Christopher's Top Ten 2022

The word for 2022 is disaster. Many of the best books I read this year were quite literally about disaster: Svetlana Alexevich's Voices from Chernobyl, about the nuclear disaster that happened, and Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, about the nuclear disaster that's yet to come. William T. Vollmann's Europe Central is about that disaster that shook a whole continent--and a century--by its heels. Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, my favorite book of the year, is about the kind of ecological disasters that are happening around us all the time without our care or attention; the kind of disaster that sprouts at our own touch, like a Midas of petroleum. Other books, like Adam Erlich Sachs' Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World--not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, a book I enjoyed but which did not make my year-end list--are about epistemological disasters, the ugly wreck of science foundering against its own limits.

Last year, I made a resolution to read more international fiction. I had a great year in that regard, adding eighteen new countries to my repertoire: Antigua, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Oman, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Serbia, Belarus, Senegal, Cuba, Latvia, Botswana, Morocco, Rwanda, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Belize. This project has been a real blessing; it lead me to a half-dozen really terrific books I never would have otherwise read. Among those I really enjoyed, but which didn't make the list below, are Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga's Our Lady of the Nile and Moroccan Tahar ben Jelloun's heart-stopping prison novel This Blinding Absence of Light. This project also forced me to do a better job of reading books by people of color: 41 out of 110. For another year, I was able to read roughly equivalent numbers of men and women writers: 55 out of 110 books were written by women. Ten of the 110 were non-fiction.

As always, the more you read, the more there is to read. I've got some great books under the tree to get to, and about 120 more countries. Happy new year, everyone! See you when the page turns to 2023!

Honorable Mentions:

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara
On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera
The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Six Walks by Ben Shattuck
The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Top Ten 2022:

10. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich - What kind of book is this, that has no original words in it? Can an author speak with someone else's voices? Voices from Chernobyl is a stunning thing, a work of journalism that is unsettling because it seems there is no veil between the world and the reader. We are given the thing itself, Chernobyl, killing and maiming and ruining lives. We are allowed to see, seemingly without interpretation or interpolation, the flaws in Soviet society that preceded the disaster and its rippling effects. For those reason few books seem so honest, or so pitiless. My guess is that Voices from Chernobyl is a book we will be returning to again and again in the 21st century, which promises to be a century of unabated disasters. They may not look like Chernobyl--they may be floods, or famines, or diseases--but there will always be powerful people who would prefer we didn't look straight at their complicity, as Alexievich does in Voices from Chernobyl.

9. The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs - It's funny to think of the resonances, in retrospect, between Sachs' The Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (see below). Superficially, they could not be less alike. Sachs' novel about the mathematician Leibniz visiting a blind astronomer who claims to be able to predict an eclipse without the use of his eyes is a 17th-century picaresque, whereas Labatut's is a novel of the grim and bewildering 20th century. But both manage to capture historical moments at which scientific progress threatens to destabilize us in frightening ways. For Labatut, it's the strangeness of quantum mechanics. But Sachs reveals that such fear, the fear that science will lead us not into greater knowledge but greater darkness, have their roots in the Cartesian dualism of Leibniz's day. And of course, The Organs of Sense is simply a great deal of fun, a bit of illusionist magic that plays the curtain drop perfectly.

8. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - I almost wanted to dislike Europe Central. Aren't there enough books about World War II, anyway? Why would Vollmann, whose novels about European settlement and conflict with Indigenous people of the Americas are some of the most comprehensive and thorough explorations of that particularly American narrative, want to turn his incisive eye--and what one can only assume is a poor and beleaguered research assistant--toward someone else's continent? But Europe Central won me over, as I knew it would, partly because it contains some of Vollmann's boldest writing, his wildest tightrope-walking. (Who else would dare to have a chapter written from the point of view of a metaphor?) And partially because in composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Vollmann presents a cowardly, corrupted genius who is one of his most sympathetically tragic figures.

7. The Lover by Marguerite Duras - Every year I discover at least one new writer for whom I think, I'm going to read everything this person has ever written. This year, it was Marguerite Duras, whose quasi-biographical story of a young girl's induction into the world of sex and despair at the hands of a rich Chinese man in colonial Vietnam was perhaps the most psychologically rich book I read all year. I was fascinated by what lurks under the surface level of The Lover: a story about two brothers, one innocent and murdered, the other an evil killer--though in what way is never clear--and a mother whose neglect compels the young narrator into a cycle of sexual self-annihilation. The Lover, I think, is a story that threads a historical needle, published at a point after we decided feminine sexuality was a worthy literary subject, but before the kind of statutorily abusive relationship depicted here became too hot to touch. For that reason alone there won't be another book like it anytime soon.

6. The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe - I was sad to finish Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series; nearly as sad as I was, I think, to have no more of Ferrante's Neapolitan series to read. (Though surely this is the only meaningful connection between them.) The Citadel of the Autarch is a book that, like the three books that precede it, makes every fantasy book in the world look imaginatively impoverished by comparison. I've never read another book with a setting as clever as the Last House, where every floor exists in a different chronological era--and The Citadel of the Autarch has inventions like these in every chapter. Citadel completes the series by explaining how Severian came to become the Autarch, the all-powerful ruler who seeks to usher in the rebirth of Urth's dying sun, and answers one of the books' fundamental questions--why him?--by subverting it completely: as he takes on the dying Autarch's consciousness, he absorbs the thousands of consciousnesses absorbed before him, becoming a kind of Son of Man. Tolkien could never.

5. Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah - The Nobel folks got this one right, I thought. Paradise is a kind of Heart of Darkness from an African perspective: a young Tanzanian boy, essentially sold by his parents into the service of a powerful merchant, joins a disastrous foray into the inner bush, where incipient German colonialism has yet to set foot. Unlike Marlowe and Kurtz, Yusuf isn't far from home; he's searching for one that eludes him, and one of the novel's tragic ironies is that, unable to find one in the cities of the coast or the cloistered villages of the bush, he ends up running off to join the Germans. It seems banal to say, but Africa looks different through the eyes of African writers; there's a complexity and subtlety to Gurnah's narrative that even a master like Conrad could never see. On top of all that, Paradise is just a gripping adventure story.

4. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner - Isn't there always a book that sneaks up on you? One that, once you put it down, you can't stop thinking about it? This year, The Topeka School was that book for me. Everybody's talking about toxic masculinity these days, but few have written about it in ways that feel as true as Lerner's sort-of-autobiographical novel about a prestigious debater at a Kansas high school. I found myself thinking again and again about Lerner's depiction of the way machismo can make its way into our language and speech; the way that talking can become a kind of game of domination. The Topeka School has more going on than this, though; it's also about psychology, and infidelity, and even Trumpism, and it's to Lerner's credit as a writer that it doesn't all fall apart. It's the style that make it cohere, I think, in the end, the words of the poet, rather than the debate champ.

3. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson - Everybody's got their post-apocalyptic book these days. I think what separates the mediocre ones, even the good ones, from the real greats is a capacity to imagine a whole new world, different from ours in ways that are entirely surprising and strange. That's what makes Riddley Walker a classic of the genre, and Fiskadoro is the closest any book I think has ever gotten to the sheer weirdness, the linguistic transformation, of that novel. It is even, like Riddley Walker, an exploration of a post-bomb society trying to understand, with diminished knowledge, how they got to be where they are. But the bombed-out Florida Keys, the mystical resurrection of Jesus-like Fiskadoro, the ghostly broadcasts from Cuba, the ragtag apocalyptic orchestra, and the final image of the mysterious ship on the horizon--presenting, like the helicopter at the end of July's People, either hope or devastation--are Johnson's alone.

2. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut - Do you think Cormac McCarthy is bummed to have written only the second best book of the year that prominently features reclusive mathematic genius Alexander Grothendieck? Labatut's novel, a series of vignettes about scientific and mathematic geniuses of the 20th century, is, as the title suggests, a chronicle of a world for whom progress leads to more doubt, more darkness, and even--as in the first section, "Prussian Blue"--the horrible atrocities of Nazi Germany. The seams between reality and fiction are more invisible, and more insidious, perhaps, than any book I've ever read. But such methods seem to match the darkness and inscrutability at the heart of the "new science" that is the book's subject.

1. Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams - I kind of wish it weren't--I like seeing new authors at the top spot--but Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering was the most enjoyable book I read this year. It's the story of Willie and Liberty, a pair of "wanderers" who drift from one stranger's house to another, trying on other peoples' lives like used coats. It was fun to read it in the same year as Fiskadoro, another novel about the Florida Keys. (I have Williams' guidebook to the Keys sitting on my shelf, in case I ever get back to the "spiritual and biological abbatoir" that is Florida--her words.) If Fiskadoro is about a Florida after ecological disaster, Breaking and Entering is about a Florida for which the disaster--as is true in all of Williams' books--is already here, where apocalypse is present in every river, every shopping center, every vacant home. Liberty herself is like the heron she tries to save, wrapped in a wire, free and wild but trapped at every turn by human dross. Her boyfriend Willie tries to seduce her into a kind of non-life, but is there no other way than to embrace annihilation?

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Kid turned and faced him.

What you want me to believe, said Western, is that you came here to help her in some way.

Help her in what way? She's dead.

When she was alive.

Jesus. How do I know? You see a figure drifting off the screen and you pick up the phone. How do you know that the call of the coletit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of thing that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

What did she know?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get a hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing. Jesus.

Bobby Western has been a lot of things. Right now he's a salvage diver, plumbing the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to ransack wrecks and tinker with pipelines. Once upon a time he was a student of physics, a mathematical whizkid who received his genius from his father, a Manhattan Project engineer, and who was yet in the shadow of his even more brilliant sister, Alicia. After that, he was a race car driver, a profession that put him in a coma. When he emerged from this coma, Bobby discovered that Alicia--his greatest love, his soulmate in perhaps the most literal sense--had committed suicide. The Passenger's companion novel, Stella Maris, is her story; this is Bobby's, although Alicia is here too, in the form of italicized flashbacks in which she faces her own hallucinatory attendants: a crude, disfigured figure called the Thalidomide Kid and a troop of Vaudevillean goblins.

When The Passenger begins, Bobby has been sent to scout a plane crash in the Gulf, the kind with moldering corpses inside. There's no sign of entry on the plane, but the black box is missing, and one of the passengers seems to be, too. Bobby makes a few quick investigations, finding little; but shortly after he finds himself the subject of a mysterious investigation: he's menaced by agents of unknown affiliation, his apartment is ransacked, his car and bank account are seized with no explanation, his fellow diver is killed under mysterious circumstances. Are Bobby's pursuers connected with the crashed plane? Or are their interests related to Bobby's father, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, helping to usher the world into an age of atomic cataclysm?

The Passenger's refusal to bring these mysteries to a satisfying conclusion seemed like an affront to me personally. Maybe there are answers in Stella Maris, but I doubt it. So one must think of the plane crash as a symbol: a symbol, perhaps, of Bobby, who survives his wreck and his coma but emerges into a world that is missing its most important soul, and which refuses now to make any sense. Alicia, perhaps, is the passenger of the title, whose significance is reduced in death to a mere absence, and whom Bobby spends the entire book fretting that he will forget. (For what its worth, in the post-Game of Thrones era, sibling incest seems too anodyne to be shocking, even a kind of literary cliche.) Amd the forces of grief and despair that pursue him can not even be named, much less mollified.

And yet, I found Bobby's dives to be some of the most interesting and engrossing parts of the novel. Much has been made of McCarthy's newfound interest in physics and mathematics, apparently gathered from his friendship with quark-discoverer Murry Gell-Mann and a connection with the research department at the University of New Mexico. But McCarthy's interests haven't changed, it seems to me; he's still the Gnostic, terrified by the world's indifference and unknowability. Mathematics is, like diving, another way of plumbing the deaths, searching for a truth that will not be made known. As the Thalidomide Kid tells Bobby--who sees him also, like a kind of dispensation--"Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing."

The Passenger is an awfully strange book, even for McCarthy. On one level it's sort of an espionage novel, a classic noir of the man who got into deep. But in practice it's mostly talky, composed of a dozen or so lengthy conversations: with down-and-outs from New Orleans to Knoxville, with Bobby's shrewd private investigator, with his fellow divers, with a friend of Alicia's from the period of her commitment. One of Bobby's interlocutors is a trans escort named Debussy Fields (LOL) who is touchingly and sympathetically drawn in a way I really would not have expected McCarthy to have in him. But all these conversations, all these parts--diver driver mathematician apparition--have difficulty cohering. The Paassenger could only be a late period work. It reminds me of those late Shakespeare plays in which he stopped bothering trying to make sense to anybody but himself.

But it's a Cormac book, no doubt, and who else is going to give you a book like that? Who else is going to give you those sentences? The language is plainspoken and hushed, with fewer forays into the OED, but the rhythm of those words is unmistakable, inimitable. And though the mathematics, it seems to me, betrays a dilettante's eye, they give a new language, perhaps even a better one, to ideas that have troubled McCarthy's books for a long time. We've had a long time to live with books like Blood Meridian, even The Road. Something tells me that we'll have to live with this one a little longer to really see it as it is.

The Cross by Kristin Lavransdatter

Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she had asked for--for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart--not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road's end.

She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.

Kristin Lavransdatter should only be read at Christmastime, perhaps before a fireplace in an oak-trimmed room, with a fragrant wreath on the door and a steady snowfall at the window. It's been nothing but hideous rain here in New York for the past few days. But that's all right, I guess; The Cross, the third and final novel of Sigrid Undset's series about the life of the medieval Norse noblewoman, is all about disappointed expectations. It begins with Kristin and her husband Erlend having come down in the world as a result of Erlend's attempt to overthrow the king; he has been saved from execution but stripped of most of his lands. At their remaining estate, Kristin and Erlend are little-loved by their tenants and neighbors. There is hope in their seven sons--perhaps they will re-win the position Erlend has lost--but you know what God does when you make plans.

Beware, weary traveler: past this point are spoilers. What I know realize, having read The Cross twice--once in the original English translation, which enters the public domain later this year, and then in Tiina Nunnally's much improved one--is that the novel is structured around three principal deaths, each one swifter and more anticlimactic than the last: Simon's, then Erlend's, the Kristin's. Simon's, perhaps, has the most drama to it. When his wound becomes infected and he knows he is going to die, Simon plans to tell Kristin the truth, that he has always loved her, even after she broke their engagement, and after he married her sister Ramborg. But as he sits on his deathbed being tended by her, he finds he is unable to say the thing he thought he wanted to say, instead urging her to reconcile with Erlend, who has moved out of the house after a quarrel. Even before this, Simon has been the books' most selfless and upright character; and his final words to Kristin are an act of self-abnegation that surprise even himself.

Simon dies before he can think better of his silence; Erlend dies so quickly he's unable to hear confession. In a way, he dies for Kristin: after he hears that Kristin has been slandered by those who believe she has had an affair with their overseer Ulf, he returns to the estate and immediately picks a fight, in which he's mortally wounded. It seems at first like Undset has engineered a pretext for a final reconciliation, but no such luck. The speed with which Erlend, whose charisma and recklessness are the novels' catalyst, is carried off is almost shocking. When he's gone, both Kristin and the novel feel adrift. Slowly, Kristin's place at her estate is supplanted by her son Gaute and his new wife; the life she led, which had burnt so hot, fades strangely away.

What I find so interesting about Kristin's death is this: much is made in these novels about family. Kristin's original sin, for which she struggles her entire life to atone, is the betrayal of her father by breaking her engagement and sneaking off with Erlend. Simon urges her to be a more faithful wife, and she tries mightily to be a faithful mother to her sons. When she's displaced from her estate, she leaves to become a nun in the sister cloister to the monastery where her sons Naakve and Bjorgulf have become priests. But on the way she finds herself caring for a child that belongs to a pair of other pilgrims; when she contracts the Black Death it's not because she's caring for her sons, but because she is caring for strangers. Her last acts are to save an annoying little boy (who is about to be sacrificed to pagan gods to ward off the plague) and to bury the pestilential body of his mother. And the death is so quick--there's no final word like Simon's, or even Erlend's.

So what struck me this time is the subtle way that The Cross supplants the notion of family, which has been so crucial to the novels, with a different, broader understanding of family. A family that encompasses the beggar and the stranger. When Kristin hears, prior to her own death, that her monk sons have been carried off by the plague, she barely has time to grieve before she is back to her work as a carer. Kristin Lavransdatter is a deeply Christian book, and makes little sense if a reader's not willing to take its religion seriously. And here at the end perhaps you see echoes of the Christ who urged his followers to hate their mother and father.

A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

A shape moved clumsily, slowly along the porch. A bent shape which crept blindly, as if accustomed to the darkness within the Earth. It looked up at him with filmed-over grey eyes; he saw and understood the shirt of dust which clung to it... dust trickled silently down its bent body and drifted into the air. And it left a fine trail of dust as it moved.

It was badly decayed. Yellowed, wrinkled skin covered its brittle bones. Its cheeks were sunken and it had no teeth. The Form Destroyer hobbled forward, seeing him; as it hobbled it wheezed to itself and squeaked a few wretched words. Now its dry-skin hand groped for him and it rasped, 'Hey there, Tony. Hey there. How are you?'

Fourteen colonists receive new orders; they're being transferred to the previously uncolonized planet of Delmak-O. But when they arrive--on one-way transports--they find that there's no communication with the powers that sent them there. They've come from other worlds where they received specific instructions about their roles, but there are no instructions on Delmak-O. The world is populated by strange creatures that seem both mechanical and organic; some have the ability to replicate any object placed in front of them. Out there in the wilds there is a cubic building (which they call, imaginatively, The Building) which vanishes if you try to approach it. It's a setup designed to make people go mad, or perhaps for people who are already mad. Soon, they start dying one by one.

A Maze of Death is one of Dick's most overtly religious books. In the theology of the colonists, advanced alien beings have assumed the role of God, and those who are lucky often find themselves visited by their avatars: the Walker-on-the-Earth, the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor. This religion is vaguely Christian, tinged with paganism, often Gnostic: these avatars are opposed by the Form Destroyer, who is responsible for the imposition of entropy and death. A Maze of Death is the first book of Dick's I've read since finishing Lawrence Sutin's biography of him, and there are familiar echoes here of the religious visions whose meaning Dick clamored to discover in the last decade of his life. The colonists share a religion of universal certitude; some of them, like protagonist Seth Morley, have even seen avatars like the Walker, who saves him from boarding a doomed ship. Ironically, Delmak-O is more frightening to them because it resembles the world in which the rest of us live, where the existence of God, much less His intentions or directions for our lives, is obscure.

I wouldn't put A Maze of Death among Dick's best work, partly because of the--SPOILER ALERT--Life of Pi-esque twist at the end. As it turns out, Delmak-O is actually a constructed reality occupied by the residents of a spaceship, left unable to land anywhere because of an accident. These residents enter computer-generated scenarios like Delmak-O regularly to alleviate the tedium of their situation; but their increasing, and increasingly violent, resentment toward one another surfaces in the simulation. Everyone who dies on Delmak-O returns to the ship perfectly safe and alive. But what frightens them the most is the convincing nature of the computer-generated theology. What seemed so real, and so gratifying, is taken from them, and once again they occupy a life that hurtles toward death with no purpose.

Though A Maze of Death was written, as far as I know, before Dick's visions, the ending of A Maze of Death suggests the most frightening possibility that Dick considered: that there was no presence beaming ideas on rays of pink light into his brain, that it was all fake, and that he was mentally ill. All that is troubled, though, in the book's final moments, when the Walker--who as far as the ship residents know, was only a computer simulation--comes to take Seth away from the ship for good. In the end, the idea that there is no supernatural, no godhead, no revelation, is too intolerable to depict.

A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty

It was December--a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to walk along a sunken portion of the original Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a heavily trafficked path running from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It was blazed by Native Americans, and used by early pioneers. Before roads and railroads spread across the south, merchants took their goods to Natchez on steamboats along the south-running Mississippi, then walked back 400 miles along the Trace. Today, portions of the "sunken trace" remain, where the feet of thousands and thousands of travelers have worn a path twenty feet down in the soft earth. Walking along one of these portions is like walking along a shared history.

What a pleasure, then, it was to return to Eudora Welty's story "A Worn Path," about an elderly black woman walking along the trace to Natchez, where she is to pick up medicine for her grandson. The Trace, by the time of the story, is largely disused; in Natchez they call it the "old Trace," and few others use it. It's a difficult trip, that involves crawling under a barbed wire fence and over a creek, but she makes it, as she has every few months for years. The story is a well-loved one because it has a beautiful simplicity: Phoenix Jackson is an image of diligence, of courage and steadfastness. She's also wily: she pockets a nickel dropped by an unwitting hunter, and cajoles another one from the pharmacist in Natchez. But walking the sunken trace made me realize the extent to which she is also a symbol of a history that, as Welty wrote the story, was being abandoned and forgotten, a history literally written in the earth.

"A Worn Path" is one of two familiar masterpieces in A Curtain of Green, an early collection of Welty's; the other is "Why I Live at the P.O.," which is certainly a contender for the funniest short story ever written. I have always loved this story, with its escalating familial outrages, and its gaggle of comic Southerners, as colorful as something out of commedia dell'arte. It's a story I've always thought about teaching, but have avoided, partly because of the single casual n-word, and partly because it seems a shame to cut it up and analyze it, which might kill it. It's a story that should only be enjoyed, and maybe marveled at.

Most of the other stories in A Curtain of Green were disappointing. Many of them, like the title story, seem awfully slight, attempts at portraying a milieu or a mind, or even a vibe, rather than a story. Some of them struck me as being mainly experimental, attempts by a young and newish writer to feel out her craft. How different they are than, say, the linked stories of The Golden Apples that Welty wrote later in life. Some of them are Welty straining at the Southern Gothic, and not particularly succeeding: "Clytie," for example, about a trio of ghoulish rustic shut-ins who are left to fend for, and fight, one another after the death of their father, struck me as being grotesque for grotesque's sake, and its ending--the dim-witted Clytie drowns in a water-barrel after becoming captivated by her own face--like an unfunny joke. I enjoyed the comic narrator of "Mr. Marblehall," who can't stop being flabbergasted by the pathetic audacity of the title bigamist, but it's hard for anything to feel funny when it comes behind "Why I Live at the P.O." Several of the stories just seemed forgettable: what was "Flowers for Marjorie" about again?

But there are two stories that were new to me that I thought were, like "Why I Live at the P.O." and "A Worn Path," Welty at her best. The first is "The Hitch-hikers," about a traveling salesman who picks up a couple of vagrants on his way back into his hometown. One of the two hitchhikers murders the other, and the murderer is locked up in the hotel room across the hall from the salesman. The salesman goes out to a party while the police and the hospital deal with the aftermath of the killing; but of course the event weighs on him strangely. "The Hitch-hikers" is one of those stories that successfully gives the impression of a whole life, a whole world, beyond its margins. The violence does not interrupt a peaceful routine, but stands in, somehow, for the alienation the salesman feels from his own life.

The other masterpiece is "Powerhouse," about a black jazz musician playing in small Mississippi clubs. At first, I wondered a little about the way the narrator describes Powerhouse:

You can't tell what he is. "Nigger man"?--he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard's, but big glowing eyes when they're open. He has African feet of the greatest size, stomping, both together, on each side of the pedals. He's not coal black--beverage colored--looks like a preacher when his mouth shut, but then it opens--vast and obscene.

But as the story went on it seemed to me that the narrator (not Welty) is trying to label Powerhouse, to understand him by affixing these words to him, and failing. The narrator fails, because Powerhouse takes over the story, whipping up the crowd with an extended black comic story about the death of his wife, which he has just learned about in a telegram. He tells this story as he plays--interspersed with descriptions of the song that plays beneath it--and then, later in the bar, elaborates upon it. His wife, he says, fell out of the window while she was looking for him, her body discovered by the telegram sender, a man with the unlikely name of Uranus Knockwood:

"Why, he picks her up and carries her off!" he says.
"Ya! Ha!"
"Carries her back around the corner..."
"Oh, Powerhouse."
"You know him."
"Uranus Knockwood."
"Yeahhh!"
"He take our wives when we gone!"
"He come in when we goes out!"
"Uh-huh!"
"He go out when we comes in!"
"Yeahhh!"
"He standing behind the door!"
"Old Uranus Knockwood."
"You know him."
"Middle-size man."
"Wears a hat."
"That's him."

The charismatic Powerhouse has completely taken over the story, molding it into call-and-response jazz rhythms, wrested it, it almost seems, even from Welty herself. It's never clear how much of the outrageous story Powerhouse tells is true. "And who could ever remember any of the things he says?" Welty writes. "They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke." There is real grief, real resentment, real outrage--you can figure out for yourself who it is, in the context of the Black South, that might always be "standing behind the door," coming in when they go out--but the story is a performance. Everything about Powerhouse is a performance. Like "A Worn Path," "Powerhouse" is a depiction of a Black person by a white writer, but where "A Worn Path" succeeds (in my opinion) through admiration and empathy, "Powerhouse" succeeds from something like intimidation and wonder. It's a story that seems channeled, not written. It's incredible.

Deep South by Paul Theroux

Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.

On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.

Paul Theroux has traveled all over the world: India, Southeast Asia, Africa. But until he steps out of his door on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one morning and hops in his car, he has never been in the American South. He heads down the interstate, making brief stops in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, heading deeper and deeper into a land that is familiar but unfamiliar, recognizable but unrecognizable. His travels in Africa become a specific touchpoint: the poverty Theroux sees in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas is not just a reminder of the third world, but an instantiation of it, right under the American nose. Deep South explores these forgotten places, which are not just unknown to Theroux, but to nearly every American, because they lie in the places that even the highways have passed by, where industry and work have vanished, and which the cultural and political leaders of the United States would just as soon turn a blind eye toward.

I'm a Southerner, though I have always thought of my home in North Carolina as quite different from the "deep south" of Mississippi and Alabama. It is interesting to read about yourself, or at least a region to which you are allied, from an anthropological perspective. At first, I felt a kind of bemusement at the Northerner who carries with him a set of bromides about the South, without wondering whether or not they are accurate or true. When Theroux writes that the church is the center of social life in a Southern town, and claims this is one way it differs from his native New England, I thought about how a few weeks ago, I visited Sandwich, Massachusetts--where Theroux literally lives--and ended up at a church festival where a bunch of elderly white Catholics were selling wreaths and dolls and chili hot dogs. Certainly for those folks, the church is at the center of social life in Sandwich. And what do we do with the increasing number of white Americans, southerners included, who no longer go to church but claim evangelical as an identifier? There's an awful lot of cant about the South, is all I'm saying, and it can be hard to set it aside and see the place clearly, especially if you carry your expectations with you.

This feeling was amplified, for me, by Theroux's pointed aversion toward urban life in the South. Charleston, Asheville, Natchez: Theroux passes these places by, stopping in them briefly, if only to tell us their charms have no interest for him. To Theroux, this is a way of side-stepping the tourist sheen of the South, of skirting the guidebooks. But it also presupposes a real South that lies in rural places. Of course you are going to find the South to be poor and rural if you define it from the beginning as rural and poor. But moreover, I found myself wondering if Theroux doesn't miss something crucial about the South by not interrogating the "New South," the cities where industry has fled, where investment in the tech sector, for instance, has created new opportunities for gentrification and dispossession. I'm not sure you can understand the depreciation of Greenville, Alabama, for instance, unless you understand the boom in Huntsville.

But anyway. Most of my reservations about Deep South came to little, because in the end, what makes Theroux seem reliable is the fact that he keeps coming back. Deep South is the story of not just a single trip, but four different trips, each in a different season. Theroux keeps coming back to the same locations over and over again, meeting with the same non-profit leaders, the same black farmers and unemployed whites, the same Indian motel owners. Out of this investment in time a real picture of a region emerges: a place rich in pride and cultural power, but torn inside out by the deprecations of global capitalism and political neglect. By the end of the book, Theroux is no longer ignoring the cities: he spends several chapters on his time in Hot Springs, Arkansas and the capital of Little Rock, integrating them into the larger story of the South as he sees it.

I brought this book with me on a trip to Mississippi last weekend. We didn't quite get up to the Delta, the poorest part of the state and where Theroux spends most of his time, but we did see much of what Theroux saw. For me, it was the sight of a roofless, wrecked building on the main street of Port Gibson, sitting next to a restaurant: someone's business and dream. Everywhere he goes, Theroux wonders why Africa gets so much aid from the USA while its own communities suffer. (I thought Theroux was a little silly in the way he would compare the money given to say, Ghana, population 31 million, to the federal aid provided to a town of 800, but still, point taken.) But among the neglect are people whose roots are deep, and who spend their lives trying to make those communities thrive.