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.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The flamethrowers could have been from a different century, both brutal and ancient and at the same time horribly modern. The flame oil in the twin tanks they carried was five parts tar oil and one part crude, and they had a little canister of carbon dioxide and an automatic igniter and a belt pouch with spare igniters. The flamethrower was never, ever defensive. He was pure offense, overrunning enemy lines. He surged forth, a hulking creature with huge tanks on his back, a giant nozzle in his hand, hooked to the tanks. He was a harbinger of death. He looked like death, in his asbestos hood with the wide cowl, and he squirted liquid fire from a magnificent range--fifty meters--into the pillboxes and trenches of the enemy and they had no chance.

The narrator of The Flamethrowers is a young artist from Reno whose work revolves around speed: she takes photographs of landscapes through which she has passed, by foot, or ski, or, as is the case in the beginning of the novel, by motorcycle, having shown up to Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats where world speed records are being chased. One of the novel's most arresting scenes involves the narrator in a fiery crash, from which she emerges not seriously dinged up, and which results in her perversely being given the opportunity to ride a Valera company machine that will make her the fastest woman in recorded history. She may or may not be aware of the similarities between her own work on speed and that of the Italian Futurists, who embraced speed as an ideal at the same time they embraced Fascism. Among those futurists was a young soldier named Valera whose legacy includes the motorcycle company that produces both the narrator's bike and her boyfriend, Sandro Valera.

The bulk of The Flamethrowers centers on the New York art scene of (I think) the 1970's and 80's. Sandro is an artist himself, and introduces young Reno (as she's sometimes called) to a world of provocateurs and gallerists, some of whom make a more permanent impression on the narrative than others. Kushner treats this world as faintly ridiculous, as surely it was, but also deadly serious. Some of these artists have emerged from the world of radical politics where bombs and art are seen as equal tactics. Some of them are just poseurs, and it's hard to tell exactly which are which. As the scion of the Valera Motor Company, Sandro fits uneasily among them--Kushner makes sure to emphasize that the company's exploitative ways didn't end with Mussolini by including a section from the perspective of a Brazilian rubber worker. After a disastrous sojourn to Italy where she's scorned by his well-to-do family (and cheated on), Reno absconds with Sandro's groundskeeper, who turns out to be a member of a Communist cell whose clandestine activity will upend Sandro's life.

The Flamethrowers is hardly a perfect book; I'm not even sure it works on the whole, but it did make me wonder why Kushner's debut, Telex from Cuba, was so limp. Many of the same traits of that novel are on display here: the gratuitous POV shifts, the whiff of extensive research. But I thought this novel succeeded at doing something the other clearly attempts, and fails: it brings together several disparate-seeming subjects and themes in a way that connects them persuasively. At the heart of the novel is the way that us and them are enmeshed. Sandro's attempt to escape the distasteful elements of his family's legacy by entering into the art world fails because the art world is also enmeshed with the realities of capitalism and exploitation. The Italian rabblerousers whose provocations set off the novel's climax are like the flamethrowers of the Italian army that fascinated Sandro as a kid: a purgative force. To the extent that their nozzles are also pointed at themselves may not be foolishness but a kind of honesty and self-sacrifice.

That said, Kushner has a way of writing around things that leaves me feeling as if I've read about something, but not really read it. This is the third of her books I've read now, and in each case I find that there's something missing, for me, at the heart of them; I walk away wondering what it was that I really read about. I think it's actually easy to locate that missing center here: it's the protagonist, whose attraction to Sandro and artistic ambitions mask a kind of inner vacuity. She's our point-of-view character, who frames all our judgments of the "characters" we meet in the New York scene, but that invisible eyeball quality leaves her a little invisible. Her artistic project, for example, is so quickly abandoned it felt like something of a red herring. The best parts of the book are when Kushner breathes a little life into her: when she crashes her motorbike and when she runs away from Sandro. Still, Kushner has a real knack for detail and anecdote, and there are elements here--the Futurists, the Bonneville Salt Flat stuff, the movie Wanda--that I really love. So I enjoyed reading it.

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

The battle raged. The hornets harried and charged him from every direction. Some tried to slip through the folds of his suit to reach his flesh, others violently flung themselves against his helmet, and he saw their eyes up close--red, as if injected with blood. Their stingers pierced the stitches of his garment and the veil of his helmet, narrowly missing him. But Sidi had always been incredibly dexterous. He was the son of the mountains and the hills, accustomed to its animals and insects. His mind and movements were still sharp, protected from the weight of his years by the nectar produced by his girls. They were watching over him the same way he watched over them.

Sidi is a beekeeper in North Africa who produces some of the region's best honey. His secret is love: he calls his bees "his girls" and watches over them with an intense fervor. But his girls, and his livelihood, are threatened by the arrival of a new predator, the giant Chinese hornet, which can tear an entire hive apart in a matter of minutes. At the same time, Sidi's unnamed country is dealing with a predatory upheaval of its own. Having just cleared the way for its first-ever elections, the polls are led by a group of religious fundamentalists who wear all black. The fundamentalists are intent on winning the election, whether that means providing food and clothing to potential voters, or rounding up apostates in the desert and cutting off their heads. 

I fear there's not much to say about Tunisian author Yamen Manai's The Ardent Swarm. It is no more or less than this obvious metaphor: the fundamentalists in black are the hornets who have arrived with the threat of violence and destruction. (There might be something said, however, about the way the novel analogizes the fundamentalists to a threat from "outside," as something that has been imported from somewhere else--not a homegrown danger, even as it presents one local character who is seduced by the fundamentalists to join them.) It's a nice touch that Sidi, who lives in the hills like something of a wild man, is and remains more or less ignorant of the fundamentalist threat. Sidi and his allies are taken up instead with their solution to the hornet problem: a trip to Japan to carry home Japanese queens. These bees are the only ones to have invented a strategy to defeat the hornets; they surround them in a ball and basically smother, or overheat, them to death. This is "the ardent swarm," and what it suggests is that if the citizens band together, perhaps at the ballot box, they can defeat the threat of a fundamentalist takeover. The novel wisely lets that remain to be seen, though it's curtains for the hornets.

With the addition of Tunisia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 119!

Crazy Genie by Ines Cagnati

I told her about her, of what the grandfather had told me, that before she had me she would laugh and sing day and night, and that later, once she was expecting me, she never wanted to say who my father was, and the grandmother, who is a bad woman, had gone into a fury because she didn't wand bad things like that to happen in her family, which was the most respectable in the village. Then she had moved into the shack under the crazy willows that talk at night, and she had never gone back to her home, and she worked at people's houses to be fed, and they called her Crazy Genie because she never talked, but she wasn't crazy, she simply didn't talk and didn't laugh.

Marie's mother is known in her village as "Crazy Genie." Despite coming from a respected family, she takes on odd jobs to survive: milking cows, threshing wheat, husking corn. She's not really crazy--the word is a tool that the people of the village use to place her beyond their sympathy and understanding. If Genie has fallen in the world, it must be her own fault--as Marie's grandmother, still incensed about Genie's becoming pregnant out of wedlock, believes--or, more likely, there's just something wrong with her that can't be helped. Marie spends much of her childhood trying to make sense of this dynamic, while trying without success to become closer to her mother, whose material sacrifices we can see clearly are meant to protect and care for Marie, but who is extremely sparing with words or gestures of maternal love. The only things that Genie says to Marie for much of the book are commands: "Go home," "Don't bother me," etc., etc.

It's a dangerous world out there for girls, as Marie finds when the town mason, Ernest, is lying in wait for her en route from a job back to her home under the "crazy willows that talk at night." We learn later--spoiler alert--that this Ernest is Marie's father, and that he has raped his own daughter just as he raped Genie many years before. In this way, Crazy Genie becomes a book about the way that male cruelty can have resounding effects well past the moment of violence: Ernest's deeds ripple throughout Genie's life as well as Marie's, and his rape of her, which is presented rather elliptically in the text, is perhaps only a more severe manifestation of the general ruin he has brought upon her. And yet, Ernest is a distant figure from the narrative, appearing only a few times in the shadows. Men, of course, get to walk away. But there are others who collaborate in this violence and ruining: the grandmother, of course, and the townspeople, whose incurious nature prevents them from seeing the injustice that lies behind Genie's tough exterior.

It's easy to see what Crazy Genie has in common with Free Day, the Ines Cagnati book that NYRB translated and published a few years ago. Both are about young girls living in difficult circumstances in the French countryside, trying to scrabble out an existence in the face of disadvantageous circumstances. But they're incredibly different stylistically. Marie's language is much simpler, more systematic, as might fit a more rational and less emotional child who is trying to make sense of the world around her. The simplicity of the language emphasizes, too, the repetitiveness and routine of the life that Marie lives with Genie. It's a style that works, but it's not as good as Free Day, a book where anxiety and dread leak through the language in a much more interesting way. That said, Crazy Genie moves toward a climactic ending that is as difficult and tragic as anything in Free Day, and which elevated the book for me--because I always appreciate a real bummer.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

If I know anything about Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, I know that it contains a scene where Hemingway reassures F. Scott Fitzgerald in the bathroom of a bar that the size of his penis is perfectly ordinary. A Moveable Feast wasn't published until the 1960's, a few years after the death of Hemingway, and perhaps it's best that it much after the death of Fitzgerald, as well, who, as Hemingway depicts him here, was an anxious hypochondriac, tortured by his wife, who probably had enough anxiety to deal with in his life. The penis story is just one of many--there's a long tale about Fitzgerald's hypochondria absolutely derailing a boys' trip to the city of Lyon--and one of the charms of A Moveable Feast is the peek inside the lives of some of the great artists who were trawling around Paris at the time. Fitzgerald gets out better, perhaps, than Gertrude Stein, who's depicted as something of a stubborn battleaxe who hides petty resentments behind a thin veil of principle. That's too harsh: as with Fitzgerald, Hemingway's depiction of Stein is ultimately a loving one, because his depiction of Paris, and those years of his life, is a loving one as well.

But the most interesting depiction of any artist is, I think, the book's depiction of Hemingway himself. Hemingway's writing about a time before he's published any novel at all, and his work is all in short stories, and so the larger-than-life bullfighter and hunter who would be known as "Papa" isn't really present here. The Hemingway of A Moveable Feast is a rather vulnerable creature, battling the uncertainty of writer's block, cultivating a style of simplicity not out of masculine bravado but the need to put down on paper "one true sentence." This Hemingway marvels at his friend Fitzgerald not because his book is so good (when they first meet, he hasn't yet read Gatsby) but because he had the ability to write a novel at all. I thought A Moveable Feast was an interesting counterbalance to the popular image of Hemingway as an icon of machismo. Certainly the vulnerability and the incertitude of Hemingway here involves a lot of self-fashioning, but isn't "self-fashioning" the complaint that people level against Hemingway in the other direction? All of which is to say again that I think those who resent Hemingway for his masculinity haven't read him, or haven't read him closely enough.

It's impossible, I feel, not to respond to what Hemingway can do with a sentence. His sentences seem simple enough, but then, if they're so simple, why are they so moving? I was moved in that way often during A Moveable Feast, though I don't quite agree with those who thinks it's among his greatest works. It has the kind of muddy incoherence of something that feels unfinished, as if it were something he might have knocked into a more recognizable shape, if he'd published it during his own life time. Still, it's remarkable in the way it manages to turn real people--the Steins, the Fitzgeralds, the Pounds, and Papa himself--into Hemingway characters, so vibrant and real even though they are so lightly sketched, touched with a kind of authorial grace.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

And it was perhaps the cold desolate lovelessness of the place that threw into sharp focus the magical and life-affirming qualities of the country around it. To enter that country is to be choked with dust, suffocated by waves of thrumming heat, and driven to distraction by the ubiquitous Australian fly; it is to be amazed by space and humbled by the most ancient, bony, awesome landscape on the face of the earth. It is to discover the continent's mythological crucible, the great outback, the never-never, that decrepit desert land of infinite blue air and limitless power. It seems ridiculous now, to talk of my growing sense of freedom given the feudal situation I was living in, but anything could be mended, anything forgotten, any doubt withstood during a walk through those timeless boulders, or down that glittering river-bed in the moonlight.

In the late 1970's, Robyn Davidson moved to Alice Springs, the town at the center of Australia's Outback, with one goal in mind: to obtain and train a group of camels in order that she might walk from the center of the country to the Western Australia coast. The trip, as Davidson describes it, is not just about getting to know the country, but getting to know oneself: alone for long stretches of time with only the camels and her dog, walking across some of the most featureless and inhospitable landscape on Earth, Davidson becomes not just independent and self-sufficient, but in tune with herself in a way that's not possible in Brisbane, or even in old ramshackle Alice. This is a kind of book that has become popular in recent memory--I'm thinking of Cheryl Strayed's Wild--but whereas those books always seem to be a kind of marketing strategy, when Davidson writes about self-actualization, I tended to believe her, not least because of the incandescent rage she expresses toward the demons of the press that want to turn her into tomorrow's headline.

Close to half the book is taken up with the preparations for the trip, which involve taking small jobs in restaurants and ranches in Alice Springs. I was really interested in Davidson's discussion of anti-Aboriginal racism in Tracks: the Alice Springs of the 1970's she describes is a place where whites drop slurs as easily as spitting on the ground. (It's also a place disproportionately filled with men, who frequently threaten young women like Davidson with rape.) Davidson paints herself as kind of a hothead who often leaps to the defense of Aboriginal Australians, and it's this fervor that really makes her seem honest and impolitic, though I would suggest there's a kind of blindness, too, in the way she throws around suggests of Aboriginal "demise." Later, on the trip itself, she's briefly joined by an Aboriginal man named Eddie who takes her through some of the track that she would not, and in fact would not be allowed according to Aboriginal tradition, traverse on her own. These sections, which depict a kind of free camaraderie despite a real language barrier, are some of the most charming of the novel. When Eddie leaves and Davidson faces the last, deadliest stretch of the trip, the book's tragic elements return to the forefront.

If this were a book about traversing an American desert, you might expect some stunning descriptions of landmarks, well-known and not. But the Australian desert is not like the American one; it's featurelessness is part of the essential nature that draws Davidson to it, and it's not possible--or so I gather, and so I understood as I crossed it by air a few weeks back--to impose a mental geography on it, unless perhaps you are an Aboriginal Australian moving along a songline, perhaps. So the focus, for the most part, becomes on Davidson herself, her self-sufficiency and stubbornness. (Though I really liked her description of what was then called "Ayers Rock," which she explains that no tourist mob could ever really reduce or diminish.) I thought it was especially funny how Davidson spent 100 pages talking shit about the clueless photographer that National Geographic sent to snap photos of her, right up to the point where she sleeps with him. That kind of hotheadedness and brashness is what makes you like Davidson, and what makes you believe in her.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

Henry hadn't been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages  rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn't see them--oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Henry, the namesake "Prop" of Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., is the world's first fantasy baseball player--and I do mean fantasy. He spends all of his spare time simulating baseball games with three dice and a few dozen charts that describe what each roll means. With these simple tools, he's able to reproduce whatever can happen on a baseball field, from pop flies to sac bunts to home runs to rarer events like fights and injuries. Henry simulates whole seasons at a clip, pitting teams with names like the Pastimers against the Haymakers and the Beaneaters, and players with names like "Sycamore Flynn" and "Melbourne Trench." At this speed, the league takes on a history, and a lore, of its own, Henry watches fifty years of baseball history go by at a clip. As the league grows in imaginative size, so it takes over Henry's life, leaving him on thin ice at his accounting job. When a new star is in the midst of a breakout season, the energy and enthusiasm it provides gives Henry even a kind of sexual prowess at the local bar; but the league's slumps are Henry's slumps.

Fantasy baseball is the obvious touchpoint for The Universal Baseball Association, but there are others that make more sense. What Henry does is actually closer to a one-man roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, combining personal modifiers and the power of chance. Like D&D, Henry's game is inertly mathematical until enlivened with the power of imagination, and imagination is where Henry thrives. At the beginning of the season depicted in The Universal Baseball Season, an up-and-coming pitcher named Damon Rutherford has thrown a perfect game at the onset of a season that promises to be legendary. The novel "drops in" to the perspective of the players themselves, caught up as Henry is in the larger narrative of Rutherford's rise and the magical tension of the games. (A stunning amount of the novel is just Coover describing, grippingly, the events of a baseball game.) I would suggest that what Henry really is is a writer, and that the book is a kind of metacommentary on the relationship between the novelist and the world he creates.

The crisis of the book is set off when a stray roll sets off the "Extraordinary Occurrences" chart--and an errant pitch hits and kills Damon, the star pitcher. The death is a seismic event in both the Association's life and Henry's, provoking existential questions. To what extent is Henry responsible for Damon's death? He is, after all, the one who made the chart. And what can he do about it? Is it permissible for him to "load the dice" and punish Jock Casey, the supercilious young pitcher who felled the young prince? Or is the crisis an empty one, the game all vanity, and something that should be chucked in the garbage bin entirely? Why is it that we got so invested in these fictional worlds? After all, aren't I, the reader, a little choked up when I read about Damon's father, the league legend Brock Rutherford, climbing down from the stands to get to the body of his son lying at the plate? In a Muriel Spark sense, Henry is both author and God, pushing his inventions around and hiding his hand.

In fact, I want to suggest one more touchpoint: the story in Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum about a computer simulation of life in which the relationship between the simulated beings and their programmers is a perfect analog of that of us and God, a relationship with an impermeable barrier at its heart. The Universal in Universal Baseball Association is pointedly chosen; to these players, the diamond is the entire world. Henry suggests the weirdness this produces early on when he describes the players as organizing themselves into political-type "parties," which actually might be more like sects. The culmination of this aspect of the novel is the bravura final section, and "in-universe" short story about a future generation of the Association where players ritualistically reenact the death of Damon Rutherford, now a kind of quasi-religious figure. It's unclear whether the player representing Damon is actually at risk of being killed; it's unclear whether anyone actually plays baseball anymore. It's totally strange, totally unexpected, and cranks the strangeness level of the novel nearly past what it can bear. But fascinatingly, it suggests that the players have a life of their own, and if God--Henry--is around, he's chosen not to make himself known.

The Orchard Thieves by Elizabeth Jolley

Never let fear come into your life, someone had said to her when she was still a schoolgirl. She had never forgotten this, and here she was, a threatened and frightened woman after being fearless all her life, simply because a daughter, the middle one, without warning and without explanation, had come home seeking sanctuary. When she thought about it, there was no safe place in her house if someone should come, the hunter or the huntress, after the middle sister. Nothing closed properly in the house, the windows were loose in their frames, any keys which still remained would not turn in the locks. She never tried to lock up the house. At night the household was especially vulnerable with three women and three small children and one unborn child sleeping there. She had to understand that she had been afraid for almost four weeks, ever since the arrival of the middle sister.

The woman at the center of Elizabeth Jolley's The Orchard Thieves is known simply as "the grandmother." The other characters, too, are reduced to their familial roles: "the youngest daughter," "the grandsons," "the aunt"--that is, the eldest and childless sister. Into this web arrives the middle daughter, known as, you guessed it, "the middle daughter," returning to Australia from England with her daughter ("the cousin") in tow and a baby in the oven. The middle daughter has experienced something harrowing, perhaps related to a lover, perhaps the father of the baby, although it's also hinted at that she has relationships with women. What it is, the grandmother is never permitted to know; her role is to provide sanctuary without question, and the reader is never permitted to know either. But the grandmother's anxiety is ignited: how can she protect her middle daughter if she doesn't know where the threat lies?

In the above passage, the grandmother claims to have been "fearless all her life" until this moment, but we can see that this is not true. Until the arrival of the middle daughter, her primary concern is for her three grandsons, who act in the story as a unit, and who are always up to some mischief or peskiness. A bowl of fruit, sitting in the kitchen, is too beautifully arranged for anyone to take from it in the daylight, but at night the grandsons sneak in to steal apples and grapes, one by one--the orchard thieves of the title. The grandmother is entirely aware of this, and fascinatingly, her fear for her grandsons centers on the knowledge that they will be, at some time in their life, the thief, rather than the victim. But the "Orchard Thieves" also refers to the adult children, including the youngest daughter's husband, who seize on the opportunity to discuss despoiling the grandmother of her home. Does the grandmother see this greed in them, too, as she sees it in the young children? Does she excuse it, even nurture it, also? Is it cruelty, or a natural way of things that must be endured?

Jolley is always such a cryptic writer. In a way, The Orchard Thieves is the most straightforward of her novels, which always feel like they either have a piece missing, or perhaps one added in. Here, it's what has happened to the middle daughter--keeping that information back is, I think, a remarkable kind of authorial restraint. But the story from the narrow perspective of the grandmother is not cryptic at all, though its narrowness is a kind of limitation of the kind that Jolley seems to like. The reduction of the characters to their family roles turns it into a kind of fable or parable about aging and motherhood. One's reminded of those spiders who offer their bodies as refuge for the eggs of parasitical wasps, only to be eaten up after they hatch, piece by piece.

Nothing by Henry Green

"I wonder if it's why the relatives won't come."

"No Philip really. You know what their whole generation is!"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well they wouldn't let a little thing like that, I mean of going to bed, what we've just been discussing, make the slightest bit of difference would they?"

"I don't believe it is a little thing."

"No more do I."

"That's where the whole difference lies," he said "between our generations. Their whole lot is absolutely unbridled."

Philip Weatherby and Mary Pomfret are two young lovers about to announce their engagement to their parents. The problem is, their parents, Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret, are old lovers, whose affair with each other once ruined both of their marriages and threw their entire social world into upheaval. This event--like most events in Henry Green's novel Doting--is talked about only obliquely, and we are left to intuit that, beneath the layers of British gentility and emotional repression, what happened between Jane and John was rather volcanic. The two parents set about sabotaging the marriage in the way only the British can, or perhaps the way only Henry Green's characters can, without ever openly or explicitly acknowledging that they're doing so. In fact, once Philip and Mary begin to inquire with Jane and John about a little worry that has been niggling at the back of their minds--is it possible the pair are half-siblings?--it's difficult not to see the writing on the wall.

Among other things, Nothing is a book about generational differences. Jane and John come from the generation that came up between the two world wars, whereas their children are the products of post-World War II austerity. They see themselves as infinitely more sober and earnest than their parents, especially about things like love and sex, which they somehow take both more seriously and less obsessively, or so they believe. There is something inverted about the parents, primarily concerned with their flirtations and social lives, and the children, whose lives revolve around work. Jane and John are flighty and selfish, but their children are worse: they're bores. It was never quite clear to me why Jane and John are so against the marriage of their children, except that perhaps they take the possibility that Mary is John's daughter seriously. Or perhaps it's simply that the children's conception of marriage as an institution of respectability and sacrifice threatens their own open, freewheeling flirtation, which has carried on for years, much to the chagrin of the current lovers to which they seem rather lightly attached.

And this is all, of course, circumscribed with the narrowness of permitted language among the English bourgeoisie. Only Austen, I think, is able to express such a range of feeling and personality within such narrow constrictions. Like Doting, which as I understand it is often seen as a companion piece, Nothing is almost entirely dialogue. In both books, Green acts as something like an invisible eye, recording the language of the English classes that would have been familiar to him. (And it's interesting to me how well Green, a pretty posh guy, captured the voice of the middle and lower classes over his career.) Green famously wanted his dialogue to express the opacity of the human mind, and to dramatize how little we understand from someone's words just what they are thinking of feeling. But often I felt the language here does something almost opposite, unveiling and exposing people's true intentions even as they try to keep them hidden. It's genius-level stuff, but I have to admit that I liked best the moments where Green lets himself intrude upon the conversation to offer one of his paragraphs of jagged modernist language. For all that is great about both Doting and Nothing, they often felt to me like a novelist running away from the height of his own powers.

Six Books About Australia

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Voss by Patrick White
The Welcome to Country Handbook by Marcia Langton
Walkabout by James Vance Marshall
Connardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard
The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, "who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks," disguised himself as an enormous "boomer" or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier's Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, leveling their muskets. "Don't shoot, I am only Billy Hunt," the nervous marsupial squeaked, in their consternation."

On my recent trip to Sydney I visited the Hyde Park Barracks, basically a housing unit for convicted English criminals who were sentenced to "transportation," that is, exile to Australia for their crimes. The barracks are barracks, not a prison--Australia was the prison. But what does it mean for a whole continent to be a prison? Robert Hughes' history The Fatal Shore details the Australian transportation system from the landing of the "First Fleet" in 1788 to its end in the late 19th century. I was searching for a general history of Australia, but one thing Hughes' book makes clear is that, as far as European settlement goes, the history of transportation is the history of Australia, which makes it all the more incredible that, according to Hughes, the social stigma around the "Stain" made it impossible to talk about Australia's convict past for most of the 20th century. Australians might take comfort in Hughes' point that, in creating one of the world's safest countries, with one of its highest standards of living, the nation is proof against the eugenicist belief that "criminality" is a heritable trait.

Hughes makes pointed comparisons between the transportation system and the Russian gulag of the 20th century, both attempts to deal with social problems wholesale by exiling "problematic" sections of society. Transportation, Hughes notes, precedes Bentham's idea of the modern penitentiary, and its invention was an attempt to deal with what seemed like an insoluble problem: where do we put all these criminals? The First Fleet of 1788 dealt with a grueling eight-month ocean crossing to find themselves on the other side of the world in a poor harbor racked with disease and little arable land; with these meager tools they were meant to build their own society. Early Sydney was hell for soldier and prisoner both, and many soldiers remarked on how little difference there seemed to be between them. As free settlers begin to make their way to Australia, the "System" grows in its cruelty, becoming more punitive and violent, perhaps to make the class distinctions more obvious and iron-clad. A basic fact that I didn't understand is that convicts would be leased out as workers to free settlers. And yet, a prisoner who did well could receive a "ticket of leave" to work for themselves, and once their time was up, many stayed, becoming themselves powerful landowners who were sought after as masters by other convicts, being more understanding.

Hughes describes a 19th century Australia whose key social distinction is between "Exclusives" and "Emancipists"--that is, free settlers seeking to maintain their social superiority and freed convicts who had been elevated to the ranks of polite society. Although the elevation of "Emancipists" ended with the relatively liberal government of Lachlan Macquarie, whose successors were those who hardened and strengthened the penal system, this conflict seems to have shaped Australian society up until the moment that transportation ended and, embarrassed by "the Stain," everyone agreed to forget all about the System. Hughes tells an interesting anecdote about a former prison ship that briefly opened as a public attraction before being sunk by irate Tasmanians, whose former colony of Van Diemen's Land was the harshest and longest-lasting of the various colonies. As an aside, I thought that Hughes' book was really well-written for a general history, full of interesting anecdotes and a dry sense of humor that made it a real pleasure to read.

'Voss did not die,' Miss Trevelyan replied. 'He is there still, it is said, in the country, and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been troubled by it.'

'Come, come. If we are not certain of the facts, how is it possible to give the answers?'

'The air will tell us,' Miss Trevelyan said.

The class distinctions between Exclusive and Emancipist provide an interesting window into Patrick White's classic novel of Australian exploration, Voss: Bonner, the explorer's wealthy patron, is a free settler whose "subscription" to the exploration is a kind of social expense meant to distinguish him as a gentleman. Bonner, like most of Australia's free settlers, is a mediocrity who takes advantage of the fresh country to make an attempt at a gentility that he wouldn't have had in England. The household servant, Rose, whose illegitimate pregnancy causes the family so much trouble, is an emancipated convict; in Laura's attempt to adopt Rose's baby (after her death) one can see the porous borders of early Australian society, and the desperation of those like the Bonners to keep them hardened. The novel's other Emancipist is Judd, the former convict who is Voss' foil on the expedition. Judd, having made his claim to the new country by toil and suffering, has a kind of practicality that Voss lacks; it's no coincidence that he alone survives the expedition. And yet, White makes it clear that Australia "belongs" to Voss, and not to Judd, by right of a kind of vision that Judd lacks, perhaps because Voss is outside the system that has so circumscribed the roles of Judd, Bonner, and Rose.

Voss' outsider-ness makes him, perhaps, more akin to the aboriginal people who make up such an important part of the exploration. Hughes describes how, among prisoners, Aboriginal Australians were thought of as being on the side of the jailers, since they had legal protections the prisoners did not, and were often used as "trackers" to bring back escapees. Judd ends up in a party with the older Dugald and younger Jacky, perhaps an uneasy union. But the country they enter into clearly belongs to those Aboriginal people who have never, like Dugald and Jacky, entered into a compact with white society--I recall easily one of my favorite scenes, where Dugald, having rejoined a tribe of Aboriginal kinsmen, rips apart the letters entrusted to him, whose pieces the tribe watches fly away in wonder. Voss and co. eventually find themselves in the keeping of another such group. Physically depleted by their journey, they are neither prisoners nor wards; they simply have nowhere else to go. There's a kind of mysticality at work here, a suggestion that the Aboriginal Australians belong to a kind of metaphysically different world, but I would argue that what is clearest is that "Country" belongs to them. Voss, by the power of his own vision and separateness, comes closest to achieving what has been natural to them for millennia.

There's something risky about revisiting your favorite books. Voss was my first of White's novels, and one thing that surprised me is that it is, prose-wise, rather ordinary compared to some of his other stuff, which tends toward the grotesque and the physical in ways that are not present here. It struck me actually as the most readable of White's books, which was a huge shock. But I was gratified to find it as good as I remembered. The psychic connection between Voss and Bonner's niece Laura produces the novel's most genius passages; the way that White manages to persuade the reader that Laura is present with Voss in the Outback even as she is physically in her Sydney estate takes one's breath away. And it was a special experience to read this novel just before my own trip to the Outback, where I got a great sense of the vastness of the hostile country from the hotel lobby bar where I spent much of my time sitting.

Why should we learn about the history of human life and the environment in this country in the time before the British arrived? Because most of the human history on this continent is that of the First Peoples, who lived here for tens of thousands of years. Their descendants--the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples--continue to follow and respect the ancient traditions and customs that make this country unique. It is likely that these are the oldest continuous living cultures surviving anywhere on the planet.

I turned to Marcia Langton's The Welcome to Country Handbook to help me understand a little more about the Aboriginal cultures that are, in a real sense, at the heart of Voss. As Langton points out, it is possible for Aboriginal people to make a remarkable claim to being the oldest living culture, perhaps up to 60,000 years old. Hughes describes the Aboriginal peoples encountered by the First Fleet as stunningly primitive compared to Native American societies encountered by settlers in North America; it is a wholly other perspective to consider that what the First Fleet found was a culture that had evolved in tandem with the continent over incalculable generations. Langton's book is an introduction to Aboriginal peoples for curious tourists, and hits some of the highlights one might expect: the 20th century renaissance and market for Aboriginal artwork, the political conflicts between Aboriginal Australians and the federal government, the diversity of Aboriginal languages and societies, etc.

I found this book mostly disappointing. First of all, 90% of what it cites are websites. It's written, too, like a website, perhaps one belonging to some kind of NGO: "Through storytelling, history, beliefs and knowledge about people, places and the world are relayed to each new generation." OK. To be generous, it seems to be written for a curious tourist who knows very little not just about Aboriginal Australians but Indigenous peoples, or race and culture more generally. That's fine, perhaps, but it means that there is a limit to the depth it is able to accomplish. Is it necessary to sit through a chapter that describes what racism is, or race?

But when the book does manage to say something specific, I found it pretty fascinating. I enjoyed learning, for instance, about the complex ordering of Yolŋu society, in which everything is considered to be one of two "moieties," even people, and marriage must be endogamous across these two moieties. Langton describes a highly ordered society in which dozens of familial relationships are recognized, if not more, and I got the sense--perhaps only through implication--that other Aboriginal groups have similar practices. Furthermore, I was interested in the way that Aboriginal Australians seem to share meaningful qualities with Native Americans and Black Americans, both as the original inhabitants of the country who were the victims of attempted genocide, and as a racialized class whose "blackness" forms a meaningful structure of their identity.

She felt compassionate: charitable: virtuous. Like a dignitary bestowing some supremely preciosu gicft, she handed her panties to the naked Aboriginal.

He took them shyly: wonderingly: not knowing what they were for. He put the worwora down, and examined the gift more closely.  His fingers explored the elastic top. It flick-back was something he didn't understand. (Bark thread and liana vine didn't behave like this.) He stretched the elastic taut; tested it; experimented with it, was trying to unravel it when Peter came to his aid.

'Hey, don't undo 'em, darkie! Put 'em on. One foot in here, one foot in there. Then pull 'em up.'

Now let me turn to two novels that explore interactions between white European-Australians and Aboriginal people. The first is Walkabout, James Vance Marshall's novel about two young children who survive a plane crash on their way to Adelaide. Foolishly, the children begin to walk in the direction of what they believe to have been their destination, although they're still in the Northern Territory--and will never survive. They are saved when they come across a young Aboriginal boy on "walkabout," cast here as a traditional rite of solo exploration (but which, as I understand it, really refers to the period in which Aboriginal people employed on cattle stations would return to their communities in the off season). The Aboriginal boy has skills that the two white children desperately need; he shows them how to procure water from below the dirt and which plants are edible, as well as how to catch and kill wallabies and echidnas. The two children, who are from Charleston, South Carolina, refer to their new friend as "darkie."

Of the two, the young boy Peter adjusts most easily to their new reality, choosing to go naked as the Aboriginal boy does. The older girl, Mary, has more misgivings, and her embarrassment for the boy's nakedness leads her to make a gift of her own panties, which he puts on with much good humor. (What a moment there is here for scholars of both race and gender!) In this way, Walkabout presents what seems to my eye a pretty typical conflict between "civilization" and its antithesis. Mary's unthinking hierarchies are challenged by the Aboriginal boy, even as the novel reifies the difference between them. It must be said that the fate of the Aboriginal boy seems to reflect the tragedies of Australian history: he catches Peter's cold and dies, having sacrificed himself to save them. Interestingly, Marshall ascribes the boy's death partially to an Aboriginal belief that death is inevitable once it has chosen you, and must be faced with equanimity: even before he catches Peter's cold, the boy sees in Mary's hostility a kind of "evil eye" that presages his death. Whether there's any basis for this belief, I don't know, but I saw it again in the case of one of the hired hands of the next novel, Coonardoo.

She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to. Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.

But Coonardoo the playmate--Coonardoo whom he had seen long ago under the shower, young and slender, her lithe brown body, wet and gleaming, brown eyes laughing at him, her hair, wavy and sun-burnished, lying in wet streaks about her head. Coonardoo? Why should he hurt her by a harsh, indifferent manner he showed nowhere else?

Coonardoo is set on a cattle station in Western Australia in the early 20th century. It centers on Hugh Watt, the owner of the station Wytaliba. The life of a white man in the remote bush is a strange one, and Hugh struggles to find a white woman who will accept such a life. His first choice, Jessica, goes back home after a week, and his eventual wife, Mary, becomes so embittered by the experience that she takes their six daughters and moves back to the nearest town. Hugh finds brief comfort in a dalliance with Coonardoo, an Aboriginal housekeeper who he has entrusted, like his mother before him, with the station's management. The back of the book describes this dalliance as a kind of forbidden love, but I wonder if that's true--it might have been, perhaps, if Hugh's own ideological commitment to racial separation hadn't kept him from suppressing his feelings for Conardoo. In either case, the brief affair produces a son, Winni, whose favor by Hugh is what tips Mary off to her husband's infidelity.

Coonardoo is an interesting document on interracial relationships. It must have been quite scandalous when Katherine Susannah Pritchard published it in 1926, when I can only imagine that relationships between whites and Aboriginal people would have been rather outside the pale of literature. But Pritchard shows how such things might be possible on a remote station in the Australian bush, far from the polite society of town, where a white man might spend his life among the Aboriginal people attached to his station (they seem to be neither enslaved or employed, but associated somehow) while his nearest white neighbors might be a day's ride away. The villain of Conardoo is a station owner named Sam Geary who lives openly with his "gin" (I think this term is now considered offensive), who desires Conardoo for his own, and keeps pressing Hugh to sell his rights to her, whatever those might be. Is Geary's sin the way he treats his own Aboriginal wife, Sheba, or merely his openness about it?

After Mary leaves, Hugh finally accepts Coonardoo as his "woman," something that he had been loathe to do, but even then treats her coldly, never returning to her bed after the one sexual encounter that produced Winni. Part of me wants to read Coonardoo as a novel of repression about a man whose racial ideology is so strong he can never let himself embrace the one relationship that might have made him happy. But I wonder, too, if Pritchard herself is able to imagine this relationship, or if it remains elusive for the writer in her period. More troubling yet is that Coonardoo herself seems kind of an absence in the middle of the text, a character that the novel is really unable to look squarely at or understand--at least, that is, until the final chapter, when an older and disillusioned Coonardoo returns to Wytaliba at the end of her life to look up on its ruin, and think about what might have been.

What do tourists do? They walk, they stand, they look, they buy. They fumble for money on buses, not knowing whether to pay the driver or the conductor.  They visit famous monuments, fountains, old houses full of stone and shutters and anachronistic lace. They notice that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream. They know that their existence is without point. They envy those who go arm in arm, who have a home to go to.

Finally, a novel of modern Australia. Helen Garner's novel The Children's Bach is set in suburban Melbourne, where the reunification of two old college friends, Dexter and Elizabeth, causes a disruption in both their lives. Dexter is a family man, brash and outlandish, who rails against "Americanisms" while his wife Athena takes care of their two children. Elizabeth is more adrift, unmarried, cynical, living in an unfurnished loft. When the two run into each other, Elizabeth brings two new presences into the life of Dexter's family. The first is Vicki, Elizabeth's much younger sister, who finds in their suburban home a foothold in life that Elizabeth's loft will never provide. The other is Philip, Elizabeth's sometimes boyfriend, a rock musician who persuades Athena to run away with him on a holiday to Sydney, much to the obvious chagrin of Dexter.

I admit I didn't see the pivot in this one coming. Vicki describes Athena as "perfect"--the perfect woman, the perfect wife. And early on, she seems to have a kind of stolid devotion to Dexter and their life; Vicki admires the pair of them for their frankness with each other. But an early sign that all is not well with Athena is the way she talks about their disabled son, Billy. "Don't bother getting romantic," Athena tells Vicki, "There's nobody in there." She admits, "I'm just hanging on till we can get rid of him," and says, "I've abandoned him, in my heart." In a novel that is otherwise quite small, filled with minor domestic gestures, the cruelty on display here really stands out as shocking, as does the moment that Vicki and Athena bond over the impulse they share to push the boy in front of an oncoming car. Billy, such as he is, seems to represent a kind of problem, a challenge to the kind of life that Dexter and Athena live, that can only be solved by exile. Athena's sudden abandonment of Dexter makes sense in this context, then: "Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain."

Back in Melbourne, Dexter commiserates by getting drunk with--and sleeping with--Vicki. This is a huge blow to his self-conception as a nobler person: "Tis was modern life, then, this seamless logic, this common sense, this silent tit-for-tat. This was what people did. He did not like it. He hated it. But he was in his moral universe now, and he could never go back." But it seems to me what Dexter fails to understand is that he's always been in this moral universe, however much he feels as if he has been above it, and Athena's abandonment of him for Philip is only proof that this is true. There's something very antiquated in Dexter's attempt to find moral absolution in the suburban family life, rather than its epitome, and he may be the only one surprised that such an attempt could fail.

I really enjoyed this one. Brent said there's something Muriel Spark about it, and though there might be a "Guy whose only seen Boss Baby" element to that, I think it's true. In its reticence, its cultivation of the opacity of these characters--which is what allows Athena's desperate move to shock us--I saw a bit of Henry Green as well. And part of that opacity is that I feel like there's something that eludes me about the novel, and makes me want to return to it; I don't think this will be the last book of hers I read.

So, this is an interesting place to end up: Australia's penal past makes it unique among world countries, but in its persecution of an Indigenous racial underclass, it ends up following familiar forms, especially to those of whose who are American. And in the end, though Dexter may hate the way that American culture imposes its ideas on Australians, it presents a 20th century story of suburban anomie that us Americans find utterly recognizable.