Review: Replay

Replay by Ken Grimwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went looking for this book because I’d heard it was essentially the same plot as Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, a book I very much enjoyed. Superficially, that’s true. Both work on the premise that an individual lives his life, dies, and is reborn knowing everything he experienced the previous times around. That’s an obscure plot possibility, so it’s easy to see the connection. I know some reviewers complained that North simply stole Grimwood’s idea.

As it turns out, though, reading this one – which is nearly as good as North’s book – is fun in large part because of its differences. Each book is a reflection of its era. Each takes the same concept and applies it to a different cultural argument. As someone who’s been trained in historical literary criticism, I know that at a theoretical level, but it’s striking to see it play out as it does between these two. In fact, given that both have a lot to offer, I think it would be a good assignment – for a class, maybe, but certainly just for the reading experience – to read them back to back.

North, in her 2014 book, takes the notion of fable comfortably; she takes for granted that different experiences or perceptions sit side by side and determine the reality we experience. That’s axiomatic in an age of “alternative facts.” We’re in the middle of it now, but maybe a couple decades from now it will stand out as striking that so many of us in this moment happily embraced fantasies of one sort or another. How different experientially, after all, is Marvel’s sustained Cinematic Universe, from what it must feel like to accept the narrative our President puts forward; one imagined truth sits upon another until it’s an edifice large enough to walk inside and close the door behind.

Replay is, at bottom, a late 1980s novel rather than one from the 2010s. It’s less trusting of fable, with the result that we get a more sustained push for verisimilitude. In fact, one of the two major ways this falls short of the fun of North’s novel is that this is simply more tedious in its detail. Writing in that moment, Grimwood must have felt called on to make more elements of his work “believable,” with the result that it moves more slowly.

North succeeds by asking us to open ourselves to a staggering new potential view of “the real.” (In fact, her ‘replayers’ could be the basis for a conspiracy theory, and they are actually a group of conspirators who establish vast fortunes and security for one another over the ages.) The real comparison for Grimwood, then, is other writers of his moment, writers who were working in the wake of the disappointment of “flower power” and other 1970s optimisms.

The most obvious point of comparison, then, is Groundhog Day, a fabulous film that’s ultimately about the notion that the universe is benign, that it’s singled out Bill Murray’s character so he has the opportunity to learn what really matters in his life. He relives his one day over and over until he gets it right, until he gets Andi MacDowell and learns to put others before himself.

More effective as a comparison, though, is Forrest Gump. The Winston Groom novel is published in the same year as this one, and – at least by the time it’s a movie – it’s a conservative, cynical farewell to what it sees as the excesses of the 1960s and early 1970s. Jenny goes with every fad, every would-be new age discovery, and she suffers for it. Forrest, too dumb to be distracted, clings to old school ways, valuing the things Groom thinks we’ve forgotten to value, things only a self-centered soul could forget about.

This novel is hardly as cynical and conservative as Forrest Gump, but its biggest departure from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is in its ultimately acknowledging that we can’t answer life’s deepest questions. The novel explicitly asks what we’re supposed to do with the near-immortality of innumerable “replays” of our life, and it provocatively refuses to provide an answer. Jeff and Pamela don’t really learn anything. [SPOILER] By the end, when they’ve finally moved beyond what was their original deaths, they’ve achieved an innocence they haven’t had since their first lives.

I admire that reticence to be meaningful, and I there’s a great openness in Grimwood’s insistence that we simply have to be open to life’s vagaries, open to finding what happiness we can in an indifferent universe.

This is certainly worth reading, above all in conversation with North, but I do have to fault it some for dragging. North takes her excellent conception a step further by morphing it into a satisfying thriller. As this one ends, as we see all but Grimwood’s final point about uncertainty, it slows down. As a result, it drags both at the start and at the finish, not dramatically, but enough to make me prefer the fable North gives us to this genuinely ambitious sci-fi work of the 1980s.


View all my reviews

Review: The Whiskey Rebels

The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most historical novelists seem to start out as writers who get interested in history and then turn it into story. That is, I gather, the method that even the best – like Hilary Mantel – have followed. David Liss does it the other way around, though. He began as a historian – and, I believe as a historian in the potentially dry field of economic history – and then he found a way to tell stories that gave a flavor of the historical clashes and processes he came to understand.

I read his Conspiracy of Paper when it first came out more than 15 years ago, and I admired it enough that I wrote him with vague hopes that he might be looking for a job as an academic historian and would consider the place I was then teaching. As I recall, he wrote back kindly, expressing polite interest for after he’d finished his PhD, but I think he must already have glimpsed his coming career path. While this is now only my second Liss, I can see he’s been turning out quality historical fiction ever since.

This novel, at a bottom line, is an assessment of Alexander Hamilton’s footprint on American life. Like a good historian – a better one that the otherwise masterfully talented Lin-Manual Miranda – Liss sees that legacy as mixed. On the one hand, Hamilton established a system of federal credit and wealth-generation that made the subsequent American experiment possible. Without Hamilton’s bank and credit regulations, the Revolution would have withered.

On the other hand, the price of that system was that some spark of the true American rebellion got snuffed. To the degree that early America represented a Jeffersonian vision of small farmers, conquering the land and living in what we might retrospectively see as a nobler Libertarianism, Hamilton’s centralization of economic authority shifted power back to the merchant class. As characters here complain, Hamilton restored some of the inherent corruptions of capitalism that at least some American Revolutionaries understood themselves as fighting against.

Liss deals with that dichotomous view of Hamilton by creating two protagonists here. Ethan Saunders is a disgraced spy, one who feels personally let down by Hamilton but ultimately supports his aim. Joan Maycott is, in spirit, a pure Jeffersonian, a young woman who wants to write the first great American novel, and who determines to help settle Western Pennsylvania with her young husband. When Joan is fleeced by land speculators – and when even worse follows as a consequence of her being tricked – she identifies Hamiltonianism as her ultimate enemy.

The result is a novel in alternating chapters, with Ethan narrating one and then Joan the next (although there are occasional alterations in the pattern). Each protagonist sees some grey to the black-and-white character of what Hamilton represented, but the effect is that over the course of the novel we get a pro/con for Hamilton’s influence.

Remarkably, Liss never lets that feel dry or forced. In fact, it’s only in retrospect that I see what amounts to the history lessons concealed beneath the novel itself. What we have on the surface is a pair of adventure novels – ones that ultimately intersect in satisfying ways – and a pair of nicely imagined characters grappling with the New World of the American Republic.

The result is a legitimate thriller, a novel that moves quickly and that has a great deal at stake within it. I’m sure it’s possible to read this and think of Hamilton as merely an incidental figure, as simply the “client” that detective Saunders works for or the politician that rebel Maycott intends to bring down. You can read this, in other words, as a fast-paced adventure story.

I enjoyed this throughout, but there are a couple spots where Liss is not entirely deft in his narration. The alternating chapters bother me less than I imagined they would, but it did bother me toward the end when he resorted to the sleight-of-hand of not quite telling us what was going on. (For example, Ethan would declare something like, “I determined to go to the one man who could tell me what I needed to know,” leaving it hanging that he was off to see, say, Philip Freneau, for no purpose other than to sustain some narrative uncertainty.) The hardest part of the literary effort Liss set for himself was to weave the two narrative perspectives together, and the seams do end up showing even as the story comes together effectively.

As a side note, Liss continues here some of what he did in A Conspiracy of Paper where, also interrogating economic history, he explored the possibility of what we might call “tough Jews” in historical times. There, it was Daniel Mendoza, the great boxer, who becomes pressed into service as a quasi-detective. Here, it’s Hamilton’s agent Levian, a ruthless and effective spy who partners with Ethan to undertake the dirtiest aspects of their shared work.

In any case, I recommend reading this both for its history and its own energy. Liss knows what he’s doing here, and I suspect he knew what he was doing 15 years ago when he made it clear he saw a better future for himself as a novelist than as a history professor.




View all my reviews

Review: Death of a River Guide

Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Flanagan is perhaps my current favorite living writer in the world. His two most recent books – The Narrow Road to the Deep North and First Person – are two of the three or four best books I’ve read in the last three years, and I think he may make sense as a Nobel Prize candidate. (And I need someone to root for in that department now that Philip Roth is gone.)

This is Flanagan’s first novel. It has a great-sounding premise, too: our narrator Aljaz is, as the title says, a river guide. Also, as the title says, he is dying. He’s caught in the narrows of a raging river, and, as he fights drowning, he has a series of visions of his life, his father’s life, and the lives of his ancestors who found their way to the remote part of Tasmania where he grew up.

In many ways, though, I think this is too clever a premise. The writing here is always fine, but there’s a preciousness to some of it that rubs me the wrong way. For one thing, it begins with a narrative of his own birth, one that implies the removed visions he’ll have throughout, but one that suggests to me an entirely different trajectory than the novel eventually takes.

For another, our narrator switches back and forth between first- and third-person, sometimes speaking of ‘I’ and sometimes of ‘Aljaz,’ sometimes even switching between the two mid-anecdote. I think there’s a method to it – I find Flanagan too careful a writer even here to make a casual mistake; I think, that is, it reflects a sense that he really is leaving himself behind, that his ego is slipping from a self-centered perspective to a perspective from all the human family who have known this place. Still, it comes across as awkward.

In similar fashion, we get a great deal implied. I’m not asking for a world writer to condescend to dump a lot of information about the history of his esoteric community, but this does seem unnecessarily complicated. I compare it in ambition to the best work of an earlier of my favorite living writers, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here. Richler certainly never pauses to feed us tidbits of Canadian history, but he does find ways to give us more clues within the narrative than Flanagan does here.

So, for two-thirds of this, I hung on for the beautiful prose and for the way the occasional anecdote about Aljaz’s life would simply sparkle. (The fragmented story of an ancestor who escaped the penal colony to find his way to a “New Jerusalem” has a lot of resonance, as does Aljaz’s broken love story with a woman of partial Chinese ancestry.) It didn’t come together for me as a whole, and I found myself checking the number of unread pages more often than is usually a good sign.

As I hit the homestretch here, the final 50-60 pages, though, something seemed to click. Part of me thought I might have been witnessing the effective birth of the author I’ve come to admire through his more recent work; part of me thought maybe I’d finally accumulated enough background to pick up on how the whole worked together.

In any case, there are some gorgeous passages that not only evoke the raw beauty of the landscape but that also ground the rest of the narrative. Flanagan makes clearer what’s going on around Aljaz (and how he came to be in his predicament, something that’s not as clear as I describe it until close to the end) and he shows the man growing into a larger awareness of the world he has known throughout his life.

Just by way of example, there’s a magnificent passage at the end of chapter eight that marks part of that late-novel amplification. In it, semi-SPOILER, we learn that Aljaz, like so many of his fellow Tasmanians, has some aboriginal ancestry. That’s his story, but it’s also really the story of the world around him. As he writes, “most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night fell they slept together, some openly, some illicitly, but whether they slept together out of shame or pride or indifferent lust the consequence was the same: they begat children to one another. But the lies were told with sufficient force that for a good many years even the parents remained silent, and whispered their truths only occasionally, and then only in the wilds where no one would hear, or in the depths of drink when no one would remember.”

That, I maintain, is some seriously gifted writing.

First Person had a similar leap in quality toward the end – such an extraordinary leap that it went from being a novel I was mostly enjoying to one I think may be the equal of the Booker-prize winning Narrow Road to the Deep North. This one, less impressive throughout than First Person, goes from being one that I largely endured to one that I now admire. I doubt I’ll have the patience to re-read this one any time soon – for one thing, I intend to try to get through all the rest of Flanagan, which means the second through fifth novels he’s written – but I have a suspicion that giving this a little more attention would make it even more rewarding.

For now, I want to see the kind of artistic leap Flanagan made between this one and the next. Somewhere, I am convinced, I’ll be able to locate when this talented writer moved from being really good to flat-out world-class.


View all my reviews

Review: Every Man a Menace

Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hoffman does two clever and rewarding things in this one, but he balances those excellences with a less-than-perfect prose style. The result is that this is a strong book, but not quite as memorable as its best elements suggested.

For starters, Hoffman is clever in the way he takes a conventional, chronological narrative, tears it into strips, and feeds it back to us as a fragmented story that comes together. It’s a terrific structure, and I admire it.

Even more, I admire Hoffman’s fearlessness here. I need to start with a [SPOILER], but he’s as effective at killing off his point-of-view characters as anyone I can think of. We open with a lengthy chapter from the perspective of Raymond Gaspar, a down-on-his-luck ex-con just out and grasping at a longshot chance to strike it rich. We’re introduced through him to what promises to be the biggest shipment of ecstasy in recent San Francisco history. And then he gets killed. It’s so unexpected, so cold-blooded, that I have to cheer.

And, [SPOILER #2], then he does it again, killing off another character we’re supposed to be sympathetic towards. Semyon, is a young guy who’s farther up the ecstasy-supply chain, but he’s likeable enough. Like Raymond, though, he’s unwittingly in the way of someone else. And that’s that.

Those two virtues work hand in hand. [SPOILER, cont.] You can’t kill off central characters mid-story unless you have new perspective from which to continue. So, all in all, I’m impressed with Hoffman’s technical solution to a challenging problem.

All that said, though, this one makes me miss the quality of the prose in the best noir. Ellroy is an extreme example – you can take any skilled practitioner like Daniel Woodrell, James Crumley, Megan Abbott, or Ken Bruen – but you know with each sentence that you’re into a different kind of narrative. It isn’t necessarily poetry, but it’s something different from the normal.

So, my big complaint with Hoffman is that the prose here is “normal.” If the best noir has the feel of metered verse, this is unmetered. It’s “unrhythmic” in the sense that it has an enduring matter-of-fact tone at all times.

I listened to this, and I think the narrator was unusually weak, but I do think there’s something not-quite about the way Hoffman tells us his story. If the essence of noir is that something is hardboiled – that it gives the impression that difficult experiences have boiled away the softness – this feels like a fresh egg. Maybe it makes sense that the prose implies a softness in a story that [again, SPOILER] kills off so many protagonist figures, but I couldn’t help feeling that this excellently plotted story never quite caught the music it should have.




View all my reviews

Review: Hocus Pocus

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the parallels I see between Hemingway and Vonnegut. Each survived the trauma of his war, and each went on to find a new way to write literature. I have not, historically, thought of Vonnegut as anywhere near Hemingway’s level, but I’m slowly reconsidering that.

My basic insight into Vonnegut, courtesy of re-reading Slaughterhouse Five several months ago, is that we see his trauma expressed in narrative. For Hemingway, trauma showed itself at the level of the sentence. You could feel the effort it took to write each one, with the result that each was powerful and fragile; each made it clear how close it came to never having been written. That’s the Hemingway power: the stark beauty of each sentence implied an emotional violence that was below surface-level. (That’s a reference to his famous notion of a story, like an iceberg, being 6/7s underwater.)

In Vonnegut’s case, it’s not a matter of the sentence. He comes close to having logorrhea. Instead, it’s that he dances around his story. He lets us see that he thinks there’s something demeaning in turning his trauma into narrative. Once such an experience becomes a story, it gets cheapened. If it never becomes a story, though, it vanishes as if it never happened. So there’s that perpetual anguish in his best work. He fights the impulse to turn experience into linear narrative, and then he fights the impulse to see his stories resolve themselves in conventional ways.

Anyway, I just might try to develop that notion into an academic paper someday, but reading this late Vonnegut for the first time brings to mind another parallel with Hemingway. I have sometimes heard late Hemingway described as “Hemingway imitating Hemingway.” I’ve never known exactly what that was supposed to mean, but I felt – whatever it meant – it applied to things like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “Old Man and the Sea.”

I think now, at last, that I finally understand that notion: the best Hemingway gives evidence of the trauma behind its making. The work bears the evidence of the effort it took to carve out each sentence. It feels like a coin toss whether it’s author could have survived to write it.

By late Hemingway, though, that effort has worn smooth. Hemingway knows how his own work is supposed to feel. He knows he wants short, tight sentences, and he knows he wants a protagonist who can’t voice his deepest emotions. Those late stories get to how Hemingway is supposed to sound, but they give evidence of skipping the hardest part of the creative passage. They no longer have the residue of the deep emotional work it took for Hemingway to get himself to write sentences in the first place.

Here, for Vonnegut in Hocus Pocus, I think the same thing is happening. This is Vonnegut imitating Vonnegut. He does it reasonably well, but his material coheres too quickly into a focused narrative. We get strands that start to shape themselves – our protagonist, Eugene Debs Hartke, lets us know right away the nature of his being held in jail on charges he helped lead a prison revolt – and then they fall apart. SPOILER: For instance, we never learn the outcome of his trial, even though it’s the original structure around which the narrative is built. Instead, this ends on what feels a lot like a digression, on his meditations around the death of a relatively minor character who has almost nothing to do with the revolt. Our narrator even tips his hand, clumsily, a few chapters before the end, telling us he’s learned of a death that marks the end of his story, but withholding whose it was until another 20 pages.

This isn’t an awful book, but it’s certainly not top tier Vonnegut. Like Hemingway, he produced his best work in a concentrated period – 1963-1969, with Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse Five. Before that, he was finding his voice. After, with stretches of exception, he was imitating that best work, giving us the form that his trauma took, but unable again to work through the second-level trauma of writing into the unknown of his deepest personal hurt.

I suspect I’ll keep re-reading Vonnegut. I thought I knew him when I was a teenager – in some ways he was the first adult novelist I ever really wrestled with – and now I find I’m meeting him in a whole new way today. Even a book like this makes me admire something like Cat’s Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five all the more.


View all my reviews

Review: Under the Bright Lights

Under the Bright Lights by Daniel Woodrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people, I’m a big admirer of Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone. I teach it regularly in my noir fiction class, and I’m giving it a test run in my general introduction to literature class this semester. If you haven’t read it, I offer a top recommendation. It’s the best of what contemporary noir can be: understated in its language, it calls on a weakened character to rise to her best self on behalf of others. It’s an ethical interrogation of a community that works by reasonable and defined practices that, when they fall on Ree’s shoulders, become immoral.

This one, Woodrell’s first novel, has glimmers of what he’d become. There’s the occasional turn of phrase that rises above the conventions of the genre, and there’s a persistent sense that a misunderstood community – here a Cajun community in Gulf city that seems like New Orleans or a smaller fictional relation – does criminal things for reasons we outsiders can’t fully understand.

For the most part, though, this is a conventional noir, better than run-of-the-mill – notably better – but something that feels in retrospect like the apprentice work of someone who’d go on to become a master. When I compare this to the apprentice work of another noir master, James Ellroy, I find this a lot stronger than his Lloyd Hopkins work (which similarly gives evidence of the great work that would follow). In each case, though, I recommend starting with the best stuff and getting back to the early stuff only if you’re a completist.

The best example of what’s limited here requires a SPOILER: The end of this involves a boat chase through the swamp that has shaped this community. It’s a great concept, and I can imagine a fine movie growing out of it, but Woodrell handles it less deftly than he would the subtler and more compelling climax of Winter’s Bone. Here, for instance, we never really see the swamp before the climax. We get it hinted at before, but the climax here has to carry the burden of description and conclusion. It’s far from a failure, but it’s also less of a culmination than it might have been.

In similar fashion, there’s a potentially powerful relationship between our detective protagonist, Rene Shade, and his brother Tip. Even here, Woodrell writes dialogue with real skill, and many of the quiet scenes between them are effective. Woodrell doesn’t have the sustained focus here, though, that he does on Ree and her family in Winter’s Bone. Instead, we get the great insight of their relationship diminished by a series of other potentially powerful friendships, loyalties, and betrayals.

As a work of literature, this is better than a lot of the noir I still enjoy. (I’m thinking, for instance, of James Lee Burke, who also writes about the greater New Orleans community.) As a coherent detective narrative, though, it doesn’t quite come together.

Thankfully, it did come together – marrying the best of this to a tighter sense of plotting and more fully sustained attention to character relationships – for Woodrell. I enjoyed this enough to give the next one a shot (I’ve already got it as part of a re-released trilogy of Woodrell’s first novels) and I’m curious to know which work showed this talented writer going from good to great.


View all my reviews

Review: Improvement

Improvement by Joan Silber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One answer to post-post-structuralism was the idea (mostly by way of Delleuze and Guattari) of the rhizome, the sense that there is a structure beyond easy structure, an organic form that blurs the line between a recognizable pattern and mess. That is, the rhizome has a pattern, but it isn’t anything we can replicate. It grows where space and opportunity permit, and it’s only after the fact that we can see it’s all done I support of the mushroom or other fungus above it.

I’m a big admirer of what seems the flavor-of-the-decade in American literary structure. I’m thinking of the model that Colum McCann pioneered with Let the Great World Spin, and that Jennifer Egan took further in A Visit from the Goon Squad. That’s the one where we get a story (or chapter) about one character, move to a story about a character only tangentially connected to the first one, and then on to others. There’s never an indirect connection among all the loose ends, but there are some indirect ones. The result is that we as readers get something like a bird’s eye view of a tangled group of people who don’t realize how they affect one another.

In case no one has yet done so, I propose calling those novels rhizomatic. That is, their structure becomes evident only after the fact. They grow where their stories take them, but they eventually double back. There’s pattern – or maybe just the residue of pattern to them – but it takes completing the novel to get a sense of the power it promises.

This is my second Joan Silber, and I think she is as gifted in this form as McCann or Egan – and that’s saying a lot. As I read Fools, her next most recent book, her innovation within this form is to look at communities across generations. In that book, she asks what became over the decades of the great dreams and passions of a group of “fools,” of the anarchists and Dorothy-Day-befriending young people who envisioned a better world in early 20th Century Bohemian New York.

I think this one is the doing the same thing only more subtly. The closest thing we have to a central character – though not the central narrator – is Kiki, a 1960s free-thinker who spends much of the 1970s living in Turkey as the aftermath of a kind of happy accident in meeting a man she loved on her world travels.

Kiki is far from a caricature, but at one level she embodies a radically hopeful sense that the world gives us the opportunity to be better than we are, that it promises us a chance at – as the title says – improvement.

For most of these narratives, Kiki is late middle-aged, and we see the influence she has on her niece, Reyna, who falls in with a crowd of small-time hustlers. We get a variety of narrators giving us chapters that don’t entirely fit together, but the movement of the book culminates in Reyna thinking she is sacrificing her aunt’s legacy – in the form of a valuable carpet she gave her from Turkey – in order to recompense a woman she may have inadvertently wronged. (SPOILER: Lynette holds her responsible for the death of her brother, Claude, but it’s a consequence of an accident. Reyna might have prevented it, but she’d have run a clear risk herself.)

As it turns out, though, Reyna’s selling the carpet to help someone who won’t even know she’s helped her is exactly Kiki’s legacy. As she says near the end, it wouldn’t be a gift if she’d had any hope for it other than that Reyna use it as she saw fit. Reyna, then, without quite knowing it, is an heir to Kiki’s hope for improving the world. And Lynette, who gets the money without knowing its source, goes on to improve her life and to bolster the memory of her not-as-great-as-she-pretends brother.

There are other stories of “improvement” throughout the book, but they’re never obviously so. Silber seems to suggest that we take a step forward and then we take one back, but as a deeply but subtly Jewish writer she seems above all to demonstrate a sense of “tikkun ha’olam,” a notion that it falls to us to try to make the world better than we found it.

This looks at times like it’s a “mess,” like it’s stories are disconnected and inelegantly concluded, but such a rhizomatic mess ultimately points the way toward the mystical promise – ever-forestalled – of mess-iah. That is, Silber reminds us that we may never improve the world to the point of perfection, but that’s not what we’re called to do. Our job, in this and every generation, is to try to make things at least a little better, to shoot not for perfection but only improvement.


View all my reviews

Review: Dog Songs

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far as I can tell – and there are substantial limits to what I can see – Mary Oliver is the greatest living American poet. She is the heir to what I think of as the Midwestern school of poetry: Theodore Roethke out of Michigan and James Wright (like her) out of Ohio. There’s a lot to admire in the confessionals like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, and there are countless poets who make me go “wow” when I find just the right piece by them (like Robert Hass or Ed Hirsch), but I admire the Roethke-Wright-Oliver strain most of all, and here she is, still producing.

When Oliver is at her most ambitious, she’s exactly what all great poets have been: the most precise mouthpieces we have for questioning who we are in the universe. Some of her later work has been staggering in the simple ways it asks the deepest questions. I haven’t read all of her late collections, but I have read in all of them, and she has a clarity of vision like no one else. She is one of our great religious poets, yet she rarely discusses religion. She is one of our great nature poets, yet her work always comes back to asking us who we are in the middle of nature.

This collection is not her most ambitious, but it’s littered with beautiful poems. When I picked it up at a bookstore on vacation, I assumed it was her sellout, her chance to cash in on having one of the biggest names in poetry. It is that, to a tiny degree, but it’s also evidence that even when she allows herself to indulge in sentimentality, she is far more than sentimental. In fact, fleetingly, she is at her best.

The idea here is that each of these poems is about dogs. Many (including many of the weaker ones from the second half here) are about specific pets she’s had and lost. In a lesser writer’s hands – and, as I see it, just about everyone is a lesser writer – that would feel like an indulgence. In hers, it builds towards a sense of dogs as opening us to the natural world. The dogs she has known and loved have come into her home and allowed her to domesticate them, but, in turn, they have provides her a seasoning of the uncontrolled, of wildness.

As she puts it directly in the long prose poem/essay, “Dog Talk,” that concludes the collection, “I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”

At its best, that means we get pieces of poems like this from “Luke’s Junkyard Dream.” The poem recounts the world as it opened up to one of her dogs, born in a junkyard and infected with worms. As it concludes, though, he discovers the possibility of a greater beauty. “Listen, a junkyard puppy/ learns quickly how to dream./ Listen, whatever you see and love --/ that’s where you are.”

Or there’s a selection from “Her Grave,” a meditation on the burial spot of one of her beloved pets. “A dog can never tell you what she knows from the/ smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know/ almost nothing.”

And, echoing that sense that we have much to learn of the wild from these dogs we take into our lives, there’s this from “Holding Onto Benjamin,” “No use to tell him/ that he/ and the raccoon are brothers./ You have your soft ideas about nature/ he has others,/ and they are full of his/ white teeth/ and lip that curls sometimes,/ horribly/…And it’s his eyes, not yours,/ that are clear and bright.”

Those are among the best of the collection, but even some of the ones that work less well have their redemptive moments. I found myself tiring of one of the later prose poems, “You Never Know Where a Conversation is Going to Go,” and then there came its conclusion: “Every time you wake up and/ love your life and the world, you’re/ praying, my dear boy. I’m sure of it.”

If you’re interested in Oliver’s work in general, start somewhere else. If you have ever tried to explain to someone what it means to love a dog, though, this might be exactly the collection of poetry you were looking for without knowing it.


View all my reviews