River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon

When I leaned over the side of Nikawa that Saturday morning to check the hull, a mural of cumulus sky lay across the slick river, and from the clouds suddenly appeared a countenance smiling down on me, a bearded one. If I'd believed the Engine of Creation had a human face, I might have taken the visage for it, but it was only I, who soon dipped my hands into the river and shattered the firmament and myself, then held perfectly still towatch the fractured sky and a man's mug slowly return as if the river knew precisely where each piece belonged, and all was seemingly just as it had been, but it was an illusion of the reflection, another trick of the river, for in that minute the water took to return to a mirror I was that much older, the clouds had puffed noticeably into new shapes, world population increased by 162, the planet sailed another eleven hundred miles through the ether, the solar system traveled seventy-eight hundred miles closer to the Northern Cross, and the tectonic plate the Missouri flows across had crept microscopically closer to Siberia. A stilled river is an illusion of the human situation where stasis is only a concept, but a flowing river is a traditional metaphor for the way of all tings. Mountains suggest fixity, but rivers give continuance.

The "River-Horse" of William Least Heat-Moon's book is the Nikawa (which means that phrase in the language of hte Osage), a C-Dory boat that Heat-Moon plans to take from one coast of the United States to the other. It's a daunting, perhaps impossible task, possible only with the judicious use of portages, but Heat-Moon is intent on spending as much time as possible on the water, without use to shortcuts. It's a route that takes them from New York up the Hudson to the Erie Canal, across the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers, over the Continental Divide, into the rough waters of the Snake and Columbia. There's not a lot of leeway for error: a day or two lost, and the Nikawa may miss the date of the snowmelt in the Rockies that provides enough water across the Missouri for a boat to travel. But America's rivers are highly regulated things, chopped to pieces by locks and dams that prevent easy movement, and where the authorities let the boat pass, Nature may throw up other roadblocks: rough shoals, rocks, and terrible weather. It is, in short, an insane thing to do.

But it is a way of really seeing America. Heat-Moon explains that he'd seen every county in the United States except for a handful in the Deep South, and traveling by river is a way of reacquainting oneself with the country, getting a different view. And as we're often reminded, it's the original way that America's representatives acquainted themselves with their new nation: as he travels the route of Lewis and Clark, Heat-Moon re-reads the explorers' journals. (I was struck by, among other things, how the part-Osage Heat-Moon interacts with the Native Americans he comes across on the trip, reenacting in a way the movement from the metropolitan coast to the west, which remains Indian Country in many ways.) And as they go, the river becomes a metaphor not just for America but for the shifting nature of things, as expressed in the passage above. Only late in the book does Heat-Moon confess that his traveling has resulted in yet another divorce, and that in essence his wife told him that the choice was between his river journey and her--and he, of course, chose the river.

River-Horse is a different animal than Blue Highways, a travelogue I loved, though certainly more than one reviewer must have noted that the river must be the original "blue highway." It's a much more solitary endeavor, for one, more engaged with the landscape than the community, though Heat-Moon makes up for this by taking a passenger along this time, a worldly-wise friend he terms "Pilotis," who, lucky for the writer, is always ready with a bon-mot. But from time to time, Heat-Moon and Pilotis get off the river into the small towns that once were the lifeblood of a kind of public transit system now little-used, and Heat-Moon gets to make use of what I feel is the real strength of his writing: an uncanny ability to capture the quirks and speech of strangers. The motto of the Nikawa is "Proceed as the way opens," and the travelers on it have reason to return to it many times, avoiding any number of near- and not-so-near-scrapes and setbacks, but ultimately making it to the other side of the country.

Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

"You are not dreaming, Zaliwe," says the mop, shimmying out into the light.

The voice is still my mother's. Climbing an octave on the third syllable of my name like she'd spent the whole day laughing and didn't have anything left in her chords to finish the word. Amama could fill up a room with her laughing voice alone. Where mine was kapenta in a bowl of water, hers was tilapia, large and filling. You couldn't look away form her if you wanted.

My favorite story in Zambian writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento's collection Obligations to the Wounded is "Mastitis," about a new mother who's having a real bad time. Not only is she struggling to produce milk for the baby, her mother has just died, and her husband seems to be having an affair with another man. Abandoned and frantic, she considers suicide, or just perhaps contemplates her own death as a way of resolving her troubles. Then, her mother's voice appears in the kitchen to advise her. Her mother's ghost is invisible, but real--look at the way it twirls the mop--and little by little, it coaches the narrator in the act of massaging her breast to provide milk for the baby.

"Mastitis" combines several of the novel's larger themes--motherhood, sexuality, the generational differences between Zambian families, especially emigrants--into a single story. It ought to be messy or overstuffed, but I thought the story succeeded on the strength of these storylines being woven together into something persuasive. Where the stories are simpler, they seem one-note. For example, a story about a young Zambian exploring a trans male identity, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother, seems to repeat and reconfigure an earlier story about a young Zambian exploring her same-sex attraction to a friend, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother.

Much stronger, I thought, was the opening story "Azubah," about an emigrant in America who travels back to Zambia to take care of her mother, who is in the grips of dementia. In her addled state, the mother admits that her own father sexually abused the protagonist, something the protagonist had psychologically buried. This story, I thought, like "Mastitis," brought a complexity to the relationship between generations that other stories lack.

With the addition of Zambia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 120! Still about 75 to go. At a rate of one a month, that will take me about six years.

Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but its rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection!

What do we really know about ourselves? This is a fundamental question of philosophy, I suppose, but as Walker Percy shows in Lost in the Cosmos, it's also a fundamental question of pop psychology. The whole book takes the form of a pair of "quizzes" that allow you to select the belief closest to your own--about the self, about religion, about sex, etc.--with the promise that the results will illuminate something about your life. We've moved on from this kind of book since Percy wrote it, but you still see traces of it everywhere, in Buzzfeed quizzes and horoscopes and Meyers-Briggs types. If Lost in the Cosmos has something resembling a thesis, it's this: despite years of scientific advancement that has transformed our understanding of "the Cosmos," we really know very little about our own nature.

How much of this book is serious, and how much is tongue-in-cheek? The quiz format lets Percy have it both ways--he doesn't have to make any genuine claims about the self or human nature, ones which might expose a kind of amateurishness or oversimplification that often seems to be lurking here. Are these "dyadic" and "triadic" diagrams supposed to mean something, or are they just a joke, meant to resemble the kind of bullshit that happens when you try to diagram the undiagrammable? But the method also enforces his contention that we actually know very little, the author himself included. And though the parody lacks some bite in 2026, it can be very funny, as Percy spins little Percyesque stories about priests and football players and stuff like that. I can't say that I ended up understanding myself or anything any better after reading it. I can't even say I understood the book itself. But it was certainly a gas.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The flamethrowers could have been from a different century, both brutal and ancient and at the same time horribly modern. The flame oil in the twin tanks they carried was five parts tar oil and one part crude, and they had a little canister of carbon dioxide and an automatic igniter and a belt pouch with spare igniters. The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines. He surged forth, a hulking creature with huge tanks on his back, a giant nozzle in his hand, hooked to the tanks. He was a harbinger of death. He looked like death, in his asbestos hood with the wide cowl, and he squirted liquid fire from a magnificent range--fifty meters--into the pillboxes and trenches of the enemy and they had no chance.

The narrator of The Flamethrowers is a young artist from Reno whose work revolves around speed: she takes photographs of landscapes through which she has passed, by foot, or ski, or, as is the case in the beginning of the novel, by motorcycle, having shown up to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats where world speed records are being chased. One of the novel's most arresting scenes involves the narrator in a fiery crash, from which she emerges not seriously dinged up, and which results in her perversely being given the opportunity to ride a Valera company machine that will make her the fastest woman in recorded history. She may or may not be aware of the similarities between her own work on speed and that of the Italian Futurists, who embraced speed as an ideal at the same time they embraced Fascism. Among those futurists was a young soldier named Valera whose legacy includes the motorcycle company that produces both the narrator's bike and her boyfriend, Sandro Valera.

The bulk of The Flamethrowers centers on the New York art scene of (I think) the 1970's and 80's. Sandro is an artist himself, and introduces young Reno (as she's sometimes called) to a world of provocateurs and gallerists, some of whom make a more permanent impression on the narrative than others. Kushner treats this world as faintly ridiculous, as surely it was, but also deadly serious. Some of these artists have emerged from the world of radical politics where bombs and art are seen as equal tactics. Some of them are just poseurs, and it's hard to tell exactly which are which. As the scion of the Valera Motor Company, Sandro fits uneasily among them--Kushner makes sure to emphasize that the company's exploitative ways didn't end with Mussolini by including a section from the perspective of a Brazilian rubber worker. After a disastrous sojourn to Italy where she's scorned by his well-to-do family (and cheated on), Reno absconds with Sandro's groundskeeper, who turns out to be a member of a Communist cell whose clandestine activity will upend Sandro's life.

The Flamethrowers is hardly a perfect book; I'm not even sure it works on the whole, but it did make me wonder why Kushner's debut, Telex from Cuba, was so limp. Many of the same traits of that novel are on display here: the gratuitous POV shifts, the whiff of extensive research. But I thought this novel succeeded at doing something the other clearly attempts, and fails: it brings together several disparate-seeming subjects and themes in a way that connects them persuasively. At the heart of the novel is the way that us and them are enmeshed. Sandro's attempt to escape the distasteful elements of his family's legacy by entering into the art world fails because the art world is also enmeshed with the realities of capitalism and exploitation. The Italian rabblerousers whose provocations set off the novel's climax are like the flamethrowers of the Italian army that fascinated Sandro as a kid: a purgative force. To the extent that their nozzles are also pointed at themselves may not be foolishness but a kind of honesty and self-sacrifice.

That said, Kushner has a way of writing around things that leaves me feeling as if I've read about something, but not really read it. This is the third of her books I've read now, and in each case I find that there's something missing, for me, at the heart of them; I walk away wondering what it was that I really read about. I think it's actually easy to locate that missing center here: it's the protagonist, whose attraction to Sandro and artistic ambitions mask a kind of inner vacuity. She's our point-of-view character, who frames all our judgments of the "characters" we meet in the New York scene, but that invisible eyeball quality leaves her a little invisible. Her artistic project, for example, is so quickly abandoned it felt like something of a red herring. The best parts of the book are when Kushner breathes a little life into her: when she crashes her motorbike and when she runs away from Sandro. Still, Kushner has a real knack for detail and anecdote, and there are elements here--the Futurists, the Bonneville Salt Flat stuff, the movie Wanda--that I really love. So I enjoyed reading it.

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

The battle raged. The hornets harried and charged him from every direction. Some tried to slip through the folds of his suit to reach his flesh, others violently flung themselves against his helmet, and he saw their eyes up close--red, as if injected with blood. Their stingers pierced the stitches of his garment and the veil of his helmet, narrowly missing him. But Sidi had always been incredibly dexterous. He was the son of the mountains and the hills, accustomed to its animals and insects. His mind and movements were still sharp, protected from the weight of his years by the nectar produced by his girls. They were watching over him the same way he watched over them.

Sidi is a beekeeper in North Africa who produces some of the region's best honey. His secret is love: he calls his bees "his girls" and watches over them with an intense fervor. But his girls, and his livelihood, are threatened by the arrival of a new predator, the giant Chinese hornet, which can tear an entire hive apart in a matter of minutes. At the same time, Sidi's unnamed country is dealing with a predatory upheaval of its own. Having just cleared the way for its first-ever elections, the polls are led by a group of religious fundamentalists who wear all black. The fundamentalists are intent on winning the election, whether that means providing food and clothing to potential voters, or rounding up apostates in the desert and cutting off their heads. 

I fear there's not much to say about Tunisian author Yamen Manai's The Ardent Swarm. It is no more or less than this obvious metaphor: the fundamentalists in black are the hornets who have arrived with the threat of violence and destruction. (There might be something said, however, about the way the novel analogizes the fundamentalists to a threat from "outside," as something that has been imported from somewhere else--not a homegrown danger, even as it presents one local character who is seduced by the fundamentalists to join them.) It's a nice touch that Sidi, who lives in the hills like something of a wild man, is and remains more or less ignorant of the fundamentalist threat. Sidi and his allies are taken up instead with their solution to the hornet problem: a trip to Japan to carry home Japanese queens. These bees are the only ones to have invented a strategy to defeat the hornets; they surround them in a ball and basically smother, or overheat, them to death. This is "the ardent swarm," and what it suggests is that if the citizens band together, perhaps at the ballot box, they can defeat the threat of a fundamentalist takeover. The novel wisely lets that remain to be seen, though it's curtains for the hornets.

With the addition of Tunisia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

Crazy Genie by Ines Cagnati

I told her about her, of what the grandfather had told me, that before she had me she would laugh and sing day and night, and that later, once she was expecting me, she never wanted to say who my father was, and the grandmother, who is a bad woman, had gone into a fury because she didn't wand bad things like that to happen in her family, which was the most respectable in the village. Then she had moved into the shack under the crazy willows that talk at night, and she had never gone back to her home, and she worked at people's houses to be fed, and they called her Crazy Genie because she never talked, but she wasn't crazy, she simply didn't talk and didn't laugh.

Marie's mother is known in her village as "Crazy Genie." Despite coming from a respected family, she takes on odd jobs to survive: milking cows, threshing wheat, husking corn. She's not really crazy--the word is a tool that the people of the village use to place her beyond their sympathy and understanding. If Genie has fallen in the world, it must be her own fault--as Marie's grandmother, still incensed about Genie's becoming pregnant out of wedlock, believes--or, more likely, there's just something wrong with her that can't be helped. Marie spends much of her childhood trying to make sense of this dynamic, while trying without success to become closer to her mother, whose material sacrifices we can see clearly are meant to protect and care for Marie, but who is extremely sparing with words or gestures of maternal love. The only things that Genie says to Marie for much of the book are commands: "Go home," "Don't bother me," etc., etc.

It's a dangerous world out there for girls, as Marie finds when the town mason, Ernest, is lying in wait for her en route from a job back to her home under the "crazy willows that talk at night." We learn later--spoiler alert--that this Ernest is Marie's father, and that he has raped his own daughter just as he raped Genie many years before. In this way, Crazy Genie becomes a book about the way that male cruelty can have resounding effects well past the moment of violence: Ernest's deeds ripple throughout Genie's life as well as Marie's, and his rape of her, which is presented rather elliptically in the text, is perhaps only a more severe manifestation of the general ruin he has brought upon her. And yet, Ernest is a distant figure from the narrative, appearing only a few times in the shadows. Men, of course, get to walk away. But there are others who collaborate in this violence and ruining: the grandmother, of course, and the townspeople, whose incurious nature prevents them from seeing the injustice that lies behind Genie's tough exterior.

It's easy to see what Crazy Genie has in common with Free Day, the Ines Cagnati book that NYRB translated and published a few years ago. Both are about young girls living in difficult circumstances in the French countryside, trying to scrabble out an existence in the face of disadvantageous circumstances. But they're incredibly different stylistically. Marie's language is much simpler, more systematic, as might fit a more rational and less emotional child who is trying to make sense of the world around her. The simplicity of the language emphasizes, too, the repetitiveness and routine of the life that Marie lives with Genie. It's a style that works, but it's not as good as Free Day, a book where anxiety and dread leak through the language in a much more interesting way. That said, Crazy Genie moves toward a climactic ending that is as difficult and tragic as anything in Free Day, and which elevated the book for me--because I always appreciate a real bummer.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

If I know anything about Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I know that it contains a scene where Hemingway reassures F. Scott Fitzgerald in the bathroom of a bar that the size of his penis is perfectly ordinary. A Moveable Feast wasn't published until the 1960's, a few years after the death of Hemingway, and perhaps it's best that it much after the death of Fitzgerald, as well, who, as Hemingway depicts him here, was an anxious hypochondriac, tortured by his wife, who probably had enough anxiety to deal with in his life. The penis story is just one of many--there's a long tale about Fitzgerald's hypochondria absolutely derailing a boys' trip to the city of Lyon--and one of the charms of A Moveable Feast is the peek inside the lives of some of the great artists who were trawling around Paris at the time. Fitzgerald gets out better, perhaps, than Gertrude Stein, who's depicted as something of a stubborn battleaxe who hides petty resentments behind a thin veil of principle. That's too harsh: as with Fitzgerald, Hemingway's depiction of Stein is ultimately a loving one, because his depiction of Paris, and those years of his life, is a loving one as well.

But the most interesting depiction of any artist is, I think, the book's depiction of Hemingway himself. Hemingway's writing about a time before he's published any novel at all, and his work is all in short stories, and so the larger-than-life bullfighter and hunter who would be known as "Papa" isn't really present here. The Hemingway of A Moveable Feast is a rather vulnerable creature, battling the uncertainty of writer's block, cultivating a style of simplicity not out of masculine bravado but the need to put down on paper "one true sentence." This Hemingway marvels at his friend Fitzgerald not because his book is so good (when they first meet, he hasn't yet read Gatsby) but because he had the ability to write a novel at all. I thought A Moveable Feast was an interesting counterbalance to the popular image of Hemingway as an icon of machismo. Certainly the vulnerability and the incertitude of Hemingway here involves a lot of self-fashioning, but isn't "self-fashioning" the complaint that people level against Hemingway in the other direction? All of which is to say again that I think those who resent Hemingway for his masculinity haven't read him, or haven't read him closely enough.

It's impossible, I feel, not to respond to what Hemingway can do with a sentence. His sentences seem simple enough, but then, if they're so simple, why are they so moving? I was moved in that way often during A Moveable Feast, though I don't quite agree with those who thinks it's among his greatest works. It has the kind of muddy incoherence of something that feels unfinished, as if it were something he might have knocked into a more recognizable shape, if he'd published it during his own life time. Still, it's remarkable in the way it manages to turn real people--the Steins, the Fitzgeralds, the Pounds, and Papa himself--into Hemingway characters, so vibrant and real even though they are so lightly sketched, touched with a kind of authorial grace.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent's mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.

In the late 1970's, Robyn Davidson moved to Alice Springs, the town at the center of Australia's Outback, with one goal in mind: to obtain and train a group of camels in order that she might walk from the center of the country to the Western Australia coast. The trip, as Davidson describes it, is not just about getting to know the country, but getting to know oneself: alone for long stretches of time with only the camels and her dog, walking across some of the most featureless and inhospitable landscape on Earth, Davidson becomes not just independent and self-sufficient, but in tune with herself in a way that's not possible in Brisbane, or even in old ramshackle Alice. This is a kind of book that has become popular in recent memory--I'm thinking of Cheryl Strayed's Wild--but whereas those books always seem to be a kind of marketing strategy, when Davidson writes about self-actualization, I tended to believe her, not least because of the incandescent rage she expresses toward the demons of the press that want to turn her into tomorrow's headline.

Close to half the book is taken up with the preparations for the trip, which involve taking small jobs in restaurants and ranches in Alice Springs. I was really interested in Davidson's discussion of anti-Aboriginal racism in Tracks: the Alice Springs of the 1970's she describes is a place where whites drop slurs as easily as spitting on the ground. (It's also a place disproportionately filled with men, who frequently threaten young women like Davidson with rape.) Davidson paints herself as kind of a hothead who often leaps to the defense of Aboriginal Australians, and it's this fervor that really makes her seem honest and impolitic, though I would suggest there's a kind of blindness, too, in the way she throws around suggests of Aboriginal "demise." Later, on the trip itself, she's briefly joined by an Aboriginal man named Eddie who takes her through some of the track that she would not, and in fact would not be allowed according to Aboriginal tradition, traverse on her own. These sections, which depict a kind of free camaraderie despite a real language barrier, are some of the most charming of the novel. When Eddie leaves and Davidson faces the last, deadliest stretch of the trip, the book's tragic elements return to the forefront.

If this were a book about traversing an American desert, you might expect some stunning descriptions of landmarks, well-known and not. But the Australian desert is not like the American one; it's featurelessness is part of the essential nature that draws Davidson to it, and it's not possible--or so I gather, and so I understood as I crossed it by air a few weeks back--to impose a mental geography on it, unless perhaps you are an Aboriginal Australian moving along a songline, perhaps. So the focus, for the most part, becomes on Davidson herself, her self-sufficiency and stubbornness. (Though I really liked her description of what was then called "Ayers Rock," which she explains that no tourist mob could ever really reduce or diminish.) I thought it was especially funny how Davidson spent 100 pages talking shit about the clueless photographer that National Geographic sent to snap photos of her, right up to the point where she sleeps with him. That kind of hotheadedness and brashness is what makes you like Davidson, and what makes you believe in her.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

Henry hadn't been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages  rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn't see them--oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Henry, the namesake "Prop" of Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., is the world's first fantasy baseball player--and I do mean fantasy. He spends all of his spare time simulating baseball games with three dice and a few dozen charts that describe what each roll means. With these simple tools, he's able to reproduce whatever can happen on a baseball field, from pop flies to sac bunts to home runs to rarer events like fights and injuries. Henry simulates whole seasons at a clip, pitting teams with names like the Pastimers against the Haymakers and the Beaneaters, and players with names like "Sycamore Flynn" and "Melbourne Trench." At this speed, the league takes on a history, and a lore, of its own, Henry watches fifty years of baseball history go by at a clip. As the league grows in imaginative size, so it takes over Henry's life, leaving him on thin ice at his accounting job. When a new star is in the midst of a breakout season, the energy and enthusiasm it provides gives Henry even a kind of sexual prowess at the local bar; but the league's slumps are Henry's slumps.

Fantasy baseball is the obvious touchpoint for The Universal Baseball Association, but there are others that make more sense. What Henry does is actually closer to a one-man roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, combining personal modifiers and the power of chance. Like D&D, Henry's game is inertly mathematical until enlivened with the power of imagination, and imagination is where Henry thrives. At the beginning of the season depicted in The Universal Baseball Season, an up-and-coming pitcher named Damon Rutherford has thrown a perfect game at the onset of a season that promises to be legendary. The novel "drops in" to the perspective of the players themselves, caught up as Henry is in the larger narrative of Rutherford's rise and the magical tension of the games. (A stunning amount of the novel is just Coover describing, grippingly, the events of a baseball game.) I would suggest that what Henry really is is a writer, and that the book is a kind of metacommentary on the relationship between the novelist and the world he creates.

The crisis of the book is set off when a stray roll sets off the "Extraordinary Occurrences" chart--and an errant pitch hits and kills Damon, the star pitcher. The death is a seismic event in both the Association's life and Henry's, provoking existential questions. To what extent is Henry responsible for Damon's death? He is, after all, the one who made the chart. And what can he do about it? Is it permissible for him to "load the dice" and punish Jock Casey, the supercilious young pitcher who felled the young prince? Or is the crisis an empty one, the game all vanity, and something that should be chucked in the garbage bin entirely? Why is it that we got so invested in these fictional worlds? After all, aren't I, the reader, a little choked up when I read about Damon's father, the league legend Brock Rutherford, climbing down from the stands to get to the body of his son lying at the plate? In a Muriel Spark sense, Henry is both author and God, pushing his inventions around and hiding his hand.

In fact, I want to suggest one more touchpoint: the story in Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum about a computer simulation of life in which the relationship between the simulated beings and their programmers is a perfect analog of that of us and God, a relationship with an impermeable barrier at its heart. The Universal in Universal Baseball Association is pointedly chosen; to these players, the diamond is the entire world. Henry suggests the weirdness this produces early on when he describes the players as organizing themselves into political-type "parties," which actually might be more like sects. The culmination of this aspect of the novel is the bravura final section, and "in-universe" short story about a future generation of the Association where players ritualistically reenact the death of Damon Rutherford, now a kind of quasi-religious figure. It's unclear whether the player representing Damon is actually at risk of being killed; it's unclear whether anyone actually plays baseball anymore. It's totally strange, totally unexpected, and cranks the strangeness level of the novel nearly past what it can bear. But fascinatingly, it suggests that the players have a life of their own, and if God--Henry--is around, he's chosen not to make himself known.

The Orchard Thieves by Elizabeth Jolley

Never let fear come into your life, someone had said to her when she was still a schoolgirl. She had never forgotten this, and here she was, a threatened and frightened woman after being fearless all her life, simply because a daughter, the middle one, without warning and without explanation, had come home seeking sanctuary. When she thought about it, there was no safe place in her house if someone should come, the hunter or the huntress, after the middle sister. Nothing closed properly in the house, the windows were loose in their frames, any keys which still remained would not turn in the locks. She never tried to lock up the house. At night the household was especially vulnerable with three women and three small children and one unborn child sleeping there. She had to understand that she had been afraid for almost four weeks, ever since the arrival of the middle sister.

The woman at the center of Elizabeth Jolley's The Orchard Thieves is known simply as "the grandmother." The other characters, too, are reduced to their familial roles: "the youngest daughter," "the grandsons," "the aunt"--that is, the eldest and childless sister. Into this web arrives the middle daughter, known as, you guessed it, "the middle daughter," returning to Australia from England with her daughter ("the cousin") in tow and a baby in the oven. The middle daughter has experienced something harrowing, perhaps related to a lover, perhaps the father of the baby, although it's also hinted at that she has relationships with women. What it is, the grandmother is never permitted to know; her role is to provide sanctuary without question, and the reader is never permitted to know either. But the grandmother's anxiety is ignited: how can she protect her middle daughter if she doesn't know where the threat lies?

In the above passage, the grandmother claims to have been "fearless all her life" until this moment, but we can see that this is not true. Until the arrival of the middle daughter, her primary concern is for her three grandsons, who act in the story as a unit, and who are always up to some mischief or peskiness. A bowl of fruit, sitting in the kitchen, is too beautifully arranged for anyone to take from it in the daylight, but at night the grandsons sneak in to steal apples and grapes, one by one--the orchard thieves of the title. The grandmother is entirely aware of this, and fascinatingly, her fear for her grandsons centers on the knowledge that they will be, at some time in their life, the thief, rather than the victim. But the "Orchard Thieves" also refers to the adult children, including the youngest daughter's husband, who seize on the opportunity to discuss despoiling the grandmother of her home. Does the grandmother see this greed in them, too, as she sees it in the young children? Does she excuse it, even nurture it, also? Is it cruelty, or a natural way of things that must be endured?

Jolley is always such a cryptic writer. In a way, The Orchard Thieves is the most straightforward of her novels, which always feel like they either have a piece missing, or perhaps one added in. Here, it's what has happened to the middle daughter--keeping that information back is, I think, a remarkable kind of authorial restraint. But the story from the narrow perspective of the grandmother is not cryptic at all, though its narrowness is a kind of limitation of the kind that Jolley seems to like. The reduction of the characters to their family roles turns it into a kind of fable or parable about aging and motherhood. One's reminded of those spiders who offer their bodies as refuge for the eggs of parasitical wasps, only to be eaten up after they hatch, piece by piece.