Review: Gone to Dust

Gone to Dust by Matt Goldman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I get the sense I’d like Goldman if I met him. There’s a light humor here, and I get the impression he’s a likeable guy from the strong record he has as a sit-com writer. If I knew him, I might find positive things to say about his book. But, I don’t know him, and I have to own up that I don’t think much of this one.

This is a book built on genre conventions and gimmicks. The genre is mystery, mostly of the cozy variety rather than noir, and the gimmicks are fairly thin.

First, we get a Private Eye protagonist who’s both Jewish, by descent, and Norwegian, by virtue of living in Minneapolis for generations. He’s called Nils Shapiro, which has a nice ring to it, but feels like a gimmick to give a generally flat character some substance.

Then we get an antagonist who’s aware of how investigations work, so he (or possibly she) has contaminated a murder scene with carpet-vacuum detritus to prevent any DNA testing.

Along the way, there are several characters with catchy stories: the suspect who gets a “hands off“ from the FBI since he’s cooperating in an investigation of Somali warlords, the bi-racial young woman who’s returned to befriend the mother who gave her up for adoption years before, and the ex-wife who’s beautiful, perfect, still-unattached, and yet unattainable.

The mystery is tangled, which is a good thing, but it’s also deeply contrived. For long parts we get things tilted toward one suspect, then to another. That’s the genre, and I get it, and I’m sure many do a worse job than Goldman.

What wears on me, though, is that while I like Nils well enough, I don’t like the fundamental narcissism of the story. He’s the hired gun, but somehow it always turns out to be about him. The woman whose best friend/recently rediscovered biological mother has just been killed? Well, she’s got time for a romance and a little psychotherapy even before the funeral. The wife who’s got everything? She doesn’t want to move on, and she’s happy to support Nils financially, emotionally, and even sexually when he’s down. The blousy, drunken nurse who’s hoping to make her fortune by marrying the wealthy asshole? She takes time out to tease Nils that he and her green-eyed friend are in love. And the big break in the case? That’s because Nils can play Jewish geography with anyone in Minneapolis.

In that light, this recalls the worst of Mickey Spillane, where the tough guy hero upholds some otherwise forgotten standard of quiet self-reliance and somehow still has all the great women after him. Nils is more fun than Mike Hammer, but if that’s your standard, we’re all in trouble.

To be fair, some of the gimmicks do spice up the conventions, and the mystery does bounce from possibility to possibility. This could be worse, but I can’t recommend it to folks (like me) who prefer their mysteries with the creative edginess of noir.


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Review: Fools: Stories

Fools: Stories by Joan Silber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: Pafko at the Wall

Pafko at the Wall by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is at least the third time I’ve read this. The first was when it appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1992 as the first-ever “portfolio” extended piece they published. (Now they do them once every three months.)

The second time was when I read all of Underworld, where this appears as the opening segment. That turned me into a DeLillo fan, something I had not been when all I’d read was White Noise. I thought then, and see no reason to think otherwise, that Underworld was one of the great novels of the late 20th century, a flat-out masterpiece.

I’m reading this again now for a particular and focused purpose. I’m trying to find baseball novels that explore the link between fandom and some larger faith. It’s for a class that my friend Will and I are planning to teach next spring.

If I weren’t looking, I might not see anything along those lines. As Underworld makes clear, this is primarily about the role of history in shaping us. Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run to win the pennant marked an instant when all of post-war America – celebrities like Gleason and Sinatra, policy-shapers like J. Edgar Hoover, businessmen, kids, Blacks, and whites – came together in a shared experience.

As Mao II, written just before, makes clear, there’s also a concern with the power of crowds, with what happens to people when they blend into some larger formation. As a set piece, this is all about the crowd, about a collective hope that the Giants can win the impossible game.

But since I am looking for notions of fandom as a kind of faith, I do find them, and I don’t think I’m imagining them. We get it bluntly in a few places, for instance when our 14-year-old African-American protagonist Cotter admires what his seeming friend Bill has to say about believing the Giants can still win it. “Cotter likes this man’s singles of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust. It’s the only force available against the power of doubt.” (48)

We also get a sense of the religious, at least in passing. At the moment when Thomson hits his home run, for instance, the Giants manager Leo Durocher goes into a strange dance that DeLillo describes in religious terms. “The manager stands and spins, he is spinning with his arms spread wide – maybe it’s an ascetic rapture, some kind of Sufi exercise, they do it in a mosque in eastern Turkey.” (60)

And then there’s also the strange sub-plot of Hoover catching a stray bit of magazine someone has torn out and let float. It turns out to be a reproduction of Breughel’s “The Triumph of Death,” and Hoover can’t put it down. It’s a great DeLillo moment to have Hoover dwell on a notion of hell as everyone around him experiences a peculiar and fleeting heaven, but I don’t it’s a stretch to read it that way.

At a fuller level, then, I see a way to read this novella as a description of a kind of perfect moment, an instant of innocence and magic that briefly redeems the squalor of the crowd (Hoover alone absent from the elect). It helps to know the history of Thomson’s home run before reading this, to know it as a moment that lived in the memory of a generation coming to adulthood a couple years too late to have participated in World War II.

The end of this, and forgive me if it’s somehow a SPOILER, deals with Cotter trying to hold onto the ball that he’s caught. DeLillo doesn’t tell us, but the later parts of Underworld make clear – as does cultural memory – that the Thomson ball is one of the great lost artifacts of the American 20th century. It would be a highlight of the Hall of Fame or the making of any restaurant that could display it.

As I see it, Cotter has found a totem, something that carries the residue of the redemptive power of the home run. For one ecstatic moment, everyone together experienced the power of Thomson’s bringing the Giants back from the near-dead to the heights of winning the pennant. He wants to hold onto it despite Bill’s offer of close to $20. He knows, without being to articulate it, that he’ll never experience anything so transformative – anything so, for lack of a better word, holy – again.

If that sounds like I’m forcing it, consider what Toots Shor says to Sinatra when Sinatra starts to complain about Gleason’s having just vomited all over his feet. “Let me get to the point. This is an all-time memory. This is a thing I’ll never forget in my normal life span except you’re ruining my memory in advance by standing her with your hands flapped out saying, ‘My shoe.’ “

Or, even more directly, consider the evidence of the final paragraphs of the story, as Giants announcer Russ Hodges – whose “the Giants have won the pennant” cry is one of the most famous baseball calls of all-time – reflects as the stadium remains in bedlam and the confetti swirls around him. “Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power.” (70)

All in all, this certainly holds up on a third reading, and I’m hungry now to read all of Underworld again. There are many reasons to read it; maybe fandom as a metaphor for some larger spiritual hunger is one of them.


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Review: Moonshine, Vol. 1

Moonshine, Vol. 1 by Brian Azzarello
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed and admired Azzarello’s 99 Bullets, especially the first couple volumes. They struck me as extensions of genuine noir, creating and recreating experiments in applied morality: would you, given the chance to do so without consequences to yourself, kill someone? The fun of the early part of the series was that the answer varied, and it’s still on my long-list of texts I might teach in a noir class.

This one offers some of the same virtues. Azzarello can move a narrative along quickly, and Risso draws with a nice urgency and with enough distinctiveness to character that even recurring background figures seem to have consistent reactions and qualities. In other words, we’re dealing with pros, and it shows. As someone who can’t draw and who struggles with moving narrative forward, I have a sense of how effortless they make this, and that in itself is something to enjoy.

At the same time, this falls short of the excellence of 99 Bullets. I was drawn to this (after finding my taste for graphic novels inexplicably wither over the summer) because it calls on history peripheral to what I write about: the Italian-American booze kings of mid-1920s Prohibition. Other than a recurring reference to Joe Masseria – and why him of all the historical figures you might have chosen? – it turns out to be largely ahistorical, with a name pulled out of the history books as window dressing.

That may not be a turn-off to most people – the book doesn’t promise to engage with actual history, and the presence of a werewolf makes clear it isn’t – but I think a lot of the easy stereotyping might. We get Italians who are always goombahs, Appalachians who are always hyuck-hyuck hillbillys, and African-Americans who are always inscrutable, wise, and generous. In such a context, everyone feels flattened, and – despite Risso’s fine artwork – the characters blend together as tools rather than actors.

The one exception is our protagonist, Lou Pirlo, a handsome hood who’s never gotten over the drowning death of his younger sister. Lou gets a chance to redeem himself in Masseria’s eyes (from a screw-up that I suppose gets revealed in volume two) by trying to buy the high-grade moonshine that mountain-king Hiram Holt distills. It’s an impossible situation because Holt – who, for much of this book [SPOILER] seems to be the werewolf – doesn’t want to sell and Masseria doesn’t want to hear “no.”

Pirlo has undeserved good fortune throughout this. He says more than once he can’t believe he’s alive after some close call, and I feel the same way. Nothing distinguishes him from Masseria’s other thugs, and nothing other than his being visited by the apparition of his dead sister, humanizes him. He’s a cool concept for a main character, but he isn’t really developed. (And, from the evidence of 99 Bullets, character development isn’t necessarily Azzarello’s thing; he deals effectively in types.)

Anyway, I found myself losing interest toward the end of this volume. I can see the wheels moving toward something that feels like saga or at least soap operar: Holt’s beautiful but bewitched daughter has some purpose for Pirlo; Holt himself is up against the limits of his power; Masseria will try again; a chance mention of “silver” will mean something; and the beautiful and mysterious African-American Delia will help Pirlo with the magic only she possesses. From where I’m sitting, though, it feels more like contrivance, a story built more from the need for climaxes rather than the genuine product of character and motivation.

I’ll go back to 99 Bullets, but I’m almost certainly done with this.


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Review: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

OK, you have to start with the title here.

Even if you aren’t a poetry person, you have to be struck by it. It sounds as if it’s making sense even though it can’t be true at any literal level; you can’t have more than one assassin, but the grammar coheres. Then, in that verbal ambiguity, new possibilities arise: “assassin” is metaphorical, and “my” refers not just to one person but to many occupying the same position.

The book turns out to be an interrogation of those possibilities while also probing the nature of “sonnets.” It’s angry, thoughtful, committed to a project of self-betterment, and full of images and turns of phrase that do remarkable things, things like the title of the book which also serves (in the singular) as the title for each of the separate 50-or-so poems here.

I think there are a handful of these that work less well – a few are too gimmicky for my taste (“You don’t seem to want it” or “I cut myself on some glass”) and some seem a little too repetitive of the motifs that Hayes weaves throughout (like the “male hysteria” conceit”) – but even those tend to be redeemed by the cumulative power of the project. Many more are flat-out excellent while most of the “ordinary” ones are also effective and compelling. The result is that even those rare misfires function as part of a collection. In fact, I come eventually to wonder if they aren’t ultimately impressive as well, kind of like the squawks in a Coltrane solo – not so much errors as reminders of the technical brilliance it takes to pull off jazz at that level.

This is very much a jazz collection. The purist in me protested when I first realized these “sonnets” are neither metrical nor rhymed. I got over that complaint about 12 lines into the first one, though. Hayes has intuited the rhythm of the sonnet and then seen how far he can stretch it.

Here’s one example from my expanding list of great poems here:

Sometimes the father almost sees looking
At the son, how handsome he’d be if half
His own face was made of the woman he loved.
He almost sees in his boy’s face, an openness
Like a wound before it scars, who he was
Long before his name was lost, the trail
To his future on earth long before he arrived.
To be dead and alive at the same time.
A son finds his father handsome because
The son can almost see how he might
Become superb as the scar above a wound.
And because the son can see who he was
Long before he had a name, the trace of
His future on earth long before he arrived.

I’m struck by how that really is sonnet-like, not just in its layout but in its laying out of contrast. The first eight lines give us what I think is a gorgeous reflection on a father seeing a son and loving him for being shaped by the woman he loves, and then the final six reverse that, looking from the son to the father.

That’s enough to make me say wow, but Hayes is full of other excellent ones. Consider these lines from “From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday: “I believe/ Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse/ Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart./ As if what you learn making love to yourself matters/ More than what you learn when loving someone else.”

Or consider from “Our sermon today…”, “When the wound/ Is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and/ Ascendance require the same work. Our sermon/ Today sets the beauty of sin against the purity of dirt.” As with the book’s title, I am both bewildered by such language and drawn to it, drawn by its clarity of expression to find the ambiguity beneath it.

Or from “The subject is allowed…”, “What if it were possible to make a noise so lovely/ People would pay to hear it continuously for a century/ Or so. Unbelievably, Miles Davis and John Coltrane/ Standing within inches of each other didn’t explode.”

Or the first one, the one that convinced me to buy this and that points so forcefully to the nature of ambiguity at the center of the collection, “Orpheus was alone when he invented writing./ His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent/ His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it./ He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant/ I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.”

I’ve said all of that without touching on the political. I’ve heard this one referred to as one of the first great literary works to grapple with what the Trump moment means. That’s true in part since many of these address not just African-American history but also, implicitly, the Afro-pessimism that’s taking root in so much contemporary literature. One poem even seems to mention Trump by name – the not-as-effective-as-my-favorites “I pour a pinch of serious poison” – but I think, in the end, our current moment is incidental.

This is really what jazz has always been: an improvisation that insist a single moment can make sense of everything we imagine of both “before this moment” and “after.” This is angry and beautiful, and it speaks to poets and poems who’ve helped shape its voice, but it’s ultimately something like Coltrane at his best. It’s an artist spilling it all out and finding, against all odds, that it holds together.


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Review: While the Messiah Tarries: Stories

While the Messiah Tarries: Stories by Melvin Jules Bukiet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I knew what to expect from this book. I think I must have read something from it years before – probably “Library of Moloch” – and had everything pegged in it as disturbingly heavy. That squared with Bukiet’s reputation as one of the important second-generation Holocaust writers.

So I was surprised to find so many of the early stories work more in a magical-realism mode. They still tend to be heavy on references to the Jewish legal tradition, so they feel like a cross between Steve Stern and Cynthia Ozick, but they are lighter than I expected. That’s truest in my favorite of the early stories, “Landsmanshaft,” where an old Jewish man – who has promised his enemy he’ll dance on his grave – fulfills the promise only to realize he is celebrating the lives they shared together and in opposition.

As this collection gets to the end, though, it gets heavier until it does feel like the Bukiet I thought I knew from less concentrated reading. The focus on the unthinkable, the Holocaust itself, becomes increasingly direct. It becomes a book that’s full of dread. And with that, I acknowledge Bukiet’s skill in putting it together. There is a thematic connection, but there’s also a distinct trajectory. “Library of Moloch” weighs as it does because he has set us up for it.

In those final stories, Bukiet follows a striking pattern: someone, somehow excavates a missing element of the Holocaust experience and then determines it’s too much. In the abstract, the protagonist makes the experience “live” again for a fleeting moment and then puts it out of reach of others who would try to recover it.

A “lighter” version of that narrative comes in “Postscript to a Dead Language” where a Jewish scholar reconstructs the entire Biblical-era Jerusalem. He doesn’t realize that his collaborator, a demented messianic-Christian, intends to use the model to perform a second crucifixion, hoping that his killing of the beautiful shikse Ira Kepler is in love with will bring about the second coming. Kepler survives only when he’s able to get Wilson Hemmings to glimpse the Holy of Holies where, when he sees the swastika that’s come to represent the unsayable heart of the Jewish faith, he suffers a heart attack. The model remains, but no one else will ever be able to see to the heart of it.

Things get darker in “Himmler’s Chickens” where our protagonist, Kahn, sets out to retrieve a home movie showing Heinrich Himmler killing his beloved farm animals as the Allies close in at the end of the war. He finally recovers it and is troubled by the way it humanizes Himmler, by the way he clumsily sets out to show his love for the animals he will not allow to fall into his enemies’ hands. As a result, having watched it once, Kahn throws it into the river, making it impossible for anyone else to see it.

All of this culminates in “Library of Moloch,” which is a haunting and damning story. In it, a man who has spent his career assembling a library to memorialize all those who suffered is accused by one “survivor” (who powerfully rejects that label since, she says, she had no agency in the experience, simply “remaining” after it ended) of being a voyeur, someone who wishes he had suffered as they did. It’s a brutal declaration, made all the worse because it seems as if it might be true not just for the Ricardo of the story but for Bukiet himself. That fearlessness in a writer is staggering, and it darkens not just the story but the whole collection tarnished which becomes all the more memorable as a result.

At the end, though, as we see in the other stories, Ricardo burns – or simply imagines himself burning – the memorial he has spent his life establishing.

There’s no denying the skill in these stories. This one has been around a while, but it remains relevant and powerful. I’m not claiming this is The Pagan Rabbi, but it belongs on the same shelf as some of the important work of the last half century confronting how we confront the Holocaust.


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Review: L.I.E.

L.I.E. by David Hollander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a chance Hollander could teach my son next year at Sarah Lawrence and, in any case, he’s been a mentor to my cousin David, but I’d have good things to say about this in any case.

The back-cover description gets right what’s happening in the story, but it falls short of explaining what’s really going on. This is a year-in-the-life of a group of suburban Long Island kids and their families as they deal with events in and around the end of high school. It’s also very funny, and then it veers into a remarkable examination of the nature of fiction.

The first substantial chapter of the novel turns into a multi-threaded narrative that comes together in a wonderfully humiliating moment funny enough to recall Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell.” After a series of separate misunderstandings and broken plans, Harlan Kessler is about to lose his virginity on the floor of his parents’ living room when everyone – parents, siblings, neighbors – arrives in flagrante delicto. Oh, and his dog dies too.

That aesthetic dominates the first half as Harlan experiences a Charlie-Brown-football relationship to his can’t-get-rid-of-it virginity. If the novel had simply continued in the same vein, I’d still have enjoyed it.

[SPOILER] It moves on, though, chronicling his successful relationship with Sarah, his growth as a guitar player, and his growing unhappiness with life on “Wrong Island.” As it does so, it becomes increasingly experimental in its narrative. We get, for one, a lengthy chapter written in the form of a play, featuring a sub-plot where Harlan saws his own skull open, releasing his brain, which goes on to saw itself open, releasing another brain, and so on. It can’t happen, and indeed it doesn’t, but it sets us up for the possibility that we’re leaving conventional narrative behind.

Then, in the final full chapter, we do indeed leave it. As Harlan rides in a car with a guitarist friend, he listens to a tape recording they’ve just made of their own jam session. As it turns out, though, they’ve inadvertently recorded Hollander himself as he’s written their secret thoughts. It’s excruciating for Harlan, but there’s no turning it off. His life isn’t real; it’s comprised of the words Hollander is giving us.

The effect is a dramatic broken fourth wall, and [SPOILER CONTINUED] Hollander emphasizes it by having Harlan simply drive off the page. He escapes his own narrator, Hollander himself, and we’re left with a striking final mini-chapter. In place of narration, we have a series of characters commenting on Harlan’s disappearance, talking as if they too have been freed from whatever plans Hollander had for them. The novel concludes, then, not with an ending but an unraveling, and the effect is profoundly liberating. Harlan belongs now to the world – or at least to us readers who are moved enough to continue thinking of him – rather than to the writer who created him.

I think all of that reflects some of the same things that Rick Moody tries to do – the novel is dedicated to Moody – but I like this more than the Moody I’ve read. (To be fair, the only full-length book of his I’ve read is The Five Fingers of Death.) Both men seem to balance a kind of punk aesthetic, a tendency to maul the structure of their work, with a real affection for their characters.

Here, it’s clear that Hollander cares about Harlan, that he wants this conceited, moderately talented and reasonably bright kid to find something like happiness. He won’t make it easy on him, but he will give him a shot at eventual fulfillment, a fulfillment he’d never satisfactorily find through any conventional narrative.

I apologize for giving more spoilers than I’d usually like, but I think it’s the unusual moves that take this from something funny and insightful into the realm of really provocative. If you love something, set it free. I guess that means Hollander loves his character, and it’s hard not to share a good bit of that for the character and the book as well.


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Review: Undermajordomo Minor

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I feel as if I might be missing the skeleton key to this one.

On the one hand, I really enjoyed its neo-fairy-tale atmosphere. In that light, it reminded me of The Hike and Sendlin Ascending, other books (more successful, I think) that evoke a sense of wonder from almost their opening sentences. Each, this included, captures a tone that makes you want to sit up and listen, a goodnight-story tone for adults.

On the other, I don’t quite see the big picture for this. I’ll do it badly if I try to paraphrase the Russian formalists on fairy tales, but they’re collective point (as I understand it) is that fairy talks function by giving us certain sets of narrative features and then varying them within an implicit larger pattern. That is, there are almost always similar pieces – a mostly innocent boy or girl on a quest, a mentor figure, an adversary, a forbidden place – and they get moved around in different ways to make a different point.

I’m not looking for Aesop-level morals, but I am hoping for a sense of why I was asked to listen to this particular story. Entertaining as this is at every turn, I found myself confused over how its different elements connected.

Early on, there’s a kind of religious sensibility. Lucy, for instance, entertains the possibility of a religious faith that his father rejects and that may or may not be what causes him to live while his father dies. (SPOILER: At the very end of this, we re-encounter the figure Lucy took to be Death and discover it’s merely a brain-damaged beggar…or is it? That point is unresolved in a way that calls us back to the neglected theme without letting us know whether to take that theme too seriously.)

There’s also a classic fairy tale trope around the young protagonist as liar, and Lucy tells a couple potentially incriminating lies along the way. In the end, though, he never seems to suffer for any of them. It may be that the novel is violating the expectation that liars will pay for their untruths, but even that possibility gets more or less washed away in the larger narrative. It’s something that happens but that never gets enough attention for us to come to any conclusion.

While this feels inventive throughout, it doesn’t feel structured in either the way I hope or the ways the Russian formalists describe. As one example, it takes until fairly late in the book for us to be introduced to “the very large hole” which comes to play a central role in the story. It isn’t hard to imagine that deWitt might have had Lucy stumble upon it as soon as he arrived in the area around the castle. For that matter, he might have had Lucy hear about the possibility of suicide in the hole when he was still on the train and denied that story for no apparent reason.

In a potential SPOILER, the entire novel ends as if it’s trailing off more than culminating in something. First, Lucy escapes from the hole, but to what? There’s an emptiness when he returns with almost everyone dead or gone. It isn’t clear to me why that matters; it feels more incidental than cumulative, almost like an excuse for him to leave rather than the real end of the story.

And then the final scene of him composing his own epitaph, while boasting beautiful prose, doesn’t quite seem to tie all the pieces together. There’s a dash of the religious quality, there’s something of the broken-heartedness we’re told to expect, and there’s a promise of more to come. Within those different pieces, though, it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to privilege as readers.

I hear deWitt’s earlier one is better than this, and I’ll be open to it. After this, which certainly has its merits, my expectations are only middling.


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Review: Rosalind: A Family Romance: A Novel

Rosalind: A Family Romance: A Novel by Myra Goldberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have to confess I can’t be unbiased as I review this. I don’t know Goldberg, but my son has registered to take a fiction writing class with her, so I feel as if I’m two degrees of separation from her.

That said, this is an ambitious book. At a technical level, this aspires to something Joycean. It’s a series of intertwined stream-of-consciousness narratives that cumulatively tell the story of a family shaken by their wife-and-mother’s major open-heart surgery. Rosalind is young, but substantially overweight, and she needs the surgery to survive. It provokes her husband Henry into a state of uncertainty, her daughter Nana into a rebelliousness that consists of stealing her clothes and selling them to fund her track career, her brother Lev into accepting a lucrative job and coming cross-country with his family to be with her, and assorted others to re-examine their lives as part of a larger family.

As if all that weren’t enough, this is further Joyce-like in the way it maps its contemporary story onto a classic one. In place of The Odyssey, though, we get As You Like It. Just as that heroine, Rosalind, escapes a difficult situation by fleeing to the forest of Arden, so does our Rosalind. She eventually leaves her husband – she’s “banished” goes the description – to spend time with her mother in the small town of Arden. And then, as in the play, everyone joins her there. In that pastoral setting, the tribulations of their separate modern lives start to fade away, and they are able to be restored as a family and a loving couple.

Needless to say, I’m impressed. It isn’t easy to attempt such ambition, and it’s all the more difficult to make the characters compelling. In the best of this, I am moved by the different experiences, each intense and personal. It probably says more about me than about Goldberg, but I found the scenes from Henry’s perspective the most compelling. One sentence that particularly moved me (at the start of chapter 13) was “For in youth he’d chosen this Rosalind to be his joy, his other soul, his alternate body. Now death had shown up on their doorstep and Rosalind had taken him, adulterous, for her lover.” I think that’s a gorgeous encapsulation of his feelings as she, recovering from her heart condition but unwilling to give up cigarettes and other unhealthy habits, measures how she can love him as her new self.

In a similar fashion, Goldberg sums up the nature of Rosalind’s father from the perspective of her more aggressive mother. “It was Sidney’s bargain with life she couldn’t stand, not Sidney. For his good nature had been bought, she felt, by ignoring real dangers to his loved ones, had been paid for through passivity and at action’s expense.” That may not be universal, but it sure seems to define one way of critiquing some of the Jewish men I have known and whom Goldberg considers in this novel.

All of that said, there is a sense that some of this is dated. Impressive as the conception and prose is, the novel seems tied to its historical moment. (It’s written in the Reagan years, published in the Clinton.) There’s a sense that it explores a world before cell phones but after the ubiquity of long distance. It’s set at what might seem – in these Trump years – the dawn of a culture of narcissism, a cultural moment when people were just finding how much gravity their own personalities could have.

It’s hard to be much more specific than that, but a corollary is that this assumes a familiarity with Shakespeare that simply isn’t as widespread as it was. Without a sense of the connotations of “Rosalind,” it’s hard to appreciate this fully.

As a bottom line, then, I admire it but don’t know how widely I can recommend it. If you give yourself over to it – if you re-read As You Like It and then take this slowly, perhaps reading it twice – I think it’s likely to be powerful and maybe even formative. If you try to breeze through it, though (and I did move quickly through parts of it) you’re more likely to see it as a remarkable achievement that calls for slower attention to get the most out of it.


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Review: Break In

Break In by Dick Francis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My father loved Dick Francis, and I can still see him in a beach chair at Spring Valley Pool reading or rereading one while my brother and I played around him. A Francis novel combined two things Dad loved: well-written work and horse racing. I hadn’t read one in at least 20 years, but it was Father’s Day and this was in the pile, so I figured it would be a way to reminisce a little.

The start of this shows what Dad loved about these novels. We get a riveting description of our protagonist Kit Fielding as he serves as jockey during a nail-biter of a steeplechase run, and we get a deep background provided with clear efficiency. Francis gives us everything we need to know in just a handful of pages, and he does so without “info-dump,” without breaking the narrative he grabs us with at the start.

We get, as well, a great example of the “cozy,” the old-fashioned Agatha Christie style mystery where, beyond the crime in question, we’re led to see the fundamental decency of the world. That’s in contrast to the hardboiled or noir, mysteries that suggest the opposite: that the world is a dark place where decent people are at a perpetual disadvantage.

And Kit is decent. Francis more or less bullies us into liking him. He’s such a good guy that we have no choice. His brother-in-law comes from a rival racing family, the result of a marriage his sister undertook as a kind of real-life Juliet Capulet move. He still helps Bobby out when Bobby is suddenly the victim of a sudden series of tabloid attacks. He loans them money, puts on his amateur detective hat, and even forgives Bobby after a tantrum-style unprovoked attack on him.

Later, he forgives several others who wrong him. It’s a kind of turn-the-other-cheek response that ultimately wins in the novel but that, in this age of Trump, seems quaint and impossible.

And, just to show how very British this all is, he pursues an eligible young woman patiently and chastely, waiting to be certain that all concerned are interested and have no objections. We get an eventual “sex scene,” but it’s almost comically discrete.

While I am impressed with the opening here, I’m afraid my disappointment grows as it goes. Kit is able, far too often, to ask the right tangential character the right question to get the response he needs. He gradually learns the real reason behind the campaign against his brother-in-law [SPOILER: It’s to get at the brother-in-law’s father] and, he is able to put together a documentary detailing the old man’s financial crimes.

[CONTINUED SPOILER] The further we go, the more we’re asked to assume Kit can simply accomplish things others cannot. Why, for instance, is he able to ask three people for their experiences, stick a video camera in their faces, and get a report so damning that it undoes Allardeck’s chances at a knighthood? I mean, there are two major newspapers out to get Allardeck as well; not one of them has a reporter with the capacity to follow up on the very basic leads Kit pursues?

All of that goes along with the strangely nonviolent quality of the novel. Kit gets beat up once or twice – and he’s subjected to a stun gun at one point – but the only gun in the novel comes at the very end, and then no one fires it. There are large sums of money in play and ruthless men out to get it, but no one ever ventures to real hurt.

I’m glad I read this since it did make me feel as if I were in conversation with my father. Short of that, though – with a nod to the clear skill of its early narrative – I don’t feel called back to this. It’s no slight on Dad to acknowledge that the genre has grown since he read these. Francis has some better ones as I recall, but this shows he could also lose sight of wrapping up his own creations.


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Review: Arcadia

Arcadia by Iain Pears
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel is the literary equivalent of the Escher drawing where two hands draw each other into existence. There are two central threads to most of this, one based in Tolkienesque fantasy and the other in late-1960s time travel sci-fi, and each constructs the other.

On the one “hand,” we have Henry Lytten, a tweedy British professor with a background in World War II espionage. He’s friends with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the other Inklings, but he’s less ambitious. He wants to sketch a mild little fantasy world where, absent other structures of power and authority, Storytellers have deep temporal powers.

On the other, in a dystopian future where corporate chiefs have become the equivalent of fascist dictators, a rogue scientist named Angela Meerson has discovered a device that makes time travel possible. Her bosses don’t quite understand it – they think they are opening up windows to a parallel universe and don’t realize the decisions they make can affect their own timeline – but they’re planning to seize it anyway. She needs time to escape, so she ventures into the past. She lands in the 1930s, meets a young Lytten during the war, and slowly perfects her machine. To test it, she needs a template, an imaginary space she can open up without affecting other elements of time. She tries Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but there are logical inconsistencies – it depends upon the gods for its creation and maintenance, but the gods are not explained within it – so it collapses. She settles for Lytten’s smaller cosmos.

The result is that Lytten’s world becomes real.

In other words, we have a fantastic world that depends for its reality on the science of a later future, but that future depends for its self-understanding on the story-telling fantasy.

The overall concept is exceedingly clever. I nearly gave up on this after 30 or 40 pages because it was so full of familiar tropes. It felt almost cliched to see the old professor and the brilliant beautiful scientist and the little girl – Rosey/Rosalind – who gets pulled into the mix. It becomes more interesting and successful, though, as Pears’s ambition becomes more evident. He really is trying, Escher-style, to create a tangle of origins, to fuse these two different literary genres in a way that refuses precedence to either.

The only book I can think of that accomplishes anything so remarkable in terms of genre is Dune where Frank Herbert blends the two threads to create a space fantasy. (Stars Wars, of course, attempts the same thing, but it isn’t a book, and it’s at its best when it just lets the adventure run forward without pausing to explain its ideas. In fact, the more serious Star Wars asks us to take it, the less bearable it is.) That’s a very different experience in terms of tone and scope.

This book is not Dune, though. As much fun as it eventually becomes – and that’s a lot of fun – there are some clumsy technical aspects to it. The audiobook has two narrators, one for the Lytten thread and one for the Meerson, and that reflects the narrative challenge of telling the whole story from two different sides. Pears frequently resorts to the tired device of narrating one person’s view of an experience and then switching in the next chapter to another person in the scene giving us the other half of a conversation or encounter. That means some repetition, and it means some narrative condescension: it’s as if our narrator asks us to ‘hang on a moment’ while the author makes some changes to the scenery.

There’s also the problem of our getting new information at awkward times. It’s a great deal of fun to discover that minor characters introduced early on turn out to have connections to threads that get revealed to us later, but sometimes Pears can’t quite pull that move off with real deftness. Sometimes we simply get a new character introduced as consequential when it feels we should have known him or her more fully at an earlier stage. Some of that might be the product of a narrative that changes because its past changes, but other times it feels as if it’s Pears has reached the limits of his own story-telling capacity.

And, [SPOILER] there’s the somewhat jarring move in giving us two Roseys, of splitting her so that one remains in Anteworld and one returns to the 1960s. I kept expecting that to create the conditions for two distinct future worlds, but it seems simply an anomaly. It’s Pears ‘halving his cake’ and eating it too. It breaks the universal rules that he gives us, but then it doesn’t radically alter the future.

Those quibbles aside, the real fun of this is the way Lytten’s world begins to expand. Once Rosey accidentally stumbles into it, it begins to flesh out its own logical conditions. A reference to the nature of taxation in Lytten’s notes becomes the seeds for an entire economy. Individuals Lytten knew at one time or another become the basis for new characters, but those characters beget others as well. It feels like a literal realization of what authors do; the vision conjures the details, and the details drive the story that carries out and alters the vision.

We get, among other things, the fun of Rosey helping the members of the new world to understand English (they’re language has altered over time) and of reintroducing them to Shakespeare. With that, we have her enacting parts of Rosalind from As You Like It. So Shakespeare becomes – as the book’s title reinforces – one of the authors of the universe that Lytten and Meerson have set in motion.

There’s a lot more to tell, and part of the fun of reading this is to imagine the conversation you’d have with another reader. This is rich in details, seeming contradictions, and clever resolutions to those contradictions. It’s the kind of experience that gets better through sharing; Pears cleverness becomes all the more enjoyable when you can explain it in slow motion, when you can point to the ways he pulls off what he does.

[SPOILER] There is a cleverness to the final pages as well, when Meerson’s daughter turns out to have used the misunderstandings of the fascist bosses to help them wipe out their dystopia so that she and her renegade friends can replace them with a pastoral utopia. I saw that coming for a while, but I never quite believed Pears would do it. That is, this is such a gentle book – there’s only one killing through the entirety of it, and that’s a misunderstanding where a lifelong soldier gets to die a slow and honorable death – that it seems uncomfortable to make the happy ending dependent upon the nuclear holocaust that gets set in motion. That is, the ending fits the narrative structure, but not its tone.

In any case, this is certainly one to read if you have the time. It has its flaws, but those flaws are the result of remarkable ambition and nearly endless cleverness.


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Review: Quarry

Quarry by Max Allan Collins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love the concept of the Hard Case Crime Series. In older, rediscovered pulp classics like Lawrence Block’s Grifter’s Game, or in neo-noir like Ken Bruen and Jason Starr’s Bust, they go after the aesthetic of the hardboiled tough guy as American philosopher-angel. When it works, it’s a little bit like watching Mitchum pull out a cell phone, a little incongruous but something you can get used to anyway.

This one, I’m afraid, doesn’t really work.

I’m a fan of Collins going way back. I enjoy his Heller novels very much; he used some of them to write about my gangster relatives and when I had the chance to meet him quickly he was generous and interested in what I had to say. I also like what he did with Dick Tracy (which I wrote part of my dissertation on), and I admire Road to Perdition even if – I realize now with a start – I never did read the whole thing.

So I’m disappointed not to be able to give this Hard Case/Collins a better recommendation. Still, if Heller felt like lighter weight E.L. Doctorow, this feels like Mickey Spillane retread. I have no problem if you try to write like Hammett and fall short; when your model is as unimpressive as Spillane, well, hit or miss you still fall short.

As I understand it, the twist in this series was that Collins made an amoral hit-man his protagonist. That’s not a bad idea, and maybe he was the first to do it, but it’s been done since and done better (by Lawrence Block among others). After that, this is a series of clichés and clumsy plot devices.

Any time Quarry needs a clue, there’s a character who conveniently tells it to him. Any time he has to be one step ahead of someone, he is, effortlessly and with a Mike Hammer like arrogance that gets tiresome quickly.

There’s also an uncomfortable take on homosexuality. To Quarry/Collins’s credit, there’s an explicit credo of live-and-let-love to the question, but there’s also an implicit sense that “those people” are simply too different. [SPOILER] Quarry’s gay partner brings disaster to their ‘job’ when he falls for a sadistic predator, and Quarry is willing to tolerate such difference so long as it doesn’t get in his way. In other words, it could be worse – and it may have been progressive for the early 1970s – but it isn’t anything we really need to revive.

Anyway, I’ll try to get to Road to Perdition one of these days, and I might go back to one of the early Hellers – True Detective actually features a photo of my great-uncle as the heavy who walks into a bar on page one – but I’m certainly done with the Quarrys. Collins went on to do some solid work, but as far as I’m concerned it isn’t happening here.


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Review: Grifter's Game

Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading Block as long as I’ve been reading noir, which is close to thirty years now. I’ve enjoyed his Scudder novels – which my father recommended to me as far back as the late 1980s – as well as the Bernie Rhodenbar and Hit Man novels. He may well be the king of the detective series; others have strong ones, but three? That may be unbeatable.

So I am predisposed to like and admire anything he does, and, when Ken Bruen dropped a reference to enjoying Block and I found a copy of this in a great used book store in Ithaca, NY, I decided to give it a shot.

I didn’t realize when I picked this up that it was from 1961. I wouldn’t have guessed Block was old enough to be writing back then, but it turns out he is almost a missing link between the James L. Cain school and the more contemporary series-focused star. I’m not going to call him better than Elmore Leonard, but I’m also not going to say that he’d be embarrassed by the comparison. Even back that far, closing in on 60 years ago, Block was a pro’s pro.

Put differently, this is a conventional femme fatale/just-better-than-stupid male patsy story, but it’s so expertly done that it could serve as a textbook. (I’ve heard of apprentice writers who sometimes write out models of their hoped-for genre by hand, trying to unpack what makes an admirable work function. If I ever try that, this will be one candidate.) When I say I remember little of the early parts of this, it’s not an insult. This one is like a literary equivalent of a roller coaster. You know it’s headed somewhere, and you know you’re on board. You don’t have to think much, but it will thrill you all the same.

As a [SPOILER] this has a memorable and disturbing conclusion, though, one I imagine I’ll remember for a long time. Near the end, Joe goes to a Hitchcock film and realizes how much of it turns on coincidence. As a viewer, he forgives it because the direction is so crisp, so distracting in its skill. He starts to realize the same may be true of Mona, who might have been leading him along so he’d kill her wealthy heroin-dealing husband.

Joe considers that Mona may have been distracting him from coincidence, and Block runs the risk of making the same claim for himself. And it works; it’s only when I look back at the coincidence of Joe stealing just the right luggage and then falling for the owner’s wife that it bothers me. Block implicitly compares himself to Hitchcock, and, again, he doesn’t embarrass himself with the claim.

When Joe does see through it, though, he realizes he can’t imagine killing Mona, but he also can’t imagine living with her. She’d leave him eventually, and she’s got all the money. He wants her, but he wants to be able to control her.

So [DOUBLE SPOILER] in one of the most sadistic moves I can remember from fiction, he gets her hooked on heroin. It’s brutal and blunt, but he keeps her in a hotel room, shooting her up every several hours for a week, and then he has her, or at least a shell of her. He fell in love with her beauty, but also her independence. The drug steals it from her, he steals it from her, and the novel ends with the likelihood that he’ll get himself hooked as well, less out of guilt than a burning desire to follow her and be with her even in her drugged state.

I’ve thought a lot over the last several years about the nature of the femme fatale. I incline toward the argument that she is a proto-feminist figure, a woman who, lacking options in a world where only men can have true economic, cultural, or political power, uses her sexuality to break the bonds of convention.

In such a light, Mona is a classic femme fatale. Her ultimate comeuppance marks her defeat, but it does so in a way that acknowledges her allure. Joe was frightened of her power, but he realizes in the end that he loved her for it. In the world they share – a world where World War II vets still dominate society – there’s no place for such power, and that eventually means there’s no place for either of them.

This is genre done with real skill by a guy who’s an old master today, but who was a young star just figuring it out when he did this one.


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Review: A People's History of Chicago

A People's History of Chicago by Kevin Coval
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a wonderfully ambitious book, and I couldn’t help feeling as if it had my name on it. It’s an alternative history of Chicago – and I suppose I can call myself an alternative historian of Chicago – yet it’s also a book of poetry, and I write (rarely) and teach (more frequently) poetry.

I realize this takes its name and theme from Howard Zinn’s famous People’s History of the United States, but I see this in many ways as a particular person’s history of the city. Coval is pushing throughout against the idea that Chicago grew because of its industrial leaders. We don’t get Marshall Fields or Col. McCormick – which is great; they’re both overrated in any case. Absent the standard parameters of the city, though, we get Coval’s vision of how to draw a line from the city’s origins to its status today.

And the line he draws is a pretty straight one: it is, throughout, a story of displacement, of the disenfranchised fighting against – and generally losing to – the powerful. We begin with the group of ‘X’-signing Native chiefs who had the land of the city swindled from them (a story, to my embarrassment, I don’t really know). We early on get a poem about Jean Baptiste DuSable, the African-American man acknowledged as the city’s founder, and the way he has no streets named for him while Kinzie, the man who purchased his original homestead, dots the map with his namesake streets and landmarks.

Coval does a good job of noting others who are dispossessed in the city. We get Haymarket, the victims of the Eastland disaster, the residents who aren’t served by the opening of the ‘L.’ Selfishly, I was sorry not to see a reference to the Lazarus Averbuch affair – that’s the one Walter Roth, Aleksandar Hemon, and I have all written about – but Averbuch is there in spirit.

The second half of this becomes increasingly personal, and we see Coval identifying with those dispossessed. One late poem talks about the night the Cubs finally won the World Series, but he speaks of his inability to join in the celebration. He’s too aware of how the performance of North Side joy would be impossible on the West or South Side, and he implies that it mimics the sort of violence that the police and mayor use to justify cracking down on those neighborhoods.

In the final one, “Chicago Has My Heart,” he talks of wanting to love the whole of the city, of wanting to find a way – and I paraphrase – to re-possess (not repossess) all of it. He wants, as he says, for it to belong to the entire “body politic.”

It’s only fairly late in this that Coval begins to identify himself as Jewish, and, for me, that provides a fascinating complementary perspective to the Native- and African-American perspective he works to push into the foreground. Throughout, he celebrates – directly and indirectly through the language of his poems – the role Chicago has played in developing hip-hop culture. By writing as a Jew, Coval both acknowledges himself as on the periphery of the crucible that formed that culture and shows its pliability. Hip-hop and slam poetry may be the language of African-American youth, but it’s also a vocabulary that can be put into the service of a project like this – a project that reframes the history of a city that celebrates itself as a matter of policy.

In that light, one of the most intriguing poems for me is the late, “Atoning for the Neoliberal in All, or rahm Emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot.” To begin with, even the title reference is obscure. How many non-Jews (for that matter, how many contemporary Jews) know what Kapparot is? (It’s a ceremony of repentance in which a chicken serves as a scapegoat – and yes, I did look that up to be sure I had it right.) More subtly, the insistent repetitions of the final page read with a rhythm reminiscent of the closing prayers of Yom Kippur (at least in the Reform and Conservative siddurim I’ve known). This is, in other words, a kind of Jewish prayer in which our subtly Jewish narrator condemns our overtly Jewish mayor for selling out half the city. The comparisons to Israel as a place that enforces apartheid on its Arab citizens seems to me to lessen some of the effect, but the point is clear: Emanuel’s Jewishness opens him up for even more condemnation from a Jewish writer wanting the city to be all it promised it would be.

And, to take that a step further, I’m struck by the degree to which this book is also a subtle homage to the great Yiddish poets from between the World Wars, poets whom Coval’s grandparents likely knew as well as mine did. (That is, they probably overheard them at Bughouse Square or in various Jewish restaurants.) For all that these poems are hip-hop inflected, they are also engaged with the contemporary world in the way someone like Yaakov Glatstein was. They take for granted (as hip-hop does) that the material of the newspaper is more fit for poetry than are references to Greek mythology or towering historical figures. They enter into conversation like opinionated old men, throwing their opinions and their anger at the world without apology and with – if you listen for it beneath the growls – a fierce and humorous joy.

The proof of a project like this has to be in the quality of the poems, of course. I’m drawn to many, though not all. I especially liked “The L Gets Open,” “The Great Migration,” “Muddy Waters Goes Electric,” “Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer,” and “mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green.”

More impressive to me, though – and perhaps this is a hip-hop device – are the many memorable and tight lines that Coval fires off. Here are a few of my favorites:

“City of long cons [,] fire & fine print.”

“City of scraps & sausage”

“Jane Addams…originated in loot & leisure”

“the city builds heaven for a few, tenements for most.”

“the acoustic guiatr’s an impotent whisper in the throat of the war machines”

“shtetls grew ghettos”

“patronage is a Chicago word for family”

“I witness…until America is haunted by the spirits of those it says never happened”

“this is how Black boys are bar-mitzvahed in Chicago/America, by boot and brick”

So, yeah, I admire what Coval is doing here, and I’m glad he’s in the city to do it. I’ll keep this one on the shelf, and I imagine I’ll pick it up again every now and then when I want to be reminded how much of the city’s history has never quite made it into the city’s history.


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Review: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this novel up in hopes it would be reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, another novel about a centuries-old painting and the effect it has on some contemporary lives. Where Tartt’s masterpiece is written on a Dickensian scale, giving us characters from trailer parks alongside characters from the New York elite, this one works toward a broader historical scope, mapping a pair – or maybe a triptych – of unhappy love stories across the 1630s, 1950s, and 2000s.

The abiding concern throughout this seems to be with an exploration of “forgery.” That’s true in its concern with paintings and their copies, but maybe even more so with the ways people pretend to certain roles within a relationship. When we first meet Marty DeGroot, he’s a not-quite-satisfied New York patent attorney who seems to have it all. When the painting he’s inherited from several antecedent generations gets stolen, though, he discovers the extent to which he’s been shamming happiness. He comes alive when it’s his responsibility to recover the painting, and he’s more authentic seeming as a lover when he adopts an alias to seduce Ellie, whom he discovers is part of the plot.

In turn, Ellie is unsatisfied with her work as an art history grad student until she has the opportunity to make a near-perfect copy of the painting. She too comes alive, more authentically, once she is involved with the fake. For the only time in her life, she is a real artist, a real artist engaged in the work of forgery.

And, in the other story, Sara first paints her work as a substitution for the real joy of her dead daughter. Even her original, that is, is a sham of the experience that inspired it.

I like the ambition such a series of inquiries implies, and I’m not troubled by the fact that Smith never quite resolves them. I am a bit troubled, though, by the clinical tone of much of this. I admire this at a technical level, but I just couldn’t quite embrace each of the separate stores with the intensity I wanted. It’s as if those underlying questions attenuate the stories they make possible – everyone is experiencing something that’s a type of forgery, a semblance that falls short of the authentic. [SPOILER] Each of our three protagonists finds a measure of true happiness at the end, but Smith gives that happiness only cursory attention: Marty makes a kind of amends for being a bastard, Ellie finds a new scholarly passion when she determines to uncover Sara’s last days, and Sara finds a kind of peace with a non-artist who loves her. It’s as if the point of this is that we can never approach the authentic until it’s too late.

I wish I could be more specific about how this falls short in such ways. All I know for certain is that, after listening a while, I’d find myself no longer enthralled. Smith writes beautifully, and I admire each scene, but I feel as if the central conceit of falsification simply deadens the effect of the story itself. I love the opening section here, where we see Marty in his unfulfilled life, but then I feel as if each time we revisit him we’re starting over. The different scenes simply carry less weight as they reintroduce us to the characters. It’s always interesting, but we seem always to be called on question what we think we know about them.

I don’t want to sound too cranky with all of that. I enjoyed the novel thematically, and, more than that, I admire its form.

Like a lot of novels I admire – like at least one I dream of writing myself – this is a broken narrative, one that calls on us to assemble a whole from its fragments. As a reader, I’m charged then with making meaning from these parts, and I love that challenge. There are writers who do that especially well across a contemporary swath – what I call the Dickensian scope. Tartt, of course can be great at it, but I think as well of Colum McCann and Jennifer Egan who also give a good range of the world of their own time. My own ambition – and I think it’s Smith’s as well – is to do that across time, to let these different pieces imply a history so vast that no single person’s perspective is enough to take it in. My hero and model for that is Mordecai Richler.

Smith doesn’t resolve this with the easy conclusion he might have selected, a conclusion in which our contemporary characters find happiness in discovering the lost happiness of those who came before. On the other hand, he ends this with sufficient parallels that it feels as if that’s the lesson we’re supposed to take from it ourselves.

As a bottom line, then, I admire the ambition and the technique here, and there are many passages I admire. I wish, though, it found some way to come together more effectively as a whole.


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Review: Zero K

Zero K by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Philip Roth dealt with old age in a series of strong and overlooked short novels that mark the last of his bibliography. Each dealt with a separate character – sometimes a revisited David Kepesh (The Dying Animal) or Nathan Zuckerman (Exit Ghost) and sometimes brand new, aging figures in Nemesis, Everyman, The Humbling, or Indignation – but the subject was always the indignation of the failing body, the central nemesis of mortality. It was always a dissection of how a single human being confronts the end of a life.

Don DeLillo deals with the same question in his own, very different fashion in a novel that seems to me to keep alive his hopes of winning a Nobel prize. (And, with Roth’s death, his chances are probably a little higher than they were, since he’s moved up a place in the line of Americans worthy of the honor.)

DeLillo has always been more philosophical, more abstract than Roth or Cormac McCarthy (whom I love to contrast him with since McCarthy is so elemental). At his worst, as in the overrated White Noise, he gives into his own concepts and loses a sense of the personal. At his best, as in Mao II or Underworld, he discovers characters who can confront his impulse to see humanity rather than individual humans.

In Zero K, DeLillo’s protagonist is a comfortably middle-aged Jeffrey Lockhart. He’s inherited enough wealth that he never needs to work, but he’s also estranged enough from his billionaire father that he doesn’t have a hand in managing anything. He’s repaired their relationship, but there’s still a clinical feel to it. And clinical is a tone DeLillo knows well.

The central action of the novel comes in the way Jeffrey’s father, Ross, has become convinced of the possibilities of cryogenic freezing – of putting dying bodies into Zero K states from which they can be awakened decades or centuries later when medical technology has improved. Ross’s second wife, Artis – with whom Jeffrey has a subtle but compelling relationship – is dying, and Ross has invited Jeffrey to join him in a former Soviet Republic for the unregulated operation that will shut her down altogether. Ross, giving into grief over the loss of Artis, eventually announces that he too would like to enter Zero K so he doesn’t have to endure life without her.

This sets up, then, a kind of dampened version of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with a son trying to pull a dying father back into life. Only here, there’s nothing of passion and little of compelling interest for the son to conjure with. Ross has done everything he can imagine with his life and wealth, and he and Jeffrey don’t exactly share a life. The only reason to stay alive is philosophical, abstract – again, DeLillo territory.

That conflict takes up the first 60 percent of the novel, and it’s compelling. DeLillo unfolds his situation with typical skill, and he reveals his characters – and their flatness – slowly and masterfully. Then, as he’s been doing in some of his other recent novels like The Body Artist and Point Omega, he disrupts the narrative form he’s used most of the way.

We get, briefly, a powerful meditation on the nature of the unraveling self from the perspective of Artis as she’s in the cooling tank. It’s got a slightly gimmicky feel to it, but it works for me, recalling the moment in As I Lay Dying when Addie Bundren reflects on her life as her family wheels her lifeless body toward her family burial ground. It works because Artis is one of those late-DeLillo characters who comes to life, whose appreciation for the concrete world acts as a check on the floating abstractions that otherwise so tempt DeLillo and his characters.

At one point before her “death,” Artis talks to Jeffrey about how she loved watching drops of water fall down the shower curtain. It’s gorgeous prose, but more than that it’s also life-affirming. It’s DeLillo reaching for what Roth found at every turn – the concrete complexity and beauty of being a human.

So, brief as the episode is, Artis’s posthumous reflections serve as a powerful check to Ross’s reluctant, deadened embrace of a final shot at life.

The final section of the novel moves us forward a couple years. Jeffrey has “come alive” in relative terms. He has, for the first time, gotten close enough to Emma that he has a real and enduring relationship. Through her, he’s come to know her son, Stak, who has his own challenges living in the concrete world. And he feels the potential of a happiness he’s never known.

At the same time, though, Ross turns out really to be dying, and he eventually asks Jeffrey to accompany him back to the Zero K facility for his own freezing operation. Soon after, Stak gives in to his preoccupation with foreignness – he’s loves speaking other languages and eventually [SPOILER] runs off to take part in a pointless internecine rebellion in the country where Zero K is located – and that sends Emma back to her estranged ex-husband. While in the country, Jeffrey sees a news broadcast that shows Zak being killed by government troops, but he can’t bring himself to tell Emma.

By the end, Jeffrey has again lost everything that tethered him to the human world. Ross is “dead,” and Emma has left him. He hasn’t even been able to tell her that he knew about – even saw – her son’s death before she could confirm it.

He has, in other words, entered into a kind of emotional Zero K. He’s too frozen to appreciate the world that he glimpsed with Emma and that Artis so movingly articulated.

To end where I started, then, I read this as DeLillo answering Roth’s (and Thomas’s) challenge to confront the fact of dying. For now, at least, DeLillo’s “death” is an emotional more than a physical experience. The work he sees as urgent is to fight against the clinical experience of losing touch with the people around us. Or, if you prefer a cynical reading, it’s to embrace the notion that we cannot take our friendships and love with us when we go.

Either way, DeLillo remains a powerful voice. I’m getting to this a year and a half after it came out, but it seems to me a powerful addition to the literature of what it means to confront death from the perspective of old age.


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Review: Bang the Drum Slowly

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not the book I thought it was, and that’s a good thing.

I’ve known about this one for a long time. My father knew Harris, and I assume from a quick check of Harris’s Wikipedia page that it was when they were both on the faculty at San Francisco State in the early 1960s. I even think the two of them played softball together, something my father did often and that I assume the baseball-inclined Harris did as well.

I thought this book was, more or less, Brian’s Song for baseball. It’s no spoiler to say that our narrator’s roommate and possible best friend, Bruce Pearson, is dying. We learn it in the opening pages of the book if not from the back-cover copy. It’s an old story, A.E. Housman’s athlete dying young.

Brian’s Song was that necessary TV movie of my childhood, the one artistic statement (with the possible exception of a half-generation earlier’s Old Yeller) where boys were permitted, even encouraged to cry. It too was about a pair of friends, one of them dying.

This, it turns out, is much subtler, and, as a result, much more interesting.

Our narrator, Henry Wiggen, is a top left-handed pitcher in the majors. As a young man, he wrote a best-selling memoir – Harris’s earlier novel, “The Southpaw,” – which has earned him the nickname of Author. Bruce, who’s not especially bright (I’d love to see how Robert DeNiro played him in the 1973 film), insists instead on calling him Arthur.

Henry is at first the only one who knows about Bruce’s condition, and he agrees to hide it. At first, it’s a mercenary kindness. While Henry is a star, Bruce is a journeyman catcher. If word gets out that he’s sick, he’ll get cut and lose his livelihood. So Bruce covers for him, eventually negotiating a hardball contract that prohibits management from splitting the two roommates up. If one gets traded or released, the other has to as well.

Over time, though, it becomes clear that part of Henry’s motivation in hiding the truth is that he cannot really understand what it means to die. Bruce is starting to understand it, but Bruce has limited capacity to articulate much about experience.

For a long time, then, Henry denies the fact of death. He can do that, first, because he’s young, and second, because he’s a baseball player. Every day is a new start. There’s no such thing as history that extends before the first inning. It’s a game of spring – when the novel opens but, in many ways, always – and it’s a game of perpetual revival.

And that’s the ultimate beauty and power of this book. Henry is bright, funny, and unrestrained. He spends as much time not talking about Bruce’s situation as talking about it. In a brilliant device, Harris introduces a writer character late in the book who reads the first couple chapters that Henry has already written of this book. And that’s his criticism: the book is not enough about Bruce, but rather about Henry and all the things he does in order not quite to face up to the fact of Bruce’s disease.

There are splashes of Bull Durham in this. The team is in a pennant race, but more importantly it’s a group of guys who know the game too well to forget it’s a game. They scam one another as well as star-struck fans. They deal with racism, inflicting it and enduring it, and they try to unify against a still all-powerful management.

As the season passes, word of Bruce’s condition leaks out. Within the team, it brings forth a spirit of quiet generosity. One of the biggest jerks on the team goes out of his way to keep the secret and be kind to Bruce, but it’s a kindness born of strength rather than tenderness. It’s moving and beautiful, but it’s quiet and blunt too.

As Henry figures out what’s going on, he both spends more time writing the book he feels called to write – with the writing of it part of the story as well – and with Bruce. He’s too unlearned to understand how every generation before his has dealt with death, but he’s too bright to imagine he’s the first one to experience the loss of someone he cares about.

The bottom line for all of that is that this book is funny. It’s not knee-slappingly so – and the transformation of the sport over the last quarter century likely makes it harder for people younger than mid-30s to understand some of the particulars of what he’s saying – but instead it’s gently so. Henry has a funny perspective on the world. Harris’s great ambition here is to compel that perspective to wrestle with death.

There’s no saving Bruce. We know that from the first chapter. But there is the chance to give him one more season, to draw things out and bang the drum slowly.

This may no longer be for everyone because the vernacular and references have aged, but I think it really is an exceptional novel. I’ve waited a long time to read this, and I may have come upon it at just the right moment.


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