South and West by Joan Didion

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

How could it have come to this?

I am trying to place myself in history.

Joan Didion's South and West isn't really a book, or if it is, it's a failed book, the scaffolding to a book. Published in 2017, it was taken from her notes, and mostly about a trip that Didion took throughout the deep South in the 1970s, followed by a brief collection of memories of California occasioned by the abduction of Patty Hearst. Whether Didion meant to contrast the two, I have no idea, but the contrast is there from the beginning of her journey through the South, which she writes attracted her because it seemed to be "for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center." It was also a kind of return for Didion, who spent a few turbid years in Durham, North Carolina. Never mind the vast difference between Durham and Birmingham; the South may be, for Didion, a kind of shadow life not lived.

It's clear enough to me why the manuscript of the "South" section of South and West, at least, waited years to be published: Didion has no idea what to do with the South. She applies her journalistic eye, her withering eye, everywhere, but what she sees lies only at the surface of things: signs, gravestones, the front porches of houses. The language that Didion uses to describe the South is the language of mystery; the kudzu and tropical greenery seem, at every vantage point, to conceal an essential impenetrability. Uncharacteristically, Didion seems to shrink from the South. She seems to spend much of the trip in hotel swimming pools. She even tells us that she finds these pools, with their familiar interchangeability, comforting.

The greatest insights of the South instead come from the mouths of the few people that Didion interviews--all of whom seem to be known acquaintances from the world of writing and the academy. Like the white southerners of V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, they offer up a fear of change and integration dressed up in the language of moderation. One interviewee laments how he has been forced by integration to send his kids to private school, and somehow manages to make it sound like a tragedy for the Black kids, too. (Didion interviews no Black Southerners, though they linger at the margins of the scrupulously reported scenery.) Is this the dark heart that Didion gestures at? It seems to me that these cultural dynamics, while vile, are not particular difficult to understand, and do not amount to any kind of essential mystery. But Didion has no interest in probing further into this or anything else, and it seems to me that in the place of insight she offers a number of Gothic metaphors, chief among them that of the snake pit. The still brown waters of the Mississippi provides a "sense of water moccasins." An anecdote tells of dripping gasoline down a snake hole to make the snake emerge, "drunk" and easy to kill. Over and over again--in a way she might have toned down, I think, if she'd ever fashioned these notes into something more--she imagines snakes lurking in the greenery. No wonder she doesn't want to touch.

We get Didion's tremendous power of noticing, but no understanding. At a movie theater in Meridian--another fungible place and easy escape from the part of the world she supposedly wanted to discover--she describes the crowd as gazing at the screen "as if the movie were Czech." But how does a Mississippian watch a movie any differently than a Californian? And why should they understand it any less? It seems like a rich comment, to me, from someone so obviously stymied by her own choice of subject. Better to say that Joan Didion looked at the audience as if they were Czech.

The "West" part of South and West is even less polished, more partial. It's slapdash in a way that reveals the true nature of the book as "notes"; "South," by contrast, seems to have gone through at least some process of arrangement and shaping. And yet, it has a richness to it that "South" never manages, especially with regards to the effusive material culture of the Californian upper middle class: the "Lilly Dache and Mr. John hats, the vicuna coats, the hand-milled soap and the &60-an-ounce perfume." In these shop-items Didion gets deeper into the identity and culture of the Californian West than she ever allows herself to do in "South"--or, at least, that's how it seems to me as a Southerner. Maybe a Californian would feel differently. But I don't think so. "West" reads like a quickly abortive attempt by Didion to find her own place in the world, her "place in history," as she writes, and though she quickly hits a wall--it's not easy to write about yourself--it made me go back and think about "South" as an attempt to do the same thing by contrast, to discover the Californian Didion by discovering the Didion-that-was-not in the South. Perhaps it's not the South that Didion was shrinking away from in those hotel pools--maybe it was herself.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva

A song about homeland and exile, that's what I wanted to write--I who thought I did not have a homeland and that my home was the world; I who thought exile was simply a journey, a change in place. For the price of thirteen years, I have paid for one piece of wisdom, which I would like to leave to my people. I want to tell them--and to warn them. The world is not only large, I shall sing, it is also hostile. Hide away from it in a single homeland, a single city, a single home; fence off a small part of that big world so you can master it and warm it; find yourself one trade, one sipahi commander, one line of work; have your own children. Cling to something amidst the boundless current of time, amidst the boundlessness of the universe. Choose one truth as your own.

By his virtues, Cem should be the heir of Mehmed the Conqueror, who took Istanbul for the Ottoman Empire: he is handsome, courageous, creative; a leader, a poet, a warrior. But when Mehmed dies, his brother Bayezid moves swiftly to consolidate his power over the sultanate, and Cem is forced to flee. He schemes to reconcile with his brother, and failing that, to raise an army of his own, but when he crosses over to the island of Rhodes, he finds himself suddenly the prisoner of the Knights Hospitaller, who recognize the strategic value of holding onto Cem. Along with his friend--and, it is strongly implied, his lover--the poet Saadi, Cem becomes a bargaining chip, shuffled around the powers of Europe for thirteen years. His jailers pretend to be his hosts; they provide luxurious quarters and food, even hashish, and they tell Cem that he cannot leave for his own safety.

The Case of Cem is, supposedly, a classic of Bulgarian literature, and newly translated into English by Angela Rodel. The Bulgarian Mutafchieva, perhaps, found in the historical figure of Cem a powerful metaphor of the clash between the East and West. Mehmed's acquisition of Istanbul, after all, set off centuries of conflict between Christendom and the Islamic world. Not knowing all that much about the particulars, I found The Case of Cem often very confusing, but the larger story comes through quite clearly: it's in the best interests of all sides to maintain a kind of status quo, and Cem gives up his life to provide it. He moves from Rhodes to Nice to Rome, but everywhere he goes, the situation remains the same. Outside the walls of the various castles where he is trapped, they begin to sing songs about him; tragic songs about the poet-warrior who was betrayed and imprisoned.

The Case of Cem is organized into a series of first-hand accounts by historical figures involved in Cem's "case," all of whom are speaking in the authorial present from within the grave. The most common narrator is Saadi, the poet and lover of Cem, who knows his master best and who is affected the most when, throughout his long exile, Cem begins to wither away and lose all of his natural virtues. This is the most touching aspect, I think, of Cem's story, the way he becomes listless and fat, addicted to hashish and half-mad. It's all the more powerful because what is dissolved is not just Cem himself, but the pure love that Saadi bears for him. It's this love, in the end, that is difficult to watch curdle and die. When Saadi decides, after many years, to do what he said he would never do--abandon Cem and escape on his own--is it a betrayal? Or does the man he abandons contain so little of Cem himself that there is no one left to betray? Only Cem is unable to speak for himself in the novel (a trait that reminded me of John Williams' Augustus), and the effect is that we feel that Cem's dissolution has moved him into some place farther away than death. If Cem speaks, it's only with the voice of the songs that spring up about his ordeal, and even then those voices are less Cem's own than imagined substitutions.

Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann

Whenever Jimmy needed the smell of a woman or the soft weight of a woman's embrace, why, he had the whores being themselves for Gloria who partook of them all and lived on them all like some sky-goddess feasting upon the smoke from sacrifices. As for the rest of what he needed, the airy loveliness and happiness, he had that always with him; it floated at his arm like a helium balloon; no one could see it or ask about it or take it from him. So, having the hair, he really only needed the memories. Jimmy sat alone in his room, drinking tequila until his lips went numb. That's right honey babe (he said to Gloria) I have you I'm not lying I never lied to you I haven't told the truth for so long now that I've given up lying.

Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. He lives entirely on the social security checks he gets from the government; these go to rent, to the bar, and to the prostitutes who make the Tenderloin their home. Sometimes he has sex with them (though when he does, he ends up obsessing over whether or not he has contracted a venereal disease), but mostly he only wants to hear their memories, which he appropriates for the woman of his dreams: Gloria. Gloria is Jimmy's one true love, his wife, whom he has known since childhood, and who represents everything good and beautiful--glory--about the world. But she's not real.

Jimmy spends his days "searching" for Gloria. Sometimes this seems to take on a literal aspect, as in searching for a woman who has hidden just behind the next corner, then the next. But mostly it means memorizing the stories told to him by the real prostitutes, sanitizing them and replaying them in his mind as a memory belonging to he and Gloria together, or just to Gloria. It's a difficult process, because the prostitute's stories are often grim ones. It's easy enough to assign to Gloria a lovely childhood memory of going on a road trip or sitting in a dark movie theater, but what can Gloria do with the memory of being nearly killed by a serial killer who targets prostitutes? Or the many stories of torture and rape that feature in these women's lives? Jimmy's quest makes him sort of an odd duck among the johns, and when his methods escalate--because when you chase what cannot be caught, your methods must escalate as a matter of course--it alienates him more and more from the life of the Tenderloin, already characterized by its alienation from the larger world. He begins to ask not just for stories but locks of hair, talismans to make Gloria real, and then it's an easy step from locks to entire wigs.

It seems likely that the stories that make up Gloria's imaginary life are ones told to Vollmann by the prostitutes of the Tenderloin, or fictionalized versions of them. A brief appendix, "A Profile of the Tenderloin Prostitute," is almost certainly taken verbatim from such conversations. No writer throws himself into his subject like Vollmann; after being embedded with the mujahideen, the Tenderloin was probably an easy assignment. Vollmann's engagement with the Tenderloin surpasses what one might call research or journalism; he (later?) famously developed a female alter ego to live among the women described here. (What Vollmann calls, in the language of the time and place, "Transvestites" or "Transformers," are as central to the construction of Gloria's identity as AFAB women.) For this reason, Vollmann's books always have an honesty and authenticity that few other books, especially novels, can match. Whores for Gloria crackles with the real life of the Tenderloin.

Ultimately, Whores for Gloria is a story about the nature of our desires. Jimmy both does and does not believe in Gloria; he consciously and intentionally cobbles an identity and memory for her from those of the Tenderloin women, but after he does so he must forget that he has done this, and in a sense persuade himself that the image he has made is a representation of the world. Of course, this is what all our desires are: images that we have made to persuade ourselves that they are real. In Jimmy I recognize the power of the fantasy life that dwells within, as well as the fear that descending too far into the fantasy can leave one alienated and unfit for the world. Such desires are principally about sex and romance; you might even say that all sexual desire is structured the same way as Gloria. But Vollmann captures the way that even our yearnings for other people are rooted in a deeper yearning for abstractions like beauty and goodness that need images to cling to, but which can only be failed by them.

A Boat Load of Home Folk by Thea Astley

After Lake reached what should have been structure, he found an aching gap. There were chunks, of course, of wall and roof and immense spaces filled with thrown trees. A statue of Our Lady of Sion lay face down among the grasses. the whiteness of it was like light. It all seemed amusingly symbolic though he had not the heart to see it thus while custom nudged him past towards the presbytery, now only a flattened jumble of timber walls and passion-vine streamers torn out in the high wind. They flew steadily and crazily over the rubble, over the banana-trees that had one stood in a grove near the front door. As Lake went by he picked at a frond of these whose suave leaves lay in his hand without emotion and added to his sense of aloneness. The rain was cutting his skin like bullets, pasting his hair across his eyes. But he opened his mouth to the rain the way he used to do as a boy and felt the tearing of it across his tongue.

Thea Astley's A Boat Load of Home Folk focuses on a group of people who disembark from a ship on a Pacific island which is, I think, supposed to be Vanuatu. Among them are an unhappily married couple, the Seabrooks; Stevenson, a local official dogged by his own relationship wit his young son; a pair of elderly companions, Miss Paradise and Miss Trumper, on vacation; and a gruff priest with a mysterious errand. None of them know that, before the day is over, a terrible cyclone will rip through the island, exposing their frailties and insecurities in the same way that it rips the roofs from the buildings.

The priest, Greely, turns out to be sent from the diocese (or whatever) to discipline a local priest, Lake, who has recently been caught in flagrante delicto with a young native boy. Lake is arguably the center of the novel, and its most interesting character, an ineffectual and disillusioned priest right out of a Graham Greene novel. When the elderly Miss Trumper is stricken by a nervous attack--brought on by a rift with her companion Miss Paradise, and the psychological horror of, I guess, seeing a native Pacific Islander for the first time--Lake is pulled out of the bar where he is drinking himself stupid in order to perform the last rights. If this were Greene, perhaps, Lake would do this begrudgingly, and have to face the truth that God works his ways with human agents even despite their own inadequacies and failures. But Lake doesn't give Miss Trumper her last rights; in fact, he wakes up in the eye of the cyclone to find that she has died, unshriven. This, Lake decides, is his ultimate failure; that the inquisitor Greely cares less about this failure than he does the homosexual dalliance is the ultimate indictment of the authority that seeks to punish him. (I also really liked Lake's confession to Greely that, while drunk, he consecrated an entire truck of bread.)

I found the stories of the other characters difficult to penetrate. Like Astley's other novels, A Kindness Cup and The Acolyte, I felt as if I were missing something, as if unable to get through to some essential nature of the book that was veiled. Which is strange, because the fundamental premise of the book seems rather straightforward: the terrible cyclone, the failing relationships, etc--a natural disaster as the exposer of things that we'd prefer to hide is almost a cliche. I did find a renewed appreciation for Astley's prose, and I liked how she refuses to pull punches with the strength of the hurricane, which really does rip things up, sink the boat, destroy houses, and kill people. After all, if you want your life to be radically different, you first must destroy it.

Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

There are times, Miss Porch thought, in life when one might be walking towards oneself. Either the child towards the other way around. Either way it was a passing confrontation, not recognizable until it was over.

Elizabeth Jolley's Foxybaby begins with the protagonist, novelist Alma Porch, driving into a parked bus and being rammed, in turn, by a pair of cars behind her. She's arrived in a remote section of the Australian bush to teach a summer drama class to overweight women as part of the "Better Body Through the Arts Program." Her class, such as it is, involves filming a "treatment" of her novel-in-progress, Foxybaby, about a man desperately trying to save his daughter and her child from a life of heroin addiction. But the school is a strange place, and she is trapped there. The bus, it seems, has been placed there by Miles, the school handyman who will sell any object that's not nailed down to anyone, and who provides himself with additional income by cooking succulent midnight dinners for the starving dieters. The whole place is run by a strange woman named Miss Peycroft, who has her own ideas about how Foxybaby ought to go, and among the portly matrons of the Better Body Through the Arts Program sexual energies, lesbian and otherwise, are fiercely bubbling.

What are we supposed of Foxybaby, the novel-within-the-novel, and its treatment? It seems to be a lurid and humorless melodrama set to "rock and disco" (which doesn't stop Miss Peycroft from pulling out her cello). Is it the regular kind of bad, or is it the Elizabeth Jolley kind of good? Good or bad, the participants throw themselves wholeheartedly into the creation of the treatment, and at each night's reflective "symposium," they overflow with suggestions about how to tweak or enliven the script. Thematic connections between the novel and the scenario of the "true" novel seem scant, but not to the participants: at the novel's climax, the regally jovial Mrs Viggars, who plays the part of the father Steadman, has decided to adopt the ragged, pregnant girl who plays the daughter Sandy. The two novels, the one within and the one without, share a kind of exaggerated tone and style, but not much else, and yet the matrons seem to find ways of relating to it; perhaps this is the novel's ultimate point about the power of fiction. At the end, in the novel's most surreal scene, when the class is gathered on a field trip to the beach to film the final section of the treatment, Mrs Viggars points out a trio of figures that Miss Porch can barely see at first, walking along the sand: Steadman, Sandy, and Foxybaby, having emerged from fiction into real life.

Jolley is such a strange writer. Foxybaby turned out to be one of my very favorite kinds of books, one that seems either like a work of genius or a bizarre failure. I enjoyed the ragtag group of matronly participants, from Mrs Viggars to the annoyingly grandmotherly Jonquil Castle (insane names here) to the prim and vicious Miss Harrow, who recruits Miss Porch for what she thinks will either be a feast or an orgy, but which turns out to be an art exhibit. The wild pieces I thought would never come together eventually did, or at least they felt they did; I even found myself moved, ultimately, by the melodrama of Foxybaby. Maybe that's the point of the novel, in the end, that novels don't have to make sense, and sometimes it's better that they don't, or to hover somewhere outside of sense. They just have to move you.

Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi

 I walk along the sidewalk, and yet I don't. Simin lingers in the folds of my mind. You took the peril that was to be mine, I say to her in my heart. If it were not for you, if I had not fainted that day, it could have been me buried in that grave. I feel angry. I feel the rebel inside me, the daring, rash Kowsar. The Kowsar who doesn't believe in subservience and subjugation, who doesn't believe a woman is a pitiful wretch, to be done with as a man wishes.

Siamak Herawi's Tali Girls focuses on three young women in the village of Tali, Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, each of whose life takes them in a different direction. Kowsar is a brilliant prodigy who is lucky enough to have the blessing of her family to marry her beloved Farhad, though he provides little in the way of a dowry. Simin is the most beautiful, which is a dangerous thing to be, as she is plucked at just nine years old from the schoolyard to serve as the third wife of a vicious mullah. Geesu, too, is threatened with a similar fate when she is demanded of her father by a Taliban warlord, and she runs off with her own lover, Farrokh--and yet, as she learns, it is easy to escape one warlord, but it is difficult to escape the scheme of misogyny and brutality that govern the lives of women in Afghanistan.

Tali Girls switches between third- and first-person perspectives; mostly it's told in the voice of Kowsar, whose indignation and rage beat loudly in opposition to the religious rule that closes down the school, beats their teachers, and snatches girls for horrific mistreatment and abuse. The switching perspectives allow Herawi to write some of the most viscerally brutal scenes I have read recently. Simin's story--spoiler alert--ends quickly: she stabs her husband in the eye with a pair of scissors to defend herself against another painful rape. In return, he cuts her from her genitals to her neck, and then beheads her corpse. And all this is told from the first person perspective. And it's not the last time we are asked to witness such a terrible act from within the victim's point-of-view; we experience it through Geesu's eyes, too, when she is is captured along with Farrokh and killed by stoning.

The evisceration of Simin is brutal enough, but it may be Geesu's death that hits the hardest. Simin's husband, Mawlawi Khodadad, is the novel's primary villain, an ally of the Taliban who delights in torturing his wives and who treats them with open contempt as objects for his gratification. The most satisfying scene in the novel occurs when Kowsar, hidden behind the mandated burqa, sneaks into Khodadad's office unrecognized and takes his other eye. But Geesu's death by stoning requires more than one vicious mullah; it requires the active participation of the whole community. Tali Girls reminds us that the misogyny that kills Afghan women is not the sole property of the Taliban; in fact, Simin's rape and murder occur before the Taliban even show up in town. It would be too brutal, perhaps, if not for Kowsar, who might have been in Simin's place if not for the fainting spells that made her unappealing to Khodadad. Tali Girls pointedly asks us not to dissociate from violence by watching it from an outside vantage point, but I found myself wondering, does Kowsar as protagonist undercut this aspect somewhat? Is it a flaw in us or in the narrative that we must have a survivor to cling on to?

With the addition of Afghanistan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 95!

Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick

Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

I got to visit the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts this week, a church where young Herman Melville attended services before shipping out on his own round-the-world voyage, and which appears as a slightly fictionalized version of itself in Moby-Dick. The walls of the Seamen's Bethel are covered in marble plaques that memorialize those who were lost at sea; Melville must have looked around from his pew in the back--marked today with a much smaller, humbler plaque--and known what a risk he was taking on. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his book Why Read Moby-Dick?, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket as the American capital of the whaling industry by the time Melville wrote his novel, but Melville still Ishmael travel to Nantucket to see the old icons of the whaling industry. Melville had never been to Nantucket when he wrote Moby-Dick, so it might be said that the New Bedford chapel in Moby-Dick is where Ishmael leaves the real world behind, launching off into the world of Melville's rich imagination.

Why Read Moby-Dick? is a series of short essays about what Philbrick, a writer otherwise known for books about sailing like In the Heart of the Sea, finds valuable in Moby-Dick. These essays more or less follow the novel's chronology, beginning in New Bedford and Nantucket, moving through the introduction of Ahab to the grand voyage, and finishing with the dramatic conclusion when the Pequod is destroyed by the infamous White Whale. The essays have brief, explanatory titles like "Queequeg" and "Chowder," and they spend a fair amount of time summarizing the essential points of the novel. As the title suggests, the book might be seen as pitched to people who have not read Moby-Dick, although I can't imagine someone reading a book like this in order to decide whether or not they want the undertaking. More properly, the audience is probably people like me, who have a fondness for the novel but aren't going to re-read it any time soon. Along the way, Philbrick provides a little bit of historical information, about whaling, about Melville's relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., but for the most part it's a straightforward and not particularly revealing exegesis of the novel.

It's a little funny, I think, the way in which Why Read Moby-Dick? is so opposite to the novel it's about. It's a tiny little book, in form as well as spirit; almost universally I thought the essays were a little short and seemed to stop before they were through. If the spirit of Moby-Dick is to delve into long, digressive passages like "Cetology" that overflow the banks of narrative efficiency; Why Read Moby-Dick? is a no-nonsense operation with little interest in luxuriating alongside the novel's richness--only briefly describing the luxury. The enthusiasm comes through, but the exegesis can be a little stale; I didn't come away with what felt like any new insights. Philbrick's central contention, that the novel contains the seeds of all American history, and that it is in some deep sense about the national pre-Civil War conflict over the slave trade, seemed to me very thinly supported. And it was funny to hear Philbrick, after insisting that the novel points to these ideals and conflicts, say at the end that "The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I."

I hold to the opposite reading, which I think is probably Harold Bloom's: the whale is a symbol, but it's a symbol who points toward too many things, and ends up a kind of maddening blankness--white, the color of all colors. That's the brilliance of Moby-Dick; it points every way you want to look. Presumably, even toward the Fugitive Slave Law, if you were willing to make the case. As for Why Read Moby-Dick?, I think the answer to the question is obvious: because the Cliffs Notes version isn't going to cut it.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion--I began to do things while I was unconscious. I'd fall asleep on the sofa and wake up on the bathroom floor. Furniture got rearranged. I started to misplace things. I made blackout trips to the bodega and woke up to find popsicle sticks on my pillow, orange and bright green stains on my sheets, half a huge sour pickle, empty bags of barbecue-flavored potato chips, tiny cartons of chocolate milk on the coffee table, the tops of them folded and torn and gummy with teeth marks. When I came to after one of these blackouts, I'd go down to get my coffees as usual, try a little chitchat on the Egyptians in order to gauge how weirdly I'd acted the last time I was in there. Did they know that I'd been sleepwalking? Had I said anything revealing? Had I flirted?

Why do you think this book is so famous? I don't know how many copies it sold or whatever, but it seems undeniable to me that Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a book that, at one point in the not-distant past, everyone was talking about. It wasn't her first book, but it definitely elevated her into another layer of the authorial stratosphere, and cemented a reputation as a sort of sleazy it-girl novelist, or novelist for people who want to be sleazy it-girls. I think the protagonist captures something of the way we think about ourselves, or want to be, or afraid of being: disaffected and alienated from her bullshit artworld job, cast aside by her dickish lover Trevor, she decides to spend a year doing as little as possible. She finds a quack psychiatrist who will prescribe her a smorgasbord of pills, and she does her best to stay catatonic. When this doesn't work--she's pulled back into the "real world" by her needy friend Reva, whose mother has just died--she plans a serious sleep, a strict regimen of the most serious pills that will keep her asleep for three out of every four days. When she awakes in months, she hopes she'll be reset, a new person.

A lot about this book doesn't work, in my opinion. The satire of the art world--she's assisted in her serious sleep by a Chinese experimental artist who has permission to use her sleeping form in any artistic way he wishes--is shallow and unfunny. The middle act at Reva's mother's funeral interrupts the novel's entire reason for being in exchange for very little that's interesting. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel, the revelation that the narrator is sleepwalking while under the influence of the most powerful drug she's been described, is mostly wasted. (I really like the irony inherent in the fact that, in her sleep, she is living and enjoying the full life she is trying to escape, but all this amounts to, in the end, is a couple of Polaroid photographs of her enjoying herself at a club.) The novel's endnote (spoiler alert), in which Reva is killed in the World Trade Center, is telegraphed so baldly, it reads like Moshfegh is prophylactically defending herself against charges that it doesn't fit. The only part of the book I would say I liked without reservation is Dr. Tuttle, the insane and insanely unethical therapist that prescribes drugs with loopy abandon.

That said, it's hard to deny the appeal of Moshfegh when she really digs into the literature of sleaze and squalor. It works better in Eileen, I think. But it's Rest and Relaxation that caught everybody's attention, and I think that has something to do with the way that the novel embodies a language about depression and isolation that has become familiar to us, even as we remain uncomfortable with it. In a way, it's a satire on our easy ideas of self-care, that we can fulfill our responsibilities to other people by pleasing ourselves first, and indulging our powerful urge toward inertia, toward kicking back and letting go. Interestingly, it works: the narrator comes out of her stupid feeling rejuvenated, and ready to return at last to the world. But Reva, her only friend, will not be there--our narrator awakes in August 2001--and perhaps that's the point of that silly, stupid ending; that while you're practicing self-care, the world keeps turning, and it won't wait for you forever.

Second Skin by John Hawkes

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the right stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

Skipper, the hero of John Hawkes' Second Skin, begins to tell what he calls the "naked history" of his life. As he writes it, he's living the high life on a tropical island, inseminating cows and hanging out with his paramour, a Black island woman he calls "Catalina Kate," and who is pregnant with his child. But this life is a late reward for Skipper, whose life, we learn, has been marked by a series of hardships and betrayals beginning with the suicide of his father, who shot himself in the head with Skipper, then a child, waiting on the other side of the bathroom door. Suicide makes something of a theme in Skipper's life; his daughter Cassandra, too, commits suicide by flinging herself off of an abandoned lighthouse. Her death is precipitated by that of her husband, Fernandez, whom Skipper himself discovers in a seedy motel, stabbed to death for being a "fairy spic."

Hawkes lays out almost the entire story in the opening chapter of Second Skin, teasing the reader with the key details and only later digging into each gruesome event, which we know each time is coming. These tragedies and betrayals have their key in Tremlow, the naval officer who commits mutiny against Skipper. Tremlow is a shadowy character, often alluded to but only briefly seen; he is a malevolent force who dances in a hula skirt and persuades the other sailors aboard the boat to beat Skipper before sailing away in the ship's lifeboats. There is no justice, no restitution, for what Tremlow does; he and the others disappear into the sea and are never heard from again, perhaps sunk, or perhaps living the kind of life that Skipper himself is allowed to live in the latter stage of his life, eating coconuts and watching hummingbirds on a tropical island. Tremlow comes to stand in for all the betrayals and violence that fall upon Skipper and his loved ones. At the site of Fernandez's death, and later Cassandra's, Skipper hallucinates a vision of the mutineer. He is the primal, inevitable force of life, which deals tragedy without reason. Skipper, for his own part, comes to seem like a "man more sinned against than sinning," an eternal victim whose courage and valiance are rooted in the suffering he undergoes.

Hawkes is a strange writer. I've read two of his other books. The Beetle Leg is one of the most inscrutable things I've ever read. Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, by contrast, is a fairly straightforward adventure novel; I devoured it. Second Skin, perhaps, falls somewhere in the middle of these two novels. Like Alaskan Skin Trade, it seems to borrow much from boy's adventure novels. And like with The Beetle Leg, at times I had trouble discerning what exactly was going on. This is, I think, the result of Hawkes' intricate, full-barreled prose and the particular un-logic that governs the plot of the book. But it also had something to do with the impenetrability of the other characters. Only Skipper has any real life, here, and perhaps the loyal mess boy Sonny, the one person whose devotion to Skipper never wavers. But the suicides, the father and Cassandra, are more mysterious, as is Skipper's contemptuous wife, Miranda. Some reason is belatedly given in Cassandra's case, but it seems like a red herring; both characters seem somehow equivalent to their final acts. (I read after finishing the book that Cassandra's miscarriage is supposed to be Skipper's child, and that the marriage with Fernandez is meant to disguise Skipper's incest with his daughter--if that's true, it was totally lost on me.) When Skipper has a vision of Cassandra, laid out on the rocks well before her death, we understand that it is inevitable, so inevitable that it obliterates whatever else might be left of her character. Nor did I understand why so many of the other characters visit cruelties upon Skipper, pelting him with rocks or beating him with tire irons. That is, I suppose, their nature, as Skipper's suffering is his.

All that, I guess, is to say that I had trouble sometimes feeling as if I had plumbed past the novel's surface level. It got me thinking about the title, Second Skin, which Skipper uses to describe the oilslicks he puts on before going out to sea. Is there a primary skin beneath this, something truer than his identity as a sailor--his long-suffering nature, even Christlikeness? And if it's true of him, what of the other characters? Is it possible to get down past the layers of Cassandra, or Catalina Kate, or poor murdered Fernandez, or the father who commits suicide while the young boy is outside the door playing his cello? Or is a second skin more like a creature emerging brand-new from a chrysalis, as Skipper does in his new and luckier life on the island? 

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

"Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See, there's the evening star--how near it looks! Jacques, don't you love winter?" She put the sled-rope under his arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from the neighbours' houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break just for this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea.

I spent a day last week in Quebec City. If you've ever been there, you know it's not for the easily winded: it's built upon a huge rock called Cap Diamant, and the lower town, at the rock's bottom, and the upper town, on its peak, are linked by stairs so precipitous they have names like Escalier Casse-Cou, the break-neck stairs. It's in the middle of one of these climbs that Euclide Auclair, the apothecary at the heart of Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock lives. Symbolically, it shows something about Euclide's character. Though brought to Quebec from France in the service of the governing Count de Frontenac, Euclide serves the common people also, with steadfast prudence. And perhaps, more even than others, it demonstrates the way that the apothecary clings to the rock, like a sea bird in its nest, an isolated refuge in the midst of a large and wild place. Most of the novel takes place over the village's long winter, from the moment that the last boats leave for their treacherous journey back to France to the time they return along the St. Lawrence River. During that time, the colonists are truly cut off from France. Perhaps this is when they not only must fend for themselves but when they are most themselves.

Euclide, a widower, has a daughter named Cecile. Cecile is the light of the village; as Euclide is steadfast, she is virtuous and pure. It's Cecile who entreats the Count to provide shoes for her friend Jacques, the son of a base prostitute. Cecile, too, is a natural Canadian; though born in France, she has no memory of the place, and to her, the thought of being recalled to France is a frightening one. Cather, who was ever interested in the mythology of nation-making, is trying to pinpoint the moment, I think, that refugees from one place become the residents of another. Cecile is a real Canadian, not just a Frenchwoman clinging to the rock for fear of being swept out to sea. She boasts all the virtues of French civilization, including a devout Catholic piety, though in her they are transformed into something distinctly French Canadian. One can imagine this book might have been influential among the French Canadians, who insist politically and culturally on calling themselves a nation, if only it had avoided the original sin of being written in English.

It's difficult to read Shadows on the Rock without thinking about Death Comes for the Archbishop, which Cather had published four years earlier. Both books are about European, even French, exiles in the new world. Euclide is a humble apothecary, but he, and Cecile especially, seem hardly less the representatives of the faith than Bishop Latour. Both books suggest that the transposition to the New World enliven that faith and make it stronger; in Shadows of the Rock, we are treated to a long story about a devout Montreal anchorite whose devotion to solitude harkens back to a medieval piety no longer possible in Europe. Shadows on the Rock even provides a Bishop Latour-like figure, the Bishop Laval, a real figure whose tomb I saw in the basilica at Quebec. This figure--genial, wise, and forgotten by Europe--even gets a death scene at the end, a "good death" that mimics Latour's.

The comparison does Shadows on the Rock little favor. The mystery and ambivalence of Archbishop are largely supplanted here by a conservative devotion to the myth of missionary goodness. Euclide's steadfastness, Cecile's virtue, will not permit a scene like that in Archbishop in which Latour is brought to a secret cave where he hears the howling sound of ancient gods, nor will they permit a vision, like Latour has, of the Holy Family as part-Indigenous mestizos. The Indigenous, in fact, are kept largely off-screen, lurking as frightful threats and agents in the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries like Jean Brebeuf. (It would be interesting to compare this vision to Vollmann's Fathers and Crows, a novel that casts the Jesuit missionary work among the Hurons and Haudenosaunee in a more contemporary, and cynical, light.) I really enjoyed Cather's rich image of colonial life, and of course, the writing is as lovely as ever. (Don't you love the "paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the sea?") But I couldn't shake the feeling that the novel clings, like the colonists in Quebec, to a rock-like certitude.

American Ramble by Neil King Jr.

This trip was different. On a fresh morning in late March, I stepped past the threshold of our front door, tugged the garden gate closed behind me, and set off to walk to the city of New York. A slow stroll, I liked to say, down a fast lane. An easy walk along a founding swath of the country that most travelers want to put behind them. A congested landscape usually seen as a blur, along a corridor named for a train, the Acela, whose name in turn is a faster form of accelerate. Ad + celerare, from the Latin: toward something, whatever it is, swiftly; to hasten the occurrence of a thing you want over.

No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over.

In 2021, journalist Neil King, Jr. set off from his home in Washington, D.C. to walk all the way to New York City. The journey, as he describes it in his book American Ramble, was conceived after a frightening bout with esophageal cancer that left his voice strained--a lasting mark that colors each interaction with the people he meets on his journey. Cancer, King found, contracted time and space, made things slow down, and each day seem precious and full of wonders. In a way, a journey on foot, as opposed to the machines of modern convenience, does the same thing. What would it be like, King wonders, to walk through the most heavily trafficked corridor in America, not by automobile or train, but on foot?

It's not a fair comparison, but throughout American Ramble I couldn't help but think of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, perhaps because I was so impressed by that book that I still have it on the brain. But I do think they have in common a kind of take-things-as-they-come approach: for Heat-Moon, the program is not a list of destinations, but the back routes on the highway; similarly, King is constrained to come across landmarks and communities as he finds them. I wished, in fact, that he had done a little more to synthesize the different stops on his trip, or perhaps to synthesize them in a way that was more historical and contextual than personal. What I liked best about the book is the way it reveals certain historical themes of this particular landscape that have been buried by urban sprawl and the great highways. King's route takes him through the crucibles of the American Revolution, including Valley Forge and the Delaware River, which he pointedly crosses at the same place that Washington did. It also takes him through the heartland of American religious pacificism, including the Amish country of southeastern Ohio and the vestiges of Quaker and Shaker culture. In each individual instance, King, a journalist, does a great job of investigating the particularities of place and history, but there is a larger story that emerges from the happenstance of the route that I felt was missing, somehow.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore that momentousness of the feat by the end of the book. King makes it clear that this isn't the roughing-it style hitchhiking of his youth; he stays in hotels and AirBNBs and his meals are restaurant fish tacos, not Vienna sausages on a camp stove. And yet, by the time he strolls into New York's Central Park, he's traversed some of the most pedestrian-hostile landscapes on the face of the planet, including the great wastes of warehouses he calls "Amazonia." More than a story of physical triumph, it's a story of resolve, and a stubborn desire to see a familiar landscape in a new way.