S. L. Wisenberg
University of Nebraska Press ($24.95)

by Lisa Lishman

“You don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl," writes S.L. Wisenberg in her new essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory and Other Obsessions. "But it helps. . . .What matters most is that you must love suffering. You have to pick at wounds, must be encumbered by what you consider an affliction. You have to see your pain as a dark hole you could fall into."

It might be easy to characterize some of Wisenberg's writing, especially early in the book, as self-indulgent, or even sentimental ("You watch your tears make little dents, like tiny upturned rose petals, on the pages," she writes, describing turning through pages of Holocaust photographs in the library's World War II-Europe section). However, what emerges by the book's end is Wisenberg's enormous capacity for empathy, her deeply felt desire to locate herself in different places and times, in other peoples' skins. One senses that Wisenberg is writing to maintain connection between the past that haunts her and the present in which she struggles to understand her identity as a Jewish-American woman living in a post-Holocaust world.

Wisenberg grew up in Houston in the 1960s. Her parents were born in America, too, but Sandi and her older sister, Rosi, grew up acutely aware that "if our grandparents and great-grandparents hadn't immigrated in the beginning of the 20th century we probably would have ended up like the people who died in the Holocaust—or survived." Sandi and Rosi spent many hours playing a game not unlike Cowboys and Indians. In their version, Nazis and Jews, the two would hide in their bedroom closet and pretend they were hiding from the Nazis: "We liked playing in the closet," Wisenberg writes. "We liked the thrill of hiding. . . . The Nazis would take us to a concentration camp. They would take my glasses and asthma drugs and let death just come up and kill me, like that."

When she grows up, Wisenberg's obsession with the Holocaust becomes a metaphor for her urgent desire to connect her personal and private past with the larger, historical past in which millions of Jews were lost—or, perhaps even more urgently, for her fear of losing that connection. The inventive style of the essays, as well as their varied subject matter, reflects both this desire for connection and the fear of losing it: the writing is always associative and ruminative; often, Wisenberg doesn't bother to construct transitions between the disparate movements that make up her essays, as a more traditional essayist might. In "The Language of Heimatlos," Wisenberg moves between descriptions of her childhood in Houston, where the one kosher bakery in town was run by "short, sharp foreign bakers" who scared her "with their unfamiliarity," and a beautifully researched account of Herschel Grynszpan, the young German Jew who assassinated a German embassy official in Paris in 1936. (Hitler used Grynszpan's action to justify Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, in which "at least ten thousand Jews, including longstanding citizens of Germany and Austria, were sent to Buchenwald and tortured.")

In other essays, Wisenberg pairs her reflections on Kafka with her memories of her father; she imagines the diary entries that Anne Frank's sister, Margot, might have written; she reflects on race relations in her hometown of Chicago; she describes her parents' observance of Jewish rituals and writes somewhat regretfully of losing touch with her faith: "And you try but you can't remember when you stopped saying the Shema. And it's not their faith that you envy so much as their daily acceptance of the mystery of oneness—the oneness of unbroken repetition, the chain they are still a part of."

In "Monica and Hannah," perhaps one of the most unlikely and interesting pairings occurs, as Wisenberg riffs on Monica Lewinsky and Hannah Sennesh, the young Hungarian martyr to the Nazis: "These two young Jewish women, half a century apart, are as good examples as any of paths that privileged young Jewish women in the developed world can take, have open to them, make open to themselves. Is that a fair statement? Is it fair to lump them together?" Fair or not, Wisenberg makes a convincing case that Monica is a Holocaust Girl, too, a Jewish woman of her time, just as Sennesh was.

Ultimately, Holocaust Girls reflects Wisenberg's philosophy that in order to understand the past, you must lose yourself in it, and perhaps that kind of imaginative leap has its own risks. In "Plain Scared, Or: There is No Such Thing As Negative Space, the Art Teacher Said," Wisenberg writes:

This is the secret, the secret I have always known: that the bare open plain is my heart itself, my heart without connection; that the bare cinder block room is my soul, my soul without connection—the place I fear I will end up when the fear of loss of connection overrides everything else.

In order to find a place herself in the present, Wisenberg must lose herself in the past, and that irony is what makes Holocaust Girls such a poignant and urgent collection.

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P. Renée Baernstein
Routledge ($27.50)

by Charisse Gendron

In 1533, in the spirit of the Catholic Reformation, Countess Ludovica Torelli bought a house near Milan for a group of Barnabite monks and female devotees bent on improving morals by doing penance in public. Two years later, the women took nuns' vows and founded San Paolo Converso, with a papal exemption from enclosure within convent walls allowing them to carry out "spontaneous acts of public humiliation," showing their scorn for worldly folk with the occasional "cordial adoration of the Cross . . . in the middle of the piazza with arms open wide."

The Barnabites and Angelics, as the nuns were called, even adopted a spiritual leader or "living saint," Paola Antonia Negri, whose raptures confirmed the divine inspiration of her teachings and of her appointments to monastic offices. But residents of San Paolo were a mixed lot. Countess Torelli's widow friends squatted there indefinitely. Extra daughters of local aristocrats entered the convent to leave more dowry money for the daughter who would marry. At least during the convent's first two decades, poor women joined without being assigned to the community's hard labor.

In 1552, the Roman Inquisition tried the Barnabites and Angelics for heresy. The Inquisitors sent the living saint Paola Antonia Negri to prison and enclosed the nuns within the convent walls, no longer to be "missionaries, governors of charitable institutions, and penitential examples of religious zeal to the city." Founder Countess Torelli left in disgust, later to start a secular girls' college—but she was the only one. The others, under a new regime with traditional aristocratic values, strove to remain in the pope's good graces by embracing enclosure, meanwhile maintaining their ties to the powerful relatives who brought the world to them in visits and letters. Still, within a generation, girls brought up in the convent would never see the Milan cathedral, a fifteen-minute walk from their residence.

The author of A Convent Tale, P. Renée Baernstein, while disappointed with the Angelics' about-face, narrates their history with justice, style, and erudition. She maintains her composure even with the introduction of Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan from 1565 to 1584. Borromeo fostered the papal bull stating that nuns could leave the convent grounds only in cases of leprosy, epidemic, or fire. He walled up San Paolo's windows and the inner church so that nuns had to stick their tongues through a grille to receive communion from the priest saying public mass. To remain his favorites, San Paolo's nuns complied, but others rebelled. When the archbishop's agent reminded the nuns of one convent to stay back from the door, they "began to raise their voices" to him, and when he threatened them with excommunication they began "hurling insolent remarks." In Rome "it was said that some nuns committed suicide rather than suffer the privations imposed by two reformers of Borromean stripe."

So long as they paid him fulsome lip service, Borromeo squinted when wealthy Angelics disobeyed his domestic regulations. Girls came to the convent with monogrammed plates and tooled leather shoes. Their friends moved in during rough spots in their marriages. But to clamp down on such infractions would be to cross the nuns' families and friends, who governed the city, endowed the convent, and held office in the church itself.

What makes the enclosure of San Paolo almost tolerable is how some women flourished there, in particular those of the Sfondrati family. Following a widowed aunt, four Sfondrati girls entered the convent in the 1530s. (Their elder brother became "The Baron"; the younger became Pope Gregory XIV.) In 1572 the Angelic Paola Antonia Sfondrati, who had seen what happens to unruly nuns and preferred subversion to defiance of the rules for female religious, was elected prioress. She, her sisters, her niece, her grandnieces, and their puppets "dominated the convent's major offices and activities" almost continuously for nearly a century.

Unable to travel like her brothers, Paola Antonia corresponded extensively with them and with those who could abet their careers and fortunes—even though, technically, paper and pens were forbidden. To the consternation of senior nuns steeped in the "old-time rigor" of Countess Torelli's day, Paola Antonia commissioned emotive frescoes and introduced controversial polyphonic singing. The senior nuns complained of new vocal stars that "they can't come to spiritual exercises nor to mortifications because they mustn't be saddened. . . . In the old days, the singers washed the dishes. . . ." Paola Antonia also managed her family's money and pressed them into donating to the convent.

Under Paola Antonia's niece Agata Sfondrati's priorate, the nuns compensated for immurement by constructing inside the convent a replica of the shrine of Loreto, complete with a life-size wax Virgin. Agata would dress up the statue on feast days and command the nuns to process it around the convent on a "pilgrimage" to the shrine. As Baernstein reminds us, such theatrics show that "one response to the convent's enclosure was a particularly vivid and highly developed life of the mind." When a Sfondrati rival, none other than Carlo Borromeo's niece, briefly captured the priorate in 1623, she turned the shrine of Loreto into a linen closet.

The Angelics left no first-hand evidence that they suffered under enclosure; Paola Antonia Sfondrati, perhaps sincerely, praised "segregation" as an aid to contemplation. (That families forced some unwilling daughters into the convent is another issue.) "The convent was the world writ small," Baernstein concludes, but it was the world with an extra crimp in it, in which hundreds of women with worldly as well as spiritual concerns lived their entire lives within the space of a city block.

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Rachel Pollack
Llewellyn Worldwide ($14.95)

by Kris Lawson

Rachel Pollack's The Forest of Souls is a metaphysical study detailing a new way of looking at Tarot cards and their use. Pollack—known for her fiction and comics work as well as for her expertise in Tarot—advocates a meditative, almost holistic method of divination. She's even drawn her own deck, using her knowledge of symbology, tribal mythologies, and art to produce the Shining Tribe Tarot. The Forest of Souls is not a guidebook, however; as Pollack herself says "all the thousands of pages that carefully lay out the meanings of the Major Arcana (yes, I include my own books here) cannot give you the true experience of Tarot unless you allow yourself to enter the pictures. I do not mean a formal guided meditation, but simply an openness to really look, to let the pictures go inside you by going inside them."

In the book, Pollack contrasts cards from her deck with cards from such decks as the Marseilles (a historical reproduction from the Renaissance), the Thoth deck of Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, and the ubiquitous Rider-Waite deck of A.E. Waite and Pamela Rider, as well as more contemporary decks of Pagan, Wiccan and multicultural sources. Although Pollack appreciates and explains the history and method behind these decks, she's careful to point out that many of the historical decks have traditional, sometimes rigid rules laid down for their use. For her, however, using Tarot can be a more creative experience: "We analyze the cards, symbolize them, look them up in a reference book, all to make the Tarot rational and safe. We try to pin it down, to give it an origin . . . all to take it out of its dream state and land it safely in history . . . [but] we can use Tarot and its dream playfulness to remove the pins that hold down all those traditions."

The Forest of Souls thus combines a look at the history of Tarot with her own ideas of re-working the cards' traditional meanings. For example, Pollack discusses the Egyptian and Hebrew symbols on traditional cards, drawing a line of numerological coincidences between Egyptian mythology, the 72 names for God in the Kabbala, and the 12 signs of astrology. She compares the story of the Egyptian god Thoth, who "gambles with the Moon" to win five days (or 1/72 of an Egyptian year) not already present in the calendar, with the story of another god, Seth, who uses 72 "henchmen" to measure Osiris for a trap, a box constructed to his exact measurements, in which Osiris suffocates. "It is the same for us," she interprets. "Virtually from the moment of our birth, society measures us. . . . With every measurement the box becomes tighter, and more elaborate. Just like Osiris, we suffocate in a box that limits us to one degree of who we can become."

In another example, Pollack compares Tarot to quantum physics: by observing, the observer "creates" a reality from the infinite number of probabilities; by using Tarot, the questioner consciously or not selects the cards that convey the answers. "In any Tarot reading, the card itself is only half the answer to a question. The other half lies in the way we interpret it. This too involves the will, for we must will ourselves both to explore what the card can mean and then apply what we get from the card to the actual questions or situations."

Pollack's Tarot method involves thinking of the cards not as coded messages to decrypt by using a reference book, but as a collection of 78 images which one can use as "keys": "Maybe we can say that, rather than unlocking readymade secrets, the Tarot keys unlock us from all our definitions and limited conceptions of ourselves and the universe." She goes on to confess that "Something I've learned over the years I've worked with Tarot is to give myself permission to break the rules, even the ones I make up myself."

For Pollack, it's not which tradition is correct, it's that all of them can be linked together. Her examples demonstrate this imaging and layering method. For some readings, she uses her cards to construct questions instead of answers, and finds more inspiration when her questions are "answered" by other questions. In other readings, her simple, symbolic drawings suggest many traditional meanings, which link together to form a story. Pollack also suggests alternative "spreads" (the order in which the cards are displayed and read) that use a multi-directional relationship with the cards around them rather than the standard over/under/crossed traditional methods.

Perhaps the best thing about Pollack's book is her belief that the magical is rooted in stories:

The modern world has largely stripped away the sense of the miraculous from the patterns of the world. We break things down and study them in pieces, and steadfastly deny that anything connects to anything else. But there are ways to restore that sense of wonder. One of these is divination, for divination demonstrates that patterns really do exist, that the world really does fit together. . . . Fairy tales and myths and Tarot cards do not code wisdom in simple forms in order to keep it from the uninitiated. They do what they do because we can absorb wisdom best when it thrills and fascinates us.

As a storyteller herself, Pollack knows how to convey information; while not exactly thrilling, her book is indeed fascinating as it encompasses and twists the traditionalism behind Tarot readings into her own style. Absolute beginners may be confused, as Pollack assumes her readers will have already had some experience with traditional methods and are looking for a new way of conducting readings. For the dedicated dabbler or serious student, however, The Forest of Souls is a fresh and appealing work about a path much tread.

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Nick Hornby
McSweeney's ($26)

by Francis Raven

Songbook is essentially a mix tape of novelist Nick Hornby's writings about his favorite pop songs—not albums, not bands, but songs. This is how Hornby parses music; as he writes, "Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else." It sounds like an idea riding towards disaster, and yet it completely pans out: Hornby masterfully lays out the vast territory of experience that is the pop song. The inclusion of a CD containing many of the songs Hornby writes about also helps make this unusual book work.

Hornby informs the reader that when he began the book he had assumed the writings would focus on associations between the songs and the times and places where he had heard them, but luckily for the reader it didn't turn out that way because "if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use." Hornby loves many songs this much—first and foremost Springsteen's "Thunder Road," which by the author's own count he has listened to some 1,500 times since 1975.

Of course, Hornby knows that most of the pop songs he is currently listening to will soon be discarded, but this does not diminish his present pleasure in them. "Maybe disposability is a sign of pop music's maturity, a recognition of its own limitations, rather than the converse," he muses. This said, Hornby proposes that "sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are, perfectly. . . . It's a process something like falling in love." The difficulty that these two theses present is one of the major problems of contemporary life: is the self really anything if even those moments of clarity about who we are are perfectly disposable? Hornby does not answer this question but seems hopeful on the subject, a hope that stems from his belief in the beauty of songs.

At $26, Songbook is expensive; Hornby quips it's an organic book and "with organic stuff, you always pay more for less." But all of the proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated to Treehouse, a U.K. charity that helps to educate children with autism and related communication disorders, and 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing lab based in the Mission District of San Francisco, so you can feel better about the purchase. The expense of the book is also justified by the CD that accompanies it. It's a pleasure to be able to read Hornby's essays and listen to some of the songs that they're about.

Perhaps what is most fantastic about Songbook isn't the general metaphysical map of the pop song it lays out but the fact that Hornby's descriptions, evaluations, and metaphors about the songs are so apt. One hopes it might spur a new golden age of the rock review by encouraging the phenomenological review of the single song, the likes of which haven't been fully realized since the 1970s.

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Edmund White
Bloomsbury Publishing ($16.95)

by Summer Block

In The Flâneur, Edmund White navigates a Paris that is increasingly stranded by history. A flâneur is someone who wanders a city, strolling, taking things in, with no preconceptions and no agenda. White is the perfect flaneur—intelligent, perceptive, interested in everything, open to everything. His idiosyncratic observations are the perfect antidote to the typically weary American tourist, guidebook in hand, on a forced march through culture. (For Americans, Paris is still a duty, but an increasingly tedious one, like a sixth-grade field trip to a state capitol.)

White is intimately acquainted with Paris, having wandered its streets lovingly for nearly twenty years. He is well versed with all the many things people love about Paris: the odd little stores, the eccentric museums, the many tucked-away places. But even he admits "the city's glory days are long in the past" and piquantly comments that "Paris is the one city left where the tyranny of Paris fashions still holds women in its thrall."

White goes on to launch some more serious assaults, though he is not the first writer to note that "Paris . . . has become a cultural backwater. There aren't more than two or three internationally known French painters living anywhere in France . . . the galleries look like amateur art fairs . . . few French novels are translated into other languages; since Foucault's death no philosopher has had a universal stature; the center of the city is too expensive to welcome young bohemians or wannabe novelists."

If French culture is now mainly an archive of things past, it is not surprising that White himself wanders back in time at least as often as he investigates Parisian life today. Whether discussing the life of the novelist Colette, the prominence of African-American entertainers in the 20s and 30s, or the persecution of homosexuals in the 19th century, White also wanders the side streets of history—appropriate since Paris is as much a construct of history and literature as bricks and cement. White succeeds admirably in tying these "historical" concerns to modern-day situations (e.g., French racism against Arabs, AIDS scandals and cover-ups), but in so doing, he only accentuates the point that for Paris, the future is only a rehashing of the same old things.

White's observations, though, offer far more than the same tired truisms about France or the Parisians. He chooses to focus much of his attention on people and places that escape the public notice—including Paris' racial minorities, its Jewish quarter, and its attitude towards AIDS and homosexuals—and these observations are often loosely connected, weaving between personal ruminations, interviews, anecdotes, and history. What ties these vignettes together is largely the concept of The Flâneur; this conceit of the wandering observer gives White some license to meander in his storytelling.

Perhaps the most memorable chapter in The Flâneur is on the Parisian royalists, a small but dedicated group working to re-institute the French monarchy and crown one of two warring aristocrats. Not only is the story original—and funny—but it does much to contrast the Paris that is progressive, modern, a shrine to fashion and ever-changing trends, with the Paris that is old-fashioned, traditional, and even backward-looking.

The chapter on the royalists nearly concludes The Flâneur, but for White's closing rhapsody. Half defense, half elegy, White looks at modern Paris: "the blue windows set in the doors of the boxes at the Opéra Comique . . . the drama with which waiters cluster around a table in a first-class restaurant . . . the pleasant shock of the klieg lights that suddenly turn night into day when a bâteau mouche glides by . . . " So much is passé, so much is a cliché, but there is still something to Paris. It doesn't reside in the tourist spots, in the museums, on the runway, but in the details of a daily life that is beautiful, orderly, and timeless.

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Gore Vidal
Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books ($11.95)

by Mark Sorkin

In his paperback bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, published last spring as a belated response to 9/11, Gore Vidal peeled the "evil-doer" label off Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh and pasted it onto the Bush administration. With Dreaming War, he continues to rail against what he considers America's evil empire with his characteristically acerbic verve, updating his arguments to address the impending conflict in Iraq. "Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold," he writes, the administration "abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam Hussein. This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, 'evidence' is now being invented."

Vidal has relentlessly criticized American foreign policy for decades, and his recent harangues against the "Cheney-Bush junta," as he dubs it, are particularly damning. Published in an anxious climate where dissent and patriotism have been recast as polar opposites, Dreaming War makes good fodder for readers sympathetic to Vidal's iconoclastic politics and easy sport for those charged by rhetoric about anti-Americanism. But Vidal insists he's a patriot. In fact, he considers himself one of the last guardians of the republic, and he continually invokes the founding fathers to defend American ideals against their co-optation by lobbies and corporate interests.

In the past half century, Vidal argues, America transformed from a Jeffersonian republic to a "National Security State." Several of the essays collected here (more than half of which are recycled from The Last Empire) set out to debunk historical myths and "Received Opinions" about World War II and the Cold War, presenting alternative narratives that expose the machinations of an emerging superpower. According to Vidal, Roosevelt wasn't surprised by the Pearl Harbor attack; he provoked it because he needed public support for intervention in Europe. And even though Japan was ready to accept defeat in 1945, Truman dropped the atomic bombs to intimidate the Soviets. The ensuing Cold War required the creation of the "many-tentacled enemy" of Communism to justify the forty-year prosecution of wars for imperial gain.

Today, Vidal continues, a similar fog obfuscates public reception of the war on terrorism. The face of the enemy has changed, but the script is the same—along with the pointed questions Vidal poses. Was 9/11 a surprise attack, or was it provoked? What took the Air Force so long to respond once the hijacked planes deviated from their flight patterns? More generally, to what extent do the interests of the energy industry affect military strategy in oil-rich Afghanistan and Iraq?

It's not difficult to guess Vidal's answers. (Hint: "Blood for Oil" appears in the subtitle.) In that sense, Dreaming War amounts to a small stew of compelling but predictable arguments, with some witty barbs sprinkled throughout and just a dash of ego to spice things up. Ironically, most of Vidal's current responses to Received Opinion correspond to Received Counter-Opinion. Maybe that's because he's writing the official anti-script.

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Pete Hamill
Little, Brown & Company ($25.95)

by S. Clayton Moore

Pete Hamill has reached a new zenith with his new novel, Forever. It is an epic chronicle not only of the life of a man but the birth of one of America's most vibrant and diverse cities—with all the blood, sacrifices, and human frailties that great cities require.

At its heart is Cormac O'Connor, who chases a dastardly Earl from Ireland to the teeming shores of Manhattan seeking revenge for the death of his father, a blacksmith who literally forged swords from plowshares. The story is rich with the myths of the world's primal cultures from Ireland, Africa, and Mexico, and Hamill tries to find a common foundation among them. The central theme involves the Irish story of Tir Na Nog, the land of eternal youth, which in legend is always found to the west of the old country.

In the course of his pursuit, he saves the life of an African shaman, who gives him a blessing and a curse; young Cormac is given life everlasting, but even eternity has rules. Cormac must live his long life on the island of Manhattan and glory in all that it has to offer:

To find work that you love, and work harder than the other men. To learn the languages of the earth and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.

It might be a tall order but Hamill does his best to put Cormac through his paces over the next 200 odd years, forcing him through cholera plagues, the burning of the Five Points, doomed love affairs, and all the other hazards that New York summons for him. Cormac is privy, too, to some of the defining moments in the city's history as he encounters such formidable historical luminaries as George Washington, Boss Tweed and Willie Mays.

Cormac obviously reflects many facets of the author's own life, including a career as a journalist, a sideline as a painter, and a distinct affection for things Mexican. Also like Hamill, he is a keen observer of the human condition. Hamill's years of practice as a reporter at the New York Post serve him well as he describes the phases of O'Connor's life, which run between cycles of terrific delight and sublime loneliness. After all, it is an extraordinary experience to watch everything you love die: neighborhoods, cultures, even all your friends and lovers.

Hamill finished Forever on September 10, 2001, but fate wasn't done with New York and so the author was forced back to the novel to rebuild his ending. While the tragedy had a profound impact on Hamill's world, he also had to present his protagonist in true form with the last 245 years that we as readers have spent with him. He succeeds in knitting together the tragedy and triumph of both Cormac and New York with only a minimal amount of manipulation.

Like the bits of metal that Cormac's father forged into a weapon of honor or the New Yorkers who rose out of the ashes of tragedy, Cormac himself is beaten and tempered on the anvil that is Manhattan. Despite the fire of adversity and through his quick wits and passion for the great city, Cormac finds the true metal of his character and makes a life in a hard New World.

Ultimately, Forever is a rich and ingenious marriage between genres. Adventure, mystery, fantasy and memoir are boiled into a rich, hardy, and ultimately palatable stew. Virtue is rewarded and evil is punished. What more could you want from a fairy tale?

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Charles Dickinson
Forge Books ($24.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

Every culture tells stories about fate. The word of an oracle, the decree of a god, represents either an irrevocable doom or an opportunity for some loophole-exploiting trickster to rewrite destiny. Our culture fills this niche with time-travel stories, and these tales generally offer two possible morals. Either we should accept that the present—and its surrogate, the future—is so fixed that all our attempts at change only make it more inevitable, or else we should be empowered by the hope that clever strategies and well-timed actions can rescue us from history's blind stumble. Charles Dickinson's novel, A Shortcut in Time gives us a time-travel tale that eludes both patterns, offering a world that can be shaped by its characters, even if they aren't always in complete control of that shaping.

Dickinson displays the mastery of cause and effect that any time-travel author needs, seeding small, seemingly inconsequential details throughout the narrative so that they can return in unexpected ways later. His characters, however, are not so adept. The novel's narrator, Josh Winkler, seems to have no more command over the repercussions of his actions—in either present or past—than any ordinary person would. As he sleepwalks through a sort of midlife slackerdom, an artist supported by his physician wife, Josh has less of a sense of having an impact on his world than most people; even his most urgent actions seem to unfold over the course of hours, if not days.

The roots of this ineffectualness can be seen in the novel's opening chapter, in which a teenaged Josh's eventual heroism is too late to avert a tragedy. The reader might expect this is the central moment which must be undone in order to right the future, but neither Josh's temperament, nor the workings of time travel as Dickinson develops it, lead events in that direction. The novel's characters are more occupied with getting to the place and time where they belong than with rigging the past in order to rearrange the present, and the "shortcuts" of the title are only vaguely amenable to conscious manipulation.

By de-emphasizing the mechanics of time-travel, A Shortcut in Time allows Dickinson the space to unfold Josh's story quietly, almost incidentally. Josh's low-key description of the aftermath of his first slip into the past is indicative: "A lot could happen in fifteen minutes, and at the same time, not much at all. I felt myself catching up to the present. Soon I would be living through time I hadn't lived through already." A few lines later, Josh uses the word "helpless" to describe how he feels while watching the predestined world pass him by.

Josh Winkler is not the only time traveler in the novel—among the others is a 15-year old girl from the turn of the century who displays a more hands-on approach to moving through time. Scenes between young Contance, with her resourcefulness and her drive to return home, and the ever-cautious Josh provide many of the novel's most compelling moments. In the end, however, it's through Josh's story that Dickinson rearranges a familiar story-pattern into something new, and perhaps appropriate to an age when the interconnections of cause and effect seem more chaotic and complex than a simple domino chain.

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Halldór Laxness
Translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson
Vintage ($16)

by Laura Sims

Over 100 pages into this novel, a character describes our protagonist, Olafur Karason, as "delicate and radiant, like a tender plant; every line of his body suggested a personal life, every movement an expression, every proportion a grace." This may come as a shock—we have seen Olafur primarily as a forlorn and sickly orphan struggling to be a great poet while living off the grudging charity of others, and we have felt a mixture of pity, loathing, and respect for him. More importantly, he has seemed, up to this point, wholly incapable of carrying the epic weight a 600-page saga demands. But when Olafur finds himself being woken up from his hitherto wretched existence as a bedridden invalid by a woman renowned for her healing powers, the reader too finds herself coming alive to the possibilities inherent in this lead character, as well as to the generous delights of this Icelandic novel, written in 1937 by Nobel Prize-winner Halldór Laxness. While this optimistic turning point in the narrative heralds the start of a new relationship between reader and protagonist, the remaining 400 plus pages contain so much misery for Olafur that one begins to pine along with him for those early days, dreary as they were, when he lay in a squalid corner waiting to die, neglected and/or abused by every member of the "charitable" household on which he depended, watching a single sunbeam penetrate the ceiling of his hovel.

Although it may seem that Laxness is leading us straight into Hardy territory, Olafur's highly amusing interactions with others prevent the novel from being categorized as a straight tragedy, just as his various insufficiencies as a potential "hero" prevent it from being pigeonholed as an epic. Neither can it be named comedy, political satire, nor romance, although the elements of each category abound. They abound likewise in the alluring, frustrating, despicable, loveable, and ridiculous character of Olafur Karason himself. Laxness certainly indicts society vehemently for its abuse of the poetically gifted Olafur, but Olafur does not escape indictment himself. In the following exchange between the poet and Peder Pavelsen, the manager who owns and runs the town of Svidinsvik where Olafur spends much of his adult life, we witness the poet's vacillation between ridiculous docility and passive resistance. The manager, in a drunken stupor, offers his benefaction in exchange for Olafur swearing to support the manager's pet cause, the "Regeneration of the Nation"—an ambiguous movement which sounds grand but amounts to further exploitation of the poor laborers by the few rich rulers of the town. The manager begins:

"If you'll swear to be my poet, you shall have a roof."

"I don't know how to swear," said the poet.

"Well, in that case you can go to the devil," said Peder Pavelsen; he let go of the poet's hand and pushed him away.

The poet's upper lip began to tremble at once, and he said bitterly, "It's easy enough to push me away."

"Yes," said Peder Pavelsen. "You're a rat. Anyone who won't raise three fingers in the air for the Regeneration of the Nation is a rat."

At that the poet changed his mind and declared that he was ready to raise three fingers for the Regeneration of the Nation.

Then the manager loved the poet again, embraced him, and wept a little.

The manager, after securing Olafur's loyalty, presents him with a house worthy of such an oath: a vacant, broken-down, rat-infested old palace. When the poet goes to claim his "home," he finds that both front and back door are nailed shut, and a feral cat passes by, stopping "to hiss in the poet's direction" as an added insult. At another time he is tempted, by a passionate woman who becomes his lover, to join the coalition of "freedom fighters" who plan to rebel against the town's leadership to improve working conditions and pay for laborers. For a moment, the door to another world swings open to Olafur; in the next moment, he chooses wife and child, the stability of home, not because he has found true happiness there, but because he pities his dependents too much to abandon them. His lover responds to his explanation that "'pity is man's nobility'" with the accusation: "'You don't believe in life! You think that the Creator cannot keep the world going without your idiotic pity!'" Olafur sticks to his chosen path, but also "looked back as he softened, and saw himself splitting in two: the freedom- fighter, the madman, the villain and the poet were left behind in the distance, and forward stepped the meek adherent of conventional orthodox behavior." This move requires courage on his part, but the reader may feel something akin to his lover's frustration when he makes this bleak choice. Rarely has any writer offered up such a vexing character as Olafur Karason. It may be that we love his very humanness —he is momentarily rebellious, then mundanely heroic; often absurd, then suddenly saintly; and he rarely travels the path of his life with ease, like most of us. Olafur Karason's humanity is what comes across so vividly in Laxness's masterpiece, and our own humanity urges us to follow him along his life journey.

In the moments scattered throughout this tale when Olafur engages in transcendent communication with what we may call "world light"—that otherworldly inspiration common to poets, martyrs, and sainted outcasts of every kind—the reader can wholeheartedly admire him. It becomes clear that he is a being who can escape the tired earth, and the tedious ways of humanity, when he lies in a field looking up at the sky, or looks out toward the great glacier dominating Svidinsvik's horizon, and realizes "that Nature was all one loving Mother, and he himself and everything that lives were of the one spirit, and there was nothing ugly any more, nothing evil." These moments are few and far between, but they always return, and they lead him to the place where "beauty shall reign alone," where his meager, largely unhappy existence is transformed into poetry, beauty, and ultimate redemption. Before Olafur reaches that state of perfection, however, he stumbles along, allowing his fellow humans (and readers) to peg him as parish pauper, worthless scoundrel, ridiculous poet, sainted hero, or whatever they wish—while he solemnly goes about his existence, a quiet soul surrounded, and roughly touched by, the noise and ugly commerce of life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003

William Boyd
Alfred A. Knopf ($24.95)

by Emily Johnston

Novelist William Boyd has a fondness for framing devices: The Blue Afternoon told the story of a man's love affair while describing his daughter's new and enigmatic acquaintance with him decades later, and Brazzaville Beach opens with a woman at a seaside African cabin reflecting upon the tumult of the previous years. In Any Human Heart Boyd continues this framing in minimalist fashion, presenting a story told almost entirely in journal form, but with occasional passages and footnotes supplied by a supposed literary executor. At its finer moments, the novel reads like something you might find in the musty attic of a family home, open with mild curiosity, and then read straight through, fascinated by the engaging, detailed evocation of one individual's thoughts throughout a long life.

From childlike self-proclamation—"Yo, Logan Mountstuart, vivo en la Villa Flores, Avenida de Brasil, Montevideo, Uruguay, America del Sur, El Mundo, El Sistema Solar, El Universo," the book begins, in its only Spanish entry, when our protagonist is first given a journal—Any Human Heart moves on to adolescent delights and traumas; to youthful hope as the author, a writer, begins publishing; to middle-aged compromises and the shattering effect of World War II; and finally to a penurious but more serene old age. The moods of the character's aging are for the most part wholly believable, however the intimacy of a journal does come with dangers; inevitably episodic in nature, the novel loses its drive as Mountstuart loses his exuberance, and sags dangerously about halfway through its nearly 500 pages.

One problem is Boyd's decision to make Mountstuart a successful and peripatetic author and gallery manager that he meets most of the great writers and artists of the early and mid-1900s. The London-Paris-New York axis of these worlds was indubitably a small place, and a moderately well-connected writer really might have gone drinking with Picasso, Waugh, Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf, Frank O'Hara, Pollock, and innumerable others. But combined with the decision to have Mountstuart become friendly with, and possibly be the victim of a conspiracy by, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—in a cloak-and-dagger assignment originated, of course, by Ian Fleming—it results in a corny, you-were-there, Forrest Gump feel to the middle of the novel. Boyd seems to find it interesting to imagine characters on the edge of great historic moments—one of the minor characters in The Blue Afternoon is a near-winner in the race for a flying machine. There's something beguiling about this exploration of what it might have been like to be centrally involved in such lost moments, but Mountstuart's closeness to fame proves far too distracting.

Because the first third of the novel is so engaging, it's a great disappointment when the appealing exuberance of both Mountstuart and one of his two closest friends disintegrates. In Mountstuart's case we are given something that could be a reason—returning from the war after a surreal imprisonment in Switzerland, he finds that his passionately loved second wife has 1) remarried, as he had been declared dead two years before, and 2) died, killed by a bomb along with their little girl, as they walked to her nursery school. In the course of a little over a hundred pages, the reader goes from entries such as this:

Freya Deverell. Freya Deverell. I have that feeling of heartrace, that bloodheat and breathgasp, just writing her name.... It terrifies me, the fragility of these moments in our lives.

to ones such as this:

Is this worth recording? I experienced what can only be described as a spasm of happiness—the first since I heard the news—when I managed to work out (with a toothpick) a shred of mutton that had been stuck in a crevice between two back teeth.

The problem is this movement away from honest emotion had begun years before his harrowing return, rendering him both less self-aware and less appealing. Shortly after being rebuffed by a much-loved friend in his still-hopeful early twenties, he marries Lottie, a woman he doesn't love, and is a terrible cad to her and to their child. This might happen, of course—it happens every day—but we never find out why; like other critical junctures in the book, this major shift is simply elided in a note by the executor. (Mountstuart also makes painful intellectual errors regarding World War II, but given the kind of shallow man he has become, these are less surprising than his profound unkindness.)

In the case of his friend Peter Scabius, there is nothing to explain his degeneration; he enters Mountstuart's journals as a beloved boarding-school friend—shy, honorable, and very much entranced by the farm girl he is dared to kiss. Though she seems simple at first, Tess is his equal, and they marry a few years later. Before long, though, Scabius is a compulsive womanizer as well as a trivial, pompous writer who lives as an exile to avoid paying taxes on his fortune. (Mountstuart stays in touch with him, somewhat inexplicably, though he doesn't bother to read his novels.) There is no real exploration of this change.

On the second page of the novel, an older Mountstuart says that in the missing pages of his earliest journal he probably made a commitment to be "wholly and unshakeably truthful" and asserted "refusal to feel shame over any revelations which that candor would have encouraged." Presumably Boyd offers these shifts as the compromises of aging in a man such as our unreliable narrator, to point up his folly and self-deceit. People can lose their idealism and compromise themselves, self-justifying all the way. But because the reader doesn't really see Mountstuart and Scabius losing their finer qualities, their later selves seem less real than their earlier ones.

Late in the novel, as an elderly and humbled Mountstuart sits people-watching at a rented beach shack, he says:

I feel...a strange sense of pride: pride in all I've done and lived through...Play on, boys and girls, I say, smoke and flirt, work on your tans, figure out your evening's entertainment. I wonder if any of you will live as well as I have done.

This last line is a shock: Mountstuart hasn't been that self-deceiving, and old age has made him moderately less so; there is a poignancy to these later entries that has not been present since the earliest ones. He certainly has nothing to feel triumphant about—a very few people loved, not particularly generously; many people hurt; a few books published—and these no braver, evidently, than their author is in the rest of his life.

Boyd can be the subtlest of writers: there's a moment in The Blue Afternoon, in the midst of a love story presented for the most part as though its narrator were reliable, when the reader has a laser-sharp awareness of the man's self-deception as he unfavorably compares his no-longer-beloved wife and his new love in order to believe more fully in his new love story. This weakness is like one Boyd explores more explicitly in Brazzaville Beach, when his protagonist realizes with chagrin her own narrative manipulation: "She was behaving like a Soviet historian, cooly airbrushing assassinated generals or purged ministers out of official photographs, reshaping, tidying events to suit her own way of thinking." Now that culture, language, and even trickery have been discovered to have analogues in the animal kingdom, self-deception may be all that truly sets us apart, and it has always been rich territory for a novelist. In Any Human Heart, though, we have neither romantic self-deceit nor warm-blooded and intelligent self-assessment—in a journal, of all places, we lack a view of the interior journey of the narrator.

Despite the authentic feel of the journals, Boyd seems too willing to let cleverness trump subtlety here; there's even a winking footnote that refers to a supposed biography of a minor character—in fact, this "biography" is a novel that Boyd himself published in 1998. The bulk of Any Human Heart is dominated by a not very likable man who brushes up against a lot of famous people, and offers, even to himself, little in the way of honesty or deep emotion. Such a character could still command our attention—and Boyd's skill as a writer does, for the most part—but the contrived center of the novel allows our narrator too little room to be human, and the exploration of his heart is too insubstantial to be satisfying.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003