One of Ours by Willa Cather

When Ernest left, Claude walked as far as the Yoeders' place with him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A question hung in the air; over all this quiet land about him, over him, over his mother, even. He was afraid for his country, as he had been that night on the State House steps in Denver, when this war had been undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time.

Claude Wheeler is a desperate man. He takes over his father's Nebraska farm, but day-to-day existence seems intolerable to him. He's an idealist, but no ideal seems worth his devotion; he wants badly to admire someone, but the grand scope of the Nebraska plains no longer seems to admit any real greatness. He thinks momentarily that he has found a purpose in life by marrying his sweetheart Enid, but her kind of idealism doesn't match his own. She leaves him at home while she goes to temperance marches; eventually, after several bitter disputes, she leaves him to go take care of her missionary sister in China, an environment for which she has been training all her life. Only when the United States enters World War I does Claude find a stage commensurate with the moral and aesthetic greatness he desires, and he becomes a lieutenant on the French front.

This is the, what--fifth?--book of Cather's I've read. For the first time I think I'm coming to understand that Cather is a deeply conservative writer, perhaps the greatest conservative writer that the United States has ever produced. In The Death of the Archbishop, it's the bolstering of the national mythmaking of the frontier--for example, the whitewashing of an anti-indigenous marauder like Kit Carson. In A Lost Lady, it's the inherently conservative sense of a despoiled golden age, and the diminished state of modern life. Those elements are here, too, but alongside the glorification of war as a way of self-actualization:

The sound of the guns had from the first been pleasant to him, had given him a feeling of confidence and safety; tonight he knew why. What they said was, that men could still die for an idea; and would burn all they had made to keep their dreams. He knew the future of the world was safe; the careful planners would never be able to put it into a strait-jacket,--cunning and prudence would never have it to themselves.

It's almost stunning to read the phrase "men could still die for an idea" and realize it's meant to be a good thing! I suspect that World War II supplanted World War I in our public memory, and allowed the notion that World War I was largely a bloody and pointless waste to find purchase. But of course Cather is writing in 1922, well before World War II and when World War I was simply known as "The Great War," and so the scale of the war becomes a magnet for those conservative ideals. Claude, living after the age of the great frontier, inherits a West full of bankers and clerks; the European front becomes for him a new frontier, on which he can becomes his best self, a leader of men and a self-sacrificer. When--spoiler alert--Claude is killed in the trenches at the novel's end, while leading his men in a desperate and doomed hold on an important position, we are asked to read it not as a waste of a life that might have blossomed in other ways, but as the proper culmination of a life that has finally found a reason for being.

All this is to say: the ethics of this book are kind of fucked up? And maybe the ethics all of Cather's books? But she's such a great writer that it's easy to forget all of that, and the prose so pointedly blonde that when she turns out one of her evocative phrases ("this war had been undreamed of, hidden in the womb of time") it's enough to take your breath away. One of Ours proves that Cather is as good at describing the French countryside as she is the Nebraska plains. One of the most subtly powerful moments comes when the Nebraska soldiers, riding in a train across the north of France, spot the familiar cottonwoods that dot the riversides of their farmland homes, which allows them both to see a new value in those things they have taken for granted, and to cement a kind of kinship with the foreign world they have been enlisted, like a noble dream, to protect.

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

Lisa stood up and ran a few paces, shouting Raj's name. Then she turned and ran in the opposite direction. Jaz couldn't see her eyes behind her sunglasses. A sick feeling descended over him like a shroud. Something had happened, something that wasn't going to come right.

They walked and shouted and walked and shouted, turning wider and wider circles around the rocks until their voices were hoarse in their parched throats and their clothes were coated in fine white dust. Even as his head spun and sweat soaked his back, Jaz felt as if an IV were pumping cold gel through his veins. The world was far away; he was trapped somewhere else, somewhere dead and bone-white, outside time and space. He thought perhaps he should look for prints, the ridged soles of a child's sneaker, but any trace had been obliterated by his own tracks, crossing and recrossing the same ground.

Lisa and Jaz's son Raj is a terror: non-verbally autistic, he screams and throws tantrums on an hourly basis. Though Jaz's finance job has made them quite wealthy, they avoid most hotels, choosing to stay at cheap motels when traveling--which of course they do infrequently. Though they avoid saying it to each other directly, Raj has destroyed their relationship with each other, already strained by the cultural differences between their Jewish and Punjabi families. When visiting the Mojave Desert in California, Raj suddenly disappears, thrusting Lisa and Jaz into the national spotlight. And when Raj suddenly reappears, he has become patient, calm, and even begins to speak. What happened to him in the desert? Jaz wonders, is this really his son at all?

Lisa and Jaz's story is the main narrative of Hari Kunzru's God Without Men, but it's only one thread among many: Kunzru weaves in stories of the desert going back to the 19th century. A Spanish Jesuit and explorer encounters mysterious Indian practices; an obsessive anthropologist seeks revenge on the Indian man who stole his wife; a cult calling itself the Ashtar Galactic Command springs up there, claiming to be able to contact an advanced alien race who wish to bring peace to mankind. It's strongly suggested--I think--that, when the anthropologist in the 1920's spots a "glowing child" walking with his Indian rival in the desert, that the child is Raj, having slipped through some sort of time portal, but then again, Raj is not the only child to have disappeared in this place. A cult leader's daughter also disappears, only to reappear years later--though whether it is really her or just someone willing to play the part of a long lost daughter is unclear.

I recently wrote a book that shares a lot of qualities with Gods Without Men. (A book needing representation, if you happen to be an agent, wink wink!) It revolves around the disappearance of a young child, and it's told in a multivocalic way, through several rotating third person points-of-view. So when I say this book doesn't quite work on a fundamental basis, I wonder if that feeling is something of an anxious projection on my part. But Gods Without Men just has too many parts. When Raj is rediscovered, for example, it's by a young Iraqi refugee girl who has moved to the desert to take part in a training program for US soldiers in a pretend Iraqi village. The story itself is fascinating, but it lacks any strong connection to the main narrative. Similarly, the book sets up as important early on a washed-up British rocker who has come to the desert to record a Laurel Canyon-type album with his band, but this character ends up being more or less irrelevant to the book as a whole. Each of these pieces is engaging on its own, but taken together, the main thing I felt was impatience: Come on, get back to Lisa, Jaz, and Raj. The danger with these types of novels--and I feel this in my own book, too--is that they make it so any empathy you might for any specific character or conflict is incredibly slow to develop.

The slightly-too-complex structure of Gods Without Men, I think, conceals a vacuity at its heart. There is a pleasing mystery to what is going on, exactly, in the Mojave (He doesn't say it, but contextually Kunzru seems to be writing about a remote section of Joshua tree National park), but the novel essentially waves a hand at it as if to say, isn't this all so mysterious? I don't need the novel to give me any hard science-fiction version of what happens to Raj when he disappears, or what the cult members are actually doing when they think they're talking to the "Ascended Masters," but in the place of possibilities Kunzu provides what is, essentially, a vibe.

I don't want to get too negative; I actually enjoyed this book, though it failed to come together for me. Kunzru is an excellent writer on a sentence level, and he does a good job with the Mojave, a truly alien and forbidding landscape if there ever was one. And like I said, each piece itself is engaging--but I wanted them actually to come together, rather than seeming as if they came together.

Storm by George R. Stewart

Surrounded almost entirely within the two arms of this polar outbreak, Maria was brought to a standstill off the coast. The J.M. looked at her with a fatherly feeling. First she had been an active little storm running her thousand miles a day, slipping through the air as a wave. She had matured, and with heightened winds had bodily carried the air along with her; she had broken a ship, and swept a man overboard. Then she had shrunk, and seemed to be declining. Now, caught between the two polar arms, she had become stationary, and again vast and vigorous, and in her nature more complicated than ever before.

George R. Stewart's novel Storm has many characters: weathermen and meteorologists, highway workers, farmers, managers in charge of railways, electric power plants, and spillways, cops, even an owl and a boar. But the main character is Maria, as the storm is named by a junior meteorologist when it forms off the eastern coast of Japan. Maria moves across the ocean, threatening to end a long drought that has gripped California, and when she arrives she unleashes torrents of heavy rain and, at higher elevations, snow. She's a large storm, and a costly one, though not exceptional. She lives for twelve days, and in her short life she touches the lives of thousands upon thousands of people living in California and beyond; the way those lives are touched--sometimes for the better, as with the farmers, sometimes for the worse--are the story of Storm.

What makes Storm worthwhile is that it reveals how shrunken our conception of weather, at least in literature, can be. A storm or powerful shower might provide the backdrop for the travails of a human being, but such a narrow focus obscures the way in which weather events connect the lives of thousands of human beings together in a way nothing else can. Storm operates on a truly huge scale: though it focuses on California, the story of Maria can only be told in the context of the great mass of polar wind that keeps the storm locked on the California coast, a wind that moves from the Canadian Arctic down through the American plains, becoming a powerful wet gust in Mexico and the tropics of Central America. The story of Maria is not just national, or international, but global.

The stories that Stewart chooses to tell are often focused on middle management. There's the junior meteorologist, or "J.M.," who first identifies her, but also several characters whose jobs are directly responsible for storm response. For the managers, the response can be as simple as rerouting power from one power station to another when one is knocked offline, or as complex as managing the snow plows trying desperately to keep Donner Pass open on I-40. Working class characters, like the plow drivers, end up out in the storm, and they don't always come back alive: one of the most shocking moments in the novel is the death of a lineman who falls from a line. Though a storm like Maria is a beautiful thing, Stewart is honest about the many dangers they bring, dangers which, while mitigated by the march of technical progress, have been part of human life for millennia. When Stewart introduces a pair of young lovers who must drive back to Reno through the storm and disappear, I expected them to have been holed up somewhere to wait out the storm--until, at the novel's end, the wreckage of their car is found.

Storm was written in the 1930's, and some of the storm response in it seems charmingly antiquated, as with the meteorologists whose principle task is to make a daily chart of hand-drawn isobars by collecting radioed-in information about air pressure throughout the northern hemisphere. There's no digital mapping and no radar. But the snowplows, the electric lines, the spillways, all these probably function more or less the same way today as described in Stewart's novel. Storm is a reminder that human beings have yet to conquer the world of weather, and are at its mercy in ways big and small every day. It's an especially fascinating and sobering novel for a world beginning to grapple with the ways our lives will be upended by climate change in the years to come.

Thirst by Amélie Nothomb

I'm pointing out these issues because this is not what will be written in the Gospels. Why not ? I don't know. The evangelists were nowhere near me when this happened. And regardless of what people have said, they didn't know me. I'm not angry with them, but nothing is more irritating than those people who, under the pretext that they love you, claim that they know you inside out.

Thirst is a retelling of the final days of Jesus' life, told from a jail cell in which he is placed in the day between his trial and his execution. This day, as Jesus notes, doesn't exist--the Gospels present a whirlwind between the betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane and the crucifixion--but as a literary conceit it works and is consistent with Nothomb's Jesus who is, let's be honest, a bit prickly.

The best part of the book is the seriousness with which it takes the incarnation, the actual embodiment of Jesus. The central image, that of desire, most clearly addressed in the literal thirst of the title but also illustrated by Jesus' desire for food (he's annoyed at how slowly John eats), physical intimacy (he's in a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, here styled as Madeline), touch (his favorite moment to reflect on from his perch in eternity is the Pieta), and companionship. There's an anti-gnostic flair to the best sections, aggressive pushback at the gnostic idea of the flesh as evil. Nothomb pushes it even further than most, claiming that God was deficient--indeed, that creation itself is deficient--because it is corporeal while God, having no body, is not.

The first half of the book, where Jesus talks about his miracles and ministry, I enjoyed a lot. Jesus didn't, he says, enjoy performing most of his miracles. Only the wedding at Cana was enjoyable, and after that, miracles were necessary but hard, painful. One is reminded, though Nothomb doesn't cite it, of Luke 8:46, when Jesus is touched by a sick woman and she is healed: "I felt power going out of me." Jesus, when healing here, draws on a power he calls "the husk", a strange name I couldn't quite suss out the reasoning behind. Perhaps this Jesus is a bit touchy because he feels, in a way most Jesuses do not, the loss of his power as it is used to heal others but not himself.

The second half, focusing on the crucifixion, was dicier. I tried very hard to put aside any theological irritation, but certain ideas were repeatedly so frequently that they began to grate, especially Jesus' repeated paeans to the love between he and Madeline. In Thirst, transcendence comes ultimately from this relationship, and it makes the story feel small. The Passion as a doomed romance was never going to be a winner for me--is there a single novel about Jesus that doesn't lean on Jary?

Finally, the book ended on a low note, with Jesus referencing "affirmative action" from the cross, stating that, contra the Gospels, he didn't ask God to forgive his killers, and, finally, achieving his great redemptive moment in the realization that the person who really needed forgiven was... himself. Yeah, after a monologue about how badly his sadistic Father has screwed things up, he realizes that he needs to let all his anger toward himself, for spending his life on others, go, and he dies.

There are good ideas, good writing, powerful themes, but ultimately, there's nothing transcendent in Thirst, for me. Jesus isn't someone you'd want to spend time with--and there's a good chance he wouldn't want to hang out with you either--and his life and death really accomplish nothing in particular. On Easter weekend, it just didn't hit right. Novels about Jesus don't need to be theologically rigorous, but I don't understand making Jesus the protagonist of your book if you've got nothing theological to say.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them "the lost children." I suppose the word "refugee" is more difficult to remember. And even if the term "lost" is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as "the lost children." And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

A family of four begins a cross-country road trip from New York City to Arizona. Mama is a documentarian who wants to record the stories of those affected by the separation of children at the U.S.-Mexico border; she has recently been working to help a friend locate her missing daughters, who have disappeared somewhere in those borderlands. Papa is a documentarist--as different, they say, as librarian from chemist--who wants to record natural soundscapes in the areas once occupied by Geronimo's Apaches, the last "free" people in revolt against the United States. In the backseat are his son, "the boy," and her daughter, "the girl," and together they are a somewhat makeshift, though precarious family: Mama, who narrates the first half of the book, isn't sure that what she and her husband are looking for on the trip is the same, and foresees that the end of the trip might also bring the dissolution of their marriage. But somewhere in the vicinity of the Chiricahua Mountains, the former stronghold of Geromino's Apaches, the boy, caught up in the stories his father and mother have told him about these many absent figures, takes his sister and runs away into the desert.

Who tells the story of the missing? How does one tell the story of the missing? For Papa, it's about recording emptiness: the natural sounds where people are not. It's also about imagination: the stories he tells the children about the Apache are obviously half-made up, a way of constructing a presence where non exists. (Papa, and the novel, perhaps pointedly and perhaps not, never seems to recognize that there are lots of living Apaches one might also record.) For Mama, the question is a fraught one over which she constantly agonizes. After hearing about it on the radio, they make their way for a rural New Mexico airport where a transport of children back to Mexico is taking place, and though they witness a small line of kids trooping from the hangar to the plane, most of what there is to see and document is stillness: a building, a plane. Even the boy becomes a documentarian/ist, with a Polaroid camera he's given for his tenth birthday. In this context, the fact that the children are undocumented takes on a special valence: Who will pay attention to them and how?

In Mama's section, this anxiety plays out through intertextuality, criss-crossed with a number of literary and journalistic sources that might help one make sense of the removal and disappearance of these children. Some are real books, fastidiously quoted and then indexed in interstitial lists of what's contained in the family's many moving boxes. I found this to be the least successful part of the novel, an attempt to write around a fundamental absence that left the narrative feeling overstuffed with ideas. Mama fixates especially on a fake book that tells a fable-like story of a group of children on a weeks-long train journey; it's pieces from this book--and others--that the boy adopts and reinterprets when the novel switches, halfway through, to his perspective. This section doesn't always work voice-wise, I thought, and even at ten his impulse to venture into the desert without his parents seems almost too thick-skulled to be believed. But it allows Lost Children Archive to escape some of the writerliness that makes the novel's first half seem sluggish.

In one cutesy detail, the kids each want to take their own empty moving box, to be filled with what they find on the trip. The girl ultimately fills hers with echoes: the sounds of people responding across a great distance, that turns out to be--for better or worse--the sound of us talking to ourselves. And yet, when the kids find themselves alone and lost in the Arizona desert, there is the chance that the echoes will turn out to be a real voice, searching for us as we are searching for it.

Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polak

The mathematician moves into a glass condominium with fourteen doors and has nightmares about the rooms behind them switching places. Sometimes she opens them to find a rival mathematician sitting on a long velvet couch. The rival has a retentive memory and a svelte build, while the mathematician has neither.

I read an article last week about different types of story engines--plot, character, language, voice--and I've been thinking about it since. So when I picked up this slim collection and began reading it, I immediately started wondering what engine was driving these short stories. I decided on one not mentioned in the article: the concept engine.

All these stories--really, microfictions in the same general stream of Joy Williams' 99 Stories About God--have a concept, maybe two, which is riffed on over 2-3 pages before moving on to the next narrative. A woman who carries her own rope barrier with her, a bride-and-groom to be whose actions flout the story's narration, an old man who's being locomoted to a mysterious resort, a passenger plane that's hopelessly lost. Great hooks, but I was initially disappointed in the follow-through; many of the stories seemed to lack a late twist, revelation, epiphany. A couple, like Grocery Story, hardly seemed like narratives at all.

But as I read deeper and paid attention to the book's divisions--Catastrophes, Interiors, Sceneries, and Forgotten Things, I realized that I was approaching them wrongly. Although a number of these pieces stand alone just fine, by and large they serve the larger thematic purpose stated in the title, a series of scenes, objects, experiences, meant to be observed, interpreted, considered, like a walk through a gallery of tall tales. By the end, I'd been mostly won over by the concept, and the last story, Love Language, about a passenger plane that gets lost before heading into more abstract, unsettling territory.  I also enjoyed the pair of stories, Invitation and Sabbatical, that deal with creepy landlords ingratiating themselves to their tenants. The former is even quite creepy.

In the dedications, Polak ends with "And, completely, to God", a persona curiously absent from all but the last story. These characters don't pray, don't think of life after death, don't consider the metaphysical implications of the frequently absurd situations they find themselves in, and I wonder why. Maybe the absence of God is why the museum exists to begin with. God is dead, we have killed him, and all we got is this crummy museum full of beautiful, broken people. Who can say?


   

The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise by Georges Perec

having carefully weighed the pros and cons you gird up your loins and make up your mind to go see your head of department to ask for a raise so you go see your head of department let us assume to keep things simple--for we must do our best to keep things simple--that his name is mr xavier that's to say mister or rather mr x

If you don't want to read this entire book (all 80 of its small pages) you can instead look at the flowchart below which was the inspiration for the exercise. Georges Perec, possibly the most member of the experimental writer's group Oulipo, is probably best known for his 800 page Life: A User's Manual, but this slim volume is really the novelization of the flowchart, written in the way Perec imagined a computer might speak--there's no punctuation between sentences, no capitalization, no direct dialog. And given that, it's the perfect length.

The premise is in the title: the protagonist, unnamed, wants to ask his boss for a raise. A number of obstacles may or may not arise--if/then is one of the computational structures Perec structures the book around, alongside the loop--and depending on those, different options present themselves and so on. Branching narratives are common in Oulipe texts, and TAOAYBFAR's twist is to present all possible options and then follow them to their terminus which is, in reality, just another, slightly modified version of the loop the proagonist is stuck in.

For 70 of the pages, the narrator is entirely unsuccessful in asking for his raise. He's blocked by Fridays, weekends, vacations, measels, Lent, angry coworkers, and, most cleverly, the absence of his boss who is in fact stuck in the same loop of approaching his own surperior and being denied. You might think this would be tiresome and horse-beating, but in fact Perec is not much like a computer at all because he inserts a biting and poignant narrative between the lines. The protagonist may not get much closer to his raise in these 80 pages, but we do learn that he's been at the firm since he was a teenager, that he's now married with children, and during the time span covered by the iterations in the book itself, we know that he's at least 5-6 years closer to, well, death by the time he finally gets his ask.

It's not much of a spoiler, perhaps, to reveal that the end of the book is just the beginning of another iteration of the loop--after asking his boss for the raise, which is only an additional 9 pounds per month(!), he's given what amounts to a polite brush off as his boss says he deserves it but it needs to be sent up the ladder, a ladder that both the reader and the protagonist know is ultimately unscalable. Maybe in six months, the dispassionate text says, or maybe 6 months after that.

But the text isn't really dispassionate either. One of the funniest, most poignant jokes is the repetition and mutuation of passages:

you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organization of which you are an employee
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of one of the biggest firms in one of the key sectors of one of the nation's most infulential industries
---
you can always wait for him by circumperambulating the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the consortium which pays you a pittance while grinding away the best years of your life

Perec shows his cards in the second person narration: the protagonist doesn't have a name because their name is your name, their endless loops are your endless loops, the slow grinding away of the best years of your life under the crushing machinery of capitalism is the day-to-day existence of most people, and tiny mutations in the sequence are the rays of hope, which are always yanked away but promised again. But at least Perec makes it funny.

 

Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber

After reading the email from Schmidt I knew I would have to fly to see Schmidt on his deathbed in Berlin. After rereading and reflecting on the more emphatic passages of his relatively short email, I was convinced I'd have to visit Schmidt one last time as he lay, in his words, dying in Berlin. Although we hadn't spoken in years, the email, sparse and cruel, hadn't surprised me, it felt suspended, as if it had been written years before and was merely waiting for me to open and read it. The tone of Schmidt's email hadn't surprised me either. Schmidt had been my best friend and confidant, my spiritual companion in art, art history, and art criticism, our interests drawn to the Northern Renaissance, specifically Dutch Mannerism and, more specifically than that, the painting Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Count Hugo Beckenbauer, Saint Sebastian's Abyss the focus of both our early studies and later our entire careers.

An unnamed narrator receives a nine-page email--that is, we are told, relatively succinct--from his old friend and colleague Schmidt, who is dying at his home in Berlin. Schmidt and the narrator are the world's two foremost experts on Hugo Beckenbauer, a once-obscure Viennese painter whose masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, was discovered by the pair in a textbook at the Ruskin School of Art when they were just students. (Which of them saw the painting first is a matter of longstanding debate.) The narrator and Schmidt built their careers on Beckenbauer and Saint Sebastian's Abyss, until a falling out turned them into rivals and bitter enemies. Schmidt has called the narrator back to his deathbed for, it seems, a final settling of accounts, a final word about the painting that has animated, and destroyed, their friendship.

Schmidt traces the fault line in their friendship back to a comment the narrator made during a conference, a comment he calls that horrible thing, and which turns out to be the simple affirmation that art is essentially subjective and democratic. For Schmidt, art appreciation is entirely objective: once he chides the narrator for letting himself be overcome by his emotions when viewing Saint Sebastian's Abyss, saying that whenever he is overcome by a flood of emotions, he steps away and return when his faculties are more under control. Schmidt tells the narrator that he endeavors to approach the painting as its enemy, and when the painting bests him again and again, it is further proof that it is the greatest painting in the world. Schmidt is elitist, anti-democratic; he believes that all art produced after the death of Cezanne in 1906 is trash, and employs this belief to torpedo both of the narrator's marriages, both to modern art critics. In this way Saint Sebastian's Abyss dramatizes the tension between attitudes toward art which must remain in tension, I think, for criticism to function.

But Saint Sebastian's Abyss has less heady things going on, too. Chief among them is the depiction of a deeply troubled and codependent relationship that outlasts everything else in the protagonists' lives. You wonder, actually, do the narrator and Schmidt really feel so strongly about Saint Sebastian's Abyss, or is it a convenient object of transference for their turbulent attachment to each other? (In one of the funnier touches of the novel, the narrator describes packs of roving Schmidite hoodlum-critics who harrass him in public, wearing Schmidt's trademark bushy mustache as a kind of gang symbol.) The painting, which is described in slow dribs--the line of apostles floating into the sky, the high cliff, the "holy donkey"--is a field of contradictions on which a psychic battle of love and hatred is waged. Schmidt and the narrator explore large abstractions there, like death, belief, and the end of the world, but to what extent are our convictions about these things really about our feelings for each other?

Over the course of the novel, which takes place mostly in flashback, between the narrator's reception of the nine-page but relatively succinct email and his arrival at Schmidt's apartment in Berlin, the narrator gives us the story of Beckenbauer himself, a syphilis-ridden and perhaps completely blind sex addict who died in grotesque circumstances. He describes the intervention of a Jesuit named Vogel who tries, with uncertain success, to convert Beckenbauer on his deathbed, and the comparison between the two pairs is clear. Will the narrator be able to convert Schmidt to his principles of belief and democracy at last? Or will it be the sickly, apocalyptic Schmidt who converts the Jesuit? The novel finds a third way to these options that is, I think, entirely satisfying.

One thing that makes Saint Sebastian's Abyss work so well, I think, is Haber's style, which is simultaneously long-winded and drastically restricted. The narrator is repetitive to the extreme, as befitting someone who is dwelling on a long history in its last stages; the way that stock phrases (the horrible thing, for instance, but also the monkey paintings, which is used to describe Beckenbauer's two surviving lesser works) recur really captures how key moments in our lives crystallize into significance. These stock phrases allow Haber to write fantastically long and comma-strewn sentences, which are nevertheless easy to read because they involve escalating arrangements of the same words and ideas. It's a neat strategy that really captures the narrator's frame of mind.

Versailles by Kathryn Davis

My soul is going on a trip. I want to talk about her. I want to talk about her. Why would anyone ever want to talk about anything else?

My soul is a girl: she is just like me. She is fourteen years old and has been promised in marriage to the French Dauphin, who also has a soul though more visible and worldly, its body already formed (so I've been told) from layers of flesh and fat. In France they piss into chamber pots made of lapis and dine on common garden slugs. In France their hands smell like vanilla and they shoot their fleches d'amour indiscriminately in all directions, owing to their taste for books pernicious to religion and morals.

My soul is also powerful, but like a young girl it has wishes and ideas--yes!--a soul can have ideas like a mind does.

At fourteen, Marie Antoinette--Antonia in her native Austria--is driven in a carriage to the estate of Versailles near Paris, where she will be wed to the future Louis XVI. Antoinette, as described by Kathryn Davis, is curious and sprightly; she has trepidation about her marriage to the Dauphin, but she has cultivated also a sense of separateness from her physical existence that leaves her aloof. It's true that her body likes the pleasant things of Versailles--though the extravagant many-layered diamond necklace that helps bring about her downfall interests her not at all--but her soul looks on from inside these things with a kind of equanimity that will be tested by public hatred and, eventually, violence. Unlike many depictions of Marie Antoinette, Davis' queen gets along rather well with the fat, sensual Louis, who arrives in their bedchamber after the wedding wanting only to eat the slice of pie he's brought with him. Both are souls riding on a tide of history, and in that way, they are made for each other.

It will sound like a cliche, but here it goes: Versailles itself is like a character in the book. Davis titles each section with the name of a different room from the palace, so that the flow of the novel is like progressing through it. It is a strange and obscene place, Versailles; Davis scrupulously counts the tiles and the mirrors to give a specific sense of excess. For the revolutionaries protesting the price of bread, Versailles is a monument to crippling waste and selfishness, but Davis captures a sense of wonder and whimsy the palace possesses, a sheer clownish extravagance that demands awe. But it, too, is like Antoinette, a body animated by a soul, and for all its orange trees and hedge mazes and gilt mirrors, Versailles is separate and different from the people who move within it. In the novel's powerful last line, which comes after Antoinette and Louis have been beheaded and the palace shuttered, Davis describes "Seventeen arcades, each with eighteen mirrors. Three hundred six mirrors and in every one of them no Antoinette."

The three books of Davis' I've read couldn't be more different: Versailles, The Walking Tour, and my still-favorite, Labrador. Yet I'm starting to see a pattern in how freewheeling Davis' prose is, how eagerly it jumps through structures, points-of-view, and forms. Versailles is the most ordinary of the three, but still it has a tendency to switch from Antoinette's first person POV to a third person POV in the middle of a paragraph. When a scene takes place away from Antoinette--scheming courtiers, rabid peasants--Davis presents it in play-like dialogue. In one of these characters Bread itself--you know, the stuff you're supposed to eat cake if you can't get--is a character. I didn't feel as attached to Antoinette as I did the teenage protagonist of Labrador, but like a visitor to Versailles, I was dazzled.

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all. But his grandsons new already; not the names of the strict position of the sun each day in relation to its house, but the larger motion and meaning of the great organic calendar itself, the emergency of dawn and dusk, summer and winter, the very cycle of the sun and of all the suns that were and were to come. And he knew they knew, and he took them with him to the fields and they cut open the earth and touched the corn and ate sweet melons in the sun.

I have been trying to teach House Made of Dawn for years and years, it seems like. It took several years of pondering to conceptualize the class in contemporary Native American fiction I now teach, though I always knew that Momaday's legendary novel would be a part of it, and then just after I reread the novel in 2020, school as we knew it shut down. Reading it again I feel a kind of nervous anticipation about how students will respond to it--personally I suspect they will find it too difficult to really enjoy, though they will be challenged by it in ways they may not recognize on a surface level--and again I feel rather stymied by it. It's a weird, complicated book, one that's hard to penetrate, and one whose greatest power seems removed somewhere behind the page itself, and to see it is to see as the traditional Pueblo dancers do, "beyond the mountain": "To say 'beyond the mountain,' and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being."

Anyway. I've reviewed this book twice before, and you can read those reviews here and here, so I won't make a big review for this time around. But one thing I did notice this time around, because I've now read The Way to Rainy Mountain, is how much of that other novel is contained within this one. Momaday is Kiowa, a tribal nation native to the Great Plains, who lived for a time at the Walatowa Pueblo in New Mexico because his parents were teachers in the Indian Service. (There is a "pan-Indian" quality to the novel if you're willing to look for it, not least in the way the Pueblo reveres the customs of a small group of refugee Navajo who were integrated into the Pueblo generations prior--something that is echoed in the befuddled care the Navajo narrator Ben Benally bestows on the Pueblo protagonist Abel in Los Angeles.) The experiences of Momaday's grandmother, an Oklahoma Kiowa, are incorporated into the book as the memories of Josiah Big Bluff Tosamah, the bombastic "Priest of the Sun" in the Native American Church in Los Angeles:

The last time I saw her, she prayed standing by the side of her bed at night, naked to the waist, the light of a kerosene lamp moving upon her dark skin. Her long black hair, always drawn and braided in the day, lay upon her shoulders and breasts like a shawl. I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech. There was something inherently sad in the sound, some slight hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

I probably wouldn't have noticed the parallels if not for Tosamah telling the story of how his grandmother was a member of a Kiowa band that traveled to Texas to beg to be sold a buffalo from a private herd, for which they were rebuffed, a moment that largely spelled doom for their religious traditions. What's interesting about this is that Tosamah is a rather ambiguous character, whose church is depicted as too syncretic, and too eager to make accommodations with the settler world into which Indian Relocation programs have dropped these characters: he makes fun of Abel for being a "longhair," but that's who Abel is--though he tries to make it Los Angeles, it's only back at Walatowa that he can really be the person he is meant to be. What was Momaday doing, I wonder, by giving a character like Tosamah his own memories?

I don't know that I find this book any easier after three readings, but I am noticing new things about it. It can be a challenging, even off-putting book, but how many books really reward repeated readings like that. I hope my students, even if they don't love it--and I don't think even I could say I love it, though I respect and admire it--find something in it worth reflecting on.