Measurement by Paul Lockhart

In general, the main task of the geometer is to translate geometric information into algebraic information, and vice versa. This is not so much a technical problem as it is a creative one. The real idea was the dissection of the pentagon into similar triangles. Where does such an idea come from? How can you invent something like that? I don't know. Mathematics is an art, and creative genius a mystery. Of course, technique helps--good painters understand light and shadow, good musicians have a thorough knowledge of functional harmony, and good mathematicians can untangle algebraic information--but a beautiful piece of mathematics is just as hard to make as a beautiful portrait or sonata.

Paul Lockhart's Measurement starts with a triangle. If you connect each of a triangle's vertices to the midpoints of the opposite sides, they all seem to meet right in the middle--but do they? How do you prove it? From this exercise, Lockhart spins out an explanation of the basic premises of most grade school level (and perhaps beyond grade school level, what do I know) mathematics. "Measurement" is the key term here, that in doing mathematics we are measuring things according to other things, breaking down polygons into constituent shapes, measuring the paths of vectors in a space of any number of dimensions, fitting triangles into circles and slicing up cones. It's mostly stuff you might remember from high school, but which, unless you went on to a career in STEM, you have probably mostly forgotten. But it's presented in a way that reinvigorates the material, not as a set of dreary problems, but as a kind of elegant unfolding and shifting, toggling back and forth between different modes to reveal fundamental relationships.

I take that back: there are lots of problems. They just aren't the kind that I remember, which start with "Imagine a ladder ten feet high," or "Two trains leave Pittsburgh at 10:03 a.m." Instead, they sound like these: "How can we measure the length of a helix?" Every curve can be straightened without metric distortion. Is the  same true for surfaces?" "How many corners are on a four-dimensional cube?" Some of these problems are explained, but some you're supposed to take a break and explore on your own. I didn't do this, but I appreciated the invitation all the same. I liked that the problems kept the number to a minimum. Lockhart emphasizes that what this mathematics about is not application, the kind of "real-world" motivation that is vogue in education today, but the imaginary "pure" mathematics that is never exactly reproduced in the messiness of the real world. In this way, Lockhart emphasizes the beauty and the elegance of mathematics. It's a subtle argument not just for a way of looking at math, but a way of teaching math, one that forsakes ladders and trains for the two simple section titles: "Size and Shape" and "Time and Space."

I'll probably remember very little of the specifics here, except maybe for the explanation of conic sections as lines in projective space, something I'd never heard about before, and the disturbing fact that there's no way to measure the perimeter of an ellipse algebraically. But I really did appreciate the opportunity to rethink some of the mathematics I learned, and see it in a new way. Lockhart is right when he says that mathematics can be elegant and beautiful. My dad, a professor of physics, unlocked an understanding in me when he told me, when I was a kid, that mathematics is a kind of language. I suppose that, as Lockhart writes, it's a kind of art as well.

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim by Marcia Douglas

Now that woman, Leenah, she know. I like how she stand up to me. Check her out. She look me in me eyes and she listen me with her heart. Me respect her. Me find meself a tell her things me never tell no other woman. Or man. Jah descend on that dawta and she see me plain--no locs and no guitar; no herb and no mic--just I&I.

In Marcia Douglas' The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Bob Marley is reincarnated in the body of a "Fall-down Man," that is, a beggar, living at the Half Way Tree clocktower in Kingston. No one recognizes Bob, and when he tries to give away his precious ring, once owned (maybe) by Ras Tafari himself, Haile Selassie--tries to give it away for a couple of patties and a box rink--no one wants it. Only Leenah, a former lover, recognizes Bob in his new guise, but reconnecting is hard, because every time Bob steps out into the street, another five years have passed. As Bob speedruns the future that, in our world, death denied him, he's joined at Half Way Tree by Jamaica's past, visited by the spirits of Edward VII, Marcus Garvey, and his own white father. (Maybe I'm stupid, but I actually didn't know Marley was biracial.) As a kind of nexus where the threads of Jamaica's history are joined, it seems appropriate that Marley, who came to represent the country for so many, ends up here, where once, we're told, a young slave was hanged.

I really enjoyed The Marvellous Equations, and I loved it most when Douglas speaks with Marley's voice, or else in the incredibly evocative language of Rasta Jamaicans. So many Rasta elocutions, some of which are familiar from reggae music, have the rhythm of true poetry: Jah, Zion, Babylon, sufferation. But there's so much more to this expansive novel, which bills itself as being written in "bass riddim," with many harmonies and counterpoints under which the single heaving bassline of Jamaican history can be heard thumping. We expand out into the story of Leenah's family, including a great-uncle who spends his time in heaven hunched over a sewing machine with sky-blue thread. There's an angel whose notebook is recorded, and a number of Jamaican streetfolk who come into contact with Bob-slash-the-Fall-down. We even get the story of Haile Selassie himself, a reluctant and bewildered godhead to the Rastafarians, a representation of the hope of a return to an African "Zion." We see Selassie killed in his chamber by his maid-slash-lover, and that hope extinguished, but as Marley notes to a young runaway he befriends as the Fall-down, Zion is a place inside yourself. Among other things, it seems, The Marvellous Equations is about how the deaths of both Marley and Selassie forced Rastafarianism to turn away from the kind of millenarian idea of an African promised land to something more inward.

But it's about a lot of other things, too, including the nobility of the love between Bob and Leenah (a more noble love, it seems, than the one shared between Bob and Rita Marley, who only makes a few momentary appearances here.) Foremost it's about Jamaica, a place where history and hope converged on one exceptional but flawed--one might even say doomed--man. Part of the reason I picked it up is because I couldn't stomach committing to Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, a 700-page tome that also has Marley's life as a central thread. Maybe I still will read that one someday, but it's hard to imagine it being more inventive, colorful, or satisfying than this one.

With the addition of Jamaica, my "Countries Read" list is up to 124!

A Void by Georges Perec

Things look normal, but looks can play tricks on you. Things at first look normal, till, abruptly, abnormality, horrifying in its inhumanity, swallows you up and spits you out.

OK, let's get this out of the way: what is most notable about Georges Perec's A Void is that it never uses the letter "E." What follows from that? Well, after a while I found myself less impressed with Perec's achievement--after a few pages, the impression ends up being something like "OK, there are actually way more words without the letter E than I thought--and more impressed with that of translator Gilbert Adair, who had to preserve not only this feat in English but the particular vibe of the circumlocutions that are employed. I have no idea if, for example, it stands out as self-consciously goofy in the French when someone is described as "worth their avoirdupois in gold" (rather than weight, you see), but in Adair's translation, at least, it becomes cheeky, a flaunting of the trick. This stands out especially when Perec/Adair rattle of a long list of things without the letter "E," as when the hero, Anton Vowl, suffers from insomnia, "switching to a cot, a crib, a foldaway, a divan, a sofa, a hammock, lying on his back, on his stomach, or with arms akimbo, casting off his quilt or placing a thick, hairy tartan rug on top of it, borrowing a plank of nails from a fakir or practising a yoga position taught to him by a guru..." This is showing off: look how easy it is. These circumlocutions stand out as both braggadocious and funny, and much of the delight of the book is seeing how writer and translator not simply a-void the forbidden letter, but embrace its absence.

That's all great, but what about the novel itself? Is it even a novel? The plot involves Vowl, who has suddenly disappeared after a short, strange illness. Vowl's friends and associates, with E-less names like Amaury Conson (a pun on consonant) and Olga Mavrokhordatos and Hassan Ibn Abbou, all assemble to solve this mystery, only to reveal a much deeper and more troubling conspiracy that involves a mysterious sigil that seems to have the power to kill. This sigil, described, among other ways, as a parabola with a dash down the middle, is clearly the absent "e." The biggest pleasure of the book is that this produces a kind of dramatic irony; we know what's missing from these characters' world. The dramatic irony is enhanced by--my favorite part--a series of literary copies found in Vowl's possessions that are essentially famous works reimagined with no "E," as in "Living, or Not Living" by William Shakspar, or a version of "The Raven" called "Black Bird." I also really enjoyed a "clue" that involved a bit of text discovered without the letter "A"--something the characters are ironically quite able to clock.

But it must be said that, ultimately, the book's E-lessness is only incidental to Perec's style, which is madcap, effusive, silly, and maybe even a little superficial or shallow. The mystery ends up being "resolved" by a dramatic story of siblings separated at birth and a secret killer. It's playful, like all Oulipoan literature is or should be, but it also reminded me that Harry Mathews was able to elevate such restraints and word games into something both human and humane in The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. A Void is wonderfully clever with its chosen restraint, and it does more with it than you might suspect. But ultimately what I'll remember it for is what was missing.

I Liked Rex by Diane Williams

What in the world will her name be? Diane!

I should not hurt anybody else I know with this story.

I hope she is not too fake.

At the lake she is often cheerful, although her eyebrows are frequently raised--a common response to the untoward or to the unexpected.

A highly dangerous path leads to the lake. But why say that?

What can you do in a page or two? That's the animating question, I think, of the short fiction of Diane Williams' new collection I Liked Rex. And the answer is plenty, when you toss out some of the drearier literary conventions: "Must there really be a need for harsh realism?" she wonders at one point. Which is not to say that the stories in I Liked Rex are full of space aliens or sea monsters, but that the kind of detail accumulation one thinks of as the stuff of realism is not important here. But that's not to say, in turn, that detail is not important. The story "There You Go" begins like this: "The man entered the lady's house as if it were the most natural thing for him to do. She watched as he exited his car, towing toward her his hard-shelled valise--which held personal articles, which he could not live without--including his oral irrigator." What's important about the oral irrigator? Why is this, out of all the "personal articles... he could not live without," singled out for focus? Who is this guy anyway? A reader weaned on harsh realism has every reason to be outraged, because there aren't really sufficient answers to these questions. But there is a novel and interesting kind of writing, one which flouts a lot of hoary expectations of sense and meaning. (As an extra question, I might ask what the hell kind of point-of-view this is.)

Here's what I'm thinking. A good realistic novel is a kind of surprise engine, a series of advancements or intensifications that come out of a set of ground rules. A short story can do this in miniature, but a piece of flash fiction really can't; there's no time to set the rules, the parameters, and little space for the story to surprise us once, much less several times. But Williams' stories manage to do exactly this, by withholding information, by tossing up red herrings, which are not really red herrings, because why should anything else make more sense than an oral interrogator? I found that, in each of these individual stories, I was surprised at every turn, sometimes by a novel image or unexpected phrase, sometimes by the reveal of some key detail lately revealed. One of my favorites, "Pleasure of the Day," begins: "before things fell apart, she had her first pleasure of the day." What's the pleasure of the day? Well, it comes on a "tin tray, layered with paper that catches and preserves the grilled treat's grease and crumbs." Later: "The even wider grin she received was well worth the cost of the cream horn?" Is the treat the cream horn? I guess! Why mention it more than three-quarters of the way through the story? Well, because it's not the specific cream horn that's important. It's that hell of a ringer at the end: "The world... yes, the world can look pretty shitty when you have finished eating up the Plain Jane, or the Triple Threat, the Big Top, or the Baby Princess Louise."

Williams is maybe best known to the lit mag world as the editor of NOON, a mysterious and well-regarded journal she's edited for years, which--uniquely these days--accepts only snail mail submissions. I've never read her before, but I think--I think--I Liked Rex is really typical of her work. It's like nothing else I've ever read, which is, to my mind, the single highest praise you can give to a book. That said, I don't know how much these stories will stick with me. Their anti-realism, their refusal to cohere to simple themes and narratives, means that it's easy to bounce off of them. They are like pin-pricks, sharp and intense, but disappearing quickly. But I'm sure it won't be the last of her collections I read.

The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm

For a moment she struggled with herself as to whether she should confess that she had been keeping something from him, in fact she had lied to him, but now she could no longer say it, now it was too late. It had been a game. Now it had turned serious, bloodily serious. To him it would now appear as a low-down dirty lie, as if she had meant to trick him, keep him like a household pet, make a fool of him, and finally drive him to a total loss of self-control. And hadn't she done exactly that? If she had at least let him twist her arm or strike her--she had never thought of that, instead she had held him in a grip of iron, using all her strength: in fact, she had defended herself. If she were now to sit across from him with a swollen eye and bruises on her arm, it would have made everything easier; she could have said, I just wanted to keep you here a bit longer. But now he was sitting there with his bandaged right hand, apologizing for having gone out of his mind.

The narrator of The Invention of Curried Sausage is sure that, contra the wisdom of the day that curried sausage was invented in Berlin, it actually came from his home town of Hamburg, where it was first sold by Lena Brucker, a food-stall proprietor he remembers from his youth. Intent on proving his theory, he travels back to Hamburg to find Lena in a retirement home, where she unfolds the story of curried sausage over a series of visits, a story that turns out not to be about curried sausage at all, really, but about the last days of Nazi Germany and the upheaval of the lives of ordinary Germans. Lena tells the narrator a story about how, abandoned by her husband in the final days of the war, she picked up a much younger soldier in a bomb shelter, taking him back to her apartment where they begin a torrid but complicated affair.

For Lena, the presence of the young soldier Bremer reinvigorates a life that had grown stale and isolating. For the soldier, Lena offers the companionship of a beautiful older woman and safety from the front lines, where soldiers are being offered up as sacrifices in a last-ditch effort to save the Reich. But the war is over within a few days of the young soldier's arrival, and Lena quickly and instinctively makes the decision not to tell him. As long as he believes the war is still ongoing, he knows that he will be shot as a deserter as soon as he emerges. When British soldiers appear on the streets, she even makes up a story about an armistice signed between Germany and the Allied powers to fight the Russian menace in the East. In a way, what The Invention of Curried Sausage reminded me of was the wonderful movie Goodbye, Lenin, about a young man in post-Soviet Russia who must convince his ailing mother that the Iron Curtain has not fallen. Both stories are about the ways that, in the midst of rapid transformation and change, we lie to ourselves--and to others--in order to hold onto the world to which we've become accustomed.

It's clear from the very beginning, almost cheekily so, that the curried sausage is a red herring. We eventually do get the story of the curried sausage, which involves the resourceful Lena making a series of effective black market trades after the war's end, mastering the shifting reality of a makeshift economy. Bremer the soldier is, at best, a footnote to that story. But the story the narrator takes away is of much greater insight and significance than the wone he went looking for, because it captures something meaningful of the reality of the German landscape at the end of the war. I was really struck by the shrewdness and psychological richness of Timm's novel. Let's be honest, few people are hankering for realistic novels from the perspective of the Germans in World War II. But by exploring the specific moment of the Reich's collapse from the point of view of two ordinary but, like all ordinary people, exceptional people, The Invention of Curried Sausage struck me as interesting and gratifying.

Break It Down by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. "But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel," said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. "But how much better if it were a real house," her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. "But wouldn't a quilt be more practical," said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. "But how much better if you dug a large hole," said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. "But how much better if you slept forever," said her mother.

Everybody thinks they can write short fiction, but I think a lot of writers just aren't good at it. Being good at writing novels, sustained narratives that unfold over several sittings, doesn't necessarily translate into being good at writing short stories. Lucky for us, then, we have authors who choose to make short fiction their medium, like Lydia Davis, who's often held up as one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners. Break It Down is the first of Davis' collections, and it's the first in her big omnibus The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I will be reading over the course of several years and counting each as individual books--sue me.

The impression I was left with was--well, I don't know. I often think of the short story as something that needs to make a quick and sudden impact, like a meteor hitting the earth, but Davis' stories are often quite light. She operates mostly from a bird's-eye view, relying on lots of summary and abstraction--contra the kind of specificity and focus that many writing books push you toward--and avoids fireworks, big changes and resolutions. The stories are full instead of subtleties, as with "A Few Things Wrong With Me," a story about a woman undergoing a breakup who is forced to take a hard look at her flaws. Like many experiences, this one is brief and inconclusive, and ends with the woman deciding she doesn't want to think about herself any more: "But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I'm not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that." No revelation here, no epiphany. But what comes instead is something perhaps truer: a sense that personality is in the eye of the beholder, and that the intensity of a crisis is always fleeting.

For my money, Davis' shorter, weirder stories are her best. My favorite might be "The Brother-in-Law," about a strange, unassuming presence in the house of the unnamed narrators: "The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they do not know." That's great. That's a great couple of sentences. The story, which is about how weird the guy is and how he just kind of "dissipates," contains lots of great sentences: "Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun." These stories, like "Mildred and the Oboe" (she masturbates with it, we think) and "City Employment" ("All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa") are where Davis' talents for the subtle and the strange really shine. I'm aware that, by going through the book in order I'm moving through Davis' career chronologically, so one thing I'll be looking for is how these elements change and grow--does the strangeness win out, or the subtlety?

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

Not when it was so goddam evident, so right-before-your-eyes obvious, that in Wakonda, that year, the town's worries and woes were being caused by nobody else but that goddam hardnose up the river! And rain is one thing and, fine, maybe you can't do nothing about the weather except yak about it, but Hank Stamper is a different breed of cat from the rain! And you can maybe put the blame on the Arm of the Lord those years when that arm puts a stranglehold of frost on the woods so tight it freezes all the way to your pay envelope, and maybe you can roll with the blow of the wind if there's nothing else except the wind blowing... but when the arm is the arm of Hank Stamper strangling off your income, and you know damn well that the blow is being dealt by the fist on that arm, then you find yourself having a pretty hard time blaming your woes on anything other than that arm!

Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion is set in the fictional town of Wakonda (lol), Oregon, where a strike has brought the lumber industry to a standstill, except for one family: the Stampers, who make a private contract with the local lumber company to continue felling trees. (These small non-union outfits not associated with sawmills were called gyppo loggers, and in the real world they were as hated by their union counterparts as the Stampers are in Kesey's novel.) Hank Stamper, the oldest son of grizzled patriarch Henry, is just the kind of guy to make such a contract, not selfish, really, but stubborn, and insensate to what other people might think about him. But Hank needs labor, and few of the locals are willing to scab for the man they see as taking money out of their pocket. Lucky, then, is the return of Hank's half-brother Lee from school in the East. Lee and Hank have a complicated history: Hank may have been sexually involved with Lee's mother, who has recently committed suicide, and Lee has always felt in Hank's shadow. His return to Wakonda is a chance to either prove himself or defeat his brother--in his neurotic state he vacillates between these goals--both of which might mean making off with Hank's wife Viv, whose intelligence and sensitivity are wasted in that remote ramshackle house on the Wakonda River.

Sometimes a Great Notion is a one hell of a tome. Not only is it 700+ pages, it's stylistically frenetic, most notably in its habit of switching from third to first person without warning. Often I found myself reading whole paragraphs before realizing I'd been dropped into the first person, then having to go back and figure out whose head exactly I'd been dropped into. In moments of high physical or mental intensity, Kesey will even switch rapidly back and forth between, say, Hank and Lee within the same paragraph, often with liberal, but not perhaps clarifying, use of italics and parentheses. It's a big, beautiful mess, and in my opinion it tries to do too much. But it's clear that Kesey is trying, and often succeeding, to capture several levels of human experience, from the larger communal life of the logging town to the inner turmoil of the individual psyche. The ramshackle house, with its precarious add-ons supported by innumerable timbers and pillars to keep it from sinking into the river, is a symbol of the precariousness of the Stamper family, besieged both from without--as with the locals angry with their lumber contract--and within--by the inflexibility of Hank and the psychosexual vengeance of Lee.

Sometimes I felt like the boat needed to cross the river and reach the Stamper place, bobbing up and down on uncertain waters. But when the narrative finds moments of pathos and intensity, it's really something, as when [spoiler alert] one of the Stampers' most loyal associates is pinned by a log against the bank of the rising river, certain to drown before the heavy log can be lifted. The characters here are at the mercy of happenstance, including the torrential rains and natural remoteness of the coastal Oregon landscape, but even moreso they are the mercy of themselves, their stubbornness, their desires, their inability to see and speak to each other. As the passage above suggests, it may be the Stampers themselves who most resemble the weather, implacable, insensible, and unstoppable, even by themselves. 

Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano

It's been ten years I have been away from my village, the same age as my daughter Maria, whom we like to call Edo, named after her grandmother, who hovers around me like a thick, transparent cloud of air. I could only feel her presence, whereas I think my babies could see her more clearly. She'd play with them while I was busy with something else, like washing their tiny clothes covered in dust and poop. They'd be beating t he air with their hands and small legs, babbling and smiling, their wide black eyes following silhouettes floating in the air. I got the sense this was more than a child entertaining themselves with angels, as people say--the bond with this other being felt too strong. Maria-Edo was there, the children's grandmother, sitting on the edge of the bed, stopping my children--or what she probably saw as her own children reincarnated--from rolling off and hitting the floor.

Lucy-Eghino, a young girl living in the south of Sudan (which is now, you know, South Sudan) is the only one of her mother's children who survives. On her deathbed, Lucy's mother Maria, never having gotten over the struggles of her offspring, declares that Lucy's children will be the reincarnations of her own. But the children that Lucy will raise will see a different life than the traditional Sudanese village in which Lucy was raised. When violence breaks out, Lucy and her husband Marco must travel first to Juba, then to Khartoum in the north, a busy megalopolis where safety is only temporary, and civil war begins to approach. In Khartoum they live with Peter, another southerner raised by an Arab family in the north who has joined the military in order to find his imprisoned father, and his wife, Theresa. Together with Peter's extended family--who have a couple of other subplots related to the military oppression in Sudan in the 1970s and 80s--these four do their best to maintain the life of their family in the midst of upheaval.

I liked the first part of Edo's Souls. South Sudanese author Stella Gaitano draws on the traditions and legends of the country's small village to give us a sense of a woman with a deep-rooted power to transform the life of her child; we believe that Maria-Edo's--what, blessing? curse?--will come true. And when Lucy finds a baby on the road to Juba--the only survivor of a horrible killing--we understand it as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy; what Maria-Edo has condemned Lucy to be is simply that, a mother. But the rest of the novel felt sadly familiar to me--a novel about political violence in the developing world where the violence hovers mostly somewhere offstage, operating opaquely. Gaitano makes Peter a kind of reluctant soldier, wavering over his multiple loyalties, but this fails to give us a real sense of what the violence in the Sudan is about or why. It's all very bloodless--not in a literal sense, of course. But the real problem is that, just as Lucy is disenchanted with the north to which she must flee, the novel becomes disenchanted as well. Gaitano tells us that the spirit of Maria-Edo watches over Lucy's children, but Lucy's children are more or less nonentities to the narrative, having been totally subsumed by the adventures of Peter, or Peter's sister and her Arab lover. It was a mistake, too, I think, for the novel to move from a third person that mystifies and enchants the narrative to a series of first-person narratives where the characters exhibit a shallow, plotty inner life. Oh well.

With the addition of South Sudan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 123!

Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Sonny Boy, a painter cannot paint, sculptor sculpt, photographer photograph, musician compose, not without the experience; your birth was to enhance my art. Art enhanced. Now how do I get rid of you? All evidence of you. Everything. I should kill you. Artfully, I've done it before. What a requiem I would compose.

Sonny Boy, I had to birth you. I thought you were the blessing of a uterine lining, gone for what they all told me was forever. The possibility of my redemption, a miracle from God, who found me at last.

Sonia Kurisu is an art student and lounge singer living in Las Vegas who has just given birth to her first son, Solomon--Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy is technically her first, but she is haunted by the spirits of three boys she killed before they were born: one appearing as pieces chopped up on a doctor's table, another as a drug-malformed "turtle boy," and another as he was buried, in a jar. Sonny Boy himself is no picnic, becoming another burden in a life of drugs and abuse that Sonia struggles to get away from. When he turns out to be severely autistic, nearly non-verbal, Sonia's family members converge upon her, dragging her back to Hawaii, and not always with kindness. Sonia struggles to love her deadbeat mother, her born-again sister, her meddling grandmother and aunt. Her connection is with her father, who sends lyrical letters from whatever part of the world--Japan, Nepal, Argentina--he happens to be visiting. His quasi-abandonment, of course, informs Sonia's fantasies of getting rid of Sonny Boy for good.

I have a high regard for Yamanaka's work. I thought Blu's Hanging was a near-masterpiece, and although I didn't like Wild Meat and Bully Burgers as much, its final scenes have stayed with me for a long time. Father of the Four Passages, in fact, has a similar ending, in which Sonia is provoked by Sonny Boy--who has some sort of mystical powers to speak without speaking, it seems, though that's all a little bit muddled--to find restitution for the three dead children, including turning the baby-in-the-jar to ash on top of Mauna Kea. Father of the Four Passages differs from those other books in that its protagonist is an adult, not a child, and Yamanaka brings a much more poetic and staccato style to it, eschewing the earthy and pop-cultural aspects of those other two books. It's kind of a mess, and the end is supposed to bring it all back together by giving the various pieces of the book a kind of direction, toward atonement, restitution, healing. And that mostly works, but I did find the experience of reading Father of the Four Passages to be a much more whiplash-inducing experience, and though the story coheres, the book didn't necessarily cohere for me. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

When our daughters were small, I'd sometimes dump a bunch of building toys on the floor (Legos and wooden blocks and parts of other sets) and we'd sit there for hours, listening to music and talking and absentmindedly making something. There was no plan; we were just putting this with that, because we liked the way it looked. But pretty soon, a structure would start to appear. The ramps were leading to that platform, and there was a cool little space under that platform, an excellent place for that plastic dragon and Lego plumber to live. The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had "meaning," but it wasn't a meaning we'd intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange or anticipated the exact effect it would have on us later when, having forgotten we'd made it, we walked past it. That is, the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain combines several short works by Russian masters--Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol--with short essays explaining how and why Saunders thinks the story works the way it does. These pieces come out of a class that Saunders teaches on the Russian short story, and while the class might not be a workshop class in the truest sense, it's clear that what Saunders really cares about is thinking of these stories as a writer, someone who wants to imitate their graces and surprises effectively. I think sometimes that anyone can think about a piece of fiction as a reader, but if you start thinking about it as a writer you'll find that you see much more--and for better or worse, you can never really stop. So whether the class is a writing workshop or not, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is a book for writers.

First things first: one has to admit that the stories Saunders has chosen are really good. There's no surprise there, I guess. But it's been a while since I've visited the Russian short story--which I also took a class on in college--and I really was delighted by these stories, which are so different from one another, but which have a kind of earthy, earnest pre-Revolution "Russianness" that is unmistakable. One of them, "The Nose" by Gogol, will be familiar to many, as it was to me, but it's still a highlight, a funny absurd story of a man chasing his own nose around town that shouldn't work, but it does. (Saunders describes the story as functioning with a kind of audaciousness, making the absurdity work by pointedly illustrating that it shouldn't work, thereby getting a little grace from a skeptical reader.) But I had never read, for instance, Chekhov's "The Darling," about a woman who gives her whole self to a series of lovers, or Tolstoy's simple morality tale "Alyosha the Pot." (There are more stories by Chekhov here than any other, and I think that's no accident--he really was the genius of the short story.)

One thing that struck me as being rather funny is how straightforward the writing advice here is. Though Saunders is often associated with a kind of topical futurism and social critique, when it comes to teaching writing, he has a kind of old-fashioned fuddy-duddiness, which, if I'm honest, I think as a teacher I share. He takes seriously, for instance, the idea that a story should contain something like "rising action"--a phrase that might make a postmodern bristle. One specific point he makes that I really appreciate, and has made me think about my own writing, is that a good story needs to "always be escalating," and while I don't know if that's true, I do think that it will often explain why an otherwise well-written story seems not to work. I appreciated, too, his thoughts on how "The Gooseberries" and "Alyosha the Pot" succeed by a kind of thoughtful reticence, whether neither Chekhov nor Tolstoy puts too heavy a hand on the moral questions at the heart of the story. That is, I think, easier said than done, and one must admit that to be a writer like Chekhov or Tolstoy you have to have a kind of genius insight into the nature of human beings at baseline that few possess. Nonetheless, for us ordinary Iosips, there's a lot here worth pondering.

G. by John Berger

I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.

G. is the illegitimate son of an American divorcee and an Italian candy manufacturer who grows up in England. That makes him, in some sense, both no one and everyone, an heir to the international turbulence of the late 19th century that, as we know and he does not yet, will blow up into the conflagration of World War I. Most of his life is marked not by politics, but sex, beginning with his seduction by his own aunt in that English country house and continuing on through a series of reckless affairs with everyone from chambermaids to Austrian noblewomen. But love for G. is represented by the face of a Roman woman who protected him when, as a child, he escaped a visit to his father and ended up in the barricades of a nationalist uprising. So perhaps sex and revolution are tied together from the very beginning, something that G. will have to relearn when, after years of tomcatting around, he casually accepts a reckless request to do a little light spycraft in the city of Trieste, where Serbian nationalists are beginning to become suspicious not only of their Austro-Hungarian overlords, but Italians like G.--if that's what he is--as well.

John Berger was better known as an art critic whose Ways of Seeing (which I have not read) has been overwhelmingly influential. From time to time, G. reads like a novel by an essayist, who frequently interrupts the narrative to expound on the various emotional and visual dynamics that occur between G. and his several lovers. (One of Berger's most enduring ideas is the male gaze, which says something like "men watch women while women watch themselves being watched," and that idea is all over G. as well.) Berger isn't hiding his hand; the "I" here is so strong that Berger will often compare the events of the novel to things that (presumably) happen in his own life, or baldly declare the struggles of composing the text: "I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent." The dryness of Berger's essayistic style contrast in an effective and interesting way with the heedlessness of G., who follows his passions at every turn. The reader identifies more strongly with that "I" than it does G., a man who we suspect would probably be incapable of thinking very articulately about what he's doing, or why, or how he fits into the larger context of European history as it passes from the age of revolution to the age of total war.

For all that, there is a novel here, and an interesting one. More or less, it can be split into three segments, the first being G.'s conception and childhood and the second being a long middle set in the town of Domodossola, where a friend and fellow pilot is attempting to be the first to cross the Alps in an airplane. In a way I won't overexplain he both succeeds and fails, and this perhaps sets the tone for the third part, with G. in Trieste. G. enlists a Bosnian peasant woman as his plus-one to a ball where he intends to seduce the aforementioned Austrian noblewoman, causing a terrific scandal. Is G.'s act political, or not? Is he acting merely out of lust for the Bosnian woman, or is he intending to indict the Austrians by shoving the political iniquities and instabilities of their rule in their faces? Are political and revolutionary deeds acts of will or are they something closer to lust, rising from someplace deeper within? These are the questions that make G., I thought, a strange and provocative work.

Little Constructions by Anna Burns

Do you know this syndrome? Do you have it? I'll tell you. You're having a hard time, say, because something not very nice once happened to you. It was a big thing, and although it's supposed to be over, in your body and in your head and from the way you now look out on the world, it's not bloody over, it's still bloody going on. Or maybe it wasn't a big thing. Maybe it was a series of little things, most of them below the level of police CAD reference number material, but if you add them together, plus feather in the timescale, they amount to one hell of a cumulative assault.

But poor you. It's too late. By now you're infantilised. By now you've lost your language. By now you're no longer capable of speaking about what happened, for didn't you try and try and nobody could hear? You're left swinging to one extreme therefore, which is clutching on to reluctant people, babbling incoherencies, or else sitting alone at your kitchen table, driven into silence, unable to tune into anything at all.

That's because of evil. That's what evil does.

Little Constructions opens with Jetty Doe, a member of Belfast's notorious Doe crime family, barging into a gun shop and demanding a gun. She takes with her a handful of the wrong ammo--buckshot for Kalashnikov--and heads off to shoot her lover, the husband of her sister, crime lord John Doe. This sets of a series of events that reverberate not just in the future but somehow in the past, beginning with the complete dissolution of the gunshop owner, Tom Spaders, still reeling from being mugged by a group of children seven years before. From there we're introduced to all the members of the Doe family, who are named like Duggars: there's Jetty, of course, but also Jotty, and Julie, and JanetJoshuatine, and JerryJudges and Joe and Johnjoe, and so on, and so on. Not all of them are literally Does, and those that are literally Does occupy a vague place in the family hierarchy. Who is a sister, and who is a wife? Who is a daugher? And what happens when all these roles get mixed up?

Anna Burns' first novel shares certain recognizable qualities with her breakout book, Milkman, as well as another book of hers I enjoyed, No Bones. All are about the ways that a climate of constant violence can warp the brain and prevent one from seeing things as they really are. Little Constructions attempts to make that point even more severely than the other two, by presenting a kind of impossible-to-follow shaggy story, moving backward and forward from the point of Jetty storming the gunshop, filling in details, going on digressions, casting doubt on those details, etc., etc. It has a number of unforgettable images and ideas: John Doe's son hiding in the suit of armor as John assaults his daughter; the many, many coffins that Doe buries, each time claiming (persuading even himself, perhaps) that he's burying a beloved family member. Though these images touch on political and sectarian violence in Belfast, it seems clear that Doe is just a petty criminal, and yet that has given him a kind of nobility that has driven him and the rest of his family crazy, like a bunch of Habsburgs.

I enjoyed Little Constructions for a little while. It has a manic energy I really enjoyed, and I was fascinated by the bodiless "I" that Burns employs as a narrator. Is it a bystander? A ghost? One of those fantastical constructions that the Does use to justify and smooth over the contradictions of their insane lives? But in the end, it was just too confusing. I can barely explain what happens in the book's second half, and what I can explain, I certainly can't put in order. (Is the big blow-up that happens at the end a day after Jetty storms the gunshop? Or years later? And who exactly ends up dead?) It's all intentional, of course; Burns is trying hard to keep you from finding your footing in this topsy-turvy world. But I felt that it was those other, later books where she managed to find a better balance of realism and hysteria.

The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul

Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside.

'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain't going to vote for you.'

Harbans shook his head sadly.

Foam settle into the angle of the seat and the door. 'Way I see it is this. In Trinidad this democracy is a brand new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.' He dropped his voice solemnly: 'I respect people like you, you know, Mr Harbans, doing this thing for the first time.'

Trinidad, at the time of V. S. Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira, is a newly independent and democratic state. Elections are being held, but no one has ever stood for them before, much less managed a campaign. There are no polls, no TV advertisements, no rallies--but there are vans, loudspeakers, and lots and lots of wheeling and dealing. The novel centers on an election between Sujurpat "Pat" Harbans, a Hindu merchant, and a Black Trinidadian known simply as "Preacher." The racial breakdown of the vote in diverse Trinidad is obvious, but there are many more votes--belonging to Muslims and "Spanish"--left up for grabs. Harbans enlists the young Foreman "Foam" Baksh as his campaign manager, which sets off a series of comic enterprises that mostly end with Harbans writing a check or a petrol voucher. Someone is getting rich off this election, but it isn't the candidate.

Naipaul became a much more "serious" writer with his later works, which are so often thoughtful and beautifully written investigations into the postcolonial spirit. But for my money, he was never better than at the beginning of his career, when he wrote these comedies set in Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira sits nicely between Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that made his career--all being vernacular-heavy novels that depict small-potatoes Trinidadian strivers. The irony from all of them comes from the presentation of Trinidad as a remote outpost; the election between Harbans and Preacher may share certain elements with English parliamentary elections, but England's a long ways away, and how many MPs owe their seats to fears that a puppy is imbued with obeah witchcraft? (This subplot, in which Foam's little brother nicks a newborn puppy and hides it in their storage room, leading to fantastic rumors, is maybe the funniest thing in the whole book.) It seems to me that Naipaul in his later work explored the anger and resentment that emerge in the spirit of the postcolonial subject, who knows how little he measures up to his colonizers, but these books are lighthearted because no one really seems to know or care.

"We is a creeping nation," Foam tells Harbans, and I think that's probably pretty close to Naipaul's view as well. There's something admirable, even honorable, about Trinidad's first forays into the world of electoral politics. But Naipaul captures well how, no matter the size of the country or how long it's been a democracy, elections turn not on clashing ideals but petty personal conflicts and jealousies, as with the breadfruit tree whose roots are in the yard of Ramlogan the tavernkeeper, but which drops its fruit in the yard of Chittaranjan the goldsmith. And it captures how everybody, even down to the lowest taxi driver wanting his ten dollars in petrol vouchers, wants to get his thumb in the pie.

Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine

Though Jody required the younger one to stay indoors during the day, it was typical for neighbors to see Mice hurtling down Reef Way or through neighborhood side streets at sunset. Perhaps the girl's racing around in the evenings satisfied a need.

In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after moving into the apartment, I acquired the habit of breathing them in, of trying to draw goodness from one sister, then the other. Among family, satiating cuddles, from what I understood, could arise at breakneck speed: I waited.

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 is about two half-sisters, living in south Florida after the death of their mother. One is Jody, the elder, and the other is Mice, whose improbable name comes from her pale white skin, cotton-colored hair, and thick glasses. The sisters are alike in some ways, so much so that they often seem like the same person, but in others, they are quite different, Jody the anxious caretaker and Mice in her own world, making crystal radios and hiding in wells. The girls, and Mice especially, are the subject of much gossip in their small suburban outpost of Miami, and though opinions differ, many seem to believe that there's something not quite right about Mice, that her strange appearance is connected somehow to her diffident nature and her unwillingness to work. Mice is tormented regularly by a series of teenagers who are simply known as "the teenagers," although, in a stroke that shows just how weird the novel is, one of them turns out to be a 28-year-old who's just kind of hanging out at the high school.

By far the most interesting thing about Mice 1961, for me, is the position of the narrator, Girtle, who occupies a strange kind of position in the girls' household as a maid or factotum, doing odd jobs and cleaning. The truth is that Girtle (what a name!) seems to have inveigled her way into the house by simply asking to be there; her origins are obscure, though she tells us that she once hopped a fence to escape an orphanage. Girtle longs to be part of the sisterly bond between Jody and Mice, and she even tries to peel Mice away from Jody by way of promising to take her to a remote cabin. As a narrator, Girtle manages to disappear, often very literally, hiding and skulking around and trying not to be noticed. Much of what Girtle is able to report is because she is literally unseen, not noticed by the townspeople, and often not by Jody and Mice, either. More interesting still, Girtle has a recurrent premonition that someone she calls "the helper" is soon to arrive, a figure who will come to further Mice's narrative as the protagonist of the story, perhaps by taking her away from Girtle. When a smooth-talking James Dean type with a secret connection to (what we know will be) the Bay of Pigs invasion, we're not even shocked that Girtle turns out to have been correct.

Mice 1961 has so many fascinating parts, and it's written in a slightly alien prose that keeps the narrative vigorous and captivating. But why is the middle of it so tedious? A huge section of the book takes place during a town party at a local bakery, where the villagers come in bearing cakes and pies (and in one case, "blue water"), gossiping about Mice and Jody but all sorts of other people as well. Some of these townspeople are memorable and some are not, but together they seem as if Levine is trying to give us a sense of the somewhat cloistered town in which the sisters live, one of those mid-century commuter towns that end up as a kind of panopticon of good manners. Girtle records it all fastidiously, but I felt again and again that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. Like Jody, I kept wondering: Where's Mice? 

Carnality by Lina Wolff

We knew what kind of show it was, my wife and I, so we've got no grounds to play the innocent. It's just you'd think with a nun behind it there'd be limits, some kind of safety net. Not because I'm a believer. I don't believe in any religious communion or system. But an institution has always got something to lose, if only its self-image, which is why there are things you never believe it capable of doing. What we'd both heard about Lucia was that she could work miracles. I don't believe in miracles, but Soledad insisted that a miracle was exactly what we needed at that point: some vast, unbelievable miracle that transformed everything.

Bennedith is a Swedish travel writer on a month-long paid trip to Madrid. Looking for meaning, she takes on another role caring for a man who suffers from severe Alzheimer's--gratis. At a bar, she meets a man named Mercuro who inveigles his way into her life, and her furnished flat, telling her a strange story of woe: having cheated on his wife Soledad, he turned to a television series called Carnality, helmed by the mysterious Miss Pink and Mister Blue and their unseen patroness, a nun named Sor Lucia, to help him fix the rift between them. Sor Lucia's solution is simple: because Soledad needs a heart transplant, Mercuro can fix what he has done by offering her his own heart. In fact, by signing the waivers for the show he has already made the agreement to do so, and it is in fleeing the pursuing transplanters that Mercuro has ended up in Bennedith's arms. Bennedith is at first repulsed by Mercuro, then compelled. His own story of irrevocably fucking up has some resonances with her own, not least of which the way she shamefully loses her job with the Alzheimer's patient. So it's no surprise that they end up in each other's arms, literally.

The title Carnality takes in all kinds of fleshy meaning. There's Mercuro's carnal lust, of course, but there's the carnality, too, in the sense of carne, meat, as in the heart that Mercuro is compelled to cut out and give away. The last half of the book is a long series of letters from Sor Lucia, the patroness of Carnality, explaining to Bennedith (who is in jail after a series of complicated events involving a reckless Swedish party boater--go figure) her childhood as the stepdaughter of a cruel butcher during the Spanish Civil War. Sor Lucia's missing thumb is rumored to be from a pig's bite, but she explains that it was actually cut off by a man seeking vengeance for her stepfather's crimes. It's this experience--butchering, being butchered--that makes Lucia an asset at the convent, and gives her a kind of necessarily mercilessness. The story of the TV show Carnality is a story of that mercilessness, although one can see in Lucia's letters to Bennedith that cracks have begun to appear in the nun's moral certitude. Moral questions, Carnality, suggest, are tied up with the body as well as the soul.

What I liked most about Carnality was how unsettled it was. It constantly seemed to be transforming from one kind of book into another one, and I never really knew where it was going to go next: from Bennedith's listlessness and ennui to Mercuro's bizarre tale to their adventure with the evil boater, then to Lucia's letters and history. So I was a little bit disappointed, as I suppose would be inevitable, at the way the various threads were tied together at the end. I actually found that I wanted Carnality to remain mysterious, perhaps a fiction of Mercuro's head--Bennedith has never heard of it--rather than getting the detailed history of how Lucia came to be at the head of the mysterious television show. To Wolff's credit, she ties everything together skillfully, and the end brings the various themes of mercy and violence together really well--but I wonder if there was another version of the novel that stayed as unsettled and weird as it was at the beginning.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

The Whatsisname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essential to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was acting, the body parts he had taken from them would decompose in situ. It would be the end of him, and he would be free of this world.

A suicide bomb goes off in American-occupied Baghdad. Hadi, a local junk merchant, picks up the pieces of bodies and stitches them together into a single corpse, thinking that perhaps the authorities will give the corpse a real burial, unlike the pieces of people that litter the street. But the next day, the corpse has disappeared, animated--as we learn--by the spirit of another victim of the bombing, who has been separated from his own body. Soon, Hadi realizes that the creature he's made is connected to a series of killings in the news. The creature, now known as Criminal X or Whatsisname, is busy killing the people who are responsible for the deaths of those of whose parts he is constructed. When one part is avenged, it falls off, and Whatsisname must take new pieces from the dead, but this only complicates his mission, mixing up the identities of victim and criminal, and soon he even resorts to killing people himself.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is an attempt to capture the cruelty and widespread violence of Iraq under the American occupation. The Americans, the displaced Baathists, the religious fundamentalists in al-Qaeda, are all are responsible for widespread slaughter that allow something like Whatsisname to emerge. At first, it's an image of the lack of respect and dignity afforded to the dead in a place where murder has become commonplace--what Hadi desires for the corpse is not revenge, but simple burial. But soon it becomes an image of the way that violence proliferates and metastasizes, expands past the limits one might think to place on it. You can see Saadawi's attempt to capture the landscape of a particular time and place in the large cast of characters that converge around the creature, policemen, journalists, astrologers, etc., etc. There are Iraqi Christians and Jews as well as Muslims; in one funny and pointed scene, a poster of a hadith is torn away to reveal a statue of the Virgin Mary; when the statue is destroyed it reveals a Jewish menorah. There is more, Saadawi seems to be saying, to Baghdad than violence; there are traces of a pluralistic society that has curdled in the face of fundamentalism and war.

I thought this novel was fairly effective. The image of the monster is clever and apt; Saadawi avoids getting too much into the explanatory weeds of how the creature is born or operates, but the way in which it is consistently regenerated by violence--the very violence it seeks vengeance for--is a fresh way to express an old and true idea. There were times I wish that the narrative were focused more on Whatsisname and less on the constellation of supporting characters--I found it difficult to care about the journalist Mahmoud's lust toward his boss' paramour, for instance--but for the most part, it worked for me.

With the addition of Iraq, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 122!

The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and argued, she saw Councillor Carne in her mind's eye as the apostle and ringleader of reaction, the author of false economies, the culprit really responsible for leaking taps in the science room and blackbeetles in the basement. Because of this, it was a little difficult to banish the thought of him completely from her consciousness; but at least she never forgot to remember him with resentment.

Is there such a thing as the "Great Local Politics Novel?" If they're taking nominations, I might suggest Winifred Holtby's South Riding, a novel about a Yorkshire region and the city council who decides on issues of public health, housing, and finance. One of the most respected members of the local political scene is Robert Carne, a conservative farmer who has had to sell most of the furniture out of his hereditary estate in order to pay for the treatment of his mentally ill wife. Carne is the principal opponent of Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local school, who needs the city council and its concomitant organs to approve the building of a new school. Carne disapproves of the idea, but more than this, he stands for all the forces that stand against progress and change. What happens next except, of course, Sarah's hatred for Carne becomes an obsession, and that obsession turns to ardent love?

OK, it sounds silly. In fact, what it reminds me of most is--forgive me--Parks and Rec, a story about the importance of local politics that centers on an alliance between two people, in this case Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope, whose friendship transcends their differences. The viewpoint of South Riding is the same insofar as it posits that both Sarah Burton and Robert Carne are figures of good despite their opposed political programs, and that the love that might be conjured between them is a force possible of transcending those differences. It threatens to be cheesy, but Holtby succeeds by virtue of not diminishing the actual importance of the politics involved, and by giving the romance between Sarah and Carne an air of Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy.

But Robert Carne and Sarah Burton are only one part of the novel, which has a six-page inventory of characters in the front. Holtby presents the political life of the South Riding by introducing councilors, aldermen, socialists, tavern-keepers, laborers, teachers, children, preachers, etc., etc. One of the most critical plotlines involves Lydia Holly, the star pupil of Sarah's who has to drop out of school in order to take care of her many siblings after the death of her mother. It's clear that local politics means something to someone like Lydia; it is the engine that might mean the difference between a scholarship, and escape, and another life wasted in the trap of poverty and motherhood.

Much of the political wrangling in the book involves a scheme to put what is (I think) a kind of council house somewhere in the riding, and the dishonest speculation of greedy figures who want to use the scheme to enrich themselves. It's a little funny how easily this maps on to the local politics of our modern day, so much of which is about whether to build housing and where. One question at hand is: can social good come out of self-interest? Not, perhaps, in the libertarian way of the free market that engineers the most efficient social outcome, but in the way that flawed and even corrupt people may do good despite themselves. I'm not sure. Ultimately, the position of South Riding seems to be that whether it's noble or venal and hopeless, local politics is the most important politics tehre is.

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed their secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx's Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of the Earth's waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

The first story in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is written from the perspective of a sperm having an existential crisis. How can you have faith when you know that only one "swimmer" among billions will make it to the promised land? And is there even a promised land--an egg--at all? It's classic Barth: first of all, it's funny. Secondly, it operates via layers of irony and metaknowledge; one must understand how the ironies of the sperm's existence point back to the self of the reader. But there's a real humanity underneath in the way that explores the difficulty of understanding one's cosmological place when by their very nature the larger forces, be they God or the universe or the possessors of testicles and ovaries, are beyond our understanding. It is maybe the best story--not a good sign for a collection when the first story is the best--but actually I think I slightly preferred "Petition," written from the perspective of a conjoined twin cursed to ride eternally on his brother's back, asking the King of Siam for help in severing them. Like "Night-Sea Journey," the sperm story, I enjoyed how slowly, by design, I came to understand who and what was speaking to me.

Lost in the Funhouse is most famous for its title story, about a trip to the Maryland sea shore where Barth's stand-in, Ambrose, gets--well, you know. The story is famous for its metafictional elements, which call attention to the narrative choices, and the narrative failings, of the author, even going so far as to introduce a diagram of Freytag's pyramid. This is all purposely deflationary; I think even Barth would agree it's a paragraph like the one above, from another story about Ambrose, in which he imagines a relationship with an older girl, that really stir the spirit. But in "Lost in the Funhouse" Barth questions what it that's happening to us when our spirit is stirred, whether that spirit-stirring is an honest exchange. There may not be so much difference between Ambrose tricking himself into happiness by telling himself a story and the reader who lets himself be tricked. Be that as it may, I found "Lost in the Funhouse" to feel stale. It is, as Brent said, "the OG" in a way, but sixty years of postmodernism has produced, I think, more interesting and effective ways of exploring the same ideas. The subsequent stories, "Life-Story" and "Title," which take these ideas to their most abstract and intricate ends, I felt to be absolutely dreary reading.

Much better, then, are "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad," a pair of stories that draw from Greek myth to explore the nature of storytelling. "Menelaid" is a particularly difficult read, in which Menelaus tells a number of stories to Telemachus that involve quoting the discourses of others so that eventually ten or twelve sets of quotation marks are nested inside one another and you don't know who the hell is saying anything. But I really enjoyed the story's suggestion that, when Menelaus wrestles with the shape-shifting god Proteus (as I guess happens in the myth), it destabilizes the entire story, if not the world: how do we know the Menelaus that ends up with Proteus in his arms is not actually Proteus himself in Menelaus' guise? And if Proteus could be Menelaus, why not Helen, or Telemachus--or the reader? 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.