Laura Sims
Fence Books ($15.95)

by Molly Sutton Kiefer

What is not written is just as critical as what is on the page in Laura Sims’s My god is this a man. This book is a mash-up, containing the poet’s voice but also intruding voices, some of which we can tell (as when she quotes various murderers, or the more obvious black text boxes that contain language from the surviving Boston Bomber juxtaposed with a relaxation tape) and some of which we can only surmise.

As an object, the book is square and grey with a watercolor of a creature running on the cover—the torso resembles the quick beauty of many four-legged creatures, perhaps a horse or a dog, and the legs are drawn down into curled claws as if the feet of a dead bird. We have not even opened the book yet and already we are presented with an image that is oppositional, life force and death at once.

With one quick spin of the pages, we also see the reading experience will not be typical. In many senses, it invites a dipping-into kind of reading—the more traditional front-to-back reading won’t grant a firm narrative arc. Each page might offer a smattering of words, or words within a box outline, or white words in a black box, or something else entirely. What we do know, as we read, is that expectations are meant to be shifted.

The box frame calls to mind many things: a pane of glass, a television or computer screen, a territorial border. The first two appear side-by-side, with one stating “I am here” and the second “I have always / been here.” The two boxes gaze back at the reader as if a pair of eyes; one cannot help but think of a figure lurking at the window. There is another pane-poem that states, “The hordes / of the curious,” which aligns the concept of the viewer and the viewed, the voyeur and the subject.

Sims employs changing fonts and font sizes in an elegant manner to convey meaning. One page simply states, “I lied her on the floor,” the usage allowing for layered meaning, and the following page, knowing the reader must be stunned, enlarges the message—“I said, ‘I lied her on the floor’”—as if commanding, Did you read me? React!

Line breaks are critical to the dual meaning Sims operates with in her collection. There is the page that reads

and she
became
a woman
being
done to

Without a standard grammatical guide, we are left running our eyes up and down the page, chunking phrases to create and recreate meaning. Another pane-sequence reads “I called him myself” then “TRUST” and one turns the page to “had been / hammered / out of me.” The center of the book exists as a jumbling of quotations from the killers whose diaries and letters the poet consulted, and still another moment contains the line, “I had a head, but I lost it,” which begs the question: what sort of head? And whose?

We are greatly aware of space within the text—of what is used and left empty. Towards the closing, Sims writes, “The State unearthed a tiny // wooden door.” With all of the falling, all of the textual movement, one might think of Alice and the rabbit hole. A few pages later, Sims gives us a visual with a repeating field and “a body” resting neatly in one hole. This reimaging of writing and re-reading allows the reader to interrogate the text with a swath of white space, a silence with purpose.

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Brendan Lorber
ButterLamb ($7)

by Davy Knittle

In Brendan Lorber’s chapbook Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems, the title poem is full of tense twins. Here is work that experiments with living and dying as they double on themselves from the first lines: “Take shape OK give it back / sweet world or tempest above.”

But what is an “unfixed elegy?” Is it a poem for the unfixed—whether for the unsolved or unrepaired, or for those unseated from life, or from death? Lorber’s work is propelled by an anxiety to shadowbox death, to figure it out, but it also doesn’t want to, and what propels that anxiety remains unclear.

The lines in “Unfixed Elegy” are characterized by wide internal spacing, leaving room for ghosts, or for extra time to double back on what’s just doubled back on itself. The space becomes an encouragement to hang out in the language:

Each year        takes the next two        to recover
yet this is living      Every sexy line
ave maria’d to a new ring around
the rosy        I like jokes        but most are on me
The nothing        that demands a double

Perhaps an unfixed elegy is one that loops, that loses its grounding in death and circles through states of being and its own language. “Unfixed Elegy” thus becomes a lyric contortion, raising up the figures of “sweetness,” of “desire,” and of “hands”—in the tradition of, for instance, “sweetness and light”—and then twisting them, as in “sweets // we reach at the cost of hell and back.”

Forces of all kinds in “Unfixed Elegy” are so intensified that they’re terrible and lovely at once, and repeat forever. Here, “Problems unsolved forever are another problem” and the question is posed: “How can desire be fickle when / all it wants is endless advance through / more desire?”

The death of others creates both desire and problems, where “I don’t want to remember the dead / I want them alive” and yet “your death / is all we need to bring you back.” Lorber takes a number of different stances on managing death and its environs, shifting his position and identifying places where the ability to take a stand on death is itself unfixed.

Other recurring motifs include a set of fragments from “Ring Around the Rosy,” where the sweetness of the song, how light it is about warding off or surrendering to death, echoes the tension between the grave and the sweet against which the chapbook pulls.

In the final three sections of the poem, its circuits resolve into a focus on the “new year,” and its final section, the poem becomes a prayer carrying the weight of both loss and sweetness:

May the element        of water        not rise up
against us        The element        of space        not
rise up        Earth not rise        May fire not
Nor air        May the sounds        lights and rays not
May the infinite oh yeah?        be met with yeah!

In the chapbook’s litany of prayers, the final one in this stanza speaks most clearly to a central desire to encounter a response that pulls its cycle forward. If “your death / is all we need to bring you back,” then it is finality that makes possible the doubling of a return, where death is a response. In Unfixed Elegy, ending moves things along.

There’s an inescapable speed to Lorber’s poems; the accurate and sweetly chilling sense that life is passing as one reads, that “each year takes the next two to recover / yet this is living.” “Unfixed Elegy” suggests that the fact of living is more than can be made sense of in each moment, that we’ll never catch up to ourselves, or agree with ourselves, that the dead can come back to us, that time will never add up.

Lorber has created an expert network of tensions here: the finite and the infinite, the fixed and the unfixed, the planet and the body, the dead and the living, the surety of death and the question of the return of those who have died, of being called back and being brought back, of problems and desire, of death accepted and death fought, of wondering and knowing, of clear tensions and webbed ones. Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems is a chapbook where “the shortest distance / between two points are other points with / distance between them.” What an unwinnable set of distances this is, and yet what a hand, offered out and “strong enough to lift / our weight.”

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Jack Kerouac
Da Capo Press ($24.99)

by Steve Matuszak

Legend has it that in 1944, a young Jack Kerouac left his handwritten manuscript The Haunted Life in a taxicab, forever lost to the tides of time and fortune. However, in 2002, the manuscript resurfaced and now, finally, is being published in The Haunted Life and Other Writings. In addition to the title story—which actually appears to be a fragment of a larger work that became The Town and the City, Kerouac’s first novel—The Haunted Life collects a variety of texts including prose sketches, letters from Kerouac’s father, and some of Kerouac’s diary entries.

As with other recently published “lost works” by Kerouac, The Haunted Life is of more interest as a historical document than as literature. The book’s editor, Todd F. Tietchen, tells us that the collection reveals Kerouac’s creative process at an important moment in his career. It allows one to diagnose what Tietchen calls Kerouac’s “impulse to record—to submit memory to print,” a “compulsion,” he claims, that “seems driven by the author’s keen awareness of the transience of existence” and his need to lay what has been lost to rest. “Nevertheless,” Tietchen concludes, “much of Kerouac’s work continues to revolve around its originating sense of loss, as if the act of recalling or commemorating can never fully liberate him from the things being recalled. . . . Kerouac remains haunted and seems unable to resist the impulse to ‘remind others.’”

It is, in fact, Kerouac’s dissatisfaction with his writing that gives The Haunted Life its pulse. Aware that the rapid pace of change brought about by World War II demanded new social forms, Kerouac intuits that it would also require new literary forms, the old forms no longer suitable to the times. In a piece titled “Typing Exercise,” he laments, “I shall combine Symbolism with Naturalism in Galloway—but to take myself at nineteen, and that dreary provincial town, and make a work of art out of it commensurate with the liveliness and intelligence I want to achieve, that indeed seems impossible, and a boresome task without even the fruit of my own satisfaction. Poo!”

It seems that the new form Kerouac came up with after The Town and the City, the more elastic, spontaneous form of On the Road, was meant to exorcise what Tietchen claims haunted him. With that new form, rather than try to recapture what has gone, Kerouac turned his attention to the flame of the present, the very engine of life’s transience, the past as it is manifested in the present through the act of remembering. In The Haunted Life, Kerouac still did what was “boresome,” so it haunted him. But if life is haunted by change, the structures he employs in The Haunted Life too are ghosts, dead but still here, oblivious to the fact that they’re no longer alive.

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Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
New York Review Books ($14.95)

by Jenn Mar

When Taiwan's most revered countercultural icon, lesbian writer Qiu Miaojin, committed suicide in 1995, she left behind what must be the most ambitious literary manuscript in history, a genre-pushing project that breaks down barriers between art and life, suicide and fiction. This year, New York Review Books has released Qiu's long-neglected Last Words from Montmartre, a fragmentary novel that, true to its title, contains the author's final words on desire, displacement, and art.

One of the puzzles of Last Words from Montmartre is how to treat the posthumous manuscript, as the author has taken great pains to blur distinctions between personal confession and lyric aphorism. Not quite a roman à clef, the novel comprises twenty letters that circle around an unnamed narrator bearing conspicuous resemblances to Qiu and her series of failed relationships with women. Translator Ari Larissa Heinrich notes in the afterward that Qiu might have intended to use her own suicide as "a kind of speech act, as the ultimate means of sealing the connection between art and life." Qiu's suicide complicates our reading by opening up the possibility that Last Words from Montmartre, which culminates in themes of displacement and suicide-as-art, makes up only the first half of Qiu's masterpiece; the author's death, the death of a stigmatic, politically charged body (Qiu was a Taiwanese lesbian living between nations, culture, genders), completes the performance in a most excruciating form of poetic expression. Whether or not you read Qiu's suicide as a meta-fictional device, the shadow of her death falls across these letters, which are at times melancholy, passionate, and fatalistic, but always take its ideas seriously.

Qiu's masterpiece offers an ever-mutating sensibility drawn from various genres: psychological fiction, autobiography, lyric aphorism, letters, and journal entries. If you approach Last Words from Montmartre with expectations of plot, any semblance of a plotline will disintegrate in front of you. If you treat the text purely as a personal or cultural artifact, then you will surely miss its poetic resonances. The instinct underlying these letters is to purge a raw form of expression containing the unmediated knowledge of the unconscious, the "purest" form of art. Qiu's narrator records her thoughts with no particular narrative strategy; her aphorisms shape an attitude about various subjects such as love and displacement, but without forming a coherent argument. Instead, these musings accumulate across chapters and heighten the mood and themes, much like a poem.

All twenty letters reveal the details of the narrator's failed relationships and discuss at length the conditions for "eternal, perfect love." At times, these confessions contain elements of fragility and narcissism and call to mind the crushing melodrama of a youth's first heartache, in which practically every sensation is suffered as trauma. In the opening chapter, the narrator declares, "My sorrow, my day upon day and night upon night of relentless grief is not for the mess the world is in, and it's not for my own mortality; it's for my delicate heart and the wounds it has had to endure." This might come across as melodramatic in tone, considering the fact that the narrator is responding to a bad breakup and the death of a pet bunny. But indulgent though they may be, these letters "are themselves a fierce form of desire," a guidebook steering us through the complex emotional registers of adult life. The book pins its confessions on tortured melodrama, poetic riffs, and cool aphorisms, and risks being maudlin, repetitive, messy, difficult to read—all to record a breathtakingly intimate, raw, unfiltered confession. Few writers use the confession and aphorism as purely and effectively as Qiu, whose poetry offers a distinct type of clarity; Last Words from Montmartre achieves a profoundly intimate portrait of an individual whose life unravels before us.

The unfinished quality of Last Words from Montmartre resembles the films of Theo Angelopoulos, whose works clearly inspire the book’s thematic and formal preoccupation with displacement and dislocation. "If I take one more step, I am somewhere else . . . or I die," says a character from Angelopoulos's famous The Suspended Step of the Stork. Qiu's unnamed narrator is similarly a refugee in many ways; living between genders, nations, cultures, and languages, her identity can't be resolved by any single declaration of identity. Quoting a work by Angelopoulos, Qiu's narrator leaves us with her final utterance:

There is always someone who says:
This is mine.
But I did once say proudly,
I have nothing of my own
for now I know that nothing means
nothing.
That one does not even have a name.
And that sometimes one must borrow one.
You can give me a place to look at.
Forget me by the seaside.
I wish you happiness and health.

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Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Knopf ($25.95)

by Douglas Luman

One year ago, amid secrecy surrounding the Japanese release of Haruki Murakami’s first book since his epic project 1Q84, readers lined up at many late-night booksellers in Tokyo to purchase copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Anticipation was fueled by a campaign of containment that might make intelligence agencies envious—both author and publisher (Bungeishunjū) were cryptic or silent; press galleys and review copies were nonexistent. Only a small coterie knew anything of the content of the book, much less the actual title. On announcement, orders on Amazon Japan outpaced sales of 1Q84, even if beating its twelve-day sales record by only one day; a million copies were printed due to overwhelming demand.

Though the English-language publication of the book is not surrounded by the same level of secrecy, the anticipation leading up to the novel’s release is no less palpable. Because of the critical splashdown made by 1Q84, and the author’s reputation solidified by his previous books, American readers are equally hungry for this latest work by a contemporary master.

Murakami’s career has been a tale of two authors—the one who wrote fantastical narratives such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, and the one who wrote Norwegian Wood, the product of a resolution to write a strictly realistic novel. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a synthesis of both halves. It contains incidents of magic of everyday life, but without the focus on these events defining the lives of the characters.

The novel’s protagonist, Tsukuru Tazaki, lives and works in Tokyo as an engineer remodeling railway stations. He leads an austere lifestyle, in which he has few close friends and has been more of an observer than a participant. Of his relationships, he has had “no one he could call a close friend. A few girlfriends entered his life along the way, but they hadn’t stayed together. Peaceful relationships followed by amicable breakups. Not a single person had really climbed inside his heart.” This is a consequence of what he feels to be his “colorlessness,” an appellation that results from a closely-knit group of five high school friends, all with names including colors, that suddenly sever their ties to Tsukuru after he moves to Tokyo from his hometown of Nagoya to attend university.

Even the one friend that he makes during his studies, a free-spirited physics student named Haida, is associated with a color—his name means “gray field”—which, though a “fairly subdued color” is still, to Tsukuru, more vibrant than the meaning of his own name (reiterated throughout the novel, his name roughly means “to build,” a moniker he considers appropriate to his function, which is to build railway stations). Though the two young men are good friends, eventually their relationship peacefully falls by the wayside. Much as in other periods in his life, it seems like Tazaki is waiting for something just like passengers wait in the train stations to which he has dedicated his life, a pursuit that is not quite passionate. It is simply what he does in his transit between birth and death.

As the novel begins, 36-year-old Tsukuru is looking back on these friendships due to the compelling force of Sara, the woman whom he is currently seeing. Though he exhibits sexual interest in her, his characteristic lack of passion seems to drag on the relationship. Sara perceives that there is a kind of block inhibiting Tsukuru, one that relates to the dissolution of his high school friendships, and implores him to pursue the reasons behind their sudden disconnection, withholding intimacy (both sexual and platonic) and keeping Tsukuru at a distance until he sorts his problems out. The unfamiliar force of his interest and unrecognized passion for Sara compels him forward and he agrees to the arrangement, awakening a new interest in inquiring into the circumstances that compelled his once-close friends to ostracize him.

Through the course of his personal investigation, he reconnects with these friends, finding two of them staying close to home in Nagoya, one in Finland, and a set of murky circumstances surrounding the fourth. Ultimately, his search leads him to reflect on how he has crafted a parallel set of realities, a theme that Murakami has explored in a surrealistic mode in novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. By contrast, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage approaches the protagonist’s exploration of self much more realistically—looking into the value and interpretations that we attach to life-changing events, self-made symbols, and the stories that we tell about ourselves. Tsukuru’s pilgrimage is not unlike our own, often inexplicably twisted on directions that veer uncontrollably no matter how long we grasp onto our one true “roadmap,” our plans and plans within plans. Inevitably, things go awry, but that is the sign of a life lived and not a life spent on the sidelines.

Murakami’s other books have often pursued notions of dimensionality, asking questions about how planes of existence intersect (1Q84), overlay (Kafka on the Shore), or parallel each other (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle). In these stories, there is no alternate universe in which characters’ paths are not taken. With Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Murakami explores what happens to characters that ignore potential and possibility. Whereas the reader may often ask the existential question of hypothetical reality (the “what if”), the actions of Tsukuru and his four friends create the dimension of what is. The true tale of the novel is how characters choose to handle the situation. Each chooses their own forms of escapism, Tazaki included, and it is up to the protagonist to collect these shards of reality to piece together the dimension of the present. Again, much like many tracks might meet at a train station, the narrative threads all come together in the form of Tsukuru Tazaki, who realizes and assumes the role of the nexus, bringing him out of his “colorlessness” and endowing him with the zeal and passion for living.

Newcomers to Murakami will be welcomed by his typically straightforward style of lean, taut prose that outpaces the action of the story, the hallmark of his ability to write narratives of introspection that question the nature of reality. In the same way, his loyal fans will find a familiar voice that avoids falling into author-centric tropes even though the themes and material of the novel are mainstays for Murakami. In similar fashion, the author’s preference for the kind of “three-act” structure that exists in most of his other novels is extant here, matching his pacing better than it did in 1Q84.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking book, but it heralds a moment that needed to happen in the sequence of Murakami’s impressive oeuvre—a return to relative realism after the last few novels’ intense exploration of the magical. The novel is accessible, and will usher in a new wave of Western readership for the author in addition to satisfying already loyal readers. The book asks the high-level questions characteristic of Murakami’s work while grounding them in a reality that provides a firm foundation for abstract soul-searching. As much as 1Q84 showcased Murakami’s boundless talent, this new release signals an author turning a corner into work that merges the best parts of his career, which will only whet readers’ appetites for what is yet to come.

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Stevan Allred
Illustrated by Laurie Paus
Forest Avenue Press ($18)

by Jason Cook

Story cycles are often dedicated to exploring a place, the setting as the dominant character exerting tidal influences on the stories taking place within in it. The town of Renata in Stevan Allred’s A Simplified Map of the Real World, however, is just a place: some forests and farms, roads and where they lead, mountain lakes and submerged cars, houses and the lives lived inside them. It’s the people who bring Renata alive, engaged as they are in age-old amorphous feuds, youthful adventures, and acts of vengeance.

Allred has an eye for those sweet moments, the glimmers of hope and uplift that come by as rarely in fiction as they do in life. In “The Idjit’s Guide to Intuitive Mastery of Newtonian Physics,” two brothers rig a car for a high-flying stunt into a mountain lake. The town’s residents gather to watch, including Sheriff Larrabee, who intends to put a stop to it. Instead, the sheriff watches the victory because “if a man couldn’t raise his middle finger and shake it in the face of gravity every once in a while then there wasn’t much point to being alive.” Allred achieves another feat of strange beauty with “Doubling Down” and its protagonist Brooke, a self-absorbed, crass, reckless stripper who survives a horrific accident in the opening pages. We follow her home after her injury, where her own deficiencies are matched by those of her middle-class respectable family. While she never reveals a single redemptive character trait, there is something triumphant in the senseless, dangerous act of destruction at the end, her own middle finger.

The finest example of this, and A Simplified Map of the Real World’s strongest piece, is “Vortex.” Lenny is a closeted gay man in 1970, the setting for a particular kind of tragedy. At an outdoor rock concert, he meets another man and they venture into the woods. Everything seems to lead to the unfortunate societal revelation and its fallout. However, in the last line, Allred turns the table, letting the story trail off with a note of hope and brightness.

The sensitive and compassionate characterizations in these stories are fueled by prose that is both strong and delicate. Characters stumble into uplifting epiphanies, those soft moments when possibilities unfurl just a little: “The world was vast, and if you only knew how, you could get there from here, and bring back artifacts that proved you knew the way.” Following these moments with a picture of a bleaker tomorrow is an easy trick which Allred usually denies himself. This Simplified Map of the Real World shows the emptiness of lives unloved and existing in the wreckage of abandoned dreams, but also points the way to beauty and celebrates those finer moments about which we sometimes seem to have forgotten how to speak.

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Meags Fitzgerald
Conundrum Press ($20)

by Jay Besemer

Imagine yourself here, in a busy train station or perhaps a mall, staring with an odd and anxious longing at a vintage photobooth. Your heart lurches with the thrill of the forbidden, or something like it—as if you’re about to do something your parents wouldn’t approve of. Taking a deep breath, you walk into the booth. You sit down carefully, pull the curtain shut firmly, adjust the backdrop behind you. You insert your money and press the button, slightly euphoric, slightly hopeful, slightly embarrassed. The red light comes on. The reflective glass tells you HOLD STILL in no uncertain terms. Do you? No time to decide on a strategy, a pose. The light flashes, the shutter opens and closes with a cough, and your photobooth adventure begins. Each time is different, unique, special.

But what’s so special about photobooths? Where did they come from, and why are they disappearing? Who cares? These questions and more are addressed in Canadian artist Meags Fitzgerald’s graphic “novel” Photobooth: A Biography. More accurately described as a mixed-genre graphic nonfiction that combines elements of history, autobiography, travelogue, and long-form personal essay, this unique and fascinating volume tells nested stories stemming from the author’s love of and work with classic analog wet-chemistry photobooths. Both deeply personal and fiercely public-minded, Fitzgerald’s book takes readers through the origins and transformations of the photobooth all the way through to its present-day decline. Fitzgerald’s prose interweaves an engaging historical-technical exploration of the booth with an examination of her own—and others’—more subjective creative, emotional and experiential relationships with this technology. Her rich, precise and inviting pen-and-ink illustrations make readers feel they are beside her in the booths, accompanying her on an international quest to investigate and save this endangered species.

Photobooth is organized into three sections with a prologue. The prologue sets the stage, establishing both personal and public context. Here we are reminded that even as recently as 2003, “We didn’t carry hundreds of photos of ourselves everywhere on our phones. Social media didn’t exist as a concept yet.” This is vexingly easy to forget. Our relationships to images have changed dramatically—perhaps traumatically—in the last decade, and that change is both mental and physical. Part of Fitzgerald’s argument is that the physicality of our older image-making technologies, and of the photobooths themselves, deserves to be honored—ideally, to be preserved. If preservation is impossible, the total loss of the analog booth could have a wide-ranging cultural impact.

This could happen sooner than we think, and we’re shown why on page seventeen:

The paper for colour photos stopped being made in 2007. The stockpile is being used up and is projected to be gone by summer 2015. Currently, there is only one supplier in the world still making the B&W paper, if they stop photobooths will disappear from public places entirely within five to ten years.

Wet-chemistry booths in the EU face an additional threat if the chemicals used in their developing tanks become banned, which could happen in 2016. These circumstances account for the sense of urgency that permeates the book, and helps explain why Fitzgerald devoted so much of her recent life to this labor of love.

Part I launches into a serious socio-historical exploration of the photobooth, where we see the evolution of the technology itself alongside the social uses to which it is put. During the Great Depression, the photobooth allowed those hardest hit by economic disaster to make dignified, high-quality portraits and self-portraits at affordable prices. In the Second World War, many of those serving (on both sides) chose to photograph themselves in booths before reporting to duty, or coming home, or in other situations. And as spaces not affected by segregation, photobooths were accessible to African Americans in a way that many photo studios were not. Additionally, the privacy of the booth gave queer couples a safe place to be themselves together, confirming and celebrating their intimacy. The self-serve photobooth “allowed people to document themselves as they wanted to be seen and as they saw themselves.”

Part II of Photobooth: A Biography moves from general booth history to more specific histories—those of the people whose lives are deeply imbricated with the history and fate of the booths. Fitzgerald’s real quest emerges here. This is where the narrative goes on the road, becoming at once deeply personal and passionately social. The deeper shift into more subjective territory is quite riveting, even exciting. We begin to understand why personal stakes in the analog photobooth are so high for Fitzgerald and for many of the people she visits.

The relationship and the tension between digital and analog technologies is never clearer than in these pages. Fitzgerald depends upon email, social media tools and Web communities like photobooth.net to navigate and plan her international journey, and this irony is acknowledged. Yet the face to face connectivity detailed in the book—and even the very premise of traveling all over the world to engage with and touch other booths and boothers—seems directly opposed to the limited range of interactions possible in social media contexts. The act of touching is crucial here. It is one element of the complex social and behavioral context of booth use that can’t be replicated by smartphone cameras or the “fauxtobooth” function (my term, not Fitzgerald’s) on some laptops.

In the end, though, there comes a time when we have to say goodbye. The penultimate page of the story offers a resolution of sorts:

I felt like I chose to love these things that couldn’t really love me back, not because they’re inanimate, but because they’re just too preoccupied with their own extinction. . . . I was overcome with gratitude. I knew that it didn’t really matter what happened next because everything had already been worthwhile.

Whatever does happen next for chemical photobooths, the journey of Photobooth: A Biography is certainly fulfilling. Fitzgerald’s love comes through loud and strong; love of photobooths, certainly, but also love of the people in her life, boothers or not. This is a must-read book for fans of graphic-genre narratives, photographers, pop-culture historians, scholars of human relationships to our technologies, and anyone who loves a good dip-n-dunk.

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16 Graphic Biographies
Edited by Monte Beauchamp
Simon & Schuster ($24.99)

by Paul Buhle

The idea that comic artists have worthwhile biographies has become an object of the upscale sector of the book trade, with gorgeous volumes reminding collectors of the greatness of creative giants along with healthy selections of their work. Masterful Marks, in its lush four-color pages, offers something different. The artists who have rendered these sixteen stories of their heroes are not constrained by precise biographical accuracy. Their intention, rather, is to get into the brains and hands of these remarkable figures, and each artist has his own method of madness to do so.

Not all the adventures here are, strictly speaking, about the objects of study and artistic experiment. Drew Friedman’s “R. Crumb and Me” is heavy on the latter subject: how he grew up as a pre-teen, hoarding the forbidden Crumb comics of the later 1960s while still under ten years old himself; how he inveigled himself into the company of Crumb’s mentor, Harvey Kurtzman; and as the years go on, how he sees Crumb in old age. So much had been detailed about Robert Crumb in the ’90s film Crumb, not to mention the artist’s own self-revelatory drawings, that perhaps there was no need for a more intense biographical treatment.

Kurtzman as an object of wonder is subjected, by contrast, to intense factual scrutiny. Artist Peter Kuper wants to get as intimately close to the subject as nearly fifty close-drawn panels in six pages can manage. The conceit of the piece, that Kurtzman is himself a survivor of his times if not the actual “corpse on the Imjin” (the subject of his most intense story on the tragedy of the Korean War) becomes wonderfully suggestive. Kuper makes one feel that Harvey, with his personal triumphs and tragedies, is the story of comic art at its highest level of achievement.

It is well known that comic artists (or “cartoonists” as the subtitle of this book has it) have been a solitary, often bitterly unhappy, lot. Most of them, like Charles Schultz of “Peanuts,” were plain lonely. Like their fellow newspapermen and pulp writers, quite a few had a drinking problem and ragged careers. No one offers a better example than the inventors behind Superman, Jewish teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. A collaborative effort between the book’s editor Monte Beauchamp and artist Ryan Heshka, their story is packed with lurid details of the creators falling into the hands of ruthlessly exploitative pulp publishers who cheat them out of millions while Superman “leaps tall buildings with a single bound” in sales. A depressed Shuster turned to S&M pornography as the legal case dragged on. The two had created an industry and received, in the end, $20,000 per year for what remained of their lives.

Marc Rosenthal delivers on Charles Addams, an eager beaver with commercial success in mind from early on, but afraid of tight spaces and in love with medieval weapons. By 1938, he made it at the New Yorker—with the macabre touch that never left him. His success went on, even to a 1952 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, and his personal life was a match for his art, including a wife who took all the rights to his work and a girlfriend whose previous lover, Nelson Rockefeller, had died in her arms. Addams drank heavily, but it was the cocktail age, after all, and he was buried in a pet cemetery, which seems just right. Rosenthal notes in passing that for Addams, the captionless cartoon was the ultimate art form, and he has a point.

Beauchamp also supplied the script for artist Owen Smith to depict Lynd Ward, the master of comics’ silent film, i.e., the woodcut novel. A recent, excellent documentary, following a Library of America set of Ward’s best work (annotated by Art Spiegelman) has brought the remarkable artist back, and the sepia drawings of Smith are more than equal to the task. Ward’s father was a socialist preacher of wide organizational influence and young Lynd studied under the graphic greats in 1920s Germany. He had ample personal tragedies along the way, but Lynd’s half-dozen “wordless” novels are classics of the field, his later career (the novels made no money) as children’s artist a fabulous success. Hardly anyone knew of his earlier work when Will Eisner praised his accomplishment in 1978, the same year Alzheimer’s took Ward.

Eisner, as it happened, was himself returned from obscurity, with a couple of good decades ahead of him, by comics publisher and sometime artist Denis Kitchen, who here contributes a fine piece on Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. Geisel, a German-American lad growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, was obsessed early on with rhyming. Prominent Boy Scout, he was to be awarded a medal personally by President Theodore Roosevelt who, however, ran out of medals at a crucial moment and cursed the boy, introducing Geisel to permanent stage fright. He was a suspended artist for the sin of drinking in Prohibition-era college, drew for the humor magazine under pseudonyms, later invented the rumor that he created comics with his feet, and made it into the comic strip dailies before being personally fired by William Randolph Hearst (Geisel was a militant anti-fascist and Hearst an admirer of Hitler, for a while anyway). Like several others in this book, Geisel found a calling in kids’ books, through one bigger than anyone else: The Cat in the Hat alone sold eleven million copies, with much, much more to come. Geisel chain-smoked himself to death but never lost his antic, quietly egalitarian and ecological sense of humor.

There are other items here, like Gary Dumm’s delightful treatment from Beauchamp’s script of the life of Hugh Hefner (who fancied himself a cartoonist and tortured Harvey Kurtzman by blue-penciling “Little Annie Fanny” for decades); Dan Zettwoch’s study of Osamu Tezuka (one of three non-Americans in this book, and the only non-white); Arnold Roth’s suitably strange take on Al Hirschfield; and above all, underground comix maven Frank Stack on nineteenth century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer (another non-American).

The pages on Walt Disney by Beauchamp and Larry Day I find unsettling, perhaps because the political complications, everything from Uncle Walt’s personal anti-Semitism and anti-unionism to his major role in the Hollywood Blacklist, feel a little too pressing to me—but there are also plenty of good things to say, and they are said here. For similarly political reasons, I do not take so much to Nora Krug’s tale of French artist (the final non-American) Hergé and his creation Tintin, nor to Mark Alan Stamaty’s Jack Kirby, who suffered war trauma but spent a lifetime glorifying war and inventing, then re-inventing, our current superhero banality.

Never mind. This is a magnificent volume, its individual contents far from needing the reader’s fondness in every case. Reader, look for it, drink it in. Feel lonely with these fellows, and admire them for their accomplishments.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

William Giraldi
Liveright Publishing ($24.95)

by John Pistelli

To date, the novelist William Giraldi is less renowned for his fiction than for his criticism. With his notorious 2012 review of Alix Ohlin’s work in The New York Times, Giraldi entered the literary scene as a fiery, uncompromising defender of canonical standards on the model of one of his avowed heroes, Harold Bloom:

There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that “this world is but canvas to our imaginations,” that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. [The New York Times, August 17, 2012]

Giraldi’s approach proved largely unwelcome, with various literary websites and magazines calling him everything from “horrifyingly aggressive” to simply “dickish.” But despite its violation of the literary world’s sometimes cringing Internet-era commitment to empathy and relativism, the aestheticist position defended by Giraldi has much to recommend it. For critics like Giraldi—and for the likes of Bloom and Wilde before him—works of art and literature are emphatic ideals standing above and against death-tending nature: a poem or a novel is “a lie against time,” in Bloom’s phrase, a willed assertion of sensibility in the face of our inevitable finitude and vulnerability. On this view, the library of great books is less a temple than a gauntlet: past masterpieces provide examples of the imagination’s power even as they set a chastening measure for future works. To deny this, according to the aesthete, is to acquiesce to death-in-life.

Contemporary writers therefore need to know their tradition if they are to go beyond it; otherwise, they may merely emit banal effusions in an attempt at unmediated self-expression, unaware that they are creating little more than lifeless travesties of bygone aesthetic vanguards, like the emotive free verse of the proverbial adolescent poet. If this were not so—if tradition and standards were unimportant—then writers from previously-excluded social groups would not have expended so much energy throughout the last century in charting those groups’ own distinct literary traditions, with critical landmarks from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

Do Giraldi’s own novels succeed on these forbiddingly canonical terms? His 2011 debut, Busy Monsters, does not quite. An absurdist picaresque about the too-aptly-named Charles Homar’s search for a fiancée who has left him to hunt a giant squid, Busy Monsters too often comes off as a series of farcical linguistic effects, a barrage of big comedy. Two things rescue it from excessive zaniness. First is Giraldi’s sophisticated ability to create in Homar—if not in his other figures—a nuanced character who wins our sympathy not in spite but because of the vulnerability implied by his otherwise ridiculous naïveté and dangerous attraction to violence. An authentically Cervantine pathos arises from Homar’s self-defeating attempts to do good in a world determined, at least until the end, to thwart him.

Busy Monsters’s second virtue is precisely its conscious relation to the long history of the novel and not only to its proximate influences in the huge-voiced and hugely flawed narrators of Saul Bellow or Barry Hannah. Homar narrates his escapades as ongoing installments in a monthly magazine column; this means that, within the novel’s fictional world, the characters have read and commented on the previous installments, which affects the writing of future ones. With this trope of narrative as an unreliable and perpetually processual text, Giraldi returns us to the origins of the European novel in such metafictional romps as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, forcing us to confront the often absurd mediation of language in the construction of narrative and identity as Giraldi’s characters comment on the novel in progress: “He admitted that my memoirs ‘Witchy Woman’ and ‘Them Prison Blues’ were cheap on details, not nearly as thorough as they could have been were I blessed with quote Jamesian interiority and the plotting proficiency of Wilkie Collins unquote.” But criticizing one’s own book in one’s own book, however amusingly or with whatever learned appeal to literary history, seems like a bit of a cheat; a writer as ambitious as Giraldi can’t play forever without a net.

Giraldi’s new novel, Hold the Dark, is fortunately a major advance on Busy Monsters. The first novel’s essential elements—the fleeing woman, the voyaging man, the beast as quest-object, the human capacity for violence—are recombined in the second to produce not comedy but tragedy, not absurdism but a visionary gnosticism that pictures humanity as absolutely alienated within nature.

Set in an isolated Alaskan town, Hold the Dark opens with a sentence suggestive of folklore: “The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut.” When Medora Slone’s boy is taken, she calls in the aging wolf expert Russell Core to help her track down the boy’s bones and slaughter the wolf that killed him. Core, with little in his life since a stroke incapacitated his wife, decides to go to Keelut and help Medora. Core is thus the reader’s surrogate in the icebound north, an emissary from the disenchanted world of reason: “They’re just hungry wolves, Mrs. Slone,’” he explains, “‘It’s no myth. It’s just hunger. No one’s cursed. Wolves will take kids if they need to. This is simple biology here. Simple nature.”

Core learns quickly enough that events more extreme than reason can explain have transpired in Keelut, and that the mysteries of human motivation are more frightening than the hunger of wolves. It turns out that Medora has herself killed her son. When her husband, Vernon, who has just returned from fighting overseas, sets off in pursuit of her, Core decides to follow. Vernon, accompanied by his childhood friend, Cheeon, begins a killing spree across the Alaskan wilderness as he searches for his wife, whom a wise old villager claims is “possessed by a wolf demon.”

At times, Hold the Dark seems like a polemical response to trends in contemporary literature, implicitly judging social realism to be an evasion of the reality that “man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being,” even as the novel’s refusal to explain fully its supernal elements (is Medora really cursed or possessed?) underscores the crude literalism in the fantastical genres with their eminently reasonable “world-building.”

The novel alternates between the perspectives of multiple characters, but its third-person narration attempts to create a consistent and singular idiom. Like such precursors as William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Daniel Woodrell, Giraldi seeks a higher verbal register than the vernacular clarity of realist prose. Though set in the present day, Hold the Dark’s language is jeweled with archaisms—unbidden, ebon, sere, weal—along with phrases from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens.

But as in Busy Monsters, Giraldi boldly places his work in an even longer and more demanding lineage. Its promotional copy describes Hold the Dark as “an Alaskan Oresteia,” and while this sounds like nothing more than bombastic overkill from the marketing department, it is not entirely wrong. Giraldi has brought the ethos of Greek tragedy into a contemporary setting; the drama evoked by Hold the Dark is not Aeschylus’s trilogy, however, but Euripides’s Bacchae. Like that play, the novel shows a community wracked by a visitation of ecstatic violence, and a self-styled man of reason and moderation trying to hold his world together, only to be drawn into the chaos. Giraldi, like Euripides, suggests that it is vain to resist these periodic outbreaks of frenzy, because they come from beyond the rational world humans have built and are thus beyond that world’s control. Hold the Dark’s terse and aphoristic dialogue at its best has the compressed intensity of Euripides’s drama, especially as conveyed by Anne Carson’s recent translations: “Why is this happening to me, Mr. Core? What myth has come true in my house?”

In an essay on The Bacchae written in 2011 for the Tin House blog, Giraldi concludes: “Dionysus will not be beaten back, cannot be buried in our dullness. He is our nature, our blood. So get up and dance.” Hence the ambiguity in the novel’s title: at first we think Giraldi is counseling us to hold off the dark. But what if we ought to embrace it instead? This question brings us back to where we started: with Giraldi’s defense of literary tradition as a necessary curriculum for the ambitious writer. Literature is the gathered testimony of men and women driven by the daemon, wolf or wine-god, to set down their ecstatic visions before the dark claims them absolutely. With Hold the Dark, Giraldi has added his voice to the tragic chorus.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014