American Ramble by Neil King Jr.

This trip was different. On a fresh morning in late March, I stepped past the threshold of our front door, tugged the garden gate closed behind me, and set off to walk to the city of New York. A slow stroll, I liked to say, down a fast lane. An easy walk along a founding swath of the country that most travelers want to put behind them. A congested landscape usually seen as a blur, along a corridor named for a train, the Acela, whose name in turn is a faster form of accelerate. Ad + celerare, from the Latin: toward something, whatever it is, swiftly; to hasten the occurrence of a thing you want over.

No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over.

In 2021, journalist Neil King, Jr. set off from his home in Washington, D.C. to walk all the way to New York City. The journey, as he describes it in his book American Ramble, was conceived after a frightening bout with esophageal cancer that left his voice strained--a lasting mark that colors each interaction with the people he meets on his journey. Cancer, King found, contracted time and space, made things slow down, and each day seem precious and full of wonders. In a way, a journey on foot, as opposed to the machines of modern convenience, does the same thing. What would it be like, King wonders, to walk through the most heavily trafficked corridor in America, not by automobile or train, but on foot?

It's not a fair comparison, but throughout American Ramble I couldn't help but think of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, perhaps because I was so impressed by that book that I still have it on the brain. But I do think they have in common a kind of take-things-as-they-come approach: for Heat-Moon, the program is not a list of destinations, but the back routes on the highway; similarly, King is constrained to come across landmarks and communities as he finds them. I wished, in fact, that he had done a little more to synthesize the different stops on his trip, or perhaps to synthesize them in a way that was more historical and contextual than personal. What I liked best about the book is the way it reveals certain historical themes of this particular landscape that have been buried by urban sprawl and the great highways. King's route takes him through the crucibles of the American Revolution, including Valley Forge and the Delaware River, which he pointedly crosses at the same place that Washington did. It also takes him through the heartland of American religious pacificism, including the Amish country of southeastern Ohio and the vestiges of Quaker and Shaker culture. In each individual instance, King, a journalist, does a great job of investigating the particularities of place and history, but there is a larger story that emerges from the happenstance of the route that I felt was missing, somehow.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore that momentousness of the feat by the end of the book. King makes it clear that this isn't the roughing-it style hitchhiking of his youth; he stays in hotels and AirBNBs and his meals are restaurant fish tacos, not Vienna sausages on a camp stove. And yet, by the time he strolls into New York's Central Park, he's traversed some of the most pedestrian-hostile landscapes on the face of the planet, including the great wastes of warehouses he calls "Amazonia." More than a story of physical triumph, it's a story of resolve, and a stubborn desire to see a familiar landscape in a new way. 

Paterson by William Carlos Williams

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river
animate a thousand automatons.

Paterson, New Jersey is a cool place. At the edge of the great swathe of suburbia between New York City and Philadelphia, a place that--don't tell my wife I said this--feels clogged with Panera Breads and mattress stories, Paterson seems to me a real place with a real identity. Some might consider it a little rough and tumble these days, as cities who once relied on dead industries sometimes are, but it boasts a booming immigrant population, and its downtown still retains some of the striking manufacturing buildings of its earlier incarnations. In its heart is an immense waterfall that looks like something imported from the Adirondacks; these Great Falls of the Passaic were the engine of America's first industries, as dreamed by Alexander Hamilton. I've only been there once, but to stand at the falls felt to me like being at the intersection of nature, industry, immigration, urbanism--like being at center of something essentially American.

And all that is before you even consider that William Carlos Williams, one of the great American poets of the 20th century, lived there, and made the city of Paterson the subject of an epic poem composed over the course of decades. Williams' Paterson wears some of its influences on its sleeve, namely--and I think I'm repeating familiar knowledge here, though it is clear enough from the poem itself--the free verse and democratic fervor of Walt Whitman and the mythmaking of James Joyce. Williams, if I recall correctly, wanted to do for humble Paterson what Joyce did for Dublin.

But that's not exactly right, I think, Joyce used the vernacular of myth and history to turn Dublin into more than what it was, but Williams' long epic seems to collapse the scale of Paterson, rather than to enlarge it: the city, he tells us, serves as a metaphor for the poet himself: an agglomeration of parts that somehow has an essence of its own, a collective organism. At the heart of the poet is the falls itself, a representation of the churning and ever-changing mind, which "unseen / tumbles and rights itself / and refalls--and does not cease, falling / and refalling with a roar, a reverberation / not of the falls but of its rumor / unabated." In the first couple of books--Paterson is made of five, the first in 1946 and the last in 1948--the poet walks through Paterson itself, watching lovers and children, stirring up street preachers and grasshoppers, and the effect is of a man walking through himself. The city shrinks to the man, but the man expands to the city. Paterson becomes, at times, a kind of identity-formation on the page:

I cannot stay here

to spend my life looking into the past:

the future's no answer. I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself--
comb out the language--or succumb

--whatever the complexion.

To this point, Paterson is punctuated with all sorts of prose material, from newspaper clippings about Paterson to historical anecdotes to letters from Williams' own correspondents, including his housekeeper and a young and star-struck Allen Ginsberg. The letters are unattributed, unless you have an edition like this one that scrupulously records Williams' sources. For a poet like Williams, who is so attuned to the music of vernacular speech, the letters are rich and musical, but for a reader like me they are often baffling, like looking over the shoulder of a man on the train, seeing his correspondence without context. They, like so much of the poem, seem to mean less than is desired, to point mostly to the reader's own inability to read them. Paterson is often seen as a response to Eliot, who thought that poetry ought to be entirely impersonal. Williams is right, I think, that that's a silly way to think about poetry, but much of Paterson felt to me like a locked box. "Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it's all right," one imagined speaker says, "but what the hell does it mean?"

The poem's later books move far away from Paterson as a city; we are in Paris, perhaps, with Marie Curie, discovering uranium and unintentionally giving birth to the atom bomb. They become quite death haunted: "Though he is approaching / death," Williams writes, "he is possessed of many poems." I was quite touched by the tender hopefulness of this passage:

We shall not get to the bottom:
death is a hole
in which we are all buried
Gentile and Jew

The flower dies down
and rots away    .
But there is a hole in the bottom of the bag.

It is the imagination 
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole
we escape    .    .

I liked, too, an extended riff on the famous unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters in Manhattan, a work of art that is familiar to me in a place that is quite dear. (Not least because my wife and I had an early date there, now nearly ten years ago.) "The Unicorn / has no match," Williams writes, "or mate    .    the artist / has no peer," like "Death / has no peer." The artist is unique like the unicorn, like death; he creates the uniqueness of himself on the page, as he creates the city by walking through it, the city that is not the same as it was a moment ago, anchored by the falls where water moves thousands of gallons by the second. I left Paterson wishing that the waterfall would stop for a moment, and the poem and the poet reveal more of themselves, but there's no stopping it.

Trinity by Louisa Hall

Then the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains, and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.

I grabbed for somebody's arm, and I saw that the women around me had turned into X-rays, and that my own arm was an X-ray as well, our bodies having become in an instant nothing more than revelations of the bone cages we'd lived our whole lives in.

Louisa Hall's Trinity, is, at least on the dustjacket, about Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb.  It takes a wide view of Oppenheimer's life, not just focusing on the narrow period of his work at Los Alamos, like Countrymen of Bones, another great fictionalized version of Oppenheimer, but before and after: in Berkeley, where he goes to meet his mistress who will eventually die by drowning herself in a bathtub; in Princeton, later in life, as he suffers through the slings and arrows of McCarthyism and agitates for nuclear control.  Oppenheimer had a fascinating life that often bordered on tragedy, with plenty of rich details.  (Hall repeats Countrymen of Bones' account that Oppenheimer played a corpse in a Los Alamos production of Arsenic and Old Lace, which I'm not sure I realized was a true detail.)

But in practice, Oppenheimer moves through the book like a shadow, or a background character, hardly ever seen face-on.  The novel comprises seven first-hand accounts of people of varying closeness to Oppenheimer: a friend, a secretary, a Secret Service investigator, even a college student whose only experience with Oppenheimer is seeing him speak in public.  Trinity shares a strategy with John Williams' Augustus: when a figure seems too broad, too loaded with stature to look at straight on, give as many different accounts as you can.  But unlike the Emperor Augustus, Oppenheimer never really gets a chance to speak for himself.

Trinity has exceedingly little to say about who Oppenheimer really was.  In some of these accounts, he's little more than a minor character who moves in the background of the narrator's immediate life.  The thesis of the novel, actually, is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to really know another human being.  The Secret Service investigator admits he has no way of knowing why people do the things they do--which seems like a weird thing for a detective to admit--and later sections extend that anxiety to their husbands, family, and friends.  Trinity is not just the name of the Los Alamos nuclear bomb test but a representation of the essential multiplicity of human character.  I absolutely knew we were going to get a paragraph like this one, which applies the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to human relations:

You never know, absolutely, what another person was feeling, just as we never know the velocity and the position of a particle at any moment, all knowledge being by nature incomplete, all studies missing an aspect at least of the object they study.

I'm not complaining.  When Trinity is at its best, it makes this anxiety seem freshly horrifying.  The novel is really kept up by three tentpole stories among the seven, each of which is narrated by a young woman in Oppenheimer's orbit.  The first is a Woman's Army Corps worker at Los Alamos who has recently been abandoned by her lover, a married scientist in Oppenheimer's orbit; the second is a secretary of Oppenheimer's whose eating disorder comes to symbolize, I think, the escalating rot in the 20th century social order; the third is a magazine writer who sees the offer to interview
Oppenheimer as an opportunity to pin down a great wrongdoer in the way she was never able to do for her cheating husband.  These woman are all victims of broken marriages, of husbands and men who pay too little attention to them.  Like Oppenheimer, who makes his secretary run back to get his copy of the Bhagavad Gita so he can get the quote just right, they use myth and literature to help them understand their own situations.  The first imagines herself as the murdered woman in Crime and Punishment, the second as Persephone in the summer.  How can they know other people?  They barely understand themselves.

The best of these may be the final section with the interviewer, because of all the stories in Trinity it does the most to really grapple with Oppenheimer's legacy, and to do more than throw up its hands at the impossibility of knowing anyone else.  Its attempts to bring the various threads of the novel together are fairly timid, but the narrator's brash inquisitiveness is an effective way to end the novel.  "Shouldn't we live all our lives," she says, "knowing it's our responsibility to account for ourselves with precision?"  If Oppenheimer can't give a reasonable accounting of a life that resulted in hundreds of thousands dead and more permanently mutilated, why should we bother with them?

The other four narratives range from entertaining to seemingly irrelevant.   I don't know what we're supposed to get out of the college student, for instance, whose insight into Oppenheimer is mostly watching him walk under a row of trees outside the lecture hall.  It can seem a little like padding, but I guess that's okay, because what it pads is so precious, and dangerously fragile.

Household Words by Joan Silber

Now he slept in her brain like a worm in an apple, and fed off her mental processes; this was what it meant to be eaten away by grief.  Only this wasn't grief--she was past the pain of fresh mourning, wasn't she?--this was the slow erosion of personality by the habitation of some other.  It was most like those mothers who died from toxemia carrying dead fetuses within them.  She was sorry she had ever let her life be so linked, so ingrown, with that of another person.  It was too late to escape now, but she was certainly sorry she'd ever had children; they were like the past, they clung and clung.

In the 1940's, Rhoda Taber is young and relatively happy, married to a successful pharmacist.  "She couldn't help feeling contempt when she saw people who would choose misery," Silber writes, when Rhoda sees a "bum" at the Jersey Shore, "carrying it with them like an unattractive feature they made no attempt to conceal."  A detail like that is a death sentence, you know, calling misery down on the character's head.  And at first it seems like the misery that will seize Rhoda will be of the ordinary suburban type, the realization that being married and having children will not make her fulfilled, and that's part of it, sure.  But the narrative shifts dramatically when Rhoda's husband Leonard dies of a heart attack in the middle of the night, leaving her as a single mother with two children.

I was surprised to flip to the copyright page and see that Household Words was written in 1980.  It seems so much more like the kind of suburban panic novel that was popular twenty or thirty years earlier, like a book by John O'Hara or John Cheever or Richard Yates.  Maybe it took that long for the novel to become something women could write about women, also, an affirmation that what Emerson said about "the mass of men" leading "lives of quite desperation" is as true--perhaps moreso--for women than men.  But in any case, it has a sort of aggressive realism that seems very antiquated; there are no metanarratives, no pyrotechnics.  Household Words is remarkable--to the extent that it wants to be remarkable at all--in the sharpness of the character drawing and the solid plainspokenness of its prose.

It's also remarkable in that it's very, very bleak.  Rhoda, having grown older and become chronically ill, perpetually in conflict with her rebellious daughter Suzanne, marvels that her life has been made up mostly of unpleasantness and misery.  And she's not wrong.  But it's hardly misery on a grand scale--she's not a refugee of war or a starving child.  Rhoda has been unlucky but not spectacularly so.  Her life is both ordinary and miserable, and that seems like the point: the ordinary life is frequently miserable.  Silber pointedly avoids any sort of grand resolutions; Rhoda neither finds love again after Leonard's death or ultimately reconciles in any meaningful way with Suzanne.  When life ends, as it does for Leonard, it rarely does so in a way that allows loose ends to be tied up or grand statements to be made.  Call it the life-sucks-then-you-die school of philosophy.

I enjoyed Household Words, if that verb is appropriate.  It seemed scarier to me than any Grand Guignol gothic novel, because its monsters are so ordinary.  And in doing so I found it much more effective than those older, similar novels, which often seem to think that ennui is the biggest punishment the world can wield, bigger than grief or illness or death.  Or, thinking about novels like Appointment in Samarra and Revolutionary Road, they seem to belief that death is the consequence of ennui, or disillusionment, rather than the destructive and random force it is.  Household Words, by contrast, refuses to offer a neat or circular narrative that might suggest it's all fictional.  Instead, Silber suggests it's all too real.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Here is the rare book that includes a spoiler in its very title. Before you even open to the first page, Junot Diaz informs you that his hero, the impossibly overweight, impossibly nerdy Dominican New Jerseyite Oscar de Leon, is not long for this world. Poor Oscar. Never had a chance. The only real question, I guess, is whether or not he'll die a virgin.

Of course, it isn't just Diaz that predetermines Oscar's demise, but fuku, a Dominican curse that follows Oscar's family over several generations, all the way back to the monstrous reign of Rafael Trujillo, whose specter hangs over the book even long after the de Leons have moved to America. For Oscar's mother and grandfather, fuku meant savage beatings and imprisonment at the hands of the Trujillate. For Oscar, fuku means that he is cursed to play Dungeons and Dragons while the cool kids are at parties; it means while he's catching up on his anime everyone else is getting laid--a lesser fuku, you would have to admit, though perhaps not by the degree you would suppose. Oscar lives a life that, while marginal, is uniquely American; Diaz shows us how cultural ideas can translate strangely across nations and generations, yet remain unmistakably relevant. Though he is wheedled by his family and friends for being un-Dominican, it isn't until he returns to the Dominican Republic, compelled by possibly requited love, that the fuku can be broken.

And as compelling as Oscar's story is, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao can be a frustrating read because too often Diaz lets everyone else get in the way. The middle section of the book is cored out to accommodate lengthy discourses on his sister, his mother, and his grandfather, and while those stories are interesting in their own right, leaving Oscar to the endpapers of his own book seems somehow unjust. I found myself thinking of two other books which deal with the same cultural collisions with less mess: One is The Joy Luck Club, which packages each character's story into neatly stacked chapters. The other is another Pulitzer prize winner, Middlesex, which, while by no means a great success, at least has the sense to build a family story chronologically to create some sort of narrative thrust.

But Oscar Wao, coño, what a mess. It reminds me of one of those plastic novelty slugs filled with water--you know, the ones that fold over themselves like an elongated donut so that you can't hold onto them*. And this one's sprung a leak. There is an underlying pattern, I'm sure, that Diaz had in mind by heading backward in time with each successive chapter only to rocket back to the beginning, but the result is maddening. I kept expect to return to Oscar, who is the book's only truly interesting character, but instead I kept getting rewarded by another trip in the Delorean (and here's where Yunior, Oscar's roommate and narrator, would have provided a much more obsure example of a time machine to color the narrative).

On the micro level, too, Oscar Wao is unwieldy--Diaz writes in a unique twist on that hyperactive, barely stable post-modern dialect that is peppered with oblique sci-fi references, unnecessary Spanish, lengthy footnotes, and muddled metaphors. It's hard not to admire its breathtaking energy, but it's the kind of style that works only once and I fear it will inspire a thousand would-be imitators. Behold:

And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pais overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinverguenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

Yanquis and pais I find forgivable, but why subject us to the teetering construction that is sinverguenceria instead of "shamelessness?" And then there's cuco, which as far as I can tell suggests "cuckoo" but more likely refers to a mythical bogeyman-like monster, this one "shod in iron" like a robot. And notice how that last sentence, as evocative as it is, lacks a subject or lets one--"its cities swarmed with machines and industry"--be lost in the shuffle. "The glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes" is a jumble of half-metaphors. This isn't a sentence; it's a heap of jargon. I'm not even going to mention the lack of quotation marks in dialogue.

I wanted to like this book, but it is elusive. It's as if too often Diaz wants us to love this book for its manic nature, its quirkiness and affability, but it is difficult to love Oscar and his book simultaneously. Oscar himself is slow-moving, ponderous, and deep; his Brief and Wondrous Life is, regrettably, none of those things.



*There has to be an official term for these. I don't know what they're called so I can't find a picture of one.