The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox

If her teaching load had not been so great, if her Guggenheim Fellowship had been renewed, if she had been hired at Penn after all, if Myres had not saddled her with a crushing secretarial load, if her champion John Franklin Daniel had lived--if she had lived--it is entirely possible that Alice Kober would have solved the riddle of Linear B. Among her papers in the archives of the University of Texas is an undated notebook in which she constructed a phonetic grid containing more than twenty Linear B characters--more than twice the number of her published grid. She never published this larger grid, nor did she assign sound-values to any character on it. But as Ventris's decipherment would show, her relative placement of every character was correct. She was clearly poised to make headway, if only she had been given time.

What is beyond doubt is this: Without Kober's work, Linear B would never have been unraveled as soon as it was, if ever. Her deep intellect, her single-minded resolve, and her ferocious rationalism made it possible to recapture the vanished key to the script, the earliest Greek writing of all.

A few years ago I saw Margalit Fox talk about her book The Riddle of the Labyrinth at Hunter College High School. The central figure of the book, classics professor Alice Kober, was a graduate of the high school and later a professor at the college when they were both women-only. Although both institutions are now co-ed (I have a degree from one and worked at the other), I wonder if Fox saw that there was something fitting about bringing Kober's story back to the place where she started, a place where talented and intelligent women were educated to lead exceptional lives, but lives that were inevitably circumscribed by their gender; Fox's book is the first to give Kober credit for her work in unraveling the script Linear B, which was for half a decade one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the academic world.

The modern story of Linear B goes like this: in the year 1900, archaeologist Arthur Evans excavated the site of a palace on the island of Crete which he considered to be the home of the legendary Cretan king Minos. What he uncovered was evidence of a flourishing civilization hundreds of years before the Greek classical age, including a collection of tablets in a completely unknown script. The script, called Linear B, proved nearly impossible to decipher because no one even knew what language the Minoans spoke. Over the next few decades, the decipherment of Linear B became a holy grail for professionals and amateurs alike, and it attracted innumerable theories. Some speculated that the tablets were written in Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language we've never been able to reconstruct; others theorized that it was a Polynesian language. It wasn't until 1952 that an amateur, an architect named Michael Ventris, deciphered the code, proving that the Linear B tablets recorded the earliest known examples of the Greek language.

Fox's day job is as an obituary writer for the New York Times. (In fact, when I saw her speak I thought she was going to talk about working for the obits.) She brings to The Riddle of the Labyrinth and obituarial eye, insofar as she uncovers the forgotten figure at the center of the story, the one between Evans and Ventris whose hard work enabled the decipherment, but whose work has been almost completely forgotten: Alice Kober. It was Kober who correctly identified Linear B as an inflected language (it uses word endings for grammatical purposes) and built the first "grid" that assigned syllabic sounds to the Linear B symbols. Without Kober's intuition and hard work, Ventris would never have been able to crack the code.

One of the really satisfying things about The Riddle of the Labyrinth is Fox's lucid explanations of the process that Kober and Ventris went through to decipher the language. Kober's breakthrough is one of those simple movements that good literary detectives make, which make everyone else look like fools: having assumed that the language of Linear B was inflected, she observed that you could match up symbols that started with the same consonant sound. (It takes a little bit longer than a paragraph like this to explain, but imagine if you had a script that recorded words like "kisses" and "kissing" using symbols that represented whole syllables. You'd have a symbol for "ki" and symbols for the sounds "sses" and "ssing"--but you would know those symbols both started with the same sound.) Fox's explanation of the codebreaking required to beat Linear B is fun and clear, and written on a really human scale.

But she also makes it clear that what was needed was not just cleverness or intuition. Kober's work was painstaking, and involved hours of labor, including the creation of an immense box of cards for each word, around the edges of which Kober punched holes so you could immediately see what symbols two or more words had in common. In the story that's been told about Linear B, it's Ventris' cleverness that gets lionized, especially because he fits our paradigm for the lone genius, working late at night--both an amateur and a man. But Kober, Fox shows, was no less clever than Ventris (maybe more so), and what's more, almost all of the gruntwork was hers. If she hadn't died so young of a mysterious illness, Kober might have beat Ventris to the prize, or perhaps they would have gotten there together.

Fox doesn't intend to take anything away from Ventris, who really did finally unlock the secrets of Linear B, but her framing is a challenge to the way we like these sort of stories to go. Linear B wasn't deciphered in a single stroke of genius, but thanks to the hard work of many people over many years, and the glory, as is so often the case, has never been appropriately distributed. The decipherment brought to light the forgotten lives of thousands of early ancient people; The Riddle of the Labyrinth does much the same for Alice Kober.

Party Going by Henry Green

Looking down then on thousands of Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys, woven tight as any office carpet or, more elegantly made, the holy Kaaba soon to set out for Mecca, with some kind of design made out of bookstalls and kiosks seen from above and through one part of that crowd having turned towards those who were singing, thus lightening the dark mass with their pale lozenged faces; observing how this design moved and was alive where in few lanes or areas people swayed forward or back like a pattern writhing; coughing as fog caught their two throats or perhaps it was smoke from those below who had put on cigarettes or pipes, because tobacco smoke was coming up in drifts; leaning out then, so secure, from their window up above and left by their argument on terms of companionship unalloyed, Julia and Max could not but feel infinitely remote, although at the same time Julia could not fail to be remotely excited at themselves.

The first sentence of Henry Green's Party Going is such a classic Greenism: "Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead at her feet." Of all the sentences in the books assembled together in this collection (which also contains Loving and Living), that one might be the most characteristic of Green: the tension between obscurity and simplicity, the chopped articles mimicking the immediacy of experience, the careful positioning of past and present (notice we never see the bird being disturbed, only in the state of having been disturbed).

The bird-watcher here is May Fellowes, a middle-aged woman here to see off her niece Evelyn as she heads off on a train trip with her friends to the south of France. Miss Fellowes picks up the dead bird, washes it in the ladies' room, and wraps it neatly in brown paper, a kind of memorial rite that looks strange from the outside, and does to us too until the carefully controlled Green lets Miss Fellowes account for her feelings later on in the text. The bird's death establishes, too, the novel's central problem: the dense fog isn't letting any trains leave, and so the traveling party of Evelyn and a half-dozen of her friends is stuck in the station until something changes. All of the novel's action takes place in the station or the hotel above it, where the party is sequestered away from the regular commuters.

Party Going is a strange novel. It seems like it's going to be a "bottle episode," where a set of people are thrown together in a room where their conflicts will come to kindling. But as a matter of fact, all the characters in Party Going are almost never in the room together. Max Adey, the wealthy but capricious "leader" of the group pays for three rooms: one for the group, one for Miss Fellowes to lie down in--she takes suddenly ill in what they speculate is a pigeon-related illness--and one for him to escape to, with or without one of the women he's hooking up with.

The others come in and out of these various rooms, going to search for each other or check on luggage or go down to the hotel bar: the selfish Alex, the group outsider Angela, her jealous fiance Robin, the tensely married Claire and Robert, and helpless Julia, desperately in love with Max. Julia's hoping that the trip will cement her relationship with Max, but she hasn't counted on the unexpected arrival of Amabel, the stunningly beautiful and sort of malicious social climber who considers Max her right.

One of the interesting tensions I've noticed in Green's writing is this: Party Going is a novel written on a very human scale, and the dramas are all quite small, and entirely interior: this person wants to be liked by the group, this person wants to be loved by Max, this person wants to make her husband jealous, etc., etc. But at the same time, Green's famous for obscuring the motivations behind dialogue; he hardly ever explains the tone of voice someone uses or the face they make when they say something. It's supposed to mirror the actual experience of conversation, where nothing is ever clear, but when the entire drama of the novel centers on what people are thinking and feeling, it makes the whole thing a frustrating shell game.

The characters in Party Going are like the negative image of the characters in Loving, a novel about the Irish servants of a British castle, and Living, a novel about ironworkers in the north of England. In those novels, people struggle to make their lives meaningful within the structures that capital has created for them, but the characters in Party Going are the idle rich. When they escape to the hotel, a great steel barrier is set down in front of the door to keep the ordinary rabble from entering. The hotel is a cloistered space where the "party" can literally look down on the "thousands of Smiths" below and worry about the possibility that they'll break down the door. Almost without exception, the characters are awful: though Miss Fellowes goes out of her way to administer last rites to a pigeon, her niece and the others treat her sudden illness as a bother that might keep them from boarding the train when it finally runs. When they're not engaged in petty emotional games with each other, the whole group can't stop talking about a gossipy scandal about a socialite who may or may not have written a letter to the newspaper saying he wasn't invited to an embassy party. (This story was mostly inscrutable to me, honestly.)

Which means that, though finely wrought and impressively controlled, there's little to love in Party Going. It's a novel about bad people, and I found myself mostly hoping the train would finally depart, only to roll over all of their shins. As an expression of the way that money and class poison people's brains, it works tremendously well. But I'd rather spend time with the servants and the ironworkers.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Yeah, well, he says to Marianne.  I wasn’t that compatible with Rachel, I don’t think.

Marianne smiles now, a coy little smile.  Hm, she says.

What?

I probably could have told you that.

Yeah, you should have, he says.  You weren’t really replying to my texts at the time.

Well, I felt somewhat abandoned.

I felt a bit abandoned myself, didn’t I? says Connell.  You disappeared.  And I never had anything to do with Rachel until ages after that, by the way.  Not that it matters now or anything, but I didn’t.

Normal People is a very simple novel, telling the story of Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan and the viscitudes of their relationship over four years beginning in high school.  When we meet them they are in the Irish equivalent of twelfth grade, taking tests and applying to university.  Connell is the mildly handsome, popular, athletic son of a single mother who cleans houses for a living.  Marianne is nerdy, unpopular and unattractive.  She has no friends despite being from a wealthy family.  Her redeeming feature in the opening is that she is willing to keep her growing friendship with Connell secret so that he won’t need to reveal that they know each other because his mother cleans her mother’s house.  

Of course, he also won’t have to risk the social cost of befriending someone of such low standing and as their relationship develops into a seemingly loving sexual one, he continues to keep it secret, only occasionally admitting his true reasons:  he is insecure enough to fear social estrangement.  Marianne is submissive enough to let him get away with this for a time.  In fact, much of the novel involves Marianne getting over a serious problem with submitting to the whims of men while Connell learns to be honest with himself.

A friend who is a very astute reader dismissed the novel as “slight,” and the criticism is not unfounded.  The plot involves Connell and Marianne breaking up and getting back together four or five times over the course of 4 years.  He asks another girl to the Debs (apparently like an American prom) despite the fact that he is sleeping with Marianne and she finally dumps him.  But they both go to Dublin (their hometown is near Sligo in the west of Ireland) and when they meet again in college Connell is lonely and estranged by his poverty (he is on scholarship) while Marianne has taken advantage of the opportunity to start over, and is thriving away from her abusive family.  They meet at the party and renew their relationship.  From that point on the pattern is clear – if they are together at the beginning of the chapter, they will break up by the end.  If they are separated at the beginning of the chapter, they will get back together in that chapter.  

However, I found their relationship both moving and absolutely believable.  Rooney paints them as complex and compelling characters.  She has a great ability to capture the thinking of each character in compressed interior scenes combined with a great visual knack for portraying them as moving, talking, breathing in ways that illuminate their interior lives.  This externalization or dramatization of their interior lives is what really moves the book forward.  Though there is very little dramatic action, there is a great sense of theater in watching them circle closer and farther away from each other.

There is also a great old-fashioned sense that they belong together – even their earliest conversations are intensely emotional and honest.  The missed communication and immaturity that keeps getting in the way seems realistically frustrating and I sensed their relationship spiraling towards something rather than just repeating itself.

Throughout all this, Rooney gives us a fairly deep and realistic sense of their psychology.  Connell is the only child of a single mother who has never revealed who his father is.  While they have a healthy relationship, he struggles with a deep-seated sense of self-loathing that stems in part from his fear that his mother regrets having him.  Marianne’s homelife is full of physical and emotional abuse and she tends to get involved with men who dominate and abuse her – Connell’s secrecy being the least of it.  Her later relationships are frankly and openly sadomasochistic and whenever they are together Connell understands that he can do whatever he would like to her.  It is the tale of them learning how to deal with that dynamic that deepens and broadens the novel.

I enjoyed the book immensely and will miss these characters.  I know I have the mini-series to look forward to, but I think that – for her visual sense, her compression and her humanism, I will look into her other novel.

The Red Record by Ida B. Wells

The statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been tried, convicted, and executed.

I'm not sure if this is really a book. It's less than 100 pages long and the last chapter is guidance on how to distribute the work. But I doubt anyone reading it is going to be itching for more by the time they reach the end.

The Red Record was written by Ida B. Wells in the late 1800s as part of her crusade against the lynchings of black men, women, and children that were taking place across the US in the aftermath of the Civil War and emancipation. And the numbers are indeed staggering--at least 10,000 by the records available, a number which is certainly missing many of the murders that were committed with no fanfare.

Most of the content is statistics and then expansion on those numbers. The chapters have names like "Lynching of Innocent Men" and "Lynched for Anything or Nothing". They open with breakdowns of lynchings for various "crimes":

INCENDIARISM
Jan. 26, Patrick Wells, Quincy, Fla.; Feb. 9, Frank Harrell, Dickery, Miss.; Feb. 9, William Filder, Dickery, Miss. 

ATTEMPTED RAPE
Feb. 21, Richard Mays, Springville, Mo.; Aug. 14, Dug Hazleton, Carrollton, Ga.; Sept. 1, Judge McNeil, Cadiz, Ky.; Sept. 11, Frank Smith, Newton, Miss.; Sept. 16, William Jackson, Nevada, Mo.; Sept. 19, Riley Gulley, Pine Apple, Ala.; Oct. 9, John Davis, Shorterville, Ala.; Nov. 8, Robert Kennedy, Spartansburg, S.C.

After the statistics, Wells includes firsthand accounts by participants in the lynchings, white reporters and, in a couple instances, herself. These recountings are stomach-churning: shootings (shooting corpses with literally hundreds of bullets was a popular activity), hangings, rapes, mutilations, torture, branding, decapitation, and I could go on. And some of these accounts do, telling the stories of the victims who weren't given a chance to speak for themselves. And Wells doesn't play for cheap sympathy. Whether lynching is for no reason, or because "someone has to hang", or suspicion of actual crimes, she consistently says the same thing: that Black people are entitled to the same due processes as white people. The number of people in these stories that were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time is staggering, as is the number of police, judges, mayors, and governors who either turn a blind eye or are actively involved in the lynchings.

I'm hesitant to include the most horrific excerpts here, since it's so easy for recounting violence against black bodies to turn into pornographic spectacle, but here's an example:

He said when they came in and shot his father, he attempted to run out of doors and a young man shot him in the bowels and that he fell. He saw another man shoot his mother and a taller young man, whom he did not know, shoot his father. After they had killed them, the young man who had shot his mother pulled off her stockings and took $220 in currency that she had hid there. The men then came to the door where the boy was lying and one of them turned him over and put his pistol to his breast and shot him again. This is the story the dying boy told as near as I can get it.

Of course, it's impossible to read Wells' work at this time in history, when protests are still happening across the US in response to George Floyd's murder by the police, and when all of us can run off a list of 25 lynchings that we watched happen on camera, often at the hands of law enforcement. Much faster to list the names of those held accountable for their crimes. And the penultimate chapter, which recounts issues Wells had when presenting her case to various women's organizations shows how little the responses of white people have changed, as person after person passes the buck ("not our fault"), feigns offense at being lumped in with those who are ACTUALLY complicit, and both-sides lynching with, say, Prohibition. It's a depressing, upsetting read. Inspiring that Wells was able to do the work she did to end 1890s-style lynching; depressing to see how racism and hatred have morphed into the racially-motivated violence we still see daily. The Red Record captures a moment Wells tried to bring to an end. Sadly, it often seems like we're still living in it.

White Walls by Tatyana Tolstaya

But the people who sing noisily in the fire and smoke in the invalid's illegal mouth--aren't they also searching for a way out of their own universe, diving, jumping, dancing, glancing from under their hands toward the ocean horizon, seeing off and meeting the ships: Hello, sailors, what have you brought us--rugs? plague? earrings? herring? Tell us quickly, is there another life, and which way should we run to seize its gilded edges?

None of the stories in Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya's collection White Walls is like her post-apocalyptic novel The Slynx because every one of them is set firmly in the mid-to-late 20th century, among the petit bourgeois of the Soviet Union. And yet almost all of them somehow feel like The Slynx, with its palpable odor, its atmosphere of decay, its fairytale-like fantasy. But the fairytales in Tolstaya's stories are confined to the mind, to the nearly inarticulable private experience of the individual.

All of these stories really feature only two kinds of characters: little children, whose fairytales are quite literal and literally taken, and grown-ups, whose fairytales are no less complex or vivid, but who bury them beneath the social modes of the middle classes; while they talk about overcoats and pastries, desires churn within them in the shape of monsters, fairies, princesses, creatures. When it comes to children, Tolstaya's talent reminded me of Mavis Gallant's, whose also able to slip ingeniously between realism and the landscape of a child's mind, but Gallant always seems so controlled, whereas Tolstaya's prose is riotous and overstuffed--more appropriate, perhaps, to the experience of children. Tolstaya is likely to change from past tense to present to subjunctive and from the third to the second person all on the same page, and her sentences are so metaphorical it's hard to dig beneath them to find a sense of realism at all.

It's the adults, though, that stick with me. Tolstaya's adults are the heirs of her children; they're people who were told that growing up is a process toward a blessed life, but who never seem to find it. They are like the insidious Natasha of "The Poet and the Muse," who believes "she'd certainly earned the right to happiness, she was entitled to a place in the line where it was being handed out," or like the main character of "The Circle":

At times Vassily Mikhailovich imagined that he would finish out this life and begin a new one in a new image. He fussily selected his age, an era, his looks: sometimes he wanted to be born a fiery southern youth; or a medieval alchemist; or the daughter of a millionaire; or a widow's beloved cat; or a Persian king.

In one of my favorite passages from this story, Vassily Mikhailovich becomes the owner of a Rubik's cube, that symbol of the possibility of transformation and perfection:

Having stood four hours in the cold along with thousands of grim fellow sect members, Vassily Mikhailovich became the owner of the marvelous cube and spent weeks twisting and twisting its creaking movable facets, until his eyes grew red, waiting in vain for the light to another universe to shine at last through the window. But sensing one night that of the two of them, the real master was the cube, which was doing whatever it wanted to with helpless Vassily Mikhailovich, he got up, went to the kitchen, and chopped up the monster with a cleaver.

Our fantasies control us, Tolstaya says, and not the other way around. I first heard of Tolstaya because the band Okkervil River named themselves after one of her stories; in "Okkervil River" a hermit dreams of meeting an old pop singer whose music he listens to every night. And then he looks her up and really does meet her, but it turns out that he's just one of a dozen admirers who meet at her house as a kind of club, and before he knows it, she's coming over to his apartment regularly to use his bathtub.

After reading the fifteen-odd stories collected here, I don't think I could tell you what half of them are about. It's not that they're so similar--though, like I said, the characters follow familiar patterns--but that any of Tolstaya's stories is liable to erupt at any minute into severe pyschedelic weirdness, like an angel riding a bus, and they sort of blend together in one long phantasmagoria. Is it literal weirdness? Metaphorical weirdness? Is the angel really on the bus? Before you can really consider the question, Tolstaya's already moved on.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely. Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for the outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I'd dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.

Adam Gordon is an American poet on fellowship in Madrid. He tells people that he's there to study, and write poetry about, the effects of the Spanish Civil War. His Spanish is a little rusty, and he's addicted to what he calls "little white pills"; a combination which can have unfortunate consequences, as when he's unable to stop smiling as a woman tells a clearly upsetting story he does not comprehend, which leads to someone punching him in the face. The punch itself is not so bad, honestly; it has an immediacy and a recognizable quality of experience that is different from what really torments Adam, which is the anguish of his own interiority: the distance from experience, the inability to communicate, and the uselessness of words.

Why not stay at home, someone asks him, and write about the United States of Bush? Why come to Spain and write poetry about their fascists? But Adam's fellowship in Spain, we come to understand, is not actually an attempt to face history and experience but to flee from them. His bad Spanish is not actually a problem to be overcome but a safety net. He can utter half-formed sentences and others--especially women--will supply the missing meaning, allowing him to seem in profound or mystical. When he fails to understand the motivations or needs of others, he can blame it on the difficulty of translation; when he is frightened of being understood himself he can retreat into it. Translation in Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a kind of metaphor for the whole experience of postmodern life, and its difficulties legitimize alienation and loneliness.

Adam speaks in the language of critical theory:

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability.

I had a hard time with Atocha at first because I couldn't figure out of this was wholly sincere or if it was parody. Who talks like that? Ultimately, I decided that the answer was both: Adam's alienation and general sad-sackery are real, and the language is both an attempt to make sense of it and to push it away. It wouldn't work at all if it weren't combined with a narrative heavy on farce: Adam, for example, courts sympathy by telling women his mother has died, and then when he accidentally brings her up in conversation, invents a half-dozen other pointless lies instead of coming clean. Language won't really allow us to come clean, Adam seems to tell himself, and while that may be true it doesn't explain why he's such a piece of shit half the time.

The book clicked for me about a third of the way through when Adam hears a story from a friend, by way of text, about an accidental drowning in Mexico. It's somehow both shocking and funny: Lerner's rendition of the text chain is one of the most accurate uses of modern technology I've ever seen in a novel, and it's incredibly pathetic. (How can you tell a story like that when each party has to stop every few lines to say "you still there?") And of course later on Adam steals the horrible story and tells it like it's his own to impress a girl. But the drowning, even filtered through technological hearsay, is the interruption of postmodern alienation by the real.

The same thing happens in the book's late stages when Adam finds himself in the middle of the Madrid train bombings of 2004. What can a poet do to affect history? Probably nothing, Adam admits on a panel, half gleefully because it absolves him of the attempt--but history, reality, experience, violence, these things keep appearing in your life whether your critical apparatus is prepared for them or not. A novel about terrorism and critical theory seems like it ought to be a real drag. It's a credit to Lerner, who is clearly only separated from Adam by the thinnest shade, that Leaving the Atocha Station is both funny and affecting.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Emil stood looking down at her, holding his shoulders stiff and stiffening the arm to which she clung. Her white dress looked gray in the darkness. She seemed like a troubled spirit, like some shadow out of the earth, clinging to him and entreating him to give her peace. Behind her the fireflies were weaving in and out over the wheat. He put his hand on her bent head. "On my honor, Marie, if you will say you love me, I will go away."

She lifted her face to his. "How could I help it? Don't you know?"

Emil was the one who trembled, through all his frame. After he left Marie at her gate, he wandered the fields all night, till morning put out the fireflies and the stars.

I tried to read O Pioneers! several years ago while driving through Nebraska. It opens with the young Alexandra Bergson asking Carl Linstrum to save her brother Emil's cat from where it's climbed up an icy pole. Winter on "the Divide" is a gray and monotonous thing, even for a place that feels monotonous even in the summer, and Cather's prose is grown in that soil: spare, cautious, without adornment. It's beautiful, if you know how to look, but it's not going to tell you how to look. In that way, it's a lot like Nebraska. Anyway, the combination of being in Nebraska and reading about Nebraska in Nebraskan prose was too much for me and I had to put it away.

Reading it now, I'm sorry I let it go too quickly. O Pioneers! is a beautiful love letter to the Nebraska of Cather's youth, and it's a bittersweet counterpart to the (mostly) more optimistic My Antonia. Cather's main characters are all established in that first scene: Alexandra, who is entrusted pages later to keep up the land by her dying father; Carl, a man she loves who ends up leaving Nebraska; Emil, the sensitive young boy who will hopefully be the beneficiary of the prosperity Alexandra promise to her father; and Marie Tovesky, the curly-haired darling who plays with Emil as a child and later marries the moody, tragic Frank Shabata.

O Pioneers! moves across time in fits and starts. We get to see Alexandra fulfill the promise she made to her father, buying up adjacent lots and turning the Bergson homestead into the most successful on the Divide. But prosperity brings change, and ruins her selfish brothers Lou and Oscar, whose masculine entitlement makes them believe they, and not Alexandra, are the ones responsible. Prosperity allows Emil to move to Mexico City to escape his hopeless love for Marie Shabata. And it wreaks changes on the land itself, too, which grows and changes, though something of the pioneer spirit that dominated its early days is a little lost. Alexandra and Emil, who are the novel's twin moral centers, are perhaps the only one with enough perspective to see this, and its bittersweet nature finds expression in the symbol of a wild duck:

Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun. In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade. They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasures. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, "Sister, you know our duck down there'--" Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.

My first impressions of O Pioneers! was that it was a lot like My Antonia, though perhaps a little simpler and more pastoral. Alexandra Bergson has the same determination as Antonia, but it's rarely in any opposition to the land, or to the new society that grows up around the homestead; she moves in it more easily and naturally. All that is to say I wasn't prepared for O Pioneers! to end the way it did, with violence and bloodshed breaking into the peaceful nature of the plains. Death is a part of both books for sure, but mostly it comes in the form of illness, exhaustion, or age. As Emil thinks, looking on the grave of a friend, "That, too, was beautiful, that simple doorway into forgetfulness." (What sins I might happily commit to write a sentence like that just once in my life.) In retrospect, that should have been a warning that Emil's attitude is bound to be challenged. I liked Antonia better, but O Pioneers! shocked me, which is something I hadn't really expected from Cather.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

He put his fingers around the phone in his lap. The phone slipped away with a clatter that echoed in the concrete cylinder, and he let himself collapse toward it. He had his mouth by the phone. He had a finger on the button. He needed to make his finger press it. He couldn't make it happen.

No problem. If he could keep his eyes open, he wasn't dead. Lying on his belly he stared at the red spectacle of his life as it traveled past his face and headed away from him through the dust. That's all he needed to do now. He needed to keep seeing his blood.

Jimmy Luntz is competing with his barbershop chorus in the city of Alhambra outside Los Angeles when Gambol, a stooge working for a man who holds Luntz's gambling debts, picks him up and drives him far out of town. The plan is to break one of his legs or arms but in the woods seven hours north Luntz manages to overtake Gambol and shoot him in the leg. While tossing the gun into a river, he encounters Anita Desilvera, a woman who's recently been framed by her husband and a corrupt judge for embezzling two million dollars. The pair gravitate toward each other, both on the run, and together they might be able to make off with the stolen money and escape from Gambol and his associates.

Nobody Move is a love letter to the hard-boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The prose is brisk and filled with quips, and the story is violent: one of the best moments comes when Anita rips out the wheelchair-bound judge's colostomy bag and hits him in the face with it. (In case you're wondering, it does, in fact, burst.) To me, it was most reminiscent of No Country for Old Men, a book about ordinary people whose mixup with criminal elements thrusts them into a race against time, against violence, and for a great deal of money, and which is equally indebted to Chandler and Hammett. And like No Country for Old Men, I only had an approximate sense of the causality behind the various twists and turns. To his credit, Johnson knows that sometimes even hapless Luntzes get the better of wizened criminals like Gambol; violence is difficult to control and luck more likely to run out than remain.

The main thing a book like this has to do is be fun, and it is. It just zips by; I read the whole thing yesterday. But the pared-down prose robs you of some of the expected joys of reading a Denis Johnson book, and I liked the novel best when there were flashes of Johnsonian weirdness, as when Anita--having, spoiler alert, just killed her husband--sees his apparition copying her movements across a river. Or the fact that one of the goons is, without explanation, called "the Tall Man" for pages before you find out he's five-foot-eight.

The thing that connects it best to books like Angels or Jesus' Son is that it's about a couple of real down and out losers. Luntz is a loser because he has a gambling addict (and a member of a barbershop chorus), and Anita is made a loser by her husband (although she's also clearly an alcoholic), but Nobody Move is driven by the tantalizingly equivalent possibilities that they'll make off with a million dollars or be unceremoniously shot. You might even read the title, which might as well be the title of an Elmore Leonard novel, as a subtle hint at the explosive possibilities of crime to punish and reward.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

"So God just leaves?" John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!"

"No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

"Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. "'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.'"

"But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.

Well, this is the quickest I've ever got to fifty. All in all, I'd trade this year's fast pace for not having a deadly pandemic, but here we are.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow is about the first mission to make contact with a newly discovered alien species, only the catch is this: it's not the governments of the world who send the mission, but the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, who get the jump on everyone else. The heart of the mission is a Puerto Rican Jesuit priest and linguist named Emilio Sandoz, who undertakes the mission secretly with the help of a ragtag crew. The novel works in flashback, beginning when Sandoz is captured on the alien planet of Rakhat and sent back to Earth as the most hated man in the universe, a prostitute and murderer, and the only member of the mission to survive. The central question the novel withholds is, how did a mission of Christian love go so wrong?

This novel really ought to be right up my alley. In fact, I selected it for my 50th because I thought I would love it, but I didn't. The first 300 pages or so are all prelude, as we see Sandoz connect with the group of loved ones who will become his fellow missionaries/astronauts: a beautiful Jewish programmer, a Texan pilot, an eager young radio operator, an older couple who serve as surrogate parents. That Sandoz's friends and relations turn out to have discrete and necessary skills for the mission is described as a kind of fate, a suggestion that God has blessed and arranged the mission. And the novel works hard, too hard, to establish the connection between these characters, mostly with bad jokes and scenes of bonhomie that mostly made me impatient to get into space.

Once the mission gets to Rakhat, things improve: Doria Russell, who I believe is an anthropologist, describes a stratified society where two species are locked in a cultural state of predator-prey dependency: the more developed Jana'ata keep the simpler Runa as contracted gatherers and servants. The missionaries befriend both species, and Sandoz works his linguistic magic so they can converse, but the introduction of humans threatens the ancient arrangement. As with a lot of science fiction, my principal reaction was that the aliens aren't weird enough: what are the chances that life on other planets is bipedal, or capitalist, or has a language humans are able to reproduce with speech? I can get on board with Star Trek, but it seems to me a novel about the challenges first contact loses some credibility when aliens look and talk so much like us.

Doria Russell make several allusions to earlier Jesuit missions of the kind that accompanied European colonists in the New World. Maybe it's just because I read Fathers and Crows, but I think it's hard to look at those Jesuits with anything but contempt. Sandoz and company don't try to convert the people of Rakhat; their intentions are only to learn. But it seems to me there's a puzzling lack of thought about the destabilizing presence of humans, given what the Jesuits and colonizers of the early modern era did to human communities. In The Sparrow, it's the introduction of food gardens that spark violence, giving the friendly Runa the excess energy to reproduce without Jana'ata permission. I mean, who could have thought that planting species from another planet might have long-reaching effects?

But that gets to what I felt was the larger failing of The Sparrow. Like the Jesuit colonizers, it has a severe lack of interest in how first contact might affect the contacted, and chooses to focus on the consequences for the colonizers instead. The pain that becomes the focus of the novel is Sandoz's, having returned from Rakhat in a ruined state both physically and psychologically. The metaphor of the sparrow is applied to his own suffering, but if there are rippling effects on Rakhat of the Jesuits' actions, the novel isn't interested in them except as facets of Sandoz's guilt. That didn't work for me.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

'So you're in love with her?' she went on.

A word again... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.

As a child, David is taught by his father that genetic aberration is a sin. When a crop shows signs of mutation, it is burned, and the same is done--in secret--when genetic aberrations appear on infant children. This belief is woven into the society in which David and his father live: according to their Bible, because man is made in the image of God, those things which seem to differ from the standard image are works of the Devil to be feared and destroyed. "Accursed is the mutant," goes one verse, "in the eyes of God and Man."

These ideologies, Wyndham suggests, are the result of some kind of nuclear cataclysm. David and his family live in post-apocalyptic Labrador (sweet), ringed in by "Fringes" where mutants are exiled, which themselves bleed into the horrible "Badlands." Nuclear disaster, it seems, has caused these "aberrations," but so too has it created a religion in which the pre-disaster "Old People" are revealed and genetic purity seen as the route back to a pre-lapsarian state. Truth be told, it's an idea that's been done to death, from X-Men to Divergent: mutants are always symbolic of the repressed other, but Wyndham did it early and well; nothing about The Chrysalids seems hackneyed or shallow.

There's only one way this kind of story can go: David slowly comes to realize, by befriending a mutant, that not all difference is bad. Here that's Sophie, a young girl who David plays with before noticing, after she gets her foot stuck in a crevice, that she has six toes. But as David grows up, he realizes that he himself is a kind of mutant: he shares a telepathic link with six other young people in his community, including his cousin and lover Rosalind and his little sister Petra. What feels natural to him turns out to be a genetic aberration so severe that its discovery could send his entire community into uproar and lead to his own destruction.

The link between David and the others seems like a classic symbol for radical empathy. I've been thinking about that, empathy. You see it in books everywhere. Is it a copout? You could make a case, I think, that a science fiction novel like The Chrysalids offers an insufficient solution to social diseases like nationalism and racism. Individual empathy is good, but only to the extent that informs structural and systemic reform. But there's a reason, I think, that the most dogmatically social realist books seem so forced: a novel can reflect social structures and propose new ones, but it can't enact them. A novel, however, enacts empathy by putting us in someone's head; here, it puts us in several heads, minds that are so closely tied together they become one mind. As a political solution, it doesn't help, but it makes The Chrysalids something more than a mere allegory or fable.

The Chrysalids hit a real sweet spot for me. It's not afraid to go for broke: Petra's telepathy skills turn out to be so powerful she can communicate with a colony of telepaths in New Zealand, who come to the rescue of the protagonists. It seemed to draw from some of the best parts of mid-century pulp science fiction, but it was written before those aspects had to be done with a tongue in cheek to seem relevant. The worldbuilding is smart, but not too smart or complex, and the simple chase narrative of the second half really worked.

Playing in the Dark – Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature – even the cause – of literary “whiteness.”  What is it for?  What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as American?

These three linked essays were given as the Massey Lectures in American Studies at Harvard in 1992, just before Morrison published Jazz.  While the ideas here are complex, her delivery is easy going – erudite without being obscure.  While no doubt her central ideas about whiteness are more familiar to us now, she makes what was a radical leap in interpreting American literature seem effortless.

Her central point is easily summarized:  even though African American writers are largely suppressed in the first 150 years of our culture, and even though white writers created few black characters and paid scant attention to black life, because American society and culture was centered on the exploitation of Africans and then African Americans and because every aspect of American political and economic life was suffused with issues of relations between the races, there is a distinct Africanist (her word) presence in all of American literature.  She argues that this is a fruitful avenue for future literary criticism.  Now, thirty years later, we know she was correct, as issues of whiteness and the Africanist aspects of American culture have been so much more widely recognized and analyzed.  Still her arguments are powerful and relevant.  Each chapter (or lecture) centers on one major work’s Africanism, while mentioning several others.

First is the Willa Cather novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The novel centers on the handicapped white woman Sapphira’s fear that her husband is going to betray her by raping her personal attendant, the beautiful, teenaged Nancy.  Sapphira punishes Nancy for this possibility in a number of ways (including attempting to get another white man to rape her) and pushes Nancy to run away.  The novel is clearly a mediation on power, with the focus on Sapphira’s limited power.  Morrison shifts the focus to what the novel says about the concept of whiteness by analyzing the actions and feelings of Nancy’s mother – who aids both her mistress’s plots and her daughter’s escape.  In this reading, Sapphira’s status as a white woman is defined by her ability to torture Nancy and her mother.  When Nancy successfully escapes, Sapphira is mystified and loses some part of her identity as white – the balance of her need for Nancy’s assistance and her near total power over Nancy’s life is what defines her whiteness.

The second major black character Morrison identifies is Wesley, the nearly silent, often unnamed deckhand in Ernest Hemmingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937).   Morrison makes clear that Wesley is one of a number of black characters in Hemingway works who silently and namelessly to help and care for the white male protagonist.  She gives an excellent close reading of passages involving Wesley, and other characters, paying attention to when they are allowed to speak, what they say, when they are given names and when they are simply referred to by the N-word (which Morrison has no compunction about using).  What she makes clear is that Harry Morgan’s identity as a fiercely independent, capable and principled white man is entirely dependent on his relationship with these black characters, both because they lack any personal agency or principles beyond momentary pleasure and because they are occasionally angry and outspoken.  It is the Hemingway character’s willingness to put up with these outbursts that proves his principled independence.  Hemingway sets up a straw-man in the form of a  dependent and subservient black man – whose very identity is centered on his subservient dependence – and then proves his character’s better qualities by having him allow this stereotype to step out of his defined identity for a moment.  His whiteness is defined by this balancing act – he can dominate but he does not have to.

Finally, Morrison discusses the character of Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (1885) She is not terribly interested in Jim’s character – nor does she seem terribly impressed by Twain’s accomplishment in making him fully human.  What interests her is how Jim’s continual humiliation and re-enslavement is necessary for the novel to continue to explore freedom.  In the mistake of missing Cairo (and Jim’s chance at freedom), in the continual humiliation of Jim – especially in the final chapters, but at various points throughout the novel – and in the way that Jim is granted his freedom in the end, she sees Twain’s dilemma in creating a concept of freedom within an American culture that is so bound to color restrictions.  In her view, Huck, Tom Sawyer and Twain himself can only exist as white, can only be vehicles for the exploration of freedom, if Jim is available as a continual reminder of bondage.  Jim cannot become an autonomous being who grabs his own freedom – having been developed as a cogent and rational adult, he must be reconverted into an absurd, ignorant child incapable of independence before he is granted that independence by the ghost of his master.

There is another category of literary whiteness Morrison is interested in exploring – images of whiteness that are presented as if they are separate from social breakdowns of skin color.  The most obvious of these, which Morrison has discussed in other essays, is Melville’s great whale in Moby Dick (1851).  Here, she discusses, too briefly, the white world at the end of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.  Poe’s band of adventurers have reached the end of their resources and, adrift on a lifeboat, they encounter first an unusual white light emanating from the sea (contrasting with the sudden darkness of the sky) and then a shrouded white figure, vastly larger than an ordinary human and of “the perfect whiteness of the snow.”  Poe being Poe, the figure’s import is left mysterious and the meaning of whiteness goes unexplored.  For Morrison it is the finality of the image that gives it its importance.  Like Melville’s whale or the snow on the top of Kilimanjaro that ends Hemingway’s short story, this image of purity and infinity is touched with evil, with death, with an unknowable power.  In these moments, American writers seem to see whiteness as both a goal and a dilemma – the impossibility of a vision of whiteness without blackness is a trope in American literature that reflects an essential truth about American culture and society:  they do not exist without their Africanist elements.

While most critics of American culture have long appreciated that there is no American culture without the contributions of African American writers, artists, musicians and thinkers, Morrison would expand the importance of these Africanist elements to recognize their impact on white writers, artists, musicians and thinkers.

Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo

Vince was here, so clearly that she didn't need to talk to him. She couldn't see him but felt his presence and it was as if this was the very opportunity her confused thoughts were waiting for. Slowly the darkness in her mind lifted. She didn't tell Vince how hard it had been waiting for him, and how impossible it was to describe the dreadful emptiness of life without him because Vince knew all that, and he wasn't going to say where he'd been and what he'd been doing. Strange how quickly he had become part of the new estate. There was nothing frightening or disturbing about him; everything was as natural as it had been throughout their lives together; it was just that he had turned into a house, a set of buildings, a light bulb. The strange thing was how easy it was to assemble him from such tiny fragments. How could a man turn into a building? What material might he be made of? It was a pity he couldn't speak and tell her what she wanted to know.

Iza's Ballad is about two women, a mother and a daughter, and how each of their lives is transformed the death of Vince, their husband and father. Ettie has been with Vince for most of her life, and his death leaves her life deflated, emptied out of its essence or being. She takes comfort in the practicality and judgment of their daughter Iza, who has decided to take her mother away from the old house in the village where she grew up and take her to live with her in modern Budapest. Ettie is grateful for Iza's ability to see clearly and act prudently when she herself is bewildered, but Iza's plan turns out to be a real stinker: there is no room in Iza's life for Ettie, and in Budapest she begins to waste away.

The setup might seem like it leads to comedy, as the old woman's country manners clash with the young woman's citified ways. But Iza's Ballad is not a comedy, and the small ways Iza unwittingly robs the old woman of her life actually seem more tragic because they are so small: the items not taken from the old house, the furniture taken but reupholstered, the cook who prevents the old woman from cooking meals. Ettie is hopelessly out of her element in Budapest and a danger to modern appliances; it's easy to be sympathetic to Iza, whose want to look after her mother is sincere. But as Ettie becomes more and more despondent, Iza's practicality begins to look too aloof, too suffocating, too emotionless.

Iza's Ballad is one of those books where the characters' histories must be laid out in every detail before the author is satisfied that they have become real. Behind the conflict between Ettie and Iza there are innumerable decades, centering, naturally, on Vince the husband and Vince the father. It seems that Vince had once been a judge in the small village, and had been removed and disgraced after standing up for some defendant (I was not totally clear on this) against the pressures of Nazified Hungary. To Iza, history like this is part of a past that modern Budapest seems to have left behind. To her ex-husband Antal, whose life has been entwined with Vince's and Ettie's as much as Iza's, this past must be preserved; so much so that he even buys the old house from Ettie and Iza when they move to Budapest. Iza's Ballad has a few minor characters like this, including Iza's boyfriend Domokos and Antal's fiancee Lidia, who have become so entangled with the family that they too deserve their own viewpoint sections.

Iza's Ballad disturbed me because it seems to recognize a fundamental and cosmic tragedy in what are common experiences: every couple must experience, to some degree, what Ettie goes through when Vince dies, and it's horrible. The tragedy is compounded by Iza's inability to understand it; her take-charge attitude is in the end, only a shield to keep her from feeling, but even if she were to marry Domokos, or return to Antal, wouldn't she, too, end up like Ettie in the end? And the novel's all the more disturbing because it refuses, as you might expect, to give Ettie and Iza a moment of reconciliation or mutual understanding. The disconnect between them is resilient, permanent, and perhaps more indicative of the way we relate to our own parents--or children--than we'd like to think.