverent and entirely all-American.
Lapdance was a smash, not merely because Phillips and McHugh supplied
plenty of booze but because they hooked up with some pornographic-film operations and had porn stars on hand to prove it.
Robert Redford, founder and presiding guru of Sundance, "called Lapdance `the lowest of the low' in an interview afterward,
which delighted us despite our having no gripe with Robert Redford himself." Indeed, Lapdance was such a hit that they repeated
it a couple more times, until so many imitators showed up that there no longer was any point to it.
Meantime, in cahoots with another like-minded friend, Phillips
set up "a brand strategy firm specializing in naming," which they called Quiddity. Phillips wondered: "Could there truly be
a living to be made in telling other people what to call their products? It seemed so goofy a scam that I could hardly believe
it was working. But clearly it was." In time, as he came to comprehend the system in which Quiddity managed to turn a few
dollars, he developed a "chortling cynicism" about it, because "coming up with good names turned out not to be what our work
was really about." The lesson he learned applies to many other contemporary American businesses and economic phenomena:
"Coming up with the names was just one tiny point on the curve
between starting an engagement and finishing it. The work was first about getting the work, then about making the clients
feel good about the process, and finally about ratifying whatever decisions the clients reached. Those were decisions over
which we ultimately had no control. At the end of the day, they were going to call their company whatever they wanted. If
we couldn't talk sense into them, it was much better to make them feel good about a poor decision than to argue against it.
They didn't want the right answer or even necessarily a good answer. They wanted to feel good about an answer."
Eventually, Phillips walked away from both Quiddity and CRAP.
In nearly four years, he "had produced only work so bankrupt that no one could ever say I had tried my best and failed: corporate
branding, porn and snuff, bad comedy," yet what he felt was not disappointment but relief: "Fame, wealth, success in whatever
form -- it was hard now even to remember what I had imagined, but whatever it had been, an image of myself as prodigy, wunderkind,
l'enfant terrible -- it simply was no longer possible. I was, at least by any reasonable measure of age, all grown up. ...
This release from the tyranny of my own expectations was a sweeter relief than I can describe."
But he still has to make a living. Maybe, if we get lucky, he'll
keep on writing books. The pay is lousy, but they last.
By
Brenda Maddox
Publisher Da Capo
ISBN 0306815559
354 pages
$26
Reviewed by Edwin M. Yoder Jr.
It may seem odd that the son of a provincial household in Wales
would become the most important exponent of Freudian psychology in the English-speaking world. But a clue may lie in Brenda
Maddox's title, which, consciously or not, recalls Keynes' famous description of another canny 20th-century Welshman, David
Lloyd George: "this siren ... this half-human visitor ... from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity."
Perhaps something Merlin-like in Ernest Jones was an essential complement to Viennese solemnity.
In any case, those interested in psychoanalysis must be interested
in Jones. He inherited the crown prince's role that Freud had intended for Carl Jung of Zurich, believing that "gentile" participation
would avoid the dismissal of psychoanalysis as a Jewish cult. But Jung, the son of a clergyman, forfeited the princedom when
he began dabbling in what he lightheartedly called "spookery," and the mantle fell to Jones, a British neurologist and the
only non-Jewish member of the secret five-man "committee" Freud appointed to be gatekeepers of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. He
became Freud's prolific correspondent, president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, editor of its journal and,
finally, Freud's biographer. Jones' three-volume life (1953-57) was the heroic labor of his last years. Critics hailed it
as a masterpiece, although Bruno Bettelheim, a formidable interpreter of Freud, observed that Jones had scanted psychoanalytic
theory in his portrait, devoting only nine pages of many hundreds to Freud's pivotal self-analysis and only 14 to his masterwork,
"The Interpretation of Dreams."
Aside from the Freud biography, Jones' chief contribution to psychoanalytic
literature is "Hamlet and Oedipus," a monograph he wrote while "exiled" in Toronto (1908-10) that treats Shakespeare's play
as a tale of Oedipal rivalry. Maddox writes that the theory "fits ... like a glove," and it is a tight fit indeed. To view
Hamlet as haunted by the ghost of a father he hated as a sexual rival demands a sense of paradox. But Jones' engaging little
book has been catnip for amateur Freudians, and its cinematic monument is Laurence Olivier's 1948 film in which Hamlet romances
his mom like a 1940s Hollywood masher.
Jones had retreated to Canada when charges of inappropriate sexual
behavior compromised his London practice. He was formally exonerated, but Maddox believes the charges were credible.
It seems almost de rigueur for eminent Freudians to have complex
love lives, and Maddox writes candidly of Jones'. Jones was a small, pale, round-faced man, a wiry, gnomic figure whom women
seemed to find irresistible. When animal energy was added to psychoanalytic authority, the result was more than one erotic
entanglement. Jones married twice; before that, he was involved in a troubled common-law relationship that ended strangely
when he took the woman to Vienna for analysis, where she fell in love with and married another man named Jones, apparently
with Freud's approval.
Ernest Jones' first formal marriage was tragically brief; his
wife died in surgery after a year. His second, to a German-speaking woman whose assistance on the Freud biography was indispensable,
was long and professionally productive. Jones ultimately lived down early disrepute to become a grand old man of British medicine
and, following Freud's death in 1939, the pre-eminent custodian of the psychoanalytic arcana. Jones courageously flew to Vienna
at the time of the 1938 Nazi takeover to persuade a reluctant Freud to leave for his London exile.
Jones' story is of interest intrinsically and as part of the history
of one of the 20th century's most influential ideologies. Maddox is an experienced biographer (of Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle,
among others), but this book shows signs of haste. The author mentions intriguing events -- for instance, Jones' clash over
the "morality" of psychoanalysis with none other than Oscar Wilde's "Bosie," Lord Alfred Douglas, by the 1920s a pillar of
Catholic puritanism. But having brought up this arresting subject, she bypasses elaboration for duller matter -- not the only
point at which she steps on her own story. Her evaluation of Jones' Freud biography consists almost entirely of approving
quotations from eminent reviewers (though not Bettelheim). She relies heavily, and at times credulously, on Jones' unfinished
autobiography, although even the best autobiography is often unreliable. And she offers unargued judgments, such as her airy
endorsement of the thesis of "Hamlet and Oedipus." "Freud's Wizard" is nonetheless readable and valuable. But Jones' life
and work demands more considered treatment.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr.'s new novel, "Lions at Lamb House," about Sigmund
Freud and Henry James, will be published in September.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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By
Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher Riverhead
ISBN 1594489408
228 pages
$22.95
Reviewed by Christopher Byrd
One of the glories of the literature of exile is the sharp outlines
a writer can bring to the contours of his adoptive society. For readers who were born in the writer's host country, such literature
can uncover things that might otherwise be obscured by familiarity. Dinaw Mengestu's praiseworthy first novel, "The Beautiful
Things That Heaven Bears," draws upon this principle. Take, for example, this wide-eyed reflection by Sepha Stephanos, the
Ethiopian emigre who narrates the story, on riding the Washington (D.C.) Metro: "The red-line train bound for the suburbs
of Maryland is delayed. The trains of this city continue to marvel me, regardless of how long I live here. It's not just their
size, but their order, the sense you get when riding them that a higher, regulatory power is in firm control, even if you
yourself are not." Most native Metro users probably wouldn't greet a delay with such transcendental musings.
But Stephanos lacks an outlet -- aside from his friends -- to
channel his thoughts. The novel underscores this element by contrasting his plight with that of the 19th-century writer Alexis
de Tocqueville, who is a favorite author of a character in the novel. Unlike the blue-blooded Frenchman who returned to his
homeland and was celebrated for his insights into American life, the struggling Stephanos seems unlikely to return to his
native country or win admiration for his perspicacity.
As a teenager, Stephanos fled Ethiopia to escape fallout from
the military coup that ousted Haile Selassie in 1974 and thrust the Dergue -- a junta that ruled the country until 1987 --
into power. Stephanos' father -- a prosperous lawyer in Ethiopia's capital -- attracted the ire of a government determined
to snuff out all so-called counter-revolutionaries. After witnessing his father's brutal treatment at the hands of the Dergue's
henchmen, Stephanos acceded to his mother's wishes and fled Ethiopia. Eventually, he made his way to Washington.
Mengestu's tightly written novel largely unfolds in alternating
chapters of past and present. The story is structured around a period of unrest in Logan Circle when gentrification led to
evictions. For Stephanos, the influx of moneyed white people into the predominantly black neighborhood where he resides and
runs a grocery store is a welcome event. He hopes that his business might improve along with the neighborhood and that his
loneliness might be alleviated by a white academic and her biracial child, whom he befriends.
Unfortunately, vandalism aimed at Logan Circle's new residents
prompts the Tocqueville-loving scholar, with whom Stephanos is enamored, to leave the neighborhood. And so, while Stephanos
mulls over the events that vaporized his hopes for a more fulfilling life, he finds himself in a self-reflective purgatory,
searching for a new raison d'jtre. Indeed, the title of the novel comes from the last lines of Dante's "Inferno," where the
poet, emerging from hell, is granted a glimpse of heaven before he makes his way into purgatory.
Apart from its lean sentences, which very rarely overreach, Mengestu's
novel benefits from his plausible depiction of characters caught on the seams between two worlds -- rich/poor, black/white,
citizen/foreigner. This lends an urgency to their ruminations that believably cleanses their conversation of small talk. In
other words, the big ideas of Stephanos and his two African friends about racial politics in America, the necessary accouterments
for success, and why colonels make for better dictators than generals don't come off as stilted but as natural byproducts
of their exiled condition.
With its well-observed characters and brisk narrative pacing,
greatly benefited by the characters' tension-laced wit, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" is an assured literary debut
by a writer worth watching.
Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York.
