The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and argued, she saw Councillor Carne in her mind's eye as the apostle and ringleader of reaction, the author of false economies, the culprit really responsible for leaking taps in the science room and blackbeetles in the basement. Because of this, it was a little difficult to banish the thought of him completely from her consciousness; but at least she never forgot to remember him with resentment.

Is there such a thing as the "Great Local Politics Novel?" If they're taking nominations, I might suggest Winifred Holtby's South Riding, a novel about a Yorkshire region and the city council who decides on issues of public health, housing, and finance. One of the most respected members of the local political scene is Robert Carne, a conservative farmer who has had to sell most of the furniture out of his hereditary estate in order to pay for the treatment of his mentally ill wife. Carne is the principal opponent of Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local school, who needs the city council and its concomitant organs to approve the building of a new school. Carne disapproves of the idea, but more than this, he stands for all the forces that stand against progress and change. What happens next except, of course, Sarah's hatred for Carne becomes an obsession, and that obsession turns to ardent love?

OK, it sounds silly. In fact, what it reminds me of most is--forgive me--Parks and Rec, a story about the importance of local politics that centers on an alliance between two people, in this case Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope, whose friendship transcends their differences. The viewpoint of South Riding is the same insofar as it posits that both Sarah Burton and Robert Carne are figures of good despite their opposed political programs, and that the love that might be conjured between them is a force possible of transcending those differences. It threatens to be cheesy, but Holtby succeeds by virtue of not diminishing the actual importance of the politics involved, and by giving the romance between Sarah and Carne an air of Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy.

But Robert Carne and Sarah Burton are only one part of the novel, which has a six-page inventory of characters in the front. Holtby presents the political life of the South Riding by introducing councilors, aldermen, socialists, tavern-keepers, laborers, teachers, children, preachers, etc., etc. One of the most critical plotlines involves Lydia Holly, the star pupil of Sarah's who has to drop out of school in order to take care of her many siblings after the death of her mother. It's clear that local politics means something to someone like Lydia; it is the engine that might mean the difference between a scholarship, and escape, and another life wasted in the trap of poverty and motherhood.

Much of the political wrangling in the book involves a scheme to put what is (I think) a kind of council house somewhere in the riding, and the dishonest speculation of greedy figures who want to use the scheme to enrich themselves. It's a little funny how easily this maps on to the local politics of our modern day, so much of which is about whether to build housing and where. One question at hand is: can social good come out of self-interest? Not, perhaps, in the libertarian way of the free market that engineers the most efficient social outcome, but in the way that flawed and even corrupt people may do good despite themselves. I'm not sure. Ultimately, the position of South Riding seems to be that whether it's noble or venal and hopeless, local politics is the most important politics tehre is.

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed their secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx's Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of the Earth's waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

The first story in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is written from the perspective of a sperm having an existential crisis. How can you have faith when you know that only one "swimmer" among billions will make it to the promised land? And is there even a promised land--an egg--at all? It's classic Barth: first of all, it's funny. Secondly, it operates via layers of irony and metaknowledge; one must understand how the ironies of the sperm's existence point back to the self of the reader. But there's a real humanity underneath in the way that explores the difficulty of understanding one's cosmological place when by their very nature the larger forces, be they God or the universe or the possessors of testicles and ovaries, are beyond our understanding. It is maybe the best story--not a good sign for a collection when the first story is the best--but actually I think I slightly preferred "Petition," written from the perspective of a conjoined twin cursed to ride eternally on his brother's back, asking the King of Siam for help in severing them. Like "Night-Sea Journey," the sperm story, I enjoyed how slowly, by design, I came to understand who and what was speaking to me.

Lost in the Funhouse is most famous for its title story, about a trip to the Maryland sea shore where Barth's stand-in, Ambrose, gets--well, you know. The story is famous for its metafictional elements, which call attention to the narrative choices, and the narrative failings, of the author, even going so far as to introduce a diagram of Freytag's pyramid. This is all purposely deflationary; I think even Barth would agree it's a paragraph like the one above, from another story about Ambrose, in which he imagines a relationship with an older girl, that really stir the spirit. But in "Lost in the Funhouse" Barth questions what it that's happening to us when our spirit is stirred, whether that spirit-stirring is an honest exchange. There may not be so much difference between Ambrose tricking himself into happiness by telling himself a story and the reader who lets himself be tricked. Be that as it may, I found "Lost in the Funhouse" to feel stale. It is, as Brent said, "the OG" in a way, but sixty years of postmodernism has produced, I think, more interesting and effective ways of exploring the same ideas. The subsequent stories, "Life-Story" and "Title," which take these ideas to their most abstract and intricate ends, I felt to be absolutely dreary reading.

Much better, then, are "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad," a pair of stories that draw from Greek myth to explore the nature of storytelling. "Menelaid" is a particularly difficult read, in which Menelaus tells a number of stories to Telemachus that involve quoting the discourses of others so that eventually ten or twelve sets of quotation marks are nested inside one another and you don't know who the hell is saying anything. But I really enjoyed the story's suggestion that, when Menelaus wrestles with the shape-shifting god Proteus (as I guess happens in the myth), it destabilizes the entire story, if not the world: how do we know the Menelaus that ends up with Proteus in his arms is not actually Proteus himself in Menelaus' guise? And if Proteus could be Menelaus, why not Helen, or Telemachus--or the reader? 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.

The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

This is when the Fitzgerald's unique characteristics--the modular construction, the use of welds over rivets, the extraordinary flexibility of the hull, the lowering of the Plimsoll Line, and whatever damage she might have suffered over Six Fathom Shoal--would all be tested by the once-in-a-lifetime conditions on Lake superior. The fully loaded Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard on a good day, and this was not a good day. The question lo longer was whether the Fitzgerald could withstand such relentless punishment, but how long before she succumbed.

The first few times I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," I'm pretty sure I thought it was about some late 19th or early 20th century shipwreck. I had no idea that it was about a ship that sank in 1975, just a few months before the song was released. Is it the song, or something else, that gives the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the air of an old myth? Certainly, what captured Gordon Lightfoot's attention--the struggle of human courage against the merciless lake, the ship's status as the largest and most famous on Superior, the way it vanished without a trace, the phrase "storm of the century," the heart-rending detail of the bell ringing 29 times at the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral--are the elements that still make the story such an enduring one, on the Great Lakes and beyond.

John U. Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald is pure dadslop (complimentary). It's the kind of book you give an uncle for Christmas. But it also tackles a pretty serious challenge, which is that, because there were no survivors, the story of the Fitzgerald's wreck is actually a difficult one to tell. Bacon solves this problem partially by padding the book in several predictable ways: extensive prefatory chapters about the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, other shipwrecks, and lengthy profiles of a dozen or so of the sailors who went down on the Fitzgerald--lengthy, if you'll forgive me saying so, even for the human face they provide to the tragedy.

Once the ship leaves on its fateful final trip, though, I found the book gripping. Bacon does an excellent job dissecting the evidence in order to present and evaluate the theories about what happened to the Fitzgerald, and the ultimate impression is of a ship caught in a series of compounding difficulties, some preventable and some not. No one could have stopped the warm front moving up from the West Coast that created a "perfect storm" and fifty-foot waves, but it seems clear that the Fitzgerald was shipping with too much weight, pushing for one last run in a season when storms become too strong for most shipping. Decisions which must have made sense in the moment likely doomed the Fitzgerald: trying to avoid the storm by taking an unfamiliar northern route, which drove it over a poorly-charted shoal, slowing the ship down, which gave it more maneuverability in unpredictable conditions--but which also gave water more time to poor through open hatches or a rent in the hull. The perfect storm, it seems, includes not only the atmospheric conditions but the profit motive that drives recklessness. Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Fitzgerald, is described by Bacon as the most trusted and reliable on the Great Lakes--but it wasn't enough.

Mostly, the book made me deeply sad. A hundred things had to go wrong for the 29 people on board the Fitzgerald to lose their lives; if any one of them had gone right instead, many of them would still be alive today. Bacon notes that shipping practices today are more heavily regulated, weather forecasting and communication with ships is much improved. God willing, that means that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will stay what it is--a legend and a warning.

State of Grace by Joy Williams

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we're all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you've made it. Do not be a polite guest.

Kate, the protagonist of Joy Williams' first novel, State of Grace, lives in a college town on the Gulf Coast. She lives in a sorority house, though she doesn't actually seem to be in college (is anyone in this college town in college?), and then she lives with her partner, Grady, who loves only her, along with his Jaguar coupe. The baby she's carrying, we quickly learn, is not Grady's but her father's: a holy rolling reverend from Maine who shows up out of the blue to re-cement his too-intimate relationship with Kate. We learn through flashbacks--if you can describe the fluid chronology of State of Grace in such terms--that Kate and her father were loathed by their mother, who instead heaped her love on a daughter she accidentally killed in a car accident. Car accidents: at some point, Grady wrecks that Jaguar, and Kate is left to face the problem of her pregnancy alone while Grady battles for his life in the hospital.

Here's a half-baked theory: Joy Williams and Cormac McCarthy had remarkably similar careers. Both started out writing fiction in the Southern Gothic mode; both found their voice as they moved away from this milieu toward the American Southwest, as Williams did with 99 Stories of God and The Quick and the Dead. Of course, that overstates the case, because Williams kept writing about Florida to great success, especially in books like Breaking and Entering. But early on both authors wore their influences a little too much on their sleeve, in both cases Faulkner, though Williams seems to draw quite heavily from Flannery O'Connor as well. State of Grace both is and isn't recognizably Williams, to me. The narrative malleability, the inability to write a bad or boring or even merely functional sentence, they're all here. But the novel spins and plods. It's too internal and self-regarding, and it strikes me as a version of Williams that hadn't yet learned to harness her stylistic richness to a mode that moves forward. And the father figure, while enigmatic and interesting, seems picked up right out of Flannery and not like a character from a Williams novel at all.

But there are flashes here of real Joy: I especially liked a subplot in which Kate is persuaded by one of the sorority sisters to "borrow" a leopard from a local menagerie with the help of her friend, Corinthian Brown. You can imagine how well that works out. The scariest thing, actually, about the book, is not the way the friend is mauled--another disaster along the lines of those that strike Kate's sister and Grady, victimized by the world's primal savagery--but the whisper campaign that comes afterward about how they caught and killed the "n---er" who they held responsible. You can recognize in this moment the seed of a lot of Williams' future fiction, not least an abiding interest in the world of animals as it intersects with the world of human beings. I wish more of the novel had been like that.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

We forded the river, whose course is marked the whole way by a fringe of cotton-woods and aspens, and traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious. The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this; for not only do five high-peaked giants, each nearly the height of Mount Blanc, lift their dazzling summits above the lower ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so vast, and the whole lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue, not haze--something peculiar to the region.

Explorer Isabella L. Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is an account of her 1873 travels throughout the Rockies, framed as a series of letters written to her sister. I put it on my Kindle on a whim for my trip to Colorado because I was struggling to find a book written by a woman--as you might know, I try to alternate--to go with Craig Child's travelogue about searching for Ancestral Puebloan sites on the western side of the state. Bird's book turned out to be delightful--a breezy, well-written account of life in Colorado in the late nineteenth century, accented by skillful descriptions of the land and droll accounts of the region's "characters."

Obviously, traveling in the Rocky Mountains in 1873 is not like the traveling I did there this week.  It takes an hour for the modern traveler to get from Denver to Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, but when Bird did it, it took several days of difficult travel by horse. And when she got there, Estes Park was not the town we know it today, but a true park, meaning a kind of valley or glad that might be home to a few houses. In this case, those houses belong to a pair of rival mountain guides, both of whom ingratiate themselves to Bird: Evans, with whom she typically boards, and the infamous desperado known as "Mountain Jim," whose bloodthirsty and frightening reputation is immediately belied by his chivalry toward Bird, with whom he strikes up an immediate friendship.

Birds account of Mountain Jim is, if I had to pick something, the most delightful thing about the book, and it's complicated by the numerous footnotes for publication revealing, little by little, that Jim met his end after the events of the book after being shot by Evans. We never get the whole story, which as I understand it is somewhat lost to history, but there's a bittersweetness to Bird's clear implication that it was Jim's reprobate ways, not Evans, that really brought his downfall. This knowledge brings a special irony to a late section where Jim, having guided Bird up a high winter pass, tearfully breaks down about his own "lost" nature.

But Jim is only one of a few fascinating characters who appear in Bird's travels, which include other trappers and guides, destitute farmers, and poor greenhorns who are in over their heads in the hardscrabble new territory. Bird notes that the thin mountain air has attracted many consumptives, and some of the saddest parts of the novel are depictions of tubercular patients who have arrived in the Rockies to live out the last moments of their lives. I also really liked her resentful account of a young boarder who eats everything, does no work, and loses the milk cow. But the most interesting character might be Bird herself, who despite some false modesty about her abilities, comes off as an intrepid and capable solo traveler. It's no wonder that, wherever she goes, the newspapers have announced the arrival of the remarkable "British lady." And part of that character is not just her ability to traverse the mountains, but really see them--her descriptions of the Rockies transcend the 150 years of stylistic difference, and I was particularly struck by her detailed account of climbing Longs Peak, a feat that challenges climbers even today.

House of Rain by Craig Childs

I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.

I got to return to Mesa Verde National Park last week and tour two more of the enormous cliff dwellings built nine hundred years ago directly into the rock. They are impressive places, made up of turrets and geometric stacks of rooms and huge circular underground kivas. It's hard not to think what the first white Americans, cattle ranchers, thought when they encountered them for the first time: how could somebody build something like this and then just abandon it? The "disappearance" of Ancestral Puebloans, previously known as the Anasazi, has been compelling narrative for a long time, a puzzle to be solved. Craig Childs, in House of Rain, travels through major and minor Puebloan sites throughout the southwest and Mexico, seeking an answer to just that question.

Among other things, House of Rain is a travelogue, and some of the most impressive passages involve Childs moving across the high, dry landscape of the Four Corners area on foot, sometimes with his wife and infant son in tow. He skillfully and poetically describes the beauty of this area, which is among my favorite places in the world. So in that sense it was like comfort food to me. And I appreciated hearing descriptions of some of these Puebloan sites I'll never see; tucked away in the corners of deep canyons, undisturbed in the way those first ranchers must have seen them. You can see how much more uncomfortable Childs is at, say, Aztec Ruins, a site run by the National Park Service in the backyard of a suburb of Farmington, New Mexico. Better to pass into these regions of quietude, where the intervening years can disappear and the past reappear in the form of a broken wall, a husk of corn, a potsherd.

So what happened to the Ancestral Puebloans? As Child notes, though a little begrudgingly, the mystery is not much of a mystery at all: they migrated, probably because of an intense drought in the high country of the Four Corners. Childs puts some specifics to this that I found highly interesting: his conclusion, based on the introduction of new kinds of polychromatic pottery in the lower regions of Arizona, is that the Puebloan culture migrated to the south, mingling with Hohokam and Mogollon cultures that were already there to create the culture now known by archaeologists as the Salado. It's Childs' contention, actually, that tensions between the new elements of this multicultural society resulted in the collapse of that society, leading the Pueblo peoples to splinter into the groups that now make up the two-dozen-odd Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, as well as the Hopi. But Childs throws his lot in with some more outre conclusions as well, like a revisionist theory that Puebloans migrated north from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde and then south again along the same meridian to a location in Mexico known as Paquime (or today as Casas Grandes), which other archeologists consider more closely related to the Aztec cultures of Mexico to the south. In any case, Childs favors a version of the Puebloans that emphasizes their grandeur, claiming for them a larger sphere of influence than many of his peers.

House of Rain is only twenty years old, but it wears its age. The term Anasazi, a rude exonym that comes from the Navajo, has been entirely supplanted by "Ancestral Puebloan." And while Childs undercuts the question Where did they go, my understanding is that nobody accepts this any longer as a framework from which to begin--something which perhaps Childs should be given credit for. But my biggest frustration with House of Rain is how it keeps modern Pueblo peoples at arm's length. They appear infrequently, and often in ways that stymie Childs' research, as with a council of elders that refuses to give Childs permission to conduct research. Childs paints this as a typical reservedness, but then again, he's the one who uses the word Anasazi around them, knowing it's offensive, but catching himself too late. Childs folds in some of the stories and legends of modern-day Puebloans that support the narrative of migration, but I noticed that these stories always tend to begin "a Hopi man once told me," while the researchers have names. At a dig, Childs notes the frustration of an archeologist who is forced to stop digging when human remains are found--a key stipulation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act--and, in way that felt telling to me, lets that frustration pass by without comment.

All of these are minor missteps, perhaps, but they add up to a sense that Childs is most interested in the version of the Ancestral Puebloans that live in his imagination, and keeps the modern-day Puebloans and Hopi who might shine light on them at arm's length because they might complicate that imagination. Which is all just to say that I think House of Rain would be stronger if it had found a way to engage more deeply with them. That said, in the end, I really enjoyed deepening my understanding of the people of Mesa Verde this way, and I was persuaded by Childs' invitation to see them not as a static society that suddenly "collapsed," but a living, moving culture passing through several stages of development over centuries: a rhythm, a form of motion.

Americana by Don DeLillo

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial ins, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we would build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres."

David Bell is a young junior executive at a television company. His workplace is something of a circus, perhaps in the sense of a gladiatorial circus maximus: people are always getting the axe, and others rising in their place. Someone is sending out cryptic quotations that Bell thinks of as "schizograms," messages that may contain a deep meaning or none at all, or whose deepest meaning might perhaps be the fact that they mean nothing at all. And of course, everyone is sleeping around. So far, David has been the beneficiary of this cutthroat atmosphere, rising to a level of power and prestige. But when he's sent out a road trip to Arizona to film a group of "Navahos"--Native Americans standing for, throughout the novel, the opposite of the American impulse to capitalism and celebrity, though as always with DeLillo, that initial position is constantly undercut--David goes "off the grid," pursuing instead a private project in which he travels around the anonymous and suburban fabric of America filming a kind of quasi-version of his own embattled childhood in the Hudson Valley.

Americana was DeLillo's first novel, published all the way back in 1971. His novels have always had a quality of being ahead of their time, and Americana is no different; it strikes me as being as much about the television-addled "Me Decade" of the 1980s as White Noise, a book from the 80s, is really secretly about the advent of the internet era that followed it twenty years later. DeLillo's characters are always obsessed with the image, and Bell is the prototype, a lover of Burt Lancaster and Ozu movies who thinks, in some cryptic way that's never fully explained for the reader, that putting a version of his childhood on film might--what? Resolve it? Redeem it? Transform it? Bell's big project at the network is a program called "Soliloquy," in which people sit in front of the camera and tell their life story. (More foreshadowing: the front-facing video.) Is this Bell's "Soliloquy?" If so, is DeLillo exposing how the versions of our lives we distribute are always in a sense performative, that they never really capture the truth? Bell's version of his childhood is avant garde, elliptic; it took me a long time to even realize that was an important element of his "film."

For a first novel, Americana launches with incredible confidence. DeLillo's style is already hard-baked here, and the sentences are as epigrammatic and incredible as anything in Libra or White Noise. Americana is, if nothing else, a real pleasure to read, from one sentence to the next. But I left unsure of what all those sentences add up to. I think perhaps this is really a problem with the third section, the actual "road trip" the title promises. The first section is a terrific parody of the modern workplace, and the second section is a relatively straightforward realist depiction of Bell's coming of age: his mother's sickness and death, her confession that she was raped by the town doctor, David's outrageous Don Draper-like father, the disappearance of his sister. I loved this section; it's a more familiar kind of writing than we usually get from DeLillo, but in exceptional form. I actually didn't know he had it in him, this kind of realism. But the third section is too stuffed, too peripatetic, even as Bell ends up not traveling the country but rooted in one anonymous Midwestern town among football captains and insurance adjusters. I thought it suffered, perhaps, from first novel disease, packing in so many ideas that nothing comes out clearly. 

Catherine the Great and Small by Olja Knezevic

The year was 1988. July in Belgrade was intolerably hot; the city smelled of dead dogs and cats, strays killed by the heat, and of dried-up insects, black and brown cockroaches. But the pressure was on for my finals. I had to be like a young stoic and, with books as my only defence, resist desire--summer's naked, sweaty, sexual desire--and grapple with my demons.

The "Catherine" of Catherine the Great and Small is actually Katarina, a.k.a. Kaca, Kacic, Kaya, Kati, Kate, or Katydid. Katarina is growing up in Montenegro at a time of great upheaval for the tiny country: first the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which results in the creation of Yugoslavia, and then the outbreak of nationalist hatreds under Slobodan Milosevic, who was supported by many Montenegrins. But Katarina is just a normal kid, into pop and punk music, and the upheavals of world politics are in the background the more immediate facts of her life: her friend Milica, a brash and budding young actress who seems destined either for fame or a spectacular crash, and her love Sinisa, who disappears for years and then shows up again, looking as handsome as ever. Katarina, Milica, and Sinisa all end up in Belgrade, where young Montenegrins seem to end up for school or drugs. But it's in Belgrade where Milica discovers the secretive Sinisa has been sleeping with older women for a place to live--including her own friend and landlady, Alma.

Catherine the Great and Small is split into two sections, titled--wait for it--"Catherine the Small" and "Catherine the Great." Of the two, I much preferred "Catherine the Small," which depicts the small dramas of life for the young in the post-Soviet Balkans with skill and humor. Milica gets too into drugs and loses her teeth; she still has beautiful feet, and so Katarina enlists her as a shoe model in a brief business empire. In fact, I liked this section best because Milica is the novel's most gripping character, a woman almost too full of life, so much so that it seems, with good reason, that she may be burning up that life's short fuse. "Catherine the Great" jumps ahead to Katarina's adult life, living in London with an abusive Montenegrin husband named Vuksan. When her grandmother dies, Katarina returns to her hometown, which has changed its named from Titograd to Pogdorica, and reconnects with, of course, Sinisa. There's much to love about this section, too, but I became impatient with the way that it "reveals" the truth of Sinisa's infidelity; stories where the drama is limited to a reappraisal of events in the past always make me impatient.

Still, I thought Catherine the Great and Small was engaging and well-written, a fascinating glimpse into the frankly familiar life of someone growing up in one of Europe's more wartorn--and still, somehow, little-known--corners. With the addition of Montenegro, my "Countries Read" list is up to 121!

A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled--perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn't I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn't that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

Toby Hood is an Englishman who travels to South Africa to take up an open position managing a small publishing company in Johannesburg. He doesn't have much going on in England, and his curiosity makes him open to this unfamiliar country, which is so like England in some ways and completely strange in others. In South Africa, he makes immediate friends on both side of the color barrier. On one side, there's Cecil Rowe, a beautiful divorcee with whom Toby falls in love. Cecil is used to fine English tastes and moves in upper-class Anglo circles, but lacks the wealth to keep herself and her son Keith (lol) out of precarity. On the other side, there's Steven Sitole, a charismatic African who invites Toby into a world of townships, jazz, and associations with Indian gangsters. Steven fascinates Toby, who envies the kind of freewheeling life that Steven seems to lead.

It's not unheard of, but it was interesting to read Gordimer writing from a first person perspective here. It made the novel much warmer than many of hers, and it's easy to see (this is her second novel) how she moved away from the kind of intimate realism of A World of Strangers toward something that was simultaneously colder and more cynical. The novel presents a very simple double life: Toby wants to be at home both among his fellow Anglos and Black South Africans, as well as those like Anna Louw, an Afrikaaner activist who has given up connections and privileges to fight for people like Steven. And why shouldn't he? Of course, it isn't possible, as Toby is often reminded--by Cecil, describing her disgust with her own servants, or by his landlady, who tearfully and frightfully expels him when she finds out he has invited over "kaffirs." The whole thing is, as surely Gordimer means it to be, faintly ridiculous; do these people really think they can live separately as an empowered minority in a black country forever? We can see, as she cannot, how Cecil's isolation and lack of stability is downstream, at least in part, from living in a country where she fears and despises most of the people on the street.

A World of Strangers is good in a realistic kind of way, but it doesn't measure up to Gordimer's later masterpieces. I detect a kind of hopefulness and optimism in it that I think she loses later on, perhaps as she became more cynical about the possibility of political rapprochement between white and black South Africans. You can see, for instance, how much more open to Toby the people in Steven's world are than the Anglos would be to someone like Steven. There are some intimations of tension between Toby and Steven's people, and certainly the suggestion that the life Toby is leading is impossible in the long run. But there's little of the sense you get in later Gordimer that one's race will win out, that the ties of racial identity are in some sense insuperable, at least by individual effort. But I suspect some that find Gordimer chilly might actually find A World of Strangers more palatable.

Language City by Ross Perlin

This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over seven hundred languages, early twenty-first century New York City is especially a last improbably refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York have been so linguistically various, and they may never be again, but this new hyperdiversity has hardly been mapped, let alone understood or supported. In particular, in just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York form heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedent rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they remain invisible and their words inaudible.

Ross Perlin is a linguist behind New York's Endangered Languages Alliance, a kind of ad hoc meet-up space where speakers of minority languages teach them or record them, working to preserve them in the face of erasure. Similar efforts are certainly being made around the world, but only in New York is it possible to capture as many languages as the ELA serves. I have to admit to a little tingle of pride when Perlin describes New York City as the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. In fact, it's one of my favorite things about the city: walking around and hearing, in the course of an hour, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic, and many other languages besides that I'm unable to identify. Perlin's book is about some of those languages: languages that are spoken by minorities even in their homelands, and which resurface here in New York where they have a new opportunity to thrive.

This is actually a central point in the first section of the book, something that I'd never considered: immigrants to New York, and perhaps most major metropolises, are typically minorities in their homelands. Of course, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Dominant groups don't need to immigrate because they are dominant where they are. As a result, Perlin explains, what we think of as singular national languages are actually often patchworks of minority languages stitched together under a single umbrella, as with speakers of Sicilian and Ligurian and whatever else that get knitted together as "Italian." It was interesting to learn, for example, that most Iraqi immigrants to New York are Jewish. It's a dynamic that brings with it a complicated push-and-pull: the immigrant city offers a space for minority languages to thrive, but it also threatens to subsume them under national identities that supplant the language, too. This section of the book--the linguistic history of New York, beginning with Lenape speakers and Dutch immigrants and including the major immigrant waves of the 19th and 20th centuries--was my favorite.

About half the book is taken up with a series of biographies of speakers of minority languages who work with ELA. Much of the attention on the book has focused on Rasmina, a speaker of a Himalayan language called Seke, whose speakers all occupy a single "vertical village" building in Brooklyn. Of 700 extant speakers of Seke, one hundred live in this building! But there are others, too: a writer and academic who speaks Bessarabian Yiddish, a restaurateur who speaks the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, and Ibrahima, who helps spread the N'ko alphabet of West Africa. Anyone who knows my particular interests won't be surprised to hear that I most enjoyed the story of Karen, a Lenape speaker who worked improbably to revitalize the language here in the heart of Lenape homelands. Karen's story makes it clear that much of the Lenape language has been lost and has to be created anew; while there's a sadness to this, it also seems like a powerful communitarian act. Languages, Language City reminds us, are communities. And at a time when the powers that be are trying as hard as they can to eliminate the exact kinds of immigrants this book describes, it was powerful to be reminded of just what these language communities add to the greatest city in the world.

The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin

"Alone at last," said the Mouse. "Let's see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what's to be come of you. Or I was. You all seem a little shy on the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn't born yesterday. He's been around the block a time or two. I'll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not only Mickey the Mouse. I never had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life's too short. Hey, no offense." He looked around at the unsmiling children. "All right, all right," he said, "enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you'd lived?" Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. "Tch tch tch," said the Mouse, "you kids, you poor kids. I don't think I ever saw such losers. Where'd you grow up--on Fuck Street?"

Eddie Bale's son, Liam, dies a celebrity: everyone in England knows his name, and perhaps has contributed a few dollars to a fund for his care. But after the death, Eddie regrets spending all that sympathetic cash on doomed treatment that only lengthened Liam's life, if it did, by torturing him; he ought to have spent it making Liam happy. So his next scheme is to raise money to send a group of terminally ill children on a "dream holiday" to Walt Disney World in Orlando. (The novel opens with the Queen handing him a check for fifty pounds which he's instructed not to cash, but rather to show around, and induce others to give--that's the kind of novel it is, bravely unfazed by the threat of legal persecution from either Elizabeth or Mickey.) When they arrive, Orlando is experiencing a freak snowstorm--a sign, perhaps, that the dream holiday will not be all that it's cracked up to be.

Eddie's crew of kids is a motley one: there's Lydia Conscience (not the last such name), whose stomach tumor makes her look like a pregnant eleven-year old; Noah Cloth (see what I mean), who keeps having to give up bits of himself to amputation; Janet Order, whose hypoxia makes her blue; Charles Mudd-Gaddis, whose progeria makes him basically an eighty year old man. There are others, besides, chief among them Benny Maxine, the oldest and most normal-looking, whose leadership among the children threatens to devolve into schemes and dangerous jokes. The adult chaperones are no less ragtag: the gay male nurse trying to nick a set of animatronic manuals for his waxworker boyfriend; the chronic masturbator; the nurse who won't shut up about how she used to care for Prince Andrew; the doctor who is primarily excited to go to Orlando because he wants to do up-close medical examinations of Jews. And then there's Eddie, of course, who has pinned his moral life on what is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

The Magic Kingdom is, as the summary suggests, a strange novel. It struck me as kind of fearless in how faithful it is to the real Disney World; I had to imagine the avuncular-looking Elkin riding It's a Small World and Spaceship Earth again and again to get the details right. This Disney World is instantly recognizable; a cavalcade of garish and shallow images and sounds that promises a kind of satiety it can't fulfill; we understand when the kids get quickly bored and led into mild disobedience by Benny. But I was also struck by how little the book was interested in Disney World. There are a few really good moments and details--one that sticks out to me for I-don't-know-what-reason is Noah, who is depicted as kind of an idiot, going on a gift-shop spree as a way of grasping at the normal life he'll never have--but Elkin's style is wordy, jokey, longwinded, more interested in depicting the inner lives of each of a large cast of characters than getting them out into the world to interact. The scene quoted above, in which the male nurse's new lover dons the Mickey costume and perpetrates some slight psychological torture, is strangely wandering and limp. Now and then Elkin makes some truly bonkers choices, which mostly, somehow, work, as when the children exhibit the ability to meet up in each other's dreams.

I enjoyed The Magic Kingdom, though its touchpoints are several authors I consider not-quite-my-style: Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. (And it must be said I don't think it's a coincidence that Elkin gives one of his characters the last name Gaddis.) It's goofy (pun intended) and overwritten, at times exhausting, but it's this maximal goofiness that allows Elkin to address the darkness at the center of the novel--the imminence of these children's deaths--with tragic effect. When the inevitable happens, as it must, it cuts through the goofs with laserlike prediction. It's a silly, strange, and somehow sweet novel.

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Summer whites, green gardens, Mississippi, white summer suits and seersucker suits, those were the sights. In the Garden District, Claude stopped and pointed out the jasmine and the cicadas in the night. That was his innocence to me. He had the sweetness of the town itself and broken my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor, as he himself would say, for he touched my heart, to such degree, that I had to steel myself, or my heart would break, like his, into a million pieces on the floor. For in Claude Collier I saw my very youth, a fateful green garden, parades on the Avenue, an orchestra on a bandstand, my youth in New Orleans.

Louise Brown is in love with Claude Collier, a young man from her faintly genteel social set in New Orleans. Claude's main character traits are his extreme kindness and compassion and a general tendency toward haplessness, toward nervous breakdowns. In fact, everyone in Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or maybe they just claim to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown because it is, as it still is, a fashionable thing to say, but for Claude Collier it is God's honest truth. It is, perhaps, like the southern Gothics of Truman Capote, a trait of New Orleans itself, and as Louise describes above, Claude is for her the embodiment of the city and her experience in it, which is what makes it such a tragedy when he runs off to the Northeast.

Structurally, Lives of the Saints is an odd, tricky book. The sections are typically quite brief, marked by bon mots and sudden revelations of character among Louise's New Orleans set. (It reminded me, actually, of Renata Adler's Speedboat, transposed to a very different setting and voice.) A reader gets the quick impression that plot is secondary to the adumbration of a particular place and time, and is happy enough to go along, because Lemann's evocation of New Orleans is so simply and beautifully drawn ("summer whites, green gardens"--sometimes it's as simple as that). But tragedy sneaks into the corners and sets the novel moving: Claude's brother Saint falls out of a tree and is killed. Lemann's prose is so simple (sorry, that word again) that I had to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. But it's this death that sends Claude and his tweedy father, Mr. Collier, both reading, and sends Claude off to New York and Boston, leaving Louise to pine for him.

There's really not much more to the book than that. There were times when I felt frustrated by the staccato style of the novel, by the way it seems to turn in place, but after the death of Saint, I was impressed by its humor and lightness of touch, and the way it balances the melancholy. And I was frequently struck by the loveliness of Lemann's writing:

And yet one felt such a melancholy or downright sorrow, as when there is something amiss, as when you wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning suddenly, before it is time to wake up, with the distinct feeling that something is wrong--something with this life you are reading is very wrong--except you do not know what it is. It is a nameless wrong. The nameless wrong follows you wherever you go but you can't put your finger on it.

Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann

...Now he became in truth a crazed and greedy butterfly, no longer pretending to know who he was or what he was looking for, dreading the weary moment when he must stick it in, dreading the moment when the lady must leave, but avid to have and have had, his tips becoming smaller as the money went, the girls giving him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches in his balls... What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn't remember te name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn't remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left hi ma liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by. When he wanted to eat out a whore, he'd say:   I want to kin kao you,   which means,   I want to eat rice you,   and then he'd point to her pussy --

"The journalist" of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories is on assignment in Thailand, which mostly means spending every cent he has on prostitutes. Unlike his rakish companion "the photographer," the journalist is a real romantic, finding something in these women that feeds some need that lies deeper than sex, although they fulfill that need for him, too. He falls half in love with nearly all of them, until he falls fully in love on a trip deep into the jungles of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have been lately on a killing spree. It's hard to say what makes this prostitute, Vanna, different from the others, except that she becomes a repository for these deep needs; her feelings toward him--as opposed to feelings toward the necklace he buys her or the money he gives--are inscrutable and ambivalent. But his feelings are strong enough that he marries her--despite having a wife back in the U.S.--or perhaps the marriage is in name only, a name given to the strength of those feelings. Naturally, when he's whisked out of Cambodia, he yearns for her, first in Thailand, then back in the United States, where he purposely wrecks his marriage out of jealousy and fear.

It's tempting to read Butterfly Stories as a companion book to Whores for Gloria, another book about a man deeply enmeshed with the local prostitutes. The protagonist of Whores for Gloria trawls San Francisco's Tenderloin District, not Southeast Asia, and though they can be irascible or even hostile, the prostitutes there have a kind of transparency that the journalist searches for in vain. In Gloria, the protagonist rarely even has sex, preferring to listen to the whores' stories, but the language and cultural barrier make it impossible to know if any of the Thai and Cambodian girls are telling the truth, or if they are, whether it gets lost somewhere in translation. Their opacity is at the heart of the book's tragedy; we know that the journalist will never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for both depends and is stymied by the exotic nature of Vanna and the others. Even in the flesh, she's a dream and a fantasy, and it's for the fantasy that he wrecks his life, upending his marriage and ultimately even contracting AIDS.

It's hard to say where Butterfly Stories might fall in a ranking of Vollmann's works for me. It's more standoffish and at-arm's-length than Whores for Gloria, and perhaps less satisfying by design. It's frustrating read--the guy is such a loser, and I can imagine that someone who picks this one up as their first Vollmann might be put off by the exoticizing and fetishism on display, though I think one more attuned to his work will notice the instability of that quality, if not the critique of it. Most disturbing to me was recognizing a small detail--the journalist, unable to re-reach Vanna, travels to the Arctic and falls for an Inuit girl--that seemed so like The Rifles that I couldn't help but wonder how much of Vollmann really is in here. (That's something he does quite a bit, I think--puts himself in the story in ways that are ambiguous, mixing himself in indeterminate percentages.) There's a nobility to the guy in Whores for Gloria, but what the journalist evokes is more along the lines of pity--a much more discomforting emotion. But it must be said that Vollmann makes it look easy, and if Butterfly Stories does not stand out among his works, taken in isolation it must be astonishing.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

In the sound of the shower or the tub, in the spray of water on the dishes in the sink, I heard the words that Mitsutsuka and I had shared, as well as all the words that we were yet to share. We'd only met up a handful of times, which made it harder to understand how I could feel like this. I didn't know the first thing about him. I couldn't even see inside my feelings far enough to know what they meant. Over and over, i asked myself if this had all been some kind of mistake. If I sat down with a cup of sake and thought about how weird it was that I spent so much time thinking about someone I didn't even know, I just wound up thinking about him anyway. I thought about him all the time.

Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night is about Fuyuko, a young fact-checker who lives a lonely and isolated life. She's awkward around others, and doesn't make friends easily. In fact, they mostly have to make her: first Hijiri, the brash editor who encourages Fuyuko to go freelance, and introduces her to alcohol for the first time. Then there's Mitsutsuka, an unassuming older high school science teacher whose life collides with Fuyuko's when, plastered and investigating taking courses at a local college, she ends up puking everywhere. (Fuyuko's alcoholism, unwittingly provoked by Hijiri, is a major theme in the novel.) Mitsutsuka is kind, shy, reserved--exactly the kind of person, one thinks, that might pull Fuyuko out of her funk. Her feelings for him are identifiable to us as romantic, but with her diminished experience, she struggles to make sense of them, fleeing into drink or just plain fleeing.

In the center of the book, Kawakami places a flashback that explains everything we need to know about Fuyuko. She recounts how, in high school, a seemingly gentle and thoughtful boy cast his attentions on her, calling her once a week on the phone. But the first time this boy invited Fuyuko to his house, he ends up raping her and then cruelly dismissing her. Kawakami describes this scene with a painful clarity that is difficult to read. But it's clear we're meant to see this as something as a key to Fuyuko's adult strangeness: how can she reach out to others, when doing so leads to such cruel disasters? Other than this scene, All the Lovers in the Night is a quiet and uneventful book, only as big in scope as Fuyuko's shrunken life. The three central figures are well drawn, and I especially liked the ambiguity of the character of Hijiri, whose social prodding of Fuyuko is somehow both supportive and menacing at the same time; a scene where Hijiri gives Fuyuko her old designer clothes, and Fuyuko looks at her new self in the mirror, was especially effective, when it might have been obvious.

One thing that struck me when I read this, and thinking back to Kawakami's book Heaven, about a boy who is cruelly bullied, is that she shares a lot of qualities with once and future it-girl Otessa Moshfegh. The protagonist here reminds me of the heroines of books like Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, recluses who shun, or are shunned by, a wider world in which they feel unable to operate. Kawakami's book is much quieter, even compared to Heaven there's nothing really here that's shocking or lurid. That compares favorably to Moshfegh, I think, even as I think the book itself will end up being not quite memorable. 

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

I cannot pretend that all these details which I am trying so hard to reconstruct from my memory are necessarily true, but I feel myself today driven by a compulsive passion now that we are separated to make these two people live before my eyes again, to bring them back out of the shadows and set them to play their sad parts as closely as possible to the truth. I want above anything else to make the two of them clear to myself, so that they will continue to live as visibly as two photographs might seem to do propped up on a shelf beside my bed, but I don't own a single photograph of either of them. Why am I so possessed by them? Of the Captain I have heard nothing for years, and Liza, whom I left of my own accord, I see only from time to time, always with a sense of guilt. It's not because of any love I feel for them. It is as though I had taken them quite coldbloodedly as fictional characters to satisfy this passionate desire of mine.

As a boy, Jim finds himself taken out of his boarding school by a mysterious figure who calls himself "The Captain." Jim doesn't mind going--he's one of those boys who seems to always be on the outside of the group, a victim for bullies. The Captain, it turns out, has "won" Jim in a backgammon game from his true father, a dissolute gambler known to Jim only as "The Devil." The Captain is Jim's liberator in many ways, but he makes it clear that he has no plans to be a substitute father for the boy, except in the sense that he changes his name immediately, from Victor. He quickly instructs Jim in a series of confidence games and petty tricks that reveal his true nature as a con artist and thief--the name change, in fact, is more in the way of a guise than a fatherly act. Ultimately, the Captain drops Jim off with his girlfriend Liza, who seems to have made a stray remark about wanting a child, a remark the Captain has gone above and beyond to fill. Jim ekes out a strange life with Liza, who never quite rises to the level of a mother, a strange and peripheral existence punctuated by the Captain's abandonments and returns.

I was immediately captivated by the beginning of The Captain and the Enemy. Greene thrusts us into the position of young Jim, trying to figure out the strange figure who has dropped into his life and transformed it, perhaps for the better, perhaps not. "The Captain" is a Greenian figure par excellence, a con artist and trickster native to the English underworld. If he's hard to figure out, it's because he doesn't want to be figured out. Never do we really understand what the Captain's grift is: is he a big-time criminal, or a petty one? The only thing that Jim seems to be able to say for sure is that Liza, his not-quite mother, is head over heels in love with him. Later, as Jim tries to make sense of the strange childhood he has had, this fact hits him with depressing clarity: in that household or any other, no one loved him as much as these two loved each other.

I was disappointed, then, by the second half of The Captain and the Enemy, which transforms something unstable and weird into much more common Greene fare. As an adult, Jim travels to Panama, where the Captain has been living, to inform him of Liza's death, but when he arrives, he finds that he's unable to do it--not out of tenderness but what seems to be a willful rejection of the shape of the life that the Captain forced upon him as a child. The choice of Panama seems to be inspired by Greene's friendship with leader Omar Torrijos, which he wrote about in Getting to Know the General. The intrigue that embroils Jim is obscurely related to the revolution in Nicaragua and Panama's peculiar importance to the United States, as well as the agitation over the return of the Canal Zone. The Captain is implicated now in some kind of international espionage, and his enemy is an English journalist--who may be a secret American--named Quigley. Is Quigley the enemy, or is it Jim, who is offered the opportunity to betray his father figure? It's all very Oedipal, but the intrigue is too blurry and the story too familiar; it made me long for the strangeness of the opening chapter.

Close Range by Annie Proulx

But he knew all about the place, the fiery column of the Cave Gulch flare-off in its vast junkyard field, refineries, disturbed land, uranium mines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous dams, the Amoco mess, railroads, all disguised by the deceptively empty landscape. It wasn't his first trip. he knew about the state's lie-back-and-take-it income from federal mineral royalties, severance and ad valorem taxes, the old ranches bought up by country music stars and assorted billionaires acting roles in some imaginary cowboy revue, the bleed-out of brains and talent, and for common people no jobs and a tough life in a trailer house. It was a 97,000-square-mile dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery. The ranchers couldn't see their game was over. They needed a hard lesson and he was here to give one.

My favorite story in Annie Proulx's collection Close Range is "The Mud Below," about a bullrider named Diamond Felts. (In a collection where characters have names like Car Scrope and Aladdin Touhey, "Diamond Felts" is basically Jack Smith.) Diamond comes from a family with higher expectations than bullriding, though as Wyomingites they're familiar enough that Diamond's mother can take him to see an old bullrider whose brain was turned to soup decades earlier by one bad fall. But Diamond will not be moved; his embrace of bullriding is a kind of middle finger to those expectations, and expectations of all kind. It's no coincidence that his childhood nickname is "Shorty": bullriding is a way of making himself a big man, at least for a little while. To underscore this point, Proulx describes with upsetting clarity how Diamond rapes his friend's wife in the backseat of their car. Women are like bulls to Diamond, like everything else: something to be mastered for as long as you can.

One thing Close Range is not is a "love letter to Wyoming." Though there's affection here for the landscapes and sympathy for the state's pioneers, ranchers, cowboys, and down-and-outs, Proulx's vision of Wyoming is mostly that of a remote outpost where people quickly grow desocialized and impotent. They lash out, like Diamond, or the rancher from "The Governors of Wyoming" (quoted above) who secretly works alongside an environmental activist to sabotage the fences of the neighbors. Or else they simply burn up, like the hard-drinking waitress of "A Lonely Coast." These stories are nasty, none moreso perhaps than "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," about a young man in a terrible railroad accident whose brain damage makes him expose himself to women, and the pioneer chuds who are all too happy to use such indiscretions as an excuse to shoot somebody or cut them up. This story is set in the 19th century, but Proulx seems to suggest that things have changed little since then.

The stories in Close Range are often very complex, like mini-novels, and in my experience each one took ten or fifteen pages just to sort of understand the basic outline of what was going on. Sometimes this is frustrating, and other times she uses it to great effect. But I think it's instructive that the strongest stories in the collection have a real singularity of purpose, like "The Mud Below" and the collection's most well-known story, "Brokeback Mountain." The gay cowboys of "Brokeback" barely have the inner resources to understand the feelings they share for each other, and to the extent they're able to articulate them, it is to express a (justified) fear that they're putting their lives in danger. A happy ending is disclosed from the very start, because it just isn't possible in this Wyoming--that, at least, is something the pair understand. Like most of the other stories, it's bleak and cynical, but has an honest ring to it, and that's an improvement, I think, on the twee-ness of The Shipping News, the only other thing I've read by Proulx. The title, Close Range, suggests multiple possible meanings: the opposite of an "Open Range," that is, the closing of the myth of the Wyoming cowboy--but also the distance across which a bullet might hit you in the gut.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon

When I leaned over the side of Nikawa that Saturday morning to check the hull, a mural of cumulus sky lay across the slick river, and from the clouds suddenly appeared a countenance smiling down on me, a bearded one. If I'd believed the Engine of Creation had a human face, I might have taken the visage for it, but it was only I, who soon dipped my hands into the river and shattered the firmament and myself, then held perfectly still towatch the fractured sky and a man's mug slowly return as if the river knew precisely where each piece belonged, and all was seemingly just as it had been, but it was an illusion of the reflection, another trick of the river, for in that minute the water took to return to a mirror I was that much older, the clouds had puffed noticeably into new shapes, world population increased by 162, the planet sailed another eleven hundred miles through the ether, the solar system traveled seventy-eight hundred miles closer to the Northern Cross, and the tectonic plate the Missouri flows across had crept microscopically closer to Siberia. A stilled river is an illusion of the human situation where stasis is only a concept, but a flowing river is a traditional metaphor for the way of all tings. Mountains suggest fixity, but rivers give continuance.

The "River-Horse" of William Least Heat-Moon's book is the Nikawa (which means that phrase in the language of hte Osage), a C-Dory boat that Heat-Moon plans to take from one coast of the United States to the other. It's a daunting, perhaps impossible task, possible only with the judicious use of portages, but Heat-Moon is intent on spending as much time as possible on the water, without use to shortcuts. It's a route that takes them from New York up the Hudson to the Erie Canal, across the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers, over the Continental Divide, into the rough waters of the Snake and Columbia. There's not a lot of leeway for error: a day or two lost, and the Nikawa may miss the date of the snowmelt in the Rockies that provides enough water across the Missouri for a boat to travel. But America's rivers are highly regulated things, chopped to pieces by locks and dams that prevent easy movement, and where the authorities let the boat pass, Nature may throw up other roadblocks: rough shoals, rocks, and terrible weather. It is, in short, an insane thing to do.

But it is a way of really seeing America. Heat-Moon explains that he'd seen every county in the United States except for a handful in the Deep South, and traveling by river is a way of reacquainting oneself with the country, getting a different view. And as we're often reminded, it's the original way that America's representatives acquainted themselves with their new nation: as he travels the route of Lewis and Clark, Heat-Moon re-reads the explorers' journals. (I was struck by, among other things, how the part-Osage Heat-Moon interacts with the Native Americans he comes across on the trip, reenacting in a way the movement from the metropolitan coast to the west, which remains Indian Country in many ways.) And as they go, the river becomes a metaphor not just for America but for the shifting nature of things, as expressed in the passage above. Only late in the book does Heat-Moon confess that his traveling has resulted in yet another divorce, and that in essence his wife told him that the choice was between his river journey and her--and he, of course, chose the river.

River-Horse is a different animal than Blue Highways, a travelogue I loved, though certainly more than one reviewer must have noted that the river must be the original "blue highway." It's a much more solitary endeavor, for one, more engaged with the landscape than the community, though Heat-Moon makes up for this by taking a passenger along this time, a worldly-wise friend he terms "Pilotis," who, lucky for the writer, is always ready with a bon-mot. But from time to time, Heat-Moon and Pilotis get off the river into the small towns that once were the lifeblood of a kind of public transit system now little-used, and Heat-Moon gets to make use of what I feel is the real strength of his writing: an uncanny ability to capture the quirks and speech of strangers. The motto of the Nikawa is "Proceed as the way opens," and the travelers on it have reason to return to it many times, avoiding any number of near- and not-so-near-scrapes and setbacks, but ultimately making it to the other side of the country.

Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

"You are not dreaming, Zaliwe," says the mop, shimmying out into the light.

The voice is still my mother's. Climbing an octave on the third syllable of my name like she'd spent the whole day laughing and didn't have anything left in her chords to finish the word. Amama could fill up a room with her laughing voice alone. Where mine was kapenta in a bowl of water, hers was tilapia, large and filling. You couldn't look away form her if you wanted.

My favorite story in Zambian writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento's collection Obligations to the Wounded is "Mastitis," about a new mother who's having a real bad time. Not only is she struggling to produce milk for the baby, her mother has just died, and her husband seems to be having an affair with another man. Abandoned and frantic, she considers suicide, or just perhaps contemplates her own death as a way of resolving her troubles. Then, her mother's voice appears in the kitchen to advise her. Her mother's ghost is invisible, but real--look at the way it twirls the mop--and little by little, it coaches the narrator in the act of massaging her breast to provide milk for the baby.

"Mastitis" combines several of the novel's larger themes--motherhood, sexuality, the generational differences between Zambian families, especially emigrants--into a single story. It ought to be messy or overstuffed, but I thought the story succeeded on the strength of these storylines being woven together into something persuasive. Where the stories are simpler, they seem one-note. For example, a story about a young Zambian exploring a trans male identity, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother, seems to repeat and reconfigure an earlier story about a young Zambian exploring her same-sex attraction to a friend, to the chagrin of her traditional Zambian mother.

Much stronger, I thought, was the opening story "Azubah," about an emigrant in America who travels back to Zambia to take care of her mother, who is in the grips of dementia. In her addled state, the mother admits that her own father sexually abused the protagonist, something the protagonist had psychologically buried. This story, I thought, like "Mastitis," brought a complexity to the relationship between generations that other stories lack.

With the addition of Zambia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 120! Still about 75 to go. At a rate of one a month, that will take me about six years.

Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but its rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection!

What do we really know about ourselves? This is a fundamental question of philosophy, I suppose, but as Walker Percy shows in Lost in the Cosmos, it's also a fundamental question of pop psychology. The whole book takes the form of a pair of "quizzes" that allow you to select the belief closest to your own--about the self, about religion, about sex, etc.--with the promise that the results will illuminate something about your life. We've moved on from this kind of book since Percy wrote it, but you still see traces of it everywhere, in Buzzfeed quizzes and horoscopes and Meyers-Briggs types. If Lost in the Cosmos has something resembling a thesis, it's this: despite years of scientific advancement that has transformed our understanding of "the Cosmos," we really know very little about our own nature.

How much of this book is serious, and how much is tongue-in-cheek? The quiz format lets Percy have it both ways--he doesn't have to make any genuine claims about the self or human nature, ones which might expose a kind of amateurishness or oversimplification that often seems to be lurking here. Are these "dyadic" and "triadic" diagrams supposed to mean something, or are they just a joke, meant to resemble the kind of bullshit that happens when you try to diagram the undiagrammable? But the method also enforces his contention that we actually know very little, the author himself included. And though the parody lacks some bite in 2026, it can be very funny, as Percy spins little Percyesque stories about priests and football players and stuff like that. I can't say that I ended up understanding myself or anything any better after reading it. I can't even say I understood the book itself. But it was certainly a gas.