Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins
Soft Skull Press ($20)

by Steve Burt

Between 1979 and 1995, the kids, bands and record labels of greater Washington DC invented—mostly with help, on occasion single-handedly—the following developments in rock music and culture: (1) the early-80s sound of American hardcore (very young, very fast, very loud); (2) the lifestyle called straightedge, with its sometimes commonsensical, sometimes dogmatic opposition to drink, sex and drugs; (3) the anti-corporate, do-it-yourself ethos of the long-lived, small-scale record label, and the tactics which helped those labels endure; (4) "emo" (emotionally intense post-punk rock, often with a focus on anguished male vocals); (5) coalition tactics which linked post-punk bands and audiences to broad political issues; (6) the melodic Anglophile sounds of the subgenre called American indie-pop; and, finally, (7) the young feminist rock-and-politics movement called Riot Grrrl. DC punk and its offshoots matter to any story of American rock over the past 25-or-so years; moreover, DC (like almost any metropolis) has not just one but many stories about individual bands, labels, scenes, musicians, worth hearing (and hearing about) for their own sake. Other folks have tried to tell bits of those stories—in years of zines, in alternaweekly newspapers, on websites, even in a book of photographs (Cynthia Connolly's Banned in DC). This volume, though, tell most of the stories at once; it's the most reliable, most thorough, guide I've ever seen to a local rock scene, and it's well-written enough to hold at least this reader's attention from first to last page.

DC had a punk scene, as many big cities had a punk scene, in 1978. It became exceptional in part with the advent of Bad Brains, who for a few months in 1979 were the fastest and most charismatic punk band on the continent, the font in some ways of all later harDCore. (Bad Brains leader HR soon turned from the self-help philosophy of their punk singles towards Rastafarian dogma and reggae, and later into vicious homophobia and serious mental illness.) Most of the story here, however, concerns the people and bands on the Dischord record label, started in 1981 by the high school-aged Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson to release singles by their band Teen Idles (whose signature song, "I Drink Milk," made a virtue of an underage necessity). In 1980 MacKaye would became the charismatic and intensely ethical front man for Minor Threat; Dischord would sponsor other seminal so-called "harDCore" bands, and find itself somewhat unwillingly at the head of a national subculture of sometimes moralistic, sometimes inspiring straightedge youth. "I consider my life a protest," MacKaye once said. Fans thought so too, and some idolized him, then turned on him for the slightest of imagined sellouts.

Bankrupt or unpredictable venues, hometown and out-of-town violence, and personnel changes (often, high school graduates leaving for college) meant that these bands and their members were constantly changing: some of those changes looked like decline. The label and its people would rally in the so-called "Revolution Summer" of 1985, marked by the first, and the best, "emo" band, Rites of Spring. "In the place of unfocused anger," Andersen and Jenkins explain, RoS's "passion suggested that any given song could be about the end of a relationship—or the beginning of a new world." Ex-MT and RoS members later formed Fugazi, whose national tours still draw thousands of fans, and adhere to the anticommercial agenda Andersen and Jenkins describe: "all ages shows, low door prices, minimal PR, no rock 'n' roll bullshit." Political organizing by bandmates and friends created an organization called Positive Force, which begat protests and meetings, which begat the Olympia (Washington)-Washington, DC fanzine and rock band axis, which in turn begat Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and Riot Grrrl.

Most people who read this book will enjoy its detailed accounts of those influential bands. And yet, Andersen and Jenkins show, those bands' tales are hardly the only ones DC has; show by show, single by single, person by person, this book explores an entire scene, or congeries of interlocking scenes, trying very hard to focus as much on one-gig bands, friendships, rallies and basements as on big-deal outfits and sold-out shows. (Even the title conveys that decentralized focus: it names a song by the "minor" Dischord band Embrace.) That consistent multiple focus—along with the show-by-show, person-by-person, sometimes day-by-day detail—let Andersen and Jenkins pursue discoveries larger than any individual musician's story.

Dance of Days shows how the development of an artistic style—the earnest, propulsive post-punk of most Dischord bands—interacts with everything else in the artists' lives. High-school kids chuck out 60s song forms for faster, simpler music which expresses their independence, then discover that the older forms and disciplines can be harnessed to express the same ideals. Minor Threat learned, and spread, this lesson with their punk-rock covers of 60s songs—"Stepping Stone," "Good Guys Don't Wear White"; later outfits from Gray Matter to Q and Not U picked it up fast and well. Later DC punk bands found their own paths between spontaneity and songwriting, between energy and organization, and not least—between "white" and "black" musical forms; some of the bands that interest Andersen most matter not so much for what they accomplished as for what they tried to do. (Beefeater, for example, tried to merge late punk with early funk and performance art; their records sound terrible, but their shows mattered a lot.)

Other overarching stories here bring in age, race, sexuality, and gender in other ways. Every 50 pages here, or every two years, a new crop of teen bands arise to challenge, as it were, the staid twenty-something scene: no matter how naïve the kids' expectations seem, their new bands always add something—musically, personally, organizationally—to what already exists. Bad Brains were African-American, while almost everyone else in these bands (and in other U.S. hardcore scenes) was white: the DC scene of the early Eighties included genuine racial violence along with idealistic organizers who wanted to make an anti-racist scene. Punk and its offshoots (even more then than now) were largely music by, for and about young men: national tours and local events brought violent homophobes into confrontations with out gay punks. (I was less surprised by the bashings and slurs recounted here than by how early—1982, say—many punks spoke out against homophobic peers.)

Though DC New Wave (like New Wave in New York and Boston) included plenty of women musicians, the harDCore sound, and the Dischord roster, remained for years almost all male; only in 1986 did the label release its first woman-fronted band, the underrated and prescient Fire Party. Andersen and Jenkins show how MacKaye and others at the scene's "center" (if that's the right word) gradually realized, and worked to mitigate, the music's links to male dominance and aggression. (Fugazi's first EP included a powerful, controversial song about sexual harassment.) Musical and moral leaders—not just MacKaye but Tomas Squip and many others—worked hard to disarticulate punk message of independence and strength from the hypermasculine violence which so often accompanied harDCore shows. (Peripheral players in the Dischord scene—like the young Henry Rollins—seemed to thrive on the violence instead.) Later chapters—in which Andersen himself enters the story—show how leftie organizing and DC's post-punk musical became more heavily intertwined, and how Andersen's own anti-capitalist ideology clashed with the anti-corporate but entrepreneurial agenda of people who actually ran record labels (especially Tsunami's Toomey). The last chapters here describe the dizzyingly rapid—and widely discussed—rise of Riot Grrrl: this is a story we'll likely hear over and over, and Andersen and Jenkins offer mostly (as they know) a sympathetic, DC-based outsiders' perspective.

As Jenkins' foreword indicates, this is "overwhelmingly Mark Andersen's book." Andersen moved from Montana to DC in 1984: he ended up organizing, and in part directing, Positive Force, which sponsored events like the famous Punk Percussion Protests, owned a house in Arlington (across the river from DC proper), and offered groups and labels meeting space. Andersen seems to have conducted most of the (many, many) interviews: he also provides the personal reactions which dominate the last few chapters—"it is hard to build a movement for broad social change," he reflects, "out of moments occurring erratically in subterranean enclaves." He's upset that harDCore and its descendents built—in the last analysis—an art movement with political beliefs attached, rather than a more durable instrument for a social and moral cause. Jenkins—the very articulate longtime rock critic for DC's City Paper and, latterly, the Washington Post--brings to the coauthored volume (I suspect) a feel for good prose, and a knowledge of the pre-Dischord, late-70s scene—from the raunchy Slickee Boys to the geeky brilliance of Tru Fax and the Insaniacs. Readers who want to read about the music—rather than just about people and their beliefs—will recognize and appreciate Jenkins' work.

This collaboration gives an understandably Dischord-centric view of the DC scene (with timeouts for Bad Brains and their bad behavior). For most of the book that makes sense; near the end, it doesn't. Andersen and Jenkins do follow the newer, poppier, labels and bands of the early 1990s—not just Tsunami but, say, Shudder to Think—though coverage there ends up neither as supportive nor as detailed as it might be; bands with no Dischord links and no politics (like those on the Teen Beat label: Unrest, Eggs) get ignored almost entirely. But this is only to say that there remain other stories to tell. (Simple Machines has told theirs very well, as any web search will attest.) Rockers past, present and future—not to mention anyone interested in rock scenes, youth organizing, and youth culture—need this book on their shelves.

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Edited by Joy Press
Three Rivers Press ($14)

by Laird Hunt

Once upon a time, the Voice Literary Supplement was capable of busting balls and warping minds. Writers like Dorothy Allison, Gary Indiana, Kathy Acker and Lynne Tillman inhabited its gritty anti-uptown trenches, and explosions of definitely downtown trend-setting brilliance were rife. So, at any rate, goes the legend (legend to those of us who came to the tamer VLS of recent years), one that War of the Words, a collection of 40 pieces culled from the supplement's 20 years of existence goes quite some distance towards bearing out. This is a welcome reminder, as today's VLS seems a shrunken thing, a slender hodge-podge of articles that, while still capable of publishing the occasional terrific piece, has lost its edge and celebrates much the same work in much the same way that the uptown venues do.

No doubt this has a lot to do with the fusion of uptown and downtown sensibilities that occurred over the course of the '90s, when articulate writers with both brains and scruff (e.g. David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, William T. Vollman, Mary Gaitskill) were on the ascendant and began to seem relevant to the denizens of the East Village (or Williamsburg) and those on the Upper West Side. As current VLS editor Joy Press, who put the collection together, writes in her introduction, "Today, of course, it's much less clear what 'bohemia' or 'underground' signifies than when the supplement was founded. From music to films to the literary scene, left-field ideas cross over with disconcerting speed, a process that depletes them of content while sapping the community that originally nourished them." One might have hoped, however, despite such obstacles, that given its mission to treat "literature as something intimately entangled with the conflicts and confusions raging outside the realm of paper and ink," the VLS would have found a way to stay restive, lively, cantankerous, brash.

War of the Words certainly is. Press has chosen well—the book abounds with razor-sharp, sweet and sour gems. Take Peter Schjeldahl's prescient essay on the importance of Denis Cooper's proem Safe; C. Carr on Kathy Acker's Don Quixote; Thulani Davis on Buppie writers; Greg Tate on inveterate mind-blower Samuel Delany; and Jeff Yang on Chang-Rae Lee's terrific Native Speaker, and you'll get some idea of the spice and riches on hand. Not to be missed either are Dorothy Allison's investigation of smarts and eros in Anne Rice's work; Paul Elie's skewering of John Cheever; Guy Trebay's breezy but poignant look at The Andy Warhol Diaries; and Lynne Tillman's brilliant precis on the future of fiction.

Press has organized the essays into five sections, each demonstrating a different aspect of the VLS mission. Thus in section one, younger writers take on classics like Gertrude Stein, or some day classics like Don Delillo, and in section two, we get essays on deserving writers whose reputations have become a bit musty or need recasting (e.g., Zora Neal Hurston, Thomas Bernhard, Angela Carter). Sections three, four and five are devoted to general cultural issues, pop culture and emerging writers, respectively. Prefacing the essays is an engaging "Short but Sweet Oral History of the VLS", in which a host of key players talk about their relationship to the publication over the years and give testament to the powerful impact it had on them and the wider literary scene. Something one wishes, perhaps selfishly, that the once mighty VLS could have again.

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edited by Thomas Beller
Mr. Beller's Neighborhood ($13)

by Thomas Haley

Novelist and essay-writer Thomas Beller had for a couple of years been asking people to write to his website (mrbellersneighborhood.com) and express themselves on New York events, locations, and people of personal importance to them. Beller was just preparing to compile his favorites from the site into a print volume when the terrorist attacks occurred, rendering the project, in his own words, "exhausting and beside the point." Almost immediately after the Twin Towers fell, though, the website began receiving hits again, and Beller realized that the material his project had gathered and was still gathering was "not only relevant, but possessed of an urgency that it hadn't had before." Before and After: Stories from New York is Beller's selection of the most relevant and most urgent of these very short personal essays, divided into sections labeled simply "Before" and "After."

Many of the "Before" essays are, perhaps surprisingly, sharp and resonant; they do not suffer from the sense of triviality or naivete one might expect of pre-terrorism musings on the city. Maura Kelly's "Kissing the Cab Driver" is a sweet and gritty account of her terminally failed New Year's Eves, focusing on the Millennium's Eve that culminates with the desperate title event. In "The Parakeet Book," Josh Kramer tries in vain to train a bird given him by his now ex-girlfriend. "Johanna gave me the birds because she thought they would be therapeutic for me," he writes, and the detached and helpless curiosity he feels while watching the parakeet take flight and slam into his living room wall will be familiar to anyone who has suffered the end of a relationship.

Whereas the "Before" essays tend towards calmer reflection, the "After" pieces are turbulent meditations and frantic recountings. Bryan Charles, working on the seventieth floor of World Trade Tower 2, sits at his desk reading a Kurt Cobain biography when he hears "a series of muffled booms." A man from accounting named Leo Kirby started yelling. He didn't stop." Joseph Lieber, an ex-New Yorker living in Boston, wrestles helplessly with his frustration at being so far away from the city he still thinks of as home. He writes: "From the moment I learned of the attack, I felt an urgent need to be home, home in the city of my bones, home among my people. I slumped down over a kitchen chair, feeling the enormity of our loss, the enormity of my loss."

And certainly one of the most compelling issues raised by Beller's collection is that fine line between "our loss" and "my loss." Despite the scale and reach of September's paradigm-shifting events, the collection's "After" essays are no less introspective than those under the "Before" title. The self-absorption of the pieces does not make them trite, though—in fact, the best of these essays remind us that ultimately we suffer tragedy alone, drawing from our own store of memories and experiences to make personal sense of things.

Despite several essays that are not themselves particularly good, Before and After is a stirring and impressive catalog of voices. With a few exceptions—Philip Lopate, Luc Sante, and Jeanette Winterson among them—the writers here are not terribly well known, if known at all. Indeed, the sincerity and authenticity of Beller's selections are in part the result of their shirking the kind of "literary" writing generally found in such short pieces of prose. There is no mistaking, in other words, that language is here at the service of the subject; the book is so saturated with vivid humanity, with nightmarish specificity, with the undeniable realities of ashes, concrete, smoke, paper, and tears, that even the weaker pieces raise the questions that will continue to haunt us for some time.

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Kenneth Goldsmith
Granary Books ($18)

by Doug Nufer

Kenneth Goldsmith has a novel approach to poetry: He records chunks of experience and releases the transcriptions as books. The books resemble fiction, as his observations take prose form, but his focus on the bits and pieces of language (to the exclusion of fiction's standard preoccupation with plot, character, and theme) gets his work consigned to a peculiar dustbin of poetry. No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (The Figures, 1997) displays sounds and phrases he collected over the period noted in the title. Fidget (Coach House, 2000) is his tape-recorded notation of the moves his body made in a single day. And now, Soliloquy consists of every word he said in one week.

This book is less refined than his earlier transcriptions, in that the author doesn't mediate his observations as he does in Fidget or arrange phrases as he does in No. 111. It's even less refined than a: a novel, the minimally edited (and somewhat designed) series of transcribed tape recordings produced by the Andy Warhol Factory in the 1960s. Yet Soliloquy is perhaps the purest example of Goldsmith's transcription methodology. It is a quintessentially unwritten book. Sentences veer all over the place, crashing into fragments as they're jammed one after another into long stretches that break only at the end of the day. Each day gets a chapter, called an "act." For almost 500 pages all you get is what Goldsmith says, in nonstop one-sided conversations with his wife, friends, pets, and everyone else he talks to, in person or on the phone, in a chatty vernacular that's mercifully devoid of overt self-conscious displays of wit and wisdom. He refers to his project once in a while, but a hidden microphone lacks the intrusive absurdity of the cinema verite camera as it monitors the stuff of everyday life. Now that anyone in terrorized America is subject to surveillance, Soliloquy might even cultivate sympathy for those poor bastards in the intelligence sector who must listen to every scrap of verbiage that comes over the wires and through the air.

So, in addition to being unwritten, is this book unreadable? Like Goldsmith's other books, Soliloquy defies anyone who would read it straight through while also inveigling the curious to pick it up and have a go. Skip around, zoom ahead, avoid the website shop talk of his day job, cruise the prattle of the dog walks, savor literary gossip over lunch with Marjorie Perloff, and ogle the unspeakable practices of natural acts. Despite its fidelity to quotidian tedium, the book does manage to generate a kind of plot as you may wonder and the subjects finally discuss how they feel about more or less exhibiting their intimate moments. While the bulk of all of this is necessary for the book's sheer existence, it's not necessary to read the whole thing in order to appreciate it.

What is necessary? This is the question experimental work often poses, even if such inquiry exposes the work's weaknesses. Although Goldsmith's recorded experience is much different from that of Warhol's dopey superstars, Soliloquy takes a certain risk by replicating a technique that may well have been exhausted by a previous avant-garde. Then again, techniques that don't draw attention to themselves or question the necessity of their existence stalk the literary earth with all of the clout of dinosaurs. Publish a novelized memoir and the slightest deviation from the standard issue of tropes may get you accused of originality. Publish an experimental work that is substantially unique but for one or two predecessors, and you're a copycat.

The value and fun of Soliloquy is that it raises such questions and refuses to explain them away by taking dead aim at the meaning of it all.

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Wendy Brenner
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill ($21.95)

by Ann Veronica Simon

"Critics taught me something I didn't know," Wendy Brenner recently told an interviewer; "They taught me that I wrote about eccentrics." It does seem obvious that a father who believed his drowned son still breathes into a tape recorder counts as eccentric. Not to mention an upbeat shoplifter who lives illegally in a mini-storage, or a graduate student whose dissertation takes on "the spiritual and social significance of restaurant mascots." But it does not surprise me that Brenner believes she's writing about people like the rest of us in her second collection of short stories, Phone Calls from the Dead. Her characters are moving as well as hilarious precisely because she depicts them with compassion, not condescension.

In ten tales of private passion and public embarrassment, Brenner's grand parade of small-town oddballs gain our allegiance and recognition by mixing strong emotion with witty dialogue. In one story, six squirrels (yes, squirrels) entangled in a plastic shopping bag worry and argue until a melancholy veterinarian cuts them free. In another, a laid-off temp worker and a physically abused magician engage in an "ongoing debate" about whether success is still possible after 35. (They disagree, but both have miserable lives.) In all cases, the unlikely identification we start to feel prevents us from differentiating ourselves or making defensive critical judgments. Amused sympathy strips us of the illusion that we can stand at a comfortable distance from these apparent losers or lunatics.

Nearly all Brenner's characters gain our grudging interest and partial respect, even as we laugh at their absurd predicaments. Even those we might at first want to dismiss as shallow or childish have idiosyncratic habits of diction as complex and unmatchable as fingerprints. There's a homeless crack addict who talks "like Ripley's Believe It Or Not, " spouting non-sequiturs such as "You know you can die from eating glitter?" There's also a group of Valley Girls who combine stock phrases such as "are you, like, mental?" with more unique outbursts like "Woo, delighted, delighted." These characters don't speak like each other, so manage not to be interchangeable mouthpieces of Brenner's overarching linguistic virtuosity. We can't dismiss them as a series of identically instructive failures, comfortingly different from us in some genetic sense.

This book also expertly captures the private languages typical of every couple, family, or circle of quarreling officemates. In most stories, readers get to eavesdrop on the sorts of nicknames we all have for our pals and enemies—PA Girl, Shed boy, Post-It, Sonny von Cher—in a way that makes the characters who invent them more familiar than crazy. Nor can we stop absurd newspaper headlines from ringing true, along with TV shows with names like "The Cantankerous Judge," and community education classes titled "Understanding Your Gerbil." It's actually the culture we already live in that Phone Calls from the Dead reveals as eccentric. The scenes Brenner depicts are surreal, twisted, over the top—but not too far off. And a vivid, entertaining read besides.

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Ali Smith
Anchor Books ($12)

by Jessica Hoffmann

Try this: judge a book by the times its words wind you with excitement, astonishment, joy, wonder.

It happens every couple of pages with Hotel World, Scottish writer Ali Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted second novel. For instance: There's the moment when Smith's effervescent ghost (whose "breath, you might say, has been taken" and whose swooping-and-soaring first-person account of lamented life after sudden death opens the novel) begins to lose language, and the author cues the very live reader to fill in the blanks in her/his own silent, invisible parentheses. It's a thrill; it's a call to attention; it's an invitation to action—reading Hotel World, like living, like loving (the doing deeply of both are central themes of the novel) is no passive affair.

Composed of internal monologues by four women and a genderless ghost (plus a more distantly narrated epilogue), Hotel World is given in six voices. Each voice has its own distinct rhythm and vocabulary, and speaks from a different tense. Smith establishes these voices by their distinctness, and then fills the entire work with internal allusions that draw connections between the disparate-seeming sections, thus threading the novel's concern with difference and sameness, separateness and connectedness, into the book's formal fabric. The soil turned for a fresh grave echoes in a later passage in which a bedridden woman senses her own thoughts as "turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon." A teenager collects dust from behind her dead sister's bed, liking to think dead-skin bits of her sister are saved there, a-hundred-and-some pages after a ghost on its way out of this world longs for dust in particular, for how you could "watch it stencil into your fingerprint, yours, unique, nobody else's." Singularity. Relationship.

Smith's fictional hotel chain, Global Hotels—one branch of which houses most of the novel's action—promises sameness no matter the shift in town, nation, continent: "It doesn't matter where you are in the world if you're anywhere near a Global Hotel." Hotel World the novel exposes Hotel World the way of life, for what it is—a desiccation, a reduction, a self-deceiving mode of existence in which fabricated sameness secures isolation/insulation. But: the staff spits in the food and there's been a freak-accident death in the dumb-waiter; the seeming-sealed rooms are rummaged through by ghosts and chambermaids and that board on the wall covers nothing but a black hole.

There are hearts everywhere in this book. Racing, fluttering like birds flapping against the walls of their cages. Hearts slammed into mouths. Hearts pumping, stopped. Also ubiquitous are relationships with language. One character is losing words; another's doing away with vowels and other excess, speaking in a compressed mumble ("spr sm chn?"). Still another types lists of empty superlatives for a living (she writes for the style pages of the World: "That's my job, filling up the grey space every week for people like you and me.") And from their respective beds, one character runs her words together with a string of ampersands while another inadvertently invents a vocabulary of her own from inchoate thoughts floating through her feverish mind.

Hotel World works because its author is deeply engaged with both these elements—heart, language. Form and content, thought and feeling, here, are inextricable. Read Hotel World for its linguistic and structural inventiveness. Read it for its distilled and powerful expression of difficult emotions. Read it both ways, at once, more than one time. Hotel World is a delight, and a heartbreak, and a jolt into looking at language and literature and love and life afresh and with appropriate (requisite) wonder.

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Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Pantheon Books ($23)

by Jay Miskowiec

Like many other Latin American writers, Alfredo Bryce Echenique has divided his life between his homeland and Paris, sometimes referred to as the second capital of the Americas. In his latest novel, Tarzan's Tonsillitis, he passes between the old and the new world through the letters of two lovers caught between the continents.

Set against the political strife of the 1960s and '70s in Latin America and the exile of artists and intellectuals, the story centers on the relationship between Juan Manuel Carpio, a vagabond composer and singer from Peru, and Fernanda María de la Trinidad del Monte, a bourgeois Salvadoran married to an exiled alcoholic Chilean (yes, it sounds like a soap opera, but so do half the plots in contemporary Latin American novels). While every once in a while they make a furtive rendezvous somewhere in the world, from the California beaches to the streets of Paris, they mostly experience each other through their letters, which often delay in catching up with their wandering recipients.

Bryce Echenique shows a bit too much faith in the efficacy of written language here; the straightforward recounting of feelings and experiences of the lovers in their letters (which alternates with first-person ruminations) is supposed to convey their lives more directly to the reader. The author, though, often comes up on the wrong side of that dichotomy described by Henry James: that is, he tells as often as he shows, starting from the very first pages, when Fernanda writes to Juan Manuel apologizing for her apparent silence: "First, your letters were stolen. Stolen because I keep the entire collection in a huge bag, and some horrible gorillas attacked me on the street, grabbing the bag"

In a story where these letters will be prized possessions, messengers of the muses and the soul, this robbery should carry tremendous symbolic value, especially so early in the novel: this is the very theft of memory and being for these characters. But here the event comes off without the weight it needs, and the weakness of the epistolary description is telling. It's hard to speak with tonsillitis, but this depiction of writing as a way of knowing oneself and the other—of sharing something even while far apart—still doesn't show how it ever approaches lived experience.

The best passages seem precisely those when the main characters actually manage to be physically together. Juan Manuel meets up with Fernanda and her family in California. With no qualms of decorum, they spend all their time together, with her even sleeping at his hotel. Walking on the beach, they run into "that huge man with pitch-black hair walking in the opposite direction tightly holding the hand of a little girl and a little boy in each of his savage paws." That man, Fernanda's husband Enrique, forcefully emerges here as that figure which has always hovered over them, isolated and lost while still maintaining a grip on their lives.

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Susan Daitch
Dalkey Archive ($14.95)

by Jason Picone

First published in 1986, Susan Daitch's debut novel is a challenging and complex work that defies easy categorization or simple description. L.C.'s intricate structure shows the author's considerable innovation, as well as her desire to upset a reader's expectations of historical fiction. The book contains a fictional diary translated from the French, the translator's introduction, an epilogue by yet another translator, and a history of the diary and the two translators. Though this might be disastrous in the hands of most first-time novelists, Daitch displays an assured, meticulous control over her novel; the disparate elements of the book cohere in a logical, circular manner that rewards attentive readers.

The novel is primarily composed of diary entries by a 19th-century French woman, Lucienne Crozier, the L.C. of the book's title. Despite the fact that she is newly married, Lucienne's initial entries are hardly the excited thoughts of a young bride; rather, she is critical of the circumstances surrounding her marriage, regretful that she had to marry for money. Her initial misgivings lead her to turn from her husband (who is abroad most of the novel) to the Paris social scene, where she participates in liaisons with the painter Eugene Delacroix and a prominent leftist, Jean de la Tour.

Lucienne's increased involvement in Jean's political activities provides her with some respite from her loveless marriage, but she is prevented from making a substantial contribution, or even voicing her opinion, due to her sex. Her situation becomes more frustrating and untenable, as she is forced to flee Paris with Jean, eventually arriving in Algiers, where she is not even allowed to walk outside by herself.

Sickly, waited on, passivity both enforced and desired, hidden away—none of this was the fate I would have chosen when I left my mother's house. Immobility is the worst of it. How did I get into this room? We had big ideas and slapped titles on them but I haven't done much of anything. My life looks like an inversion of what I set out to do on a large scale.

One of Daitch's many successes is the high degree of verisimilitude exhibited in Lucienne's diary entries. Fictional diaries face the difficult task of familiarizing a reader with the novel's world, while, at the same time, trying to resemble a personal piece of writing that is ostensibly intended to be read by one reader, the writer. Pronouns present just the right degree of uncertainty, as no one would qualify "she" in a diary; the author would know whom the word referred to. This realistic touch has the additional benefit of enlarging possible meanings; in the quote above, "We" ostensibly refers to Lucienne and Jean, but it also could be extended to all the women in the novel, whose ambitions are largely arrested due to their gender.

What is most remarkable about Lucienne is not her unromantic relation of her activities and affairs, but the painstaking gaze which she turns upon increasingly complex subjects. Literally caught in the violence of the 1848 revolution in Paris, Lucienne observes that:

Even if one was initially motivated by principles and politics worked out months or years before, one's actions become only reactions, and one is reduced to animal instincts. The lives of the survivors are changed, a corner is turned and even the memory of the street you left behind is altered. The statue on the corner, the fountain which never ran, all become precious or ravaged, depending on your recovery.

The idea that the meaning of an object changes over time, or that meaning is inherently subjective, is of great significance in L.C. The novel's primary object is the diary, which has been translated from the French over a century after Lucienne's death by Willa Rehnfield, an American professor whose introduction and notes accompany the text of the diary. Oddly enough, the diary entries conclude with an epilogue by yet another translator, Jane Amme, who offers a history of Willa and how she came to be in possession of the diary.

The introduction of Amme (whose name suggests a sort of anti-heroine, since it's Emma spelled backwards) is Daitch's masterstroke. Jane's period as a leftist revolutionary during the late 1960s in Berkley is paralleled with Lucienne's struggle for agency in 1848 Paris in a thoroughly compelling manner. Whereas Lucienne was unable to speak at political meetings and had to flee Paris, Jane was consigned to typing for her student group's male leader and was forced to flee Berkeley. Jane's view of Lucienne leads her to render her own partial translation of the diary, a powerful gesture that seriously questions the faithfulness of Willa's version.

The last twenty pages of the novel present Jane's vision of Lucienne, a depiction that is both strange and familiar when compared with the original translation. The possibility that Lucienne Crozier was an outspoken radical and a forerunner to modern day feminism is raised by Jane, perhaps because it is an authentic portrait, perhaps due to Jane's own political leanings. L.C. is a masterful examination of subjectivity, the politics of translation, and the numbness of unfulfilled desire.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

Michael Hemmingson
Forge ($21.95)

by Tim Brown

If Michael Hemmingson is not yet the high priest of transgressive fiction, then he certainly is among the church's leading members. The author of several novels and story collections and editor of the recent What the Fuck: The Avant Porn Anthology (Soft Skull Press), he has spent the past decade pushing the envelope in literary fiction. At first glance his latest effort, the novel Wild Turkey, departs from the transgressive mode. It takes the form of a contemporary noir thriller with a murder to solve, a conflicted hero, and a beautiful woman who leads the hero along a path of self-destruction.

Philip Lansdale is a disbarred attorney now living as a stay-at-home dad. He becomes infatuated with a gorgeous woman, Cassandra Payne, who lives across the street. His neighbor Bryan, a retired cop, shares his interest, and they spend their time boozing and observing her comings and goings, fantasizing about sex with her, and wondering why mysterious strangers visit her at all hours of the day and night.

Not long after she captures their attention, Cassandra's husband is ambushed and killed. Convinced that Cassandra is responsible for the murder, Bryan and Philip join forces to investigate. The watchful neighbor soon turns into a voyeur as he peers into her bedroom window and spies on her activities. Infatuation grows into obsession, which begets midnight trysts after she discovers him peeping. Ignoring the obvious dangers of tangling with a possible murderess, Philip yields to her seductions, and the couple embarks on a twisted relationship:

"Friday night, Mr. Lansdale," she said, "come back Friday night at the same time, and let's see how we shall transgress our little affair."
Affair. I guess this was what it was—I was being unfaithful to my wife, in certain ways. In many ways. I was committing adultery and I wanted to keep doing it and I wanted to "transgress."

As the plot further unfolds, it becomes clear that Hemmingson has somehow hybridized Mickey Spillane with Kathy Acker. Additional death and mayhem ensue, involving Las Vegas gamblers, counterfeiters, transsexuals, hit men, pyromaniacs, treasury agents, armed showgirls, paraplegics and desert rats. The bloody resolution to the story would make Spillane proud. Acker, the late queen of transgressive fiction, would have loved the bizarre characters that burst from the shadows.

Despite the potential for lapsing into utter nihilism, Wild Turkey is fundamentally a story of transgression, punishment and redemption. With sentences firing straight as bullets into the reader's brain, Hemmingson fashions scenes full of steamy sex, exhilarating violence and unbearable pain. Transformed into voyeurs themselves, readers share Philip's most intimate experiences—the pleasure, the pain, and the guilt for enjoying both.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002

Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
Harriet Scott Chessman
Seven Stories Press ($24)

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl
David Huddle
Houghton Mifflin ($24)

by Carrie Mercer

You can't judge a book by its cover, the old adage goes. But what if the cover is not just something the art department at the publishing house cooked up to lure the ever-roving consumer's eye? What if it's real art? And by real art, I mean art that had a long and prosperous life of its own before some publisher plastered a title and author's name on top of it (not to mention one of those controversial Oprah stickers).

For most authors, pretty much the last thing on their minds when they write a novel is the artwork on the cover of their future book. However, for a few, that artwork would seem to be an essential element of the story. Hence, we have two recent novels, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, by Harriet Scott Chessman, and La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, by David Huddle.

The first book's cover sports a painting of exactly what the title describes, though the painting's title is actually Woman Reading, by the famous impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. We learn from the novel that Mary's older sister Lydia was the model for the painting, and Mary posed her with a newspaper, instead of the (at that time) traditional novel, so that she might look more modern. This detail, like many others in the book, is culled from the author's extensive research on the Cassatt family. Where Chessman departs from research and dreams "my way into her world," is in her point of view: Mary's sister Lydia tells the story through internal monologue. She relates observations and feelings about relationships with her family, the color and bustle of Paris in the late 1870s early 1880s (where the family was living at the time), and perhaps most interestingly, how she sees herself in a different light through her sister's paintbrush.

The novel is structured around five portraits Mary did of her sister, and the main conflict, sadly, is not fictional. Much as Lydia loves to pose for her sister, she struggles to find the energy to do so as she gets sicker and sicker from a degenerative kidney disease. But she finds another self in Mary's paintings, where "sickness holds no place," and she takes comfort there. At times Lydia struggles with wanting to live "in that creamy world of no difficulty." Chessman creates a symbiotic intimacy between the sisters that deepens as a result of the paintings. Lydia needs to pose so that she can see herself through her sister's eyes, and Mary needs Lydia as a model, so that she can see her sister more clearly. After Mary paints Lydia Crocheting in the Garden, Lydia notices her features are "dissolving" and thinks, "It's illness she's discovered." Mary doesn't want to accept Lydia's illness, but in the painting, Lydia sees "not what [Mary] acknowledges, perhaps, but what she knows."

One of the delights of this novel is that we are provided with color plates of all five portraits and can study along with Lydia and so make our own discoveries. The meditative quality of Chessman's writing feels like an appropriate companion to the paintings; each has its dabs of color and momentary, passionate impressions. Chessman bestows Lydia with a painterly eye, turning her thoughts and feelings into composition and landscape: Lydia remarks how "the [orange] peelings make a sphere on her plate" and later how a look from Mary's friend Edgar Degas felt "like a storm on a coast, stirring the trees to wildness, shifting the dunes."

The cover of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, then, is a straightforward invitation to enter into a deeper contemplation of some well-known artwork. Chessman crafts a compelling examination of mortality through the musings of the dying Lydia. Lydia's acceptance of the life she's had—and its impending close—is complicated by her sister's paintings. In the end, she is somewhat contented by the idea that each of Mary's portraits "creates a kind of memory. Whether or not anyone ever knew me, she will offer a memory of me, for the world to claim."

The cover of La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl is, alas, not so straightforward an invitation. The only intimacy we experience with this painting is in its magnification: spidery cracks spread over a face so magnified that it has crowded out everything else, to the point that its circumference can only be imagined beyond the edges of the book's cover. And the face does not belong to the Wolf Girl of the title, but to the thieving accomplice of an old gypsy in Georges de la Tour's The Fortune-Teller.

So who is the Wolf Girl? She is the invention, not of La Tour, but of Suzanne Nelson, the fictional head of the Art Department at the University of Vermont, who is the invention of David Hubble, the author of this odd novel. Suzanne retreats from her failing marriage into the solitude of her daydreams, which she believes "help her create the narrative-based criticism no one else is writing." We never see this criticism, but instead are privy to her strange daydreams about Georges de la Tour, a 17th-century French painter whose work was credited until relatively recently to Caravaggio, among others. La Tour's paintings depicted the daily miseries of peasants with great accuracy, but what little is known of him personally indicates he was as unpleasant and violent as his equally talented contemporary, Caravaggio: court records note one incident in which he beat a peasant almost to death. Huddle's Suzanne is interested in La Tour precisely because of this disconnect between "the deeply humane vision of his paintings and the nastiness of his character."

In Suzanne's daydreams, the Wolf Girl is Vivienne, a shoemaker's teenage daughter who poses as a model for La Tour. What makes her the Wolf Girl is a "coarse thatch" of hair on her back. Vivienne's parents have kept from her any knowledge of this anomalous feature of her body, and on seeing it, so does La Tour. Whereas Vivienne's parents hide the hairy patch to downplay its significance, La Tour keeps it a secret because he is infatuated with it. He poses Vivienne just so that he can stare at her defect. This ongoing fantasy seems to parallel somewhat an experience Suzanne had in college posing nude as a life model for a drawing class. Suzanne was simultaneously aroused and repulsed by the slovenly instructor who posed her. In turn, this experience recalls an earlier encounter with Elijah, a handicapped boy who sketched as he sat next to her on the school bus. But where does this elaborate trail lead?

One thing it leads to is a lot of overwritten extramarital sex. "I came like a freight train. I came like the Fourth of July. I came like a sea elephant," Suzanne thinks after she sleeps with a man she hardly knows simply because she is turned on by his art. Likewise, Suzanne's husband Jack has an equally fulfilling morning with his lover, who "moved him beyond what he thought were the limits of his sexual capacity." Stagey dialogue makes Huddle's characters even more ridiculous, with lines like "Drive fast. Take some chances, Jack. I'll make it worth your while."

Where Huddle is most successful is in his examination of art as a tool we use to form our identities, often unwittingly. Thinking back to her schooldays, Suzanne "begins to see certain parts of her daily life in terms of Elijah's pictures. Or she remembers pieces of her experience as if Elijah had drawn them." Similarly, Suzanne's Vivienne keys into the power of deception as a kind of self-affirming art when she makes up stories about herself to satisfy La Tour's curiosity. "Until you began to ask me about my life, I never saw it," she tells La Tour.

Unlike Chessman's Lydia, who saw a thought-provoking but distinctly foreign self in her sister's paintings, Huddle's Suzanne believes completely in the representations her schoolmate Elijah draws of her and her classmates: "once Elijah had set it into a picture and allowed her to see it, she could grasp what she already knew." It's ironic that of the two novels, the one whose protagonist is most obsessed with art has the least to contribute to our understanding of the artwork on its cover.

Is it fair to require illumination from these novels? Fair or not, their covers create expectations that can be difficult to fulfill. There is potential for the novel to inform the artwork and vice versa, and when it works, as it does in Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, we are left with something larger than the sum of the two works of art. When it doesn't, the cover feels like a cheap enticement. Perhaps Huddle's novel would have felt more complete had it not been paired with such a suggestive cover. Like Suzanne remembering drawings of events Elijah was never present at, some readers may experience the unfortunate side effect of imagining an added detail in La Tour's painting—the unseen hairy back of the Fortune Teller's young assistant.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002