Sunday, December 30, 2018

Review: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

The Sound of One Hand Clapping The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess it’s a good sign when Flanagan takes a title from something like a Zen koan. His 2013 “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” is one of the great novels of the 21st Century and this, his second from 1997, is awfully good as well.

After “Narrow Road” and his most recent, the almost as extraordinary First Person, I resolved to read all the Flanagan I could get a hold of. The intervening two were less impressive. His first, Death of a River Guide, had some gorgeous moments, but it seemed to me to take too long to get going an to depend too much on the gimmick of a dying man’s life flashing before his eyes. His fourth, The Unknown Terrorist, seemed to me a post 9/11 novel (inflected by Flanagan’s Tasmanian sense of being on the very edge of the civilized world) without the bite or enduring quality of, say, DeLillo.

So that left two extraordinary novels and two I had reason to admire but not fully appreciate.

This one tips the scales back toward my deep Flanagan admiration – deep enough to have him on my private, no-one-else-cares list of potential Nobel laureates. It’s less ambitious than Narrow Road, and it has nowhere near the psychological games of First Person, but it may be more achingly beautiful than either.

This opens with the unthinkable – Maria Buloh walks into the Tasmanian winter determined never to come home again, and she leaves her three-year-old daughter Sonja alone with her husband, Bojan. The two, daughter and father, are deeply broken people, neither knowing how to love the other. They have fleeting moments of joy, but the bulk of their life together is sordid and disappointed. Bojan drinks, he hits her, and he cannot allow himself to heal from his wife’s abandonment.

Much of the power here comes from what I think may be a Flanagan trademark: the ability to reveal increasingly complicated depths to the characters and situations he’s established. While we might feel inclined to blame Maria for the family’s troubles, we come eventually to see how her despair is shaped by her brutal childhood in World War II. (SPOILER: late in the novel we learn that she was forced to witness the murder of her father, who was assisting partisans fighting the Nazis, and was then raped alongside her mother and sister…all while just 14 years old.)

Bojan seems indifferent to Sonja’s welfare and happiness. He makes her wait in cars outside bars when he drinks, and he forces her to keep house – and pretend to ignore his beating of her – while she’s still a child. Yet Bojan too is haunted by the war-time of his own childhood. He has no patience for religion, for instance, determining that any God that could allow the SS the free rein it had in Yugoslavia could not be a beneficent deity.

Flanagan establishes that despair as the baseline rhythm of the novel, but then he somehow presents glimpses of potential happiness above it. In one heartbreaking stretch, Bojan opens himself up to a new love, with a woman named Jean who has an apple orchard, but he doesn’t know how to ask Sonja if she’d approve of his remarrying, and she doesn’t know how to say it’s something she’d desperately want. Each denies the other something that might have saved each, but the scent of apples lingers, and Sonja never forgets the harvest song.

Eventually, the most important of those potential change-everything possibilities is Sonja’s pregnancy. Flanagan gives us the novel in strands, in a series of chapters from Sonja’s childhood in the 1950s and a separate series from 1989 and 1990. In the latter, Sonja has returned to the Tasmania of her childhood. She’s determined at first to see her father and then have an abortion, but she can’t bring herself to go through with it. She has no hope for the future, no imagined joy, but some kernel of the need to survive keeps pushing her.

(SPOILER:) There’s no climactic moment of change, no instant of redemption, but Flanagan lets us feel the callouses soften. No power on earth can undo the trauma of war-time Europe, and nothing can erase the pain of Sonja’s childhood, but the prospect of a new life, a generation that might live without such shadows, inspires everyone to be a better self. If you don’t read this, it will sound clichéd to (DOUBLE-SPOILER) say that Bojan eventually uses his carpentry skills to make a cradle and other infant furniture for the new baby, a child Sonja names Maria after her mother – whom we learn only at the end has not run away but killed herself.)

If you do read this, though, that emotional payoff, tricky as it may sound, is authentic and moving.

This is a novel with a small scope – really just a family of two – over a half century. In its way it’s magnificent, and it’s evidence of the skill and gift of the young Flanagan, a writer who’s gone on to write some of the best work going.


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Saturday, December 29, 2018

Review: The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries

My headline for this review would be “Gulliver in Space.”

Not long ago I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and it disappointed me, among other reasons, because it put so much weight on the “science” half of science-fiction. I felt as if throughout the novel, she was trying to appease the doubters, the critics who question whether ‘speculative literature’ ever has a claim to be taken seriously.

Lem is doing the exact opposite. His space hero, Ijon Tichy, is a goofy stand-in for the free play of imagination. He’s a space explorer who, using technology as ever-changing as the campy Batman of the 1960s, ventures on one silly adventure after another.

The first of the adventures should be more than enough to hook anyone. Tichy is flying through a distant galaxy when he discovers that the equivalent of his space-rudder has jammed. He then finds that, to fix it, he will need a second pair of hands, one to hold the item in place and the other to tighten the wrench. Alone, and in despair, he takes a nap only to be awakened by himself – a version of himself from the future a day in advance. It turns out (with the sort of vague reference to science that LeGuin would have found beneath her) that his ship is approaching the speed of light as it nears a star, and that has put him into a time loop.

Lem might have left us to wonder at his cleverness, but he takes things much further. Tichy at first refuses to trust his future self. Then, when later opportunities arise, he constantly frustrates his efforts to fix the space ship. He gets into fights, ambushes himself, anticipates what he will soon want to do but guesses wrong, and finally forms a kind of parliament of all his future selves on the ship.

Silly as such a story is, though, it’s simultaneously allegorical in at least two dimensions.

The dimension that’s more readily accessible is biting. At the same time as the entire book is a celebration of the capacity of the human imagination (certainly as Lem exercises it), it’s a critique of our capacity to work together to solve our problems. The perpetual bete noir here is bureaucracy, the lumbering ways in which we attempt to order our mutual efforts. The second story for instance, has Tichy appointed as Earth’s delegate to an interstellar association of civilizations. When he arrives, though, the association has to go through a lengthy deliberative process, demanding reports on Earth’s good conduct.

That’s a consistent concern throughout the stories, and it’s easy to imagine Lem drew on frustration with the communism of his Polish childhood. Funny as the perpetual insight is – bureaucracy kills the spirit that makes us human – it clearly has an edge.

The other dimension of allegory here grows out of that notion, but – as I read this 40 years later and a continent away – I’m conscious of missing much of the historical, political, and social import. I sense it, but I feel a little as if I’m hearing someone else’s inside jokes. Even through translation, I recognize the rhythm of a master joke-teller, but I find myself a beat slow. I am aware, always, that this is coming to me second-hand, that I am watching the man perform and then pausing to read the subtitles before I can fully laugh.

You get some wonderful details here – aliens that our dim-witted Tichy mistakes for vending machines, or potatoes that, adrift in space, become predatory and rapacious – but I did find some of the later stories running together. Maybe because I was missing some of the barbs at the ends of the hooks Lem throws out there, I felt as if I’d gotten the best of this before it was over.

Still, I recognize a deep cleverness here. Aware that there are parts of this out of my reach without footnotes, I still enjoy it. This is science fiction as it was first born, as Gulliver’s Travels first showed it can be, and that – even before its other virtues – makes me recommend it.






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Monday, December 24, 2018

Review: Every Single Bone in My Brain

Every Single Bone in My Brain Every Single Bone in My Brain by Aaron Tillman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When the terrific English novelist Howard Jacobson got tired (at last) of being called the “English Philip Roth,” he responded that he preferred to think of himself as the “Jewish Jane Austen.”

It’s no surprise that some of the blurbs for Aaron Tillman’s striking collection, Every Single Bone in My Brain, compare him to Roth, but I think it’s the wrong comparison. Roth’s genius lies in the way he confronts the internal conflict between recognizing the power of the (generally Jewish) intellect while understanding its limitations in the America he comes to discover. (In that light, he’s broadening the insight behind a lot of Saul Bellow. His characters aren’t “merely” intellectuals; they’re “street smart” and yet still challenged by some who can’t accept them fully into our culture.) Roth, in other words, makes Jewish neuroticism three-dimensional, extending it beyond self-referentiality to full-on cultural critique.

Tillman belongs to a different genealogy of Jewish-American writers. His characters are less burdened by a disconnect between inspiration and feeling a full part of American culture than they are by a hunger for some sign in the world that orients their ambition or, even, purpose. That’s more in keeping with the impulses of Malamud who, mildly educated as a Jew, has his characters look for Jewish resonances in the culture around them, secret signs that their jumbled heritage echoes in the startling spaces of America. (For what it’s worth, that’s where Cynthia Ozick picks up; her characters have the same impulse but are much more confident in their knowledge of a Jewish past.)

Tillman explores that sign-hungry impulse across these stories, imagining characters of a newer and younger generation doing much of what Ozick’s Pagan Rabbi was doing. He does so with yet another couple decades of demonstrated Jewish belonging in America. His characters don’t question their deep citizenship or the possibility of their cultural place. It’s a new world, but it’s theirs. In that light, Tillman is not another in that long line of new Roths. Call him, instead, the Jewish Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The opening story, “The Great Salt Desert,” is a great example of that impulse as a young Jewish boy takes off on a wild road-trip adventure with a slightly older woman who’s fallen from her full embrace of Mormonism. Ian is understandably taken by her; she promises liberation from his straitened home life, and she promises a tutorial in sex. As they drive, though, her growing need for a direct sign of her salvation (or permission to return to the fold) proves infectious. He eventually hears what he understands must be “the voice of God,” but it comes by telephone on Cheryl’s terms, and it seems to invite him to continue as her passenger. In the end, when her journey crashes, he finds a more personal sign in “the expanse of this beautiful, petrified stretch” of desert. He’s free again to be himself, which means he free again to be a Jew in a country someone else has helped him discover.

One of the main characters of the excellent “Vacancy” doesn’t quite know she’s looking for signs when she becomes the top celebrant of rock band at her high school. She enjoys the music, sort of, but she isn’t entirely sure why she’s drawn to the guys in it. She thinks it ought to mean something, but she isn’t sure what and, as a reflection of that, she finds herself in complicated relationships with the different musicians.

And those are only the start in a collection that’s often kaleidoscopic, from the great title story to the final “Cross-Eyed Monkey Cabaret.” There are seeming signs at every turn, which gives this philosophical heft, but there are laughs as well. We see the spiritual hunger that animated Malamud and Ozick, but we see as well – yes, I admit we do – the humor that made Roth so much the measuring stick for the Jewish-American writers on whose shoulders Tillman stands.


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Saturday, December 22, 2018

Review: The English Patient

The English Patient The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started this one without having seen the movie but with images of Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas imposed on some of the characters. Then, as I read, I found the prose so hypnotic that – even as I found the story initially bewildering (as I think we are supposed to experience it) – I fell in love with it as a book. Something in the sentences was almost hallucinatory. And I came to be surprised at the thought that anyone could make a movie that would do justice to a book so tied to such language.

And then, as I came to the final third of the book, the story gradually resolved itself, and I fell in love with this in an entirely different way. I did see how you might construct a movie from its material, and I got a clearer sense of how this is simultaneously a great war novel, a great love story, and an impressive post-colonial work.

The title character may be the one who’s burned beyond recognition, but all the central characters are damaged. He, Clifton, and Katherine all fall from the sky, all literally tumble from a great height but metaphorically fall from a delusion of happiness, from a sense that love might save them. Caravaggio, the slightly older British intelligence officer who suspects the patient’s true identity, has been mutilated by his one-time captors. Hana, the young nurse, can’t overcome the trauma of her father’s death. And Kip, the bomb-defuser who threw in with the British against the impulse of his Sikh family, can’t forget how close he’s been to death dozens of times.

Against the backdrop of a world war, each glimpses someone to love, someone who seems to offer escape from a conflict so vast that it seems to have no end. And each [SPOILER] is disappointed. One part of wisdom tells everyone in such a world that there is no such thing as safety, no such thing as the privacy that their shared time in a monastery turned hospital turned abandoned outpost might promise. Yet one part of being human means pushing against that doubt, means imagining it might be possible to fly a plane above the clouds and into something like a sunset.

I love the sense of scale here. This is a huge canvas, one as busy as World War II and as vast as the great desert, but its characters are finely drawn within it. Because these people seem so small against it, though, the possibility they find in love is all the more poignant.

I also love the way Ondaatje mines history. Most of the actions are set in what seems a distant past, an inter-war/war-time moment when a whole generation was young. (It was my parents’ generation, so I’ve always felt I’ve known it.) And then, in one of the many gorgeous tremors of the final pages [SPOILER] the fact of the atomic bomb rips that past away and injects the story into a recognizably contemporary moment. Kip, who’s risked his life to defuse so many bombs, can’t forgive the West for such a devastating attack. He can’t even forgive Hana, with the result that he snaps the love they share. They’re just people, after all, just individuals caught up in different forces tearing the world apart. They never really had a chance to be happy; Kip merely acknowledges that and, leaving, rides back into the Sikh world he’s rejected for a time.

I’m looking forward now, a quarter century late, to watching the movie. I’m going to wait a little while, though, to savor a book that’s powerful and so beautiful.


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Friday, December 21, 2018

Review: The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy was formative for me and, while I’m sad to find it holds up a little less well than some others of its time, I still have a fundamental fondness for the idea of her work. She’s one of the real architects of the fantastic, and her vision of linking language to experience was both imaginative on its own terms and a gesture toward some of the literary theory that would come along not too much after.

As I visit her sci-fi, though, I find her much more conventional in that genre. There’s a clever idea here – a man develops the capacity to reshape reality through dreams that he cannot control – but the rest is virtually clichéd. There’s the scientist who wants to use his power for control, and there’s the love interest who comes along just in time to help him resist.

As it is, this feels like classic 1970s science fiction, and that’s disappointing in two directions.

First, this is sci-fi that seems as if it has to answer its potential scientific critics. Instead of accepting a literary creation on its own terms, it offers explanations. (A classic example of the failing is the way George Lucas, having given us a goofy space opera in the original Star Wars, devolved the effective vagueness of ‘the force’ into something determined by ‘midi-chlorians’ measurable in the bloodstream.) I think of William Blake wishing for himself a “four-fold vision” – a mystical experience that would be all-consuming – yet fearing he might instead discover “single vision and Newton’s night,” a line I have always understood as a disappointment in the way science can strip away wonder from the world.

In other words, I respect that science fiction has to be internally consistent, but I think this (and perhaps other examples) are diminished when they seem gratuitously to answer questions that might occur to a critical reader. If LeGuin had written a book exploring euthanasia, I might be interested. I’m bored (or worse) when this book gives us a two-page summation of the argument and then moves onto other issues. It too often feels here as if she is imagining questions she might get from a panel of scientists or ethicists rather than following the narrative thread she’s opened up.

Second, this strikes me as a narcissistic vision, one that parallels what I remember (and what stereotype describes) as part of the zeitgeist of the early 1970s. This gimmick, the capacity for someone to reshape the world through dream, smacks of contemporaneous works like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Pippin. It reads the experience of one person as tantamount to the experience of the entire world. In some of those others, there’s a naivete that, if it leaves them feeling dated, at least redeems them somewhat. This one, with its attempts to answer science and with LeGuin’s steady narrative hand, feels too polished to be forgiven. She’s simply too much a professional to get away with ham-handed work.

In the end, while I know others have admired this over the years, I think this is as weak an offering as I’ve ever found from LeGuin. I’m sure I’ll revisit her Earthsea work – maybe next time I’ll find I can again overlook its humorlessness – but I expect I’ll stay away from her science fiction.


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Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Review: The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Today we remake Spiderman every couple of years. For much of the millennium before that – extending to today – we’ve remade the legends of Arthur and the Round Table. It’s generally the same story, at least in its outlines, but the challenge is to emphasize one or another element, to take material that belongs to all of us and to reframe it with a particular perspective.

When you come to Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, it helps to know the story already. Spoiler, but Guinevere can’t deny her love for Lancelot and that means trouble all around. And the part about the quest for the Holy Grail that destroys the companionship of the knights? Yeah, there’s no avoiding it either.

Traditional authors of the story have done all sorts of things with it, of course. Malory applied it to developing and codifying a code of chivalry which, while it has its virtues, helped lay the foundation for a sexist and puritanical Britain two or three centuries later. T.H. White (with Disney following) emphasized the wonder of the story, turning it into one stream of fantasy that paved the way for the reception of (if not so much the creation of) Tolkien’s world.

Bradley turns out to be powerfully ambitious here. She inserts a clear feminist take on the legends – here, Morgaine (Morgan le Fey) is not evil, but rather the most important representative of the druidical religion that Christianity is displacing. This is not “merely” feminism, though. Instead, it’s a claim for what I’d call syncretism, for the argument that the “enemy” isn’t some form of Satan but rather intolerance of what we cannot understand in our limited human perspective. We get lots of quotes exonerating Christ from the work of extirpating the traditional religion, with the blame going instead to “His priests.” (As such, St. Patrick, here as Patricius, is much more the ‘bad guy’ than Morgaine herself.)

The idea for Bradley, that is, is that we find the best in ourselves as humans when we embrace the good wherever we find it. She’s hardly anti-Christian, yet she embraces the sense that the nature-worshipping druids had important virtues as well. The challenge is always to find a balance, to accept that catechism – the mindless listing of what we ought to believe and how we ought to conduct ourselves – is the enemy of real faith. That’s as true for seeing the power within women as it is in the context of faith.

In a way, then, she offers what may be the most important theological take on the fantastic in the interval between Tolkien and George R.R. Martin. Tolkien (and C.S. Lewis, of course) used fantasy to explore a clear vision of a benign, monotheistic space where evil nonetheless existed. At the other end, Martin has unveiled a world where there is no “true north” of faith, a world where the supernatural is present but a range of god-like figures vie with one another for amoral victory.

It’s fascinating, then, to see Bradley as a middle-ground, as someone intent on using the genre to imagine a space between catechism and amorality. At its best, that’s precisely what her exhaustive take on these legends accomplishes. The Grail of her account, for instance, may or may not be the cup of Christ, but it is clearly something long used in druidical worship that Merlin, that traitor to the druidical cause, has stolen for Christian purposes. It’s not an angel that the knights see holding it but rather Morgaine herself, channeling the powers of the goddess for a brief moment, who sets them off to discover a vision of the holy that they can imagine only within a Christian vocabulary.

As a concept, as a motive for revisiting stories most of us know in one form or another, I love all that. And parts of this, especially the opening pages, are wonderfully done. There’s a reason this was a best-seller when it came out, and there’s a reason it lingers around the edges of the genre’s canon even as Bradley has come to be held to account for a lot of disturbing things from her lifetime.

All that said, though, this can’t entirely escape what seems the original sin of the genre. This is simply too long by at least a third. What works in the first few hundred pages – the scene-setting, tension-building, character-developing work – becomes tedious by the end. We all know what’s going to happen; I’d like to see her get to the parts that matter to her sooner: the collapse of the Round Table as a sign of the failure of syncretism, the trapping of Merlin as simultaneously a feminist reclamation of the goddess and a pyrrhic victory for the druidical cult, and the final vision of Arthur as representing a “Camelot” moment that we can look to for inspiration even as we cannot recreate it.

I’m glad I read this – it came in handy as the semester wound down and I needed something thoughtful and distracting to listen to as I drove to work and walked the dogs – but I’m glad to be finished as well.


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Friday, November 30, 2018

Review: Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane

Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane by Patti Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this one through Audible, but didn’t consider it a “book” until I saw the New York times had reviewed it. If it’s good enough for them, then I suppose it’s good enough for me.

I love Patti Smith at what I think of her as her best, as a kind of punk poet. I admit I get tired of her work (though not her, never her) when she lapses into the heavy recitation rhythm stuff, when she reads a poem mid-concert and seems to ask, implicitly, if we wouldn’t rather be sitting by ourselves and reading. No, no we wouldn’t – not even those of us who do happen to read our share of poetry in other circumstances.

But, on balance, I like Patti Smith very much, and I certainly enjoyed her Just Kids. It’s justifiably celebrated as one of the great rock memoirs.

This, it turns out, is a kind of greatest hits live. It’s her reading excerpts of her two memoirs and then punctuating them with live music. The memoirs are very good – I enjoy those prose breaks more than I do the poetry interruptions – but I’ve read them. And the music is generally great, but it doesn’t really rock here. For the most part, these are late-middle-aged reworkings of the classics, songs that – beyond their excellence – are supposed to matter here because of the context of her memoirs and because of what we bring to them from our past as well. They tend to linger, to move more slowly than the album versions or, presumably, the classic concert arrangements.

This is, in effect, Smith’s answer to Springsteen on Broadway. She isn’t selling out at a major theater, but she is reuniting with her fans. She’s talking through the music, not feeling that rock spirit but capably performing a script.

I doubt I’ll ever find Smith truly boring – and this is certainly not – but I did get the sense I’d heard it all before. She’s one of the rock queens, someone I’m glad to see basking in her well-deserved renown. I’d be interested in a full concert, one where we get to see her rethinking the music as music, slowing it down and drawing new nuances from it.

Framing the music in her strong memoirs makes it something that, live, must still pack a punch. Recorded – as something that we’re supposed to acknowledge as a book – it leaves me hungry for something purer: another memoir or another concert.


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Review: The Little Friend

The Little Friend The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am as big a fan of The Secret History and The Goldfinch as anyone. I think each is a modern masterpiece, and I think Donna Tartt is one of our most gifted contemporary writers on the strength of the two of them. But this one, released a decade after the one and before the other, lacks the dark urgency of The Secret History and the vast canvas of The Goldfinch. It has a powerful kernel at the heart of it, but it’s too small a story to carry the weight of its 600+ pages.

The idea at the heart of this sounds impressive. A little girl, Harriet, comes to understand the inexplicable murder of her brother years before as having been perpetrated by a down-on-their-luck family of drug dealers and dubious evangelicals. With her precocious intelligence, she tracks down what she thinks is the real evil without understanding that evil is ultimately beyond comprehension. It’s a coming-of-age narrative with a twist – a twist of a knife where we can never see the hand behind it.

But there are all sorts of small matters that detract from that powerful central notion. For one, Tartt introduces a number of characters who, in the end, don’t contribute all that much to the story. We don’t need to see so much about Harriet’s sister or about the inner lives of her many aunts. The characters are likable enough, but they blend together somewhat, and they ultimately distract from what seems the central point about exploring the possibility of evil as a child. A little of such characters would have accomplished as much as the couple hundred pages we get of them.

For another, Tartt jumps from perspective to perspective. At times that has the virtue of placing Harriet’s questioning in a different light, letting us see through her eyes as a thoughtful detective and then see her through others as a little girl trying to find her way. At other times, it gets clumsy. [SEMI-SPOILER] In the scene where Danny and Harriet confront each other at the water tower, the action gets slowed as we switch from one pair of eyes to another. Sometimes, to my annoyance, it gets repeated.

There are parts here that venture into noir territory – what else can you call a novel that opens with the awful murder of a 13-year-old boy – but Tartt eventually shows (SPOILER: through the contrived way that Harriet survives the showdown with Danny) she doesn’t have the stomach for that. She blinks, and we get instead something that returns to the safety of conventional narrative.

Overall, I’m afraid I found myself checking how much I had left simply too often for the book to feel like a complete success. Tartt writes excellent sentences, and sometimes I’d linger over a particularly strong line, but the narrative just kept slowing down. I’d be curious to see the “studio-cut” of this, the roughly half-as-long book that would tell the same story with the excess cut out.

At the same time, I know what Tartt did before this and after, so I think the smart play remains to leave her to her own devices. This won a lot of awards when it came out 15 years ago, so maybe it’s just aged badly. In any case, with Tartt seeming to take a decade between books, I continue to look forward to the next one she rolls out, presumably in five more years.


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Friday, November 16, 2018

Review: Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read most of Murakami’s work by this point, and all of the would-be masterpieces: Kafka at the Shore, 1Q84, Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and Hardboiled Wonderland. I obviously enjoy the guy’s work, or I wouldn’t keep coming back to him, and I am as excited as anybody else at this newest bid for greatness.

On balance, I think this one delivers yet again. It’s got the familiar tropes of a main character who slowly sheds his all-around-nice-guy persona to reveal peculiar darknesses; a secondary world that may or may not be distinct from what we know everyday; sustained reflections on the nature of art in a world craving for certainty denied it; and even, though not until the end and then only in small bits, cats as totems.

The more I read this, though – and I believe it’s Murakami’s first to deal so extensively with painting – the more I began to see some parallels between Murakami and painters in general. Above all, I found myself thinking of Murakami as a kindred spirit to Marc Chagall. Both had a tendency to reuse mystical tropes, and both worked on either medium-sized or vast canvasses. Both eschewed strict realism but neither embraced anything like full-blown abstraction.

Thinking of Murakami in such a light made me realize that there may not be all that meaningful a difference between his works. That’s not criticism; it’s just an effort at explaining why a single writer has shown he can write at least five different novels sized to be career-defining works. What I’m suggesting is that Murakami is less about plot or arguments and more about arranging a variety of tropes, images, and motifs into ever-fresh ways. His imagination is so deep and his feel for balance so strong that the real question seems to be how a specific composition fits together.

In such a light, it may be that this is somewhat weaker than the other top Murakami’s. Still, I think I’ve felt that about each of them since Kafka at the Shore (which was the first I read). I’ll finish, decide it’s good but a little less good, and then, as I reflect on the whole of the novel in the following weeks. I’ll find it ultimately as satisfying as the others.

That’s certainly my experience here. In the midst of my deep enjoyment of the novel, I was looking for reasons to be skeptical. I was troubled by the inelegant telegraphing of our protagonist’s friend, the son of the great painter, who has some news about his involvement with the protagonist’s ex-wife. I was frustrated that the opening pages essentially reveal the final key images – the faceless man, the idea of portraiture, and the penguin charm of the little girl – and take away some of the joy of narrative suspense. And I was bothered that some major tropes seem to get introduced only late.

And yet, as I reflect on all of this, it’s not so much that those images and tropes are out of balance as that they are out of the balance I would have anticipated. As the novel comes into focus as a whole, I find myself appreciating all at once again that Murakami hasn’t merely recycled his old stand-bys; he has instead reappropriated them for this new literary canvas.

We get a few more explicit articulations than usual of the fundamental Murakami method. At one point, the mysterious Menshiki says, “Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities,” and “I choose to surrender myself to that instability.” Our protagonist can’t quite embrace such uncertainty but – and this is the dimension of the novel in which he is like the Nick Carraway to Menshiki’s Gatsby – he does indeed go partway. He’s willing to accept that we can’t know truth entirely but that we have to embrace something. As he puts it near the very end, “Maybe nothing in this world can be certain, but at least we can believe in something.”

In the end, though, I’m less interested in why Murakami does what he does or even for why it works. Instead, I am happy to enjoy the peculiar blend of symbol, fantasy, and melancholy that he finds a way to paint in fresh fashion over one after another of his massive canvasses.


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Monday, November 5, 2018

Review: Mao II

Mao II Mao II by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book seven or eight times, and I long ago decided it’s a modern masterpiece, but – as I read it yet again for a class – it feels fresh yet again.

If you’ve never read DeLillo and want to start, I think this is the one to begin with. It’s less ambitious than Underworld, but then so is almost everything else. I find White Noise vastly overrated; I didn’t enjoy it in its time when it was cutting edge enough to explore the early implications of image-is-everything postmodernism. Now, with that phenomenon old news, I think that book is even less interesting.

In contrast, Mao II is a book that seems to stay new, that seems to reveal new insights as we move ever deeper into the dystopic future DeLillo saw more than 25 years ago.

As I like to put it, this is probably the best post 9/11 novel I know of, even though it was written a decade before the disaster. It must have been eerie in the 1990s to read the reflections of terror that he wrapped around the image of the Twin Towers; from this vantage, it’s all the more striking. In a novel that talks about the nature of the future – as a time when crowds overwhelm the capacity of the individual and when terrorists encroach on the imaginative authority of the novelist – it’s all the more striking to see it after the fact.

There is a bit of woe-is-the-author self-pity that animates this – something I can’t help finding a bit funny as I re-read it and think of DeLillo bemoaning his own late-middle-age fate – but I forgive it. There’s so much skill, I have to write it off as a rare joke from one of our least humorous great writers.

What most compels me on this reading, though, is that we live in a moment where terrorists really are trying to wrest narrative authority from our writers. Our President’s cries of “fake news” are an unsubtle effort (one disturbingly successful) to assert that he, and he along, has the power to narrate experience to us. That’s often consisted of his self-aggrandizement and boasting – sometimes crassly harmless and sometimes dangerous for its justification of harmful policy. In this moment of election campaigning, though, his narrative has become a drumbeat of fear. Today it’s his imagining of a caravan of miserable refugees as something worthy of a military deployment. Tomorrow it will be something else.

But at bottom it will always be about stoking fear, about exaggerating a threat so that, to those inclined toward him, he can exaggerate his own power to defend.

And, of course, the fear he unleashes has the power to hurt in directions he cannot control. It’s barely a week since the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, but I can’t help seeing DeLillo’s prognostication in effect. The gunmen – and the mail bomber barely two days before – were working to make real the story our President is telling. They wanted to bring into the real world the terror born of his fantasy.

Mao II is more sophisticated than anything so simple, but its bedrock question still resonates. When the terrorists determine they will shape the consciousness of the world with their violence, what place is there for the writer? If you know the end of this, the answer is a very bleak one.


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Review: The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End

The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End by Gary Pomerantz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because I read a great excerpt of it in Time. As Pomerantz describes it, this is basketball great Bob Cousy doing something remarkable, let alone for a 91-year-old who’s lived most of his life as a celebrity: reflecting on his own role in race as it played out in his lifetime.

I don’t regret picking up the whole book, but I do feel marginally misled by that excerpt. This book does deal with Cousy as he reflects on his friendship with Bill Russell; the two of them were the twin stars – Russell clearly the greater one – of the first NBA dynasty, one electric and one rock steady, one white and one black. It deals with that friendship, or strange lack thereof, in a beautifully written opening section, and then somewhat less satisfying at the end.

In between this is a different book altogether, also a good one, but not quite what I’d been sold on.

The heart of this is a biography of Cousy, and it’s certainly well done. Pomerantz has great admiration for the man, and he certainly persuades me to share it. Cousy himself felt like an immigrant, felt like a child of the ghetto who experienced a fraction of the native distrust that so haunted Russell.

I had no idea Cousy was, essentially, French, that he was the child of two French immigrants and that English was his second language. (I got to thinking that, alongside Tony Parker and, maybe someday, Frank Nkitlina, the French have a lot to boast about in their point guards.) I’d taken his name for Irish and that, of course, would have made him royalty in Boston. Instead, he could never quite overcome a combination of accent and speech impediment, and he could never quite be home in the world of celebrity athlete that he had a real hand in creating.

Pomerantz has a number of fine passages where he gives a sense of what it must have been like to watch Cousy play in his early days. He was, after George Mikan, the second inventor of modern play. And, where Mikan brought a combination of low-post precision and brute size, Cousy brought flair and creativity. Cousy is the forerunner of the basketball wizard – the Houdini of the hardwood. I think his Youtube clips probably don’t show the great panache of his original moves. Next to the greats of today, to Step Curry to take the exemplar, he must seem drab. In context, though, as Pomerantz describes it, he was a revolution.

This does begin to drag a little in the second half. Pomerantz has some great material, but he recycles the best of it. I think, in the end, the book would have been just as effective, and a little sharper, if it were about 20 percent shorter.

But the culmination here is the profile of Cousy in his waning years. Pomerantz lets us see him as a man unafraid to ask himself a difficult question: how was it possible he could have enjoyed such spectacular on-court chemistry with Russell yet not known the extent of what he endured as an African-American in Boston. (In one harrowing scene – one we get at least three times – vandals broke into Russell’s home, painted racist graffiti, and defecated in his bed.) Cousy seems to have been well ahead of most of his contemporaries when it came to race – he roomed with the Celtics first black player, and he served as a Big Brother to a handful of adolescent African-American boys – so he could easily plead his own documented good works. Instead, he probes his conscience for times he failed to ask the necessary question, for times he might have been even braver than he was and put his hard-earned reputation at risk.

And, while there is a lot to chew on in those culminating reflections, the somewhat disappointing truth is that they’re unresolved. Outside of a powerful scene in which Cousy, in a live television interview, began crying when asked about his relationship with Russell (another scene repeated multiple times) Pomerantz isn’t able to show us too much detail in Cousy’s reflections. I’m persuaded to admire the basketball player, admire the dignified way he’s aging in a world slowly forgetting the magnitude of his innovations, but I don’t quite have a sense of how I should admire him.

Cousy, that is, deserves admiration for his intention to ask himself deep questions at a time most of his contemporaries have faded or died. Pomerantz deserves credit for laying out those intentions as clearly as he does (and for the loving and attentive biography he works around that project). In the end, though, we see only the first half of the play – the pass as it’s leaving the hands of thoughtful man Cousy and careful writer Pomerantz. Good as this is, I’d like to see the second half of the play, the part where we see the pass get caught, the part where we see the reconciliation with Russell. And that, I’m afraid – both in life and in this otherwise fine book – we do not get to see.


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Monday, October 29, 2018

Review: Siddhartha

Siddhartha Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was in high school, freshman and sophomore era, I first discovered Kurt Vonnegut and then – at the instigation of some older cousins – Herman Hesse. They were the two “serious” writers I first came to, and I can still see their books intermingled on an adolescent book shelf. (They were those thin, cheap mass market paperbacks, probably $ 1.75 or $1.95 each, and I recall the Hesse as being a sort of yellow, though I have a self-diagnosed color amnesia and can generally not remember the color of anything I’ve seen.)

I remember enjoying the Hesse, but I think I enjoyed it more for the idea of myself reading Hesse than for the Hesse itself. I liked the sense of myself as a 15 year old casually paging through a book that college students were struggling over. In any case, I don’t think I understood the context of what Hesse was saying. To me it was a kind of self-help manual. Now, revisiting – still somewhat casually – it seems to me a broadside against more established European philosophy. I must have seen that Siddhartha was “for” the power of the individual experience – the necessity of traveling ones own path – but I’m sure I had no sense that it was arguing against a philosophical tradition that saw itself as building upon those experiences that preceded it.

I admire what Hesse is saying here – that you have to look yourself for wisdom, that relying on teachers will always necessarily subordinate you to the experience of an other. I plan to spend more time chewing on the intriguing notion that our Siddhartha found even the Buddha wanting, not because the Buddha’s spiritual growth was suspect but because, if the Buddha had found a way out of Sansara into Nirvana, the “chink” he found in the great chain of existence was himself. Our Siddhartha (because, of course, the Buddha shares that name, though Hesse uses a different one for him here) believes he has to find his own path. His answer will never be as powerful as the Buddha’s, but it will be his, and that is a necessary component for him.

I’m not sure how sold I am on the image of the voice of the river as that ultimate answer. Listening to the river teaches him that it’s possible to move beyond time, teaches him that – as much as there is to enjoy in the physicality of the world – there is a blessing in recognizing that all things pass and we are part of them.

I read this because I am excited to take on the sequel that my friend William Irwin has just brought out. (Check out Little Siddhartha when you get a chance. I have my copy sitting at home in the kitchen, and I can read it now that I’ve revisited the original for the first time since 1981.) As I reflect on it now, though, I can’t help putting it in conversation with Vonnegut, who lives very much in my consciousness at the moment since I have re-read his work recently more fully than at any time in those same 37 years.

I got to see Vonnegut speak in college, and he said something that’s hung with me. He was very cranky about meditation – as I understand it, his first marriage dissolved in part because his wife found her way into Eastern spirituality, and he felt it estranged them. He told us in Ann Arbor (though it was a canned speech, and I’m sure he made it on many other occasions) that he understood some of the appeal of meditation, of the desire to lose oneself within a larger space of consciousness. He felt there was a Western equivalent, though, one that wasn’t getting the same contemporary publicity.

That is, he said he understood reading as “Western meditation,” as proudly part of the tradition that Hesse implicitly broke with. The goal in reading as he saw it wasn’t to merge with the godhead; it wasn’t to find ones way out of a sense of self and to merge with the divine or another conception of the mechanism of the universe. Instead, he said, the idea is to find oneself within the conversation of one consciousness with another.

That’s stuck with me for a long time and, given the choice, I think I’ll always embrace the experience of my fully aware self shaking hands with another mind over the impulse to lose my mind within something larger.

Meandering as all this is, my point is that I find those two “serious” writers of my adolescence much more at odds than their mixed place on my shelf would suggest. Siddhartha, as I read it, advocates for fleeing the self through a journey dependent on the self. Vonnegut gives us characters who are alien, but pushes toward a sense of recognizing the self as a distinct someone in a lonely universe.

That’s probably too pat to do either justice, but it’s how things look on this morning, some 35 years after I last really saw those two authors as talking to each other, and talking to me.


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Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Review: Hi Bob!

Hi Bob! Hi Bob! by Bob Newhart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – and if you aren’t you should be – then you know that Lenny Bruce appears as the comic lodestar of the early 1960s. He’s the one pushing the envelope, the one who’s both a model for and a provocation to Midge as she figures out her own comic voice.

If you look closely, Bob Newhart is there as well. It’s his routine that Midge’s wannabe comedian husband steals and performs as his own. (It’s the skit where he’s on the phone, as Abraham Lincoln’s press agent, counseling him about how to speak to the nation about Gettysburg.) It’s funny, even in the show we see it’s funny, but it’s also safe.

So, as we allow the history of American standup to solidify into a canonical narrative, that seems Newhart’s place in it. He’s the epitome of that formative moment’s notion of solid and safe. He is, to take a later era’s players, the Jay Leno of the early to mid-1960s, someone who reliably delivered laughs but didn’t leave behind the ripples of the more influential David Letterman or even Gary Shandling.

I think this book is Newhart’s answer to that implicit, whispered sense of his legacy. In it, he interviews – or, really, converses with – a series of today’s heavyweight comics. It’s loosely organized around topics, with the interviews broken up and spliced into something like a coherent whole, but the essence of it is to remind us that Newhart’s voice still resonates in the way he’s influenced this impressive wave of comedians. (And it is impressive: Will Ferrell, Conan O’Brian, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Lisa Kudrow.)

And, while if it ever comes to Team Lenny Bruce vs. Team Bob Newhart I’m all in for Bruce, I think that’s a good thing. If the Bruce school of comedy is all about making comedy a weapon to go after the hypocrites who are – and always will be – in control, Newhart’s is simply about taking the sting out of the discomforts of the modern world. He sees hypocrisy too, and he looks at it with his eyes open, but he takes it on by gentling it. He isn’t angry, and that anger isn’t born from the ashes of a frustrated idealism. Instead, he’s amused by the human condition. Bruce wants to get us out of our seats and agitating the status quo. Newhart wants us to see that the status quo is us. It isn’t revolution, but it is a small step toward making us all a little better.

This is an audiobook, which is a good way to hear Newhart’s voice. There’s perhaps a little more warble than there was in The Bob Newhart Show days, but his impeccable timing is still there. He is, at age 88, still a very funny man, and part of the charm of this book is to remind us that he has always appreciated comedy as an art form, that he was one of the boosters of the generation (and possibly generations) that have followed him.

There are some good insights into how comedy works. Silverman, Ferrell, and O’Brian in particular talk with him about some of the art of standup. There are also some nice nuggets about the comedy world of five or six decades ago. I mean, who else alive can talk about headlining in Vegas in the mobbed-up moment of the Rat Pack’s preeminence.

But the real reason to listen to this is that it’s a lot of very funny people telling stories and jokes that, with few exceptions, hold up. Lenny Bruce was incandescent and, if you buy into the narrative around him, that very incandescence meant he was doomed to a brilliant but short career. Newhart always cast a gentler light, one that’s directed the way for more comics than he gets credit for, and, remarkably, it’s still shining.


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Monday, October 22, 2018

Review: The Power

The Power The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel has a magnificent premise. It’s a premise on the order of Gulliver’s Travels or Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” It’s the kind of premise that allows you to see through a lot of the contradictions of our culture, that strips away the familiar and leaves you looking at possibilities that didn’t seem to exist before it. It’s the kind of premise that could conceivably give birth to multiple novels and short stories, all taking it in different and provocative directions.

The problem is, Naomi Alderman has given us multiple novels at the same time.

Alderman imagines a world in which women have developed the power to transmit electricity through touch. They can deliver paralyzing and even fatal charges that render them, all at once, the stronger gender. In the span of several years, men go from being implicitly in control – thanks to their larger muscles – to dependent, based on the fact that they would lose in physical encounters with most women.

Parts of this story deal with the personal level. We see young women who, discovering what they can do, take control of their lives, measure the emptiness of revenge, and deal with the complications of romantic relationships shaped differently from the ones they’ve been schooled to expect. (Think of much of the Jocelyn story here.)

Parts deal with the cultural. We see women pushing for notions of gender equality with greater power behind them. They don’t have to settle for the role of ‘little sister’ or ‘dependent girlfriend.’ They can take over and run things like the men who ran them before them. (Think of Roxy.)

Parts deal with the geo-political. We see, for instance, the rise of a new nation headed by the angry and ambitious Tatiana, and we see Margot building a political and business consortium that allows her to become one of the United States’ most influential politicians.

Parts deal with greater and deeper anger. Allie, who reconceives herself as “Eve,” nurtures an increasingly apocalyptic vision in which she reinterprets traditional religious scripture as a mandate for women’s superiority, can never escape the shadow of the sexual abuse she experienced as an adolescent.

And parts deal with meta-narrative in which we see the events of the novel as the imagined reconstruction of a time of upheaval as reconstructed by a man 5000 years in the future. He’s trying in his work to question the, by that time, implicit understanding that women dominate men.

I wish Alderman had picked one of those stories to explore and broaden. Any one of them would likely have been powerful. Instead, it’s as if she’s taken a plate full at a story buffet. Like an analogous plate at a Chinese restaurant, the result is promising flavors that bleed into each other. There are different places that look as if they’d make a full and memorable meal, but there’s no opportunity to enjoy the full experience of any of them.

The clash of impulses shows up in many places. For one, most sections of the novel come to us in conventional (and effective) ways as present tense. We see characters respond to changing events and grow with new experiences. It’s “novel” in the sense that it seems to be working toward the new, toward a surprise discovery. At the same time, though, we’re supposed to accept the frame narrative that the entire story is the product of an archeologist historian so unfamiliar with our world that he can’t conceive of large scale issues like sexism or Christianity as we know it. At a level of representation, it simply doesn’t work. I’d like to read the novel that results in the confusion that Alderman exploits – that she exploits with real effectiveness in the closing exchange of letters in the final chapter, for instance – but that’s not the one she’s written. Given what we know of our future historian’s ignorance, there’s no way he could have known enough to write the larger story we’ve received from such a personal perspective.

Or, for instance, there’s the clash of scale. Much of this deals with the sort of narrative I expected when I first heard the premise. We see women, or really girls, who discover what it means to be powerful, who discover what it means to own a privilege contemporary women know to be denied them. We see characters like Jocelyn negotiating those changed sexual politics as their strength subtly shifts a balance that is, for purposes of their story, real but invisible. At the same time as individuals struggle for a fuller sense of self, though, we learn about other women who have taken over the government. These women have skipped the personal politics and gone straight for all-out war. I care about Jocelyn, but there’s only so much I can care when others have cultivated their strength to the point that armies are on the move. There’s simply a contradiction in the way we’re called upon to see the simultaneous effects of the power.

And, even at the level of the premise, there’s the question of what’s happening. This begins, as we see it primarily through Allie/Eve’s eyes as a mystical experience. It’s moving to sense that the power has emerged from millennia of repressed hurt and anger. Women deserve this power as something that can allow them to make amends for a sexism that stretches back to our animal origins. Somewhere around halfway, though, the mysticism gets pushed back as scientific explanations begin to predominate. It’s less a mystical notion than a physical one, and scientists identify an organ, “the skein,” as a bundle of nerves running through a woman’s collarbone, as the explanation for what’s going on. Unlikely men – a group of Jewish gangsters – come to understand the anatomy well enough that they can even surgically remove one skein and implant it into a man. I find that change in tone, that surrendering of the mystical, righteous anger that gave birth to one idea of the power, as much a sci-fi mistake as it was for the “first” Star Wars trilogy to reduce “the force” to something called midichlorians in the blood stream. It’s not just lazy storytelling; it’s also a diminishment of what made the work evocative in the first place.

There’s much to admire in what’s here sporadically, and I have a sense it might work very well in the apparently in-production large-scale television series that may come of it. Given a larger canvas – and, I trust, with the awkward framing device removed – it will be something to see the unfolding of a new culture as women establish themselves as the more powerful gender. I won’t forget the premise, but I will forget most of the confused and contradictory strands of the stor(ies) that emerge in this version of it.


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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Review: Creative Quest

Creative Quest Creative Quest by Ahmir Questlove Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this one for a lot of different reasons, ones that don’t cohere, but that I think reflect some of the messiness, serendipity, and inspiration of this intriguing work.

1) It was on sale. That may sound silly. I can certainly afford to buy full-priced books – even the audio books I consume at a clip of 4-5 a month these days – but I find it overwhelming to look at the tens of thousands of options in the full bookstore. Instead, it’s easier to look at the ones Audible puts on sale for just a day. I pass on most, but one in ten or sometimes twenty will grab me. This one did.

2) I’ve thought a lot about creativity and its sources myself. I have an essay about plagiarism that, filtered through some practical concerns, became a class I designed (with help) for incoming Honors students called Ideamaking. I have another essay about the distinctions between creation, invention, and discovery. Until I started thinking about this book, I hadn’t realized how consistently I’d been asking the same sort of questions Questlove is.

3) I don’t know Questlove all that well. For that matter, I don’t know hip-hop as well as I’d like. From what I understand, he’s an articulate figure within the genre. He’s someone sufficiently on the cutting edge to matter, yet he’s also got a capacity to talk to “squares” like me or Jimmy Fallon, guys too old to have absorbed hip-hop in our adolescence. His voice holds up here, and I enjoyed my time with him, but there are spots where things get a bit repetitive. I liked it, but I think it might have been stronger at about one-fifth shorter. Some of the references came too quickly for me, but I’m trying to catch up now that I’m finished. I have a D’Angelo song playing right now. It may still not quite do it for me, but I am hearing it in a different way. I am imagining how I might really enjoy it, and that has to count as a real win for this book.

4) I discovered only after starting this that Questlove’s co-author is Ben Greenman. Ben was a classmate of mine at Northwestern. He didn’t rise to the level of friend, but we had at least a couple classes together and spoke a handful of times. He was himself a strangely creative person. I remember him most dramatically in a class where we were both a little bored. I compensated by forcing myself to be over-interested, to take absurdly complete notes and raise my hand often to try to find ways to engage with the material. Ben said nothing. Instead, he’d stare at the professor as he wrote – somehow not looking at his notepad – strange free association stories and essays. I never got to read any of them (he wouldn’t share) but I asked him about them a few times. I probably even tried a couple times to read over his shoulder if I happened to be sitting next to him.

5) Questlove talks a lot here about the nature of collaboration, so it’s intriguing to read this for signs of my old acquaintance’s contributions. I can’t tease out too many of them – there’s the occasional literary reference that seems to have his fingerprints on it – but Questlove acknowledges Ben a handful of times. I imagine Ben is proud of his contributions to this (I certainly would be) and it’s interesting to think of how certain works of art that grow out of collaboration, even when they have one person’s name on them, have multiple influences. This is, in part, Ben’s book. Maybe there are even an atom or two of it that grew out of the conversations I had with him after class or in one of Evanston’s bars – not my ideas, but ideas Ben sharpened when he explained them to me and the rest of our class. You don’t have to be the knife that carves the wood; sometimes you contribute by being the whetstone.

6) And then there’s the fact that Questlove (and Ben) have some thoughtful things to say about how to understand and possibly stoke creativity. I liked his breaking down the notion of cognitive disinhibition, the sense that we can’t be afraid of new ideas even though we set up all sorts of barriers against them. (My father wrote about a different version of the same thing in a short essay called “Circumventing the Self-Censor.”) I also liked the way he emphasized the notion of “seeds.” In a way that brings those two things together, he says, “It’s not about letting everything in; it’s more about not keeping things out.” The line between the two is thin, but it seems the sort of notion that, in its necessary vagueness, becomes a useful meditation for the would-be creative.

7) And, in a final thought, I really liked his discussion of “negative theology” as a metaphor for the unwritten (or uncomposed) work. That is, in some Jewish theology, we can’t know G-d directly so we work to know what G-d is not: not localized, not time-bound, not singular in essence. We should not worship our own art – I’ll add that as paraphrase and caution – but we can begin to recognize it before it comes into existence if we decide what we don’t want it to be. I like that idea enough that I think I will use it as part of the next brainstorming activity I do in class.

8) So this book is all those thoughts and more. It’s not my usual audio fare, but I mostly enjoyed it. It’s a strange book with an appeal to only a certain sort. If you’ve read this much, though, chances are you’re one of those sorts.


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Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Review: Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady

Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady by Milton Caniff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Terry and the Pirates is a one of those phenomena that time forgot. For a while not so long before and during World War II, it was one of the leading comics of its moment, up there with Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie as one of those cultural touchstones that every kid would have known and every adult would have recognized. Terry told the adventures of its title character and some of the adults he met in his travels in China and the Far East. And, more famous than even the strip’s heroes, was its seductive villainess, the Dragon Lady.

There’s an adventurousness to all this, and it’s only fair to note that Caniff could really draw. It’s amazing to think he wrote and drew a daily strip and then, at least for part of that time, added a full-blown Sunday as well.

But, but, but, the racism and sexism are simply shocking. I read this because I have a student doing some very interesting work on the image of China in the West – shout out to Alexis – so I finished something that often felt flat-out insulting. I mean, can you imagine someone referring to a woman as a “slant-eyed broad”? Or, can you imagine a servile sidekick, Connie, who happily accepts being kicked around and mocked, even by Terry and their hero-pal Pat? And “very” spelled as “velly”? Ugh.

It’s easy to forget now, but both Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie were conservative political imaginings. I did a part of my dissertation on the anti-immigrant implications of Dick Tracy’s capacity for recognizing villains as ethnically other. And there isn’t much more to say about Little Orphan Annie than that her adoptive father is Daddy Warbucks, a reimagining of the war profiteer as secretly generous…despite what those commies might think.

The crucial difference here, though, is that while those strips dealt with difference within America – as they performed what my old advisor Carl Smith called the “cultural work” of naming the differences among our different American constituencies – Terry and the Pirates dealt with a purely imagined “Orient.” Its hero is allowed to be tougher than everyone else. He can be referred to as “the handsome one.” He can be sold into slavery as a mercenary, but he commands a dramatically high price because of his capacity to outfight everyone else.

And, of course, the Dragon Lady is imagined as a woman of staggering beauty who cannot be satisfied by any but a white Western man.

As such, Terry ultimately had less to say about “us,” about America as it was, than it did about an American vision of China and the East that never could be. It’s a fantasy, one firmly rooted in jingoism and, yes, sexism. Dick Tracy may have been square-jawed and all-too-certain in that police-state way, but he dealt with the reality of crime. Terry and the Dragon Lady celebrated a sense of privilege and Western supremacy that, especially in retrospect, seems full of an anxiety it never finds the courage to confront.

The whole premise is ugly and, outside its intriguing art work and historical role, there isn’t much reason to remember it.

Still, Alexis is working to show that the trope of the Dragon Lady – of the Chinese woman who uses her beauty and wiles to entrap Westerners – is an enduring one. There may have been hints of it before Terry, but she made it full blown. And it persists today. I’m thinking in particular of the disappointing news that the generally culturally sensitive J.K. Rowling has announced that Voldemort’s snake, Nagini, was originally an Asian witch who transformed.

I satisfied some curiosity in reading this one. I’m happy to move on and leave it to Alexis.


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Saturday, October 13, 2018

Review: The Poser

The Poser The Poser by Jacob Rubin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came across this one when I was looking into some questions of impersonation and politics and found that Rubin had written a thoughtful essay on Dana Carvey’s take on George H. Bush. I thought it was very well done, and it didn’t hurt that I share his opinion that Carvey introduced a new twist into Saturday Night Live’s political discourse with that act.

In any case, this novel starts out beautifully as it fulfills a difficult ambition. Giovanni can impersonate anyone. He’s a prodigy; even as an infant even he responded to the facial expressions greeting him. To make this work, Rubin has to be a skilled mimic himself, has to be able to perform one voice after another on the page.

And, for most of this, he is. The guy can write, and the joy of discovering that in this, his first novel is part of what makes reading it so rewarding. It’s a novel that carries with it some of the weight of the act that Giovanni puts together and then performs in a seedy little theater.

So the character and context here are terrific. The story that develops in that space takes more time, and, while it starts out just as impressively, it tails off toward the end.

Initially, Giovanni finds himself drawn to impersonating others because it seems he may have no self at the core of his identity. When Max, a two-bit show biz manager finds him, he gives Giovanni someone to imitate. Through that mimicry, Giovanni finds a public pose that allows him to market his skill. Max is a bit of shyster, but he’s ultimately loveable, and that gives Giovanni a purpose.

From there, Giovanni finds himself drawn to imitating Bernie, a much more serious theater owner. Bernie represents a more sinister allure than the pleasantly shady Max. He’s aggressive in business, disparaging of those who work for him, and ultimately ruthless. If you throw in Lucy, a not-so-talented singer-actress who may or may not be the first person (beyond his controlling mother) to love Giovanni, and you have an almost mythic array of characters and relationships.

The novel starts to weaken a little when Rubin has to move those characters into new situations and settings. We leave the Broadway-like setting of the first two-thirds or so and wind up, first, in Hollywood where Giovanni becomes an unlikely movie star, and then in a less clear context where he becomes a right-wing political provocateur. Shaped by Bernie, he brings his capacity for mimicry to the campaign trail, and he weds his gifts to a cruel species of politics.

The novel is two or three years old, but, in that respect, it feels as if it’s anticipating Trump in the way that Kosinski’s Being There anticipated Reagan. Where that previously unthinkable empty suit candidacy was central to the whole novel, though, this feels somewhat appended. It’s not, ultimately, a political or even social novel. At its best, and that best is impressive, it’s a personal one.

The tragedy of Giovanni’s life is that he’s not sure he can find himself beneath the voices of others that he wears like a protective suit. Rubin gets back to that in the end, after his detour into perhaps too-public a life, and brings those ideas back as Giovanni meets a peculiar therapist who mostly understands him.

It’s not a complaint to say that this excellent set-piece veers a bit too long into picaresque. Rather, I’d be happy to try to imitate Rubin myself since I’m awfully impressed by what he’s pulled off.


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Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Review: The Unknown Terrorist

The Unknown Terrorist The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am currently auditioning Flanagan for my favorite active writer. He got off to a great start in my reading with two of my favorite novels of the last few years – The Narrow Road to the Deep North and First Person. At his best, he strikes me as world-class, as someone who ought to get sounded out for a Nobel Prize, especially given that he comes from Tasmania and gives voice to a culture the rest of the world doesn’t get to glimpse all that often.

I had more mixed feelings about his Death of a River Guide, but that was the first he’d written, and I figured he’d learned more of his craft afterwards. This one, though, is a disappointment. It may well have packed a certain power when it first came out, but at this point it seems to be cherishing insights that we now recognize as commonplace.

Stripper Gina Davies goes out one evening with an attractive Middle Eastern man. When he’s murdered soon after, the authorities mistake her for his partner, and she becomes the most wanted terrorist in Australia. Taking place in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, this novel tries to capture the universal paranoia of that moment. The central notion is that we have to find someone to blame, that our culture demands almost a collective sacrifice to begin to feel safe again.

As the novel moves along, Gina becomes that central sacrifice. She’s elevated to it by the machinations of an over-the-top journalist who has it out for her ever since she rebuffed him at her dance club, and then she eventually embraces it herself. She comes to see herself as almost a “painted bird” (to take the title metaphor of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel) whom the rest of the world has turned upon. And [SPOILER:] she embraces it, deciding at the end to kill the journalist and own up to the fictional crimes she’s been associated with.

While there’s something in the general paranoia of that situation, it feels cliched by this point – and that’s before we get to such flat characters as the pudgy journalist, the heart-of-gold best friend stripper, or the overweight cop who’s a step slow to solve the whole problem. We’re almost two decades away from the sense that terrorists have the power to rewrite the narrative of the culture, and Don DeLillo was making that point at least as far back as Mao II in 1991. From within the years just after 9/11 – and this was published five years after – it felt as if “we” were trying to recover our mutual bearings, as if we accepted a sense of arbitrary guilt. Some of that manifest itself through efforts to understand the experience of the dispossessed of the Middle East. More of it came clear through impulses like George W. Bush and the Neo-conservatives drumming for war with Iraq.

Gina’s eventual self-sacrifice seems to me an ironic rendering of that neo-conservative notion. ‘The world is off its axis. We have to attack someone to restore it.’ In the end, though, I don’t find it all that satisfying. I’m not in an especially ironic mood – with Donald Trump as President, there’s already a toxic level of irony in our everyday lives – but I don’t know that I’d have appreciated this even a few years ago. I simply don’t see Gina’s fundamental transition. In fact, I can’t quite shake the fact that it took a bad coincidence for her not to turn herself in before things reached crisis levels – when she arrives at the police station, a detained man creates a scene and the police clear the station. No such accident, and no such novel.

I could almost forgive the empty center of this if the novel weren’t rife with other problems. Gina is almost always called “the doll,” a name that comes from her performance as a pole dancer. That is, she’s objectified from the start, from even before she turns into an accidental terrorist. The first thirty or forty pages seem larded with gratuitous descriptions of her naked self, yet, in the classic irony of pornography, her nakedness is precisely the shield that makes her invisible.

As a consequence, when she does transform, it’s less clear what she’s transforming from: is it the clear-minded woman saving her dollars for a dramatic new start, the spend-it-while-she-has-it would-be fashionista, or the almost-enlightened woman who recognizes her suffering in the suffering of others. She performs as all three from the very beginning, and her final self-sacrifice seems more dramatic than narratively determined. I just don’t see the growth that would stamp this as a true success.

I’m not giving up on Flanagan. I’m still shooting to read all of his work. I hope this one is simply a one-off mistake, a misstep by a writer as talented as anyone I know of right now.


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Friday, October 5, 2018

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been ambivalent about W.B. Yeats’s poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” for many years. In it, Yeats grapples with the death of the son of his long-time friend Lady Gregory by reviewing the many deaths that have shaken him over the years. He thinks of his grandfather, an uncle, and a mentor figure, and only after that, he turns to think of Robert Gregory, shot down as an aviator during World War I. As he concludes, “a thought of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

On the one hand, I’ve admired that line for its implicit power. Here is arguably the greatest poet of the century claiming that words fail him. In so quiet a way, he pays the deepest respect he can to the friend and son-like figure he’s lost: he’s said that even he cannot find language for the deep grief. On the other hand, it looks like an instance of Yeats blinking in the face of his own great pain. It is, in that view, a kind of cowardice. Owning up to it would mean wrestling with a pain that might make him question all he knows of his life; it might mean a naked self-examination he chose not to undertake. (There’s a lot to be said about Yeats’s fundamental cowardice, the sense of his living his life and career in a self-scripted fashion that ultimately underwrote his fascism, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think of Yeats as I think about this powerful memoir of Joan Didion because, in contrast, Didion is fearless as she contemplates the loss of her husband and the imminent loss of her only child. From its opening line, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,” we see Didion acknowledging the most difficult truth possible: that she may not know enough even to be writing the words that she is. In fact, she acknowledges that she wrote those words and then had to come back to them later to realize the vulnerable place she’d set upon to begin with.

Overall, yes, this is a book about mourning, and it’s been good for me to read it in the lightening shadow of my own mother’s death this summer. But what I take away most from it is Didion’s absolute insistence on looking the unknown in the face and not blinking. She cries a lot. She allows herself to be distracted by quotidian memories of a life that, charming as it is, isn’t all that interesting for those of us who didn’t lead it. And she finds solace in quick references to classic and contemporary books that she sees as providing glimpses of the same grief she’s experiencing. But, throughout, she is grappling with the kind of deeply honest question that Yeats so articulately side-stepped: an idea I’d paraphrase as “What’s left of me when so much of my world is gone?”

If that weren’t enough, the first 30-40 pages of this are absolutely stunning. It’s hardly news that Didion is one of our best living essayists (although it may be worth noting, as I read this book almost 13 years after it came out, that she hasn’t written a great deal since this great public disrobing) but the quality of her prose is flat-out lyrical in that opening sweep. I must have read parts of this when it came out because much of it was very familiar. I hadn’t read it all, though, yet it remained familiar even as I kept going to passages that must have been new to me.

The metaphor that kept coming to me was jazz. It felt like I was reading a solo by someone like Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane, like I was hearing something the musician/author was creating in the instant. In the best jazz, you get the sense that the next note is arbitrary, as if it could be any number of possibilities, but that, once played, it could only have been that note. It’s as if the musician/author is unearthing something that hadn’t existed until it did, and that then had to be the way it was.

I’m not sure quite how long that lyrical section runs on, but that’s part of its power. It catches you up and wraps you in its language. It may as well be a poem, and I suspect even Yeats might have admired its technical power.

Then, not abruptly, we get interrupted by Didion’s reconsideration of the life she’s choppily trying to resume as well as by memories of the everyday life she and her husband lived. I’ll own up, as many other reviewers have acknowledged, that it gets a little slow in those parts. I’m sympathetic when she describes the child-made bookmark she finds in the last book her husband was reading or when she listens to his voice on the answering machine message, but I’m not particularly moved. There’s a quotidian quality to it, an almost boring sense that she’s making a public record that would ordinarily belong to her private self.

As I kept going, though, I began to sense that even such slowness was part of the jazz composition effect. The quotidian is counter-point to the lyrical. Didion knows she’s good in those early pages. She knows she’s found the voice that made her famous and that she’s using it to grapple with her new crisis. And yet, in a way I find beautiful beneath the ordinariness, she doubts that. Unlike Yeats, she lets herself ponder herself without “the coat” (as Yeats puts it in one early poem) of her great language. He boasts “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” but she’s the one who goes to that place of vulnerability that he can never let himself reach. She is, in other words, unafraid to step outside her Coltrane-like technique and confront her loss in language ordinary enough for most of the rest of us to have used.

Through all that, I haven’t touched what seems to me her central insight. In classical times, we understood grief as a necessary and public experience. We lost loved ones too often, and we lost them in sight of others rather than in quiet hospitals. As a result, we recognized the world-denying “illness” of grief as something that would change the way we interacted with the world.

In our contemporary time, we have worked to shelter ourselves from death. Our medicine is so powerful that we can deny it in ways unthinkable even a century ago. The classical thinkers would have thought us children for the hope we place in recovery from infection or physical defect; they could not have believed the tenacity with which we still imagine even our weakest will hold onto life.

As a result, we tend to be more startled by death and therefore less prepared for it. Our grief has a different power because we have not allowed ourselves to anticipate it in the same ways. We have, that is, allowed our technology and the busy-ness (yes, the quotidian) of our culture to keep from us the truth we all begin to suspect even in childhood: that everything and everyone we know will pass.

So, Didion’s book here questions much of the foundation of our contemporary experience. This is a memoir about the loss of her husband – and about the dawning acknowledgement that she is losing her daughter – but it’s even more powerfully about her recognition that there is more yet to lose. That’s as brave a recognition as I can imagine, and she faces it with a courage that makes it seem possible for me to take one more small step away from my own grief at losing my mother.

It's hard to ask much more of any book.


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Monday, October 1, 2018

Review: Mother Night

Mother Night Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m now halfway into my third period as a Vonnegut reader. The first was when I was in high school and the beginning of college. He was, then, the first “serious” contemporary writer I discovered, the first novelist who gave me some of the tools to make sense of the adult political world I was discovering, in large measure, through the critique he offered of it.

The second was, for most of my life as a serious reader and thinker about literature – a period when I got advanced degrees in American literature and taught full-time at the college level – when I generally dismissed Vonnegut as a writer of his moment, as someone who was “fun” when I came across him but who no longer had a great deal to tell us.

The third started seven or eight years ago, I suppose, when I re-read Cat’s Cradle and realized it remained, to paraphrase Ezra Pound’s quote that “poetry is news that stays news,” still novel. Since then, I have been slowly reworking my way through the Vonnegut canon. They haven’t all held up – Breakfast of Champions, for instance, strikes me as gimmicky and unrealized even though it has moments of being fun – but most have. I am, for instance, trying to weigh whether I can live with standing behind the claim that “Slaughterhouse Five is one of the important American novels of the 20th century.”

The sum of all this is that I am contemplating some big project on Vonnegut, an academic article or even a book about him and the distinct way he addressed the narrative of trauma. My thesis is that, unlike Hemingway who taught us that trauma expresses itself in the difficulty of forming the coherent sentence, Vonnegut gives us easy sentences that push against the possibility (a possibility he sometimes casts as immoral) of creating the coherent narrative. Another possibility is a senior seminar or adult ed class where we look at Vonnegut’s canon.

All of that is too-long prologue for my sense that Mother Night – which does hold up better than I thought it might – seems to me an important Vonnegut novel. It may clock in behind Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, but I think it’s right there with God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in the next tier.

As I see it at the moment, Slaughterhouse Five is the culmination of Vonnegut’s career; it’s the novel he knew he had to write in order to express the central trauma of his life. Mother Night is, instead, an inspired idea for a novel, one that reflects on the news of its moment and that Vonnegut used as a means to develop the voice he’d use more personally in his later works.

The crucial news of the moment, which Vonnegut references in the novel, was the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was a man who, looking as Hannah Arendt would describe him, “banal,” stood behind the most horrifying evil of the century, perhaps even in all of human history. Arendt’s signature work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, actually came out after Mother Night, but each was grappling with the same question: how could our everyday life, our banality, persist while the memory of such crime lingered or, worse, while we allowed such memories to fade.

Arendt wrote as an observer, as someone frustrated with her inability to see Eichmann as a sign of such evil. In a way that strikes me as deeply brave, Vonnegut inserted his own consciousness. As a novelist, he assumed some of Eichmann’s guilt – he gives us a first-person protagonist who’s served as a heinous Nazi propagandist – but he complicated it.

Howard Campbell, Jr. is not purely evil. In fact, though he spoke as he did throughout the war, he did so as a secret agent, managing to transmit crucial information to the Allies. He is a hero of the most complicated sort, one whom politics and history can never acknowledge. And, as the compelling conclusion puts it, his heroism is still not enough to save him from himself.

So, where Arendt makes an abstract philosophical claim about the nature of evil, Vonnegut places the question on the individual. He asks, Is real but secret resistance to the evil sufficient motive to be seen, forever, as complicit with it. And he asks even further, Can any of us be innocent if we have lived in a world that permitted such evil. Those are powerful questions, ones that resonated with me as an adolescent but that likely would have mattered to me less in my young adulthood.

And, while there are some Vonnegut mannerisms that sometimes distract from that central seriousness, there is something timeless about this novel. I hadn’t read it in more than 30 years, but I found crucial plot points – [SPOILER:] that Resi is posing as Helga, that Bernard B. O’Hare has a false sense of self-importance, that the Blue Fairy Godmother reveals himself – not just familiar but seemingly necessary. That is, it took me that long to realize it, but Vonnegut achieves the level of “true fable” with this. He creates an imaginary experience that seems entirely true to its internal premises.

As a bottom line, I am still working through how exuberantly I am willing to praise Vonnegut. If he is as great as I think he might actually be – if he really is one of the crucial writers of the second half of the 20th Century – then this is a novel we ought to be reading for a long time to come.


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