Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

I had certainly seen my fair share of animal bones, either happening upon them in the woods or excavating them from a fresh hunt. Something felt different about this one. I couldn't quite place it. Maybe it was because it was in Asheville, an environment I assumed was devoid of elemental remnants such as discarded bones, castoff feathers, and rock faces that scowl like relatives. There was brick and concrete and glass and steel in Asheville, for certain--anything else seemed misplaced. The bone, in such a tangible state, reminded me of home and what I loved about home--the simplicity of knowing what each day held and the certainty that people said what they meant and meant what they said. There were no flashy distractions, but there was strength, there was resolve, and they were foundational. I knew exactly where I stood and when to stand there. I had wanted so badly to fit into the shine of Asheville, but it never seemed to fit me.

The Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee isn't really a reservation, which refers to a piece of land set aside by the government for Indians; it's a piece of land that was never truly ceded to the United States. The Cherokee who live there are living in a place where they can trace their lineage back dozens of generations, unlike those Cherokee who were forced to move to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears, where there was no history, no roots. Cowney Sequoyah is a young Cherokee man who has taken a position as a groundskeeper at the Grove Park Inn in nearby Asheville during World War II. He travels there along with Essie, a Cherokee girl taking a position of maid, and with whom Cowney falls desperately in love. But at the hotel he faces fierce prejudice from his coworkers, and from the soldiers who are bivouacked there, guarding what has become an ad hoc jail for prisoners of war.

Even As We Breathe is made up of several strands: there's Cowney's mooning for Essie, who has spurned him for an Italian prisoner of war. There's a human bone that Cowney finds while groundskeeping, and a missing Japanese girl whose disappearance--when put beside the mysterious bone--puts Cowney at suspicion. The investigation into the girl's disappearance is what gives the book much of its energy, even though the situation is clearly and clumsily contrived: as Cowney points out, only stupidity--and bigotry--could draw a connection between a polished human bone and a recently missing girl. There's also a plot, which perhaps makes up the novel's true soul, about Cowney coming to understand his dead father's exploits in World War I, and the nature of his death, which is kept a secret by Cowney's cruel and bitter uncle, Bud.

There's rich material here, and a few lost opportunities. There's a connection drawn between the racism faced by Cowney in Asheville and a racism, not much discussed, that his father faced during his own wartime experiences. And Clapsaddle draws a contrast between the ritzy "jazz city" of Asheville (somewhat undermined by the hotel's use as a prison camp) and the deeper, more natural relationship Cowney has with the land of his forefathers. But the prisoners of war are narrative nonentities; the missing Japanese girl and Essie's Italian lover are more or less plot devices that never get a perspective, or even dialogue, of their own, and the possibility of further entanglements--for instance, Bud's suggestion that Cowney try to sell bear gallbladder (?) to the captured Japanese--never bear fruit.

I say this is a missed opportunity because there's an interesting parallel to be drawn between the otherness of Cowney and Essie and the foreign prisoners, who are called "guests" with a kind of grim irony. Clapsaddle plays the mystery of Cowney's father's death as a kind of personal awakening for Cowney, at the expense of any richer understanding of the role of Native Americans in the U.S. military. What does it mean, for instance, that Cowney, born with a lame foot, is overlooked by the military machine that drafted, then destroyed, his father? I thought the narrative's focus on overt acts of racism, like the ticket teller who refuses to admit Cowney to the movies, prevented it from exploring this history in richer detail, or at least in a less muddled way.

But I got a lot of pleasure out of the setting of the novel, which is an area I love and know well--from which I just got back, actually. I appreciated how Even As We Breathe allowed me to see these places from new angles, new perspectives, and to learn a bit of history--like the Grove Park's use as a prison camp--that I had never known before. I've really appreciated the way that reading fiction by indigenous Americans has helped me to see the country in a new way, but this might be the first time that I've really been challenged to see a place that is important to me personally in this way.

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Those lamenting evangelical's apparent betrayal of "family values" fail to recognize that evangelical family values have always entailed assumptions about sex and power. The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire; its counterpoint is a submissive femininity. A man's sexual drive, like his testosterone, is God-given. He is the initiator, the piercer. His essential leadership capacity outside the home is bolstered by his leadership in the home, and in the bedroom. The responsibility of married women in this arrangement is clear, but implications for women extend beyond the marriage relationship. Women outside of the bonds of marriage must avoid tempting men through immodesty, or simply by being available to them, or perceived as such. Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuses of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of "seducing" their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity.

The evangelical church I grew up in prided itself on being "seeker friendly," which meant that, in practice, it avoided a lot of the topics that were otherwise important to the Southern Baptist Convention, of which it was a member, though it avoided having "Baptist" in its name--because that might scare away the seekers. We heard a lot about husbands and wives forgiving each other, and how to manage household finances, but sexual purity and the roles of men and women were not topics for the pulpit (which was really a Plexiglas lectern). But I got the message of complementarianism--that men and women are inherently different, and have different roles, usually with men at the "head" of the marriage--in other places, and at other times: at church camp, at retreats, in videos and books. It only took a couple of weeks of attending an evangelical church with me in college--a place I expected to be equally "seeker-friendly"--for my girlfriend at the time to hear that wives should submit to their husbands, and decide that she was done with this Christian stuff more or less for good. For my part, I didn't know what to do with these beliefs; they weren't important to me, nor did they make much sense, but I was never presented with any alternative.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne is a history of the evangelical movement in the United States, and how its commitment to complementarianism, and a network of associated ideas about race and gender, were developed. One thing that Du Mez makes clear is that it might have been otherwise; even back in the heyday of arch-evangelical Billy Graham, a more liberal strain of evangelical Christianity--anti-war, pro-abortion, anti-segregation--competed for dominance. Individual evangelical leaders, including Graham himself, even mixed these strains, but with the election of Ronald Reagan, a more militant and sexist version of evangelicalism crowded out its ideological competitors.

In a way, I knew the broad strokes of this history, because I lived inside of it. But there are few things that Du Mez's book made me appreciate, which I'll list here in no particular order. For one, the title isn't just a catchy bit of alliteration; Du Mez persuades that the swaggering machoism of John Wayne really has served as a symbolic lodestar for the evangelical movement. (Every fucked-up Christian bestseller Du Mez describes and analyzes seems to name check him as an antidote to a "feminized" culture, or feminized Christianity, that they see as ascendant.) For Du Mez, Wayne, a misogynist and racist, thoroughly enmeshed with Hollywood and not particularly religious, becomes a kind of avatar for later evangelical icons like Reagan and Donald Trump. None of these men was Christian in any real sense, but through their appeal to aggressive masculine values, they captured evangelical hearts. It's a mistake, Du Mez writes, to think of evangelicalism as a specifically, or even particularly, theological movement; as these men show, its accompanying cultural values or as important, if not more.

Secondly, I was struck by how much much of a business the evangelical movement is. Ideologically, Du Mez traces evangelical roots back to Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, a 100-year old bestseller that imagines Jesus as an executive. Practically, the evangelical movement is driven by a handful of enormous corporate entities, some of which are non-profits, like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, but also mega-corporation Hobby Lobby and the Christian bookstore Lifeway, without which there is no evangelical movement, and which has immense power to push evangelicals in ideological directions by what it chooses to sell and promote.

Thirdly, I was really shocked by the enmeshment between the evangelical movement and the American military. I've always been aware of the way that the evangelical movement pushes "military values," though seeing all the seminars and bestselling books collected in on place, with their language about being a "warrior for Christ," is stomach-turning. More than that, though, I don't know that I had considered how the evangelical movement has captured the military. Du Mez presents a picture of the U.S. military and evangelical Christianity as mutually supportive entities: military values of violence, self-sacrifice, and authoritarianism are transformed by churches into a form of Christianity that the military then promotes among its members. Put this way, the culpability of evangelical Christianity in the worldwide violence wrought by the U.S. military after 9-11 is especially troubling.

Unsurprisingly, Du Mez's book has made her a popular target for evangelicals on Twitter, and elsewhere. But I had actually been expecting, and hoping for, something a little more polemical: though Du Mez's sympathies are not hidden, Jesus and John Wayne is mostly a straightforward history of an ideological movement. It does a great job of examining the way that patriarchal values came to be so defining of the evangelical worldview; on the topic of race--the book's subtitle is How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation--it actually has far less to say. (Which is fine, I think--perhaps a topic for another book.) But in the end, the facts speak for themselves: Du Mez devotes the book's final chapters to the recent spate of sexual abuse scandals that have rocked evangelical churches and their governing bodies, like the SBC. These victims, Du Mez shows, are not the victims of Christians who have "betrayed" their values, but Christians who have lived out the very patriarchal and violent values which the churches have embraced.

When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head

Makhaya found his own kind of transformation in this enchanting world. It wasn't a new freedom that he silently worked toward but a putting together of the scattered fragments of his life into a coherent and disciplined whole. Partly life in the bush was like this. In order to make life endurable you had to quiet down everything inside you, and what you had in the end was a prison and you called this your life. It was almost too easy for Makhaya to slip into this new life. For one thing he wanted it, and for another he had started on this road, two years previously in a South African prison, the end aim in mind being a disciplined life. But the Botswana prison was so beautiful that Makhaya was inclined to make a religion out of everything found in Golema Mmidi.

Makhaya crosses the Botswanan border late in the night, fleeing from a life of violence and anger in South Africa that is only vaguely alluded to. He is adrift, and possibly dangerous, but some see in the force of his personality a hope worth cultivating: Makhaya becomes the assistant to a white Briton named Gilbert Balfour, who has dreams of reinvigorating the lives of ordinary Botswanans by teaching them new and advanced methods of agriculture. In this effort Makhaya and Gilbert are challenged by a jealous chieftain named Matenge, locked in a battle with his more powerful brother Sekoto. But they have many allies, too, like the wise elders Dinorego and Mma-Millipede, and the headstrong Paulina, who has fallen in love with the mercurial Makhaya.

In many ways When Rain Clouds Gather is a very didactic novel, though perhaps not as didactic as I expected from the way it begins. It lays out a clear vision for the future of Africa, one grounded in these new agricultural techniques, a vision that is, for the lack of a better word, technocratic. Head, who was a South African who wrote in exile in Botswana, depicts Botswana as a nation ripe for this kind of progress, unlike South Africa, where white supremacy and racial suppression still rule the day. In Botswana, the chief adversary of progress is not white supremacy but tribalism, both in the sense of old tribal enmities and a devotion to old ways. Matenge is the avatar of this "tribalism," a black African who exploits such feelings for personal power. As a result, When Rain Clouds Gather has an interesting and unusual racial politic, exemplified in the alliance between Gilbert and Makhaya--the white egghead and the charismatic black African, who acts as a conduit between Gilbert and the common people. Gilbert, in the middle of the novel, even marries Dinorego's beautiful daughter Maria, and the racial difference in the marriage is treated as unremarkable. (Which is a little wild, considering that the novel is set specifically in Botswana's year-long transition to full independence from England.)

What keeps When Rain Clouds Gather from being too didactic is the character of Makhaya. Head describes him as a refugee whose inner life is a turmoil; he churns with anger and resentment about the things he has experienced and seen--most of which are only hinted at--but who is able, through superhuman self control, to choose a life of optimism and generosity. We are told Makhaya went to prison for being found with the plans for a bomb in his pocket, something that seems unimaginable; but we are led to understand that Makhaya in white-controlled South Africa and Makhaya in Botswana are truly different people. Head never lets us see the ultimate results of Gilbert's agricultural schemes, which are hastened by a drought that decimates the area's cattle, but there is something in Makhaya that makes us believe that his mere presence can bring forth new life. Whatever quality this might be, it is the same quality that makes him frightening and a little dangerous.

With the addition of Botswana, my "countries read" list is up to 68! Nice!

Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

About this quartet the most fundamental thing which can be said is that it is too sad even to rise from a moan into a wail at death's uncompassed crescendo. To be sure, the danse macabre of the second movement glows sickeningly vivid as a sodium flare at night (so much for flamelessness!); it's as bright as the electric light which illuminates the gas chamber when it's time to ascertain whether all the Jews are dead; while the menace of the third remains more chilling than those screams of terror in Leningrad when the German bombs come down; they'll never stop coming down. Yet on the whole the effect is of somebody drowning, his most desperate convulsions already behind him; he's begun to inhale water; the green water he sees is going black; and he's settling down into the muck. Some listeners who close their eyes during the second movement claim to perceive a whirling red eye-ball or domino, and the more rapidly it speeds, the more balefully it glows. This eidetic image seems to symbolize the approach of something evil. I myself have never seen the red spot, perhaps because Opus 110 already threatens me so perfectly that no kinesthesia is needed to extend or refine the threat. While Shostakovich's music wriggles like the worming of black-gloved fingers behind a policeman's back, the Bronze Horseman sinks down under sandbags and planks. Leningrad strangles in a loop of barbed wire.

It's a time and a place we all know, though perhaps when we Americans think of it, we're more likely to think of the beaches of Normandy, or the Battle of the Bulge, than the enormous front between Germany and Russia that brought millions under conflagration during World War II. Stalingrad, that six month siege that killed two million, doesn't feature very highly in our American memories. William T. Vollmann's epic Europe Central is a book that presents fictionalized versions of some of the Germans and Russians who lived through those years of intensity and destruction. Some are military figures, like generals A. A. Vlasov and Friedrich Paulus, or the SS member Kurt Gerstein; many are creative types: German artist Kathe Kollwitz, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and the novel's protagonist, more or less, the Russian composer Shostakovich.

The central image that introduces the book is a black, octopus-like telephone--"Europe Central" evokes not just central Europe but a kind of immense telephone switchboard--that snakes into the lives of its characters, making orders and demands. The same black telephone that rings in Shostakovich's house to summon him to the Stalin's secret police is the same one that rings in the field tent of Field-Marshal Paulus to inform him that he is expected to commit suicide before retreating from where he is encircled by Soviet forces. I was most interested, perhaps, in the twin stories of Vlasov and Paulus, both generals who ended up being captured by the enemy, then recruited against their former masters. Vlasov led a regiment of Russians under the Nazi army; Paulus became a spokesman for an anti-fascist Germany under the auspices of the Soviet Union, though their "betrayals" came for different reasons and they came to--unsurprisingly, given the outcome of the war--very different ends.

I was also really taken by the story of Kurt Gerstein, who "infiltrated" the SS in an attempt to save as many people as he could. Gerstein's story, which I'd never heard, is one of a noble man who tries very hard, with limited results, to stave off a great cruelty. He pretends that shipments of Zyklon-B have gone bad, to give those condemned to death more time; he tries, mostly in vain, to alert authorities outside of Germany to the horrors of the concentration camp system. For these efforts, he is put on trial as a Nazi collaborator by his French captors, ultimately committing suicide. "I consider him a hero," Vollmann writes in the (characteristically compendious) footnotes, but Gerstein's story makes one question what a hero truly is--can one be a hero when what they accomplish is so minimal, because the forces allayed against them are so great? As Vollmann grimly notes, Gerstein's name is not one of those compiled in the "Righteous Among the Nations" for their efforts to save the Jews of Europe. For all that, he's a very Vollmann-like hero, something like the noble but ineffectual Chief Joseph of The Dying Grass.

I was less sure of what to make of the novel's focus on Shostakovich, whose story gives the book its backbone. Vollmann invents, seemingly out of whole cloth, a lovelorn Shostakovich, unable to get over his early lover Elena Konstantinovskaya, who later marries the famous Soviet filmmaker R. L. Karmen. Shostakovich obsesses over Elena, even as he marries a succession of other women. What's this got to do with the political themes of a book like Europe Central? Well, perhaps in one way it's merely an observation that what drives our innermost lives is not always, or even typically, questions of justice and struggle, like those that animate Vlasov, Paulus, Gerstein, Kollwitz, Akhmatova. Shostakovich, for all his genius, is an ordinary man unable to get over the one who got away; all the grand movements of the Soviets and Germans--he lives through the siege of Leningrad--count for less than Elena. But also, there's an interesting parallel in the way that Shostakovich debases himself for Elena and for the Soviet regime. Shostakovich, a "formalist" who loved dissonance and hated the mindless patriotism of Soviet realism, was constantly in trouble with the Soviet censors. But Vollmann depicts him as absolutely spineless, falling over himself to apologize and genuflect to the apparatchiks who want him to be more conformist, though he never seems to be able to actually constrain the shape of his genius in the way they desire. Eventually, Shostakovich does what he said he never would, joining the Communist Party, and alienating all of his more principled associates. Yet clearly Vollmann finds something heroic in him, too, though perhaps it is a kind of heroism that operates at a level beneath the conscious, in the place where creativity works.

The subject matter of Europe Central doesn't resonate with me like the Native American-European culture clashes of Vollmann's Seven Dreams books. And at a subconscious level, I think I had been suspicious of Europe Central because of a vague intuition that the Seven Dreams stuff was never taken all that seriously by critics until the publication of Europe Central, with its more familiar and shopworn settings. (Who needs another World War II novel?) But I am forced to admit that the later sections of Europe Central contain some of Vollmann's most accomplished writing: the strange chapter "Airlift Idylls," narrated by a German assassin targeting Shostakovich, who seems to be more of a metaphor than anything else--have you ever seen a chapter narrated by a metaphor?--and the freewheeling, associative horror-scape of "Opus 110," which details Shostakovich's spiraling instability and debasement with a prose to match. Ultimately, Europe Central struck me as an accomplishment on the level of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a novel from which it clearly takes some inspiration.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar.

I remember being totally bowled over by As I Lay Dying when I read it in high school. I had no idea literature could do the things this novel does. So when a few of my colleagues mentioned they were thinking of teaching it in their own classes, I was tempted. It would really be something, I think, to pass the experience of teaching this book onto a new set of kids. But I wonder, looking back, how other students reacted to the novel, which is so difficult and circuitous, and frankly, grim.

What are some ways you might teach As I Lay Dying? I think the book itself is metaphysical: its chief concerns are with dying and personhood, and the way the former threatens the latter. It's what Addie's thinking about when she reflects on the insufficiency of words in the night, and the way that the name "Anse" seems only like a vessel that, in some sense, obliterates the actual nature of her husband. In that same section, which she seems to be narrating from inside the coffin being carried to Jefferson, she contemplates the way that having children seemed to be a violation of her own personhood, the way they came from her, carrying part of her person with her. This is what frightens characters like Darl, who is so sensitive as to be nearly psychic, and who goes slowly insane over the course of the novel, and Vardaman, the young boy who associates his mother's death with the fish he's caught so strongly that he says, "My mother is a fish." They're confused, bewildered, but in their confusion, both Darl and Vardaman sense something essential and frightening about the slipperiness of the self, which can be parceled out, then obliterated by death.

I think one way I might teach it is by focusing on the stream-of-consciousness techniques. How do we think? In full sentences? Or in images, or feelings, or scraps of logic that are halted and interrupted? How does one imitate that kind of thinking on the page? This might be a way of mitigating what is hardest about As I Lay Dying, of encouraging students to think about its methods as trying diligently to capture the sense of interiority that gets flattened by more traditional narrative techniques.

I also think one way of bringing As I Lay Dying to a Gen Z audience is to focus on its more feminist elements. It might seem strange, but I think the novel is deeply interested in the experiences of women: first, there's Addie, whose experience of motherhood is what shapes her metaphysical understanding, even to the point of horror. Consider the way that Anse insists on carrying Addie's body to "her people" in the city of Jefferson, saying that this is what she had wanted, when really--as the novel's final scene, like a sour joke, shows--what he wants is to go to town to buy a set of new teeth. (Not only does he come back with a new set of teeth, but a new Mrs. Bundren!) Addie's loss of autonomy, bodily and otherwise, is echoed in the experiences of Dewey Dell, who needs an abortion she doesn't know how to ask for, and who finds herself exploited by the depredations of a sex pest pharmacist because of it. Now more than ever, those themes might seem to speak with a renewed voice to students.

But I don't know. It's awfully tricky, and though I think I can get students to reflect on the purpose of the novel's stranger narrative methods, I'm not sure I can get them to actually enjoy them, or tolerate them for four weeks. And I wonder, too, if the southern accents that made the characters' language recognizable, if strange, to me, might be further beyond my students' grasp. So we'll see.

High Tide by Inga Abele

In the beginning there was a dream.

And at the end there was again nothing but a dream.

God appeared to a woman in a dream that was like death.

God found the woman within this dream and said to her:

"If you agree to live your life in reverse, you'll have the power to give life back to your lover, who died young. Just don't get your hopes up--your meeting at that crossroads will last about twenty minutes, no more. Then he'll continue on toward old age, but you, back toward childhood."

The woman agreed immediately.

High Tide is the story of Ieva, a Latvian woman whose life has been shaped by a single shocking moment: the shooting of her lover Aksels by her husband, Andreijs. Andreijs has been sent to prison for fifteen years, never again to see their daughter, Monta, and Ieva herself has been shattered in a way that makes life difficult and dreamy. But the novel's sections are presented in reverse chronological order, so that the aftermath comes first, and then the act, with two effects: we are shocked (or meant to be) when we discover that Aksels had inoperable bone cancer and months to live, and that Andreijs' shooting was an act of mercy Aksels had wanted Ieva herself to carry out. The second effect, as per that little prefatory bit about God, is that we see the knot of trauma being undone, and Aksels living again.

I'm not sure this schtick entirely works. It's certainly clever, and with a very careful staging, I can imagine the reverse chronology imbuing certain details with a sense of mystery. But the first chapters of the book, I thought, really suffer from a kind of abstraction that comes out of what one can't say, and when something must be said, Abele cheats her way around it: in a long early section about Andreijs life after he gets out of prison, she has him sitting around with his new lover on a couch while he reminisces about his early life with Ieva. This scene, besides feeling like a cheap way of getting around the strictures she's placed on herself, feels extremely inert.

It's no surprise, then, that the best sections come later on, when the context of Ieva's life begins to pile up. I thought the strongest writing in the book was the account of Ieva's newly married life in the early post-Soviet Latvia, as she bounces from job to job looking for a way to support herself and Monta, being either cheated in rapid succession by the capitalists who have rushed to fill in the gaps, or making childish mistakes that get her fired. I thought that had a lot of life, and a sense of humor a lot of the book is missing. I was also really fascinated by the way young Aksels (an extreme pothead and almost entirely unlikable character) turns to the budding punk movement to express himself, and how Ieva is captivated by that, though not a part of it herself.

With the addition of Latvia, my "countries read" list us up to 67!

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

Being different from other men sometimes sent him walking far down the beach, down among the huge green flies and the stink that rose off the garbage pit and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Belinda's ashes would be thrown away here after her body was burned.

The gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the weedy sand near the pit. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther upshore he always saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing. They reminded him of Mr. Cheung.

More than once he saw others here, also different from other men: ghosts who had appeared out to sea--from the shipwrecks, from the End of the World, from the plagues, from the cold time, from the kill-me--drowned sailors and frozen children, young maidens bleeding down their legs, sick old men and women and cancer-wasted fishwives who seems to wander hopelessly near the place of their burning; but all of them were smiling and no longer touched with pain.

Some decades ago we all thought the end of the world would be quick. A bomb would go off, and the explosion, or its immediate aftermath, would split time into a before and an after. We don't think about the apocalypse much in these terms anymore, because our possible apocalypses have been replaced with a near-certain one, one which will be slow coming. Though it will be no less transformative, it will be leisurely enough to allow some of us to ignore it. And yet the threat of the other kind of apocalypse may be no less real than it used to be, certainly no less than in 1985, when Denis Johnson wrote the post-nuclear apocalypse novel Fiskadoro.

Society in Fiskadoro, such as it is, clings to the Florida Keys. In Miami, ashy skeletons are still sitting in their cars, but Key West, now called Twicetown because the two bombs that fell on it both proved to be duds, is a thriving center of what one might call enterprise. People's shanties are cobbled together from whatever they can find, from carseats and old church pews, and what work there is seems to mostly be limited to subsistence fishing boats. Many people speak a kind of Spanish-English patois that makes the book seem like the closest thing out there to Riddley Walker. Civilization may have survived in its more developed forms in Cuba; the citizens of Twicetown get Cuban radio stations. Into this life Fiskadoro is born, a son of an ordinary fisherman, who cries when his father is killed and who wants Anthony Cheung, who plays with the Miami Symphony Orchestra--a ragtag group of amateur musicians who have appropriated the name in a gesture of desperation for civilization--to teach him out to play the clarinet.

Fiskadoro is a book about remembering and forgetting. Mr. Cheung and his associates gather weekly to be read to from the few books that remain, including a child's book on dinosaurs and, apparently, The Sun Also Rises. They grasp after the knowledge that will keep them connected to a past which has disappeared, but the knowledge itself is partial and flimsy: "The dinosaur tracks in England all went west to east," Mr. Cheung recounts. But "[by] what light was this fact called 'knowledge'? Wasn't it just one more inexplicable thing to mystify them, didn't it subtract from what they knew rather than add to it?" When the society barters for a book about the bombing of Nagasaki, a book which can at last tell them how they got to where they are, the reading causes consternation and disbelief, even a vague conviction that reading it alone has brought the hurricane that rages outside--to know about apocalypse is to invite it again. Mr. Cheung's Grandmother Wright is one of the few people who can truly remember the "before" times; she spends much of her day reminiscing privately about her experiences as a girl during the Fall of Saigon and her escape by helicopter--a set of carefully drawn memories which seem as if they were lifted out of another of Johnson's novels, like Tree of Smoke.

But if Grandma Wright is the past and Mr. Cheung a baffled, uneasy present, Fiskadoro is the future. One day he wanders off from his home on the old Key West army base and is taken in by a group of "swamp-men" who practice a form of Islam and believe Fiskadoro to possess the soul of another teenager who drowned. They inflict on him a ritual circumcision--which they call a "subincision," and which he must do himself, with a sharpened rock--that leaves him without the ability to generate new memories. When he returns to Twicetown, he remembers no one, but he has become an expert clarinetist: "He has forgotten how not to play," Mr. Cheung notes. Fiskadoro represents a hope for the future that lies in forgetting the past; unlike Mr. Cheung, he has unshackled himself from the need to know what has happened before:

He'd been assured by Martin and Martin's companion Sammy that Fiskadoro's memory would come back to him in a while--though they didn't seem to think he'd ever remember his past--but, for now, each time the boy witnessed the sunrise he saw it for the first time.

There was something to be envied in that. In a world where nothing was familiar, everything was new. And if you can't recall the previous steps in your journey, won't you assume you've just been standing still? If you can't remember living yesterday, then isn't your life only one day long?

The thought gives Mr. Cheung panic, but the novel suggests that there is a kind of hopefulness in the innocence of Fiskadoro. A belief, perhaps, that saving the world lies not in remembering the past, Santayana-like, but in forgetting it, and embracing the eternal present. In this light, one begins to see the cobbled-together, resourceful nature of the society that has grown up around Fiskadoro as something beautiful. The novel ends with an image of great ambiguity: a white shape on the horizon that may be a ship from Cuba coming to "save" them, or perhaps even another explosion, marking a new kind of destruction. But Fiskadoro suggests that whatever happens, it won't be another line in the sand that divides the before from the after, but another turn in a constant renewing.

Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal

She learns to see. Her eyes burn. Fried, worked like never before, open eighteen hours a day; an average that will soon include the sleepless nights spent slogging, and other night of partying. In the morning, her eyes blink incessantly as though she'd been plopped down in full sun, lashes vibrating, butterfly wings, but at sunset she feels them weakening, her left eye limps, it slips to the side like someone sinking onto a bank of fresh grass at the edge of the path. She rinses her lids with blueberry water, places frozen teabags on them, tries gels and eyewashes, but nothing eases the sensation of tired, dry eyes, rigid pupils, nothing can stop the formation of persistent dark circles under them--her face has been branded, the stigmata of this rite of passage, of metamorphosis. Because to see, under the glass roof of the studio on the rue de Metal, high on fumes from paint and solvents, muscles sore and forehead burning, doesn't just mean keeping your eyes open to the world--to see is to engage in a pure action, create an image on a sheet of paper, an image that resembles the one the eyes have created in the brain.

Paula Karst, a young woman from Paris, whose parents once though she was bound for art school, enrolls in a Belgian school for decorative painters. Decorative painting is not like painting-painting; Painting Time is not a novel about the creative process or the ineffable genius of painters. Decorative painting is a craft, a laborious process in which the painter tries to reproduce the look and texture of marble, wood, stone. If it is done right, the painter, far from having made a statement of self-expression, finds themselves erased in the work. To reproduce the world, to make a simulacrum of it, one must know it thoroughly, as when the brilliantly talented painter and Paula's lover Jonas takes her to the quarry where the valuable marble she must copy for her school assignment has been mined for many years. To duplicate it, Paula must follow exactly the methods outlined by her instructors (there is no creative license here), but also, she has to consider the long and fantastical history of the marble itself, laid by the passing of a great ocean and its plants, then laying hidden for millennia until broken apart by Renaissance-era merchants. This is what is meant by the title Painting Time.

Painting Time is split into three parts: first, Paula's experiences at the decorative painting school, where she lives with Jonas and comes to know her friend Kate. The second outlines Paula's initial career as a set designer for the historic Italian movie studio Cinecitta, and the third a job she takes on reproducing the famous Lascaux cave paintings. The middle part, the movie studio part, layers new and interesting questions over the first section: what does it mean to reproduce the fantasy world of movies, rather than something real? But this section is meandering, I thought, especially with de Kerangal's winding sentences, that routinely go on so long that you lose track of the grammar of the sentence's beginning, and a little saggy. It's the final section that really brings the novel together. The famous Lascaux caves are no longer open to the public, but Paula's project is the last in a series of replicas that are even more popular than the original. And yet Paula must copy them without having seen them. She immerses herself in the World War II-era story of the caves' discovery, in a way trying to collapse many layers of time--prehistoric, historic, present--but the imagination required makes one wonder about the distinction between artistic genius and the workmanlike labor of craft.

Paula has heterochromia and strabismus: her eyes are two different colors, and pointed in slightly different directions. This condition is part of her unique appeal to some, including Jonas and Kate, and a romantic liaison with a man who is provocatively only called "the charlatan." In a novel about a painter-painter you might see it as a symbol of genius, a unique way of looking at the world. It might be that, here, too, and an illustration of Paula's split self, discarding more bourgeois dreams of "artistic" painting for this different path. But thinking of that title again, it seems to me an image of eyes that cross time, that point toward the present and the past, which fold, but perhaps not completely, into a single image. One eye on the real and one eye on the reproduction, but with a blurred line between that complicates one's notions of what is real and what is fake.

Blindness by Henry Green

He got up and groping towards the window opened it. As he did so there was a sudden lull in all the noise, he could only hear the clop-clop of a horse receding into the distance, and then mysteriously from below there floated up a chuckle; it was a woman and someone must have been making love to her, so low, so deep it was. He was on fire at once. Love in the street, he would write of it, love shouting over the traffic, unsettling the policemen, sweeping over the park, wave upon wave of it, inciting the baboons to mutiny in the Zoo, clearing the streets. What was the use of his going blind if he did not write? People must hear of what he felt, of how he knew things differently. The sun throbbed in his head. Yes, all that, he would write all that.

John Haye is a senior at an English public school. He's a little lazy--as we learn from the first thirty pages of the novel, which are in the form of John's diary--but of a literary bent, and prone to childish pranks as well as bookish sentimentalism. But his life changes forever when, on his way home, a stone thrown by a child shatters his window on the train, and he's permanently blinded. John returns home to his stepmother, a sort of local busybody who struggles with the idea that her stepson might become a burden to her, and who is appalled when he strikes up an attachment to Joan, the daughter of a local drunk and defrocked priest. The match is no good, though; Joan cannot give John the kind of new beginning he desires, and in the end, he and "Mamma" sell their country estate so that John can find his way as a blind man in the sound and fervor of London.

Entirely by accident, I seem to be reading a lot of first works lately. There was Gallant, then Didion, now Henry Green, who wrote Blindness while he was still at Oxford. Like those other books, it seems awfully weak in comparison to more "mature" books, but the incipient forms of a great author's style are fascinating to see. One of the strange feelings Green's novels generate is the sense of Is that all?, the feeling that you've read something in which nothing happens and whose shape is untraceable, because it was in the accumulation of details you missed while you were waiting for grand gestures. In Blindness that means the little details of country life that John may or may not have access to any longer, and which "Mamma" must feel are distinctly at risk. 

The novel's three sections are called "Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly," as if to signal that Blindness is a novel not about loss, but of becoming and transformation. Joan, the undereducated, slovenly priest's daughter, is a kind of false start in that transformation. John indulges in fantasies that she will give him a new life, one that consists of walking with him to his old favorite viewpoints and describing the view--something which, as it turns out, disinterests and bewilders her. John has Joan all wrong, preferring the version he makes of her in his head; he even mishears her name at first as "June" and refuses to call her anything else. Their interactions give the novel some particularly Green-like moments of humor, the kind that can be difficult to catch. "They seem to me so lasting," John says to Joan, regarding trees, "so grave in their fat green cloaks, or in winter like naked lace." To which she replies: "There, an' I've forgotten to feed the chickens."

Only at the very end, with the arrival of John and his mother at London, does Green's modernism start to show. He seems actually quite resistant to describing the experience of being blind, preferring Mrs .Haye's viewpoint, or Joan's, to John's, until John is listening to the street noise below. This noise both frightens and excites him; for the first time he feels as if his subjectivity as a blind person has given him a way of knowing or understanding that might not be available to other people. He ends the novel in what you might call a "vision," if it weren't such an inappropriate word: a mysterious moment of ascent and elation that he calls, in the letter that ends the novel, "a fit." Green is cagey about what it is that John is seeing at last, and perhaps at the novel's end John is only beginning to see it himself, but he describes the feeling as one of true "joy."

Run River by Joan Didion

She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother's dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: a moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.

Joan Didion's first novel kept her close to home: Run River is about the wealthy families along the Sacramento River who can trace their ancestry back to California's pioneers, who braved a new land, tamed it, and then settled down to work it. The married couple at the heart of the novel are Everett and Lily McClellan, distant cousins who are both descendants of these people. Their attraction toward each other is based on this explicitly; when a young Everett looks at Lily, he knows that she is the kind of woman who he can "bring back to the ranch," who will anchor him and tie him to the place that is his inheritance. But the marriage is a poor one: the two cling desperately to each other and then push each other away. Everett abandons Lily and their young children to join the army when World War II breaks out and Lily, feeling abandoned, has a brief affair with a man she hates. The pregnancy and ensuing abortion sent the marriage hurtling headlong into ruin. When the book opens, an older Everett has just shot and killed Lily's lover, Ryder Channing; the novel then backtracks to fill in the gaps and tell us how they found themselves in such a violent place.

What is Run River's conception of those California pioneers? The blurb for Elaine Castillo's upcoming book of essays (which I'd like to read) encourages us to, among other things, reject the "settler colonialism" of Didion. Certainly, being the sons and daughters of pioneers have done Lily and Everett no good. There's a hollowness at the heart of their inheritance, a sense that they have not deserved what they have received because they don't know how to keep it, though Everett is, at heart, a farmer who knows how to work his hops crops from the ground. The passage I quoted above makes me wonder if Didion is suggesting that the virtues of the pioneers--I don't know, adventurousness, bravery, a longing for new things--curdle into vices when they become bound to one place, and that Lily and Everett might have been better, happier people in another time and place.

It's actually Martha, Everett's sister and Ryder's initial lover, who seems the most wrecked; her desperate attachment to the uncouth man seems like a consequence, sometimes, of having nothing better to do, no other purpose or desire. When he leaves her, she--spoiler alert--goes out to the river in a boat during a flood and drowns, dying in the very place she should have known better (and perhaps she did). Martha's death reverberates with the death of her and Everett's father, drowned in the same river in a car accident that kills him and his lover, another scion of a river family. In a way, California kills them. Ryder himself is a charming lout and grifter from Tennessee always trying to get in on the ground floor of some money-making scheme. Is he a representation of some non-Californian value, a capitalist who runs in on the heels of the people who made California great? Or is he a representation of those pioneers, who came in from the East as well, certain they could make the valley a Paradise for themselves, and then shut the gate?

Run River is just okay as a novel. The most extraordinary thing it does, I think, is make Didion seem sort of human. The qualities that make her later fiction--especially the crackle of dialogue between people who both hate and need each other--are here, but the Sacramento story clearly has a special resonance for Didion herself that doesn't quite make it to the page. In the end, River Run is a familiar kind of mid-century novel, one about rich people doing bad things to each other. (Why are rich people always so sad?)