Mona by Pola Oloixarac

The Swedish summer light covered everything like a soft layer of dust, white material that made it look like it had just rained chalk. It was so cruel that darkness wouldn't start to fall until close to midnight. The day would remain in this pale limbo for interminable hours. It was a writers' purgatory, the white page as breathing air, where everyone was just waiting around to see who'd receive the key to paradise. How long do bruises last on the body?

Mona, a Peruvian-Argentinian writer who has recently published an acclaimed debut, has been nominated for the prestigious Basske-Wortz Prize. She's been invited to a remote compound in Sweden where she and a couple dozen other writers from around the world will hobnob and gossip, and at the end of the week, the prize will be announced. Mona thinks she stands a chance, but maybe not as much as the mercurial Icelandic poet Ragnar, or the smug French writer Philippe. But she may not last through the week, as she seems to be falling apart: mysterious bruises, whose source she cannot remember, have appeared all over her body. 

On her phone, Mona reads about the disappearance of a young Argentine girl named Sandrita. Speculation flies about the disappearance, until, towards the end of the week, Sandrita turns up dead and raped on a beach. The reader is asked to see a parallel between Mona and Sandrita, perhaps even wonder if the mysterious bruises that have appeared on Mona's body represent a kind of mystical kinship with Sandrita. And yet, Mona is many thousands of miles away; the writer's conference could not be further than the reality of Sandrita's short life if it were on the moon. The writers who get up to speak about the political in their writing end up sounding proud and ridiculous, as with the Middle Eastern writer who claims, "I will be your voice" to the voiceless of the world, or the reactionary jerk who says things like, "Our Virgin Mary is Che Guevara." And perhaps that's the point--all this talk about the significance of writing is divorced from the world it's meant to represent. "It's not that there are no more literary personalities in our era," Mona tells another writer, "it's just that now they come to places like these thinking they're writers and end up leaving as characters. The festivals are the real novels!" But if so, they're novels that speak to no one but the characters themselves.

Man, I couldn't figure this book out. How seriously am I supposed to take the Virgin Mary-Che stuff? It's too shallow to be serious, but not funny enough to be satirical, I thought. Mona is a talky novel, in which Mona engages in short conversations with her fellow writers, and in which they say things that are inscrutable, shallow, or both, and in language that no one--not even writers--drops into in the very first moments of meeting someone. How seriously am I supposed to take this, for example:

And there's nothing as womanly as incarnation. To be a woman and write is to be trans. That's why writing is trans, being fat is trans, and this whole performance of being a woman is the most trans thing in the world. Ever since Tiresias, who of course was the first trans person ever.

It's hard to write a book about writing; it's a tall order for anyone, I think. But Mona isn't a book about writing; the act of writing barely enters into it. What Mona writes about, or what her writing sounds like, we'll never know, just as we don't know anything, really, about the writing of Marco or Akto or Shingzwe or Chrystos, or whoever. But the writers themselves aren't interesting without their writing, which ought to animate this whole farce. If the thesis of the book is that writing is divorced from the world--and I think that's meeting it a little more than halfway--Mona manages to be both divorced from the world and divorced from the writing. What's left is a series of tedious conversations. Mona wants to satirize those writer's conference, but it fails because it's too convinced that the conferences themselves are inherently interesting.

Mona is a book where nothing happens, until it does: first, Mona remembers at last that her bruises are the result of a rape by Antonio, the lover whose texts she's been ignoring all week. Second, the mysterious Icelandic poet finally gets up to speak, and in doing so--spoiler alert--summons a mythical Norse serpent from the compound lake. It's a symbol, I guess, of the real--power, death, violence--intruding upon the masturbatory writers who have ignored it, despite their pretenses. As an ending to the book it feels cheap and strange.

Back by Henry Green

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delivered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he'd loved, that he'd come so far for? Why did she die? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been best if they had killed him, he felt, if instead o a sniper's rifle in that rosebush they had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she's having a jolly good rest.

Charley Summers returns to England, repatriated from a prisoner of war camp in Germany, a little less than when he left: he's missing one leg. Nor is home the same as when he left it: his lover, Rose, has died while he was away. The loss of Rose leaves him bereft and numb, but Rose's father leaves him an address which he says conceals a "surprise"--his illegitimate daughter and Rose's half-sister, Nancy, who looks (to Charley, at least) exactly like Rose, except without her familiar red hair. In his fragile state, Charley is unable to understand what he's seeing; instead of finding in Nancy a new possibility, he convinces himself that she really is Rose, deceiving him and everyone else, and having become a "tart" while he was away.

Back must have been quite personal for Green, who served in the war, though as far as I know he came back intact. But it's a novel about how difficult it is to reintegrate oneself to home, which is never quite the home you leave, after the trauma of war. More than anything it reminded me of Mavis Gallant's terrific story "The Latehomecomer," about a man who comes back home after everyone else has moved on. "Moving on" is exactly what everyone wants Charley to do, including Rose's husband (!) James, who is one of several characters who urge Charley to get married again. And perhaps that advice is right, and Nancy takes to Charley despite the strange manner of their acquaintance, but only when Charley learns to see Nancy for who she is and not a treacherous, mutated Rose, can such possibilities be possible. For her own part, Nancy herself has also been mutilated by war: her husband Phil was shot down and killed in Egypt. Rose and Phil are like wounds that one can't help but scratch at, as much as they try to keep them taboo, they sneak into the conversation between Charley and Nancy. Interestingly, Charley's experience in the prison camp is the one thing that seems so deeply buried--because, it's suggested, it was such a hideous experience--that it rarely pokes its head into conversation.

Henry Green, man. The guy could write. Who else could see "a small crop of red apples half hidden, like sins?" Who else could get away with describing a character's feelings as "one tall question mark?" Because he loved ambiguity in dialogue, Green's novels often feel impenetrable, like smooth surfaces one can't get beneath, but then they'll hit you suddenly with an image of great pathos. In Back, it goes like this: Charley wants to send samples of Nancy and Rose's handwriting to an expert for comparison, but when he rereads Rose's letters, he realizes they give away their affair too clearly, and he can't bear to part with them anyway. Unthinkingly, he cuts them up and reassembles them into a less incriminating letter, only realizing afterward that he's destroyed the only link he has left with the dead Rose: "So, for the evening, he mourned the fact that Rose's treachery had destroyed the last there was left to him, the letters which, for all the months and years in Germany, had been what he was most afraid to find mislaid, or lost, when he got back."

Back is tremendously affecting like that, but there are a couple of other significant traits of Green's writing on display here. For one, he was a great writer about work, whether that's the tedious tasks of professional servants in Loving or the physical labor of foundry workers in Living. Here, Charley has a middle-management job producing some kind of widget for the war effort, a job of invoices and filing card systems that's reproduced in excruciating detail. And Green could be funny, too, as evidenced by a running gag about how many acronym organizations cropped up in England during the war ("We are now seriously behind with our S.E.V.B., S.E.P.Q., and S.O.M.F. contracts"). But the absurdity of English civil society in wartime only serves to deepen the powerful sense of loss experienced by Charley, Nancy, and others.

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

Sometimes it was days before visiting warriors saw the man they had come to follow, for often Crazy Horse kept far from the noise and the drumming, perhaps making a fast, hoping for a vision or a dream to tell him what must be done. It seemed if he could make himself more a part of the earth and the sky and the things between that a way would come to save the people. He even tried the medicine things of the Old Ones, and for two days he looked unmoving towards the Black Hills, overrun as by ants digging up the rocks and the cool green valleys and the slopes red with the grass berries so sweet to the tongue. But it was no more than a wind in the gully and n his way back to camp he saw that the buffalo chips were indeed becoming few, the trees no longer rubbed smooth by the backs of the shedding herds.

What a nice coincidence to be able to write this review on the anniversary of the victory of a coalition of Lakota and Cheyenne fighters at the Little Bighorn, or as they call it, the Battle of the Greasy Grass. During that fight, the larger force of Indian fighters utterly destroyed the forces of General George Armstrong Custer, killing Custer and almost every other American soldier. By the time of the battle, the Lakota leader called Crazy Horse was at the peak of his renown, having already distinguished himself as an especially courageous warrior in actions against the American forces, including, ten years earlier, leading a decoy action in the "Fetterman Fight" that led to the greatest losses suffered by American forces--greatest, that is, until Little Bighorn. Just a few years later, Crazy Horse's band of holdouts against reservation life would be drastically reduced, and then, once he himself surrendered to the Red Cloud agency in Nebraska, he himself would be killed by a military guard with a bayonet.

Mari Sandoz, the great Nebraskan writer, depicts Crazy Horse as the "Strange Man of the Lakotas." Crazy Horse was marked as unusual from his birth by his fine blond hair which earned him, long before he took the name of his father, also called Crazy Horse, the name "Curly." But Crazy Horse was also "strange" in the sense that he was aloof and unsociable, and cared little for the scalps and war trophies that dominated the Lakota idea of what it meant to be renowned in battle. Crazy Horse, instead, is driven by an obsessive passion for the survival of the Lakota, rather than personal gain or fame:

Their blankets held out around them, as was customary, they went on as women do, about this Hunkpatila so often in their camp, with hair summer-bleached to the color of an elk's rump. Nor was he a big man, as a Lakota leader should be; instead he stood slender as a young warrior, almost a boy when riding beside the seven-foot Touch the Clouds. He did not sing or dance as a Lakota should, and never made the ordeals of the sundance to give himself fortitude and courage. It was true that he was strong in the fighting, but he brought in no scalps for the women to dance and no stories of coups counted or deeds done. He was indeed a Strange Man.

Sandoz' depiction of Crazy Horse's life is a compelling one, animated by the central drama of the warrior's "strangeness." His early life is dominated by the difficulty of his love for Black Buffalo Woman who marries another man, No Water. In Lakota culture, a woman may divorce her husband freely by moving her things from her husband's lodge to another man's, but when Black Buffalo Woman leaves No Water for Crazy Horse, No Water responds by shooting Crazy Horse in the face; a controversy for which Crazy Horse is "unshirted," losing his authority among the leaders of the Lakota. 

That theme--Crazy Horse's conflict with Lakota leaders--is picked up later as Crazy Horse becomes the avatar of the "hostile" Lakota, who want to pursue resistance against the American forces, as opposed to the "friendlies" who prefer to accommodate the Americans by giving up their freedom of movement in exchange for food and supplies provided by their reservation Indian agencies. This conflict is not, as Vollmann depicts it in The Dying Grass, merely driven by differing perspectives on what is best for the people, but the greed and short-sightedness of Lakota leaders, who benefit from the Americans' authority. Red Cloud comes in for special criticism here, sacrificing the Lakota's autonomy by signing the "peace paper" in exchange for being designated the "paper chief" of all the Lakota, a role which had never existed among the highly decentralized bands. Red Cloud is Crazy Horse's foil in Sandoz' telling, a selfish and greedy man who sacrifices the interests of his people for his own.

What makes Crazy Horse such a compelling tragedy is that, in the end, it's a betrayal story: the Americans could never defeat the Strange Man of the Lakota, but the Lakota could, and in the end it's a constellation of jealous Indians who bring about Crazy Horse's death. These Judases have their own fascinating figures, like Little Big Man, who holds Crazy Horse's arms down for both No Water and, later, the military guard who bayonets Crazy Horse; and Woman's Dress, a childhood rival of Crazy Horse's whose name refers to his flamboyant, over-decorated appearance. I was especially interested in a figure called "the Grabber," a part-Lakota, part-Black scout and translator whose real name was Frank Grouard. It's the Grabber who seals Crazy Horse's fate by badly mistranslating his agreement to assist the whites in their war against Chief Joseph: Crazy Horse promises to fight until not a single Nez Perce is left standing, but the bumbling--or malicious--Grabber translates this as "not a single white is left standing."

I'm not equipped to judge Sandoz' ability to enter into the Lakota perspective and render a faithful rendition of the Lakota leader, but from where I stand, I find the book's wholesale rejection of the colonial white narrative pretty remarkable. Vine Deloria writes in his introduction about being persuaded by the book, despite initial skepticism. One reason the book is so convincing, though, I think, is that it relies on firsthand testimony: Sandoz relies on interviews she made herself in the 1930s with Crazy Horse's friends and associates, like the loyal He Dog, and White Calf, a witness to the great warrior's tragic murder. Though Crazy Horse himself might have found Black Elk Speaks author John Neihardt's description of the book as "the story of a great American" objectionable, it's hard to deny that Sandoz captures a spirit of greatness. After Little Bighorn, a popular myth about Custer sprang up in the USA which depicted him as a valiant man who fought to the last moment in the face of certain doom--but isn't that a better and truer description of Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas?

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Mrs. Bridge stood alone at a front window thinking of how quickly the years were going by. The children were growing up so rapidly, and her husband--she stirred uneasily. Already there was a new group of "young marrieds," people she hardly knew. Surely some time had gone by--she expected this; nevertheless she could not get over the feeling that something was drawing steadily away from her. She wondered if her husband felt the same; she thought she would ask him that evening when she got home. She recalled the dreams they used to share; she recalled with a smile how she used to listen to him speak of his plans and how she had never actually cared more than one way or another about his ambition, she had cared only for him. That was enough.

Mrs. Bridge has an unusual given name: India. But no one ever calls her anything but Mrs. Bridge, including the author of Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell: it's almost as if, in marriage, she's able to conceal at last the one possible eccentricity that follows her, in order to live a life of utter conformity. Mrs. Bridge is a portrait of 1940s housewife that might feel stale and familiar to us in 2023: a woman who permits herself to have no other ambitions than pleasing her husband. Mr. Bridge is not cruel, except in the small cruelties of isolation and inattentiveness that such a relationship fosters, but still she lives for him, cooks for him, votes the way he votes. And yet, maintaining such a lifestyle requires a force of will from Mrs. Bridge, a will that goes into not seeing the world around her as it changes.

That's the story of Mrs. Bridge: a woman who fights, without knowing that she's fighting, against a knowledge that things might be different. Mrs. Bridge is written as a collection of vignettes, snapshots of Mrs. Bridge's life, each of which shows the ways in which she fights to maintain her placidity. Sometimes it's in small ways--insisting that her daughter Ruth not wear dangling earrings in the morning, or insisting that her independent-minded son Douglas not use the back door like a servant--and sometimes the fight requires much more from her, like ignoring and rationalizing the breakdown of her friend Grace, whom the desperate life of a housewife drives to suicide.

And yet, over and over again, it seems that Mrs. Bridge might be on the brink of breaking out of her shell of cultivated ignorance. She starts listening to a training course in Spanish; she takes an art class in which she paints--without knowing why--Leda and the Swan, a famous mythological scene of rape. In one vignette, she even picks up a book titled Theory of the Leisure Class, which convinces her to change the way she votes, until she ends up in the voting booth and registers "her wish for the world to remain as it was." In each case, her housewifely duties get in the way of opening up, or she grows cold feet and puts the task away, without ever really knowing why.

One of the best scenes in the book illustrates it well: while Mrs. Bridge dines with her husband at the club, word comes through that a deadly tornado is approaching. A waiter convinces all of the other patrons to shelter in the basement but Mr. Bridge insists on continuing his dinner as if nothing is wrong. As Mrs. Bridge fetches butter from a nearby table, the tornado appears in the clattering window in all its fearsome power, but Mr. Bridge never moves, so neither does Mrs. Bridge, as much as she feels inside that she might be safer downstairs. Connell has a light and ironic touch, but the overall effect is one of deep pity and sadness; we understand Mrs. Bridge so much better than she understands herself, and we can see that the bargain she has made inwardly has provide her with stability, but not peace, happiness, or wisdom. And when her husband finally dies in his office, we know that she is truly screwed, left without the capacity to live on her own and make her own choices. The novel ends on an ominous note: Mrs. Bridge in her stalled Lincoln, discovering that the doors are wedged in tight by the walls of the garage, and there's no one around to call out to for help.

Corregidora by Gayl Jones

I wanted a song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a Portuguese song. A new world song. A song branded with the new world. I thought of the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress. Her father, the master. Her daughter's father. The father of her daughter's daughter. How many generations? Days that were pages of hysteria. Their survival depended on suppressed hysteria. She went and got her daughter, womb swollen with the child of her own father. How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies? They were fisherman and planters. And you with the coffee-bean face, what were you? You were sacrificed. They knew you only by the signs of your sex. They touched you as if you were magic. They ate your genitals. And you, Grandmama, the first mulatto daughter, when did you begin to feel yourself in your nostrils? And, Mama, when did you smell your body with your hands?

Ursa Corregidora is a singer in a blues club. When her husband, Mutt, throws her down the stairs, she goes to live with Tadpole, the club owner and her employer. Tadpole is protective, but perhaps possessive, too, and soon she is divorced from Mutt and married to Tadpole, though Mutt and his associates seem to always be watching from outside the door of the club. The incident makes Ursa begin to rethink her relationship with the men in her life, and it forces her to think about the story of Corregidora, the Portuguese slaveowner who was the father of both her great-grandmother and her grandmother--if you catch by meaning. Ursa is one of "Corregidora's women," a phrase that originally referred to those enslaved women who Corregidora pimped out--to himself, his wife, to others--but now refers to those who, through the cumulative effects of history, bear Corregidora's thumbprint.

In her memories, Ursa reflects on her grandmother's and great-grandmother's urging to do what must be done "for the generations," that is, the lineage of children and grandchildren that bring their heritage--and Corregidora's--into the future. But Ursa is pregnant with Mutt throws her down the stairs, and she loses not just the baby but her uterus as well. No matter what she thinks of her ancestors' urging, Corregidora's lineage will end with Ursa. But the shadow of Corregidora lives on in the men, both Mutt and Tadpole and others, who, despite being the descendants of slavery and oppression themselves, enact the same slaveowner logic that characterized Corregidora's life. Tadpole's consideration veers quickly into a resentment and possessiveness that mirrors Mutt's. The most profound suggestion Jones makes in Corregidora is that patriarchal masculinity and enslavement are intertwined, and that while the latter may no longer be around, the former still acts upon "the generations."

One of the interesting, and rather muted, things about Corregidora is that, while it's set in Kentucky, the particular story that Ursa tells has its roots in Brazilian, not American slavery--if I'm understanding it right. It took Brazil another quarter century after the civil war to outlaw slavery--a whole generation. That contributes, perhaps, to the vividness of the memory of Corregidora that Ursa still carries, but Jones also suggests that the psychic and sexual wounds of slavery are not easily forgotten or left behind. The prose alternate between a kind of fractured modernism, like the quote up top, and the brisk march of dialogue. Famously, it took the championing of Toni Morrison to get Jones' novel into print, and though it's a much different novel than Morrison's richer, more complex books, it's not hard to see what she saw in it.

The Names by Don DeLillo

It was as thought the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered. He studied the shapes. What was it about the letter-shapes that struck his soul with the force of a tribal mystery? The looped bands, scything curves, the sense of a sacred architecture. What did he almost understand? The mystery of alphabets, the contact with death and oneself, one's other self, all made stonebound with a mallet and chisel. A geography, a gesture of the prayerful hand. He saw the madness, even, the scriptural rage that was present in the lettering, the madness of priests who ruled that members of the menial caste were to have their ear filled with molten lead if they listened to a recitation of the Vedas. It was in those shapes, the secret aspect, the priestly, the aloof, the cruel.

James Axton is a "risk analyst": he travels from city to city--Beirut, Istanbul, Dhaka--turning the threat of political disorder into data for multinational corporations. For the time being, he is centered in Athens, because his ex-wife Kathryn has developed a sudden penchant for archaeological digs and has taken their son, Tap, to a remote island in the Peloponnese. Like many divorced people, James wavers between an intense desire for his ex-wife and a vicious resentment. In the mountains near the dig, a mysterious murder occurs, an old man chosen seemingly at random, but struck down with a pick into which has been carved his own initials. The murder is traced back to a secretive and foreign cult.

The old man is not the first to be killed in this way, nor the last. These strange murders form the background of DeLillo's The Names, and Axton becomes obsessed with them. He's not the only one--he's outpaced in this obsession by the archaeologist and dig director, and an old filmmaker friend who wants to put the murderous cult on camera--but his job affords him a unique opportunity to travel the world learning more about them. It's Axton who discovers the chilling--and strangely mundane--key to the murders: the victims are chosen because they have the same initials as the place in which they were killed.

It's so stupid, so goofy, that only DeLillo could pull it off, quite frankly. And yet The Names is much less funny, and more ponderous, than White Noise, which would be DeLillo's next novel and big breakthrough. If White Noise is a thoroughly modern novel, about the increasingly fraudulent world of soundbites and advertisements in which we find ourselves, The Names is a pointedly ancient novel. The Americans who congregate in Athens are drawn to it as a doorway to the East, to civilizations and religions that promise older, truer ways of knowing and being. The archaeologist becomes obsessed not with merely digging up ancient objects, but ancient alphabets, under the hope, perhaps, that they might be closer to the reality of things. 

But there are deep similarities between The Names and White Noise, too: in White Noise, DeLillo suggests that the entire edifice of modern culture--the television, the movies, the postcards, the radio, the tabloids--exist to stave off the knowledge and fear of death. In The Names, he suggests that this process is not only a modern one, but much older, stretching back to the invention of words and alphabets which seek to describe, and just control, the nature of the world. The actions of the murderous cult, it turns out, are meant to alert us to the absurdity of attempt. By making the alphabet itself the logic of their murders, make "the system equal to the terror" it is meant to control.

The Names is fairly well-regarded, I think, among those who read DeLillo's books. It's not hard to see why; it's tremendously weird and full of small, strange DeLillian moments. I loved Axton's son Tap, a precocious kid still naive enough to believe that mastering knowledge is the same as mastering the world. (He makes an interesting foil to Jack's son Heinrich in White Noise, who has concluded that there is no such thing as true knowledge.) But having White Noise on the brain while I was reading The Names didn't do it any favors. The story itself struck me as rather motionless, and the murder part was a much smaller part of the novel than I anticipated. What was the rest of it? Some churning combativeness with Kathryn, and a lot of talky dinners with friends and associates under the shadow of the Parthenon. The most interesting and promising section comes toward the middle, when Axton and Tap drive up into the primeval Greek mountains, and in which Axton comes face to face with a member of the cult. But in the end, it's the archaeologist who has the last and final encounter with them, and the story is told, deflatingly, second-hand. There's something very DeLillo about that--maybe things only happen in life second-handedly--but I don't know that it worked for me.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

The wall has become so much a part of my life that often I don't think about it for weeks. And even if I do think about it, it strikes me as no more strange than a brick wall or a garden fence that stops me from going any further. What's so special about it? An object made of material whose composition is unknown to me. There was always more than enough of that kind of thing in my life. The wall forced me to make an entirely new life, but the things that really move me are still the same as before: birth, death, the seasons, growth, and decay. The wall is a thing that is neither dead nor alive, it  doesn't really concern me, and that's why I don't dream about it.

A woman, staying at a hunting lodge high in the Alps, discovers that an invisible wall has separated her from the rest of the world. There's no way over or around it, and even if there were, it may be a mistake to try: on the other side of it the dead are visible, frozen into the gestures they were presumably making when the wall came down. Her world has suddenly been constricted, but it's far from empty: besides the hunting lodge she has a hut in a high Alpine meadow, a dog named Lynx, a cat, and a cow who is with calf. These animals become both the narrator's burden and her salvation; they give her something to care for her in her new life. She quickly sets to the task of guarding her own life and those of her new charges: planting potatoes and beans, mowing hay in the meadow, hunting and freezing meat, creating a byre for the cow, scouting out berries and apples.

Is the wall, perhaps, a metaphor for confining ideas of womanhood? Guess again, idiot: her confinement, it turns out, frees her from the constrictions of gender:

My face was thin and tanned, and my shoulders angular, like those of a half-grown boy. My hands, always covered with blisters and calluses, had become my most important tools. I had taken off my rings ages ago. Who would decorate their tools with gold rings? It struck me as absurd, even laughable, that I had done so before. The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skillful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget that I was a woman.

In fact, the overarching story of the novel seems to be the growing awareness of one's self and position in the world by the removal of all social appurtenances. It's a little Walden, in a way: the narrator comes to understand herself better through a life of physical labor and solitude, of facing the black void of the sky and the stars from the alpine meadow with no interpret the scene for her. I was struck by the symbol of her host's automobile, rusting by the lodge, becoming a home again for mice and insects and other things of the natural world:

Here, in the forest, I'm actually in the right place for me. I bear the motorcar manufacturers no grudge now; they ceased to be of interest long ago. But how they all tormented me with things that repelled me. I only had this one little life, and they wouldn't let me live it in peace. Gas pipes, electrics and oil conduits; only now that people have ceased to be do these things show how truly pitiful they are. And back then they had been turned into idols rather than functional commodities. I too have one of those things standing in the middle of the forest, Hugo's black Mercedes. It was almost new when we came here in it. Today it's overgrown with vegetation, a nest for mice and birds. Particularly in June, when the wild grape blossoms, it looks very pretty, like an enormous wedding bouquet. It's beautiful in the winter, too, glittering in the hoarfrost or wearing a white helmet. In spring and autumn, between its brown struts I can see the faded yellow of the upholstery, beech leaves, bits of foam rubber and horsehair torn out and pulled apart by tiny teeth.

It's amazing how gripping The Wall is, for a book that consists of little more than two years of seasonal labor: planting, mowing, hunting deer. These things have their own dramas, of course, the drama of the seasons in which desolation follows abundance; that's part of the point of the novel, I think. In this radically constricted world we are struck by the deep sadness of every loss, the kitten, the dog, the bull--the deaths of these latter two being foreshadowed in a subtle and skillful way that make the novel's climactic moment, so unlike the rest of it, a real shock. These losses are tinged with special sadness because we know they are not unique, and that the longer the narrator manages to survive, the losses will continue to pile up. Someday the last match will go out, and the last bullet will be spent; the cow will lay down its life at last, and the loss of companionship will be more profound than the loss of milk. But in that sense the narrator's loss in not so different from our own.

The Atlas by William T. Vollmann

This book being a palindrome, and this tale being the central and infinitely regressive metonym thereof, one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller's world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid--that is, a pear--and so the reference point, the map of magma which lies precisely halfway through our atlas, is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect. Then, too, mass displacements occur beneath our feet and no one knows their laws. But, as I've said, cannot we not make our own planets wherever we go, with even our own idees fixes or lunar satellites to accompany us in orbits of measurable eccentricity?

William T. Vollmann's The Atlas takes the reader, as the title might suggest, all over the globe: from the U.S. to Canada and Mexico, to Germany, India, Australia, Israel, Madagascar, Myanmar, Italy, etc., etc., etc. Place is the guiding theme of the book, and it has places aplenty, each vignetted and listed in the gazetteer that opens the book. The Atlas is arranged chiastically, that is, as a palindrome, though it's not the settings that unite the sections on either side of the fulcrum but themes. (And as such, with some exceptions, only a really patient reader will probably notice most of the correspondences, or take the trouble to count backwards from the center to find where they should lie. I'm not that patient reader.)

At the heart of The Atlas is a long title section that follows the unnamed narrator and Vollmann stand-in on a train journey from Montreal up to the northern Manitoba town of Churchill. On the train, the neatly segregated organization of the atlas begins to fall apart, and the delineation between places falls away through the slippage of memory: one memory of a lost love bleeds into another, and Thailand becomes the United States becomes Australia, and so on, as Canada whistles by in the window. Loneliness and a desire for love is, if anything, the theme that threads the many places together. Over and over again, in disparate locales, we find the same Vollmannian sad sack, yearning for the true love of a prostitute or an ex-wife. They may be the same sad sack (how many places could Vollmann possible have traveled to between 1991 and 1993???) and they may not, but the yearning is the same. For such a heady writer, the yearning is startlingly simply and sweet, even romantic. Perhaps the search for love is like the search for that central place, the heart of everything, but as the traveller of "The Atlas" learns, the center of things is something you carry with you as you go.

Though it's not by any means my favorite, The Atlas might make a good introduction to Vollmann's writing. It's a kind of Vollmann sampler platter, combining scenes and characters from his other books, even sometimes under the same titles: Fathers and Crows is here, and The Rifles, in miniature scenes that seem almost like outtakes, and a long and tremendous version of The Butterfly Stories. It was an interesting introduction to some of the places that I know Vollmann has written about, but which I have not yet read, like Southeast Asia and the war-torn Balkans. (His time with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, oddly, makes no appearance.) For me, it confirmed a lot of what I liked best about Vollmann. My favorites are still his renditions of the Canadian Arctic, which capture their melancholic color so well, and the strange contours of a culture at the limit of the world. (Of course, for those who live there and even for the transient traveller, it's the center of things; on this asymmetric rotational spheroid, there really is no center.) 

Oh! by Mary Robison

Cleveland turned away from the table, and then he turned back to them. "What are you?" he said. "Because you aren't my kids, and you aren't adults, and you aren't anything that anyone could respect or love. What are you doing in my house when every day you break my heart? Looking at you, day after day, I feel pity and even horror. Yes, I do. And, above all else, disappointment. You've let me down in dozes of ways--hundreds of ways, and you've been doing it every day of your lives. Did either of you ever think of that? You'd better--both of you--find a true course and stick to it, and stop destroying your own father."

Cleveland is a dipsomaniac millionaire, a tycoon of soda-pop stores and "midget golf" courses. He lives in a mansion with his adult children: artsy dilettante Howdy, who forsakes art for the theater as easily as he forsook rock and roll for art; and Maureen, a glum single mother who has inherited her father's drinking problem. They are kept together by the clever housekeeper Lola, whose brusque manner barely conceals an affection for her sordid charges. And as much as Lola tries, the house invites Chaos, not least of which in the form of Chris, Maureen's ex and the father of her little girl Violet, who has recently won the lottery and come to press his luck further by stalking Maureen and convincing her to return to him.

Have you ever seen Shameless? Well, I haven't. But Mary Robison's Oh! is what I imagine that show is like: a breathless madcap comedy about a broken family, and the great sadness lurking within. We come to understand that Howdy and Maureen have been deeply wounded by the absence of their mother, who they've been told returned to her native Ireland when they were children. To fix their lives, both come to the conclusion that they must go to Ireland to find her, and become whole. But it's hard to imagine these two ever going to Ireland, to imagine Maureen staying sober long enough, or for Howdy to commit to the plan, and besides, we quickly begin to suspect that the hapless pair have not been told the full story. Cleveland, their father, has brought home a new fiancée, Virginia, whom Maureen and Howdy find uniquely threatening. In a detail that is symptomatic of the book's humor, Virginia is familiar as a children's television host on local TV. On screen she talks to a man dressed like a clock, and tells children about the weather and the time. She seems hopeful that knowledge can bring order, but it is doubtful that she can do anything for these people.

I dug this. The dialogue snaps and sizzles; it's incredibly funny. Isolated bits of it can't capture the ceaseless energy of the book, but let's try anyway:

"Yes, it's settled," Maureen said. "You'll come with us. Actually, it's a good idea because I didn't really trust howdy to handle everything."

Chris said, "The trip could be a honeymoon."

"Why not?" Maureen said. "Marrying you is no different than not marrying you."

"Don't try to act nuts, Maureen. You do it well enough without trying. I swear I can't keep up with you. Here I am burning up six different ways, and I can't even tell if you're serious."

"Neither can I," she said, and sighed. "But, Chris? I do admire you for burning down the toolshed. Sometimes, I guess, the admiration I feel for you is love, like. Or maybe not. Anyway, I can't picture myself with anyone else."

"You lack imagination," Chris said. "Don't you know how come I torched the toolshed?"

"It doesn't matter," Maureen said, and sighed again. "It's a symbol."

"Jesus," Chris said. "Jesus goddamn Christ."

Oh! never lets up. Robison summons a tornado to trap and torture the motley crew that's assembled at the Cleveland mansion, and ushers it off stage almost as quickly, having done its damage, and leaving the family to do more. It's a story about trivial, insufferable people who are somehow too funny and too sad to be contemptible. Like its title, it's a sudden bolt of revelation, of shock, of surprise.