After the Death of Don Juan by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The wheel went round. The thread snapped, but was re-knit again. In hell the limbs of sinners are broken and mended, broken and mended. Men and women lie pell-mell together, naked as in the marriage-bed .There is a promise of water, but no water. There is no light and yet they see new torments approaching, and the stony looks of devils standing by. The tears dried on her cheeks as she sat spinning, and thinking of hell. In hell, too, as in heaven, the tears are dried. For all the anguish, for all the despair, no tears can break out over the burning eye-balls. Now Don Juan had come back from damnation to tell of it.

The story goes: the lecher Don Juan, caught in flagrante delicto with Doña Ana, kills Ana's father, the Commander. Later, he visits the Commander's tomb, where the statue of the man invites him to a fine dinner. Instead of a fine dinner, Don Juan receives his just desserts: the earth opens up and demons drag him down to hell. It's a difficult story to believe, but that's what Don Juan's servant, Leporello, insists, and so Doña Ana goes with her reluctant new husband, Don Ottavio, to Don Juan's village, Tenorio Viejo, to inform the lecher's family that he has died. She discovers few friends of Don Juan among the villagers there; even his father, Don Saturno, seems to understand that his son was a rather nasty piece of work. And yet the death--if indeed he really has died--of the don only promises to throw the village into turmoil.

After the Death of Don Juan is, like Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them, more interested in capturing a wide view of a place than it is an individual character. We may think, briefly, that it is Doña Ana's book, or perhaps Don Ottavio's, but when the nobleman and noblewoman arrive at Tenorio, the novel's perspective expands to take in all of the villagers who have long battled for safety and dignity under the rule of Don Saturno and his family: the miller, the sacristan, the seamstress, the many olive farmers. The villagers immediately set to discourse, first over whether they truly believe that Don Juan is dead, and then over what it means. They talk themselves into believing that the death of the don means that the money that went to support his drinking and whoring will be returned to the village, and that now they will be able to implement a scheme of irrigation that will increase the yield of their olive trees.

The back of my copy of After the Death of Don Juan describes the book as Townsend Warner's response to the Spanish Civil War. I wondered about that; obviously, it's set in Spain, but I couldn't easily make out any particular analogs of various people or factions, as far as I know them. And yet, it's a book that captures something interesting about class, and class warfare. The villagers find that Don Saturno, an intellectual and dilettante, is as enthusiastic about the irrigation plan as they are, and already has plans drawn up. But this detente between the feudal lord and his subjects is interrupted by the return of--spoiler, you guessed it--Don Juan, who, as it turns out, has not been dragged to hell at all. Talking with his estranged son, Don Saturno finds that all his noblesse oblige will amount to nothing; when he inherits the estate, Don Juan intends to cancel the leases and trap the villagers in cruel bondage. There's something here, I think, about the way that class interests win out over personal kindness; Don Juan understands that his position as lord is an essentially cruel one and has no delusions about whether it is possible for the lord and his workers to be on friendly terms. The villagers only dimly sense this, but they understand that Don Juan's return means them no good, and the novel ends with a bloody and doomed assault by the villagers on the castle.

Though it's set in 18th century Spain, After the Death of Don Juan struck me as Sylvia Townsend Warner at her most Dickensian--the large cast of characters, the broad (and funny) humor, the attempt at circumscribing the whole social relations that define the town. In this way it's very different than the books that made me fall in love with her as a writer, like Mr. Fortune. Yet, I love how she, as a writer, can commit that eloquent, sardonic voice to such different places and times: colonial Polynesia, a 14th century convent, Victorian England. In each instance, she captures something both funny and dark about human nature, and After the Death of Don Juan is no exception.

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

This book seeks to reorient U.S. history by redressing the absence of American Indians within it. Covering five hundred years of history, it builds on the work of many other scholars while recognizing that not all peoples, themes, and places can be held within a single study. American history developed out of the epic encounter between Indians and European empires and out of the struggles for sovereignty between Native peoples and the United States. American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.

Few history books have the kind of popular cache that Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America does. There have been other big "retellings" of American history through the lens of Indigenous Americans--Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's comes to mind--but this one appeared to meet the moment of a post-Standing Rock awareness of Indigenous people. It won the National Book Award, and it's not hard to see why: it's a scrupulous, thoughtful telling of history that most readers have never heard before. It begins with the colonization of what's now the American Southwest by Spanish--a colonization effort that predates English and other powers on the east coast of the U.S. by over a century--and moves steadily toward the late 20th century, taking every opportunity to show the ways in which what we think of as American history is also Native American history. The "Rediscovery" in the title cheekily shows what the game is.

In many ways, the broader strokes will be familiar to anyone who has read about Indigenous Americans. I see reflected here the same periodizing that David Treuer talks about in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee--colonization, frontier, allotment, termination, etc. I attended a seminar with an accomplished historian of Indigenous American history where I overheard her call the book a disappointment--I couldn't really hear much of her complaints, but I caught suggestions of cheap, sloppy errors and, most significantly, a sense that the book covers little ground that a historian wouldn't already know. That said, I'm not a historian, and I found a lot of the material here to be very new to me, if not in the broader strokes, the specific details that Blackhawk chooses to pull. I appreciated the reliance on specific anecdotes and primary sources from Indigenous people who lived through each of this different eras.

So, here are some of the big takeaways for me. I came away with a greater sense of how powerful Native tribes, especially the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were during the colonial period. Far from being a vassal to great powers, the Iroquois were a powerful union of tribes whose possessions constituted, for Blackhawk, a true Empire. The Iroquois, according to Blackhawk, were both a formidable military foe who frequently got the better of the English and French, but clever diplomats who knew how to forge allies with one power or another to keep the other at bay. Such triangulation might have continued apace, if not for the collapse of the French control of Haiti and the country's swift divestment from North America. Nor did I realize how much of the Revolutionary War was precipitated by hatred and suspicion of Native peoples on the margin of the first colonies. Colonists turned to a strong patriot government to help protect them from the Native nations that they felt threatened them, and to help legitimize a growing sense of racial and ethnic superiority that entitled them to seize interior lands.

These battles for the first frontier--what Blackhawk calls the "Inland Sea," the Great Lakes--make up what felt like the most important and interesting part of the book, for me. It may be that I'm just less familiar with that chapter of American history than any other. The parts that were more familiar--the expansion of American interests across the interior west, then the legacies of allotment and termination in the 20th century--had less interest for me. More than anything, I came away thinking that I'd love to read a more specific and narrowly tailored history about the battles for the Great Lakes and the immediate interior preceding the Civil War. 

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Thanks to the side panels of the mirror, I saw the two halves of my face separately, far apart, and I was drawn first by my right profile, then the left. They were both completely unfamiliar to me, normally I didn't use the side panels, I recognized myself only in the image reflected by the big mirror. Now I tried to arrange the mirrors so that I could see from the side and from the front. There is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream. Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation. If the frontal image reassured me, saying to me that I was Olga and that perhaps I would arrive at the end of the day successfully, my two profiles warned me that it was not so. They showed me my neck, the ugly living ears, the lightly arched nose that I had never liked, the chin, the high cheekbones and the taut skin of the cheeks, like a white page. I felt that there, over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent. What did she have to do with those images.

One day, Olga's husband, Mario, announces that he no longer wants to be with her. She expects him to return--after all, they have two young children and a dog, and he's had similar episodes in the past--but the break seems to be a permanent one. Being abandoned throws her into a severe mental crisis: Who is she if she is not Mario's wife? She's haunted by the image of the poverella, the poor woman, a neighbor from her Neapolitan upbringing who was perfectly normal until, she, too, was abandoned, becoming a physical and mental ruin of her former self. This crisis reaches a head when, having had to replace the locks on her apartment door, Olga finds one day she's unable to turn the keys to get out. Her phone and computer are broken; her son and dog are critically sick. She tries to keep the mounting crisis from her young, resentful daughter, but she's beginning to see visions of the poverella sitting in her apartment; she's beginning to crack.

The Days of Abandonment is totally unlike the sweeping, Dickensian social vision of the Neapolitan novels. It begins from a very simple premise: what happens to a woman when she is abandoned? It's funny, by locking Olga in the apartment, the novel's central episode seems to refuse to let in the larger world at all. And yet, it's unmistakably Ferrante. Perhaps no one is better able to put onto the page the psychology of a woman in a world shaped by male cruelty. (For this reason the rumors you hear now and then about Ferrante being a pseudonym for a male writer to be ridiculous.) The revelations that Olga comes to her about her husband are almost banal in their familiarity: she was the one whose labor kept the household, and thus the relationship, operational, and yet he's the one whose freedom and agency permits him to abandon all that in favor of a younger woman. But these are familiar dynamics for a reason, and Ferrante imbues them with the specificity of a single psychology. No one cracks in exactly the same way, and the sight of Olga collapsing--all while still trying to be a caretaker to her family and to the poor German shepherd, Otto--is something I could barely tear myself away from. Throughout her ordeal, Olga tries to steady herself by leaning on the qualities of pragmatism and patience that she feels define her, and yet the very fabric of reality begins to slip around her.

The Days of Abandonment is a nasty novel. One of my friends told me she loathed it, and I imagine many people--even those who enjoyed the Neapolitan novels--must have picked it up expecting something different, and felt the same. It's filled with scenes of even physical revulsion: the son's vomit, the blood from the wound caused by the little girl stabbing Olga with a paper cutter--a task given to her by Olga, to prick her when she descends too far into her own tortured mind--the ants that invade the apartment, the secretive and secrete-ive failed sexual dalliance with the downstairs neighbor. I was surprised that it ends on a note of healing and reconciliation. The first time he left, the time that didn't take, Mario described his actions as a "brief absence of sense." Finally confronting one another (a violent attack by Olga on Mario in the street notwithstanding), Olga tells Mario that she, not he, knows what it's like to experience a brief absence of sense. The embrace that ends the book is surprisingly tender, and the paragraph it's in is such a bravura passage I'd love to quote it, but I don't want to spoil it. It may be that after all that, The Days of Abandonment is Ferrante's most hopeful novel.

Newcomers: Book One by Lojze Kovacic

Language, one that you don't understand, can be pleasant now and then... It's like a kind of fog in your head... It's nice, there's nothing truly better... It's wonderful when words haven't yet separated from dreams... But not always... I could examine everything as though I was in a theater... Before a storm the sky would get dark. The rain splashed as though a whole sea hung in the air... The Krka flowed like a roadway from hell... the water rose to the machine with the bucket... a whole wagon, a haystack, half a haystack, a small forest... once even an ox gasping for air and lowing... floated past quickly and slammed into the banks of the river... You lost your voice from the wetness, your sight from the gloom, your soul from the lightning... And then silence again.

In Basel, a child boards a train. The sights and sounds are overwhelming, disordered, both inside the train and outside the windows, where the only city the boy has known is chopped up into pieces and discarded. It seems like a grand adventure, but it's only the beginning: soon they are in rural Yugoslavia, the boyhood home of his Slovenian father. They have been escorted out of Switzerland (for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to have something to do with the father's status as an ethnic outsider and the rise of Hitler over the border) and must start again in their father's country--a great hardship for his German mother. They traipse through miles of dark forest, nearly drowning in a river, to get to the village. That no one meets them at the train is a sign of tensions to come; unwanted, they are eventually cruelly expelled and return to the city of Ljubljana, where they live in cramped quarters and difficult poverty.

One of the remarkable things about Lojze Kovacic's Newcomers--a book, I half-understand and half-guess, that is a slightly fictionalized version of his own experiences returning to Slovenia as a child--is how slowly but convincingly Bubi, the child narrator, begins to change. On the train, he's a child of nine with a sense of wonder and adventure, but this eventually curdles into a preteen resentment and viciousness. He's unable to grasp the Slovene language, and this alienates him, teaching him it's better to be silent than to speak up. His own words are transliterated in a kind of comic German accent; when people speak Slovene, it's translated in crisp English; when they speak German, it's written in German--as if to emphasize to us that he and his language are out of place here. He cultivates a teenager's rowdy interest in sex and the female anatomy; his few furtive sexual experiences take place with Gypsy girls and at windowsills. He scrounges up a few tense and hostile friends to form a kind of street army and seek out rock-fights. His schooling suffers; he steals. And yet we sense all the time that the child of the train ride is still in there, sensitive and curious, hardened over by being a newcomer.

Hitler exists on the margin of Newcomers, in newsreels, on the radio. Though Bubi and his family despise him, their Germanness is seen to ally them to Hitler, and brings unwelcome attention, both positive and negative. But it struck me that the book is drawing a parallel between the rhetoric of the Reich and that which surrounds Bubi in both the city and the countryside. This is a Europe that is riven with ethnic hatreds, ready to raise a wall against any kind of outsider. And of course, Bubi, too, is formed in the crucible of rivalry and hatred. Hitler, for the time being anyway, is several borders away. And yet the beliefs and enmities that animate Hitler, which allow him to come to power, can be found in every city and village of Europe. The book, or at least the first half of it--it's been split by Archipelago into two parts--ends with Italian forces rolling into Yugoslavia, the threat and menace of xenophobia and fascism made chillingly real.

With the addition of Slovenia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 107!

The Widow's Children by Paula Fox

That girl! That girl with her open mouth, her idiot fearfulness--and Peter Rice, an insect husk, the goddamned vampire sucking her life away, that bloodless Christian sewing machine with his intolerable daintiness--what had she to do with such creatures, what did she have to do with thick-witted, thick-ankled old Desmond and his infant thieving of liquor, or with debauched Carlos--but at the thought of Carlos, Laura began to cry. She didn't understand anything! The unyielding mystery of her impulses was punishment enough for whatever she had done--she thought she had put them to sleep so long ago, that they had withered away just as she was withering away, but they were awake, the old beasts of her life, so merciless, so cruel.

A group of people gather in a hotel room, then a restaurant: Laura, an outspoken Spanish emigrant, her alcoholic husband Desmond, her daughter from a prior marriage, Clara, her gay brother Carlos, and an old friend, an unassuming publisher named Peter Rice. It is the night before Laura and Desmond are supposed to leave for a long voyage to Africa, and they are saying goodbye. But that afternoon, Laura has received a phone call: her mother, Alma, has died. Though she shares the news with no one, the death brings out in her intense feelings about the difficult and complicated childhood she endured with Carlos and a third, absent sibling, Eugenio, as well as the failure of her previous marriage. Laura is wry and sardonic; she tends to say whatever is on her mind, which is often outrageous and cruel, but the death of her mother she keeps jealously to herself. The night becomes for everyone--for reasons not clear to them--a rehashing of all their old difficulties, the crucible of human life that has formed them and gotten them here.

I had high hopes for The Widow's Children; I love love loved Paula Fox's book Desperate Characters, which shares with this one a kind of contracted scope and focus. And I walked away once again in awe of Fox's writing, which brims with hot surprises in every sentence: calling Peter Rice a "bloodless Christian sewing machine," Desmond's alcohol-filching "infant," the "old beasts of her life"--all so wonderful. The book as a whole suffers from being overstuffed, though, even though it tries to capture the singular moment. I had trouble keeping all the histories straight. Some people who do not appear and are only mentioned, like Laura's ex and Clara's husband, Ed, and the supercilious Cuban lady who looked after Alma and her family after they immigrated from Spain, seemed too distant to bring so much to bear on the narrative. The attempt to gather all the conflicts of a family life into a single point, I thought, was probably always doomed to be not quite successful.

I thought much better of The Widow's Children in the second half, when Laura escapes from the restaurant, before reappearing at Peter Rice's to beg him to go to her siblings and do what she cannot: tell them of her mother's death. (It answers, among other things, the question of why this extraneous character seems to be here at all.) She jealously demands, for reasons that weren't quite clear to me, that Peter not tell her daughter. The scenes of Peter visiting first Eugenio, then Carlos, then Clara, against Laura's wishes, were the strongest of the book, and they turned a novel that seemed quite scattered and unfocused into one with a real sense of thrust and purpose. It's no Desperate Characters--maybe that novel was, as they say, lightning in a bottle--but the second half of the book certainly brings these desperate characters into reality./

Mao II by Don DeLillo

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

Mao II opens with a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium among the followers of the Reverend Moon. The Moonies seem like a strange historical footnote to us now, but in DeLillo's version, they are the key to much of the 21st century--the age of the crowd. In the scene, two cynical middle-aged parents search for their daughter among a thousand brides, griping and sniping at each other, blaming each other for their daughter's mad choice. When the slippery point-of-view finds, as the parents cannot, the daughter in the crowd, she is on the cusp of ecstasy. Her new husband is another face in the crowd, a handsome-enough Korean, but what really matters is not just that the two are united, but they all are united, under the aegis of the Reverend Moon. In the crowd, they participate in him, they become a whole.

It seems a little like it has nothing to do with the rest of the book, which is about a reclusive writer named Bill Gray. More Pynchon than DeLillo, Gray lives with his loyal assistant Scott and his young paramour Karen, who is also Scott's paramour--and the woman getting married at Yankee Stadium. Their precarious stability is interrupted by the arrival of a photographer, who is meant to take the first pictures of Bill in many years. This is the beginning of Bill's reintroduction to the wider world, and the next step is a strange one: his publisher asks him to perform a public reading of the work of a poet who's recently been captured by terrorists in Lebanon. Bill agrees (why?), but the spurious logic of the reading is quickly supplanted by another, which leads Bill closer and closer to Beirut and to taking place, symbolically or perhaps literally, the place of the captive.

What does the Reverend Moon have to do with terrorism? What does it have to do with Ayatollah Khomeini, or Chairman Mao, who appears in the novel only in the form of Warhol's titular silkscreen, a face repeated again and again, in many shades. What interests DeLillo is the crowd, the mass, as in the literal bolus of humanity that grows ever wider and larger, and as in mass media, which envelops into the crowd even those who are not physically present. I was struck by the paragraph above, in which Bill tells the photographer that there is a similarity between novelists and terrorists: both are crowd-workers, stoking the primeval subconscious, working into a mass movement. For DeLillo, the end of the 20th century is marked by the turn from culture to violence, or violence as culture. It's a prescient book, not least because the scenes in New York City seem to be stalked by the presence of the twin towers, twenty years before they reached the heights of their symbolic synthesis with mass terror.

Here's what really interested me about Mao II: the second half, as Bill moves ever closer toward Beirut, operates on a plane of logic than only DeLillo can really make work. It's not dream logic, or even symbolic logic; it's the logic of the crowd, which moves toward an expression of unity. Bill, injured and sick, seems to take on the qualities of the dimly-viewed captive the closer he gets. His movement is mirrored by that of Karen, who, in Bill's absence, has taken up with a homeless tent camp in New York's Tompkins Square Park. Karen, we understand, has returned from isolation with Bill into her true home, the crowd. Tompkins Square is another Yankee Stadium. But there's a resonance, too, with what Bill is experiencing, moving toward and through a disorder that is not really disorder, that has an underlying logic that can only be expressed in the crowd.

"It's like Beirut," Karen overhears people saying about the city's growing disorder. She hears it so much it becomes like a chant, a mantra. And as Bill moves toward the actual Beirut, it makes one wonder what Beirut really is. Is it a place? Or it something larger, an expression of the crowd that can expand and contract and take in a community half a world a way? That's the logic of terrorism, isn't it, to open up the circle of suffering, the circle of consciousness, to take in those who would rather stay outside of it? I was really fascinated by these sections, which contain some of (from what I have read) DeLillo's most abstract but deeply compelling writing.

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.