Renata Adler
St. Martin's Press ($26.95)

by Rumaan Alam

It's never a particularly illuminating strategy to open a review of a book by quoting another review. Still, it's worth noting that in his New York Times Book Review essay on Renata Adler's most recent book, Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media, Bill Kovach calls Adler—or the substance of her message—"shrill." It's easy to paint Adler as a Cassandra, as Kovach does. In fact, given the relationship between Adler and the Times—her onetime employer, of which she is very critical—it's no surprise to see her book summarily dismissed as hysterical.

With a handful of erudite nonfiction and fiction works to her credit, Renata Adler is a cultural voice of some distinction, influential enough to have been name-checked in David Leavitt's lamentable roman a clef, Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (interesting to note, as Leavitt plays coy about naming, say, George Plimpton). She's a gifted writer and fierce intellect, but her contentiousness and unwillingness to accept the state of contemporary media—to which equally brilliant contemporaries like Joan Didion seem more resigned—have consigned her to a niche in the ongoing cultural debate, the place where you'd find Buckley and Limbaugh and the rest of the cranks. But the thing to remember about Cassandra is, of course, that she was right.

Kovach is dismissive of Adler's assertion that the use of a byline—standard operating procedure at every newspaper of record in this country—has given rise to the celebrity journalist. She disdains the chief practitioner of celebrity journalism, Bob Woodward, dissecting the man's body of work, to some surprising results. In "The Justices and the Journalists," originally published in, ironically, the New York Times Book Review, Adler tackles Woodward's The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. Her close reading uncovers factual inconsistencies and errors, as well as a lot of murkiness about hearsay and anonymous sources. This reading helps illuminate one way in which contemporary journalism has, indeed, gone wrong: Woodward's reputation as a reporter lends credence to the claims of his unspecified sources. Rather than entering into the record verifiable statements from a specific source, Woodward simply asserts that a thing has been deemed true enough by his standard. Clearly, that is a lapse of integrity.

Unfortunately for Adler, her suggestion that the media is not to be trusted is the sort of idea espoused by the fringe. A collection of essays such as these, published in outlets such as the New Yorker (which Adler famously excoriated in her previous book Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker), Harper's, the Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair, has a specific value. This value is not derived from the subjects explored, such as Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, as they are no longer newsworthy. The value is, rather, in reading one consistent viewpoint on various aspects of the culture. And Adler is nothing if not consistent. Her willingness to offer a close reading of the news, rather than a thumbnail sketch of it, is impressive in an era of short attention spans. Adler's reading of the Starr Report is a perfect example of her strengths as a news analyst and reporter: well-versed in matters of law, she is able to point to several specific transgressions committed by the Office of the Independent Counsel. It's refreshing to read, rather than partisan snipes at Starr or Clinton, a fact-based argument that one of the two parties was actually, demonstrably, wrong. Of course, objectivity is an ideal to which one might aspire, but which one can never rightfully claim; it's an ideal, almost impossible to achieve, for reporters or judges, police or parents.

Adler's ideas about contemporary journalism and culture are far too elegant and complex to be explored in one book review, which might explain why Adler has not managed to cultivate her own cult of personality the way so many commentators have: one must actually have read her work, and the work is demanding enough to test the mettle even of willing devotees. Canaries in the Mineshaft is not the sort of book to be read at night, in bed: it agitates and it demands far too much. Rather, it's a book to be read the next morning, before tackling that day's newspaper. It will make the truth seem, suddenly, sadly, a very complicated thing indeed.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel
James Fallows
Public Affairs ($25)

Air Rage: Crisis in the Skies
Anonymous and Andrew R. Thomas
Prometheus Books ($20)

by Peter Ritter

James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent, is flying his private airplane on a transcontinental jaunt when he's hit by a revelation: Why on earth doesn't everyone just get their own jet? Surely it would cut down on congestion at the nation's airports, wean America from its reliance on foreign-grown peanuts, and usher our great Republic into a golden age of robot maids and self-tying sneakers. This fleet of personal planes, Fallows excitedly predicts in his new book, Free Flight, will allow the hoi polloi to travel in the manner to which only the loftiest CEOs are now accustomed, "in greater comfort, without fighting their way to and from the crowded hubs, leaving from the small airport that's closest to their home or office and flying direct to the small airport closest to where they really want to go."

One can't really fault Fallows for his timing; he had no way of knowing that, by the time his book was published, a good percentage of the American population would have sworn off flying altogether. Nor could he have known that the New Economy, which tended to support such pie-in-the-sky schema, would be Old News. Still, Fallows's book already seems weirdly dated: It reads as the relic of another age, like one of those "Fast Company" articles explaining how www.socksbymail.com was going to revolutionize business. Fallows may be heralding a revolution in transportation on par with the advent of the automobile, but, at least for now, history seems to have dumped him on the curb.

The sea change Fallows prescribes in Free Flight comes in two waves. First, in response to increasing air congestion, companies will begin to build cheaper, more reliable small airplanes. These planes will then become the basis of an air-taxi network operating out of the nation's underutilized small airports. This, in Fallows's estimation, ought to correct some of the blunders of airline industry deregulation—particularly the disastrous hub-and-spoke system, that triumph of human logic wherein flights from Chicago to Boston are routed through Atlanta.

As an example of this new breed of plane manufacturer, Fallows makes a close study of Duluth, Minnesota-based Cirrus Design. (The company also happens to have built Fallows's shiny new plane, a fact which, in the days before New Economy synergy, might have been considered a journalistic no-no). Cirrus's particular innovation is the SR20, a small airplane with an emergency parachute built in—certainly a handy convenience if every idiot and his brother is going to be using one for the morning commute.

Meanwhile, rich people—Fallows uses the more democratic term "enthusiast"—will have access to the fabulous new jets built by New Mexico's Eclipse Aviation, a spin-off of the defense contractor Williams International with close ties to NASA. (The fact that Williams is also the company responsible for the motors that fly cruise missiles is not a very exciting synergy from the perspective of the prospective passenger). Fallows gets considerably less access to Eclipse than he does to Cirrus: The company will, in fact, only allow him into their factory on the condition that he does not describe what he sees there. It hardly matters, of course: Unless Eclipse is reverse-engineering flying saucers, there's no reason for anyone outside the industry to care what goes on in their factory. And Fallows seems to have dropped the pretense of investigative journalism by this point anyway; even if Eclipse was churning out saucers, one suspects he would be fawning over the potential of the company's "disruptive technology [to] change the way we travel."

In the same way that New Economy boosters seemed to willfully disregard the verities of business—particularly the fact that companies have to make money to keep from going bankrupt—Fallows often seems to turn a blind eye to the realities of airline travel. He does not take into account, for instance, that airlines—many of which have been periodically bailed out by taxpayers throughout their existence--are notoriously low-margin concerns. If American and United can't break even stuffing their 757s like cattle cars, how is a start-up carrier going to make a go of it shuttling four people between Sioux Falls and Wichita? Nor does Free Flight propose solutions for the massive pollution and congestion a fleet of small planes would engender. Only on the last page of the book does Fallows even acknowledge that planes guzzle fossil fuels and make lots of noise. The 2R20 may be a sophisticated cart, but it's still not going anywhere without the horse.

The problems with Free Flight are those endemic to a lot of American utopian thinking: It's so impressed with the possibility of technology to solve problems that it ignores simpler solutions. Might some measure of federal regulation not be the best way to ease airport congestion, for instance? And the easiest way to cut economic inefficiencies in air travel is not to build thousands of small planes, but to travel less: Instead of buying faster corporate jets, perhaps American businesses should simply reconsider the wasteful habit of buzzing across the continent for lunch meetings. In any case, Fallows's point may be moot: At this point, with the large carriers foundering, a transportation renaissance is further off than ever. Like the New Economy's free-fall, Free Flight offers an instructive lesson in utopianism: When your head is in the clouds, you're less likely to notice that you're about to walk off a cliff.

However, on this point, Fallows's book is irrefutable: Even before we had to worry about some hijacker purposely crashing our planes, air travel was a pretty unpleasant experience. Since coach-class seats are designed for teenage Russian gymnasts and airline food is mostly unidentifiable muck, flying is, for the average passenger, an ordeal to be endured rather than a rare pleasure. For those with expense accounts, of course, there is business class, an Elysium of dry martinis and wet towels. Airplanes are perhaps the most stratified spaces left in our democratic society. The haves are even spared the sight of the have-nots by that little blue curtain.

One might suspect that a revolt of the unwashed masses in steerage would therefore account for many of the incidents reported in Air Rage: Crisis in the Skies, the Cassandra to Fallows's Pollyanna, by journalist Andrew Thomas and Anonymous, "an expert in a top-level aviation-oversight organization." In fact, most air rage outbursts seem to happen in the rarefied confines of first-class: Rock stars biting flight attendants; businessmen drinking too much comp champagne and deciding it would be a good idea to open the cabin doors at 30,000 feet. We of the proletariat ought to take some perverse pride in the fact that rich people seem to do the lion's share of the misbehaving.

The problem, according to the authors of Air Rage, is that they also tend to get away with it: Because air-rage incidents are generally prosecuted under civil rather than criminal law, the fines for throwing a tantrum are often perfunctory. Their point might be better received, though, if they weren't publishing the written equivalent of a "20/20 Downtown" segment. Hyperbole reigns—"The din of complaints about airline service is becoming deafening." Generalization dominates—"Public expressions of discontent, despair, and detachment have seemingly become everyday occurrences in our stressed-out and overloaded lives." Language suffers—"too" becomes "to", and "they're" is miraculously transformed into "their." That Anonymous, a top-level expert in airline safety, neglected to use spell-check before publishing his book is maybe the most distressing thing about Air Rage.

Nor, unfortunately, are Anonymous's solutions anywhere near as creative as his grammar. Even before our current troubles, Air Rage's prescription would have seemed laughably self-evident: Malefactors ought to be prosecuted under criminal statues; the FAA and airlines should keep better track of incidents; people shouldn't drink so much during flights; and non-pilots shouldn't be allowed into airplane cockpits. Well, duh. Still, it's cause for some terrestrial indignation that it takes a tragedy to get even such basic ideas off the ground.

Click here to purchase Free Flight at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Air Rage at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

edited by Paul Auster
Henry Holt ($25)

by Sarah Fox

I Thought My Father Was God anthologizes 179 stories (plus one story quoted in its entirety in the Introduction) culled from the 4,000 Paul Auster received after inviting listeners of National Public Radio to participate in the "National Story Project" by sending "true stories that sounded like fiction." It was Auster's wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, who encouraged him to reimagine the project after his initial trepidation at the thought of becoming a regular contributor to the program. She suggested, instead, that he "Get people to sit down and write their own stories." A grand idea, and it worked.

In an interview last fall on NPR, Auster launched the idea on the air. He offered the following guidelines:

The stories had to be true, and they had to be short, but there would be no restrictions as to subject matter or style. What interested me most . . . were stories that defied our expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and bodies, in our souls. . . . All listeners were welcome to contribute, and I promised to read every story that came in. People would be exploring their own lives and experiences, but at the same time they would be part of a collective effort, something bigger than just themselves. With their help, I said, I was hoping to put together an archive of facts, a museum of American reality.

I quote at length here because what he asked for is precisely what he got, and then some–this initial request was an exact premonition of what the project would become. Every month Auster chose the best five or six stories to read on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. Of this task, he claims, "It has been singularly rewarding work, one of the most inspiring tasks I have ever undertaken." At the same time, reading close to 100 stories at a single sitting was often disquieting, occasions when Auster "felt that the entire population of America [had] walked into my house."

He also declares that of the 4,000 stories he read, "most have been compelling enough to hold me until the last word." Reading this collection, you don't doubt him for a moment. You may, in fact, wish you could get your hands on the whole pile yourself.

In a typically eloquent introduction to this collection, Auster reports on how his own beliefs about the elusive nature of fate, the passions and coincidences overwhelming our lives, the inevitable and lasting connections made between human beings—whether family members or complete strangers—all have been enriched and confirmed by the stories he's read and collected. It was his idea to develop a book, which he felt would "be necessary to do justice to the project." And for those of us who missed most of the weekend broadcasts, we owe him our deep appreciation. As great as it would be to hear the sepulchral resonance of Paul Auster's voice reading your very own words over the radio, part of the book's magic is its insistence that the reader imagine the voice of the story herself, or that she even occasionally fashion her own voice to it.

The democracy of the book is admirable, but doesn't feel brassy or obligatory. "I never once gave a thought to demographic balance," Auster writes. "I selected the stories solely on the basis of merit. . . . The numbers just fell out that way, and the results were determined by blind chance." If we know even a little about Paul Auster, we know how much of his own work is inspired by, or assembled around, blind chance.

And to know (even if only a little) the work of Paul Auster is to love him. His generosity as a writer of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and his finesse with the English language as well as the French from which he's translated volumes of poetry and prose, have already earned him a seat in the pantheon of Great American Writers. Whether he's writing a novel, an essay, or memoir heightened to philosophical inquiry, you'd be hard put to find a writer whose sentences so consistently and effortlessly unfold down the page. I'd pay good money for his grocery lists. (Here's my story: the first time I saw Paul Auster was at a book convention in Chicago. He was smoking a cigarillo, and his eyes penetrated his surroundings utterly. I thought Paul Auster was God.)

We know Paul Auster writes "literature," that he is a scholar and advocate of often under-represented, always challenging literary works and writers. His introduction to The Random House Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry is among the finest essays you'll read about these poets and their development in relation to modern and post-modern American—and World—poetry. Auster began his career as a poet, and his five poetry collections distinguish him in this field as well. His numerous collections of translations—of Jacques Dupin, Mallarmé, Joubert, and others—are highly regarded and further express his magnanimity as both gatekeeper of and contributor to world literature. As a fiction writer, for which he is best known, Auster's novels frequently defy the boundaries of genre, with stylized sentences that come from a sensitive, poetic imagination tuned to the round nuances of thought and inquiry more than speech. As if this weren't enough, Auster has also sallied forth into filmmaking, co-directing and writing scripts for the successful "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face" as well as writing and directing, more recently, "Lulu on the Bridge." You'd think Paul Auster was God.

Having thus established himself at the very pinnacle of literary excellence, we can forgive him for branding most of the stories collected in I Thought My Father Was God "crude and awkward. Only a small portion of it could qualify as 'literature.'" He goes on to try to define the stories in general as "dispatches, reports from the front lines of personal experience." But reading these stories I found myself disagreeing with Auster's assessment, for I was frequently surprised by the literary savvy, even if unintentional, in evidence here: an instinct for building suspense and narrative arc, for illuminating sometimes small but significant details, for discovering—in the telling—effective metaphors, for the subtlety with which these metaphors became realized and the gentleness with which the symbolism of certain objects or events was given up to the reader. Emily Dickinson famously proclaimed that she knew she was reading "great" literature when she felt as if the top of her head was coming off. I advise you to hold onto your hats as you delve into this collection. It's an emotional—even physical—response Dickinson alludes to, clearly not a cerebral one, and Auster himself confesses "It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone could read through this book from beginning to end without once shedding a tear; without once laughing out loud."

The "literature" question is, ultimately, unimportant in light of the book's ultimate accomplishment. Is Studs Terkel's American Dreams literature? In many ways this book recalls Terkel and his own egalitarian pursuit of the real stories of the American people. In other ways, the stories here—all written long before September 11, 2001—will reinforce our present craving for solidarity, and our attention to the plights and miracles of the individual. The book is divided into ten sections, and one of them is devoted entirely to "War." Astonishing stories of near-death, first-hand recollections from the trenches, the killing fields themselves; devastating loss, miraculous recovery—in sum, a visceral depiction of how life alters, how consciousness shifts and sharpens, how surreal everything becomes inside the landscape of war. And as Auster says, all of the stories—whether about World War II, Vietnam, fighting cancer, seeing ghosts, lost love, loneliness—seem to come from "the front lines," the battle zones of life on earth.

Ironically, however, the majority of the stories here are not focused on the narrator, but rather on someone else, a person who has impressed or changed or inspired the narrator. One outstanding example is "A Shot in the Light," by Lion Goodman—among the longest stories in the book. Goodman's narrative revolves around the 24 hours or so during which he was shot four times in the head by a man he had picked up hitchhiking, how he struggled to accept his fate while simultaneously trying to sustain his life, and the dialogue he was eventually able to arouse between himself and his attacker, a man named Ray. Through the recounting of this bizarre conversation—during which Goodman attempts both to calm Ray and convince him to head toward a hospital—we learn more biographical information about Ray himself than we ever learn about Goodman: his upbringing in East L.A., his alcoholic and abusive father, his stint in the army, his drug dealing, time spent in jail, the events leading up to his decision to rob and kill Goodman. This story sheds light, in its generosity and through personal experience, on the whole cycle of human oppression and criminal behavior better than any statistic or media analysis possibly could. And what fiction writer would dare name a character who survived such an ordeal Lion Goodman? Is truth stranger than fiction? Of course it is.

Contributors range in age from 20 to 90, and their stories cover the entire spectrum of 20^th-century American life. Some of the stories are grandiose while others are more quiet but no less extraordinary. Whether recalling—decades later and still reeling—a father's unexpected slap; or musing on the significance of a Christmas tree ornament; or praising the service of an old Ford; or detailing continued remorse over a twenty-year-old act of racial cruelty; or describing outrageous encounters with strangers, spirits, animals, God (once in the guise of George Burns), or simply engagements with memory, joy, grief, fear, amazement, the book touches on the entire gamut of human experience from people of all walks of life.

What provoked people to write these stories? What provokes us to read them? I think it's not terribly different from what provoked us to remain glued to our television sets in the aftermath of the events of September 11^th; or what has made memoir the best-selling literary genre of recent times. When we tell our stories, share them, and in turn confront the stories of others, we validate our existence and its meaning. We attempt to define ourselves, give edge to our experiences, by being witnessed and by bearing witness. This book has urged me to sift through my own inventory, try to select which story I might have sent and how I might have presented it. Undoubtedly, it will do this to all of its readers. Perhaps it will inspire us to recall a story that's been buried for years, and to tell it, or write it down, to learn about ourselves through it, to discover how we are connected by our experience to everyone else on the planet. We all have stories—they are what make up a life.

The intimacy these particular storytellers grant us makes the book all the more inviting. One writer, for example, begins her piece with the following statement: "Here is my story, the story I tell you when I know you well enough." In fact many authors begin with such flourish it becomes impossible to turn away. "Pork Chop" by Eric Wynn, starts, "Early in my career as a crime-scene cleaner" and ends with "'Well hell! . . . Ya smell just like a pork chop!'" Here's another one, from "The Anonymous Deciding Factor," by Holly Caldwell Campanella, "I come from a family of morticians." Bruce Edward Hall ("$1,380 Per Night, Double Occupancy") includes in his story a detail worthy of Don DeLillo: "She likes to chew on fingernails but doesn't want to ruin her own…so I give her mine." Among my favorite pieces is "Taking Leave" by Joe Miceli, in which the author--a Muslim prisoner whose father had only recently been released from jail himself--describes his mixed feelings about being "freed" for a day to attend the funeral of his beloved grandmother. His poignant conclusion--that nobody, even if uncuffed for a brief ride back to the jail, is free from grief and loss--demonstrates a deeply spiritual and insightful mind at work.

There are so many stories, so many incredible narratives, and there isn't a single one that elicits doubt from the reader as to the veracity of its author's telling. This is one of those books you simply can't check out of the library because it'll end up long overdue, you may even be willing to lose your library card to keep it, and so everybody—not least the librarians who've been hiding it under their table for surreptitious glimpses—will be terribly upset with you. It's one of those books you simply have to own, and one—despite its bulk—you'll never be tempted to part with. It will sit on your shelf alongside Vasari's Lives of the Artists and The Golden Bough and Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America, the big-time keepers you occasionally pick up on your way to the bathroom, and end up hours later still holding open in your lap. This is the book you can buy for every single person on your gift list, from the highest to the lowest brow. It is, at last, a genuine People's History of the United States, written by the people themselves, a 180-voiced chorus of women and men, young and old, rural and urban and everything in between, singing the body electric.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Edward Foster
Spuyten Duyvil ($12)

by John Olson

I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do not pretend to know the state of Ed Foster's liver, but I do know his heart belongs to poetry. It may sound ludicrously redundant to say there is poetry in his poetry, but considering the prevalence of conversational and confessional free verse that has passed for poetry since at least the ‘50s, it is nothing less than revelatory to champion that remark.

What distinguishes poetry from prose is sound: assonance, rhyme, alliteration, vocalic and consonantal echo. It is significant that Foster has chosen for the title of his book not merely an implement for producing sound (a bell) but a religious one at that. This device alerts our attention immediately, before we've even taken the book from the shelf, that there are religious overtones to the work contained in this volume, a sense that there is a numinous value inhering in the musicality of language.

The Angelus is a short practice of devotion repeated three times each day, morning, noon, and evening, traditionally at the sound of a bell. It consists essentially in the triple repetition of the Hail Mary and commemorates the Incarnation of the Word of God within Mary's sacred womb, thus fulfilling the Old Testament figure of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark carried the word of God in stone; Mary carried the word of God made flesh. This then is the central trope of Foster's collection, although Foster's spiritual underpinnings are far more Transcendentalist than Catholic.

Transcendentalist writers such as Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and especially the late William Bronk are of tremendous consequence to Foster's thought and style. The Transcendentalist emphasis on solitude and private communion to know God and reality, its urge to reintegrate spirit and matter (again, the central trope of the word of God made flesh), and its advocacy of intuition over reason as a way to know the Real underlie Foster's thinking and gel in certain stylistic features. Foster, like Bronk, tends toward gnomic, epigrammatic lines that tease the reader into a more intimate communion with the processes of sound and inner revelation—a grammar of the soul, if you will, whose tenses and moods occur as testimony to "the ecstasies of solitude" and "angels tipping heads / from side to side."

Edgar Allan Poe instructed a young author to write the Tone Transcendental by using small words but turning them upside down. In our more postmodern literary vernacular, we would say by "defamiliarizing them," but I like Poe's image far better: I see them as bells. Words turned right side up so that we can jingle them. Foster achieves great affect by packing his lines with dense iambs ("Stephen is the saint who has us say the things," "clothes are uniforms without their cause," "setting sound by sound/ with shifting feet"), creating rhythmic expectations, then—abruptly–disrupting them, bringing intense focus on a word, or cluster of words. In the first two stanzas of "Beggers After Sound," for instance, note the way Foster puts a tremendous weight on the last line of the second stanza, contrasting the more melodic rhythms ("like beauty on a winter street") with the leaden spondees of "to hold them down," giving the last line's significance a visceral force and density:

Know first that objects and their laws
have weight, at least to me and you.
They also know that mind,
like beauty on a winter street,
is what we're taught to see.

Laws always weigh
the mind, and partial
to an angel's hand,
there's no real secret in
the objects and the laws.
They are your mind,
and hands are only things
to hold them down.

Like Bronk, Foster favors abstraction and dense, syntactical constructions over richness of imagery. But where Bronk remains stark and stunning as the winter light he preferred, in Foster there is a disciplined severity that contrasts more piquantly with occasional flourishes of playful lyricism, as in the eighth stanza of the wonderful poem "The Dark in Caravaggio's Light":

You'd know enough
to keep a space apart
and wait with dream pipes,
reimagine arpeggio,
cantabile,
as sound.

Here we find resonating in the musical terms "arpeggio" and "cantabile" Poe's Tone Transcendental: words like clappers in an angelus of sonic dispersal.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Trevor Joyce
Shearsman Books ($15)

by Harriet Zinnes

To consider the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce one must start with a biographical fact: Joyce stopped writing poetry for about 20 years. And the reason was not biological: he did not have a strange disease, a fever, a loss of memory or a loss of intellectual rigor. Indeed, the silence was the result of a distinctive intellectual rigor. He could no longer write poems where, as he has noted, "all that is significant crystallizes in a perfection of plot and motivation, and all the rest, wanting any real brush with language, retreats once more to ground." His attack of a perfect plot and motivation was the consequence, he is saying, of a reluctance to come to grips with language. Just as American poets, and certainly not only the Language poets, emphasize language today, so does this Irish poet maximizes its importance.

As a result of the emphasis on language in the later work of Joyce, there is an avoidance of the Irish lilt, its more obvious lyricism, and a dominance of linguistic texture, a texture of sound, not easily comprehensible, filled with ambiguity and with the dexterity consequent of an admirer of John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Adorno, and Benjamin. Yet when John Cage wrote, for example, such a line as "A piece of string, a sunset, each acts," that successive juxtaposition, because of a musical coordination somehow pleases the ear and the poetry does not perplex. But this is another century. Globalization has taken hold. The old substance of poetry is gone. Love, loss, friendship, nature may still be written about by some poets but poets who see a world on the edge of chaos and disaster must break for it, must take language and pull it apart, render it with distortion, assemble its syllables from texts rarely before the matter of poetry. And here is a poet who wishes "to work comprehensively with the world which I inhabit." He must therefore pull his sentences together from regions remote from poetry, regions that are explaining the new world. Hardly a Billy Collins, more like a Bruce Andrews, he writes, "Damaged, we bleed time." Time is no longer floating. It does not flow. We are its warriors: "We bleed time." Even the mouth of the innocent "is like a bowl of blood."

American readers can now read Trevor Joyce's work in an edition collecting work from 1966 through 2000. The title is provocative: With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold. A bit perverse? Yes, Joyce is hunting the cold, namely, paralysis, death, not fire, passion, life. This is no Romantic writer. And we are all living in 2001, where fire is not passion but bombs, war, and hate. Even the poet's early poetry reveals a poet who though he observed nature closely he cared little for the material world, for he saw it as cruel and strange, a world that made the human observer uneasy because all was unfolding toward death. Even speech he saw as "a broken bird on stunned wings."

His recent poems, for example, the 1999 long poem called Trem Neul (meaning "through my dream") contains what the English poet Douglas Clark notes as "vaguely impersonal voices emerging from a Galway landscape." The poem mixes prose and verse facing each other but not in any way complementing or explaining each other. Its language is as in Joyce's poetry frequently difficult, leading to a seeming nowhere or to an incomprehensibility that seems part of the very meaning of the poem. The poet's dream is filled with the illogicality of today's world. How could the syntax, the flow of language be anything but a blur of sound, of a sound of unknown or at least of unusual meanings? Here is a page that is characteristic:

I sat there, my heart beating                             If you be not wise
shaken by what had happened, for                                then have
are we not all prone to error, all                                                (bitter)
strangers at home? As the language                              memories
changes course through time, a pla-
cemame gets stranded, parched, cut                  May you not have
off from the stream of meaning, until                            the memory
another inundation reach, reinter-                                   of the deer
pret and reanimate. The sound may
have to be bent for this to happen,                     It is my earliest
and the first sense left for ever irre-                       recollection
coverable, or the stuff of books,                                 Quite unexpectedly
though locally, as stuff of lives, it
stays a name, a pointer (maybe mis-
leading) to the place.

Yes, quite unexpectedly, there is another Joyce of importance.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Trevor Joyce
Shearsman Books ($15)
by Harriet Zinnes

To consider the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce one must start with a biographical fact: Joyce stopped writing poetry for about 20 years. And the reason was not biological: he did not have a strange disease, a fever, a loss of memory or a loss of intellectual rigor. Indeed, the silence was the result of a distinctive intellectual rigor. He could no longer write poems where, as he has noted, "all that is significant crystallizes in a perfection of plot and motivation, and all the rest, wanting any real brush with language, retreats once more to ground." His attack of a perfect plot and motivation was the consequence, he is saying, of a reluctance to come to grips with language. Just as American poets, and certainly not only the Language poets, emphasize language today, so does this Irish poet maximizes its importance.

As a result of the emphasis on language in the later work of Joyce, there is an avoidance of the Irish lilt, its more obvious lyricism, and a dominance of linguistic texture, a texture of sound, not easily comprehensible, filled with ambiguity and with the dexterity consequent of an admirer of John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Adorno, and Benjamin. Yet when John Cage wrote, for example, such a line as "A piece of string, a sunset, each acts," that successive juxtaposition, because of a musical coordination somehow pleases the ear and the poetry does not perplex. But this is another century. Globalization has taken hold. The old substance of poetry is gone. Love, loss, friendship, nature may still be written about by some poets but poets who see a world on the edge of chaos and disaster must break for it, must take language and pull it apart, render it with distortion, assemble its syllables from texts rarely before the matter of poetry. And here is a poet who wishes "to work comprehensively with the world which I inhabit." He must therefore pull his sentences together from regions remote from poetry, regions that are explaining the new world. Hardly a Billy Collins, more like a Bruce Andrews, he writes, "Damaged, we bleed time." Time is no longer floating. It does not flow. We are its warriors: "We bleed time." Even the mouth of the innocent "is like a bowl of blood."

American readers can now read Trevor Joyce's work in an edition collecting work from 1966 through 2000. The title is provocative: With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold. A bit perverse? Yes, Joyce is hunting the cold, namely, paralysis, death, not fire, passion, life. This is no Romantic writer. And we are all living in 2001, where fire is not passion but bombs, war, and hate. Even the poet's early poetry reveals a poet who though he observed nature closely he cared little for the material world, for he saw it as cruel and strange, a world that made the human observer uneasy because all was unfolding toward death. Even speech he saw as "a broken bird on stunned wings."

His recent poems, for example, the 1999 long poem called Trem Neul (meaning "through my dream") contains what the English poet Douglas Clark notes as "vaguely impersonal voices emerging from a Galway landscape." The poem mixes prose and verse facing each other but not in any way complementing or explaining each other. Its language is as in Joyce's poetry frequently difficult, leading to a seeming nowhere or to an incomprehensibility that seems part of the very meaning of the poem. The poet's dream is filled with the illogicality of today's world. How could the syntax, the flow of language be anything but a blur of sound, of a sound of unknown or at least of unusual meanings? Here is a page that is characteristic:

I sat there, my heart beating                             If you be not wise
shaken by what had happened, for                                then have
are we not all prone to error, all                                                (bitter)
strangers at home? As the language                              memories
changes course through time, a pla-
cemame gets stranded, parched, cut                  May you not have
off from the stream of meaning, until                            the memory
another inundation reach, reinter-                                   of the deer
pret and reanimate. The sound may
have to be bent for this to happen,                     It is my earliest
and the first sense left for ever irre-                       recollection
coverable, or the stuff of books,                                 Quite unexpectedly
though locally, as stuff of lives, it
stays a name, a pointer (maybe mis-
leading) to the place.

Yes, quite unexpectedly, there is another Joyce of importance.

Click here to buy this book at Amazon.com

Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press ($14)

by Michael McIrvin

I have long been suspicious of poets who write in form because form runs counter to the world bequeathed us: we know the infinite reticulations of matter are as random as a thunderbolt, for example, and consequently our attempts to make it all cohere remain provisional by definition—and therefore our language must be fluid, transformational, always in flux. Which is to say, the urge to form is at once human (the need to temporarily freeze in time what flows past us and through us)—and thus the impetus for all poetry, all writing, all art—and nostalgic, especially if it includes reaching after an ideal of order when we no longer believe in the possibility.

Somewhere in human history a sonnet could hold the world because we knew the world as a series of observable cause and effect relationships that reflected the divine will. In short, we knew the world precisely as order, and thus poets had little trouble pouring everything they knew into 14 lines with a particular rhyme scheme—the form itself was a natural thing that rode into creation on the breath of God. What better participation in the universe than to actualize incipient form, to turn our thoughts and emotions into a palpable thing?

But then we awoke to the bloodbath that is human history, and any notion of order crumbled into the dirt, sonnets and villanelles included. For how could such perfect vessels hold this terrible carnage, the poets asked? How could form exist at all in art when it doesn't exist out there, in the world at large? The trick became, and remains, how to speak at all; but more of this in a moment.

It doesn't help matters that the majority of postmodern formalist poetry (which is not the oxymoron it appears) is terrible—a pastiche of Spencer or Donne that hides bad content behind strident end rhyme and perfectly distraught iambs, as if form were an inherent excuse: after all, I did rhyme the whole damned thing, and each line is perfect iambic hexameter, which is quite hard to do, you know. But even as I write this, it occurs to me that the observation begs the question of poetical competence: most poetry in America stinks at the moment. I suppose some poets have retreated to form thinking that if those who don't know a dactyl from an anapest write garbage, maybe stark rhythm and rhyming everything abab will make one's utterance sufficiently poetical. Sadly, however, no such easy fix will suffice.

Which brings me to Dana Gioia's latest collection, Interrogations at Noon. Like it or not (and Gioia doesn't seem to mind), the poet is associated with the New Formalists, a loose affiliation of poets ranging from those who think naively that form in and of itself will save American poetry from the vacuous trap it has made for itself to a more enlightened minority whose notion of form (generally) is more complex—who seem at least to intuit the contradiction they are up against. The latter tend to remind us that the best poems, regardless of the issuing camp, are incipient song, that rhythm (of breath and heartbeat) separates us elementally from the dead. But they also seem to recognize that strict form is anomalous, a wistful backward glance at a conception of the universe we simply can't abide given the abundant evidence to the contrary.

And the best formal poems in Gioia's collection do just that, employ their self-imposed patterns in the service of meaning while recognizing the limitations of applied forms, but there are also poems that fall apart precisely because the poet has strained too hard to fit them into their own overly tight little shirts. An otherwise good poem like "Entrance," for example, ends weakly because the poet insists on exact end rhymes for the last two lines.

It is telling, however, that the poem is a failed sonnet, twelve lines instead of fourteen, which symbolizes the contradiction a poet attempting formal poetry faces: the desire to formalize (in a structurally determined poem) the chaotic world. But more than this, the slipping in and out of poetical forms, their manifestation only to deconstruct before our eyes, is innately elegiac. Consider this stanza from "Metamorphosis":

And you, my gentle ghost,
Did you break free before the cold hand clutched?
Did you escape into the lucid air
Or burrow secretly among the dark
Expectant roots, to rise again with them
As the unknown companion of our spring?

This is the world held at arm's length for observation. Even the speaker's emotions in response to a terrible loss appear only obliquely, as a culmination of imagery. Wordsworth could have written this stanza, except for the fact that its sprung iambs in a book of poems that aspire to one form or another, usually purposefully failing to achieve it in the strictest sense, makes the stanza far darker than Romantic nostalgia. The world has gone awry, has both exceeded our bleakest expectations and overwhelmed our belief that human experience makes sense (i.e., overwhelmed our belief in humanly authored form). The result is a profound disappointment.

The titles of poems like "The End of the World" or "Song for the End of Time" suggest the depth of the speaker's sadness, a recognition that the shadow of death now haunts the culture if not the species itself. In "A California Requiem," the dead themselves say,

Forget your stylish verses, little poet--
So sadly beautiful, precise, and tame.
We are your people, though you would deny it.
Admit the justice of our primal claim.

This is a recognition that the poet's forms are empty gestures on the void, that poems generally, regardless of the poet's formal assertions (from spoken word to this solemn and pedestrian rhyme scheme), are at best a personal rant against time (as Williams told us), but they are ultimately ineffectual in the face of the cold facts of human existence at the dawn of the 21^st century (in this case the despoliation of the poet's native state). As a poet acquaintance at Harvard told me recently (in the same disparaging breath in which he told me that if he were to throw a rock in a random direction in Cambridge he'd hit a teaching poet), poetry will never be the reason the masses storm the barricades or otherwise act to change the messy state of things. In short, as Williams asked himself aloud (and thereby asked us all), the unspoken question in Gioia's collection seems to be, why write at all?

The most telling title in Interrogations at Noon is perhaps "The Lost Garden," which is about an actual place but also emblematically a reference to Eden—from which we have not so much been cast as we have cast ourselves. In "Juno Plots her Revenge," Gioia tells us, "[Hercules] will use violence to make his claim. / It will not bother such a man to rule / A decimated and demolished kingdom." He could easily be talking about the human race. Which is to say, at best the poet offers up an indictment, a picture of the world crumbling, but he cannot save the kingdom, cannot save the garden, cannot incite the masses. But, indeed, every poem is homage to the innocent belief to the contrary, and therefore a heroic (if futile) act.

However, we cannot live for long in the dark territory of our recognition that humanity stumbles helplessly, gleefully, toward some awful abyss of our own making. Despair over the poet's lot, impotent understanding, leads only (and always) to self-destruction. In "Descent to the Underworld," the poet tells us that to be "Confined to this black place is worse" than death. And thus we must ascend, become an instantiation of Orpheus singing even as we climb out into the light, where

What matters most
Most often can't be said. Better to trust
The forms that hold our grief.

(from "Corner Table")

For as Williams accused Crane, failure to find a form to hold our reality (and grief is the poet's operative mode in postmodernity and, therefore, elegy the poet's most likely content) will certainly destroy the strongest among us. At the very least, I must give Gioia credit for trying.

I still can't trust poets who write in strident form; too many are weak writers hiding behind self-imposed constraints, and the urge to absolute form still smacks of unrestrained nostalgia. But Gioia, for the most part, struggles with the concept of form on that larger scale: how to make sense of the world for the race, which after all is the poet's primal job, however perfect or disrupted one's syntax, however useless the act in the end—which, somehow, ennobles the attempt.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Claudia Rankine
Grove Press ($13)

by Bonnie Blader

Oh, action of narrative Oh secret plan To chart To chart A small
piece of land

Plot. Claudia Rankine mines the word thoroughly. Her armature for this engagement with emotional implications and consequences is an Ur-plot: married woman and man make baby. Her characters exist elsewhere in art; Liv (Ullmann) and Erland (Josephson), who played Marianne and Johan in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, are replotted here. The actors are present as their characters; Rankine wants an echo of the film to shadow her project as she gives voice, mostly, to Liv, recording her resistance and submission to the idea of her unborn son, Ersatz, who inhabits her, body and mind, and plots to be born.

Plotted also are Liv's internal monologues and subtle emotional shifts. She is harrowed by threats to "I" in the face of Ersatz's "Here," which demands her recognition of flow, of a continuum, the stone-like weight of lineage and connection. Liv paints and repaints Virginia Woolf's drowned body floating, without volition, in the River Ouse. Plot, she reminds us, rhymes with rot. Woolf's pockets were filled with stones. The womb plots with death. Ersatz should turn back. The body sloughs cells: "She lets the tissue fall, wondering, Is the new always a form of a truce? a bruising?" To be fully here is the risk Rankine considers: "lost // far from here though I am here aiming."

Her devices bear notice. She shows the power of 'r' pressed with alliterative consonant weight and long vowels, finding these sounds markers for emotional content:

Ideally (so already never) what they desired, sired, is a love that
would flood everyday fears communicable: each broken step,
open depth, blackened call, searing grasp, oh ruined cell—but
it's a retarded and retarding love that frets.

Rhyme and rhythm controlled by stops force the ear to take in what Rankine has called the trace elements in words, how one word has a sound memory of other words in it, although their meanings may not be similar. She exploits this idea at various points in the book, producing sections in which word "proximities" are made to work as plot. The characters travel the distance between the words and link them. Thus, in "A short narrative of hand and face entitled Proximity of Clock to Lock," a repeated phrase ("He was biting his cuticle.") ticks off time. Meanwhile, the characters consider all of the decisions they must now make in preparation for Ersatz, decisions which spell confinement and systems, or lock. The skin Erland bites is dead, "little rips in the claims / the birth would make," and "where sperm dried this morning, his skin looked / ashen." Clock marries lock.

The text works like a mind: variously. Its visual surprises, Rankine's use of block print, boxed text, full stops mid-phrase, open field, conversation, word paintings and proximities, all complicate "Here" at the textual level: ‘Here, I freely give you this book to read; here, my hand is attached and this is between us.' The text, like Ersatz, is born with a cord that paradoxically frees readers from fixed (known) forms in order to allow them to be intimately present in its nuanced mind.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

Norman Dubie
Copper Canyon Press ($30)

by Joel Weishaus

Norman Dubie was born in Vermont in 1945. He received the usual fellowships for those writers who toil in the fields of Academe (Guggenheim, NEA, etc.), and teaches at Arizona State University. The Mercy Seat, which collects over 30 years of work, including 21 new poems, is his twentieth book.

Although he sometimes writes in the first person, Dubie seems more comfortable assuming a persona, usually an historical revenant. ("Vulnerability is a writer's best defense," he's written; "Why intellectually do I reject this?") In Dubie's hands, Western Theater's tradition of alternating between the twin masks of tragedy and comedy are molded into an irony that borders on the grotesque. In "A True Story of God," for example, Henry Thoreau is "lost in the Maine woods / At the center of the black pond," where he stands in an "Old Town canoe…welcoming a moose." The moose is already dying, and Thoreau, of delicate constitution, faints "back into his rented canoe."

The first allusion is of course a nod toward Dante. The poet is lost in the woods, and finds himself in the darkness of his soul. As for Old Town, I think of the Southwestern shops that hawk native pottery and jewelry to tourists in a cavernous semi-darkness created by thick adobe walls. We buy Amerindian trappings to warm souls grown chilly from the excesses of Capitalism's ethos of ownership. Standing in his rented canoe, Thoreau—still one of our most insightful cultural critics—raises his arms and welcomes Nature in the form of a moose. The animal floats toward him, already dying, "drunk with the methane / of bottom grasses." Then the poet faints. His guide—in a Dantean universe, he must have a guide—has "sliced off the upper lip of the creature / As a delicacy for his woman." That night, "The long rubbery hairs of the lip" will be burned in the campfire, while the poet

…is brooding, telling himself
That God is in nature and nature
Is in men; in that order…
Lies the salvation of all animals
Who are placed closer to God than to humans.

This is a sophisticated rendering of an idea that the poet Gary Snyder (whom many critics hail as a contemporary Thoreau) introduced in his poem "Long Hair," where he humorously wrote that when we eat deer meat, the animal occupies us. "When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once…and everything will change some. This is called ‘takeover from inside.'" While both poems address the spiritual investment humans have in animals, and the karmic opportunities humans give animals to realize a higher consciousness through them, Dubie adds the angst of someone desperately trying to think his way out of an uncomfortable position, while Snyder has created the myth of a man who can astutely handle any situation.

Dubie continues by having Thoreau observe that humans, "knowing they possess a soul," become "useless. Useless and cruel." A bitter commentary, with which I can agree only on the worst of days. Instead, I would say that presumption of a soul is humanity's greatest boon and heaviest burden; it makes us more restless than useless, more arrogant than cruel. But I'm splitting philosophic hairs, just as "Thoreau jumps, / the fat of the lip / snapping from the fire like gunfire."

Another representative poem in this 434-page volume, "The Dun Cow and The Hag," begins: "Beside the river Volga near the valley of Anskijovka, / On a bright summer day // An old woman sat sewing / By the riverbank. If asked she would say // She was lowering the hem of a black dress." This Impressionistic scene—Dubie's imagination flows easily between literature and the visual arts—is filled out with a cow standing beside her; a dun cow, dull grayish brown, dun being also a fishing fly of this color, which ties the woman to the river.

The woman sat all day sewing, while the cow, I suppose, grazed on the succulent summer grasses. When evening came, "a merchant / From Novorod arrived with his family." The family begins to eat "chunks of pink fish." Now, like a flat rock skipping over a placid pond suddenly changes direction, the picnicking family is poisoned by the fish, which was spoiled on their journey, all but the buxom daughter, who had gone bathing, and is now "floundering" in the river, crying for help, with "Just her arms above the water / Working like scissors."

With his knack for turning ordinary events into surreal gestures, the poet has the hag (in the Middle Ages the hazazussa was a woman who straddled the fence separating civilization and wilderness) leave the cow—contently producing the milk of life—and walk to the girl, whose arms, "Working like scissors…cut the thread for the old woman."

What are we to make of this? "Various people have held the belief that human life is determined (sometimes at birth) by maternal goddesses or supernatural beings, and that life ends when a cord, or thread, is severed," wrote the anthropologist Geza Roheim. Thus the hag had been sewing the black dress of the girl's death, wanting for her to arrive: "The black water / Ran off her dress like a lowered hem."

Even when disguised as a woman, Dubie's tutelary spirit is Dionysus, whom psychologist James Hillman has identified as a god of "downwardness, darkening, and becoming water." Indeed, though he makes his home in a sun-drenched desert, Dubie's roots are in the moist dark woods of the Northeast. While retaining the artist's necessary connection with the child's imaginal realm, he also nurtures a conscious affinity with his death. However, as many of his poems end in ellipses, and as he is said to practice Tibetan Buddhism, Dubie inscribes death as an exit, rather than an end. As his "Elegy for My Brother," one of the new poems in this volume, puts it, "The requiems are melting back into music."

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002

The Machine in Ward Eleven
Four Walls Eight Windows/No Exit Press ($12.95)

The Woman Chaser
Four Walls Eight Windows/No Exit Press ($12.95)
Charles Willeford

by Kris Lawson

Charles Willeford (1919-1988) grew up an orphan who attended boarding schools when not running away to ride the rails as a hobo. He served for 20 years in the military and commanded a tank in WWII. It was during his military service that he began writing, publishing poetry, short stories, and pulp novels, as well as taking classes and earning his bachelor's degree. After retiring from active service, Willeford taught English for 16 years in Miami before becoming a fulltime writer. He wrote 16 novels, four autobiographies, poetry and criticism, and three of his novels—Miami Blues, The Cockfighter and The Woman Chaser—were made into movies.

Willeford's life occasionally overlapped into his writing. In The Woman Chaser, for example, Willeford—who reached the rank of master sergeant—introduces a character who happens to be a newly-retired master sergeant:

His face, with it's [sic] secret, knowing, covering smile, was a reflection of and on every commanding officer he had ever served. He had done their work for them, and he had received no credit, but he knew, and that was enough for him. There were hundreds like him in the Army, a not-so-secret society of non-commissioned officers who actually ran the Army year after year, watching tolerantly as the Reserve officers entered, served a couple of years, and departed in disgust with the system.

Willeford's prose is spare and laconic. What's riveting about his fiction is how he leads the reader gradually, with matter-of-fact descriptions, into a completely off-kilter world that the reader—and the narrator—see as normal, only to have the real world come crashing down on the head of the poor sap who's telling the story.

Although Willeford is often referred to as a hardboiled writer, his stories are neither classic noir nor entirely pulp. His style seems to be more in the Hemingway-esque "one-man-against-the-world" existentialist tradition, mixed with a healthy dose of post-war "Twilight-Zone" paranoia. Willeford's first-person characters are lonely men who have been isolated by lack of family, by lack of meaning in their lives, and by an uncaring, machine-like society that punishes people who try to step outside their designated functions. And as opposed to the classic noir tradition, where women are archetypes or two-dimensional floozies, Willeford's female characters actually have a little more depth—not a lot more, but enough to get a sense of their personalities.

The Woman Chaser introduces Richard Hudson, a virtual orphan whose ability to manipulate people makes him a very successful used car salesman. Instead of being contented with the material trappings of this success, Hudson finds himself driven by the need to create something real, and coolly arranges his world to give himself the best opportunity to produce something amazing. Unfortunately, the creative goal he pursues is not conducive to his manipulations, which begin to rebound on him.

Hudson has a mother who has always spent her days dressing up as a ballerina and dancing in the basement, living off the royalties of a song her first husband wrote before killing himself, and carrying on a pseudo-sexual relationship with her son. Her second husband and stepdaughter are spiraling down the social ladder and are one step away from economic disaster when Hudson steps in and saves the day. The price he exacts is high: his stepsister's innocence and his stepfather's last remnant of pride. But Hudson ends up paying the highest price of all in exchange for pursuing his dream.

In The Woman Chaser—a title, incidentally, that seems to have been chosen for purposes of titillation rather than for its aptness—Richard Hudson visualizes the societal machine as a trailer truck brutally running over an innocent little girl. "The Machine in Ward Eleven" uses an electroshock machine to represent this process in a more intimate way. This title piece in a sextet of stories presents J.C. Blake, an inmate in a mental hospital who savors his memories the way other people probe a sore tooth or pry at scabs. Blake, a director, has higher ideals and expectations than his producers, and his career plummets. In despair he tries to commit suicide and is institutionalized. He enjoys being in the hospital, finding it easy to live there on his own terms, comparing it to a monk's cell and a womb—until he's told he will receive shock treatment. To Blake, the machine represents a living death, burning away his personality and his memories:

His memories, his ability to laugh at his follies and stupidities—when the chips were finally down, these were the only things a man had left to him. Otherwise, a man is a pine tree, a turnip, a daisy, a weed, existing through the grace of the sun and photosynthesis during the day, and ridding himself of excess carbon dioxide during the long night.

In his struggles to evade the machine Blake does everything, including debasing himself, to keep his individuality. The irony is that the struggle changes him into someone willing to accept compromise, someone who fills his role very well: a docile mental patient who is willing to trade his freedom in order to keep his memories.

There are three Blake stories in all, ranging from Tibet to Hollywood. The Blake stories at first seem to be in reverse order—Blake in the psych ward in "The Machine in Ward Eleven," "Selected Incidents," wherein a movie executive muses over Blake's life contrasted with his own, and finally, "Jake's Journal," Blake's memory of his younger days, an odd twilight existence in a lonely airfield in Tibet. Did Blake die in Tibet, and was the whole Hollywood dream just that, a dying vision? Or is the Tibet episode the result of the inmate's half-remembered, half-manufactured memories? Willeford provides no definitive answers.

The non-Blake stories in The Machine in Ward Eleven are entertaining and move quickly. "Just Like on Television—" is a darkly humorous look at the influence of popular entertainment on a vulnerable audience. "The Alectryomancer" brings in Willeford's interest in cockfighting parenthetically, but concentrates on the ability of a man to believe in something inherently unbelievable, even in the face of mockery, because it works for him. "A Letter to A.A. (Almost Anybody)" is another example of Willeford's bleak humor: an alcoholic discovers that no matter how low he and his family sink, sobering up may not be the best solution for all concerned. Willeford's not-so-subtle digs at mass entertainment, organized religion, and social service continue his theme: society will punish individuality no matter what form it takes.

Click here to purchase The Machine in Ward Eleven at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Woman Chaser at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2001/2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2001/2002