Review: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s a masterpiece, of course. I knew that the first time I read it (probably in 12th grade), and I have read it a couple of times since. Like all classic masterpieces, it tells something new every time you come to it.

I am reading it this time because, while teaching the first half of the American literature survey, I assigned eight chapters excerpted in the Norton Anthology. That was an experiment, an unsatisfactory one. Maybe excerpts can give you a sense of the novel, but it would need to be a lot more than that. I needed to read the whole thing again.

And, as I read it, I wonder whether an abridged version of this could ever do the trick. I know that, notoriously, there are chapters on the history of whales and whaling that many people want to skip or see cut, but I have valued them this time.

Pulling the camera back, I have tried for a synthetic history of American literature in this class. I start with John Winthrop and argue that, as far as our conception of it, American begins as an idea before it is a reality. As a result, it exists as “idea” even after people experience the reality of it on the ground.

In something of a dialectic approach (but not Marxist), I argue that that sense of the ideal brings into relief its antithesis – the experience of America as a discrete place with unprecedented natural resources and the need to construct a government (even a whole society!) from scratch.

Pushing forward, I see the synthesis of “ideal” and “experience” as the Romanticism/transcendentalism of Emerson. (Note that he calls his first great essay “Experience” in that he is asking how to understand experience as part of the self that forms from it. He feels the need to ask that question because so much of the tradition in which he is raised deals with the ideal – whether in the Puritanical sense or the Revolutionary.)

Here, in Moby Dick, I am reading those ‘boring’ chapters about whales and whaling as evidence of the actual, of the ‘experience’ of being on a whaling ship. That’s a tonic of sorts to the metaphysical (or ‘ideal’) of Ahab and his monomaniacal quest.

In that way, I see Melville reconciling the ideal with experience by setting each side by side. Emerson may philosophize his way through it. Melville sets the two side by side and lets the tension rise.

I’m not saying that Melville consciously wrote to keep with that dialectic. I’m sure he knew more about his own philosophy than I can ever hope to recover. I think, though, that he had a feel for teasing his way through the narrative. The pedagogical chapters seem to come in the midst of the increasingly thrilling chapters about the chase and the conflict. It’s a great pacing that hooks us on action and then teases us with stasis.

That’s narrative skill, but I think it also reflects the tension I’m tracing in the overarching claim I am making about early American literature.

I get that, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Since I am asserting this as a way of reading early American literature, I’m inclined to find it here.

Still, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it…at least until I pull this one off the shelf again (metaphorically, since I have listened to this one).


View all my reviews

Review: Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh

Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh by Thomas S. Kidd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a well-written and well-argued book, one that explicitly wrestles with my idea of the history of early American literature as a clash between America as an ideal and the experience of forming a new nation in a new land.

Kidd makes clear that, while he is rehearsing the biographical details that others have covered in more detail, he’s asking a question of Jefferson’s life: how could a man with so soaring a sense of human dignity own slaves. And not just own them but keep Sally Hemings as his mistress and the mother of his children.

There’s no easy answer to that, and Kidd doesn’t pretend to have one. Instead, he traces the two extremes of Jefferson’s life – the spirit he conjured and the flesh which he deigned to own – as in persistent conflict.

At a biographical level, Kidd shows what others have shown. Jefferson showed occasional inclinations – even intentions – of freeing his slaves, but he never had the financial stability to do so. He was so often broke and borrowing that, on his death, his estate had to auction off well over a 100 slaves. Incidentally, that’s how Monticello fell into disrepair. There simply wasn’t enough money to bring his ideals into reality.

But Kidd goes further and looks for those contradictions in Jefferson’s writing. He traces, for instance, Jefferson’s sense that freeing the slaves immediately might lead to a race war. He wanted, instead, to distribute slaves across the country in hopes of diluting their numbers so that, in some distant time, we could free them without having them concentrated in such a way as to wreak collective vengeance.

That explains why Jefferson wanted to see more slave states in places like Missouri even as he purported to hate the institution of slavery.

There’s also the strange contradiction of Jefferson arguing against what they called miscegenation. He didn’t want to see Blacks and whites having children together because that would complicate the eventual project of disentangling the races.

Yet, as Kidd mostly knew for certain, Jefferson had multiple African-American children of his own. (I say “mostly” because he was relying only on the mostly persuasive study that tested for Y-DNA evidence. It’s only in the last few weeks as I write that the even more persuasive autosomal DNA study has left no doubt.)

As I say, Kidd handles all of this with sensitivity and balance. He’s not looking for a ‘gotcha’ with which to impugn Jefferson. Instead, he’s trying to recover how the unresolved contradictions of Jefferson’s personal life and philosophy set the stage for the Civil War and – I’d say, at least – for some of the divisions that we yet see in the American electorate.

And, all that said, I have said nothing about the other striking contradiction that Kidd explores here: Jefferson’s shifting take on how to embrace Christianity. Zig-zagging between deism and a hybrid Christianity all his own, he veered increasingly toward more conventional faith but never embraced it.

We have American ideals that should make slavery (and it’s sibling, racism) unthinkable. At the same time, we are a nation of flesh – flesh as in the sense of bodies that hunger for physical comforts and furthermore in the sense of selves that will always have to compromise with the ideal, no matter how much we aspire to it.


View all my reviews

Review: Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy

Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy by Robert M. Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I continue my exploration of American Midwestern pioneer history with this biography of William Henry Harrison, and I am pleased to find it a thoughtful and generally well written, It also recontextualizes some things I knew from different perspectives.

Above all, I am struck by the way in which Harrison himself was both of and not-of the Midwest. He was born in Virginia to a father prominent enough to have been a signer of the Declaration. In fact, the family remained prominent for generations. I knew that his grandson Benjamin was also elected President (though I always have to check whether it’s his son or grandson), but I didn’t realize that he was cousins with Carter Harrison, Sr. and Carter Harrison, Jr., two mayors of Chicago whom I’ve encountered in my Chicago and gangster history work.

At the same time, Harrison was largely a self-made man – self-made with the benefit of strong connections. His father died when he was still young, he made foolish decisions about the real but not overwhelming inheritance, and joined the army at a time when it was on the dangerous side.

He didn’t seem initially to imagine a future for himself in the Northwest Territory but, like second sons of the Britain at the time who volunteered for duty in India, the remote location amplified both the risk and the reward.

So, he landed in the region as a mostly broke but well-educated young man among generally more rough-hewn colleagues.

Those contradictions seem to have followed him as he rose in the military and then the proto-state government of the region. As I read it, he was enough of the Eastern establishment to get the blessings of Washington for his political rise and yet ensconced enough in the Midwest to retain legitimacy.

More interesting to my own research questions, though, is the way he understood Native American conflict as part of the larger global conflict. Owens argues that he generally saw Native conflict as an extension of the war with Britain. Others may have been fundamentally racist – and there was real barbarity in the way some Ohioans and Indianans butchered Natives – but Harrison saw them as legitimate allies of the British power that he feared. (Owens reads Thomas Jefferson the same way.)

Harrison’s most famous military victory came at Tippecanoe when he scattered the confederacy that Tecumseh was attempting to build across sometimes warring Native tribes. Owens sees it as a not-quite-impressive bit of generalship, but what strikes me in particular is the language Harrison used to describe Tecumseh (who was not present at Tippecanoe – he lived another couple of years and was then killed and shamefully desecrated after death at another battle). He saw Tecumseh as a great orator and politician, a man very much to admire who just happened to be on the other side.

It’s fascinating stuff, and, while it doesn’t diminish some of the ugliness of Harrison’s anti-Native campaigning, it does remind us that the total victory of Manifest Destiny wasn’t always the obvious outcome. Harrison had reason to fear the Native armies that he faced, and he rose as he did in part because – however nearly inept he might sometimes have been – he was a brave man himself.

We get a glimpse of Harrison’s notoriously short time as President only at the very end of this book. Then, famously, he ran as “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” playing on a later generation’s nostalgia for a time when Native power really was strong enough, in theory, to arrest Western expansion of the U.S. (Note that Andrew Jackson rose to prominence from similar success in wars against the Natives…which were often simultaneously wars against Britain.)

That Harrison sounds, again, like a man of the East, a President, no less. But he became famous, and utilized that fame, from his time helping to build and defend the Midwest and – as the title here says – for shaping the way the East would see the threat (and eventually the bravery and honor) of the very Natives he was also often killing and exploiting in treaty negotiations.


View all my reviews

Review: Playground

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a great book. I don’t know whether it will still be great in a decade – some of what seems cutting edge and provocative today may turn out to be obvious or cliched – but, as they say, get it while it’s hot.

Powers often works with multiple perspectives in his stories, letting us see pieces of the narrative from different angles and bringing them together as part of a slow-boiling, usually satisfying conclusion.

Here, we have the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, a Mark Zuckerberg-like figure who reveals somewhat early on that he is suffering from Lewy Body dementia and knows that he will die soon.

Todd’s earliest memories have him dealing with his parents’ acrimonious marriage. His father had been a successful trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, allowing them to live in a “castle” off Lake Michigan. He dealt with his father’s competitive, maybe Oedipal-fearing teaching him of chess by imagining himself underwater, walking on the floor of Lake Michigan – an experience informed for him by a book written by the pioneering scuba-diver Evie Beaulieu.

When he’s at school – first at a Jesuit high school and then at the University of Illinois – he becomes close to Rafi Young, a poet from a tough African-American neighborhood. The two bond over games, especially chess and go, and it’s Rafi’s suggestion that Todd ‘gamify’ his new social media platform that distinguishes it from its competitors and turns Todd into a billionaire.

Todd falls in love with Ina, a Pacific Islander, and they form something of a triangular relationship until, in a well-intentioned effort to repair a lover’s quarrel, Todd inadvertently betrays a secret of Rafi’s. Todd refuses to forgive him, eventually demands money for his contributions to Playground, and the two remain distant throughout their adult lives.

(view spoiler)[We learn eventually that Todd has no heirs and that he is narrating his experiences to an AI that, he hopes, will “bring back” from the dead the people he has loved, permitting him the chance at a reconciliation he never experienced. Although we don’t realize it for most of the novel, the AI narrates the events on the island of Makatea – where Evie has gone for a blissful final season of diving in unspoiled waters and where Todd and Ina, inexplicably together again after their fight, are raising two orphaned islanders.

Makatea faces an existential threat…or opportunity. A major consortium wants to use it as a base for building sea cities, floating spaces that will not be subject to national laws. (The idea seems to come from a Peter Thiel-like billionaire.) The islanders have to vote whether to accept all that will bring, and matters come to a head when Rafi realizes that Todd is the lead investor.

The great twist of the novel comes in the closing pages when we learn that almost none of this has happened. Rafi died long before, alone, in a small room. He did leave the money he got from Todd to Ina, but they never reunited. We don’t know what happened to Evie (or, if we do, I missed it in the tumult of so many revelations), but it seems likely that she’s another figure Todd has taught the AI narrator to imagine as part of his happy ending.

The bitter truth of the novel is that Todd is dying alone. He’s lived his life immersed in the world of social media, becoming a detached and lonely billionaire in the process, and he’s hoping to fulfill his lost best friend’s dream of using poetry to bring the dead back. (Rafi early on lost a beloved sister, and that drives much of his art.)

The implications of all this are stunning, but, as I suggest, they may turn out to be dated. One way or another, we will resolve some of how artificial intelligence relates to the creative process. We will also come to recognize – as pathology, lifestyle choice, or strategy for particular success – what it means to live a virtual life over a real one. (hide spoiler)]

For now, Powers is asking questions we are just wrestling with. Like his protagonist Todd, he’s on the ground floor of a social media world that’s shaping how we are coming to shape our own art.

I should add that much of this is beautifully written. That’s a Powers’s trademark, something I say having now read his four most recent books.

Weirdly, the one I like least is The Overstory, the one that’s gotten the most attention. Other than this, I also think that Orfeo is stunning.

Anyway, the guy is definitely worth reading, and this one may be – for the next few years at least – the best place to see him at his best.


View all my reviews

Review: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was drawn to this one for a few reasons, but it didn’t quite add up for me.

First, McCullough is a big name in American history. I haven’t read his work, but I know his name, and I figured this would reflect that.

Second, it details the pioneering of Ohio, the state where I grew up, and I have come to realize I learned only a part of that story in my schooling and that I didn’t have context for much of what I did learn.

And, third, the settling of Ohio was a prelude to the settling of Indiana which is a part of the memoir project I’m swimming through. I want as much background for that as I can find.

To be fair, there is a lot of good information here. I was glad to hear more of the career of Arthur St. Clair – famous in my family because my brother was punished in 8th grade to write a 20-page research paper on the man – and somewhat amused to learn he was more of a disaster as a governor and general than I had realized. And it was helpful to understand that Anthony Wayne’s subsequent victory at Fallen Timbers – a battle I did recall from 8th grade – came as a consequence of St. Clair’s earlier defeat.

I appreciated as well the attention to the burial mounds, making this the third book I’ve read in the last couple months to mention them. (I grew up around some of those mounds, and I have admired them most of my life.)

And I’m glad for a fuller context of the settling of Ohio out of the original capital city of Marietta. I have known that fact, again, since 8th grade, but the geography didn’t make sense to me (why put the capital in a corner of the state?) until now.

What doesn’t add up, though, is McCullough’s methodology. He seems inclined to tell much of the story through the lens of journals and letters of father and son Manasseh and Ephraim Cutler and their contemporary General Rufus Putnam. It’s occasionally striking to get very specific observations from the men, but it doesn’t come together as a full narrative. Manasseh, for instance, helps organize the settlement, but he’s not really on the ground. Putnam doesn’t keep the same sort of journal and, while serving as the first mayor of Marietta, stands for most of his career as a wise elder rather than a continuing actor. And, while Ephraim was purportedly the first settler ashore when they founded Marietta, his story doesn’t exactly dovetail the others.

As a result, much of that personal account seems disconnected from the larger story of the settlement of Ohio. This comes to feel like two separate books with the Cutler and Putnam story – already somewhat disconnected from its separate parts – almost a distraction from the larger political, military, and demographic history.

I’ll be curious sometime to read some of McCullough’s more famous works, and I can imagine a way in which the method of weaving individual testimony into larger narrative works well.

As much as I am grateful for the material here, the method doesn’t quite pay off in this one.


View all my reviews

Review: Lush Life

Lush Life by Richard Price
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As advertised, this is literary fiction meets noir.

As a confession, it took me a while to get into this – and I mean that in two ways.

More recently, as I read it, I found it hard to focus for a long time. I felt (and still feel) as if this is narrated with the textual equivalent of a hand-held camera. The whole perspective is fast-moving and up-close. It feels wobbly, and it leaves me somewhat queasy. I’m not a fan of hand-held cameras in cinema – I like them intellectually, but they give me a headache with their rapid movement – and that made it tough to get into this.

Still, over time, I recognized this as a powerful procedural. It opens with the senseless murder of Ike Marcus, and we get immersed in the perspectives of several people, but three in particular.

There’s Eric, a sort-of friend of Ike’s who panics during the murder and looks for a time like a serious suspect.

There’s Matty, a seasoned detective who refuses to let the case die as the politics and short-attention span of New York City threaten to look away.

And there’s Billy, Ike’s father whose grief keeps him following every step of the investigation while inadvertently interfering in it.

(view spoiler)[There’s also Tristan, the young gang-banger who panicked and pulled the trigger. (hide spoiler)]

No one really knows anything, which contributes to the claustrophobia of the hand-held sensibility, but each wrestles with his conscience and proves himself marginally better than he thought he would be.

There’s another dimension in which it took me a while to get into this, though. I remember, with eerie clarity, hearing an NPR review of this when it came out…18 years ago.

In the radio piece, Richard Price read an excerpt of Billy talking about the shock of his grief over his son’s murder. It was so painful to hear that, as a relatively new father, I couldn’t imagine reading the book.

I also couldn’t forget the impression it made, though, and I gradually dared myself to get to it as I came to learn more and more about the noir tradition. I’ve picked it up many times since then, but it took this coming on sale when I was hungry for something like it. Next thing I knew, I was a quarter of the way through it – and I’d gotten over the distraction of the hand-held-camera style.

By the end of this, I was immersed. It’s not a spoiler to say that justice in the New York of the aughts is hazy, but it still feels like a resolution. There’s real grief here, and there’s real heroism, but it’s all in a space of moral ambiguity – a kind of ethical hand-held-camera display.

It took me 18 years to get into this. I’d say it was worth the wait.


View all my reviews

Review: Life of M

Life of M by Rachel Cusk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected to dislike this book. And I did dislike it.

But I disliked it for so many different reasons – and with the sense that maybe Rachel Cusk wants me to dislike it as a commentary on contemporary selfhood and fame – that I think it turns out to be a peculiar kind of success.

There’s a lot of notoriety around this one. Several reviewers have noted that the title character, “M,” bears consistent indicators that she is the actor Natalie Portman. M was in several movies as a young woman where she was put into sexually charged moments. She starred in a movie about ballerinas. She is the face of a major perfume ad campaign. And she presents herself to the world as a well-read, thoughtful person, someone very much part of our artistic and entertainment world.

In the book, our unnamed narrator – who speaks in the first-person plural most of the time – befriends M briefly and their lives mostly split. The handful of scenes where they spend time together give way to a flatly narrated series of scenes where M presents herself to the world.

The M who comes across in interviews and performances is as admirable as any star might be. She listens to others. She shares credit. She commits to causes worth supporting.

But our narrator paints her as ultimately an empty vessel. The trappings of fame – in particular the time-resistance of film performance (since film exists in a ‘forever state’ even as its actors age) – have hollowed her. When she is in the world at large, she has to remind herself to perform as if she is a “normal” person even as waiters and security guards, catching a glimpse of her, bend over backwards to accommodate her whims. (And she doesn’t recognize them as whims, just as things ordinary people do even as she loses sight of all that’s involved in giving her such ordinary pleasures.)

In one memorable scene, M encounters a saleswoman who looks, at first glance, a lot like her. She even has the same facial expressions. As a result, we get the fleeting sense that someone else, this saleswoman, might have experienced the (seemingly) great fortune of her career. Then, when the woman walks away, M sees that she is chunky with heavy legs, and she gets the chance to recollect that she is herself an unmatchable beauty, and that’s what has brought her such fame.

All that said, many of those same reviewers have asserted, or maybe just implied, that Cusk actually knew Portman and that this is an attempt at something like a real biography – even if it is, as M casually suggests at the start, our narrator has chosen to invent everything in it.

I understood that to be the case before I picked this up, and that’s what made me anticipate not liking it. There’s a cruelty in befriending someone and then, on so little evidence and with so deliberately one-sided an approach, to paint her as an incomplete human.

And, as part of that approach, Cusk writes in a monotone, drawing heavily on flat, stative-sentences with verbs of being rather than active ones.

And, nothing happens. There’s nothing at stake and no narrative (unless you count the little-explored fact of the narrator’s husband undergoing a frightening surgery).

As I reflect on this, though, I realize I have no way of knowing whether Cusk knows Portman – or, if she does, whether she knows her as the narrator knows M: as two women whose daily lives briefly intertwined enough for them to share a few intimacies.

In that case, I can see that Cusk might be using Portman as a lens to explore what it means to be a person – a self – in a time when so much of our lives is filmed and therefore performed. In that light, M is a powerful doorway into what fame means in a world that Andy Warhol foresaw.

M might be empty, but she is no more empty than the rest of us, just far more present.

I’m still not sure I like that message, but I like the way Cusk is asking us to play the game alongside her. Her idea of self-ness is harrowing, and her sense that fame – even fame granted to someone whose surface reactions are unimpeachable – exacerbates that idea is all the more troubling.

In asking us to think of Portman who, for all we know, may be in on the literary joke or may simply be the paragon Cusk has chosen to work through, we’re asked to read this with the possibility of it as a roman-a-clef and with the possibility of it as a serious philosophical novel.

I can’t decide what it is, and I don’t its message or its style.

But I do enjoy that Cusk has made me think about it, and, for that, I am surprised to find myself recommending it.


View all my reviews