Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

WOLSEY

This is the state of man. Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.

So let's start by saying that Henry VIII is not very good. It really has two claims to fame among Shakespeare's play: one, it has more stage directions than any other. These are mostly descriptions of kingly processions and pomp, and not the fun kind about being chased by bears. Two, it was long controversially argued, and now widely accepted, that Henry VIII is a collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher. This composite composition helps to explain why the play is often seen as a kind of incoherent mash of parts, even by contemporary-ish observers like Samuel Pepys.

I actually found Henry VIII to be fairly coherent and unified as a play. It read to me as being about the way that the elite are locked into a cycle of rise and fall, from Henry's scheming cardinal Wolsey to Queen Katherine (of Aragon), at one moment on top of the world, and the next exiled or sentenced to death. The king himself is depicted as being rather weak and fickle, led by Wolsey as much as he is his lust for the woman called here "Anne Bullen." Wolsey engineers the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, and later sits in judgment of Katherine, who has been suspicious of his influence, but later on, Wolsey himself--caught writing to the Pope in opposition to the king's marriage to Anne--is the meteor who falls.

As a result, the best parts of Henry VIII seemed to me to be those moments where a character speaks elegiacally about their own downfall and doom. I liked Katherine's incensed rejoinders to Wolsey:

Sir,
I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are queen, or long have dreamed so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

And even Wolsey's sudden realization that his life of glory is over:

I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see more.

Anne speaks wisely to her maid when she says, ignorant of the heights to which she is about to be raised, that "'tis better to be lowly born / And range with humble livers in content / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief / And wear a golden sorrow." I expect that those lines resonated quite loudly with Shakespeare's audience, who were not all that far removed from Anne's execution. And yet, the play must hedge a little on the wisdom of Henry and Anne's union, because it produced the legendary Elizabeth (who had died and been succeeded by James I by the time of Henry VIII's performance), who gets held up and prophesied over in a bit that felt like pure propaganda. One can only imagine what James' court thought, though, of these depictions of great people doomed to fall.

Sun City by Tove Jansson

There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll beneath the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentleman, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person--some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. No one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about things such as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, craft materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception.

The name of the retirement home at the center of Tove Jansson's novel Sun City is utterly perfect: Friendship's Rest. The old people who fill it, this retirement home in St. Petersburg, Florida--still, somehow, nearly fifty years later, the epicenter of America's old people--are sometimes friends, and sometimes at rest, but sometimes they hate each other. Eager-to-please Evelyn Peabody finds a great deal of catharsis in finally letting herself hate the bitter Catherine Frey. Thompson--one of the retirement home's few men--hates everyone more or less, but especially the gardener, on whom he loves to play cruel tricks. He also hates his wife, who shows up one day at Friendship's Rest wondering where he's been for the last twenty years. Rebecca Rubinstein, who cruises through the home like a Borscht Belt Battleship, looks down at them all with a sense of wry bemusement. Even the happy-go-lucky residents, like Hannah Higgins, who seems content to spend her final days with a pair of knitting needles in hand, follow a strict hierarchy of arrangement of veranda rocking chairs that adumbrates all the social relations at Friendship's Rest. The novel has a lot to say about what it's like to be in the last years of your life, and one such message is that you most certainly do not outgrow pettiness and resentment.

I loved Sun City. It felt like a novel that someone wrote specifically for me. And though I have loved Tove Jansson's books before, especially the lovely Summer Book, I never would have expected this particular book from her. It reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald: comic and insightful, with a large and slightly absurd cast of characters. Most of them, of course, are old people, but the novel has exactly two young people: "Bounty Joe," a motorcycle-driving Jesus Freak hippie who works as an ersatz swashbuckler at the HMS Bounty, a "movie ship" in St. Petersburg harbor, and his girlfriend, Linda, Friendship Rest's Mexican housekeeper. Joe is waiting for a letter to come from another group of Jesus Freaks that will summon him in the case of, I guess, Jesus Christ's return, and as the letter keeps not coming, he grows increasingly frustrated and bitter. Linda is sweet, and sort of simple-wise, and her philosophy of finding beauty in each moment contrasts with Joe's frustrated millenarianism. It struck me that, in the sense that he is waiting for an imminent world to the end, Joe is both an interesting variation on and contradiction of the old people at Friendship's Rest: they are all waiting for an end that's just around the corner, but Joe seems to think that he will be spared the full progression of life that is the inheritance of every fortunate person.

"Death is young," Peabody remarks cryptically. She is watching a young boys' chorus: "In an irrational moment she got the idea that they were harbingers of death, that they were like death itself, relentless, incomprehensible, and beautiful." Beautiful!? This sort of shocking insight, the surprising word, is the kind of thing that reminds me of Fitzgerald and one of the reasons that I found the book so satisfying. No doubt Thomas Teal's translation from Swedish has a lot to do with the book's impact as well. It's not a perfect novel where all the different threads are brought cleanly and elegantly together; in fact, the ending is kind of a mess: the residents of Friendship's Rest end up at one of Central Florida's freshwater springs at the same time that Bounty Joe and Linda are also there on a long-awaited excursion. It's a curated experience, but the Florida jungle lurks at the margins, full of shadows and monkeys. The residents get loose and lost, and the whole thing is sort of a mess, and when it was over I thought, well, what was the point of all that? But I liked the book a little bit better for that, too, for the way it denies a straightforwardly legible resolution. Because what does the end of one's life ever resolve?

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a substitute for psychoanalysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn't written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the breaks that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

Zeno Cosini, an aging businessman in postwar Italy, finds himself in the analyst's chair. He has a deep distrust of the analyst, and is determined to work through his "conscience" on his own, by writing the tome in our hands known as Zeno's Conscience. The story begins with the death of his father and moves through Zeno's association with the well-to-do Malfenti family, whose patriarch takes Zeno in as a kind of surrogate son. Malfenti has only daughters, and it's from these daughters that Zeno feels he must take his choice of a wife: he is deeply in love with the beautiful but cold Ada, and when she spurns him, he turns to the studious Alberta, then a third, Anna, but they spurn him, too, and he turns with despair to Augusta, the plainest of the four, who has nurtured a crush on Zeno for a long time. She understands that he does not love her, but she accepts, believing she will make a good wife--and she does. This picture of a "good marriage" makes Zeno's Conscience rather unique, even as Zeno undertakes a rather pathetic affair with an amateur opera singer.

I really enjoyed Zeno's Conscience, though I fear that I read it too slowly to have much interesting to say about it. It's interesting to see a book about Freudian analysis from 1923, when it was still in its relative infancy; the novel moves very naturalistically and has little of the qualities we might associate with fragmented modernism in a Freudian mode. I think what I liked best about it is how it captures Zeno as a character who acts from impulse and id even when he knows that his actions are wrong or unlikely to lead to happiness; Svevo captures the lengths we will go through to capture the attentions of a member of the opposite sex we know will never really want us in return, even in the face of evidence that we can see and understand clearly. I've heard Zeno called an "unreliable narrator," but I don't know that that phrase really captures what's going on; the later Zeno who is writing understands himself quite well, even as the Zeno of the time doesn't. We share that quality with the writing Zeno, looking back at foolish actions with the knowledge of better judgment.

Zeno strikes up a business relationship with Guido, the Argentinean whom Ada marries. His former love for Ada colors the relationship between Zeno, Guido, and the Malfentis, with many resulting misunderstandings, but Guido and Zeno actually become rather close friends. When Guido becomes a little too addicted to speculating on the stock market, the Malfentis turn to Zeno to help save him, and Zeno is cast suddenly in the position of being the responsible and soberly judging one. Guido is well-meaning and naive, and his speculation is the beginning of a horrible and tragic downfall. One thing that I got from his chapter is a sense that Guido is the one, more than Zeno, who might have benefitted from analysis, that Zeno may not always understand himself with clarity and precision, but that Guido is the true master of repression and foolish self-denial. The ending of Guido's story is, as the rest of the novel is, both deeply sad and somehow riotously funny, as when (spoiler alert) Zeno ends up missing Guido's funeral because he follows the wrong procession to the wrong cemetery.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!' Catherine declared emphatically -- and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is -- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement -- without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd have soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It's deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior. He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'

It's been fourteen long years since I last touched Wuthering Heights. I decided to reread it in advance of the new adaptation, whose trailer makes it look like a an upstairs-downstairs forbidden sex romp. Maybe it'll be good (I doubt it), but one thing it isn't is sexy. In fact, the stormy love between Heathcliff and Catherine seems to me, even moreso on this reading, to be entirely sexless. Cathy and Heathcliff both describe themselves, again and again, as the same soul occupying two different bodies, which is to say that embodiment is, in Wuthering Heights, a kind of challenge or trap. It's no wonder, perhaps, that people are always getting sick or injured and dying before their time, starting with Hindley's wife/Hareton's mother and continuing all the way to, spoiler alert, Heathcliff himself. The closest that Heathcliff gets to Catherine physically seems to me to be the moment that he digs up her grave to embrace her and accidentally, as he says, releases her ghost.

This disembodiment, perhaps, explains why Catherine is so willing to overlook, as no one else seems to be, Heathcliff's racial coloring and ambiguous heritage. You often hear people say that Heathcliff is supposed to be Black (making Jacob Elordi all wrong for the part), but it's clear to me that Heathcliff's background is meant to be much murkier than that; part of his tragedy is that he is racially ambiguous and thus there is no social place for him at Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, or anywhere else. He's described as Romani or a "Lascar," but this ambivalence is underlined by the way in which the elder Earnshaw shows up with him in tow from a trip to London as if he's simply materialized; no explanation is given. Nature vs. nurture is an unsettled question in Wuthering Heights: is Heathcliff's savageness meant to be racially constituted? Or does the novel suggest that he is a nasty piece of work because he's othered by the vindictive Hindley? Heathcliff's viciousness is, I feel strongly, too overwhelming to be the product of socialization; I trust Catherine when she says there is no oyster inside the pearl. Then again, perhaps that viciousness is natural, and thus preferable to the viciousness of someone like Hindley, dolled up and justified by his greater social standing. And on top of that, Heathcliff's little experiment turning Hindley's son Hareton into a kind of carbon copy of himself--brutish and resentful--seems so successful, at least until the coda, that perhaps the book really does believe that one is primarily the product of their social environment.

I don't think this book was as pleasurable for me the second time around, mostly just because I knew what was coming--it is a book that thrives on melodrama and shock, of the best kind--but I remain in awe of it. It's really a book that pulls no punches; people say the most out of pocket shit to each other on every page. It's almost like watching a really pulpy reality TV show. What I did come away with on this re-read was an appreciation for the second half, which I expect to be more or less cut out of the movie. Heathcliff's desire for vengeance is so strong, like his love, that it survives even Hindley, his tormentor: what is the point, I wondered this time, of pursuing Hindley's heir and house after Hindley himself has been drinking himself to a miserable death for more than a decade? I found myself interested now in the story of Cathy, Hareton, and Linton, who are all trying desperately to escape the shape that the despot Heathcliff would pound them into. It seemed to me this time around that this is where the "real" story lies, despite the popular image of the novel as consisting mainly of Heathcliff and Catherine's romance. By the end, young Cathy and Hareton seem like true survivors of a kind of natural storm that killed just about everyone else, and it's their romance that seems like a normal human one.

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt--not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock of Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible.

When Nicolas St. James decides to go to the surface in search for an artificial pancreas for a friend, he knows it might be a suicide mission. If the robot "leadies" fighting the decades-long war between the United States and the Soviet Union don't kill him, the radiation might, or one any number of sinister diseases with names like the Bag Plague and the Shrink Stink. But what he finds is not a war-ravaged Earth, but an expanse of enormous, cultivated "demesnes," each belonging to a member of the world's ruling elite. These elite keep the surface population low--and thus hold on to their demesnes--by concocting a fictional war waged by a fictional president, a robot named Talbot Yancey. Yancey's speeches are written by a cabal of "Yance-men" who are among the surface world's most powerful.

The Penultimate Truth is a kind of riff on the ideas of "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas": prosperity, at its heart, depends on the repression of the subaltern, who are often ruled not merely by violence but by subterfuge and propaganda. But burying the subaltern below ground cannot prevent the rifts of hierarchy from straining the society of the elite. The Yance-men are administered by Stanton Brose, an eighty-year old whose physical grotesqueness comes from his firm control over the continent's store of artificial organs. The main plot of The Penultimate Truth, in fact, concerns intrigue between Brose and a pair of Yance-men named Joseph Adams and David Lantano who may or may not be hatching a plan to kill Brose. Meanwhile, the grip they have on those below proves very vulnerable. Besides St. James, there are thousands of others who have emerged above ground, being stashed away in giant apartment-style prisons, and happy enough to live in a limbo between the underground tanks and true freedom--for now.

There's much that's familiar in The Penultimate Truth: the power of propaganda, for instance, and the sense that what appears to be the real world is only the topmost of a layer of subterfuges that may have no real bottom. But something else that interested me about the novel, which I don't think I've seen before in Dick, is the way that it acts as a metaphor for the frontier and the settlement of the West. The Yance-men want to convince themselves that their claims (and they literally do claim them, like Oklahoma sooners, by being first into a particular "hot spot") are terra nullius, but they know that thousands toil beneath their beds, and they're tortured by this. St. James emerges into Lantano's demesne near what was once Cheyenne, Wyoming; a significant plot point involves the planting of spurious artifacts in Utah's "Dixie" region; the national government is operated outside of Estes Park in Colorado. Even Adams' demesne in foggy California suggests that this is a novel of the West.

Sort-of-significant spoiler here: one character, whose darker skin is thought to be the effects of radiation poisoning, turns out to be an Indian. Only St. James perceives it, not having known (as the surface-dwellers know) that the Indians were all wiped out in the war. And not only this, but the character is a veteran of the earliest Indian Wars on the American continent, having prolonged his life to six hundred years through the use of a complex time-travel device. (Here Dick makes a really simple mistake, identifying the man as a Cherokee, despite describing him as being part of a "war party" in Utah--he ought to be, like, Cheyenne--or is this, too, a half-truth?) Of course, a mistaken belief that Native Americans were wiped out, or were soon to be, sustained the belief in an open West there for the taking. Dick invests the Native man with incredible secret power, and by doing so, symbolically reverses familiar narratives about disappearance and conquest.

This one was really good, not perhaps in the top tier of Dick's work, but among his best pure genre fiction. Reading Dick, really reading him, I think, can only produce awe: he produced a couple of these books every year, and though they recycle many of the same concepts again and again, like "precogs," they are so endlessly inventive, and even the prose is of surprisingly literary quality. I don't think anyone in 20th century America really elevated genre work to literature the way he did, and the fact that no one ever talks about him that way is proof of how seamlessly he melded the two.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

Cinema can be imagined as a hybrid of railroad and photography, an outgrowth of those two definitive nineteenth century inventions, the technologies Stanford and Muybridge represented, in which case fatherhood is too simple a metaphor for it. After all, zootropes, photography, and magic lanterns are also key aspects of it, and Muybridge only initiated and did not complete the invention of cinema. The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kind of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before; broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world itself a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

The movies, it can be argued, were born with a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took a snapshot of a horse. Under the patronage of California railroad magnate Leland Stanford, Muybridge was trying to discern what happened when a horse galloped. Equestrians and scientists couldn't even agree at the time whether a horse always had one hoof on the ground or not. Muybridge's innovations allowed for a photograph to be taken with an exposure time short enough to capture the horse mid-stride. (It turns out that a horse does not have a hoof on the ground at all times.) As a revolution in sight, this was huge; as Solnit points out in her book River of Shadows, the nation's most accomplished painters of horses had to go back and rethink all the work of their careers. But more was to come, because when Muybridge put such snapshots together later in a sequence, the "motion picture" was born.

I found Solnit's biography of Muybridge to be incredibly fascinating. She captures some of what has made Muybridge himself a subject of fascination: he was an English weirdo who changed his name a half-dozen times and ended up killing his wife's lover in cold blood. But the strength of the book is in the way Solnit connects Muybridge's innovations to the changing technological landscape of the Western United States and the world as a whole. The motion picture, she shows, is deeply connected to the way that the railroad--that technology pioneered by Leland Stanford--transformed the lives of Americans. It's true, there's something about looking out a railroad window that is replicated in the experience of the frames being pulled hastily over the projector. But more convincingly, Solnit connects both technologies to the nineteenth century attempt to "annihilate space and time," to break down the barriers that separated people by time and distance.

Muybridge's achievements weren't only in motion photography; he was also known for pioneering large-scale landscape and cityscape photography, taking, for example, some of the earliest panorama shots of the city of San Francisco. Solnit takes these in, too, connecting Muybridge's time photographing the Modoc War in northern California to the rapidly shifting face of the West. (I chuckled a little at the academic attitude toward the word technology, which takes in both horses and the "Ghost Dance" of the nineteenth century West, and which certainly made making these connections easier.) Solnit does a good job, too, of making the case that Muybridge shows the centrality of California in the emergence of the modern world. It's the reason the railroads were built, after all, and Muybridge was at the center of the innovations by which California changed the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

I don't know much about Solnit; I associate her with the book Men Explain Things to Me and a cultural flashpoint over stuff like "mansplaining." This book is, I'm pretty sure, much earlier, and perhaps a relic of a time when Solnit was less of a well-known name, but I thought it was really insightful and erudite, and I can easily imagine why such an intelligent and thoughtful writer would bristle at being spoken down to by male chauvinists. Really enjoyed this one.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Larry and Sally Morgan return after many years to the Vermont cabin where they once spent their happiest moments. Their old friend, Charity Lang, is dying, with her husband Sid at her side. Charity's impending death promises an end to a lifelong friendship between the foursome, fused at first in the crucible of the University of Wisconsin, where Larry and Sid were professors of literature. After losing their jobs in a flurry of firings during World War II, rich Sid's Vermont property was offered as a safe haven to the poorer Morgans. An idea of a life was constructed there, in which the Langs might act as patron to their friends, but the idyll proved to be short-lived, as Sally's sudden polio whisked them away. Now, as Charity is dying, it is an occasion for narrator Larry to look back on a beautiful friendship that never quite made as large a part in anyone's life as they would have liked.

I found the first half or so of Crossing to Safety terrifically boring. We are asked to believe that these two couples are amazed and awe-inspired by what they find in each other, but outside of a clear kind of sympathy, it was never independently clear to me that any of them was quite worth the hearts in the eyes or the dropped jaws or what have you. And the setting of the academy of the 1940's, when someone like Larry could receive a check equivalent to a quarter of his yearly salary for writing a single short story and mailing it off to the Atlantic, made the book feel sort of self-consciously "literary" in a way that people tend to make fun of. (Stoner, anyone?)

But I thought it became more interesting when the cracks started to show in the friends' relationship: we're told that Sid nurses a crush on Sally, for one. More than this, I was interested in the relationship between Sid and Charity: he sees himself as a poet but she pressures him into a narrow view of success, academic success, something at which he is manifestly less talented and less passionate about. Larry's brief success as a writer activates Sid's jealousy, and more than that, his resentment toward Charity. There's a great and telling scene where the friends go hiking and Charity is so slavishly devoted to the counsel in her guidebook that she nearly kills them with undercooked chicken. (When it says "three minutes on one side," everyone points out to the stubborn charity, it means hamburger, not poultry.) Charity even tries to die "by the book," sending Sid away at the last minute and "slipping away" (I guess this means suicide?) so that she might die cleanly, without burdening anyone. Of course, this isn't what Sid wants--he wants to be by his wife's side--but even at the end of their lives, the differences between the two seem intractable.

I don't think I'd recommend this one. It has some nice elements to it, but I found the whole thing a little tweedy and twee, and it often felt that the book was too insistent, and consequently not persuasive enough, about the power of the foursome's friendship.

Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison

"I need plywood," said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was "need" something.

That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before the NYPD began hiding him.

He looked like this: in white cotton socks and frayed blue jeans, a cowhide belt and a petal-green sweater. his hands in their horrible bandages must've been on his lap and I couldn't see them because he was bent over, with his plate pushed aside and his face on the dining room table, and he was all-the-way asleep, with a tiny chip of emerald glinting there in the lobe of his ear.

Money Breton lives in Alabama with her friend Hollis ("Hollis not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He's my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only."). Her daughter Mev has a kindly heart and a need for methadone. She has a boyfriend in New Orleans named Dix who is as dumb as a concrete levee. She works as a "script doctor," polishing up a script about Bigfoot and flying out to Los Angeles every few weeks to get yelled at by the producer, Belinda. Her son Paulie is in the witness protection program, readying to testify against some unnamed assailant (she calls him the "Evil Snake Parts Criminal," among other things) who is responsible for raping and torturing Paulie. And her cat has gone missing.

Why Did I Ever is made up of 500+ mini-chapters, some stretching to a couple of pages, but many more only a sentence or two long. They're clever little snapshots of frustration, of interpersonal tension, of annoyance and grief, of professional hardship and, when Money lets herself think about him, a deep, deep anguish about the state of her son. Most of them aren't all that important to the plot, the plot that isn't all that important to the novel. They are funny and weird:

I would say to one particular ex: "Twit was too short a word and Pigboy was unkind. I should never have said such ugly things about you. Bumpkin, however, and Thieving, Lying Wino can stay right where they are."

I liked the ones about Dix especially:

Dix says, "You don't gotta worry. I'm not one of those guys gets his rocks off beatin' on a woman."

"God love you," I say.

"You do gotta worry, though, that at times I can be verbally abusive."

"No, you really can't," I say. "To do that you'd have to know the language better, Dix. You'd ahve to know, first of all, what is a verb."

"Everything that you own," he says, "is the BEST STUFF MONEY CAN BUY!"

One can easily recognize Why Did I Ever as the work of the same woman who wrote Oh!, a book I also found to be riotously funny. Except Oh! has a kind of forward energy, a propulsiveness that makes it impossible to put aside, but Why Did I Ever takes a deliberately antithetical strategy, delivering the novel in halting chunks that only seem to come together in the aggregate. But this works, because it's easy to see that Money's life itself is similarly in tatters. The story with Paulie, which is only rarely directly addressed but seems to run under every other misfortune and sadness, as if Money cannot let herself look at or think about her son directly, is extremely touching and sad. I was skeptical for most of the novel that Robison would pull it off, but I thought the ending especially really brought things to an effective (if very sad) conclusion.

Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul

Willie Chandran and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, "What does your father do?" It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shamelessness. But now when the question  was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with an irritation, "You all know what my father does." The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.

Willie Chandran's middle name is Somerset, for the great English writer W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham, it seems, granted no small fame to Willie's father by describing him in a book as a famous ascetic who had taken in a vow of silence. In truth--as we learn from a story told to Willie by his father early in Half a Life--Willie's father took up the ascetic life more or life by accident. As a young man, he had been a follower of the Mahatma, and took up with a girl from an untouchable class in an act of social self-sacrifice. Far from shattering the caste system, the relationship scandalized both sides, and Willie's father was forced to flee to a religious life in order to escape their persecution. Willie is the offspring of this union, which has made his life unstable and uncertain, and for putting him in such a strange and impossible position he has learned to hate his father. Willie's father, fearing that rage and resentment will eat Willie up if he stays in India, writes to Maugham, who pulls a few strings to get him into an English university.

I was really struck by the elegance of Half a Life. Its three-part structure is sort of a marvel: first the first-person story told to Willie by his father, then the third-person section describing Willie's alienating experiences at university in London, and then a final first-person story told by Willie to his sister Sarojini about his fifteen years living in an unnamed African country with a wife he'd met at school. What becomes clear is that Willie has given three different places in the world a fair chance, and yet none of them has provided them with a sense of stability or belonging. This is the state of the colonized subject, and it's Naipaul's big subject, maybe never developed more fully than here in Half a Life. Willie can't thrive in India, caught between old ways and new ones, and he can't thrive in England, where his diminished status as a colonial make him a kind of outcast. In England he develops a budding writing ability that began as a child, and even publishes a book of stories about India, but they are little read and little appreciated, and he gives the passion up. Are we reading, perhaps, a story about the Naipaul that might have been?

In Africa, Willie returns to the colonized world, but not his own colonized world. There's a kind of logic to this--perhaps in Africa, Willie will be freed from the strictures of his own Indian background but also the repressive ideology of the British elite. But he finds himself embroiled again in the eternal tensions between the colonial power and the colonized, suffering through the smallness and pettiness of parochial Africans who can only assert their own value through their similarity to the Portuguese. Violence bubbles at the edge of the African city where he lives, and it's unclear whether, as a non-Portuguese outsider, Willie will be a target or be spared. When, one day, he slips and falls on the marble steps of his home, he wakes up in the hospital and announces to his wife he's leaving her. I can't, he tells her, live your life anymore; I must go and find my own. This leads him to Sarojini, a socialist rabblerouser who has needled Willie for his complacency by letter for years, and it's to her--the symbol of a new, untested, perhaps even more destabilizing approach--that he tells the story of his African life.

Willie Chandran's life is a failure three times over. In the end, he seems little different than the Africans who bounce between Africa and Portugal because neither can provide them a sense of fullness, though because of custom and language they can live nowhere else. It's a bitter book, maybe the most bitter of all Naipaul's books (although Guerillas come to mind) and rarely leavened with the kind of humor that enlivens A House for Mr. Biswas. Unlike Biswas, though, Willie Chandran is all too aware of his own shortcomings, and the impossibility of the kind of life that would provide dignity and belonging. I came away thinking this is one of Naipaul's most effective and effecting books.

Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias

Maize should be planted as they used to plant it, as they still do, to give the family its grub, and not for business. Maize is sustenance, it allows you to get by, more than get by. You show me a rich maizegrower, Hilario. It seems crazy, but we're all worse off. There've been times in my house when we ain't even had money for candles. It's the folk who own chocolate trees, cattle, orchards, beehives, who are rich. Small-town rich folk, maybe, but rich for all that, ain't so very bad being the biggest fish in a small pool. Now the Indians used to have all those things, as well as the maize that forms our daily bread. They did things in a small way, if you like, but they had all they needed, they weren't greedy like us because now, Hilario, greed has become a way of life to us. You just take maize itself: poverty sown and harvested until the very earth is worn out...

Miguel Angel Asturias' "Modernist Epic of the Guatemalan Indians" begins with a poor Indian named Gaspar Ilom waking from a disturbing dream: a voice deprecating him for not doing more to defend his land and his people from the rapacious mestizos who would exploit both for commercial farming. "Gaspar Ilom," the voice says, "lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom... Gaspar Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes... Gaspar Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red..." Gaspar leads a group of Indians in rebellion against the planters, but is defeated by their military might. First they try to poison him, but he washes the poison away in the river. When he emerges to find that his people have been decimated, he returns to the river to drown, but all is not lost: this story passes immediately into a myth that inspires the poor Indians of Guatemala.

The world of Men of Maize is one in which myths and men live contemporaneously, rather than in a distant or imagined past. Take, for example, the story of Goyo Yic, the blind man whose wife--rescued by him from the slaughter of Gaspar's band perhaps a decade or two earlier--has left him. He wanders desperately looking for her, seeking her voice, enduring desperately a painful cure for his blindness, and seeking her on a ridge that will become named for her, Maria Tecuna Ridge. When, later, the wife of Señor Nicho abandons him as well, he has already absorbed his contemporary's story as a myth. All women who leave their husbands have become, without the intervening years of mythmaking or history, tecuns. Señor Nicho's despair leads him to abandon his post as the postman (lol), much to the dismay of the people of the towns who rely on him for the facilitation of business and the exchange of money. He discovers that he is one of those who has a second animal self, a coyote, and in this guise he meets the "fairy wizards" who once watched over the defeat of Gaspar Ilom. In exchange for a glimpse of the mythical world behind the world, they force him to burn his sack of mail.

The "Men of Maize" are both the Indians and their mestizo oppressors, despite the difference in the way they plant: the Indians are sustenance farmers who live in relationship with the earth, while the mestizos clear cut the Guatemalan forests with its teeming wildlife in order to plant large commercial farms. This difference is at the heart of Asturias' epic, which pits the forces of capitalism and economic production against simple folkways. An old story, perhaps, but I was really struck by how richly Asturias evokes the lush Guatemalan jungle using the language of Latin American modernism. The novel is often complicated and difficult, though it is also at times funny and homespun, as with the depictions of the Indian towns and their inhabitants. One of my favorite bits was when Goyo Yic, having restored his sight, falls in with a friend who intends to transport and sell a big barrel of liquor. They establish strict ground rules that anyone who wants a drink will have to pay for it--no freebies--with the result that the two friends pass back and forth the same handful of coins, thus drinking the whole barrel and growing no richer.

This is a dense, dense, dense, rich novel. The number of footnotes on the first page alone (20!) made me laugh. Perhaps following them more closely, or knowing more about the myth and iconography of Guatemala, would have made Men of Maize a more legible and perhaps more enjoyable experience. But I was captivated enough by the strange music of it, and its jungle of images, its poor Indians and coyote-men and tecun women and fairy wizards. 

With the addition of Guatemala, my "Countries Read" list is up to 112! If I continue on reading one new country a month as I have been, it'll take me about six more years.

The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes

What elusive quality is it that propels people into the centre of things? My mother, Celia Paget, and her identical twin sister Mamaine seemed to possess that quality, to gravitate towards the very heart of the era in which they lived. Born in 1916 and brought up in relative simplicity in rural Suffolk, their lives became entangled with some of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whether as friends or lovers, muses or wives.

The Paget sisters were identical twins who went from reluctant debutantes to society darlings, eventually becoming enmeshed in the social circles of England's greatest mid-century authors. Celia was a longtime lover of George Orwell, while her twin sister Mamaine was the lover and eventually wife of Orwell's friend and intellectual rival Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian emigre known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Mamaine carried on a brief, torrid affair with Albert Camus, and around the margins of their lives other literary greats hung: Beauvoir and Sartre, of course, as well as Andre Malraux and others. The Dazzling Paget Sisters, written by Celia's daughter Ariane Bankes, seeks to discover what it is that drew her mother and aunt "into the centre of things."

What that "elusive quality" was, I'm not quite sure. Apparently (as one can tell easily from the cover) both twins were quite beautiful, and they had a kind of twinly, otherworldly connection with each other. The question seems like a powerful one--why would these two ordinary girls from Suffolk end up so wrapped up with the century's literary greats?--but Bankes' biography mostly has the effect of demythologizing the very question she poses. The answer seems to be part privilege and part happenstance: the girls were "picked up" by a society maven named Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to these writers. As the story of their lives unfolded, I began to understand their lives not as a series of unlikely brushes with greatness, but something more ordinary: these writers, of course, all knew each other, and it stands to reason that their social circle included people who weren't writers.

What I enjoyed most about The Dazzling Paget Sisters was learning more about the emerging tensions between this circle as the Cold War began. Koestler in particular, who modeled Darkness at Noon on the Soviet gulag, spared no mercy for his fellow writers who let their Socialist sympathies lead them toward the USSR. This led to both Koestler and Mamaine becoming, half-willingly, useful operatives for the CIA, something I wish the book had explored in more detail. And I was interested, of course--who wouldn't be--in the doomed romantic dalliance between Mamaine and Camus, under Koestler's nose. But mostly, I felt that The Dazzling Paget Sisters might have been better served by an author other than Celia's daughter, who approaches the material in a hyper-faithful chronological way that never quite penetrates the surface. It made me wonder if someone with more of an outside perspective, with less loyalty to the letter of the story, might have found a way in to the real "centre of things."

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.

The Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perisic

Cats confused people. Not just those on the island who had never seen the animals, but also the Greeks who had taken them from the Egyptians--because that was not long ago, they were not used to them yet. They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose.

In ancient Syracuse, a slave boy named Kalia becomes attached to a cat named Miu. Miu is a novelty among the Greeks, a strange creature brought from Egypt, where it's rumored they worship this strange, aloof creature. Miu is badly mistreated by the son of Kalia's owner, and the stark contrast between the freedom in the cat's bearing and Pigras' controlling nature awakens Kalia to the injustice of his own state as a slave. Hiding out in a barn, he ends up absconding on a ship with Miu--and a donkey named Mikro--on its way to the Adriatic coast, where Sicilian Greek settlers intend to set up a new polis. Kalia, Miu, and Mikro all become founding members of this new city, and it is through this new enterprise that Kalia comes to understand the nature of political and social life.

The third-person Kalia sections are interspersed with first-person observations by "Scatterwind," a creature who is made of the wind, if such a thing can be possible--even Scatterwind admits that to use the term "I" seems a bit out of place. Scatterwind, a relative perhaps of the bag of winds that sent Odysseus' men scrambling across the Mediterranean, is a keen observer of human (and animal) life. Because he is immortal, or at least long lived, he looks down at Kalia and the building of the polis with a kind of bird's-eye view that allows him to understand better how it expresses the nature of humans to collaborate and contest. Much of human behavior is inexplicable to Scatterwind, and his theories don't always pass muster: his accounting for love, for instance, emerges from the need for energy in the form of heat. And yet, his perspective puts the travails of one slave, one cat, and one donkey into a larger context of human flourishing and behavior.

The Scatterwind sections are, I think, the most novel and effective part of A Cat at the End of the World. I enjoyed the story of Kalia escaping with Miu, and the way that the plight of the domestic animals helps him understand his own place in the world and expand his sense of humanity and justice. The novel loses its energy a little, I think, as soon as the boat arrives on the Illyrian coast. There are excellent elements, great characters--the obsessive city planner whose exile from his polis is tantamount to a death sentence, the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold former soldier missing an arm--but not having the wider perspective of a Scatterwind, I had trouble understanding the dynamic of the city's growth and the conflicts inherent to it. Kalia grows, becomes an adult, obtains a wife and has children, but these things are, even in a 400 page book, zoomed through so hastily I had a hard time integrating them to the story as a reader. But through it all there is Miu, the refugee, whose proud independence and nobility serve as a counterweight to shifting allegiances and philosophies.

With the addition of Croatia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 111!

Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene

The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn't let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu's boast, "I'm never going to die"; is complex theology--"I believe in the Devil. I don't believe in God," and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama--so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit.

In the 1970's, Graham Greene received a call inviting him to the small Central American nation of Panama. The request came from no other than General Omar Torrijos, Panama's recently installed leader. Torrijos, it seems, was sort of an odd duck: not explicitly Marxist but having come to power in a coup against Panama's right-wing regime, a passionate believer in social democracy but not in partisan or sectarian politics. His core issue is the return of the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. Arriving in Panama City, Greene finds himself immersed in a world of intriguing figures: Sandinistas and Somozans working against each other in nearby Nicaragua, right-wing journalists, scheming viziers. But at the heart of it all is Torrijos, who turns out, in Greene's telling, to be a simple and humble person who only wants to spend a little time with what he sees, through Greene's novels, as a kindred spirit.

I'm reaching a bittersweet age where I'm exhausting all my favorite novelists, so it was heartening to calculate recently that, at the rate of one book a year, I can be reading Graham Greene into my fifties, even if I have likely read all of his best works. I was drawn to Getting to Know the General because I'd never read one of Greene's non-fiction books, and I was interested to see what it was like for Greene becoming, in a way, a character from his own books. In fact, for the length of his time in Panama, which includes sporadic journeys over a period of five or six years, Greene is writing a book in his head based on the General and his right-hand man Chuchu. (Despite his expressions of admiration for Torrijos, it seems like most of Greene's time in Panama is spent with Chuchu.) The book, called On the Way Back, is doomed to never be written. Perhaps the real people crowded out the fiction, or perhaps Greene simply got too deeply integrated with his Panamanian friends to cultivate the necessary distance to write his novel.

The subtitle of the book, after all, is "The Story of an Involvement," and Greene did get involved: several times he describes, with offhand diffidence, lending his efforts to negotiating for the liberation of hostages taken by Central American guerilla groups. Greene is there in the room when the treaty between Torrijos and the Carter administration that provides for the return of Panamanian sovereignty to the Canal Zone; it's fascinating to see him look witheringly at some of the assembled slaughterers, like Pinochet and Henry Kissinger. Novel, too, to read about his friendship with "Gabo," Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who ends up as a kind of Latin-American counterpart in the light intrigues that Torrijos extracts from Greene.

So, as much as anything, Getting to Know the General is a fascinating document that captures a little-remembered slice of 20th century history. But it's a pleasure, too, in the way that Greene lends his cosmopolitan eye and ear to the natural and cultural landscapes of Panama: its islands, its mountains--like the one that will ultimately take the General's life in a suspicious plane crash--its towns, its rundown hotels and haunted houses, its terrible food and vile rum punches.  

The Evening Wolves by Joan Chase

From the beginning Dad said Gloria would bring a ray of sunlight into our darkness. He warned us to find the same star--win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West. Sometimes it's dazzling, Gloria up in the morning, dressed to the nines for ham and eggs. Ready for a date if one should come knocking, lipstick prints on the coffee cups. Gloria has done us the great favor of leaving her wonderful home and responsible job for a thankless task. She did it of her own free will, including giving up smoking, although I think nothing is quite what she expected. Still, she can say, "I always wanted a family of my own," real tears and her smile breaking together. I can't think what it will come to and I wring my hands, avoiding her eyes. Sometimes she says I'm laughing at her, but I don't think so, although I don't always know what comes over my face when I'm not looking.

Francis Clemmons is red-haired, with the fiery personality to match, and so is Gloria--a perfect match. But Gloria doesn't quite know what she's getting into with Francis' children. The young boy--to young to remember his late mother--is no problem, really, but the two girls, Margy and Ruthann, are headstrong.  Francis handles them with the power of a mad king, making elaborate jokes, pouring cereal over their heads when they complain about being hungry, leaving them on the side of the road when they provoke his ire. (It's hard not to see, though I am constantly reminded of it, the tyrannical father of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, though deep down we sense that Francis is a good and caring father, unlike Stead's.) The girls, for their part, give as good as they get. They grow up in this unusual household, become young adults with sexual yearnings, and Gloria is only partly capable of giving the guidance that they miss from their mother. A family that can be made can be unmade, too, and soon the two girls are off on their own, sundering the fragile ecosystem that the five had built.

I really loved Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. It is, I believe, the only other novel that Chase wrote in her lifetime. It also tells the story of a big family, but it's fun trick is that it is narrated by all the family's young girls at once, in a "we" that can be split or combined as needed. Here, the narrative skips much more ordinarily through a series of first person narratives: Margy, Ruthann, Gloria, Tommy--though never Francis. This choice, in fact, is one of the reasons that the novel doesn't really seem to work. The novel is so fragmented, so hectic, that I felt as if I hardly knew what was going on, and I didn't get much out of the choice to depict the same moments from the perspectives of different characters. The two girls, I found, were not different enough, and they all share their father's elliptical, allusive speech, that made it hard to distinguish one from the other. Eventually I understood that Ruthann is more studious and more beautiful, more precociously sexual but also tormented by it--she marries a preacher to expiate her guilt over losing her virginity--while Margy is more lumpen, more aloof. But they both sounded a little too much like Francis, who perhaps sounds too much like Joan Chase.

Chase was an excellent prose writer, and I enjoyed the headlong flow of the sentences, which can be quite beautiful even as they borrow liberally from stock phrase and cliche ("win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West") but the "big picture" was entirely lost on me. Big jumps in time, the introduction of new characters--it all gets lost in the thicket of language. It's hard to say exactly why this novel fails when The Queen of Persia works so well. Partly it's the point-of-view choice, but that's not it entirely. Perhaps it all comes down to the suspension of disbelief and the persuasion of character; I never really felt these characters were anything but curtain-thin. In The Queen of Persia everything comes together to give the illusion of a wholeness, a whole family--but the fractured, broken family of The Evening Wolves never has that kind of wholeness.

The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don't know, but I have to say that the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of perspective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her--not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn't take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter--yes, and for a while  she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

Michael Reed is an academic at one of those huge frosty schools in the American Midwest. His life is, as for all academics, fairly banal, except that he's haunted by the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash several years back. Wherever he goes, he seems to confront symbols of his own life in the wake of their death: the painting in the art gallery that makes concentric shapes, each one becoming more perverse; the students ice-skating around the unreachable monolith on the campus rink. Reed's life is like that, moving around the fundamental absence of his family, never able to break free and form a new trajectory. In his final year at the college, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful red-headed cellist who may offer him the key to a way of living again.

Written plainly, it sounds like an eye-roller: middle-aged academic finds new life in an affair with a beautiful young student. It's what BlueSky Y.A. mavens think all "classic" fiction is like. And there are some elements of that, in fact. Yet, Michael and the absurdly named Flower Cannon never sleep together, though he does see her naked twice: once, in an artsy "performance piece" where she shaves her mons pubis, and again in a racy strip contest at a local casino. (The satire on the academy and modern art that juxtaposition makes isn't exactly subtle.) But more interesting still is the slippage of Michael's attitude toward Flower, who reminds him at times of his wife, at other times his daughter, or someone he would have liked his daughter to grow up into. The Y.A. mavens might object at how available Flower is to the older, homely (self-described) Michael, and how easily Johnson associates her sexiness with mystery and healing. But I was really struck by the strange story that Flower tells about why she's so open to Michael hanging around, in which she tells him that he reminds her of a strange man who kidnapped her when she was young. It's so weird and difficult to integrate into the novel that it seemed like an acknowledgement that Flower Cannon is no archetype but a person with a strange and luminous life of her own.

This felt like a strange sort of novel for Johnson. His work, it seems to me, often focuses on precarity: the precarious lives of the poor and addicted, or the precarity of spies whose are always gambling with their life or safety. His characters always seem to live well outside the margins of ordinary society--a description that might even take in the post-apocalyptic strivers of Fiskadoro or the rustic hermit of Train Dreams. Compared to the protagonists of those other novels, Michael Reed is frustratingly ordinary, and it's possible to read The Name of the World as a novel by a guy who got so comfortable in the world of academia that he found himself detached from the worlds he once thought important to put down on the page. (OK, I guess being an academic is also quite precarious these days, but that isn't quite what I mean, either.) But Johnson writes about grief in ways that feel devastating and true, and quite different than the ordinary bromides one gets, and so in that way The Name of the World is a reminder of the ways that deep interior experiences, too, can put us outside the common life. And of course, with Johnson there are always the sentences, the incredible sentences.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

He perched on the chaise, in the muted light of the small lamp next to it, his lovely, dark farmhouse floating near him, the night just beyond the room's closed shutters... Perhaps the nervous American schoolteacher was sitting on her balcony like a sentinel at the prow of a ship keeping them from harm... How many wonders there used to be for him! The miraculous human landscapes! Long, brilliant nights... Was he never to be one of those again? Whatever role he'd been assigned in the girl's drama--her drama of triumph, her drama of degradation--it was certain to be a despicable or ridiculous one. There was no chance--at least almost no chance--that she would receive from him what he so longed to provide: even a tiny portion of pleasure or solace. And when she remembered him, no doubt she would remember him with contempt.

The first and title story of Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a snapshot of post-9/11 New York. Nathaniel and his group of friends have been renting an incredible top-floor apartment, procured through the help of his uncle Lucien, from an absent Japanese businessman, but the experience has been deeply tainted by the bird's-eye view the apartment has given them of the collapse of the towers. "Twilight of the Superheroes" is an attempt to capture a kind of ennui that comes in the wake of destruction, and the feeling of things deteriorating around you: the Japanese businessman is returning and Nathaniel and his friends must scrounge again, like everyone else, for their refuge; though the apartment is poisonous, it's worse somehow to let it go because one has to let the dream go as well. Even the hero of Nathaniel's indie comic strip, Passivityman, seems to have curdled; his passivity is turned against himself, toward submission to the forces of capitalist warp against which his passivity was once a rebellion.

I didn't quite get what Eisenberg was doing in this story. I had to read the others in the collection to see that these stories often lack a center--it's a story about Nathaniel, but also Lucien, but also a half-dozen people besides. They shift to new perspectives, without attempting artificially to bring those perspectives to an intersection or resolution. I thought this worked much better in "Like It Or Not," a story about a meek American schoolteacher who allows herself to be taken out for a single day by a rich art collector in the Italian countryside. It's a story about the teacher's, Kate's, feelings of inadequacy against the backdrop of the luxurious and ancient Mediterranean, but it pauses for a long beat to capture her host's, Harry's, liaison with a spoiled barely-legal teen in the next hotel room. I was struck by how sympathetic the portrait of Harry was (quoted above), how lacking in judgment, and thus more powerful than prudishness or condemnation might have been. The story returns to Kate's perspective and continues chugging along; what Harry has done is largely irrelevant to her, but the story has captured a multiplicity that makes it richer. For this reason, I suppose, the stories are longish, languid things: in a book of 230 pages, there are only six.

The final story, "The Flaw in the Design," was one of my favorites, and I thought it returned to some of the themes of "Twilight of the Superheroes" in a more successful way. Here, two parents struggle with the mania of their young adult son, whose verbal floridity and unpredictable attitudes are in part a reaction to the father's work with some nameless--but certainly evil--multinational concern. To me, this captured much better a post-9/11 feeling about the world being constricted by forces of power and greed, and the hopelessness one feels against them at a personal level. And the final scene--in which the mother seeks out an anonymous tryst on the D.C. metro--complicates and estranges it even further. I liked all the others to varying extents, including the boldness of "Window," about a woman who falls in love with a single father who also happens to be a violent gun-runner. Here, as in the other stories, the pleasure is in seeing the story unfold, not chronologically necessary but in layers, though here I thought Eisenberg was less successful in hiding that authorly hand.

Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

Edward was (as Benet recalled and even retailed later) made of steel. He had ceased to tremble. He was no longer pale, but somewhat flushed. He sat silently, very still, frowning and looking down at the paper. Then he handed it back to Benet, and speaking in his ordinary voice, he said, 'So be it.' then he said, 'We must put off the wedding guests. Is it too late to ring them?'

Benet, now more collected, said, 'That is her writing, isn't it? It could be a hoax--'

'It is her writing -- rather hasty -- but yes, hers."

On the eve of Edward Lannion's marriage to Marian Berran, a message is discovered at Hatting Hall, Edward's estate. It's in Marian's handwriting, and it says she cannot marry him, and has gone away. This sends the hanger-son at Hatting Hall, and its neighbor, Penndean, into a flurry of handwringing and activity, chief among these Benet, the master of Penndean who orchestrated, more or less, the marriage between the two. It's Benet's servant, the mysterious Jackson, who ends up getting to the bottom of things. through cunning and sheer luck he's the one who tracks down Marian, who is in a state of hysteria after being coerced into writing the note by her Australian lover. Jackson, sensing perhaps that she is really more in love with the Australian than Edward, delivers her to him, leading to a chain of events that resorts the fragile ecosystem of the two houses.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly this novel was doing. Ultimately, though Marian's letter feels like the beginning of chaos--like the mysterious rock thrown through Edward's window at the beginning of the novel--it ends with all the characters understanding themselves better and pairing off in happy relationships. Edward ends up--spoiler alert--with the widowed Anna, whom he has always truly loved. Marian ends up with the Australian. Tuan, one of Benet's hangers-on, distinguished by being Jewish and neurotic, ends up with Marian's sister Rosalind, who had until now been nursing a wayward crush on Edward herself. And Benet ends up with Jackson, who he inherited from the dead patriarch "Uncle Tim," and whose mysterious nature he has always been unduly suspicious of--Jackson's deeds, in this case, wipe away the suspicion and bring the master and servant together in a new relationship as friends. Looking at it this way, the novel is something of a fairy tale or a Shakespearean comedy, and it suggests that the characters are induced to throw off the yoke of "Uncle Tim," whose dead hand guides the misbegotten relationship between Edward and Marian.

I didn't think much of this worked, really. I thought the novel made the fatal flaw of depicting Jackson as both mysterious--he shows up at Tim's/Benet's door with no history or family, and only the one name--while also giving us sections of his internal third person deliberation. It might have worked if Jackson really had been a figure of mystery, but the mysteriousness here feels like something more declared than explored. I was left wondering what it is about the guy that everyone feels is so extraordinary. I was put off, too, by Jackson's delivering of Marian to the Australian, who has basically gotten Marian drunk and forced her to write that letter. I was shocked by Jackson making such a mistake as to deliver Marian up to a sort of predator, and shocked moreover when I came to understand that Murdoch didn't think it was much of a mistake. I often find Murdoch's novels frustrating, teasing up big reveals or dramatic moments that don't quite come, piddling around with philosophical ideas that have little or nothing to do with the story, and this one might have been the most frustrating of all.

Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann

Whether it is a happy life or a sad one the Skinz live is of course unknowable to anyone watching them stride by, turning their bulging skulls greedily upon their bulging necks, trying to pitiless, exclusive; not listening much to one another; but we can consider the question. The lone ones lean up against the restaurant windows, hunching their heads in like turtles at the same time they swivel their gaze in what might be anxiety or might be automatic street wisdom. They spend too much time waiting, but on the whole they are arguably happy, having their fights to look forward to. What more, after all, could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul to screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live?

William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories are organized in the order of the visible spectrum, from "White Knights" to "Violet Hair," passing through every color in between. The symbolism there is immediately apparent: I am going to tell you about the full spectrum of human experience, of all the different kinds of people in the world, and though they may seem to one another quiet alien, they are all parts of the same phenomenon. And then, right from the beginning, he challenges you with this easy observation by giving you a story about Nazi Skinheads living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. In fact, this story (chapter? essay? section?) is classic Vollmann, a dispatch from a margin of the world that most people would prefer to pretend doesn't exist, or if it does, to think of it somehow as below noticing or writing about. Vollmann's depiction of the Skinz is both sympathetic and unsparing; they are racist and violent but also, in some way, childlike. The next story, "Ladies and Red Lights," builds on the depiction of Tenderloin prostitutes that appears in Vollmann's Whores for Gloria, but it was "White Knights" that struck me most as that book's successor and heir.

The other section I really liked was "Yellow Rose," about the Vollmann character's brief and doomed relationship with a young Korean woman named Jenny. Jenny's family will never accept a white boyfriend, something the narrator knows but cannot accept, and his insistence on presenting Jenny with an engagement ring is one of the book's saddest and most powerful moments. But the whole thing is really driven by the power of Jenny's voice, twinged with not-quite-Englishisms and a bubbliness that conceals a deeper desperation. ("Mom would stab me with knives... Mom would fry me alive if she know. I'm become steel faced, as my mother said these days.") I was delighted when these two stories, "White Knights" and "Yellow Rose," came together in the story "Blue Wallet," wherein the Vollmann character invites both Jenny and her friends and his skinhead friends to the same party, with predictably tense results. (The title refers to a wallet that Jenny loses, assuming it was stolen by said skinheads.)

There are other stories here that explore the margins of Bay Area society, notably "The Blue Yonder," a fantastical imagining of the motivations that drive a real-life killer of the homeless who was never identified or caught, and "Indigo Engineers," about a group of scrap metal engineers who attract huge crowds for a kind of proto-Battle Bots exhibition of machines that stab and slice each other. But other stories seemed to me, if not failed experiments exactly, big swings that never quite come together. I didn't really connect with "The Green Dress," about a man who falls in love with his neighbor's green dress--not his neighbor--stealing it and treating it as a lover. And I thought that a pair of mytho-historical stories, one about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace called "Scintillant Orange" and one about the Thugs of ancient India called "The Yellow Sugar," never quite rose to the convincing level that Vollmann perfected in his novels about the colonization of North America. Like The Atlas, this is really an odds-and-sods collection with organizational pretenses. Well, they're all odd, and a couple are sods, but when he's at his best, there's really nothing like him, is there?

Chaka by Thomas Mofolo

Chaka, right from his childhood, did not have many wishes; his desire was for one thing only: kingship and fame. Now he is very famous and he is a great king. Is it possible that he will be satisfied? Never! Now his greed has been aroused, and he is in search of something which even he himself does not know. Now Chaka was able to decide on matters of war without anything standing in his way, he alone having the power to do as he wished. He looked upon all the nations to the north, up to the places which even he did not know, and he longed to see his kingdom stretch till it reached those very places which he did not know. He looked upon those nations settled among the sea and stretching to the south, and the saw the villages and hamlets; great kings and small, the country adorned with villages built on the foundation of peace, and he smiled to himself.

Masotho (I just learned this is the demonym for someone from Lesotho) author Thomas Mofolo's Chaka is an account of the life of the legendary 19th century Zulu king Chaka, perhaps better known in the Western world as Shaka Zulu. Chaka's life begins ignominiously, as the illegitimate son of a king; though at first it seems that, as the only male son, he will be the king's heir, a sudden spate of issue from the king's other wives sees both Chaka and his mother sent into exile. Chaka is bullied by the other children of the bush until he commits an unthinkable pair of deeds, killing a rampaging lion and hyena, two of the vicious creatures that stalk the villages without mercy. I was struck by the way that Mafolo describes the cowardice on behalf of the villagers, who refuse to run to the aid of anyone taken by these beasts. Chaka's acts are an expression not only of his bravery and cunning but a harbinger of things to come: Chaka will transform his kingdom from cowardice to a highly militarized society that uses violence to establish an empire in Southern Africa.

Chaka's adult life has the shape of ancient myth. Through his bravery and skill, and with the help of a shadowy "sorcerer" named Isanusi and a couple of other mystical personages, he defeats his siblings and becomes king, introducing to his kingdom the new name "MaZulu," or "People of the Sky." But even at the pinnacle of a power that no other king has known, he's greedy for more, and Isanusi advises him that if he wishes to reach the true extent of his greatness, he must sacrifice his beloved, a woman named Nowila, whom Chaka ultimately kills at his own hands. It's a familiar story: a man gains all the power in the world and loses his soul. Chaka exhibits what I understand (from Wikipedia, of course) to be an attitude of ambivalence toward the legendary king, who led the Zulu to become a great empire, but did so by ruling through violence and fear. Chaka's killing of Nowila is reproduced on a broader scale when he has thousands of his own people killed for cowardice or simply perceived cowardice; as the story goes on, Chaka's rationalizations for his killing become weaker and weaker, until it seems that he seeks violence for its own reason.

One of the more fascinating moments of the story comes at the end, when Chaka is finally defeated and killed by his rivals. In his last moments, on the precipice of entering the world of the dead, he prophesies that while his rivals have defeated him, they will soon have to confront a much more dangerous enemy: the coming white man. In this, it's possible to see the story of Chaka not simply as the story a legendary king, but the formation of a culture and a kingdom who will be further defined by their conflict with the imperial powers of Europe.

With the addition of Lesotho, my "Countries Read" list is up to 110!

Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq

I saw my poor body, saw how damaged it was. There was nothing--almost nothing--left of my former radiance. The skin of my back was red, hairy, with strange grayish spots running down my spine. My thighs, once so firm and well proportioned, sagged beneath a mass of cellulite. My rear end was smooth and fat as a huge pimple. I had cellulite on my belly, too, but a strange kind, both droopy and stringy. And there, in the mirror, was what I dreaded seeing--not what I'd seen in the marabout's mirror, but something equally horrible. The teat over my right breast had turned into a real dug, and there were three other blotches on the front of my body: one above my left breast and two others, perfectly parallel, just below my real nipples. I count and recounted, there was no mistake: that made six all right, including three fully formed breasts.

The narrator of Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation snags a coveted job at a perfume shop that also turns out to be a high-end brothel. She's popular with her clients, perhaps even too popular, and too enthusiastic at her job for a clientele that prizes demureness and bashfulness. But her body, which we are told is quite curvy and expressive, drives them wild, even after she begins to grow larger and larger, her hair becoming more bristle-like, her fingernails more like claws, her hips more bent over to the ground: she's becoming, in a short, a pig. For the narrator, this seems to be a waxing and waning phenomenon (one might even call it hormonal): some days she's more human, and some days she's more pig-like. But when she's pig-like, she's truly pig-like, yearning to root around in the earth and eat bugs and wild chestnuts.

What's the symbolism here? Desire, perhaps, always conceived of as the animal that lived inside of us. And beauty standards, of course. As the narrator's body grows more grotesque, there are those who are repulsed and those who are more attracted, and where the line is is never clear. But of course our bodies are shifting, changing things, and for women, both approval and remuneration are predicated on the body never changing at all. How well this is shown by Honore, the narrator's boyfriend, who goes from romancing her at the local waterpark to dumping all her stuff out on the street. When the narrator does find a relationship where she's loved for her ever-shifting ways, it's with another shapeshifter: a rich perfumier who also happens to be a werewolf.

As you may be picking up, Pig Tales is a silly, over-the-top book, and best when it leans into the fundamental absurdity of the piggy life the narrator must leads. The second half of the book suffers, I think, from a strange political subplot that involves the rise and fall of a fascist politician who, at one point, puts the narrator in pig form in a dress and uses her for an inscrutable campaign ad. The protagonist's life intersects with his in strange, violent ways, but for the most part we are left to interpret his rise and fall, and his replacement by a theocratic regime, obliquely. In a funny way, it gives one the sense that whatever symbolic meaning you want to attach to the protagonist's transformation, it's a meaning that transcends the political sphere, only briefly and haltingly being subordinated to it. Whatever the political landscape, perhaps, the demands and expectations put on women rarely change.

I thought this book was so different from White, a book about Antarctica that totally surprised me. That book is much quieter and more subtle, but if I squint (perhaps becoming quite piglike myself when I do so) I can see a kind of writerly boldness that the two books in common, a strangeness that pushes the narrative into unexpected places.