Review: Dancing in Odessa

Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Whatever I say/ is a kind of petition, and the darkest/ days must I praise.” (from “Author’s Prayer.”)

Give me some time to take back the claim, but this may be the best collection of poetry I have ever read.

This collection feels old. Somehow, the paper in my edition is yellowed and stiff. Yet the book came out only five years ago, and Ilya Kaminsky is half a generation younger than I am. In the best ways poetry makes possible, it feels old and new, feels like a universal claim and yet like something only he could have written and only someone like me – a 50-something Jewish guy with an appreciation for history an literature – could fully appreciate.

There are five sections here, and, as I read, I came away convinced that almost each was my favorite.

The first, the one that prompted me to buy the book, meditates on the challenge of narrating history. Called “Dancing in Odessa,” it reflects on what it meant for Kaminsky to leave his native Odessa to come to the United States. He understands himself as a kind of mouthpiece for an entire culture, brimming with stories, that may have no one left to hear them. (That is, these Jews have left Odessa, and they are now in a country where Russian isn’t spoken. But, even as I say that, I oversimplify what Kaminsky says as full-blown poetry.)

Some highlights:

From the title poem,

“At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.”

From “In Praise of Laughter”
“in the secret history of anger – one man’s silence
lives in the bodies of others – as we dance to keep from falling
between the doctor and the prosecutor:
my family, the people of Odessa,
women with huge breasts, old men naïve and childlike,
all our words, heaps of burning feathers
that rise and rise with each retelling.”

Or, from “American Tourist”
“She said, ‘All that is musical in us is memory’ –
but I did not know English, I danced
sitting down, she straightened
and bent and straightened, a tremble of music
a tremble in her hand.”

As far as I’m concerned, that would have been enough – dayenu – to justify the collection, but Kaminsky doesn’t stop there. He uses that section as a springboard for all that follows, trying to translate memories of his Odessa heritage to the one he’s in now. Again, though, that’s a clumsy way to name the project. It’s almost as true to say he takes me to Odessa, that he makes me unsure what year this is and what language I’m fluent in.

In his second section, he gives a poetic biography of Osip Mandelstam. And, if I was at first disappointed to see such focus, I came around quickly. Consider this excerpt:

“on certain afternoons
the Republic of Psalms opens up
and I grow frightened that I haven’t lived, died, not enough
to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear
splashes of clear, biblical speech.”

Or, in the separate poem that punctuates the section:

“A Toast”

“In my veins
long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come
right out of the eighteenth century
Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination
Is the only word.

Imagination! A young girl dancing polka,
unafraid, betrayed by the Lord’s death
(or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah
was postponed).

In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning
poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages
where I, my fathers,
unable to describe your dreams, drink
my silence from a cup.”

Then comes a section called “Natalia,” a series of near-sonnets that come as close to Neruda as any English language poetry I’ve ever seen. I don’t say that lightly, but these have all the bewildering, unlikely comparisons of Neruda that, once said, feel as if they have always existed.

“Natalia, beside me, turns the pages,
what happened and did not happen
must speak and sing by turns.
My chronicler, Natalia, I offer you two cups of air
In which you dip your little finger, lick it dry.”

Or,

“A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.”

Then comes a section called “Travelling Musicians” which is a series of shorter tributes to Russian poets, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Isaac Babel, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Each one accomplishes the same trick, making me think I’ve read their work in the original Russian, when I don’t actually know any Russian.

From the Celan prose poem, “Seven years after his death, I saw Celan in his house slippers dancing alone in his bedroom, humming step over step. He did not mind being a character in my stories in a language he never learned. That night, I saw him sitting on a rooftop, searching for Venus, reciting Brodsky to himself. He asked if his past existed at all.”

Or, from the poem on Tsvetaeva,

“all I want is a human window
in a house whose roof is my life.”

Then, in a final section, “Praise,” Kaminsky tries to punctuate the whole collection by giving a “story with a happy ending” even though he tells the immigrant woman who asked him for it that he has none. Looping back to where began the collection, he acknowledges that there is something intrinsically happy in the capacity to tell a story at all, that history happened and that we – we humans, we Jews, we Odessan latecomers to America – have honestly lived.

As part of that, he writes,

“On the page’s soiled corners
my teacher walks, composing a voice:
he rubs each word in his palms:
‘hands learn from the soil and broken glass,
you cannot think a poem,’ he says,
‘watch the light hardening into words.’ “

I’m somewhat embarrassed to write so long a review; this is actually a very short collection. I doubt anyone will read all I’m writing here, but I hope others will read Kaminsky. This really is extraordinary stuff, and I am amazed to discover such an old voice singing such new songs.


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Review: The Devil's Home On Leave

The Devil's Home On Leave by Derek Raymond
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I lost track of the number of times I double-checked to be sure this book is a sequel to Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open. Goodreads, Google, and Wikipedia all agree, but I don’t see it.

He Died with His Eyes Open is the first in the Factory Series – books about an unnamed detective in London’s Department of Unexplained Deaths (aka “The Factory”) – and it’s brilliant. James Sallis touted the series as one of his formative influences, and you can see elements of this detective in the otherwise unnamed Driver.

The remarkable thing about that first book is the way it gives us a protagonist who’s bankrupt of hope and meaning. He lives alone in a nondescript apartment and, other than knowing he was once married, we get no details about his private life. That vacuum becomes the heart of the novel when, as he plays back a series of audiotapes a murdered man left behind, he finds himself drawn into the complex of that victim’s life. His own emptiness powers the mystery and, like Sallis, I’m deeply impressed by it.

So…this sequel. It feels as if a totally different author has written about a totally different detective. In place of a vague past, we get a clear backstory: our detective was married to an unstable woman who threw their young daughter under a bus, killing her, and leaving him to visit her as she hallucinates in a sanitarium. In place of a man who’s so hungry for something like life that he adopts the baggage of a murdered man, we get a man who’s got it all under control – dead child and insane ex-wife aside.

And, in place of a detective who takes a deep dive into a case no one else cares about, we have a man who’s exposing high-level British governmental corruption and a serial killer. And, despite partnering with a series of supposedly top-flight intelligence officers, he’s a step ahead of everyone else. He’s so smug, so cocky in the way he outsmarts people with better resources and more impressive firepower, that I found myself thinking of Mickey Spillane – not a compliment in any way.

Add to all those disappointing changes three other charges of sloppiness. First, [SPOILER:] there is the unlikely (and – barring a highly contrived climactic final scene – unnecessary) decision to let the serial killer go free to catch the other, bigger fish. Yet those “big fish” turn out to be fairly small fry in their own rate.

Second, there’s a latent and lazy homophobia running through the whole book. Characters constantly reassure us that “there’s nothing wrong with it,” but homosexuality is one way in which the book’s ultimate governmental villain gets tripped up. It’s not something to hate here, merely something to see as a weakness, a pathetic extension of what bad people do when they aren’t strong enough to be good people.

And third, there are places where this is just badly written. Again, one of the strengths of the prequel is its quiet desperation, its eloquent silences. Here we get a passage like this: “I yearn for you, Dahlia [my daughter], yearn for you, and everything I do for justice, I do it in your name; and it is my terrible guilt that I could have saved you from your mother. But instead I went off to work that day, and how shall I ever forget you at the window as you waved me goodbye? Oh, it goes to my heart those times when I think of the horror, and through my fault, leaving in me an appalling emptiness that can never be filled.”

It’s not just that that writing makes me cringe, it’s that it’s so far removed from what the first of these so good. It’s an emotional sell-out, a paraphrase of the far subtler feelings that Raymond hinted at rather than took on from the front.

I may read another one of two of these in the series, mostly just to satisfy a hunch that this could be an anomaly, that Raymond was trying to explain for himself what he was doing so well in the first book and therefore came to the project more ham-handedly.

Still, I can’t believe how much weaker this one is than its predecessor. I may go check one more time because it’s that hard to believe.


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Review: Down the River Unto the Sea

Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll put myself in the front rank of Walter Mosley fans. I’ve taught Devil in a Blue Dress so many times that the spine is cracked and the margins are full. I’ve read almost all of the Easy Rawlins novels, many of them multiple times. And I’ve done scholarship on him, presenting at a conference and working up a couple drafts of an essay on him.

Mosley started out his career as brilliant as he has ever been. Devil in a Blue Dress has its clumsy narrative moments, but it’s an extraordinary reimagining of the detective novel as a lens to examine not just race – which it justly receives a lot of attention for having done – but also masculinity.

The more Mosley wrote, the more skilled he became, working through a lot of the clumsiness and – through the Mosley novels – exploring the changed nature of race in America. (I still love the title of the essay I have never quite finished: “A Line of Any Color is Still a Colored Line.) Racism didn’t end with the 1960s, of course not, but its manifestations changed, and Mosley was right there, tracing them through Easy’s adventures. The brilliance of the original insight got more and more attenuated, but he generally kept the novels fresh and compelling.

Here, as we move outside the Easy novels, Mosley is on top of his craft, but it feels as if he’s imitating himself. Joe King Oliver has a fair bit of Easy in him; he’s a decent man who, having been framed as a cop, tries to keep his head down from the “villainous” powers that be. Even more like Easy, he has a sociopathic friend – not Mouse here but rather Mel – who trades in the amoral violence he can’t quite stomach himself.

There are a couple mysteries in tandem – a convicted cop-killer who’s really more an African-American activist and then the reemergence of the case of his own framing – but that’s part of the formula.

Mosley is too good for this to be entirely disposable, and I like the glimpse of his method when he has to start from scratch after the many Easy and later Socrates Fortlaw novels, but this is too familiar to be all that memorable.

There’s nothing especially difficult here, but it isn’t Easy either.


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Review: This Storm

This Storm by James Ellroy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At this point, Ellroy is an acquired taste…one I have certainly acquired.

I can start to describe the plot here, but, truth be told, that’s secondary. Ellroy deals with plot like Coltrane dealt with melody. It matters – it underscores everything – but it often becomes secondary to his riffs and improvisations.

Above all, you read Ellroy for the music. I listened to this one and paper-read (“eye-cameraed” or “peeped” to steal from the master) the last, and the effect is the same. I’ll go long stretches without quite paying attention to what’s happening just to be caught up in the effect of his prose.

There’s no easy way to describe what he does and what its effect is, so I say just turn yourself over to it and read. Sometimes it’s the Tommy-Gun fusillade of short, declarative sentences. Sometimes it’s the deep play on words, three-quarters found and one-quarter invented from his idiosyncratic mixture of jazz-speak, Yiddish, and thieves cant. And sometimes it’s just a quick and clever gut punch. My favorite example of that here comes when Dudley Smith tells ‘journalist’ Sid Hutchens what to say in his publication: “He abridged his Fifth Amendment rights.”

In any case, that’s where the fun is. I think in any case that Ellroy is expecting most of us to get lost in what’s happening. One of his quirks in this one is to repeat (quickly) large stretches of what a character already knows. It’s like a quick catch-up opportunity, and you can be sure I took advantage of it.

There is a potentially thrilling plot here, and I spent some time trying to imagine what the late, gifted Curtis Hanson might have done if he’d taken a shot at filming a second Ellroy after L.A. Confidential. Heavy rains bring an abandoned coffin to the surface, and the body inside helps spark an investigation around a decade-old gold heist and major L.A. fire. Several murders later, we’re thigh-deep in World War II Fifth Column stuff, and Dudley – that beautiful bastard of a human being – is trying to triple-profit on extorting Japanese-Americans bound for internment, exploiting undocumented Mexican immigrants who’ll take their jobs, and smuggling heroin across the border in the trucks he’ll be using.

There are many others in a cast that’s flat-out bewildering – bewildering even for someone like me who’s got most of Ellroy’s related work under my belt already. Lee Blanchard, Buzz Meeks, Claire DeHaven, Hideo Ashida, Elmer Jackson, and a host of others swirl around. We get the action through third-person limited omniscience in almost every case (we do get nice interludes from Kay Lake’s diary for punctuation) with the result that there are a lot of stops-and-starts as well as recaps along the way.

I don’t think this is quite Ellroy at his best. The L.A. Quartet stuff is great (at least Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential) because you can see him inventing the method. (If you’ve read some of his earlier work – like some of the Lloyd Hopkins, it’s all the clearer to see how he made himself into a real master from what was otherwise just pedestrian stuff.) The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy is probably his most sustained period of greatness because, with the method figured out, he sets out to show how the America we know is the product of some pretty debased people. It’s bleak and beautiful, and easy just to get lost in.

This second L.A. Quartet – which precedes the first chronologically – seems to know more of what it’s supposed to be doing without quite finding the ambition of the Underworld U.S.A. stuff. I very much enjoyed Perfidia, and I think this one is almost as good, but I’m less surprised by Ellroy with these. He isn’t breaking new ground as a stylist – though, he’s got the style mastered – and he’s revisiting characters whose fate we should already know. And there’s also the matter of his sometimes calling on his characters to act out of character for effect. Hideo is the best lab tech in the country; why would it serve anyone to have him facing shotguns?

Anyway, my only real disappointment with this one is that it’s over already. Listening to it was a deep pleasure. Maybe, since there are moments I just let slide by me, I’ll give this one another listen before long again.


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Review: A Long Way From Home

A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes you’re just not quite on a writer’s wavelength.

I am convinced I will some day love Peter Carey’s work. The Booker Prize people love him, and that goes a long way with me. He’s Australian, and I’m crazy for Richard Flanagan’s work. And he picks subjects that appeal to me, whether the history of outlaw Ned Kelly, a reimagining of Great Expectations (which I haven’t read yet), the story that became the formative (for me) movie Bliss, or this, the story of a road race around 1950s Australia.

And yet…this is the second in a row for me that hasn’t quite hit. I liked The True History of the Kelly Gang at least, though I was aware of thinking I should like it more. This one, well, I feel pretty detached from it overall despite enjoying many of the scenes and characters.

This opens with a line that promises a masterpiece, “For a girl to defeat one father is a challenge, but there were two standing between me and what I wanted which was – not to fiddle faddle – a lovely little fellow named Titch Bobs.” That’s a great voice, and it suggests we’ll get a love story of a kind, likely one wrapped around what the back cover suggests will be a road race.

Except that’s not quite what this becomes. Half of the chapters come from Irene’s perspective, and that voice persists for a long time (though never with quite the same wonderful and snaking rhythm). She isn’t pursuing Titch, though, so much as hoping to be his full partner in marriage, their prospective auto dealership, and eventually, the race. But even then, over time, those concerns become incidental as Titch gradually assumes some of the overbearing qualities of his own father, suspecting her of an infidelity that is true in only a passing and forgivable way.

The other half of these chapters are narrated by Willie Bachuber, the Bobs’ next-door neighbor and a regional quiz show star who’s fled his wife and daughter over what he thinks is her affair with a “black” Aborigine. Willie is drawn to Irene on sight, but this isn’t a story of their illegitimate attraction either.

In the end, I guess I’m not sure what this is about.

On the one hand, there’s an intriguing exploration of genetic determination throughout this. [SPOILER:] We learn eventually, for instance, that Willie is not – as he believes – the son of the gentle German couple who raised him but rather the product of an Aborigine and the white woman he raped. His own child, then, is actually his, and he’s been inadvertently betrayed by story and genetics. (And, as a consequence, he ends the novel attempting to fit into an Outback Aboriginal community.) Similarly, we see the good-hearted Titch unable to make himself much different from the obnoxious father he long tried to flee.

And, yet, those strains don’t become evident for a long time, and they leave too much of the novel unaccounted for.

On the other hand, this seems in part to be about the notion of “taming” Australia into a “modern” state, one that it’s possible to circumnavigate by car. For all that this novel is arranged around that metaphor, it doesn’t cover either the long build-up to the race nor the strange aftermath.

I add that confusion to the often-irritating way that the dual narrators function. I like the possibilities of two different story-tellers, but here Carey seems often clumsy with it. We’ll get one character narrating a scene and then another narrating the same one from a different perspective. That’s something of a pet peeve of mine, maybe because I’ve tried to make it work and found it’s unsatisfying.

In any case, there are certainly flashes of the brilliance I expected here, but they aren’t connected to each other. I’d like to give another of Carey’s novels a shot, but I find my expectations lowering. It may be that he isn’t the great writer his reputation promises, and it may be I’m simply not the reader for him.


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Review: Sacred Hunger

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a terrific novel. It won the Booker – sharing it with the remarkable The English Patient – so it’s not as if I’m discovering it, but I hadn’t heard of it or Unsworth, so it feels a bit like a discovery after all.

There are two major parts to the novel – which is a minor [SPOILER:] – in its own right.

In the first, we get a split perspective. Erasmus Kemp is the son of a wealthy merchant who’s bet most of his capital on the new and burgeoning slave trade. His father builds and outfits a ship, The Liverpool Merchant, for that very purpose, and then sends it on its way.

At home, Erasmus spends his days trying to impress a young woman by taking part in a local production of a version of The Tempest. Unsworth is talented at showing him to be self-centered and entitled, and he paints Sarah as lively and proto-feminist. It’s a rich drawing room scenario with all sorts of Jane Austen-like details signaling the rise and fall of their courtship.

At the same time, of course, we know that the possibility of this marriage depends upon The Liverpool Merchant successfully obtaining a cargo full of slaves. Underneath the carefully drawn novel of manners – and presented in generally alternating chapters – is a horror that we come to see more fully over time.

Erasmus’s slightly older cousin, Matthew Paris, is part of the crew. A once idealistic physician who embraced a proto-Darwinism (there’s even a quick scene where, demoralized, he gives his materials to a young Darwin), he’s been virtually ruined. Imprisoned for impiety, he’s lost his practice and seen his wife die. So, with little more to lose, he asks his uncle to send him on the Africa trip.

It’s though Paris’s eyes, then, that we see most of the horrors of slavery. And, remarkably, Unsworth draws both sets of scenes with real skill. There’s a consistent feel to the narrative, but the tone obviously changes from scene to scene. While Erasmus is worried about how well he is delivering his lines, Paris is trying to figure out how to treat backs that have been torn open with a cat-o’-nine-tails and, eventually, fevers and dysentery that threaten the entire trip. While Erasmus worries over the subtle feelings of Sarah, Paris has to confront a Captain Thurso who increasingly channels a Captain Ahab like mania.

The back and forth adds to the power of each, subtly critiquing the way “gentility” depends on violence against others.

If that were all there was to the novel, I’d still have admired it. But, [MAJOR SPOILER ALERT:] there’s a second half that further complicates and complements the experience.

[PLEASE DON’T READ ON FOR THESE SPOILERS:] Eventually, Thurso pushes the crew too hard, and there’s a mutiny (or perhaps an accidental conflict that leads to mutiny). Paris and the others manage to get the survivors of the crew and cargo to a remote part of the Florida coast where they establish a utopian community where the would-be slaves live on equal terms with the sometimes shanghaied British sailors.

In the wake of the ship’s failure, Erasmus’s father has become a bankrupt and killed himself, ending Erasmus’s chance to marry Sarah. Some 15 years later, having married for money and become a major merchant in his own right, Erasmus sets out to find the renegade colony and bring them to “justice.”

There are some thrilling moments in the clash, but the larger matter – as is true of most novels I consider great – is the implicit conversation between conflicting world views. Each man feels in the right, feels as if he has witnessed great wrong, and it makes for a powerful coming together.

The very end shows us a glimpse of the future that Paris imagined, but – to be fair – we get an earlier glimpse in the opening pages when we meet Paris’s mixed-race son, a New Orleans character who can quote Alexander Pope and yet who knows the African-American experience first-hand.

As mixed as all that is, Unsworth never loses control of what he’s doing. I’m not prepared to say it’s better than The English Patient – that book is more ambitious artistically, and it achieves a yearning that few others accomplish – but, in turn, this one takes on perhaps a larger subject and certainly brings convincingly to life a broader range of characters.

I see that Unsworth, who died in 2012, has a long list of other books. I’m looking forward to exploring more of them.


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Review: It's a Long Story: My Life

It's a Long Story: My Life by Willie Nelson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Willie Nelson is a terrific artist. Much of the fun of reading this memoir is coming across him recounting how he dashed off one or another of his songs. He claims, for instance, to have written “Crazy,” “Night Life,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” in the space of little more than a week while hustling between part time jobs as a young husband and father in 1960 in Houston.

Describing the experience of it, he gets off my favorite line in the book: (this is a paraphrase since I listened to it) “It felt like they came fully formed. It came so easily I wasn’t sure I deserved the credit, but no one else was around.”

The best of this book is a satisfying reflection of the best of what makes him one of the most significant country artists of the 20th Century and one of the significant American musicians as well. Like few others, he can boil a feeling down to a concrete image, and then he can convey that image in clear and memorable language. That makes him a poet.

And it also shows him reflecting a wonderfully wide range of influences and collaborators. It seemed odd to have him open this book with a reflection on T.S. Eliot’s claim that “In the end is my beginning,” but why not? Both are men who’ve spent a lifetime trying to work with words.

By the end of this, it’s encouraging to find that Nelson, who’s committed to sustaining America’s gospel music heritage and who’s often enough embraced by people nostalgic for a time we now know was rife with inequality, broke the implicit color line when he played with Johnny Pride and later Ray Charles, campaigned for Democratic candidates as far back as the early 1970s, and more recently recorded the first major label LGBT-themed country song with his cover of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond Of Each Other).”

In other words, he is, as he frequently boasts, a man who’s constantly reinventing himself, someone who’s always following his personal inspiration and aesthetic. That’s especially true (as he discusses) in his idiosyncratic vocal phrasing. He had a hard time establishing himself as a recording artist precisely because his timing was so unusual. He marched (or sang) always to his own beat, finding things others overlooked along the way.

At the same time, Nelson – like a lot of significant artists – has turned out his fair share of shlock. T.S. Eliot has Old Possum’s Book of Cats, and Nelson has a lot of string-laden, trite numbers too. I can forgive him, of course; the man has recorded – no joke – 92 studio albums in his career, so some will obviously be less excellent than others.

We see some of that over-the-top tendency in this book, though. As wonderful as many parts are – especially the ones where he reflects on his various inspirations – we also get passages shot with cliché and evasion. On the one hand, it’s touching that he refuses to say a bad word about any of his first three wives. Each is beautiful, talented, and devoted to the family. It’s not as flat as all that; each is also headstrong and passionate, and each is hurt when he begins to betray her. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel we’re missing important parts of Nelson’s story.

In one peculiar incident, he talks of one wife understandably losing her temper when she opens a hospital bill for the expenses around the birth of his daughter to another woman. As readers, we’re as blindsided as she is. In the preceding chapters, he’s barely addressed his dissatisfaction with his current marriage. Instead, we get the bad news all at once, and with it we get the let’s-just-move-on determination.

As I come at last to see it, Nelson’s forte is the song, the concentrated 3-5 minute drama. The parts of this book that most fully reflect that artistic vision are the ones most worth savoring. The ones that call for more nuance, though, the ones that ask him to reflect on his mistakes as a parent or husband over time, tell us less – or tell us what they do in a shorthand of “faith” and “keeping on” that we’ve heard explicated more carefully later. I am glad to hear him talk about his commitment to legalizing marijuana, but we don’t need soapboxing here.

So, this is one for the real fan, or even the moderate fan, but I don’t think it’s for the who-is-Willie-Nelson reader. It’s good to have this artist still rolling, though, and – as I hope will happen with any musician’s biography or memoir – it’s helped me discover fresh ears for material I’ve enjoyed a long time.


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Review: Legion versus Phalanx

Legion versus Phalanx by Myke Cole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is born of a terrific idea. Myke Cole wants to translate from the often too-academic sources the latest thinking about a series of complicated classical world battles: the showdown between the successor Hellenistic states of Alexander’s empire and the rising power of the Romans. More specifically, he pits their two distinctive fighting theories against one another, the Alexandrian phalanx and the Roman legion.

The phalanx, as Cole describes it, is a formation that affords maximum protection to its soldiers while letting them remain a lethal fighting force. Soldiers carry large shields in tight formation and then use pikes to attack as they march slowly forward. You can see how it helped Alexander conquer so much of the world; given discipline and mutual trust, it was a military technology that overwhelmed the wilder, more individual fighting styles of the “barbarians” they went up against.

A phalanx that held together was, essentially, unbeatable. There were problems, though. Sometimes a phalanx might fall into disarray because it moved too quickly or because it was fighting on uneven ground. Because its soldiers had to stand close together, both side-by side to ensure shield coverage and front-to-back to allow for filling in for the fallen, they were compact and could move in only one direction. And, if an enemy could break it, its individual soldiers were less able to fight in the close combat that could follow; pikes are, after all, not very useful close-up.

Cole explains the way the Roman legions answered that technical challenge. For one, they tended to carry javelins. Thrown from a distance, those missile weapons could soften up a phalanx, sometimes opening holes in the line that charging soldiers could enter. For another, they armed their soldiers with short swords which meant that, in the crush that would follow breaching a phalanx, they were able to move more nimbly. And, for another, they stood further apart in formation which meant they could more easily reach an exposed flank. Over time, the Roman legions won, and their formations were a crucial part of how they came to conquer most of the world.

I’m simplifying much of that; Cole is careful to explain that changes in such tactics came slowly and that each side often employed some of the elements of the other. Still, that’s the fundamental claim, and Cole explores it through close-up descriptions of six battles between the Romans and Hellenes.

The good news is that I feel smarter for having read this. I can see some of these ancient conflicts playing out, and I can understand how each side would have embraced its particular tactics.

At the same time, Cole owns up at the start of this to being a nerd. (He is, I gather, a successful fantasy writer as well.) He’s interested in all sorts of esoteric points, and, while he promises otherwise, he can’t help going into tangents that complicate and distract from his central point. His goal, he tells us, is to translate from the academic historians to the general reader, but you can see him always working to answer the academics. He’ll complicate something clear as if he’s trying to show that he knows more than what he’s fully telling the rest of us.

I define a “nerd” as someone who cares more about something than the world says he or she should. In general, I like that sense and am guilty of being such a nerd myself. There’s a challenge about telling the world too much about what we nerds care about, though. However much we may want to indicate that we are simplifying, we’re always pulled back to some nugget we can’t quite share. Trust me, I know the challenge from writing about Jewish gangsters.

As a consequence, I think Cole falls a bit short of his full ambition. As a number of reviewers have pointed out, it takes him a long time to get started – three or four chapters of definitions and background. Then, even when he gets to the individual battles that make up the heart of this, he gives extensive dynastic detail to explain how each significant general rose to prominence. In other words, he does an awful lot of “info dump” here, interrupting his interesting narrative/thesis to give us what are ultimately a range of footnotes.

So, bottom line, there’s a lot of good stuff here, but it may be more for us nerds than Cole originally hoped.


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Review: Eternal Life

Eternal Life by Dara Horn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a great passage in the Reform Jewish High Holiday prayer book that asks the question – and I paraphrase language that’s really beautiful – whether we would choose to live forever if the price were that we would never have a new generation to follow us. In this novel, Dara Horn asks the question in different fashion: would we want eternal life if it meant birthing generation after generation with the certainty that we would live to see them dies.

As with everything Horn writes (and I think I’ve read most of her novels by this point) there’s a lot of thought behind it. She’s interrogating some of the deepest axioms of the Jewish experience: why do we value peoplehood so much even though none of us can trace that peoplehood through an unbroken line, or, what does it mean to value a tradition based on Temple worship when, as we know from history, our Rabbinic tradition supplanted it through a combination of violence and philosophy.

Our protagonist, Rachel, is a reimagining of the Wandering Jew; she is “cursed” to live without dying because of a bargain she made in the Temple to spare the life of her son, Yohanan. Over time we learn – though Horn drops hints throughout – that Yohannon is no ordinary figure. History knows him as Yohanan ben Zakkai (though, in Horn’s imagination he is actually the grandson of the Temple’s High Priest) and he is, essentially, the founder of Rabbinic Judaism. He’s the sage who escapes Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem – the siege that would end with the destruction of the Temple – in a coffin so that he could establish the first great Rabbinic academy at Yavneh. Rachel has, inadvertently, given up her own death so that Judaism will also never die.

So, in at least some respects, Rachel is a kind of Rip van Winkle. She is (with the exception of her recurring lover Elazar) the only person who can remember a Judaism radically different from the one we know today. She knows the power of the Temple – after all, it was the High Priest who caused her to live forever – and she knows the ephemeral nature of all life that has followed. As a result, she has a jaundiced view of the faith around her. She’s hardly Orthodox in her opinions, yet she can’t seem to throw off what she inherits of her tradition. Horn isn’t entirely clear about it, but it appears that each of Rachel’s fifty or sixty families (she’ll appear as a young woman, marry, and then live with a family for a couple generations) is Jewish. That is, she’s bound to a tradition she doesn’t quite embrace. She is a literal duplication of the Matriarchal Rachel who is ever weeping for her children, who watches them experience a world that ever threatens them.

Anyway, all of that is how this novel “thinks.” Horn, a fine scholar before she was a novelist, is always good at using fiction to frame larger questions. Beyond that, though, while she is often a fine stylist, she’s simply less good at some of the technical work of making a novel sing. She can develop character and setting very well, but I think she misses the larger subtlety of what time and era can do to someone. As much as I enjoy most of this, I can’t help being frustrated that the flashback conversations of two millennia ago sound an awful lot like the family conversations of today. For all the discontinuity she explores, she imagines every Jewish family sounding a lot like every other Jewish family; Rachel’s mother of 2000 years ago scolds her the same way her son of the 21st Century scolds his own daughter. I’d like, that is, to get a deeper sense of how the very concept of the individual has changed, at the ways a radically changed culture have changed the ways we value and even define the self.

That’s a fairly small concern next to the larger pleasure of this ambitious and thoughtful work, though. I’m glad to have Horn’s voice as such a prominent one in contemporary Jewish-American fiction, and I’ll be ready for the next one she rolls out too.


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Review: Birds of America

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve known Lorrie Moore’s “Dance in America” for a long time, and I think it’s one of the finest short stories of my adult life. If you’ve never read it, please do. It’s one of the finest celebrations of the capacity for art to stand against death that I have ever read. And, if that sounds like a downer, trust me, it isn’t. I’ve never been anything less than encouraged when I’ve read it.

While I have read a fair amount of other Moore, I hadn’t read any of the other stories in this collection. Most of them are terrific, but I think only one other – “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” quite matches “Dance in America” for as-good-as-the-American-short-story-gets level. That one is a potentially terrifying account of a mother, who’s also a writer, who has to deal with a sudden and potentially fatal disease in her two-year-old son. That ick-kid motif may be limited to these two stories, but Moore is equally excellent in both. She has a way of exploring the ways art can help us confront the worst. There’s nothing easy or sentimental about it; quite the opposite, she resists the easy point, avoids the heartwarming cliché. She makes us work to get a glimpse of something that might comfort us, and that restraint makes the comfort all the more effective.

Moore’s style seems to me to answer Raymond Carver’s; it might even be, though I worry this is an over-simplification, a feminist answer to it. Carver, of course, is powerful for his minimalism. Like a latter-day Hemingway – but with a greater sensitivity to the pain of others – Carver boils experience and language down. There are “extra” words – extra only by the standards of Hemingway, but he’s still generally driving toward his powerful point. He knows what he’s after with his stories, and he delivers.

Moore feels more meandering than that. Her narrators often seem chatty; sometimes, as in the beginning paragraphs of “Terrific Mother,” we’re almost misled by the tone. Other times, such as in “What You Want to Do Fine” or “Real Estate,” she takes a long time to develop character and situation only to conclude with a slight epiphany – but an epiphany all the same, and all the more powerful for the way it seems so fragile.

In other words, she doesn’t always let herself get confined in conventional narrative. Her characters are alive and her situations are real, but they don’t have the neat, directed nature of Carver’s. I can’t decide whether to read that as gendered, but it does seem to resist a certain, masculine-like “all business” quality.

That said, however rambling they can feel, these stories never feel unplanned. In retrospect, they’re doing work that’s a constant surprise. Her characters have depth because we see them in contexts other than the most immediate ones, and we get to see them through skillful set-ups. Years ago, I was at a writers conference, and someone asked a short story writer whose work she read. Without irony, the writer began, “Well you mean other than Lorrie Moore, right?” Some of the settings of some of these stories may have aged a bit, but that strange and compelling skill is still here.

I’m working on an essay about Moore, so I’ll be reading more of her work soon. For now, I’m happy to dig into this work that’s already been an inspiration.

(As a final note, the other two I most admired on this reading are “Willing” and “Beautiful Grade.”)


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Review: He Died With His Eyes Open

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Think of this as “Krapp’s Last Tape” if Raymond Chandler had written it.

Our protagonist is an unnamed detective in the Thatcher years with London’s “Factory,” a branch of the police tasked with solving crimes no one else is concerned with. He’s divorced, lives in a depressing bachelor pad, and has no life outside of his work. Over time we learn that he’s an excellent detective, a handsome and appealing lover (if he chooses), and a tough physical presence, but the central fact of his life is an emptiness.

He begins to fill that emptiness when, investigating the brutal murder of a middle-aged washout, he finds himself replaying dozens of diary-style cassettes on which Staniland recorded his frustrations, philosophical digressions and, above all, infatuation with a tough “club woman” who emerges as a clear suspect in his murder.

Our protagonist sets about interviewing everyone he can, finding himself ever drawn into Staniland’s life as he constantly replays the tapes. Unlike Samuel Beckett’s Krapp, who listens to stories he told himself in his youth, our detective here begins to fill in the blanks of his own life with the experiences and frustrated passions of Staniland

This gets a bit clunky near the end when [SEMI-SPOILER] he finally locates the Barbara and manipulates her through the insights Staniland has given him, but even there there’s a disquieting sense of impersonation and parasitism.

As a word of caution, some of the cassette passages begin to drag as well.

Set aside those concerns, though, and this book lives up to the glowing introduction from none other than James Sallis, who calls Raymond one of the real greats. And I can well imagine that Sallis is right. There are, apparently, four other novels in the Factory series. I will certainly be looking for another one soon.

As a bottom line, this is noir like few are able to accomplish. It’s existential in the way it challenges us to see how flimsy our hold on life/reality is, and it teases us with a mystery that’s compelling in its own right but ultimately just a symptom of a greater despair.


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Review: Men in Granny Panties: A Love Story

Men in Granny Panties: A Love Story by Seamus McGraw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Seamus McGraw is a regional treasure. He’s written and spoken about fracking and other profit-driven/screw-the-future assaults on the natural resources of our shared Northeastern Pennsylvania home. He’s supported other local artists (even though I’d never met him, he once took a good hour to talk with me about one of my own projects), and he’s tireless in fighting the good fight while making time to laugh.

I didn’t know until now, though, that he’s also a fiction writer, and Men In Granny Pants turns out to be to “NEPA” (as we call Northeast Pennsylvania) as Carl Hiassen’s work is to Central Florida. It’s a series of absurd characters who, in their greed or naïve efforts to preserve what we still have, get caught in a web of stories.

At the heart of this is Benedict, a professional wrestler who lost his capacity to feel pain some years before. As a result, he can take all sorts of abuse in the ring. He’s pining for his lost love, Madeline, who’s been addicted to drugs to keep her under the control of his manager who has a scheme to make a fortune off of Benedict throwing a match.

Then, at the same time, a local hack politician pins his re-election hopes on a campaign to keep alive a brain-dead racist pseudo-religious con man – who, it turns out, enjoys wearing granny panties and posting about it.

There are even more off-the-wall sorts – a slacker druggie who turns up everywhere and a college professor and granny-pant wearer himself among them – and all of them come together in a climax that involves a broken-in-body Benedict and the aftermath of his refusing to take a dive.

Funny and compelling as the plot is – and [SPOILER] moving as the final scene is when Madeline finally has a moment with Benedict – the real effectiveness here comes in the same sort of sardonic worldview that Hiassen has mastered. This is a thoughtful writer showing us our insanity. We’re invited to strip away the exaggerations, but then we’re still left with what isn’t exaggerated at all: we have politicians in power in our state and region who care nothing about what we’ve already learned in the aftermath of thoughtless mining history.

In other words, this is funny every page you turn and then, when you’ve turned the last one, you find out it isn’t so funny after all.


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