The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion

There are people who understand this kind of transaction and there are people who do not. Those who understand it are at heart storytellers, weavers of conspiracy just to make the day come alive, and they see it in a flash, comprehend all its turns, get its possibilities. For anyone who could look at a storefront in Honduras or Costa Rica and see an opportunity to tap into the United States Treasury for $25,870, this was a period during which no information could be without interest. Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity. That Elena McMahon walked into this heightened life and for a brief period lived it is what interests me about her, because she was not one of those who saw in a flash how every moment could connect.

In 1984, a middle-aged journalist and mother named Elena McMahon walks off a job covering a presidential campaign and disappears. Her father, formerly one of those people in the world of intelligence with spurious credentials and obscured duties, has fallen in the grips of dementia. He mentions to her what he probably shouldn't talk about: an arms deal he's organizing for the federal government to fund the Contras in Central America. Elena, disillusioned with her life and job, walks into the job her father can longer do, and soon she finds herself speeding toward Costa Rica (or maybe not?) on a secret flight. Her father's contacts reassure that the job is simple, but she doesn't know that there is another game being played: her father was actually being set up to take the fall for the assassination of an American embassy official, and now Elena has taken his place.

The nature of these events unfold slowly and in non-chronological pieces as they are unveiled and processed by the nameless author, an obvious Didion stand-in. The events of the book, such as they are, have already happened (though of course narrative demands that the climax of Elena's misadventures in Central America and the Caribbean be withheld until the very end), they only need to be ordered and understood. In that way, the job of the journalist-writer is to employ intuition in drawing the connections that are buried and hidden. It's not so different, perhaps, from the job of someone like Treat Morrison, the agency fixer that identifies Elena on the Caribbean island where she's arrived as a potential security threat. Elena, we're told, is not someone who sees the connections immediately; it's what made her a bad journalist, it seems, and it makes her a bad choice for government espionage, though perhaps it makes her a good mark. But in typical Didion mode, the postmodern journalist asserts at every opportunity her inability to understand what happened in this case, not just because the spyworld players cover their tracks, but because of the fundamental unknowability of human beings. Everything can be ordered and the connections made, but the question at the heart of the event--why did Elena McMahon chuck up her entire life to walk into danger?--is unanswerable.

The Last Thing He Wanted was the final novel that Didion wrote in her life. It shares a lot of DNA with her previous novel, Democracy, written twelve years prior, so much so that The Last Thing He Wanted seems at times like a retread of that novel. The complicated task of the journalist, existing somewhere within and without of the text, is better and more interestingly explored there. The way that the political and personal intersect, too. But The Last Thing He Wanted also finds Didion in a mode that reveals just how powerfully and thoroughly she was influenced by the intrigue novels of Graham Greene. The journalist-narrator is a layer of Didion wrapped around the story, but everything else is pure Greene: the busted play, the layered agendas, the sweaty tropical locale. Ultimately, I found that The Last Thing He Wanted doesn't quite succeed because it plays the story so at arm's length that the reader ends up standing outside the story as much as the journalist does. But it's as pure a distillation of Didion's influences and interests, as far as fiction goes at least, as perhaps we ever got.

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

 A great killer must love to kill; unless he feels it is the best thing he can do, unless he is conscious of its dignity and feels that it is its own reward, he will be incapable of the abegnation that is necessary in a real killing. The truly great killer must have a sense of honor and a sense of glory far beyond that of the ordinary bullfighter. In other words he must be a simpler man. Also he must take pleasure in it, not simply as a trick of the wrist, eye, and managing of his left hand that he does better than other men, which is the simplest form of that pride and which he will naturally have as a simple man, but he must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing.

"The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word," Ernest Hemingway writes at the beginning to Death in the Afternoon, "It is not an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy..." For the bull, obviously, he explains, but for the bullfighter, too, whose life is at risk. Even the greatest bullfighters in the long list of those Hemingway names over the course of the book, like the infamous Joselito, eventually die at the horns of the bull. And those who don't die from being gored, from having their lungs and groins punctured and their intestines drawn out, die from the mental strain of this demanding profession, or from their own crippling cowardice. The bullfighter gives up his life to an exercise of pure aesthetics, of delivering a death so beautiful people flock to the ring to see it.

Popular opinion has moved against bullfighting, even in Spain, where it's outlawed in several provinces that Hemingway once traipsed around, seeing fight after fight, but even in Hemingway's time it was controversial. The thing most people object to, Hemingway says, is the death of the horses, who are so often gored and killed in the efforts of the picadores. Hemingway describes the appreciation of bullfighting as something that belongs to a discerning few; he's under no pretense that most people will be able to look past the inherent cruelty of it to see what makes it beautiful. He compares it, even, to the appreciation of wine: even those who do see its beauty must develop their "eye." Hemingway, of course, has that eye, and much of Death in the Afternoon is a description of the various movements and methods, the bandilleras and volapies and muletas and faenas that make up bullfighting's technical vocabulary, and describing who did them best and who did them worst. He even conjures up an interlocutor in a fictitious old lady, who is that one-in-a-thousand member of the crowd who lacks a natural revulsion to the scene and is willing to be taught. (The old lady's impatience with Hemingway's literary digressions is a funny recurring bit.)

Hemingway is Hemingway, and at times Death in the Afternoon swerves into great literature. In the center of the book is an essay called "The Natural History of the Dead," which is a kind of presentation of the various forms of death and dying that Hemingway witnessed during World War I. Toward the end, a loving evocation of the life of the Spanish countryside makes one of the book's chief rewards. (How little Hemingway might have known that the Spanish Civil War was a few short years away, and that much-loved countryside would provide many more examples for his "natural history of the dead.") Elsewhere the book is doggedly instructive and practical; it really is intended as a guide for those interested in getting into early 20th century bullfighting. I laughed when the book turned, at times, into a kind of fanboying over Hemingway's favorite fighters; it was like listening to Bill Simmons rank NBA all-timers on his podcast. I'm one of the haters--I'll never see a bullfight. But I feel like I understand a little better from Death in the Afternoon what Hemingway and others found to be worth their attention.

The Giant Joshua by Maurine Whipple

A shiver of terror pierced her heart like an icicle. She had not meant to love him, but they had been in the clutch of something bigger than themselves. Some winged power over which they had no control had swept them from the earth to the sky. She had said to him: 'All that counts is doing out jobs. We'll keep our love secret, where it won't hurt a soul in the world.' But words won't dout a flame. And she had not been able to stop loving him, no matter how hard she tried. Even after Kissy came, she could not destroy this burning essence that was the central core of her being. How was it wrong? It had seemed that a passion diffusing so much light and warmth could not be wrong. Where had been the first misstep? Over and over she recounted each pebble that had gone to make the avalanche.

Clorinda--Clory--is one of a wagon train of Mormon settlers sent forth from Salt Lake to build a new city in the desert of Utah's "Dixie Country." She's just sixteen, but recently married to a much older man, a Scot named Abijah McIntyre, who has two wives already. Clory becomes close with the meek second wife, Willie, but Abijah's first wife, Bathsheba, polices his attentions with a will of iron. The marriage is undertaken at the insistence of Brigham Young himself, but it's a difficult thing for a young woman to be saddled with a husband for whom she will never feel the kind of ardor he feels for her, and to live in the shadow of two other women as well. On top of this, Clory falls quickly for a tempestuous younger man named Freeborn, who just happens to be Abijah and Bathsheba's son. She gives into temptations, and then to doubts, but at other times she takes these events as tests of her piety, and like certain hardy flowers her spirit blooms in the desert.

It's funny, the Mormon pioneers of the 19th century are so very American. They left the East escaping religious persecution; they built civilizations out of the Wild West; they thrived by sheer willpower and resourcefulness. Other pioneers of the Wild West occupy our national imagination as part of our shared patrimony, but the Mormon pioneers retain a kind of otherness that prevents Americans at large from embracing them in the same way. The Giant Joshua is an epic for Mormon America, and I do mean epic--I started reading it on the plane to Utah three weeks ago, and I just finished it yesterday. There's a great deal of mythmaking in it, sometimes speciously so: it's strange to read how disappointed and disapproving Brigham Young is in the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a group of Mormons attacked a train of non-Mormon settlers; many historians now think it happened with his complicity. But in Clory there is a kind of ambivalence that makes the novel worth reading. She believes wholeheartedly in the community that grows up around her, and in God, but the rewards of "plural marriage" remain dubious and out of reach for her.

One book I was reminded of, very discordantly, was Norman Rush's Mating. From time to time it seemed to me that Brigham Young occupies the Nelson Deneen role in the planned community of Utah's Dixie, pushing pieces around with a heavy hand in order to create a centrally-planned utopia. Young tells the pioneers what crops to plant, what trades to take up, where and how to sell, and even where to build their first temple. He's depicted as kindly and compassionate, with a genuine interest in all the settlers of Dixie--he knows them each by name--but his machinations are heavy-handed, and they don't always work. He moves Clory together with Abijah as surely as he he commands the villagers to plant cotton instead of wheat, but when a marriage falters--or a crop--he's up and gone, back to Salt Lake, and the consequences never fall on him. If the village functions, it's not really Young that earns the credit, but the collective action of the pioneers who, through trial and error, tame the Virgin River, make peace with local tribes, and build a city from scratch.

The Giant Joshua can be quite brutal. Clory settles down quickly to have a family for Abijah, but one by one, her three beloved children are picked off by disease. Her secret lover, Free, dies in a reprisal raid on a group of Native horse thieves. She reconciles herself to Abijah, who is a competent and capable husband, but he has too much passion for her and too little love. One of the cruelest scenes comes toward the end when Clory, in her forties now, still beautiful, pregnant again with a child of Abijah's, discovers him in flagrante flirto with a young flibbertigibbet who becomes his newest wife. That's the thing about plural marriage: in a way, you can be discarded even more easily. The end of the novel, too, is cruel to Clory, in a way I'll keep to myself. But for all that, the author Whipple (who I think was Mormon?) shows an abiding admiration and respect for what pioneers like Clory and Abijah, for all their faults, were able to wring from the harsh desert landscape.

Heading West by Doris Betts

In contrast with this gleaming vegetation, Mrs. Dover's Western photographs had shown no tender green, no leaf, no grass. If they drove until the Southwest turned to stone, Nancy would have her chance to see muted reds and blending golds in the layered cliffs, the color of light on implacable stone. A place like Grand Canyon, she thought, would give Sisyphus bad dreams.

Nancy Finch is traveling with her sister and her sister's husband on the Blue Ridge Parkway when they're attacked and robbed by a strange man. The attacker, who calls himself Dwight Andersen, takes Nancy as a hostage, and suddenly Nancy is barreling along the highway toward nowhere in particular. It's a mystery what animates Dwight, though he makes veiled allusions to a twin brother he may or may not have killed. He seems to have no plan, no intent, though Nancy extracts a promise that when they reach the state of Arizona and the Grand Canyon, he'll let her go. As insurance, Dwight takes another hostage, a disgraced judge named Harvey Jolley, though for a while Jolley fails to understand that he's a hostage, and not simply a hitchhiker. The three make an unlikely set, but fate has forced them together, and they are headed west, knit together by the threat of violence.

Nancy and Harvey make a few half-hearted attempts at escape, but it becomes clear over the course of the book that there is something they treasure, too, in the westward flight. For the judge, it's an escape from the death of his wife and the ignominy of his corruption. For Nancy, it's a chance to extricate herself from the selfish and provincial ties that bind her to her sister and her mother, a kind of secondary status as the unwed daughter. It's a strange dynamic: for Dwight, the kidnapper, the trip seems to mean nothing at all, nothing but constant motion; it's the other two who are thinking and feeling animals, and who begin to assign meaning to their flight. The Grand Canyon becomes a symbol of where they are headed, a vast and beautiful chasm where one might really fall into, or escape, and be lost, forever.

I always heard about Doris Betts growing up in North Carolina; her books end up in those "local" shelves you see in Raleigh and Charlotte bookstores, but I'd never read her before. The quality of the writing, the sentences themselves, is high: clever, forceful, funny. For the most part, I didn't buy the intricate backstories that Betts invents for the characters: the judge's orphaned childhood, Nancy's numerous lovers, none of these things seemed relevant or quite convincing. What I was convinced by, however, is the novel's central section, a bravura piece of writing in which Nancy, having escaped from somewhere in Arizona, travels to and descends into the Grand Canyon alone. (If you have ever seen the Grand Canyon, and the many, many signs at the Grand Canyon urging you to take seriously a hike to the bottom, you know why this is a suicidal thing to do.) Nancy never explains why she does this; it's mere compulsion, brought on perhaps by the site of the canyon--why climb down into it? Because it's there. She's halfway down, blistered and delirious from heatstroke, when she hears her name being called: Dwight has followed her into the canyon.

It beggars belief, but it's the kind bold and outrageous choice that the novel could have used more of. It seems right, and gripping, that the showdown between Nancy and Dwight happens in the canyon. Implacable, impersonable, rocky, wild--it seems like his territory. But after a scuffle [spoiler alert], Nancy pushes Dwight over a ledge; he falls and is killed. Funnily enough, this happens at more or less the halfway point in the book. The second half becomes a climb out, both literally and metaphorically: Nancy is rescued by the good samaritan who drove her to the canyon in the first place, and she just so happens to have a handsome, prickly, and available sun for the battered and sunburnt Nancy to fall in love with. This stuff is OK. I have to admit that Heading West felt to me like a tremendous novella packed between two chunks of protective styrofoam. But even Sisyphus has to roll the ball up the hill again.

North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford

For none in their business can separate from the sea. And it is better to act than to be acted upon. It is possible that a terrible fate awaits each and every one of then, but the voyage has begun and it will be done. Goodnight, she thinks. Above her, the ceiling gives way to sky. Goodnight. To the whale in the deep, and the ship crushed by ice. To the gulls on the quay, her child somewhere in sleep. To the waves crashing the shore, and a hard wind a lee, to the long wait and winter, all of it, goodnight.

In New Bedford, Captain Arnold Lovejoy is approached by the wealthy Ashley family with a job: he will sail their ship, the Esther, to the Chukchi Sea, where he will bring back another captain, one of their agents and the husband of the family heiress, who has abandoned his ship to the ice and decided not to come back. The Esther will harvest whales as it goes, but it's a hard time for whalers; overfishing has sent the whale populations plummeting. A mysterious representative of the Ashleys, named Thule, joins Lovejoy on board; he seems to understand that there is more to their mission than Lovejoy has been told. There is the usual gaggle of seaman, steerers, and cooks, as well as a pair of ships' boys, brothers, who remain nameless. None of them, of course, has read Heart of Darkness, and they don't know that a ship sent after a madman is doomed to find only madness.

The ships' boys are repeatedly raped by a sinister deckhand named Eastman. Unable to defend themselves, they find their own defender in a mysterious figure who they discover swimming toward the ship one day in the middle of the ocean. This figure, who calls himself Old Sorrel, is completely naked, and has the head of a bird, complete with an enormous, snapping beak. Old Sorrel, we learn, is a kind of counterpart to the mysterious Thule. Thule needs the Esther to make it to the Chukchi Sea, to recover a valuable and magical artifact belonging to the Ashleys. But Old Sorrel's modus operandi is sinking ships, puncturing them with his enormous beak. It's suggested, perhaps, that he is the one who sank the previous ship, and is a manifestation of the Other, the sea-madness that claimed the last captain. But he also serves as the boys' only friend on the ship, and ultimately defeats the sinister rapist who pursues them.

North Sun is half realism, half fantasy, drawn from scrupulous research about whaleship journeys in the late 19th century. The crew battles the familiar, though no less frightening, hardships of the whaling life: massive, recalcitrant whales; marauding sharks; pack ice that threatens to close on the Esther and doom it to overwintering in the arctic; terrible disease and starvation. Perhaps the elements of the fantastic, like Thule and Old Sorrel, and the slithering shipworms that seem to be at Old Sorrel's beck and call, are only representations of those real-world hardships. In confronting them, perhaps the crew of the Esther are only confronting themselves, in the way that the isolation of the ship and the far north force men to confront their most immediate and unvarnished selves, desires. Lovejoy and the crew confront their own helplessness aboard the Esther: one of the most mysterious, and effective, scenes actually occurs back in the Ashleys' parlor, where we learn that the ship's benefactors have a model ship in which the crew can be seen, magically and in miniature, about their business. The forces that control the ship's journey are not always clear, but whatever they are, the crew themselves have no agency, and can only go where they're carried, toward destiny or doom.

The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager

Luce says that my father believed we were all part of a very great fabricated reality; that we have been placed here strategically, as part of a way of knowing what kind of patterns humans will discover and what kind of patterns humans will invent. Then, as if to illustrate this point, she uses the tip of her steel-toed boot to make a circle in the soil and then she makes shapes inside the circle that look like portions of continents. She tells me that my father believed some other cognition was watching us and our fabricated reality. It would keep watching us until it learned what it needed to know, and then--then it would end things abruptly. Everything would rush toward a single point he called The Beautiful End. It would be like one of those old analogue television sets turning off. The way when you flipped the switch, the light and sound would bend until it disappeared into the vortex at the center of the screen. Then she takes her shoe and runs it over the world slowly until the soil is just a big smear.

I can't help but thinking that The Beautiful End, the old TV turning off--it sounds precisely like what happens at the center of a black hole.

In the middle of the night, someone is building giant facsimiles of the nests of birds--the birds that, sometime in the last decade, completely disappeared. Also gone are the stars, replaced by a kind of haze. The narrator of Lindsey Drager's The Avian Hourglass longs to be a radio astronomer, perhaps because radio technology offers the possibility of seeing beyond the veil of haze, to what has been lost; she's failed the entrance exam four times and the fifth is her last shot. The ten-year old triplets she cares for have never heard the birds, never seen the stars. When the narrator discovers a brick, buried in the earth, marked with the name of the planet Saturn, it's like seeing the giant bird's nest: a reminder of something that his been irrevocably lost, popping up in the strangest place.

It's possible, even necessary, to read The Avian Hourglass as a piece of climate fiction, or "cli-fi," a genre that is becoming all too familiar. The narrator's co-parent, Uri--complicatedly, the narrator birthed the triplets as the surrogate for Uri's sister, who was killed, and now they raise them together--is a playwright composing a play about Icarus. He tells her that the Greeks distinguished "the Crisis," the moment of turning and falling, from "the Catastrophe," the rock-bottom period of suffering and anguish, and that one does not necessarily have to lead into the other. What would it look like for the people of this town to reverse the Crisis, and escape the looming Catastrophe? The town's public square is dominated daily by competing protests, one YES and one NO (answers to a question nobody seems to have formulated); after the narrator's discovery of Saturn is made known, the two sides link up to search down the bricks that represent the other planets. Together, they're MAYBE--a word that signals a kind of cautious hope, as well as working together.

The narrator's aunt Luce tells her that her father, prior to his death, believed that the town is a kind of Truman Show-style fake, and that the real world lies somewhere outside of it. The discovery of the planets seems to support this theory; they are arranged at appropriate distances from the center of town, but also seem to match up with the places they are found, i.e., Neptune lies at the water treatment plan. This suggests to the narrator that the town was actually laid out over a model of the solar system. What do we do with this information? It opens up, perhaps, the possibility of a world outside this one, where the Crisis has been or can be solved, or never occurred. But it also suggests that the town itself is a symbol of an entire universe, and that the Crisis is linked to cosmological models of entropy and possibly rebirth that lie outside our own human controls.

What impressed me most about The Avian Hourglass was the number of details and images it was able to juggle and still emerge as a coherent whole. I haven't even mentioned how Luce lives in the old artisanal globe workshop of the narrator's grandfathers, and how her front yard is full of flawed globes, like a garden of other possible worlds. Or how the narrator drives a bus with no riders, and how she knows that she'll soon be replaced by self-driving technology; or how she yearns for a woman who has since left the town, and whom she refers to only as The Only Person I've Ever Loved. It reaches a great balance of the realist and the fantastic, and I was moved by the ending, which brings these elements together into a moment where collapse and rebirth, perhaps, are the same--each existing opposite the other, across the neck of the hourglass.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

Edward Abbey was a young park ranger at what was then known as Arches National Monument when, one day, he heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the trail. Knowing this was forbidden, Abbey stepped out to confront the interloper, only to find representatives from the National Park Service, out to survey the path of a paved road. It was then, Abbey describes, that he knew it was all up for Arches. A road would bring cars, which would bring people, and soon the wilderness of Arches would be turned into another Disneyland. It's hard to say he was wrong--Arches receives up to two million visitors each year these days, so many that the Park Service had to institute a timed entry program this year. Those millions find something sublime in the wild formations of the canyonlands, but few of them find anything that could be described as wilderness.

What Abbey calls "industrial tourism" is one of the targets of Desert Solitaire, a book of essays cobbled together from Abbey's experience as a park ranger at Arches over two summers in the 1950s. When not sandwiched into an entry booth, Abbey traveled the back roads of Arches and the area known as the "canyonlands"--now the name of a national park to Arches' south, which preserves some of the most remote and forbidding landscapes that Abbey traversed--hiking, paddling, and helping ranchers drive their cows from the deep canyons. I got to see that country this past week, although I'm more of an "industrial tourist" than Abbey would have approved of. And the best thing about Desert Solitaire is the way that Abbey evokes the landscape of the desert: its strangeness, its solitude, and its natural beauty. I was captivated by a section where Abbey descends into the Maze, a section of Canyonlands National Park known for its challenging remoteness. In another essay, Abbey describes being part of a search and rescue operation that brings back the body of an unprepared hiker not far from the park's Grand View Point. I stood at Grand View Point, and looked down at that landscape; the thought of being lost in it gave me chills. Abbey imagines, perhaps kindly, perhaps presumptuously, that in his last moments the man experienced something of the sublimity that only being alone in such a landscape can bring.

For a long time, Abbey was a patron saint of environmentalists, but many of the ideas in Desert Solitaire struck me as uncouth and outdated. The road, and the cars that drive on it, are bad for the soul--fair enough--but in Abbey's estimation, the people who arrive are bad for the soul of the park. The intrusion of the road is the intrusion of development; development is the result of a booming population; maybe you can see where I'm going for this. Even when Abbey's misanthropy is lighthearted, there is a tinge of the old eugenic idea that we'd be better off with fewer people. This attitude has always struck me as exclusionary--why should Abbey be the one who gets to enjoy the wilderness, while others are dismissed as the meaningless horde? Wilderness might be good for the soul, but it's also common property, and Abbey's beloved Arches belong to all of us. It's no wonder that, later in life, Abbey voiced support for ending immigration, not just to limit the number of people in the country, but because those coming in were less deserving. Such attitudes are inevitably hierarchical, and therefore ugly.

But Abbey's not wrong about "industrial tourism," and he knows the desert. I was struck by his explanation for what he finds so appealing about the desert, as opposed to the forest or the sea. The desert, in Abbey's mind, offers little in the way of symbolism or myth; it simply is itself. By its every existence it confronts us with something inhuman, and thus beautiful; it resists human attempts to assign meaning to it. Perhaps that's true. If it is, I wonder if it's true of the desert and nowhere else. Certainly you feel something alien in the landscape, something that cannot be possessed or handled. My friends described Canyonlands with words like alien and inhuman; to me, the word was aloof. "The desert says nothing," Abbey writes. "Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation. In its simplicity and order it suggests the classical, except that the desert is a realm beyond the human and in the classicist view only the human is regarded as significant or even recognized as real."

I think Abbey would have done better to realize that the human is significant, not as being separate from the desert, but from being in it. The Navajo he describes rather condescendingly might have told him as much. And yet, there's something to that description of the desert, which is indeed difficult to love, but lovely to contemplate, and which speaks to us by seemingly saying nothing at all.

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

This morning I was once again denied access to "Some Psychological Reflections on the Death of Malcolm Melville" in the Winter 1976 issue of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, so I stared out the window for a while.

So I reread the so-called "Malcolm Letter," written by an exuberant Melville on the occasion of Malcolm's birth--
I think of calling him Barbarossa--Adolphus--Ferdinand--Otho--Grandissimo Hercules--Sampson--Bonaparte--Lambert.

So I electronically consented to my child's remote participation in Freedom from Chemical Dependency Week.

So I ordered more masks, more disinfectant wipes, more birdseed.

So I ordered more dog food and more coffee filters.

So I went to the basemant to move the laundry and watched my husband affix a piece of wood to another piece of wood with screws and glue and the appearance of deep contentment.

So I took out the recycling and then the compost.

So I threw the ball for the dog.

So I compared various translations of a haiku about the cold voice of the autumn wind speaking through a crack in the door.

So I regarded a yellow sticky note on which I had at some point written the name of Melville's brother's clipper ship, Meteor.

So I noticed an anagram--remote.

And another--emoter.

A woman is researching the life of Herman Melville, perhaps to write a biography of him. It is deep within Covid's quarantine, and the work fills up a life that has been in other ways put on pause. She reads articles and blog posts about Melville's life to her husband, who helps her to speculate about the nature of Melville's relationship with his children, his wife, his job. Melville's life seems to have been a difficult one, especially the later years, after the bulk of his literary output. The narrator's life has not been exactly easy; she alludes to a moment in their marriage known only as "The Bad Time." Still, the house seems stable enough, though from time to time she goes looking for him--to share another scrap of what she's learned about Melville--and not found him. Later, he gets sick, and we perhaps expect the worst, but this is not that kind of book; the drama that was visited upon Melville--the death of two sons, the stormy marriage--is enough.

I've never read another book like Dayswork. First off, there's the fact that it's a collaboration between two writers, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, whom I assume are a married couple. The husband is at one point called "Chris," and so I presume, too, that something of the book is autobiographical (though how interesting to choose the point of view of the wife only). Beyond that, there's the ambiguity of genre and form: is it a poem? A biography? A history? A novel? A memoir? Bachelder and Habel weave all these threads together in a way that is virtually seamless. The reader moves, French door-like, from literary analysis Melville's life to the research process to the life of the narrator. From there it expands to  encompass other genres, other historical details; much of the research is actually dedicated to the life of another pair of Melville's admires, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell and Hardwick had a famously tempestuous marriage, as did the Melvilles; research seems to show that Melville was physically abusive to his own wife Elizabeth, as Lowell was cruel to his. Are we meant to read between the lines about the narrator's marriage, too? No, that would be too much, but I think anyone can recognize the way that the grand dramas of the page put the smaller dramas of one's own life into relief.

The climax of Dayswork is stunning in its touching smallness. The husband has been exiled to a downstairs room with Covid. Over the phone from the upstairs room, the wife reads to him from a letter that Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville gushes; he was famously besotted with Hawthorne, in a way that many modern critics have read as romantic, and a few as requited. The text is Melville's, but it's punctuated by small asides from the sick husband, some as minor as interested grunts or sighs. It's a scene that's made up of so little, yet its power is tremendous. Two partners, speaking across the physical divide of sickness and technology, speaking someone else's words, but together. It works especially well because we haven't been sure whether or not the "Bad Time" is over, or the marriage is really healthy or whole, but this scene removes any doubt that these two have reconciled and grown closer together. I was really in awe of it.

And I was in awe of this book. Though I'm not aware of anyone who's ever written anything like it, I have seen many attempts to weave together literary history and the personal in a way that feels similar (Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers comes to mind). And yet, this one works because Bachelder and Habel never force the comparisons. Largely, they get out of the way of the material, and let us make the connections ourselves, though the deliberate and careful structure of the novel clearly guides our understanding. Truly, I learned a great deal about Herman Melville. But more than this, I felt the way that great works of literature radiate through time, ennobling our ordinary lives for a brief time.

Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello

Though his name is listed on the title of every Kinetoscope movie, it's unlikely Edison had much to do with the short films of Edison Studios. The War of Currents was basically over and alternating current had triumphed, so it's possible he had no clue about the plans to make Electrocuting an Elephant. The film is a minute-long, live short of the first elephant--and the second female of any species on the planet--to be condemned to electrocution for her crimes.

In the yards around Coney Island's Luna Park, the condemned elephant places each foot onto a copper plate. Once ignited with over 6,000 volts of alternating current, they smoke beneath her planted feet. The smoke rises around her body, her trunk goes rigid, and all five tons of her list forward.

The best part of Elena Passarello's Animals Strike Curious Poses, a collection of essays about animals given names by human beings, is "Jumbo II," a history of the elephant who was executed by Thomas Edison's motion picture studio at the turn of the century. In this essay, Passarello ties together several different currents--excuse the pun--that came together to result in Jumbo's execution. One such current is the history of elephants in the new world, another the adoption of electric current as a source of power. At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, an attempt to electrocute an earlier elephant is botched; it's at the same exposition where President McKinley will shortly be killed by an assassin. That assassin, Leon Czolgosz, will end up in the electric chair himself, starring in a short film of his execution filmed by--of course--Edison studios. In this way, Passarello brings together those kind of rhymes that history bears, and captures a moment of American history marked by cruelty and violence as much as progress and scientific advancement.

The second best part of the book is a two-page sketch in which Koko the gorilla uses her sign language to deliver a version of the famously vile joke "The Aristocrats":

"Ingrid hole smoke-ring blow. Mother-gorilla hole blow harmonica. Father-gorilla dance, balloon-on-noodle. Baby-gorilla clowntime, balloon-on-tadpole. Ingrid hole smoke-smoke. Around together skateboard do--smoke noodle balloon harmonica ride all! Harmonica hole play 'Purple Rain' All MAYONNAISE RAIN! All finished! Thank you."

Mustache-man tell: "Wow. What name show?"

Father-gorilla tell: "WE WONDERFUL SNOB PEOPLE!"

A note in the back of the book informs that the essay is constructed by only using words that were in Koko's vocabulary. You might say something like, the essay shows us how communicative Koko was within the limits of her language, and reveals how closer animals are to the human than we sometimes think. But mostly, it's just really, really funny.

I didn't think every essay in Animals Strike Curious Poses worked. I was less patient with essays on Yuka the frozen mammoth, the Wolf of Gubbio that befriended St. Francis of Assisi, and Mike, the Headless Chicken. At times I thought the essays verged a little too much on the literary, when what I really craved was a much more straightforward explanation of who this animal was, which sent me more than once to Wikipedia. That said, some of the swinging-for-the-fences pieces are the most successful and interesting, as with the Renaissance-era poem about the cat Jeoffry which is missing, apparently, a left-hand side of the page, and which Passarello reinvents. Other animals that appear include wartime messenger pigeons, the horse that broke Christopher Reeve's back, Arabella, the spacefaring spider, and a maneating crocodile named Osama.

"Jumbo II" worked best, I thought, because in the end it had something to say: as the targets of human cruelty, animals often end up mixed up with our human histories in ways they may never really be able to understand. And yet, this fact entails upon us a kind of obligation to consider them more deeply than we do. Topsy--the "bad elephant" electrocuted at Coney Island--was put on trial much like the human being who killed the president, and yet our attempts to understand Topsy pale in comparison with our attempts to understand why a human being like Czolgosz would do such a thing. We name animals because we see in them reflections of ourselves, but perhaps we should try harder to see and understand them on their own terms.

The Way of Florida by Russell Persson

We visit our life just once. It could rain down or it could sun a string of days or an unended ease could be what days you live in but I come to believe we visit our life just once this only one time in which we live, the string of days entire from one until the end. Inside this now I live with my body underneath the stars there I would bet the stars up there in measure of what we do an pourn down from the moon is my revital. I'm as wracked as any man here and I toil more and eat less and my charge demands that I lift us to the next day and so it is I underneath the moon the other men have fallen upon each other in what could be close to giving in as a body spells its coming day and sapped to the utmost lands where it might and I the moon addresses and it is I the moon floods up with sand for what's upcoming so that I may guide in some way these rafted men who pell-mell upon each other like blown twigs I like here standed to that task our Lord I become the one who gathers them in to proceed us all into the.

In 1527, the Spanish explorer Panfilo de Narvaez made the decision to split his party in two. Half would go by boat along the coast of Florida, and the other would go over land. The two parties would never meet again. The land party traversed not only Florida but across the southern and southwestern United States and into Florida, becoming the first non-Native Americans to see these parts of the New World. We know this because the journals of one such explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, survive, recounting the story of how the party nearly starved to death again and again, encountering friendly and not-so-friendly Indians, and eventually, when there were only four left, became famous as a band of traveling medicine men and healers. As Brian Evenson notes in his prologue, Russell Persson's The Way of Florida is in one way a translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account, hewing closely to it, though in idiosyncratic English.

I got to hear Persson read from The Way of Florida at the Association of Writers and Publishers' conference last weekend. I was struck by the section he chose, in which one of the explorers rides his horse into a river and is drowned. The stark, denuded language, the collective "we" that makes it seem as if some piece of the entire body is being peeled off. And of course, the decision to eat the unfortunate horse, a decision that presages the group's future need to resort to cannibalism. The story, such as it is, is one of increasing alienation and desperation, moving deeper into the unknown world. Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow explorers get farther and farther away from the familiar, and they grow farther and farther away from themselves. Their clothes become ragged, then fall away, leaving them entirely naked. The pious Cabeza de Vaca meditates constantly on God's will; he reasons that they have been cast out safety in punishment for their sins. What to make, then, of the way the final survivors are built up again, and transformed to a kind of prestige? Other transformations are here, and I found myself wondering if the same were recorded in Cabeza de Vaca's true journal, as when one of his fellow Spaniards chooses to stay with his new companion, a Native man who lives as a woman, over another push to return to civilization.

It's the language, though, that animates The Way of Florida. If the novel is a translation from the Spanish, it's a translation that doesn't quite arrive in English, or if it does, an English that is wholly new and unfamiliar. Persson writes long stretches without periods or breaks, with few commas, or perhaps none. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives switch places; often I found him using the "right" word but not quite the "right" form, as in "the moon is my revital" above. The experimental language slows the speed of the journey, and perhaps makes it as painstaking for us as for Cabeza de Vaca. More importantly, it has an alienating effect, and captures the strange and uncanny experience of confronting a new world. If you're like me, The Way of Florida will remind you of William T. Vollmann's novels about European-Indigenous encounter. Like Vollmann, and perhaps moreso, Persson recognizes that really seeing these exchanges for what they were requires a language that presents them to us as new and strange as they must have been.

Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman

"Yes," Patrick says with audible relief. "I want to come all the way back, Alison. I want to crawl back into the old life with you and grow small in its belly, like a baby. A man needs a woman, he needs it like a water needs duck. I've been out west now, to see what I can see, and what I discovered is that it's all on fire and giving off a dark-blue smoke. I saw the palm trees and the bathing-suit beach and the surf-whitened sea, and I looked until my eyes burned down to the nub. There's no paradise here unless you're a bird of paradise. There isn't enough ocean to put out all the flames."

Patrick Hamlin is a writer whose semiautobiographical novel has been picked up for adaptation into a movie. He's been invited to Los Angeles to work on the film, but it isn't quite what he expected. His book has been mangled beyond comprehension, and instead of working on the script, he's been tasked with chauffeuring the movie's star, a tempestuous and troubled former child star named Cassidy Carter. Cassidy is cynical but shrewd; she's the first to notice that the movie doesn't really seem to be a movie, that the crew keeps getting smaller and more patched together, and that the producers' disinterest in the filming itself may be connected to the frequent pickups of cash-filled briefcases that are part of Patrick's workload. The transparently fake production is related, too, somehow, to the advent of a commercial brand called WAT-R that has recently replaced natural water in California. Cassidy never drinks the stuff, correctly intuiting that it's connected to the rise of a debilitating form of dementia that ends with people being whisked away, vegetative, to mysterious "care" facilities.

I wanted an L.A. novel for my trip to California, and Something New Under the Sun delivered. Kleeman's Los Angeles is a Los Angeles of about five minutes into the future. Everywhere it's on fire, and the water has disappeared. Public goods have been replaced by private enterprise, which is more interested in short-term profits than keeping its customers alive. It's a state in crisis, but it hardly seems to know it's in crisis. "But it's not really an emergency," Patrick thinks when driving around a brush fire, "putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. An emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. In an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp." But of course, Patrick's got it all wrong; daydream and distraction are the prerequisites of disaster, they dominate until its too late, and even afterward. Something New Under the Sun is a novel about a state at the crossroads of all our modern crises: ecological, climatological, epidemiological, technological, capitalist.

I really enjoyed the character of Cassidy Carter, the former child star. Her shrewdness and intelligence are in violation of both her tabloid image and typical ideas of vapid celebrity. It means something that only she, as someone who has navigated the exploitative bone-crushing systems of Hollywood, can see what's going on. There's something, too, about the way that pop culture gives us a kind of buried insight into the real world that's very DeLillo. The whole book is DeLillo, maybe more DeLillo than any other book I've ever read, though it can't capture DeLillo's effortlessness (who can?). I loved the sections where Patrick combs through the Reddit boards devoted to interpretation of Cassidy's old kid's show, a Veronica Mars knockoff called Kassi Keene: Teen Detective. The message board community has splintered into schools of interpretation like rival cabbalists, building a division between those who believe the grand designs of the show are only textual (like those who spend hours inventing internally consistent interpretations of Twin Peaks) and those who believe a grander symbology is at play that points to social, even mystical truths. Again, this is all about the actress who starred in Happy Birthday, Miss Teen President!, a movie in which she exclaims, "This land is our land, and now this skateboard is your skateboard." (She tells this to the "crabby, wizened Senate minority whip, as she teaches him how to do an ollie on the somber white steps of the Lincoln Memorial.")

Patrick begins to lose it in California, an effect of the WAT-R along with his own personal fragilities. In his absence, his wife and daughter have disappeared to a summer camp-like commune in upstate New York. He worries and frets, thinking that he's lost them to a kind of cult, unable to understand that it is he himself who has landed into the lap of America's cult culture. Perhaps, in Hollywood, he's become enmeshed with the country's biggest cult of all. Patrick and Cassidy team up to investigate the evils of WAT-R, and for a while, we think we're being offered something much more conventional, a legal thriller, an Erin Brockovich. But this isn't an episode of Kassi Keene: Teen Detective, and the pair's abortive investigations are no match for the urgent logic of crisis, nor for their own needs and insecurities. If you're looking for a novel that tells us the end of the climate crisis will be a renewal of hope--or that we might find our own personal end somewhere else but within it--look somewhere else.

Zoot-Suit Murders by Thomas Sanchez

Younger saw it. A huge sign rolling through clumps of sage and spikes of yucca near the mountaintop. Nine wooden letters, each high as four men atop one another's shoulders, each letter painted white, sprawled improbably across the natural shoulder of the mountain. the letters seemed a tenuous but monstrous joke that could blow down in any retributary wind. But there the stood, naked as the last advertisement for a feeble civilization, dwarfing the simple beauty of the natural terrain, idiotic and splendid, washed in the ethereal glow of the dying sun sinking blood red into the ocean to the west:

HOLLYWOOD

The relationship between noir and Los Angeles is so funny. The city's famous for its endless summer, and in the mind's eye, it must always be daytime there--and yet, every L.A. noir seems to be set at night, or even in cold and rain. There's a relationship between the two, of course: the noirish night is the shadow of the L.A. day. It's not so much that the celluloid world of Hollywood conceals the brutality and violence of the nighttime as it's predicated on it, as if what happens at night is the engine of churning blood and bodies that make the daytime possible. It reflects a belief, I think, that any kind of pleasure or leisure requires some kind of blood sacrifice.

Thomas Sanchez's noir Zoot-Suit Murders takes its relationship to Los Angeles seriously. It begins with Nathan Younger, a Catholic social worker and amateur baseball coach (and secretly, a spy for something like the House Un-American Activities Committee) witnessing a movie star screaming for help in the barrio, the Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles. A pair of shots ring out, hitting two of the stars' pursuers, we presume, who turn out to be undercover cops. The investigation pins the murders on the Mexican youths whose zoot suits--flashy, voluminous, and colorful--have taken on an unsavory political valence during wartime rationing. But Younger, of course, thinks that the real story is more complicated, and related somehow to Kathleen, the spokesperson for a utopian cult, who was at the scene of the crime. Kathleen is beautiful, waifish, red-headed, and chronically sick; as he gets closer to her, Younger begins to fall in love, as demanded by the genre--which also demands that love be dangerous and cruel.

Zoot-Suit Murders does a great job bringing together disparate threads of Los Angeles culture and history. There's Hollywood, of course, although the starlet in crisis turns out to be kind of a red herring. But there's aspects of Los Angeles here that are often left out of the genre, beginning with the racial and class tensions of the 1940s that infamously resulted in the Zoot Suit Riots, when a bunch of Navy soldiers went around brutalizing the young Mexicans. For Sanchez, the barrio is the site of collision between Spanish fascists and communist subversion; both forces see in the disaffection of the Zoot Suiters a kind of powerful, perhaps primeval force which can be leveraged. The novel works in the city's history as the home of evangelical fervor and woo-woo spirituality. In Kathleen--who is hard at work preparing for the arrival of "The Voice of the Right Idea." It's half Aimee Semple Macpherson, and half Scientology. Around the city, a mysterious phone number--DIALGOD--is graffitied on the walls. And Sanchez does a great job filling the cult out with a lot of very persuasive utopian nonsense, while still suggesting that the cult's true aims are more legible, while more secretive.

Sometimes, the book strains to convince us that this is Los Angeles in the 1940s. At one point, a characters says, "Yah, well they'll give Emperor Hirohito an honorary degree at UCLA before that happens." Is a final showdown at the Hollywood sign inspired, or cheesy and too-familiar? Still, I really enjoyed the way the novel takes the historical and cultural moment seriously, and situates its noirishness in time and place. It's a very different novel than Rabbit Boss, about several generations of California Indians (and which I loved), but I see in Zoot-Suit Murders a similar eagerness to grapple with the way in which California and Californian identity are fashioned in the crucible of history.

My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pan, pacing out there in the street: other people.

One day, Will meets his father by happenstance at a movie theater. His father's not alone; he has a woman with him, a white woman. Only recently have colored South Africans like Will and his father, Sonny, been able to legally patronize white theaters; for both father and son it is a kind of provocation. But for Will, it's also a realization that his father is not all that he seems. Sonny is a former teacher who has become a powerful leader and orator among those in what they call "the struggle"; part of his appeal has always been his upstanding character and the support of his stalwart wife, Aila. But Will clocks immediately what Sonny is doing at the theater, hiding an affair that has come to be the center of his life. As time passes, Sonny's attachment to the white woman, Hannah, will quietly and subtly--because in Gordimer's books, politics and power move glacially, and the explosions are usually off-screen distractions--compromise his position within the movement. But more importantly, it will compromise his position with his son.

It's interesting that Gordimer titles this My Son's Story. If anything, it ought to be called My Father's Story. It is, at heart, Sonny's story, and it alternates between the icy third person that is Gordimer's trademark and a fiery first-person from Sonny's perspective. These sections, where Sonny fulminates against his father, are the best parts of the book, and something I can't remember seeing in anything else that Gordimer's ever written. Sonny's anger at his father's infidelity and betrayal grows all out of proportion, and we can see, in subtle ways, that he lets it cloud his judgment, never quite understanding what others are saying. When he sees in his mother's expression and actions a recognition of his father's infidelity, is he right? Or does he see what he wants to see in order to make a closer ally of his mother? At the novel's end, the Sonny-narrator tells us that he has filled in the gaps of what he does not know; the third-person sections are him, too. Of course, that brings up several Oedipal questions about what it means for Sonny to describe the physical intimacy between his father and his father's lover.

One thing I liked about My Son's Story is that we get moments of anti-Black racism crisply and clearly. That's not actually the case in most of her novels, which I think present racism as something structural that happens at a deeper level. She's not often interested in the racists and bigots as much as the people fighting them. But here we see Sonny and his family move to a white neighborhood, trying to heighten the contradictions of South African society. And for a while, their presence is tolerated, until Aila is arrested for keeping a cache of weapons, and the neighborhood becomes a mob, which burns down the family's house. We are expecting, perhaps, the book to move toward a final confrontation between Will and his father, for the son to explode. But the destabilizing force turns out to be Aila, as well as Will's sister Baby. As things fall apart, we see a deeper source of Will's resentment and envy: the expectation that he of all the family will live the "normal life" that is the reward of political struggle, a struggle which he is not permitted to enter. It's a hard thing, perhaps, to bear the rewards but none of the sacrifices. The novel, then, is Will looking at himself through his father's eyes; that's why it's My Son's Story and not My Father's.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

A darkness, thick and burbling, like a river, spilled down over the windowpanes. Suddenly a great flash lit everything up, and the woman saw her own shadow thrown against the wall. The thunderclap reverberated a second later. She shut her eyes. If she died there, like this, in that lucid moment, while out there the sky was dancing, triumphant and free, that would be good. Decades would go by before anyone found her. She thought about Aveiro, and realized that she had stopped feeling Portuguese. She didn't belong to anywhere. Over there, where she had been born, it was cold. She saw them again, the narrow streets, people walking, heads down, against the wind and their own weariness. Nobody was waiting for her. 

Ludovica, Ludo, is afraid of the outside world, and with good reason. One day, as gunfire and rockets break out in Luanda, the capital of Angola where she lives, her sister and her sister's husband leave and never return. The country has gained its independence, but at the cost of a deadly civil war that rages right under her window. So bricks herself into the apartment. She survives by killing and eating the pigeons and monkeys that land on her balcony, and burning her books one by one. She has a little balcony garden that provides her with vegetables, and she becomes skilled at hooking her neighbor's chickens with looped ropes from several stories up. Below her, Angola grows up, but it's a process in which she's too afraid to take part. As her books burn, she writes her story--for whom?--on her walls in charcoal.

Ludo is the center of Jose Eduardo Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion, but only the center. Though she's hidden away in her secret chamber, she becomes enmeshed with dozens of characters who live outside. She stops herself from killing a pigeon because she sees that it's carrying a message between lovers. She spares it, and places a couple of diamonds--of no value to her, and perhaps a great danger--in its beak. The diamonds enrich a political prisoner who buys the apartment next to Ludo's, becoming her unwitting neighbor. The message turns out to have been intended for the brutal commandant who tortured him. Slowly, these and other characters, whose connections to one another are just as absurd, begin to converge on Ludo's hidden apartment. Soon, they're all there at once, including a journalist who investigates strange disappearances, a mute communist leader, and a young boy who has found his way into Ludo's company, giving her a much needed companion and himself freedom from the demands of the street gangs.

It's silly, but it works. The image we're left with is of people who ought to be, and in some cases are, bitter enemies, drawn together by hyperactive happenstance. What emerges, perhaps, is an image of a country as a network of interpersonal relations. All these characters, Black African and Portuguese, rich and poor, communist and right-wing, are ineluctably drawn together despite themselves. Their relatedness is, on a plot level, an absurd bit of near-magical realism, but on a symbolic level, they represent something larger than their own ideological, racial, and class divisions. Which is not to say they all are reconciled, but merely that this network of relations encompasses and precedes them in ways they are not fully conscious of. By the time Ludo emerges into this new Angola, three decades have passed. War is over, but its scars remain. Still, there's a hopefulness in the way the book ends, with the bricks coming down and the world entering at last.

With the addition of Angola, my "Countries Read" list is at 106!

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Such frights will come and go.

Then there'll be one that won't. One that won't go.

But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

And Alice wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In "What Do You Want to Know For?," the narrator--here, clearly a stand-in for Munro herself--undergoes a mammogram that reveals a lump in her breast. She prepares for the biopsy, and perhaps worse, but it's postponed twice, until the doctor responsible tells her that the lump has always been there, on every mammogram she's received, and it hasn't grown or changed. It's not worth cutting out. Routine accretes again around her life, which was briefly opened up into frightening possibilities, but as she writes, one day there will be a fright that doesn't go away. They're sobering words, one year after Munro's death, after the fright that did not go. And of course they are made more complicated by the revelation of Munro's complicity with the ongoing sexual abuse of her daughter. but not, I think, invalidated. Munro seems to have lied for a long time about her life, but in her stories, what she wrote had a way of being deeply true. So it's with a mix of sadness and relief that I can say there are no more Alice Munro stories left for me to read.

The View from Castle Rock may be Munro's most personal collection, even moreso than the autobiographical "Finale" that closes out Dear Life. The long first section, titled "No Advantages," is a history of Munro's Scottish family, which emigrated to Canada and the United States after the Highland Clearances in the 18th century. The title image of the book comes from one of those ancestors, who, as a little kid, was taken up a prominent hill in Edinburgh and jokingly told by his father that the body of water across the bay--really, Firth--was America. It must have seemed so close, so full of promise and threat, and it must have felt a little like fate, too, because that ancestor did become an emigrant, to the real America. These stories are fascinating and rich, although I had trouble keeping the different Williams and Andrews apart, and drawn from life as they are, they resist a kind of completeness that Munro's stories do, I think, typically possess. They are more ragged, diffuse. I loved the moment when a young boy, walking from Canada to the United States, sneaks his baby sister away from his mother and hides her in a shed, then blames the disappearance on an Indian servant they left back in Canada. (Suspicions of Indian magic make this a persuasive accusation.) The little girl is found, and the boy is never blamed, and so there is no hammer fall of the kind that Munro usually doesn't shy away from. Instead, the moment is another thread in a tapestry of immigrant life, the fabric from which the writer herself is woven.

From there, the stories move down the generations. Familiar images come back again. There's Munro's father, with his silver fox farm. There's her mother, who falls prey to a debilitating disease. We've heard these stories before, in The Lives of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But Munro had such a knack for making the same story seem new each time. She changes the name of the Ontario town--here, it's Blyth--and somehow, that's all it takes, for the story to be revived and refreshed. And of course, we get aspects of these lives we've never seen before, like the introduction of her father's new wife, a foolish and insensitive woman with the improbably name of Irlma. To what extent do the old stories develop and explain the new? Is it about historical contingency only, the obvious fact that, had these people not emigrated to Canada, there would be no Alice Munro? Or is it something else, about the way the old Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name) carved out a new home for themselves so far from Scotland, something we must always do for ourselves, no matter how far from our parents' doorstep we get? There is no permanence, of course. The lump in the breast reminds us of that. We fashion home for ourselves out of what's at hand, and even then, it's only for a little while.

I'll really miss reading a Munro story for the first time. At this moment, it's a hard thing to talk about her writing as writing. It might be nice to take a break from her for a year or two. But I can't imagine never returning to these stories again, and I do plan to come back to them someday. They'll be tinged with a double sadness--dismay or disgust on top of the lack of newness--but they are too much of home for me, too, to be left totally behind.

Doting by Henry Green

They started together, fast, for the passage. Once outside, he shouted "in here" throwing open his and Diana's bedroom. There was a bathroom opened out of this, but, because the space was small, a basin with hot and cold water had been fitted by Diana's bed. It was to this that Miss Paynton ran. Turning the hot tap on, she zipped off her skirt, and stood with her fat legs starting out of lace knickers.

"Here, let me" he said, and knelt at her side.

She picked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, drenched it in that basin, and then, putting her hand inside the skirt she had discarded, she began to rub at the stain.

And it was at this moment Diana entered.

She stood at the door with a completely expressionless face.

"Arthur" she said "when you're done, could you come outside a minute."

In a pivotal scene in Henry Green's Doting, Diana Middleton walks in on her husband kneeling at the feet of 20-year-old Annabel Paynton. Her husband, Arthur, has just knocked over a tureen of coffee onto her dress, and they have scrambled to save it, but of course, that's not what it looks like. But it is what it looks like, because Arthur has just been making out with the girl, who is slightly older than his son, and although the scene is quite comical in its irony, if the coffee had not been spilled, Diana might just as well have walked in on Arthur and Annabel sucking face. It's a great scene, the best in the book, and perhaps the only scene, strictly speaking: mostly, Doting is told entirely in dialogue.

The half-affair between Annabel and Arthur is a pathetic thing, never consummated, and for the most part barely more than a concatenation of middle-aged put-ons and half-rebuffs. Annabel finds Arthur attractive, but admires Diana; mostly she operates by a kind of young person's instinct that's only half-able to really think through the long term implications of her own desires, whatever those might be. She's having a bit of fun, but for Arthur, the affair is a desperate one, even though he deeply loves his wife. Doting, Arthur says to Annabel at one point, is not the same as loving--that is, the kind of relationship that Arthur has with Annabel, obsessive, squalid, horny, is not really even in the same universe as his relationship with his wife. Perhaps that is the way most affairs are conducted, whether it's a truthful statement or no; we love our partners even as we betray them, and need not really feel dissatisfied to be captivated by the allure of someone else.

Diana mostly turns a blind eye, even encourages Arthur in what seem to be his harmless attentions. They set up rules that are as pathetic as the affair itself--no meeting at night, no bringing her to the house--and which of course are immediately broken. Diana, miffed, begins an equally sexless flirtation with Arthur's friend Charles. Arthur, wanting out of a situation of his own making, tries to pawn Annabel off on Charles, a gambit that works too well, leaving both Arthur and Diana dejected. Annabel ends up introducing Charles to her equally young friend, and they fall in love, the end of a chain of infatuations in which Charles and Clare are the only ones who actually end up sleeping together. I don't know if Doting is the best novel Green ever produced, but it's definitely the funniest, and the deflation of every grand affair is part of its charm. All this is brought full circle by the return of the Middleton son Peter, a whinging, juvenile pest who's blind to all the stormy drama that's been going on in his absence, and whose immaturity only underlines how icky the middle-aged men of the novel really are.

The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm. This was our birthright, this easy assurance that whatever we wanted was ours, both to have and to bestow. We knew nothing about privation and adventure, as Jee Moon liked to remind us. It was common knowledge Nanny had spoiled us rotten.

Kathryn Davis' The Silk Road begins with a yoga class at the end of the world. A set of siblings, known only by professional titles--the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Cook, the Iceman, the Geographer, the Keeper, the Topologist--have arrived here after a long journey on the Silk Road to get away from a rapidly spreading plague. The class is led by Jee Moon, a mysterious figure they've either just met or who has known them all their lives. When someone dies in the yoga class, it's not clear which one it is, but the grief of it complicates the safety of arrival, the safety of the arctic labyrinth.

The Silk Road is as close to Joy Williams' Harrow as anything else I've read. It operates at a high level of abstraction, in a world of myth and symbol rather than a world of logic or causality. Images of the quote-unquote normal word peek in, especially in flashbacks of the sibling's childhood in suburbia, but the Silk Road on which they walk is more like the Camino de Santiago, or the Stations of the Cross, a journey whose meaning unfolds as they walk it. The siblings enter a dreamy hospital, where one of them is seductively drawn further into the darkened rooms; is this a metaphor for death, loss, grief? Is it not enough that death haunts the end of things, does it have to haunt the journey, too?

Like Harrow (an unfair comparison, The Silk Road came first), cataclysm and disaster are what seem to have loosed the world from the grip of realism. For Williams, it's always ecological disaster; for Davis, it's a recurrence of the bubonic plague, complete with fleas, that gives the events of the novel, such as they are, a kind of medieval flair. (About six months after its publication, the first cruise ships were being quarantined after the appearance of a novel virus thought to have originated in China.) As the siblings flee, they must let go of their ideas about the world, just as they must let go of their ideas about themselves. Their titles cease to have any meaning (though it's not clear to what extent they ever did) as the journey across the Silk Road transforms them:

The thing is, he wasn't himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us to become identities. The Cook hadn't cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.

I was bowled over by Davis' novel Labrador when I read it five years ago. I've been chasing that high ever since, and the results have been a couple of pretty good novels (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Versailles) and a couple that didn't really work (The Thin Place and The Walking Tour). The Silk Road is somewhere in the middle, but I haven't done it any favors by comparing it to Harrow, which strikes the balance between the real world and the symbolic one more effectively, in my opinion. But then again, it's one of Davis' strengths that the symbols and images of her novels often seem not to cohere into something usual or expected. That Davis can make you care about these characters, whose identities are so surface-level--and to open them up so the surface can be punctured--is really an achievement.

The Burnt Ones by Patrick White

At first it was impossible to believe their personal lives could be reduced by a shuffle of history, which is what happened, monetarily at least, on the deck of the destroyer, after the sack of their city. Because it had been personally theirs, which was now burning by bursts, and in long, funneling socks of smoke, and reflections of slow, oily light. As he ran looking for that other part of him which was lost, he gashed his shin on a companionway. But he did not know. Calling her name. None of that rabble of sufferers--wet, dry, singed, bleeding, deformed by the agony of their first historic situation--none of them knew any more, as they stood in their fashionable rags and watched their city burn.

My favorite story in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones is "Down at the Dump." Set in the suburban Sydney town of Sarsparilla, it tells the story of two young people finding an unexpected connection. One, a young girl, is at the cemetery for the funeral of her eccentric aunt. The other, a boy, is from a family of poor bogans who go searching for things to sell in the dump. It just happens that the cemetery and the dump are right next to each other, separated by only a fence, across which the two teens meet and connect, or not quite, and then over which they start making out. It's a perfect Patrick White story, about the rottenness and spoil beneath suburban gentility. There's a fantastic moment when the spirit of the dead aunt looks out over her mourners, symbolically mixing the spiritual realm with literal trash. And there may be no more setting where White is more at home than the dump, which he describes in his characteristic way: "At the last dip before the cemetery a disembowelled mattress from the dump had begun to writhe across the road. It looked like a kind of monster from out of the depths of somebody's mind, the part a decent person ignored."

About half the stories are set in Sarsparilla, about another half are set in Greece or are about ex-pat Greeks. The title The Burnt Ones refers to the Burning of Smyrna, a moment in which the Turkish regime set a massive fire to the Greek quarter of what is modern Izmir, killing tens of thousands. Nearly all of the Greeks in the novel experienced this, and it colors their experience of their new homes, whether in Greece, Australia, or America, and the immediacy of its horrors contrasts with the petty psychodramas of the collection's suburban Australians. Yet, we see too how easily the Greeks, having fled this "shuffle of history," are re-subsumed into polite schemata of respectability and repression. (White writes often about Greece and Greeks, presumably inspired by his longtime partner, a Greek named Manoly Lascaris.) My favorite of these stories was "Being Kind to Titina," about a boy who tortures an awkward young girl whom he has been instructed to be kind to. She grows up and, of course, turns out to be hot, and though she only remembers him as being kind, his own cruelty tortures and keeps him from being with her. It's a story that reminds you that White can be funny:

But Titina stuck. She stuck to me. It was as if Titina had been told. And once in the garden of our house at Schutz, after showing her my collection of insects, I became desperate. I took Titina's blue bead, and stuck it up her left nostril.

'Titina,' I cried, 'the holes of your nose are so big I'd expect to see your brain -- if you had any,' I shouted, 'inside.'

But Titina Stavridi only smiled, and sneezed the bead in to her hand.

Other stories I liked: "A Cheery Soul," about a woman who annoys everyone she comes in contact with; "Clay," about a boy whose mother worries about him being unusual--a bourgeois anxiety, of course, but then he turns out to be legitimately mad. And I especially liked "Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover," about a young female door-to-door salesman who chucks everything for a slovenly Bulgarian she meets on her route, and who turns out to have a huge fetish for being whipped. I didn't think it was as strong, generally, as his other story collection The Cockatoos, though it's been many years since I've read that one. Sadly, I can see my stock of White's books dwindling--three leftover stories, a half-finished novel, and his memoirs are all I have left. 

A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant

All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs, carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment. She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it. No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious. She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution. Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.

Shirley Perrigny--formerly Shirley Norrington, then Shirley Higgins--is a Canadian living in Paris. Her first husband, Peter, died on their honeymoon in Italy, leaving her to drift toward France, where she married a journalist named Philippe. Philippe has left her, it seems, or half-left her; he has disappeared. Excuses seem to proliferate from the shadows--he's on assignment, he's visiting his family, he's sick with hepatitis--but each one is buttressed with the caveat that he's not to be contacted. Left adrift, Shirley searches for a sense of identity in the wake of these personal disasters. She makes friends with a desperate young mother named Claudie, and becomes reluctantly ingratiated with her family; Claudie sees in the slightly older Shirley someone who has her life together, which we know is the opposite of the truth. But Shirley's chief personality trait seems to be her need to care for others, which may be, as Philippe and others see it, a kind of self-abnegation that prevents Shirley from really becoming.

A Fairly Good Time is an example of a small but recognizable mid-century micro-genre: the North American girl in Europe. Mostly, as in Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, it's an American girl, but the Canadian Shirley is constantly being taken for an American anyway. Philippe, and many of the other locals, find many reasons to look down on Shirley; they take her personal idiosyncrasies to be examples of North American uncouthness, and they elevate small differences to the level of barbarism. It's really not a book that makes the French come out very well. But even among these, Shirley finds ways to  connect with people, even despite herself, and perhaps it is her outsider's perspective that makes her so invaluable to an unsettled soul like Claudie. Shirley, too, is adrift, but her adriftness has taken her far away from home, something that the too-young mother Claudie can only see and admire.

I've only read Gallant's short stories, and I love them, but I think that here, in a novel, the strengths that make her such a good short story writer work against her. Gallant's stories are rich and overfilled; they effortlessly give a sense of whole worlds that exist outside of the margins of the page. As a novel, it feels overstuffed; characters who might have made a strong singular impression, like Shirley's malicious landlady Madame Roux, end up overextended and obscure. Interestingly, I recognized the story of Shirley's first husband's death as being cribbed from one of her stories that, if I recall correctly, is anthologized in two of the collections I read. In that story, too, the young window drifts into the first harbor she can find, a lover and his family who turn out to be somewhat sinister.

This NYRB edition of A Fairly Good Time includes another of Gallant's novels (maybe the only other one, but I'm not looking it up; don't quote me), Green Water, Green Sky. This novel--really, a novella--is about Flor, another Canadian in Europe (as Gallant herself was), undergoing the slow dissolution of her mental health. Flor's story is told mostly through the eyes of the people at the edges of her life, some intimate and others quite incidental: her mother, her Jewish husband Bob Harris, her cousin George, an artist and hanger-on named Wishart. This method is strange, and it felt to me like the novel keeps us from looking directly at Flor. It's too disparate, too imbalanced, to work with any kind of wholeness or singleness, though perhaps the fragmentation is much the point. And yet, a long scene where Flor, abandoned by her mother and others, cloisters herself within her flat and begins to break down completely, shows Gallant, like nothing else in either novel does, at the height of her talents.