Two Books About U.S. History

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.

This weekend I visited Fort Necessity National Historic Site, a reproduction of the hastily-assembled for in Western Pennsylvania where a young George Washington fired the shots that started the French and Indian War. It's a strange little quirk of history that it was Washington, still a young officer and not yet the American Cincinnatus, started what some call the first true "World War." It's one of those facts that's so insane you'd think everyone would know it, except that perhaps it doesn't fit in our conception of the man who could not tell a lie and who helped forge, then lead, the American republic.

I read Alexis Coe's You Never Forget Your First in part because I wanted to read something about Washington that wasn't a colossal Ron Chernow-size tome. Incidentally, Coe describes her project in writing about Washington as being in opposite to Chernow and his peers, calling them "Thigh Guys"--because they all seem to marvel at the supposed size of the first president's hams. Coe's account is brief and breezy, punctuated by witty tables and feature boxes. I liked, for example, the way she dispatches the battles of the Revolution into a table of summaries, presuming correctly that if someone wanted that kind of thing, they might go to a thousand other books, including the Thigh Guys'. The compaction helps the reader get a stronger sense of the particular shape of Washington's life, which involve not an obvious march toward greatness but a combination of false starts, missteps, and true achievements. I enjoyed learning about Washington's actual administration as president, which always seems to be shrouded somewhat in the mists of history. While Washington's assumption and transfer of power provided the root of the American system, the administration itself seems to have been dominated by an intransigent cabinet--Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton--whose disagreements marked the birth of the partisan era and who ended up estranged from Washington personally.

I couldn't help but think that, for all its posing as an alternative to the "Thigh Guys," Coe's book has little in the way of an opposing thesis about Washington. Those he enslaved, and his moral vacillation about whether and how to emancipate them, come to play here, but that's hardly new information, and Coe seems reluctant to integrate it into a coherent understanding of Washington. He did good and bad, which I suppose is true.

Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing it rushed on them.

It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, "a roar like thunder" was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, "And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sound to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats."

Not far from Fort Necessity is the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which commemorates and interprets the 1889 flood that wiped out the city of Johnstown, PA, killing over two thousand and immiserating many, many more. David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood--the erstwhile historian's first book--tells the story of the flood in detail, beginning with the adjustments to the Lake Conemaugh dam made by a wealthy sporting club of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, moving on to the dam's bursting and the gruesome aftermath.

What can you say about this except: holy shit. If anything, McCullough's book convinced me that the flood was much worse than I'd even expected. The lucky, it seems, were killed outright, pummeled by the force of the wave, but for many if not most death came in a horrible and drawn-out way. People were launched down the river on the planks that had formerly been their houses, were caught in debris and crushed or drowned. The most horrifying fact is that the flood was actually stopped by a stone arch in Johnstown that did not give way, leaving people to be smashed within a plug of debris that quickly caught on fire. McCullough tells the story of the flood not just in generalities but in painful detail, describing the experiences of specific named victims and families, each of whom suffered their own ghoulish species of misery. It's a tough read, but I was really impressed by how scrupulously researched the book is. Here, as elsewhere, McCullough shows his eye for the telling detail: the sound of the horse grinding oats, or the unlucky brakeman swept away in his train, having settled down for a nap with his socks in his pockets. The fact that McCullough, writing in the sixties, was able to interview survivors is even more exceptional.

The Johnstown Flood would be a seminal moment in American history if only for the number of people it killed--I think the worst disaster pre-9/11?--but it stands out especially because of what it illuminates about Gilded Age America. Public anger turned toward the wealthy of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, who had turned a derelict reservoir into a ticking time bomb. I appreciated McCullough's sober evaluation of culpability; it's entirely possible, McCullough notes, that the exceptional rainstorm that filled Lake Conemaugh might have broken the dam even without the adjustments, and besides, no one living had been responsible for them. But, McCullough concludes, the neglect in replacing the original valves meant that no matter what, there had been no way to adjust the water level of the dam--a sin which falls directly at the feet of those who ought to have known better. It's not really fair to compare them, because their scopes and purposes are so different, but reading them back to back I did feel like McCullough succeeded with a strong perspective in a way that Coe struggled to achieve in her book about Washington. In both cases, however, they illuminated a very interesting trip to a part of the United States with deep layers of history.

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.