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 The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals.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.

The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

This is when the Fitzgerald's unique characteristics--the modular construction, the use of welds over rivets, the extraordinary flexibility of the hull, the lowering of the Plimsoll Line, and whatever damage she might have suffered over Six Fathom Shoal--would all be tested by the once-in-a-lifetime conditions on Lake superior. The fully loaded Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard on a good day, and this was not a good day. The question lo longer was whether the Fitzgerald could withstand such relentless punishment, but how long before she succumbed.

The first few times I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," I'm pretty sure I thought it was about some late 19th or early 20th century shipwreck. I had no idea that it was about a ship that sank in 1975, just a few months before the song was released. Is it the song, or something else, that gives the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the air of an old myth? Certainly, what captured Gordon Lightfoot's attention--the struggle of human courage against the merciless lake, the ship's status as the largest and most famous on Superior, the way it vanished without a trace, the phrase "storm of the century," the heart-rending detail of the bell ringing 29 times at the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral--are the elements that still make the story such an enduring one, on the Great Lakes and beyond.

John U. Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald is pure dadslop (complimentary). It's the kind of book you give an uncle for Christmas. But it also tackles a pretty serious challenge, which is that, because there were no survivors, the story of the Fitzgerald's wreck is actually a difficult one to tell. Bacon solves this problem partially by padding the book in several predictable ways: extensive prefatory chapters about the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, other shipwrecks, and lengthy profiles of a dozen or so of the sailors who went down on the Fitzgerald--lengthy, if you'll forgive me saying so, even for the human face they provide to the tragedy.

Once the ship leaves on its fateful final trip, though, I found the book gripping. Bacon does an excellent job dissecting the evidence in order to present and evaluate the theories about what happened to the Fitzgerald, and the ultimate impression is of a ship caught in a series of compounding difficulties, some preventable and some not. No one could have stopped the warm front moving up from the West Coast that created a "perfect storm" and fifty-foot waves, but it seems clear that the Fitzgerald was shipping with too much weight, pushing for one last run in a season when storms become too strong for most shipping. Decisions which must have made sense in the moment likely doomed the Fitzgerald: trying to avoid the storm by taking an unfamiliar northern route, which drove it over a poorly-charted shoal, slowing the ship down, which gave it more maneuverability in unpredictable conditions--but which also gave water more time to poor through open hatches or a rent in the hull. The perfect storm, it seems, includes not only the atmospheric conditions but the profit motive that drives recklessness. Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Fitzgerald, is described by Bacon as the most trusted and reliable on the Great Lakes--but it wasn't enough.

Mostly, the book made me deeply sad. A hundred things had to go wrong for the 29 people on board the Fitzgerald to lose their lives; if any one of them had gone right instead, many of them would still be alive today. Bacon notes that shipping practices today are more heavily regulated, weather forecasting and communication with ships is much improved. God willing, that means that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will stay what it is--a legend and a warning.

State of Grace by Joy Williams

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we're all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you've made it. Do not be a polite guest.

Kate, the protagonist of Joy Williams' first novel, State of Grace, lives in a college town on the Gulf Coast. She lives in a sorority house, though she doesn't actually seem to be in college (is anyone in this college town in college?), and then she lives with her partner, Grady, who loves only her, along with his Jaguar coupe. The baby she's carrying, we quickly learn, is not Grady's but her father's: a holy rolling reverend from Maine who shows up out of the blue to re-cement his too-intimate relationship with Kate. We learn through flashbacks--if you can describe the fluid chronology of State of Grace in such terms--that Kate and her father were loathed by their mother, who instead heaped her love on a daughter she accidentally killed in a car accident. Car accidents: at some point, Grady wrecks that Jaguar, and Kate is left to face the problem of her pregnancy alone while Grady battles for his life in the hospital.

Here's a half-baked theory: Joy Williams and Cormac McCarthy had remarkably similar careers. Both started out writing fiction in the Southern Gothic mode; both found their voice as they moved away from this milieu toward the American Southwest, as Williams did with 99 Stories of God and The Quick and the Dead. Of course, that overstates the case, because Williams kept writing about Florida to great success, especially in books like Breaking and Entering. But early on both authors wore their influences a little too much on their sleeve, in both cases Faulkner, though Williams seems to draw quite heavily from Flannery O'Connor as well. State of Grace both is and isn't recognizably Williams, to me. The narrative malleability, the inability to write a bad or boring or even merely functional sentence, they're all here. But the novel spins and plods. It's too internal and self-regarding, and it strikes me as a version of Williams that hadn't yet learned to harness her stylistic richness to a mode that moves forward. And the father figure, while enigmatic and interesting, seems picked up right out of Flannery and not like a character from a Williams novel at all.

But there are flashes here of real Joy: I especially liked a subplot in which Kate is persuaded by one of the sorority sisters to "borrow" a leopard from a local menagerie with the help of her friend, Corinthian Brown. You can imagine how well that works out. The scariest thing, actually, about the book, is not the way the friend is mauled--another disaster along the lines of those that strike Kate's sister and Grady, victimized by the world's primal savagery--but the whisper campaign that comes afterward about how they caught and killed the "n---er" who they held responsible. You can recognize in this moment the seed of a lot of Williams' future fiction, not least an abiding interest in the world of animals as it intersects with the world of human beings. I wish more of the novel had been like that.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

We forded the river, whose course is marked the whole way by a fringe of cotton-woods and aspens, and traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious. The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this; for not only do five high-peaked giants, each nearly the height of Mount Blanc, lift their dazzling summits above the lower ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so vast, and the whole lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue, not haze--something peculiar to the region.

Explorer Isabella L. Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is an account of her 1873 travels throughout the Rockies, framed as a series of letters written to her sister. I put it on my Kindle on a whim for my trip to Colorado because I was struggling to find a book written by a woman--as you might know, I try to alternate--to go with Craig Child's travelogue about searching for Ancestral Puebloan sites on the western side of the state. Bird's book turned out to be delightful--a breezy, well-written account of life in Colorado in the late nineteenth century, accented by skillful descriptions of the land and droll accounts of the region's "characters."

Obviously, traveling in the Rocky Mountains in 1873 is not like the traveling I did there this week.  It takes an hour for the modern traveler to get from Denver to Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, but when Bird did it, it took several days of difficult travel by horse. And when she got there, Estes Park was not the town we know it today, but a true park, meaning a kind of valley or glad that might be home to a few houses. In this case, those houses belong to a pair of rival mountain guides, both of whom ingratiate themselves to Bird: Evans, with whom she typically boards, and the infamous desperado known as "Mountain Jim," whose bloodthirsty and frightening reputation is immediately belied by his chivalry toward Bird, with whom he strikes up an immediate friendship.

Birds account of Mountain Jim is, if I had to pick something, the most delightful thing about the book, and it's complicated by the numerous footnotes for publication revealing, little by little, that Jim met his end after the events of the book after being shot by Evans. We never get the whole story, which as I understand it is somewhat lost to history, but there's a bittersweetness to Bird's clear implication that it was Jim's reprobate ways, not Evans, that really brought his downfall. This knowledge brings a special irony to a late section where Jim, having guided Bird up a high winter pass, tearfully breaks down about his own "lost" nature.

But Jim is only one of a few fascinating characters who appear in Bird's travels, which include other trappers and guides, destitute farmers, and poor greenhorns who are in over their heads in the hardscrabble new territory. Bird notes that the thin mountain air has attracted many consumptives, and some of the saddest parts of the novel are depictions of tubercular patients who have arrived in the Rockies to live out the last moments of their lives. I also really liked her resentful account of a young boarder who eats everything, does no work, and loses the milk cow. But the most interesting character might be Bird herself, who despite some false modesty about her abilities, comes off as an intrepid and capable solo traveler. It's no wonder that, wherever she goes, the newspapers have announced the arrival of the remarkable "British lady." And part of that character is not just her ability to traverse the mountains, but really see them--her descriptions of the Rockies transcend the 150 years of stylistic difference, and I was particularly struck by her detailed account of climbing Longs Peak, a feat that challenges climbers even today.

House of Rain by Craig Childs

I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.

I got to return to Mesa Verde National Park last week and tour two more of the enormous cliff dwellings built nine hundred years ago directly into the rock. They are impressive places, made up of turrets and geometric stacks of rooms and huge circular underground kivas. It's hard not to think what the first white Americans, cattle ranchers, thought when they encountered them for the first time: how could somebody build something like this and then just abandon it? The "disappearance" of Ancestral Puebloans, previously known as the Anasazi, has been compelling narrative for a long time, a puzzle to be solved. Craig Childs, in House of Rain, travels through major and minor Puebloan sites throughout the southwest and Mexico, seeking an answer to just that question.

Among other things, House of Rain is a travelogue, and some of the most impressive passages involve Childs moving across the high, dry landscape of the Four Corners area on foot, sometimes with his wife and infant son in tow. He skillfully and poetically describes the beauty of this area, which is among my favorite places in the world. So in that sense it was like comfort food to me. And I appreciated hearing descriptions of some of these Puebloan sites I'll never see; tucked away in the corners of deep canyons, undisturbed in the way those first ranchers must have seen them. You can see how much more uncomfortable Childs is at, say, Aztec Ruins, a site run by the National Park Service in the backyard of a suburb of Farmington, New Mexico. Better to pass into these regions of quietude, where the intervening years can disappear and the past reappear in the form of a broken wall, a husk of corn, a potsherd.

So what happened to the Ancestral Puebloans? As Child notes, though a little begrudgingly, the mystery is not much of a mystery at all: they migrated, probably because of an intense drought in the high country of the Four Corners. Childs puts some specifics to this that I found highly interesting: his conclusion, based on the introduction of new kinds of polychromatic pottery in the lower regions of Arizona, is that the Puebloan culture migrated to the south, mingling with Hohokam and Mogollon cultures that were already there to create the culture now known by archaeologists as the Salado. It's Childs' contention, actually, that tensions between the new elements of this multicultural society resulted in the collapse of that society, leading the Pueblo peoples to splinter into the groups that now make up the two-dozen-odd Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, as well as the Hopi. But Childs throws his lot in with some more outre conclusions as well, like a revisionist theory that Puebloans migrated north from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde and then south again along the same meridian to a location in Mexico known as Paquime (or today as Casas Grandes), which other archeologists consider more closely related to the Aztec cultures of Mexico to the south. In any case, Childs favors a version of the Puebloans that emphasizes their grandeur, claiming for them a larger sphere of influence than many of his peers.

House of Rain is only twenty years old, but it wears its age. The term Anasazi, a rude exonym that comes from the Navajo, has been entirely supplanted by "Ancestral Puebloan." And while Childs undercuts the question Where did they go, my understanding is that nobody accepts this any longer as a framework from which to begin--something which perhaps Childs should be given credit for. But my biggest frustration with House of Rain is how it keeps modern Pueblo peoples at arm's length. They appear infrequently, and often in ways that stymie Childs' research, as with a council of elders that refuses to give Childs permission to conduct research. Childs paints this as a typical reservedness, but then again, he's the one who uses the word Anasazi around them, knowing it's offensive, but catching himself too late. Childs folds in some of the stories and legends of modern-day Puebloans that support the narrative of migration, but I noticed that these stories always tend to begin "a Hopi man once told me," while the researchers have names. At a dig, Childs notes the frustration of an archeologist who is forced to stop digging when human remains are found--a key stipulation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act--and, in way that felt telling to me, lets that frustration pass by without comment.

All of these are minor missteps, perhaps, but they add up to a sense that Childs is most interested in the version of the Ancestral Puebloans that live in his imagination, and keeps the modern-day Puebloans and Hopi who might shine light on them at arm's length because they might complicate that imagination. Which is all just to say that I think House of Rain would be stronger if it had found a way to engage more deeply with them. That said, in the end, I really enjoyed deepening my understanding of the people of Mesa Verde this way, and I was persuaded by Childs' invitation to see them not as a static society that suddenly "collapsed," but a living, moving culture passing through several stages of development over centuries: a rhythm, a form of motion.

Americana by Don DeLillo

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial ins, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we would build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres."

David Bell is a young junior executive at a television company. His workplace is something of a circus, perhaps in the sense of a gladiatorial circus maximus: people are always getting the axe, and others rising in their place. Someone is sending out cryptic quotations that Bell thinks of as "schizograms," messages that may contain a deep meaning or none at all, or whose deepest meaning might perhaps be the fact that they mean nothing at all. And of course, everyone is sleeping around. So far, David has been the beneficiary of this cutthroat atmosphere, rising to a level of power and prestige. But when he's sent out a road trip to Arizona to film a group of "Navahos"--Native Americans standing for, throughout the novel, the opposite of the American impulse to capitalism and celebrity, though as always with DeLillo, that initial position is constantly undercut--David goes "off the grid," pursuing instead a private project in which he travels around the anonymous and suburban fabric of America filming a kind of quasi-version of his own embattled childhood in the Hudson Valley.

Americana was DeLillo's first novel, published all the way back in 1971. His novels have always had a quality of being ahead of their time, and Americana is no different; it strikes me as being as much about the television-addled "Me Decade" of the 1980s as White Noise, a book from the 80s, is really secretly about the advent of the internet era that followed it twenty years later. DeLillo's characters are always obsessed with the image, and Bell is the prototype, a lover of Burt Lancaster and Ozu movies who thinks, in some cryptic way that's never fully explained for the reader, that putting a version of his childhood on film might--what? Resolve it? Redeem it? Transform it? Bell's big project at the network is a program called "Soliloquy," in which people sit in front of the camera and tell their life story. (More foreshadowing: the front-facing video.) Is this Bell's "Soliloquy?" If so, is DeLillo exposing how the versions of our lives we distribute are always in a sense performative, that they never really capture the truth? Bell's version of his childhood is avant garde, elliptic; it took me a long time to even realize that was an important element of his "film."

For a first novel, Americana launches with incredible confidence. DeLillo's style is already hard-baked here, and the sentences are as epigrammatic and incredible as anything in Libra or White Noise. Americana is, if nothing else, a real pleasure to read, from one sentence to the next. But I left unsure of what all those sentences add up to. I think perhaps this is really a problem with the third section, the actual "road trip" the title promises. The first section is a terrific parody of the modern workplace, and the second section is a relatively straightforward realist depiction of Bell's coming of age: his mother's sickness and death, her confession that she was raped by the town doctor, David's outrageous Don Draper-like father, the disappearance of his sister. I loved this section; it's a more familiar kind of writing than we usually get from DeLillo, but in exceptional form. I actually didn't know he had it in him, this kind of realism. But the third section is too stuffed, too peripatetic, even as Bell ends up not traveling the country but rooted in one anonymous Midwestern town among football captains and insurance adjusters. I thought it suffered, perhaps, from first novel disease, packing in so many ideas that nothing comes out clearly.