Alyn Shipton
Oxford University Press ($27.95)

by Britt Aamodt

There are a million books about Bob Dylan. There are a million and five about The Beatles. Everything from the supergods' musical influences to their women and their philosophical underpinnings has been covered in loving and sometimes excruciating detail. Greil Marcus has made a cottage industry out of Dylan. Ditto for Mark Lewisohn with The Beatles.

So why is there only one full-length biography on Harry Nilsson, and why has it taken nearly twenty years since his death for it to come out? Fortunately, Alyn Shipton's Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter is well worth the wait. What Shipton figured out that other biographers apparently overlooked is that Nilsson was one of popular music's great singer-songwriters and that his life was as sublime and tragic as a Shakespearean drama, readymade for the biographer's art.

As the back cover reminds readers, Nilsson won Grammys, wrote and recorded hit songs like 1969's "Everybody's Talkin'" and 1971's "Without You," and composed music for acts as diverse as The Yardbirds and The Monkees. A reminder is in order because, as the back copy also mentions, Nilsson is one of music's most underrated performers; you've heard his songs, you just don't know it. He's remembered today more for being John Lennon's sidekick during the former Beatle’s booze- and drug-fueled Lost Weekend of the mid ’70s—a low point of that escapade involved Lennon and Nilsson getting booted from a club for heckling the Smothers Brothers—than for his own impressive craftsmanship.

Shipton resurrects his subject from the black hole of Beatles marginalia with a deft and riveting history. He begins with Nilsson's childhood, which was marred by a dead father and an alcoholic mother. The irony was that his father wasn't even dead; he'd abandoned the family and the mother had simply covered it up. Nilsson's father, like Lennon's own, resurfaced later when the son became famous.

Artists are often driven by the deficiencies of their youth, and Nilsson was no exception. He used his pain to compose the bittersweet lyrics of lost innocence and yearning in "Daddy's Song," "So Long, Dad," and "1941":

Well, in 1941 a happy father had a son,
And by 1944 the father walked right out the door,
And in '45 the mom and son were still alive.
But who could tell in '46 if the two were to survive.

It was "1941" that sparked Beatles' press officer Derek Taylor to send Nilsson's album to the fab four in London, which led Lennon and McCartney to proclaim Nilsson their favorite artist in 1968. Nilsson's career hit a sweet spot with the 1971 release of his album Nilsson Schmilsson and the singles "Without You," "Jump Into The Fire," and "Coconut." The last had the singer deploying his three-octave range to play the roles of narrator, doctor, and female patient.

Nilsson never saw that kind of success again. He soon parted ways with producer Richard Perry, a casualty of the artist's relentless need to find a new sound. His eclecticism paid off with a collection of American standards (long before it was fashionable) and an album of Randy Newman songs. But tragically, it also put off listeners. Shipton documents Nilsson's downward spiral into addiction and the career-damaging loss of both record company and voice. The singer would spend the '80s trying to recapture his audience and his voice, and succeeding at neither.

In midlife, Nilsson finally found a measure of happiness with his third wife and their family, but a bankruptcy and years of addiction caught up to him. He died in 1994 at age fifty-two. Like the 2010 documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?), Shipton leaves the audience wanting to know more about this singer-songwriter, bon vivant and friend to everyone from The Beatles and Monty Python to Keith Moon and Jimmy Webb. But more importantly, the biographer reminds readers why Nilsson mattered. It was his music, which like the artist himself is long overdue for a reassessment.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($25)

by Stephen Hartwell

Since his debut novel A Hall of Mirrors in 1967, Robert Stone has exhibited a penchant for presenting characters living under various state of duress. Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975, dealt with Californians whose lives had been turned upside down by the Vietnam War and the roiling sense of vertigo that was the hallmark of the ’60s American home front. Amidst settings as different as Central America in A Flag for Sunrise (1981), the open ocean in Outerbridge Reach (1992), or modern Jerusalem in Damascus Gate (1998), Stone has made a marked study of what it is to live under pressure.

His latest novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl, would, at the outset, seem relatively bucolic, being centered around a New England college town. Likewise, the main plot device involving a student-faculty love affair might seem rather hemmed in for Stone. But even here, amidst leafy academe, Stone creates a distinctly American setting that is teetering on a precipice of madness and violence.

In Stone’s work the influences of the past are never far from present. Perhaps recalling West Rock in New Haven, a landmark clearly visible from the Yale University campus where Stone was once a writer in residence, he writes of a “high ridge that showed seasons to the grimy town. . . . God had raised the ridge centuries before to protect the colony and the college from the pagan and papist savages on the other side. The college had always required and received protection.” This notion of a protecting God infuses Stone’s novel with a sense of faith, however battered, as the action unfolds.

Stone’s fictional town is still reeling, in many ways, from the turmoil of the 1960s. In the spirit of the times, the college had once opened its doors to the community, only to pull a hasty retreat. “What ensued, drug-wise, crime-wise and in terms of bitterness between the college and the town, was brief but ugly. The opening forth was followed by a locking up, down and sideways that had locksmiths laboring day and night, and now there were three or four doors for everything . . .”

Professor Steven Brookman enjoys the comforts of the Persian carpet, ancient desk, and leaded Tudor windows of his office. But glancing outside his office window he often sees evidence, in the familiar figure of a troubled local resident burdened with plastic bags, that all is not entirely well within or without the stone gates of the campus. A certain uneasiness grips Brookman as he watches the familiar sight:

Sometimes he walked silently, eyes fixed on the pavement. At other times he carried on a dialogue with the unseen, an exchange that sounded so nuanced and literate that new students and faculty thought he was addressing them or talking into a cell phone. Occasionally he grew angry and shouted a bit, but like many of the delusional, he had learned not to confront real people who—downtown—could prove all too substantial.

The local coffee shop, located in a former office building near the campus that has become a halfway house for mental patients, bears the scars of civic decay and an air of edginess hovers as students and faculty sip their espresso. The “housies,” as the students refer to them, have made the shop their headquarters, and “their behavior and queer psychic emanations gave the coffee shop an unsettling spin.”

It is within this charged atmosphere that Brookman has conducted an affair with a beautiful and rash student, Maud Stack, the daughter of a former New York City police officer. Brookman has decided to end his affair with Maud upon learning his wife is pregnant, but it is clear that he has always been of two minds concerning his young lover. “Even on days when he was not particularly in the mood for Maud, he would take up one of her essays with a stirring of anticipation not untouched by dread. Dread of her winning her way inside him again, of threatening to crowd out the contoured life he had made himself, the devotions and sacred loyalties within it.” Brookman has even mulled over the thought of changing his lock to his office.

Brookman is intrigued that Maud, a spoiled college girl in his eyes, has noted a particularly dour sentiment while studying Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” in one of Brookman’s classes. “The passage that had caught her attention was the one in which the Doctor asks Mephistopheles how he manages to wander about tempting obsessed intellectuals while doing time in hell. ‘Why this is hell,’ says the Diabolus, ‘nor am I out of it.’” And indeed, it is clear that Brookman and the others populate a certain kind of hell of their own that soon threatens to overwhelm them.

As the title of the novel portends, all does not end well for Maud. An editor of the college newspaper, Maud has taken offense to anti-abortion protestors outside the campus gates and has written a scathing attack piece on them which has garnered her some notoriety and scorn. At the same time Brookman breaks off their affair and soon after is confronted by a drunken Maud in front of his campus house; as a crowd leaves a nearby hockey game, a number of pedestrians mill around to witness Maud loudly berating Brookman, his wife looking on from their doorstep. When Maud is suddenly killed by a speeding car, however, it is unclear how she came to be in its path. What transpires from then on is pure Stone country, as the seemingly predestined fates of his characters play out before them amidst an atmosphere of impending violence and retribution, where any remnants of a fading faith are sorely tested.

Eddie Stack, Maud’s father, is sent reeling from the news of his daughter’s death. As a police officer he had been a responder at the World Trade Center disaster and had been privy to dread crimes that had been committed at the site. He now sees himself as “a burnout and a drunk, not even a mediocre policeman, a lousy one in fact, and not a particularly honest one. A coward, morally and sometimes physically. . . . An accessory to sometimes vicious things and to crimes he lacked the stones to perpetrate or prevent.” Stack blames Brookman for his daughter’s death and plans revenge, but even before this tragedy Stack knew he was a man “poisoned by anger long before he had any right to it. It must be in his blood, he thought, the anger.”

Jo Carr, a campus counselor who had seen Maud the night she died, is an ex-nun who had previously worked in South America. She attempts to console Maud’s father, but also tries to steer him away from confronting Brookman. But Carr, who recalls another ex-nun in Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, has weathered her own wars and bears her own scars. “In South America, at close quarters, she had seen a struggle toward mutual extermination so savage, fueled by such violent hatred between races and classes, that the very phrase ‘civil war’ seemed an ironic euphemism.”

Brookman proves quite resourceful and is ready for whatever Stack may have in mind for him. He sees in his predicament that “there was some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what had happened.” And quite like Stack, Brookman is also consumed by “an ancient anger he had been born with, an insatiable rage against himself, his cast of mind—a sense that he had been born out of line, raised wrong, lived deserving of some unknowable retribution that it was his duty to honor and face down, prevent, overcome.”

In the novels of Robert Stone nothing is free and there are always consequences down the line, debts demanding payment. Both Brookman and Stack realize this—indeed, Maud seems, in the end, to have been attracted to a man in Brookman not at all unlike her father. Stack, in words that could have easily come from Brookman’s character, reflects: “No one and nothing was free, everything rigorously bound and priced, locked down and chained, from your last drink to your last orgasm to what you thought were the highest flights of your soul.”

Hovering over this book is a lingering religious faith, particularly of Catholic dogma that is either stridently defended or abruptly shunted aside. God’s presence, or lack thereof, is pondered over incessantly—although, as the title of an earlier short story by Stone puts it, “An Absence of Mercy” is perhaps the true worry here. In Death of the Black-Haired Girl, Stone has once again painted a picture of an extremely unforgiving world, where a bad end is as likely as any other.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Curzio Malaparte
translated by David Moore
New York Review Books ($16.95)

by Andrew Marzoni

July, 1941. Yampol, a village in Ukraine. An Italian journalist bears witness to a corpse, flattened by a tank, “a dead man—something more, or something less, than a dead dog or cat.” As he recalls, “It was a carpet of human skin, and the fabric consisted of a fine network of bones, a spider’s web of crushed bones. It was like a starched suit, a starched human skin. It was an appalling and at the same time a delicate, exquisite, unreal scene.” The journalist watches as a young Jew impales the head of the corpse on a spade, lifts it into the air: “He walked with his head high, and on the end of his spade, like a flag, he carried that human skin, which flapped and fluttered in the wind exactly as a flag does.” Not just any flag, either. “That’s the flag of Europe,” the journalist says to his companion, “It’s our flag.”

This journalist, both author and narrator of this “delicate, exquisite, unreal” scene, is Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Eric Suckert in Tuscany to a German father and an Italian mother, later adopting the surname “Malaparte” as a nom de plume: “on the side of bad,” an anti-Napoleon. Malaparte wrote an entire novel, Kaputt, about his experiences as a correspondent for Milan’s Corriere della Sera, covering the Eastern Front of the Second World War. Kaputt was published in 1944, but the passage above was published five years later, in Malaparte’s next novel, The Skin, in which flattened human remains become the flag of Europe—the only symbol able to unify a civilization whose last remaining pretenses to modernity are its ruins.

The Skin presents its reader with the same world which Roberto Rossellini offered to film viewers in his neorealist classic, Paisà (1946): Naples, just after the Allied invasion in 1943—a city of poverty and prostitution, black marketeers and American GIs (many of them black, as well). While André Bazin, writing in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, praises Paisà and neorealism in general for “its stripping away of all expressionism” and its tendency “to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality,” citing Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica’s attempts “to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality” and Cesare Zavattini’s “dream . . . to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing ever happens,” the mixture of journalism and fiction Malaparte achieves in The Skin—nearly two decades before Norman Mailer perfects the genre in The Armies of the Night (1968)—insists that if anything can be said to be certain after Hitler, Mussolini, and Auschwitz, it is that reality itself is inescapably mediated. Reporting his adventures as Italian liaison to the American 5th Army, Malaparte alternately challenges his reader to accept and reject the veracity of his account, stretching his real experience to what would appear to be grotesque caricature, were it not for the desolate chaos of its historical context. Like Mailer, Malaparte is interested in exploring the fine line between fact and fiction in order to expose it as nonexistent–a thesis he advocates with irony, winking at the reader: “I would not wish to be discourteous to Malaparte, for he is my guest,” says General Guillaume to the hero, over a “humble camp meal” which the Frenchman fears will be “transformed into a real banquet” in the Italian’s next novel. The false tale of cannibalism Malaparte then employs to convince his companions—and us—of his narrative reliability is but one of many examples of the scope of his irony, the blackness of his humor.

David Moore’s new translation of The Skin renders the original text in strikingly fresh, often noirish English prose while retaining the high expectations held by Malaparte for his reader. The Skin is a truly multilingual novel: in addition to the narrator’s Italian, German appears, as does much dialogue in French (especially between Malaparte and his best friend, Colonel Jack Hamilton, a fictional stand-in for University of Virginia grad Colonel Henry H. Hamilton, “who died in vain in the cause of European freedom,” Malaparte writes in the book’s dedication), and as Rachel Kushner notes in her introduction to the edition, “In the Italian text words like ‘punching-ball’ and ‘booby trap’ are left untranslated, and Malaparte’s American friends love to say things like ‘Gee!’ and ‘Nuts!’ and ‘Good gosh!’” The co-presence of these languages fragments the text in a way that mirrors the fragmented world Malaparte attempts to represent: chaotic, made broken and baffling by the nascent spread of global capitalism through military means, the entirety of the West conquered by Americans who, in one grimly memorable scene, “go and stick a finger between the legs of a virgin,” supposedly the last virgin of Naples, “a poor conquered girl” forced to sell the only thing that she, her city, Italy, or even the whole of Europe has left: her skin.

Read from the perspective of the last half-century, Malaparte’s playful commentary on the United States’ role in global affairs seems incredibly prescient: the sort of catch-22 illustrated in an exchange between Malaparte and a partisan could serve as a description America’s relationship with the Middle East (substituting any one of many proper nouns for the name of Il Duce): “I’m killing them for shouting ‘Long live Mussolini!’” says the partisan, to which Malaparte replies, “They shout ‘Long live Mussolini!’ because you’re killing them.” But more than it is a political novel, The Skin is an existential novel, and like the best work of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Alberto Moravia, it is driven by a feeling–in this case, sadness–which pervades even in the book’s wittiest moments. The tragedy of life, Malaparte tells us, citing his beloved Naples as an example, is that we can never escape the confines of our own bodies, our own skins. “The human skin is ugly,” he tells us. “It’s loathsome. And to think that the world is full of heroes who are ready to sacrifice their lives for such a thing as this!” Without our skins, we are nothing. The Skin offers its reader only one alternative to nothingness: ugliness. Thankfully it is an ugliness that has great verve in Malaparte’s hands.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

On Writers and Drinking
Olivia Laing
Picador ($26)

by Matthew Schneeman

In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, Olivia Laing emotively employs the works of six great American writers, their biographical content, and her own history in an attempt to dissect alcoholism and the seeming relation it has with writers. Although an ambitious task that deals with cross referencing conflicting biographies, medical opinions, and the paradoxical confabulations that alcohol renders the drinker, Laing succeeds in making sense of this multilayered connection—not with aggressive statements of fact or declarations of authority, but with a gentle confidence that comes from the empathy of her own personal experience and the rigor of her scholarly abilities.

Under scrutiny are authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. This collection is comprehensively flavored by the variety of genres these authors worked in—poetry, play, novel, essay—and also in the wide range of personality: Hemingway’s hyper-masculine discipline in contrast to Fitzgerald’s bleeding heart, Williams’ sexual philandering compared to Cheever's isolation. Some similarities are obvious (they are all male, alcoholic, depressive, American) and some less obvious, like the recurrence of love for swimming or the sea, insomnia, fatherly suicide, fires as metaphors, shared locations like Iowa City or the Florida Keys, lover's paranoia. And all of these similarities and opposites are pulled from an equally varied collection of texts.

Laing uses her own trans-American journey from New York City to Port Angeles, Washington to frame the broader historical traipse through the six authors’ successes and failures, both literary and personal. Visiting the homes and haunts of her acclaimed subjects, she constructs as best as anyone can the context that propped up and amplified the disease of alcoholism—be it Cheever's father's suicide, Williams' clinical anxiety, or Carver's crushing economic instability. All catalysts are laid out not as overly simplistic answers to the question of why these writers drank, but as a working foundation to understanding.

Along with the context she creates for our subjects’ lives, Laing also gives us her personal life and feelings through gentle observation; relatable and unassuming, her thoughts are a welcome respite between the chaos and destruction that takes place in the authors’ lives. She subtly notes that her upbringing was “under the rule of alcohol, and the effects of that period have stayed with me ever since." She doesn't pretend this is a medical research project, though she includes compelling research from the Adverse Childhood Research Study and other ideas and theories from the medical community.

Laing does not finish her book with a clear answer to the vexing problem of alcoholism, but throughout the book she cites the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step method of recovery as the most effective approach to the disease, discussing the experiences that Carver, Cheever, and Berryman had with the system and their varying degrees of success. Her analysis of the authors who lived before AA was created can come off as less rooted and even a tad anachronistic, though admittedly there was a dearth of treatment options before the twelve-step approach was commonplace.

One immediate payoff from this book is the refreshing de-romanticizing of alcohol among literary giants, as too often are our heroes linked with their addictions as a casual oversimplification. Laing tempers Hemingway's pugnacious literary approach with his thoughts on drinking: “The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold.” Other examples of the reality of alcoholism include Fitzgerald's regrets on writing much of Tender is the Night drunk, or Cheever's own realization that "To drink oneself to death was not in anyway alarming, I thought, until I found that I was drinking myself to death." By not shying away from woes, embarrassments, and suicides she takes the glory out of the tormented artist and shows authors as people first and heroes second. Perhaps most importantly, she does this without the omission of the beauty and joy of these writers’ lives and works.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Monica Mody
1913 Press ($16)

by Elizabeth Robinson

Monica Mody’s Kala Pani brings together theater, folklore, faux-journalism, the suspending enjambments of poetry, and the disruptions and connections of electronic media in a fascinating formal pastiche that creates an environment of “mythic static.” Titled ostensibly after a British colonial prison to which Indian political prisoners were exiled, this book stages “a remarkable feat of intervention” into our assumptions about self and other, the private and the public, narrative linearity and associational scope. Kala Pani also applies pressure on our assumptions about the “elemental & artificial.” The reader revolves antically between these as opposing modes of agency, struggling for balance as disingenuous narratives multiply.

Mody demonstrates how narrative patterning can confine and overdetermine meaning. Tellingly, the book begins with a frame that stumbles, trying to get its “vision straight.” The frame itself is located on a stage, and this is a central conceit of the book: our realities are staged and restaged. One layer further, Kala Pani presents six world travelers who strive to travel within story, but who suffer under the constraints of rational presidents, rigorous training, and official narratologists (“These stories offspun by our most popular minds that were certain, certain that you would have no better story to tell”). With great inventiveness, Mody wends narrative around and within narrative, as though the bonds and bounds of story could twist, Houdini-like, to effect their own escape.

Her featured players, narrated with brilliant inconsistency by the world travelers, are “Sameshape” and “Othershape.” Any account of the relation of these two (sisters? lovers? performers in a Bollywood production?) is likely to unfurl into blatant contradiction. Is Sameshape a baseline by which any difference in Othershape can be manifested? It’s impossible to say. In any case, Sameshape and Othershape eventually become part of the audience. A long sequence that has the two reciting names and nouns back and forth to each other devolves into a kind of burlesque nonsense: the would-be protagonists tease the audience with names that don’t attach to any identity.

As witty and lightfooted as this book is, the shapeshifting characters function in an admonitory way, for no one ever truly gets away. The official news organ posts a headline that promises to explain “Why Freedom of Expression Will Prove To Be An Ordeal for You.” As the book comes to a close, the stage seems to dissolve as the “curtain falls apart, having nothing else to live for.” Thus, one framing narrative after another collapses. Mody erects this endlessly recursive line-of-dominoes structure and then topples it.

Having navigated this wild ride of a text, however, discouragement is the last thing that the reader feels. Rather, one emerges with a feeling of glee. Every moment of this book is a testament to resourcefulness and insubordination. The detours and proliferations of Kala Pani, along with its embrace of absurdity, become a means of survival that jumps over the limitations of the rational. There’s a sense of suspension, of process—“cursor in internal disorder”—that beguiles the intrepid reader to follow chaos into constellations that make order as we know it irrelevant.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Sandy Florian
Noemi Press ($15)

by Peter Grandbois

Sandy Florian’s Boxing the Compass defies categorization, subverts genre, and reframes our ideas of what story and language can do—all the while remaining intensely readable. In fact, upon “finishing” the book, this reader had to read it again. Perhaps a reader doesn’t ever “finish” a book like this, preferring to keep it at hand so that he or she can pick it up on a whim and reread random passages, such as: “she // unfolds her body the same way some people unfold letters from their lovers who’ve set sail, slowly, with caution, minding the curled edges of the cracked pages, that fading blue ink of time,” or “[she] steps onto the // sidewalk turning northeast on that landmass, concrete composite of well and of shell, of hole and of bowl, of buds from that ever budding past, so buckled by history and crumpled by memory, so embedded with remnants of crocodile eyes crying crocodile tears on these crocodile days . . .”

Florian’s work has been compared to Gertrude Stein’s, and the above quotation demonstrates why. However, in the metamorphic power of her surreal landscapes and the mercurial speed of her linguistic transformations, she seems closer to Baudelaire, Bruno Schulz, or Kobo Abe. Florian’s subject is nothing less than the ways in which tragedy precipitates questions of who we are and of what our world is composed. The title refers to naming the thirty-two points of the compass in clockwise order, to make a complete revolution—or, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, to return home and know that place for the first time. The problem is, how can you find your way home when your world has been thrown into flux? “The only thing she notices as she walks east-northeast to her apartment building is the shape of a dove dead at the entrance, like the shape of a brother, like the shape of a father, like the shape of a mother, a lover, a daughter.” The dead dove opens a gateway to the grief through which the narrator must work her way, a grief that is opening and closing just as the world around her opens and closes.

Life wanes into death, and death waxes into life. The problem is our desire to control the flow, to box the compass: “If she could only live inside this box. If she could only live inside this frame.” We open to one experience only to close off to another, always trying to find our bearings. The structure of Florian’s work beautifully reflects that ebb and flow as each paragraph, each chapter, ends mid sentence, only to pick up with the start of the next paragraph or chapter:

as she gathers herself into the shell of the tub, turning the handles counterclockwise, now hot, now cold, and

counterclockwise again, now hot, now cold,

and spills herself into that ocean predominating this world of ice and fog . . .

Even as paragraphs and chapters pour into each other, worlds collide within those sentences, as the dead dove becomes the brother and the bathtub the ocean. History, science, and geography crash like waves against the narrative as the reader, like the protagonist, tries to make sense of a world in which she is cast adrift: “Don’t be rash little thing. We are all lost on this boat. And the waters are rising higher, rising higher.” Florian’s Boxing the Compass forces us to look at our lives differently. As Pound demanded, she “makes it new.”

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

photo by Pete Huggins

by Mark Gustafson

Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, grew up in the Midwest and received degrees from Vassar College and Princeton University. Her elongated academic title hints at her scholarly interests, which range widely across American (and English) literature as well as popular culture. She appears often on television and radio in the U.K., and contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first book was The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Metropolitan Books, 2004).

The title of Churchwell’s most recent book, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (The Penguin Press, $29.95), has a sensationalist ring. Its fresh premise is how an unsolved double murder of a pair of illicit lovers in 1922 forms a significant backdrop to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s composition of his masterpiece. But this book is really the biography of that novel, and compellingly conveys Churchwell’s love for The Great Gatsby. She has done the heavy lifting, and filters the findings of her own and others’ research, making it all palatable without dumbing it down. Her excellent literary analysis gains more power as contemporary economic issues (Occupy Wall Street, corporate greed and corruption, income disparity, etc.) are brought to the fore. It also does what any biography should do—impels the reader back to the primary source with newfound appreciation.

Mark Gustafson: My impression is that the device of the Hall-Mills murder is very effective in opening up the idea of the interdependence, the “contrapuntal relation,” of fact and fiction, but that once through that door the murder seems to recede into the background, its work done. Which leads to the question: What was the genesis of Careless People? Did it start with the discovery of the Hall-Mills murder and then develop from there, or did you see the life of the book—its biography—whole, and then flesh it out with the details?

Sarah Churchwell: It began with a question about 1922, the year in which The Great Gatsby is set. A few questions had made me start to look at the year more closely (why doesn't Fitzgerald actually mention the Charleston in the novel? Did green lights mean "go" in 1922, was that a meaning available to Fitzgerald when he composed the novel in 1924?) and the answers I found surprised me. Looking around in the newspapers of 1922, I discovered many more facts that countered our received wisdoms about the novel, and then I found the Hall-Mills murder case, and as I read it seemed to me that it had uncanny parallels with the novel. So my book was always conceived as a biography of Gatsby, a reconstruction of the year 1922, and it turned into a kind of nonfiction parallel of the novel. The Hall-Mills case seemed to me an excellent example of the kind of material Fitzgerald was seeing all around him, although I do include other contemporary newspaper murders and scandals; I'm certainly not in any way arguing that Hall-Mills was "the most" important influence on the novel. It has prominence in my book because A) it is comparatively unknown, B) I thought it was fascinating, hilarious and macabre in its own right, and C) its parallels with the novel are very strong, if one thinks figuratively rather than literally. Fitzgerald gives about twenty percent of his novel to the Tom-Myrtle story (more than people might remember), and so my book is about twenty percent Hall-Mills. It drops out of the story because that's what happened: it petered out. But that seemed to me appropriate, too, as the novel's significance comes not from the two killings that drive its plot, but from its move toward the meanings of America, illusions, disappointment, elegy, nostalgia, and hope. So I tried to move my book in similar directions at the end, always sticking to nonfiction.

MG: What were some of the significant and unexpected discoveries (coincidences, etc.) that you made along the way?

SC: I alluded to a couple above: the meanings of green lights were in fact debated in New York between 1922 and 1924, the period in which the novel was gestating and composed. The Charleston did not become a dance craze until after Gatsby was published, which is presumably why it's never mentioned in the novel. (Fitzgerald does mention it in a short story, the only murder mystery he wrote, just a year after Gatsby came out. In fact, the plot of that story, called "The Dance," hinges on the Charleston. But it's not in Gatsby.) Dresses in 1922 were much longer than we think: they were ankle-length. There was a senator in the papers in 1922 called Caraway (the original spelling of Nick's last name in Fitzgerald's manuscript), who was famed for his honesty. The bodies of Hall and Mills were found in Buccleuch Park, NJ—and Nick says that his family has a myth that they are descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch. Could this be a coincidence? Of course. But I came to feel that the resonances of fiction and history, even if coincidental (and they're not all coincidental) had their own beauties, symmetries and patterns. The whole book is built upon such patterns: every time I found a fact that pulled against, or amplified or enriched, received wisdom about Gatsby, it went in the book.

MG: You show how, in general, readers’ reception of The Great Gatsby moved over time from an appreciation of more superficial and flashy material to its deeper, transcendent meanings. It seems that Careless People progresses likewise, mirroring that pattern, moving from the more sensationalist, tabloidish background to the astounding prescience of Fitzgerald as he represented and seemed to foretell the emptiness of the American dream and what the consequences of corruption and unbridled capitalism (not to mention nostalgia) are.

SC: Yes, as I said above, I tried to mirror the structure of Gatsby wherever I could, without being slavish. But I wanted to create echoes and resonances, to show that fact and fiction have a more complicated relationship than we usually allow. Academic literary criticism tends, to its detriment in my opinion, to treat them as if they are mutually exclusive: so-called close readings, which exalt art and ignore history, or literalistic historicized readings that treat art as just another historical document. The truth is somewhere in between, and I tried to put my book in that space, in between the two. That said, I would resist, I think, the idea that my book moves from the superficial to the profound. Rather, I would say, my process was accumulation: the patterns only become apparent as they build and emerge, and the reader has to have a certain amount of patience (although I try to keep things entertaining along the way!). So I would put it a little differently: I would say that if my book is successful, it should show that details that appear at first to be superficial, actually contribute to the profound meaning of the whole of Gatsby. They all link up—everything in my book relates to Gatsby somehow, even if that relationship is not always obvious to readers who don't have the novel open in front of them (or memorized, like me!).

MG: This book is that rare scholarly achievement: you have successfully synthesized and augmented material from the mountain of scholarship on Gatsby, and have made it more accessible and appealing for a more popular readership without any condescension or obvious dumbing-down. Is this in any way related to your job as a Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities?

SC: First of all, thank you! That is a great compliment. I think that just as we tend to have a false dichotomy between the literary and the historical, so we tend to have a false dichotomy between the fun and the serious. I think something can be seriously intelligent, seriously thoughtful, seriously original, and still be fun to read. One of my goals in this book was to restore pleasure to academic literary criticism, which has gotten itself into a rut where it (in my opinion) tends to suck all of the pleasure out of the books we all love, and to deaden them. I was certain that one could think hard and have a good time doing it, and that was the idea. The risk, of course, is that readers who believe in this false dichotomy will see that my book is amusing and think that's all it is, or see that it synthesizes existing research and assume it has no original research. In fact, it has many serious things to say, a great deal of original research, and I hope it has original things to say about Gatsby, too. But I tried to do all of that with a light touch, always recognizing the risk that the touch might be light enough that readers would miss it. The question is: is a book superficial, or an individual reading of it? As for condescension to the non-academic reader—well that's just snobbery, pure and simple. The idea that to be an intelligent reader you have to have a PhD . . . funny how it's only people with PhDs who think that. I've never thought that, because I'm surrounded by brilliant people who don't hold PhDs. What happens is that academics get caught up in technical arguments about minutiae with other specialists, and then when they are called upon to make their language less technical they think they are dumbing it down. This is a fallacy (and by the way, the phrase "dumbing down" comes from 1927!) and a nasty one at that, implying as it does that everyone else is dumb. I'm quite sure they're not. As for whether it relates to my day job, well yes, it certainly does, but my academic job has also been created to fulfill the same brief. In other words, everything I do starts with the convictions I just outlined, and I write books, journalism, and have created an academic role that are all working in the same direction.

MG: As you write about American subjects, do you take into consideration that you are writing both for an American audience but also for readers in the United Kingdom (where this book was first published)?

SC: Certainly. I have lived in the UK for almost 15 years, my husband is English, and although I have many American friends in London, by definition most of the people I come into contact with these days are British. That has altered my perspective on America in all kinds of ways. I definitely had both audiences in mind as I wrote, but for me part of the pleasure of writing this book was that it is all about America, and what it means to be American, and I was able to reflect on that. (One UK critic complained that I didn't say enough about Gatsby's European sources, and I thought: "Well that's because it's a book about America!") I always hoped that American audiences would get what I was doing in the book better than British audiences, and judging by reviews and readers' responses, that seems to be the case. That makes me extremely happy.

MG: How does Careless People intersect with the work of your earlier book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe?

SC: They're both projects that piece together the stories of stories out of other stories, which is what I like to do. So in the case of Marilyn, it was the larger story of the biographies of Marilyn, pieced together from those stories and their intersections. In the case of Fitzgerald, it was the story of Gatsby out of the stories of the novel but also biography, journalism, letters, diaries, etc. I like to piece things together into a different kind of mosaic, like those Life covers made out of hundreds of Life covers that turn into a holograph face, that sort of thing? A different Marilyn, and a different Gatsby, can emerge from these kinds of intertextual portraits. And of course Marilyn was a Gatsby in important ways: aspiring to wealth and recognition by a system that always rejected her, changing her name, chasing a dream (the American Dream, if you like) that defeated her. Just like Gatsby. On a more thematic level, the books share an interest in celebrity, glamour, icons, and again, whether something can be pleasurable and taken seriously at the same time. (Vogue called my Marilyn book "a rare combination of intellectual insight and guilty pleasure," which may be my favorite review ever; I thought it could serve as a motto for everything I write, except that I don't think we should feel guilty about our pleasures, we should just think about them harder.)

MG: You’ve just been to St. Paul, a city that would like to be synonymous with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Has your visit spurred any new thoughts?

SC: I was only there overnight, sadly, and it was too cold to go exploring! But apparently there are some plans afoot for a proper Fitzgerald center to be created, and I will definitely be keeping an eye on that.

MG: What’s your next project?

SC: Currently it's only a Platonic ideal of a project, so I think it needs space to grow up a little more before I start talking about it. But it will involve American literature and history, it will not be conventionally academic, and it will try to be both fun and serious.

Click here to purchase Careless People at your local independent bookstore

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

Diane Raptosh
Etruscan Press ($17.95)

by Daniela Gioseffi

American Amnesiac is Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry, and very possibly her best. She attempts something quite unusual with this magnum opus—one long poem spoken in the persona of an older man suffering from amnesia. The book constitutes his stream of consciousness as he attempts to piece together who he is and what he’s experienced in his American life. His situation is laid bare on the first page of the book: “I . . . / woke in Civic Center Park three states away, four hundred bucks / stuffed in my right sleeve. My life has always been a flock of mishaps // waiting to take flight.”

A poignant and interesting saga follows, page after page, as the amnesiac travels through America in and out of his mind, commenting on the meaninglessness of his journey and the story of his life that only comes to him in bits and snatches of memory. It is a skillfully written journey through the American cultural landscape, as our “John Doe” becomes “a man missing a nation and a wife, strung up between a past / I may not want and a present in which I cannot make myself at ease.”

“John Doe,” as he prefers to call himself, thinks he may be anyone from a “Calvin J. Ex sous chef . . .” to a “Think-tanker in Singapore. Financial Consultant. Art historian. / Husband. Apprentice in P.R. NGO pundit.” His rambling thoughts carry us through seventy-two pages of his memories, snatches of speculations and ironic pronouncements that constitute a meandering critique of American culture. Yet this is a difficult conceit for the author to accomplish. Whoever John Doe is, he has a very developed vocabulary and knowledge of many things, and his observations are often witty or ironic to a fault—the reader cannot help but conflate the poet and this amnesiac persona.

Hints abound, however, that “suspension of disbelief” is the goal of this dramatic monologue. At one point, the author writes,

I am John Doe, no more modest than immodest. Whatever
is done to someone else comes back to me. I shake

my bangs equally at bombs and greed. But get a load of this: Gazump
is a process of which a price of land is raised higher

than the cost agreed on days before both parties sign their John
Hancocks. Through me surges much about the state of what is,

despite—or due to—amnesia. Prosopagnosia. Fugue.
Whatever this is. I can’t recall a thing I did for Sachs. I’ve forgotten

what herbs do. I don’t know my brother. I do not recognize
a world in which the claws of leopard crabs have turned

to oil clubs . . .

Neither do we recognize this world in which we are caught in our own delusions and jumbled recollections that boggle the brain into a uniquely American amnesia. Ultimately, that is the point of this stirring saga.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Lauren Camp
Edwin E. Smith Publishing ($14.95)

by Richard Oyama

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “and still retain the ability to function.” That was close to how I experienced The Dailiness, Lauren Camp’s stirring new poetry collection. The book has scope, complexity, and amplitude—a work of fine poetic intelligence. The title poem is a sort of daybook of images, testifying to Camp’s loving attention to detail, while the first poem, “Looking Around These Days,” catalogues varieties of unease and our compensatory behaviors to quell disquiet. It is a snapshot of our dark cultural moment.

The poet renders the bond between herself and her late mother with precision and unflinching frankness: “Our relationship / was always that haunted, that taut and that still” (“How I’d Explain What Kind of Mother She Was”). The poem is a remarkable exploration of the complexities of familial tenderness, rancor, and “hidden ways” of love. The mother braids “scattered people" into "a galaxy of necessary stars" ("For Those of You"). In the same poem, “Our faces / were her fiction, her tongue flowering with what was written / on her eyes” as though she has the power to transform those around her. The breathless, unpunctuated "Ten Years" begins, "where did you day and day gone / and you in the cement the blossoms the wind." It implies our helplessness in face of death, the contingency of life.

“A Colloquy on Water” is rooted in the thirsty New Mexican landscape: “Look here, where the wild olive lives, the berried sumac, / this earth, its tart face waiting, the crabapple weeping, / the honey locust, black currant, purple ash, the amurs / and cottonwoods standing, stiffening.” In "Journey," language assumes the garments of culture: "words that tickle and stumble, words in brown jackets, / brown shoes, words that hurl and kick, pray and dance." Auden said of Yeats, "Ireland hurt you into poetry." For Camp, that tormented country summons the lyrical impulse.

The jazz poems are especially stunning, a visual/verbal correlative to the music. From “What You Might Hear:” “His horn, that pliable prophet of conduct, offers its / sequence of agony, exodus, / the fanatical fancy of finding devotion.” It’s as though Ornette Coleman’s free jazz becomes a form of spiritual and moral practice. The personal anguish of his search for a sound mimics the abduction, “exodus” and enslavement of African people—or, for that matter, all diasporic peoples.

The final poem, “When,” is a series of propositions in the form of couplets: “When you shiver, you enter the radical center / —or tangible timidity.” Once more, there is the sense of the conditional, but also that the essence of what it means to be human is the capacity to be vulnerable, to “shiver.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Lawrence Giffin
Ugly Duckling Presse ($16)

by Stephen Burt

Disturbing and bitter, haunting and at times bizarre, Lawrence Giffin’s collection of sequences and stand-alone poems can look like “theory,” or like collage, but it’s far more: Giffin uses his own dry articulations along with his sources (stories about feral children, the story of Jesus, “theory,” the Grateful Dead) to ask the largest possible questions about how we know what we know, whether we know anything, whether we are just patterns etched into the hard grooves of family life, and why—if we are only patterns, nothing but useless codes—we can feel so alone.

Giffin’s rough, arid poems describe their own goals often: one shows “how a tongue / decomposed in apostrophe / lashes out against truth.” He often turns his caustic tone on stories about children and parents, all of whom (for him) seem ready to abandon one another, as if in disgust at the failure of language to mean: how can I love you (the lines say), or love anyone, or protect you, if all I can say is a paste-up of habits and memes?

Sometimes he seems to be satirizing psychoanalysis, or taking flamethrowers to parenting advice: “More and more fathers are becoming aware of their influence / and regularly dating their daughters.” At other times he seems to be rejecting Christianity and all stories about redemption that derive from it: “My other god’s an atheist . . . / whose back is turned to us.” His longest poem rewrites the Gospels, in tiny verse segments, as the story of a disturbed, and educationally accelerated, Nebraska child who takes his own life: his mother explains his death as like the Crucifixion, a sacrifice on behalf of all other kids, which—though absurd—means that “the suicide appeared / now to be something they had / the vocabulary to understand.”

Giffin takes his cadence and verbal textures, often, from the cerebral, anti-representational sounds of the Cambridge School (John Wilkinson, J. H. Prynne), even when what Giffin says ends up far from opaque: one poem begins “You get nothing.” His forcefully abstract style, its “discarded bits / pulled apart by shear and / torque of intimacy’s involution,” admit the possibility that no vocabulary can help us understand one another much, because there’s not enough to be understood. If you look for “meaning,” Giffin says (in a poem called “Enchanted Whatever”), “a gesture appears with no end in sight.”

Giffin can also be sarcastic, or simply funny (in this he resembles Graham Foust), especially when he is attacking happy talk: “Today is a gift. You / know how you can tell? / It’s got your name written on it / in your handwriting. It reads ‘Equipment.’” But he can be serious at the same time, and not only when he is writing about damaged children. The poems are a kind of non serviam to social pressures (within the poetry world and far outside) that insist that literature should help us, that it should send messages, or carry morals, or do useful work, or celebrate the soul: Giffin writes instead about the unimprovability of everything, suggesting that feral children, and uncommunicative adults, are not so different from the rest of us, “left to want what we are without, / without the word for it.” His difficulties mime that wordlessness.

Do we all get nothing from life, from theory, from advice? Do we get happier, or wiser, after childhood, or through parenthood, or do we just wear ourselves down? Giffin’s poetry suspects the latter: it is a poetry of constant frustration, alleviated by intervals of clarity, like payouts from slot machines. Life may feel like that too, when you step back from it: it may all look like a “chasm / opening up in the center of town,” where there is no town, only “devotion in lieu of practical reason,” attempting “to handle its grief-stricken members.” I may have made Giffin’s creations sound deeply unpleasurable (indeed, he wonders why they give pleasure himself). And yet I have reread it, all the way through, now, four times: in certain moods, it tells, not the truth, but a truth, and I can’t put it down.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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