Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal

All kinds of people set out in the violet night and converged in the city whose soda pop name jangled like thousands of corrosive little pins in their dry mouths. The wanted ads that popped up on the web called for cable riggers, ironworkers, welders, concrete form setters, asphalt paving crews, crane operators, scaffolding builders, heavy-lifting contractors, excavators--these skilled workers packed their bags in a single movement, synchronised, a tight manoeuvre, and set off by any means they could. A first wave stuffed themselves into cargo planes chartered by subcontractors who specialised in recruiting skilled laborers--these companies worked fast and with cliched racism: preferring the strong Turk, the industrious Korean, the aesthetic Tunisian, the Finnish carpenter, the Austrian cabinetmaker, and the Kenyan geometrician; avoiding the dancing Greek and the stormy Spaniard, the Japanese hypocrite and the impulsive Slav. The chosen ones, poor terrified guys dealing with their baptism by air, barfed up their guts at the back of the cabin.

An ambitious politician, recently elected the mayor of the city of Coca in Southern California, decides that his legacy will be to build an immense bridge that crosses the city's wide river. The project brings together thousands upon thousands of people, from architects and engineers to day laborers: an immense undertaking that, as much as the mayor wishes it were otherwise, cannot be credited to anyone person. In a way, Maylis de Kerangal's Birth of a Bridge, which tells the story of the bridge's rise from conception to completion, suggests a novel like William Goldman's The Spire, about the foolhardy construction of a giant spire in a medieval cathedral. Such grand projects emerge only from a kind of hubris, a belief--perhaps justified--that we can create things more lasting than bronze.

I really liked De Kerangal's novel Painting Time; I felt that her unique style--long sentences stacked with clipped phrases, separated only by speedy commas--reflected the meticulous nature of the decorative painter at its center. Birth of a Bridge is similar to Painting Time in that it takes as its subject an effort requiring great meticulousness from people whose efforts are not usually heralded: the concrete scientists, the laborers moving enormous girders, the divers and excavators who dig trenches beneath the river for the bridge's great pylons. By contrast, I was surprised by the novel's moments of grand, almost comic violence. The project engineer, stabbed by an anthropologist who's rowed for days down the river in protest of the threat the bridge poses to traditional native communities in the jungle. The laborer fleeing a life in Anchorage, where he murdered his girlfriend by drawing a bear into their apartment. The same laborer, being blackmailed by Coca's underground into blowing up the bridge.

Sometimes these moments worked, sometimes they didn't. My principal feeling about Birth of a Bridge is something that I've been feeling a lot of lately: that the focus on so many characters at the expense of a single, strong point of view keeps it from being truly engaging. The closest we have to a central character in Birth of a Bridge is Georges Diderot, the no-nonsense project engineer tasked with bringing the bridge to completion. It is Diderot, rather than the ambitious mayor, who comes closest to being the father of the bridge, the one person without whom it would not rise.

In the end, unlike in The Spire, the bridge does rise, and the world is forever changed. Change will come to the native communities in the forest, whether the anthropologist likes it or not, and change comes to the lives of Diderot and the thousands of others who take part in the "birth of the bridge."

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Garrett's voice near me on the skin whats wrong billy whats wrong, couldnt see him but I turned to where I knew he was. I yelled so he could hear me through the skin. Ive been fucked. Ive been fucked Ive been fucked by Christ almighty god Ive been good and fucked by Christ. And I rolled off the horse's back like a soft shell-less egg wrapped in thin white silk and I splashed onto the dust blind and white but the chain held my legs to the horse and I was dragged picking up dust on my wet skin as I travelled in between his four trotting legs at last thank the fuckin christ, in the shade of his stomach.

I picked this book up years ago at a shop in Tucson, and I didn't think of it again until I was in Mesilla, New Mexico, the town where Billy the Kid was tried, sentenced to death and later escaped. Tucson, too, is a place that Billy fled, and in that part of the world you can follow Billy's footsteps across the desert: the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway, the Billy the Kid Gift Shop, the Billy the Kid Casino. Fleeing is part of Billy's legend, the thief and murderer, barely more than a child, who eluded the officials of the Old West until a single man, an obsessive sheriff and former friend of Billy's name Pat Garrett, finally brought him down. As is sometimes but not always the case with the figures of the old west, it's the outlaw who ends up myth, and the lawman ends up fairly suspect. That's certainly the case with Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a pastiche of prose and poetry that captures Billy's flight and his last days.

Ondaatje's Billy is a charmer, well-dressed and well-liked, in opposition to the famous photograph of Billy looking rather ragged and buck-toothed. You can't say he's a reluctant criminal, but he's certainly an uncertain one; in one of my favorite prose passages Ondaatje imagines Billy hiding in an abandoned barn at peace with the animals there: "There were animals who did not move out and accepted me as a larger breed. I ate the old grain with them, drank from a constant puddle about twenty yards away from the barn. I saw no human and heard no human voice, learned to squat the best way when shitting, never ate flesh or touched another animal's flesh, never entered his boundary." But Billy's peaceable kingdom collapses when a group of flesh-hungry rats gets drunk on fermented grain and he's forced to take his shotgun to them. Billy's life is like that; he is compelled to the violence he commits. It is inevitable.

Pat Garrett, on the other hand, is depicted as a strange and untrustworthy figure who can "kill someone on the street and walk back and finish a joke." He keeps exotic birds but he is "frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly he couldnt tell what they planned to do." He is "[o]ne who had decided what was right and forgot all morals." His pursuit of Billy is not only a betrayal of an easy companionship they once shared at the home of a cattle rancher, but something strange and monomaniacal. Ondaatje's no McCarthy, but Garrett shares a little bit of DNA with the Judge from Blood Meridian, only this time under the self-righteous patina of law.

The poetry is... fine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. None of it, I'd say, rises to the level of the prose pieces, which are richly evocative and sometimes even a little grotesque. They are as poetic, perhaps, as the poetry, not least because they're not interesting in giving any real historical account of Billy the Kid's life as much as a series of impressions from it. The book works best if you know a little about Billy already, I think, or if you, as I did, pause in the middle of it and go read through the guy's Wikipedia page. There you might learn that Billy's life, like Ondaatje's book, was fairly short and full of troubles, but it produced a legend that lives on.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Now I understood why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living. It is hard for them, after all, to change their habits--to give up smoking, or the prestige of being great lovers. I was horrified by the thought that I was invisible; horrified that Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet; but I am dead, I am out of reach, I thought; and I shall see Faustine, I shall see her go away, but my gestures, my pleas, my efforts will have no effect on her. And I knew that those horrible solutions were nothing but frustrated hopes.

When I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago, the most surprising thing was just how long it took him to get to the island. Not only are there several chapters before the marooning, there are multiple shipwrecks, after which Crusoe returns to dry land and sets out again. It’s only the third shipwreck that leaves Crusoe stuck on the island that would bring him literary immortality, a whole genre bearing his name, the Robinsonade.

The Invention of Morel, on the other hand, takes the opposite tack. From page one we are on the island, inside the head of one man, a nameless narrator on the run from the law, likely due to some sort of revolutionary activity he’s involved with in his native Venezuela. The narration takes the form of a diary, much of which, in the early going, is dedicated to describing the strange island, for prosperity. Small and fully traversable in a day, the island has a number of strange features: tides which do not precisely follow the moon, a number of mysterious, island-spanning machines that perform some initially unidentifiable work, and three structures, a museum (which is really more like a hotel), a chapel, and a swimming pool. And initially, our narrator is alone.

But after some days, a ship, populated with about a dozen people, lands. At first fearful of being discovered, the narrator grows bolder upon seeing Faustine, a pale woman who sits on the beach each day, whom he immediately falls madly in love with. But she doesn’t seem to see him--literally, he jumps out in front of her in an ill-conceived plan and she reacts not at all. He plants a garden and she doesn’t see it. He sits beside her and she never speaks. There are other inhabitants, including a man who rouses the narrator’s jealousy, the titular Morel, and they all seem similarly stricken. And so about one-third of the way into the book the central mystery is established, and the rest of the book will be spent speculating on and eventually solving it. Spoilers follow.

As the excerpt above indicates, and as I initially assumed, the narrator first believes he is dead, then that he is slowly being caught in some elaborate trap, then that the interlopers, including Faustine, might be aliens of some sort, but every scenario is eventually dismissed, and the narrator begins to notice that certain things seem to be repeating themselves: one day he wakes up and the ship is gone, the next it returns. Finally it becomes clear to him that he’s stuck in a loop--not that he is looping himself but that somehow the events around him are. After spending a little while creeping on Repeating-Faustine, he finally manages to follow the sequence of events and hear Morel’s speech wherein he lays out exactly what’s happening.

It turns out that Morel is something of a mad scientist and has invited his friends here to live a perfect week while being recorded by the giant machines around the island. Not recorded on video or audio only--no, Morel’s machines record everything to the extent that reality is impacted. Every movement, every smell, the position of every molecule in a person’s body, even the positions of the moons and the tides. But! It turns out that recording all this information requires something like the soul-stealing properties cameras were once thought to have, a process that causes a swift degenerative sickness and finally death as the person’s soul itself is duplicated--or trapped--within the machine, repeating the same set of events for eternity.

The friends are all horrified but of course it’s too late--they’ve already been captured. The facsimiles(?) though, have no idea that they’re in a loop, since their captured forms have only the memories they had at the moment of capture, and the big question of the book is finally whether their situation is really bad at all: are they metaphorically in Hell or in Heaven? Is it really so bad to repeat a perfect week forever for the first time, over and over and over? After all, the narrator is able to have novel experiences and what good has it done him?

Ultimately, he decides he’d rather be part of the loop than live the life he’s got, so he arranges, over a series of months, a sequence of events that integrate him into the narrative, with the intent that when this island is eventually discovered, those who see the diorama will think he and Faustine were great lovers, or at least a great love. And maybe somehow they are, even though Faustine will never, can never, know.

Pity the Beast by Robin McLean

What's the earth to a horse? A place to place the hoof, a cradle of grass, a prop to rest his nose while rippling grass out by the roots. And the Herd would have had no interest in eons. Seasons maybe, days maybe, the change of the wind certainly, the daylight hours on their pelts. No interest in geysers. In salt licks, maybe. Horse was a watcher, a minder of his own business, with eyes screwed in on the side of his tin-can skull, peripheral observer, yes, but what of those objects right in front of his nose? Expert in grass and wind, in the locations where rodents bored their holes, since such pits would break a forelock with one misstep. And then Horse would be left by his Herd. And then Wolf would come.

A mare is giving birth; the foal is too big, because she's been impregnated by the neighbor's immense Percheron horse. The couple who own the ranch work together to save the life of mare and foal, but they can't stop bickering, because the Percheron isn't the only neighbor who's been where he shouldn't be: Dan has recently discovered that his wife Ginny has been sleeping with the next door rancher. As the work continues, more people show up, partly to help with the mare, but partly to insult Ginny and upbraid her for her infidelity, among them her own sister Ella and Ella's husband Saul. The insults turn to violence when this crew beats and gang-rapes Ginny and throws her in the lime pit which is meant to dissolve the bodies of dead animals. But Ginny isn't dead; she climbs out and rides away, with her pursuers on the trail behind her.

I was blown away by the first part of Pity the Beast. The way that McLean slowly amplifies the anger and hatred the others have toward Ginny, at the same time they are ostensibly working together to save the mare and foal, is rich in irony and crackling with hate. It's easy to see the influence here of Cormac; the West in Pity the Beast is depicted as a point in eternity's long arc, and we are made to understand the hatred of Dan and others as something that is primeval. At the same time, there are suggestions that the West has become a diminished place, performative in nature rather than real: among Ginny's other pursuers are a deputy from New Jersey who writes postcards to his mother about his cowboying (and how he thinks Ginny must be single now), and a young teen in a ridiculous Western get-up called "the Kid."

That said, I thought the remainder of Pity the Beast failed to live up to the promise of the first section. The pursuit goes on for days, weeks, months; it goes on so long we are no longer supposed to wonder in any literal sense how long it is taking. The characters have reentered the West of myth. But this flight into myth leaves the narrative rather obscure, sometimes almost impossible to read for plot. For every interesting or novel touch, like the bits of "Mule thoughts" shared among the pursuers' mule pack, there's one that is impenetrable: I have no idea, for example, what's up with the short science fiction passages where a future scientist is doing a census of the world's cedar trees. In the end, the novel makes the same error as Dan, Ella, Saul, their tracker and their mule driver: it never should have followed Ginny into the wilderness in the first place.

Cimarron by Edna Ferber

His past, before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this; slander whispered that. Rumor, romantic, unsavory, fantastic, shifting and changing like clouds on a mountain peak, floated about the head of Yancey Cravat. They say he has Indian blood in him. They say he has an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known as "Cimarron" Cravat, hence his son's name, corrupted to Cim. They say his real name is Cimarron Seven, of the Choctaw Indian family of Sevens; he was raised in a tepee; a wickiup had been his bedroom, a blanket his robe. It was known he had been one of the early Boomers who followed the banner of the picturesque and splendidly mad David Payne in the first wild dash of that adventurer into Indian Territory. He had dwelt, others whispered, in that sinister strip, thirty-four miles wide and almost two hundred miles long, called No-Man's-Land as early as 1854, and, later, known as the Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning wild or unruly.

Yancey Cravat is a living, breathing avatar of the Wild West: fearless, adventurous, a crack shot with an enormous head like a buffalo. The five years he spends cooped up in Wichita are the worst of his life, but he stays to woo his wife Sabra, the scion of a well-to-do Kansas family. When the territory that's now Oklahoma is opened at last, Yancey is among those "boomers" who race across the border to drive a stake into their chosen lot; and though he's outwitted by a clever madam, he brings Sabra and their son Cimarron to the newly established town of Osage anyway. Sabra, for her part, is mortified by their new life, by the filth and want of Osage, and by the Indians lurking around. The Indians, in fact, are one of the greatest points of disagreement between Sabra and Yancey: she refuses to have anything to do with them, but he uses his newly formed newspaper--the Oklahoma Wigwam--to advocated for better treatment of the Osage, the Kaw, the Cherokee, and others.

Cimarron has the same skeleton as Ferber's Giant, cast back several decades in time. Yancey is like Texas rancher Bick Benedict; he has the West in his bone. Sabra is like Benedict's new wife Leslie, cast into a world that frightens her, one she doesn't understand, though Sabra bucks against Yancey's designs more than Leslie ever does.

With whom are we to sympathize? On one hand, we admire Yancey's high spirits and his advocacy for the Indians, and Sabra's race repulsion makes her an unpleasant character. But Yancey's adventurousness makes him a bad husband: when the "Cimarron Strip"--the Oklahoma panhandle--is opened up, Yancey insists on taking up his family and heading farther west. When Sabra refuse, he goes anyway, and is gone five years, while she stays at home running and growing the newspaper. Though Yancey returns, it's never for long; he's gone to Alaska, or to war in the Philippines, or in France. The spirit of the west begins to look a little selfish; it looks like recklessness and abandonment. Sabra, on the other hand, represents a kind of feminine and civilizing principle. She stewards the newspaper and helps birth Oklahoma's version of "society." Yancey's name is floated time and time again for governor, but it's no surprise that it's Sabra, actually, who becomes a congresswoman from the newly minted state. If Yancey represents the spirit of the west, it's people like Sabra who made sure that the West was more than a spirit.

Is Cimarron a subversive book? Yancey is so larger-than-life; it's hard not to see him as another bit of mythmaking about "How the West Was Won." Cimarron traffics in some embarrassing racial stereotypes: the shiftless Indian, the Jewish peddler. Don't get me started on the fawning "black Isaiah" who accompanies them from Wichita, and then suffers a death of grotesque cruelty at the hands of the Osage. Part of me wonders if the effect of a character like Yancey, who enters in the land run but scorns the government policies of theft and depredation that made it possible, serves mostly to assuage the guilt of "Boomers." But Yancey's cruelty and recklessness go far in puncturing those myths as well. In the end, Cimarron struck me as a more straightforwardly Western novel than Giant, but you can't say it doesn't have its complexities.

Coyote America by Dan Flores

I've lived in the urban-wildlands zone--in West Texas, Montana, and now New Mexico--for much of my adult life, surrounded by coyotes in each location. Living among them, I have never felt a threat of any kind. They've functioned for me more as part of the occasional magic show of life, like whales breaching an ocean surface or the Galilean moons, glimpsed through a telescope, swinging around Jupiter over the course of a starry winter night. They coyote's remarkable resilience doesn't just put me in mind of us; it operates as shorthand for the greatest story ever told, the miracle of ongoing evolutionary adaptation to an endlessly changing world. Coyotes are the perfect expression of how life finds a way. They are also one of the iconic life-forms birthed in our part of the globe, an American original that makes us more American the more we know them. We and they are similar success stories in our shared moment on Earth. That's how I, at least, see the coyotes around me. How they see me, I can't know. But I do know this: when I make eye contact with a coyote, I can see the wheels turning inside her head. If I have a theory of mind, so does she.

Camping in the wilds of far west Texas last week, we were surrounded at night by the calls of coyotes from all sides. It's a little eerie, because the coyotes don't simply arrive at dusk. They were there the whole time, slipping through the open desert where you simply didn't notice them. At night they speak to each other, but it's almost as if they are speaking to you, reminding you they're there. As it turns out, I hadn't needed to go all the way to Texas to get a dose of coyote magic: while I was there, a coyote was fished out of the East River here in New York City. Coyotes now inhabit all the continental states, and they've become more prevalent over time, appearing not just in the rural parts of America but in its suburbs and urban centers. What does it mean to share our spaces, and our lives, with these animals?

Dan Flores' Coyote America is a "natural and supernatural" history of the coyote, perhaps even a kind of biography, rooted in stories of Native American religion, in which Coyote figures as a kind of wise trickster figure, and early American legends and tall tales. The Coyote of Indigenous stories is clever and shrewd; he overcomes his enemies and pursuers by the power of his intellect and wit, though he can also be sort of a clown. In Flores' description, this well fits the coyote as a natural specimen, which has been hunted doggedly by ranchers and government officials, but which has somehow managed to thrive no matter what we've tried to do to eradicate it. And I do mean eradicate: one of the things I didn't realize is that, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set out to extirpate the coyote as completely as it did the wolf. Millions of coyotes were killed in the west by poisons, but it is in the nature of the coyote to survive--even by naturally adjusting the size of its litter to compensate for the persecution.

The extent to which the United States government sought to eliminate an entire species seems shocking to a modern-day reader. We take for granted the perspective of early conservationists like Aldo Leopold, who believed that predator species have the right to exist, a purpose for which the early national parks were set aside. (I didn't know that either--wolves, coyotes, and bears seem to have had free reign within Yellowstone, Glacier, etc.) We know now, too, that eliminating predators monkeys with the balance of ecosystems in strange ways; in one area successfully voided of wolves and coyotes Flores describes roads slick with the roadkill of small mammals to the point where driving was made impossible. But mostly, we just never proved equal to the task of eliminating the wily canids. Flores hypothesizes that, by eliminating their senior competitor, the wolf, we actually set the stage for the coyote to fill in the vacuum and take over the whole of the United States. In any case, Flores draws a comparison between coyotes and human beings, two species marked by their profound adaptability, and, if urban coyotes are any sign, two species living closely intertwined lives.

I was really struck by a chapter on on the "threat" that coyotes pose to the red wolf, a small species of wolf that has been reduced to a couple dozen animals living in North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp. Red wolves hybridize so easily with coyotes that the wolves' stewards have gone to extreme lengths, trapping and killing coyotes en masse to protect the red wolves' genetic purity. This struck me as a great example of the kind of oft-unthinking tradeoff that Emma Marris writes about in Wild Souls: if the wolves want to breed with the coyotes and vice versa, who are we to stop them, and how many coyote lives equal a reasonable cost? Flores goes on to note that genetic evidence suggests that red wolves, like their larger cousins, have a significant portion of coyote DNA already--that perhaps the hybridizing is not a kind of bastardization but a reflection of a pattern that is much older than we are. Like in all things, it's proof of the coyote's ability to adapt.

I didn't always love Flores' ham-fisted style, but I did enjoy the thoroughness with which Flores sketches the profile of a single species. Coyote America makes a convincing case that the coyote ought to be considered a kind of American icon: ancient, resourceful, clever, and brave.

10:04 by Ben Lerner

I'd been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction, nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.

Adam, Ben Lerner's stand-in (who also appears as a teenage debater in The Topeka School), begins 10:04 by discovering that he has a possible dissection in his heart that may kill him. The specter of death, both certain and uncertain, hangs behind the other dilemmas of his life that are, if not smaller, of obviously less permanent import. Existential questions have a way of doing that. When not worrying about the secret machinations of his body, Adam is a budding writer who has had a successful story in the New Yorker, and his attempts to think through an expansion of the story into a novel are squeezed by the pressure of a successful follow-up. At the same time, his best friend Alex has decided she wants to have a child, and wants Adam to provide the sperm sample.

First, about that: though Alex is clear that Adam can be a involved with "the child" as he wishes, the arrangement suggests a newfangled, perhaps diminished, version of the nuclear family. Which is fine, because the nuclear family hasn't proved to be all that helpful recently. Adam's feelings about the "donation" are complicated by the threat of his sudden death, and the need for legacy-leaving, as well as his own latent romantic feelings for Alex. Though what's offered to Adam isn't quite "fatherhood" in a familiar sense, the novel offers several childlike stand-ins for him to practice upon: Roberto, the elementary school-aged child Ben helps to research and write a book about dinosaurs; a young intern in Marfa, Texas who does too much cocaine and who needs safekeeping; Calvin, an advisee in Adam's poetry program who mistakes his own mental breakdown for poetic inspiration. In each of these cases, Adam is only moderately successful as a father figure, though never a failure, and the partial quality of each relationship seems like a trial run for the possibility of having a child with Alex.

How much of this is "real?" The dinosaur book, charmingly reproduced here, is actually the work of Elias Garcia, a kid Lerner really did mentor, but we are told that in all other ways "Roberto" is a fictional creation. Likewise, the New Yorker story is real, and we tend to believe Ben/Adam when he says that the book in our hands is the product itself, though if Ben is not quite Adam and Adam is not quite Ben, it's puzzling to wonder how the two of them ended up creating the same book. Lerner really is one of the very best at the sort of "autofiction" that dominates the literary consciousness today (see, for example, Annie Ernaux's recent Nobel Prize), because the lines between the real and the fictional are so blurred, and because the blurring of the lines becomes the actual subject of the novel. That sounds tedious, maybe, but Lerner does it so well.

We get to see several versions of "Adam": the fictionalized version, for example, that becomes the writer character of the story, and we see Alex's resentment when she sees that something she's said has become fodder for Adam's fictional life. But these are only layers beneath which an inaccessible "real" Lerner also lies. He calls it a "flickering" between fiction and nonfiction, and the comparison to poetry, I think, is the key to much of Lerner's work. But I also see a metaphor of threads which are tied together, both fictional and nonfictional, and which resemble what I see as the key strength of Lerner's prose: the ability to combine vastly different threads--Superstorm Sandy, modern art, fossils, whatever--into something that works without forcing.

Maybe I've got DeLillo on the brain because we're reading White Noise in my junior class, but I see a lot of him in 10:04: The (real-ish) Institute of Totaled Art, which displays masterpieces whose damage makes them unsellable, seems right out of one of DeLillo's consumerist critiques. And the dissection that lives within Adam like a time bomb seems to me a novel revision of White Noise's Jack Gladney, who must live with the statistical certainty of his own death after the "Airborne Toxic Event." (Side note: the punning between "Marfan Syndrome," which Adam's doctors suggest he may have, and the residency he takes up in Marfa, Texas is so under-played to be almost unnoticeable. If Lerner hit that note any harder the book would tip over into parody, but he pitches it just right.) Like DeLillo, Lerner seems to me one of the few novelists with something really convincing to say about "the way we live now." The hyper-contemporary details, like the scene during Superstorm Sandy, or Occupy Wall Street, which would seem desperately faddish in another author are convincing here. The unconventional possibilities of Adam's life begin to seem like a way forward into a new world, leaving behind the forms which led us into the kind of crisis that hangs, like Marfan Syndrome or an aortic dissection, over everything.

Robinson by Muriel Spark

The more I pondered the murder the more did I come to think of Robinson as a kind of legendary figure since it was hard to believe that only a few weeks had passed since he had led me on my first visit to the Furnace. Perhaps, even at that time, he had assumed near-mythical dimensions my eyes. I saw him now as an austere sea-bound hero, a noble heretic, who to follow his mystical destiny, had hidden himself away from the world with only a child-disciple for company. I supposed he had recognized in Miguel a strong unformed religious potentiality. Robinson himself was essentially a religious man. Jimmie had once, in the manner of one who had a relative bitten with an eccentric ambition, referred to Robinson's desire for spiritual advancement. In thinking of Robinson, I had to perform an act of imaginative distortion in that I could not think of him as part of the present tense, a human creature who had been born into a particular age and at a particular point of developed doctrine--I vaguely thought of him as having no proper station in life like the rest of us. I thought of his rescue work at the time of the crash, his nursing us to health, the burial of the dead, and his patience with our ungrateful intrusion into his elected solitude. That he could have met his ends at the hands of one of his beneficiaries seemed to me the essence of his tragedy. And in this interesting light he took on the heroic character of a pagan pre-Christian victim of expiation.

January Marlow is one of three survivors of a plane crash that strikes a small island off the coast of the Azores. The others are Jimmie Waterford, a charming foreigner who speaks in a strangely affected English, and Tom Wells, a boorish grifter with a suitcase full of cheap charms to be sold for luck. They have found themselves on the island of Robinson, named after its proprietor, a mercurial loner who has chosen the island as his refuge from the world--and who happens to be Jimmie's uncle. As they wait for the yearly pomegranate to arrive in two month's time, the only other companionship they have is Miguel, Robinson's impressionable young ward, and a cat that can play ping-pong. Robinson runs the island with a strict hand, set in his ways as hermits often are, until one day, he disappears. A trail of bloody clothes leads up to the "Furnace," an active volcanic crater. Their caretaker, January reasons, has been murdered, and the only possible suspects are her two fellow survivors.

I'd like to reread all of Spark's books, now that I've exhausted them. I had vaguely planned on reading them in the order I first read them, but I have given away my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so here's the second book I read, years ago, which happens also to be her second novel. It has a kind of richness or fullness that her later books mostly abandon, but much of what makes Spark Spark is fully present in Robinson: Robinson, for example, stands out as the divine stand-in, who arranges the lives of his wards, whom he has saved and protected, and yet cannot be truly known, or even spoken with. Robinson the island is roughly laid out in the shape of a man; January and the others find themselves in a manner inside of him. And when he disappears, is that any less than the frightening disappearance of God from modern life?

What to do, then, with Robinson's hatred of the Catholic veneration for Mary? Maybe it's not too much to think of Robinson as the jealous God who hates to share his acclaim with someone else, a woman especially. And maybe it's not too much to read January's sudden arrival on the island as a kind of imposition of womanhood on the bachelor Robinson's life, as Mary amends the traditional masculinity of God. Robinson lumps Marianism in with the good luck charms Tom Wells sells to unsuspecting travelers: luck, perhaps even providence, are the province of suckers, but if that's true, what to make of the incredible fortune that they crashed on just this island? Or that one of the survivors is Robinson's own nephew? Could the mysterious Robinson have arranged even that?

Or maybe there's nothing to all of that. Maybe the man-shaped island represents the way that January, after Robinson's disappearance, must investigate the house and determine the shape of his character in order to understand what happened to him. Maybe she must explore him as she explores the island, with its molten heart and secret passageways. Maybe it's a metaphor for the detective story.

Who knows. At her best, Spark, though she often pares her novels to the "essentials," provides no easy symbols of readings. Her images and details are slippery, and there always seems to be one detail too many, or perhaps one detail too few. Robinson is all those things, but it's a tremendously fun send-up of "desert island" literature--I mean, you've got Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe right there. Her books are always fun, I think, but Robinson is fun in that specific way that lots of people mean when they say a book is "fun." It's an adventure, and that's enough. I'm impressed, actually, by how well it holds up: if it's not quite the quality of Jean Brodie or Loitering with Intent, it's in an (only slightly) lower tier.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hour. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the one who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.

Makina must travel from her home in Mexico over the U.S. border to bring a message from her mother to her brother, who crossed before her. To bring it she must ingratiate herself among Mexico's criminal underground, asking favors from men with names like Mr. Aitch and Mr. Double-U and Mr. Q. They will help her make arrangements with the coyote, the man who assists crossers over the border, but of course they also want something of their own to go with her.

Why do so many cross the border? What are they looking for, and what will they do to get there? When they arrive, what happens to them? Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World approaches these questions with the sensibility of a poet, perhaps one who has recently ingested peyote. The novel's hallucinogenic methods reflect the metaphor that lurks beneath the story: the traveler to the underworld. Makina is like Odysseus, searching in Hades for the shade who will tell him where home can be found. In the novel's opening scene, a mysterious sinkhole opens up in the ground before her, and though she's saved, we understand that her journey across the border is another descent into something strange and subterranean. And like some ancient travelers to the underworld, the greatest risk is that she won't be able to find her way back.

When Makina arrives in the U.S., she discovers that her brother has disappeared. She hears a rumor that he has entered the domestic service of a white military family; tracking down the family's son she discovers her brother himself, having taken the son's place to save him from war. He's a walking metaphor for the requirements and perils of crossing the border: he is indispensable but invisible; more chillingly, he has been transformed into someone else. He refuses to come back with her, and in the end, Makina finds herself in a strange waiting room where new names and identities are being parceled out. Will she, too, be changed by the crossing?

Like Aura Xilonen's The Gringo Champion, another--but very different--novel about migrants crossing the border, the translator must have had fun with this one. In the translator's note, Lisa Dillman discusses the neologism jarchar, a word Herrera adapts from an Arabic term for "to leave." Dillman chooses to translate the word as verse, and suddenly a whole host of new meanings open up in the novel: not just leaving, but crossing, as in transverse. But there are intimations, too, of changing, of conversion and reversion, of turning, and of course, of the poetic "verse." When briefly captured by the border police, Makina grabs a cop's notebook and writes the prose poem above, which he reads aloud. For Herrera (and Dillman), the act of crossing becomes a kind of writing, a story or poem written in deed. Can what is written be unwritten?

Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if--what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities--across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. She opened her window softly and knelt down beside it to breathe the cold air. She felt the snowflakes melt in her hair, on her hot cheeks. Oh now she knew! She must have it, she couldn't run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. Those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for. In them she would find him. If with all your heart you truly seek Him, you shall ever surely find Him. He had sung that for her in the beginning, when she first went to him. Now she knew what it meant.

How strange to read Willa Cather write about a city. Lucy Gayheart is a small town Nebraska girl who travels to the big city--Chicago--to study piano. She falls in love with a famous and married singer, but first she falls in love with Chicago, which makes her hometown of Haverford seem irredeemably provincial and cramped. But Cather describe the city as she does natural landscapes: the buildings are gray cliffs, and Lake Michigan is prairie-like in the way the subtle changes of the sky, purple and green, rise above its flatness. 

The singer, Clement Sebastian, seeks Lucy out because he needs an accompanist. They never play together in public, but he practices with her daily, and they are drawn into the fabric of each others' lives. In Lucy, Sebastian sees a freshness and youth that has passed him by; in Sebastian, Lucy sees an elevated spirit who contrasts with the shrewd, earthy Haverford banker whom everyone presumes she'll marry. Nothing happens between Lucy and Clement, not really, but what happens to Lucy happens in spirit, rather than the body. When the banker, Harry Gordon, comes to Chicago to propose to her, she tells him truthfully that she is caught up with another man, and when he presses her about how far their relationship has gone, she exclaims "All the way!" Harry, of course, takes this to mean she has been physically reckless, but "the way" Lucy means in the way of the spirit, or the way of the mind. She's a sentimentalist in the most literal sense; the great experiences of her life are those that happen within.

So, let me give a spoiler alert for what I'm going to say next: Cather is one of the cruelest and most bloodthirsty authors that ever existed. She's more pitiless than George R. R. Martin. First, she kills off Clement, who dies by drowning on Lake Como weeks before he's supposed to return and resume his work with Lucy. She returns to Haverford a changed woman, somewhat darkened and diminished, but having embraced the idea that what happens within her cannot die, though the man who caused it might. Still, she finds herself unable to repair the break between her and Harry, who has married a woman he does not care for just to spite her.

And then Cather kills her off. I couldn't believe it. In a fit of despair Lucy takes her skates out to the old skating spot on the Platte river, not knowing that beneath the snow the river has changed course and skating is no longer safe. She encounters Harry on the way, but he makes a lame excuse and turns his carriage away from her. Blinded by anger at Harry, she fails to notice the cracking ice before it's too late. In this way she's symbolically united with Clement, having perished the same way he did. It's not quite O Pioneers! perhaps, but it hurts. Clement is old-ish, has already felt past the best years of his life, but Lucy is young, and her youthfulness and promise are her most essential qualities. But Cather dispatches Lucy at her lowest point, and it's Harry Gordon--practical, unsentimental, philistine--left to deal with the aftermath in the book's final pages. Willa, you ogre! You beast!