Ed Sanders
Thunder's Mouth Press ($21.95)

by Brenda Coultas

The Wild Women of East Tenth taught me a valuable lesson that carried me all the way through the rest of the decade. I tended to be morose and always worried about things. Events, projects and decisions swirled around me in terrible turbulence. Nobody had any time to sleep. Everybody had five careers. What I learned from Sanders's fictional women was the Dickens Principle—it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but it was our time, and we owned this moment with our youth, our energy, our good will, our edginess. So let's party.

Foremost, it was Sanders's time, most certainly—Tales of Beatnik Glory proves it. As the owner of the Peace Eye bookstore, publisher of the legendary Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and founding member of The Fugs, Ed Sanders was a central figure and originator on the beatnik-hippie scene. This new edition of his mammoth ode to the '60s, written over a 30-year span, contains two new volumes in addition to the earlier two volumes published in 1975 and 1990, and brings the "interlocking story-flow to the end of 1969."

It is both sweet, thrilling, and sad to be reading the completed work in my apartment in the East Village, Sanders's old stomping grounds, where four-room tenement apartments sell for $400,000 and up. Diners and cheap eats have been replaced by faux Belgium bars hawking steak frites that, if it were 1965 again,would set you back thirty bucks in rent. Idling bulldozers sit next to 19th-century buildings, waiting to bring down the old Bowery and replace it with glass-walled condos that start at three million. Who has replaced the artists, poets, and lower income residents of the East Village and Lower East Side? Whose times are these?

Tales of Beatnik Glory is a history lesson, activist primer, and an innovative hybrid of both prose and poetry and fiction and memoir. Set mostly in the Lower East Side of New York City, the stories are populated with real citizens (such as underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, fellow Fug Tuli Kupferberg, and poet Allen Ginsberg) mingling with Sanders's composites of local characters. Part of the pleasure in reading the work is recognizing real places that still exist (like the Catholic Worker), and imagining ones that should have (like the Total Assault Cafe, the House of Nothingness Cafe, and the Luminous Animal Theater). In the beatnik universe and cosmos, everyone is a poet and artist, coffeehouses are packed, heaven is a used bookstore, and Auden a local hero. One character makes a living by displaying his unwashed "beat feet" for tourists in Washington Square Park. This is Goof City, a place that Sanders defines as "a city of freedom for all to relax, where poverty was banished and wealth truly shared."

Sander's epic belongs on bookshelves next to other classics of New York City life, such as Luc Sante's Low Life and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, though it is a singular achievement and a necessary one—no one else has captured the optimism and the glory of the '60s on the page the way Sanders has. Full of hyphenated words and utopian ideas, the prose is a delight to read, as in the sentence, "But now, as he heard the Words of Life as performed by the anarcho-SkyArt dharma-commie jazz church of the New York Streets and pads, he felt the purest Hieratic Vastness, felt plugged into the Ladder. Greed ceased as a possibility, and the eyeball on the pyramid's apex, back of the dollar bill, rolled out of the park, through the Holland Tunnel, all the way to Minneapolis where it made a blind person see again." The constantly thrilling hyphenated beat lingo—e.g. "bazooka-spews of hostility," "lust-spackled muscle," "just-before-groinflash oblivion," "living stash-of-grass-gobble"—reflects a belief in the power of language to challenge the power structure and to change realities.

The tales are set up in chronological order, and each chapter is self-contained. Sanders traces the evolution of his characters as they mature, and each volume takes on major events of the decade. The characters experiment with communal living, drugs, group gropes, and political action; on a personal level, each one deals with her/his own diminished ambitions and the end of the '60s dream. Threatening and underlying this utopia is the dark, paranoid heart of America featuring the F.B.I., an evil sheriff, and the Klan. These encounters force the hippies to confront social injustice and the war machine.

Sanders's autobiographical stand-in is Sam Thomas, who on the eve of the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman is outraged into political engagement. Sam, later the publisher of Drugs, Social Change and Fucking, evolves into an accomplished filmmaker who refuses to recline into middle-age and middle-class comfort. When he could be basking in academic glory, he undertakes a ritual in honor of Samuel Beckett, an on-the-knees crawl up the coast of California. Later, he ends up evading fame in the homeless encampment at Tompkins Square Park during the early '90s, and even as he is arrested in a round up, he remains true to his values by documenting his own arrest, then making his only free phone call to FedEx for film pickup and shipment to his office.

Another pleasure are the female characters who fully enjoy sex and retain their own identities—feminists and artists like Claudia Pred, creator of the Luminous Animal Theater, who in her pursuit of perfection in avant-garde dance becomes obsessed with dancing on the moon; and Annie, who loves nothing more than to bring discipline to hippie men by teaching them to pitch in, peel vegetables, and make their beds. Later, she becomes a designer of swimsuits, a self-made woman. Representing the spirit of Emma Goldman is Rose Snyder, a.k.a. Farbrente Rose, a 70-year-old socialist and union activist who relates her involvement in the labor movement to the beatniks who now live in the apartment where she grew up.

There is sex o' plenty in these tales, of course, and it serves as a binder, creating cohesion among the group in this pre-AIDS time. At Hempune, a commune and freedom farm, the communards gather in the Kissing Tepee for a release: "There could be some measure of petting, but no actual intercourse, or, in general, exposure of genitals, although if you arrived nude, you could stay nude." To deal with the less unlightened souls that show up, they house them "in a refurbished pig barn out back which some dubbed the Mooch Hut. The idea was to keep them engulfed in one another so that they swirled in a ghastly interactive gnarl like mosquitoes above a cow pond."

In the final volume, as the '60s come to a close, the characters must say goodbye to each other and their dreams, and face "the victory of Grasping and Greed and War." Readers will close the book with some sadness at leaving behind the optimism and joy, the utopian possibilities of that decade. Tales of Beatnik Glory is a valuable record of an era when young people believed they could change the world and buy what they needed with their good looks. It was their time, and they made the best of it.

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Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Many Mountains Moving Press ($11.95)

by Marj Hahne

Invisible Sister, Jeffrey Ethan Lee's first full-length collection of poems, is a daring act of language that delivers with grace the self inescapably splintered by language. In the book's prologue, Lee names some of the things that betrayed him, such as "whiteness," "pretty blonde," "beautiful doll"—terms of race and gender that indelibly constructed and confined the self: "I could've been anyone / if only the cells of the self / would've let me out." This fragmented self ("all the hiding selves who seek") takes the reader through the book's core, a long poem broken into chapters from the life of Iris, the "invisible sister" of the title.

Iris, named for the eye's light regulator; for the rainbow and its goddess; for the plant of sword-shaped leaves and variously colored flowers. No wonder, then, that eyes, rainbow, sky, sun, light, shadow, and leaves are among the words and images that reverberate throughout Invisible Sister. Also echoing throughout are words of color, weather, phase, and extension: white, blue, rain, snow, ice, flame, roots, limbs, branches, lines. Fragments of lines unfold a story told in two voices (his and hers), the overlapping of which conveys this certainty: Iris' being heard is key to her visibility, to the whole self's seeing the multicolor truth.

The resounding of all the fragments of phrase, image, and music—like a soul's insistent presence—is striking, convincing us of the self's triumph not only despite, but perhaps because of, its fragmentation:

A higher wind carried
in recesses
straggler voices
of white
behind us

..................................................................

You lifted your face
the soul
the mask of self-
could hold the flesh
inflicted histories
made of
a shed chrysalis--
woman

These are the last lines spoken in the two voices, harmonizing finally to speak as one, "to sense the whole horizon / through one gleaming leaf / unfolding for the returning sun." Invisible Sister affirms that "even if we walked across the if / that strands between us // and the if is us," we can find the courage to forgive our betrayers, to honor our multiple selves in all their uncertainty, to let their voices speak simultaneously—and in so doing we can emerge fully in communion with ourselves.

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Ravi Shankar
Cherry Grove Collections ($16)

by Neil Kozlowicz

In "Fabricating Astrology," the second poem in Ravi Shankar's Instrumentality, he writes that the firmament "seems plotted / Along three axes: love, labor, time." And so it is here. Shankar's poems often begin by stopping time, by pausing in the face of life; from that stillness, labors and loves find meaning through voice and rhythm. As stated in the poem's conclusion, "Really they move / Towards annulment in a proof I cannot / Prove. Soon enough, pattern dissolves. / Let me replace them with these words." This early poem is in many ways an ars poetica. From the first poem's quiet moment of contemplation, where we hear "Breaths go in and out of many lungs," to Ella Fitzgerald singing Misty Blue in the closing poem, Shankar transforms what he cannot understand into a music that we all can feel.

Instrumentality refers to "an artifact (or system of artifacts) that is instrumental in accomplishing some end." In the title poem it is handschumachers, or glove-makers, and then all forms of physical trades which define our new humanness, which first arrived "when the first basalt flakes were chipped from boulders // To make hand-axes that could dismember most carcasses the hominid / We once were might have hunted down." This poem delights not only because of its language but by its reach, stretching back into the moments where work and words grew side-by-side, to the struggles that gave birth to literate, technological humanity. And so, by analogy, poetry is also a trade, maybe the first trade, that one can lose oneself in and concentrate on the artifacts to transcend the ego. To make something else.

For Shankar, that something else becomes a process of reduction. In "Contraction," he writes, "Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies, / mutates into false memories. . . . I tried to live / Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty." The loss he talks about here is love of another, but is only resolved and understood by working on the self, by building one thing at a time so self-esteem is no longer raised on "wobbly beams." But this is not poetry as self-help—or if it is, it is because something new has been forged, because the self, perhaps, cannot be helped or saved, only set aside.

There are occasional bumps in this first collection—when a poem uses a different form, for example, or the language flattens while covering a narrative bridge. However, a true and dynamic craftsman is at work here, and even the rough material contains a richness and texture that would be missed. This bodes well for Shankar's future work.

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Gerald Stern
W.W. Norton & Company ($23.95)

by Maureen Picard Robins

Disquieting, rattling, and turbulent verse fills the pages of Gerald Stern's latest book. Everything is Burning romps through the usual Sternian suspects: lovers (current and former), sex, wished-for-sex, sexual prowess, imagined sexual prowess, bad sex; paradise, pear and apple trees, birds, gardens; friends (dead and alive), music, a lost cultural world, politics, Judaism, survivor guilt, and his dead sister, Sylvia.

Stern's poetic persona, however, has evolved from that of rural groggy affection with big wet kisses, as seen in The Red Coal's "Cow Worship" ("I love the cows best when they are a few feet away,") to one which more pointedly celebrates the complexities and poignancy of human love, as in this volume's "Tenderness" ("The whole idea of tenderness, she says, / should be tried out on the redbud first, she says"). Stern, in these 65 poems, wends his way into rant, outburst, and defiance in the hope of needling some sort of epiphany.

The prosaic character of Stern's language and line has never been more freewheeling—so much so that one might imagine that these poems were dictated into a tape recorder and simply scribed: "I meant the personal and the social, / or call it the historical if you like, / I mean I meant there was a personal paradise / and there was a larger one . . ." ("E.P. III"). The poems ramble, stuff lines with unexplained personal references, become splotches of words that make worlds emerge whole; the reader leaves the poem with a sense of having experienced an enormous emotional range and a disorienting feel of time travel.

Emblematic of this is the poem "Never Went to Birdland." In his vestigial Yiddish-inflected American English, Stern simulates that act of remembering and the inner dialogue that often accompanies it: "Never went to Birdland, so what, went to the Y, / danced all night for a quarter, girls sat down / on bridge chairs, can't remember if they were smoking . . ." Then he remembers a particular girl and says, "I'll call her Doris—that was her name— / her grandfather was a rabbi from Bialystok . . ." The poem closes with a clear and unflinching portrait of this man, who worked to build the railroad in the Urals: "He was only / five feet tall, his hands you can't imagine / nor what the sofa was like and what our struggle was." There's the time travel in poetry that Stern pulls off.

Stern is one crafty, seasoned verse-maker, and his use of everyday speech is so disarming as to be nearly deceptive. Despite the appearance of a weak inner grammarian, he plunders meaning and achieve a rattling affect with the use of enjambment and commas to keep his beats—and his reader—off-kilter.

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Cole Swensen
Alice James Books ($13.95)

by Erik Anderson

The structure of Cole Swensen's latest, Goest, functions much like a single page: the book's three sections—entitled, "Of White," "A History of the Incandescent," and "On White"—mirror the format of "margins" surrounding "substance." Only there is nothing marginal about Goest. The book explodes the assumption of the "empty" portion of the page while equally exploring the nature of the "filled" portion of it. What emerges is an absence that is really present around a poem, almost haunting it as its lines jut out into space, inventing a language as it goes:

so that with a single downward glance you can be
the infinitesimal:
Sing:
if in pieces
we are accurate
here the we accrues.

The book's central section, "A History of the Incandescent"—which, as its title suggests, brims with references to vehicles for, and materials producing, light—is its most substantial. It is also, unlike the other sections of the book, organized around factual, or seemingly factual, material (Swensen tells us it is based on John Beckmann's 19th century A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins). But while the poems contain facts ("In the early 18th century, London hung some 15,000 lamps"), they are not, as has been suggested, arrangements of found materials. As Swensen relates in a recent interview, she does not "take other texts and collage or mix them"; rather, her method is to read and to write "in response to words that stand out on the page." Any facts the poems contain are diving boards for pools of rhyme and pun, distortion and song:

For the fabrication of artificial tears, John Christian Schulenburg, 1695,
sent a bitter silicate
to brittle it              to thin air
And dropped from there to fusing water
the entire
seventeenth century tier after tier

The book as a whole rotates around the details of light and invention in "A History of the Incandescent," but Swensen isn't making heroes out of the inventors or their inventions—she's celebrating inventiveness itself. Truth, i.e. the "facts" the book contains, are less important than the spirit in which they are conveyed. That which is presented as true is often distorted by the end. In "The Lives of Saltpeter," as in much of the book, there are two seas running parallel: in one, there exists the "true" story of the invention of glass by sailors; in the other, there exists the inventive story of the invention of glass:

Glass made its first appearance
on the shores outside Belus
when sailors placed blocks of saltpeter under cooking pots
causing the sand to fuse along the entire edge of the sea
ran another sea that refused to move

has been proved false. It simply wouldn't have worked.

The title of the poem presents itself as a similar sort of double: how easy it would be to read "The Lives of Saltpeter" as the "The Life of Saint Peter" (as easy as reading "Ghost" for "Goest"). And why not be reverent? The poem is at play.

The margins, the sections "Of White" and "On White," in keeping with their nature as margins, are parallels of each other: both contain serial poems entitled "Five Landscapes," and poems in response to a Cy Twombly exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. (a portion of which is available online at http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/twombly/twombly1.shtm). These sections are airier, not as concerned with the world as fact. Like Twombly's sculptures, they are "about" their interaction with, and invention of, the space around them. At the same time, the poems invoke a sense that what is being presented is subject to change:

Niepce's first photograph,
which was the first photograph,
was of a scene of roofs so blurred they were often mistaken for sails.

One clause follows another, distorting or appending the one before it; language becomes like a haze over the very words in employs: "in pieces or entire; its presence / veneers over want; in all its moving parts, it could be something else."

But "Of White" and "On White" are different sections. For instance, in the first "Five Landscapes" series there is little movement, as the poet watches through a third-person haze: "the air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches remain...A child...is turning to walk down to the lake." In the second series, however, an "I" is moving through landscapes on a train on a vibrant summer day:

There's a wedding in a field I am passing in a train
a field
in the green air, in the white air, an emptier here
the field is everywhere
because it looks like something similar somewhere else.

What was objectivity and inertia in the first series has transformed to color and movement and expression in the second—perhaps as the mind is transformed after crossing the poem's line from the left hand margin to the right.

Although the first and the last section of the book, as opposed to the central section, are obsessed with fields, presences, spaces, hazes, they are so while retaining a sense of playfulness and music: "and of all he touched it is said / the Red Sea is white, and the Dead Sea, dead. Is a thread / seen end on." The margins aren't empty: they form the space in which the inventiveness of the central section is sung into place ("it's called solidifying—to solmizate in the infinitive; transitive: to sing / any object into place").

There's no shortage of material here; and no matter how minimalist some of the poems may be, they are carried by their rigor, wit, and song. Like most of Swensen's work, and most good work in general, Goest may require a few readings, but the reader will find no shortage of pleasure and reward in them, given a little time:

defined as that which,
no matter how barely, exceeds
what the eye could grasp in a glance:
intricate woods opening out before a body of water edged
with a swatch of meadow where someone has hung a bright white sheet
out in the sun to dry.

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John Green
Dutton Books ($15.99)

by Cindra Halm

James Kirkwood's Good Times, Bad Times, first published in 1968 and now tragically out of print, set the bar high for the "I went to boarding school and had a life-altering adventure" novel. John Green's Looking for Alaska meets the challenge: it modernizes the fish-bowl context of the teenage drama, foregrounds the essential confusions of peer influence, and asserts the voices of smart, flawed characters to build a compelling narrative.

Miles Halter, an observational, philosophical, and bored 16-year-old, asks to transfer to his father's alma mater boarding school to experience, in Rabelais' dying words, "a Great Perhaps." When he meets Alaska, a troubled, fetching, feminist rebel, the concept becomes engaged in reality. Miles, for better and worse, immerses himself in hive-mind schemes of personal and group upheaval. Though the action centers on how individuals interact with and resist the dynamic of the collective, the psychological conflict here is primarily internal, as each character struggles to find his/her own integrity within the bonds of relationship.

That a pivotal event occurs is built into the structure's "before" and "after" sections. The reader may feel the tension of time ticking both toward and away from disaster; the strategy contributes a sense of continuum to the teen world's impulsive, invincible perspective. Add to that pranks which veer into danger, booze-and-cigarette induced choices, and first forays into romance and sex, and a passionate portrait of present moments as well as anticipated fantasies develops. Green is especially adept at pulling back from the flashing action of the instant to reveal the characters' reflective insights and their vulnerable, full-spectrum emerging consciousnesses.

Like many similarly-themed stories, Looking for Alaska may vacillate between the adult and the young adult bookstore shelves. Although anyone 16 and older will likely enjoy the book, it may especially touch the adult who has more diverse, complex memories of both personal and literary experiences with which to welcome it.

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Peter Abrahams
Laura Geringer ($15.99)

by Kris Lawson

In Down the Rabbit Hole, 13-year-old heroine Ingrid Levin-Hill demonstrates the genius of an intelligent young girl as well as the glitches. She tends to think faster with her feet than her brain—not a bad trait in a soccer player, but one that has mixed results when she investigates the murder of Echo Falls' local crazy woman, Cracked-Up Katie.

Ingrid unwittingly involves herself in Katie's murder by leaving her unique soccer shoes in what later becomes a crime scene. Desperate to retrieve them so she won't get in trouble with her parents, Ingrid witnesses someone else altering evidence. When two innocent people are arrested, Ingrid, a Sherlock Holmes fan, tries to ease her nagging conscience by finding evidence that will clear them.

Crime-solving is one more burden to add to Ingrid's complicated life: she's in rehearsals as the lead in a stage production of Alice in Wonderland, her algebra grades are slipping, and her parents are fighting about money. Vincent Dunn, selected to play the Mad Hatter, forms a connection with Ingrid but, true to his role, is just as confusing as he is helpful. Meanwhile, her grandfather needs her help with a mysterious project that will keep developers off his land; her father's boss has a daughter who wants to play Alice and will stop at nothing to get the part; and the cute son of the police chief (whom she's dodging) suddenly asks her out.

Although the mystery is not complicated, Peter Abrahams's book is light-hearted and fun, with just enough depth to keep it from flying completely away. Ingrid's crime-solving may be a tad improbable, but her unique voice and textured life are resonant and memorable.

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George Pelecanos
Little, Brown and Company ($24.95)

by Jeff Charis-Carlson

After twelve novels that transform the U.S. capital into an urban version of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, readers have learned what to expect from George Pelecanos: well-crafted, geographically aware tales in which scenes of urban violence reflect the morally compromised choices of even the most stone-cold characters. In his 13th novel, Drama City, Pelecanos continues to explore his well-staked fictional territory.

As the intertwined story of dual protagonists, Humane Officer Lorenzo Brown and Parole Officer Rachel Lopez, the novel continues Pelecanos's fascination with the thin line between legitimate and illegitimate authority in Washington. It features the expected blend of hard working families, imperfect law enforcement officials, and various reformed, reforming, and recidivistic ex-cons. Directly following 2004's Hard Revolution—a historical novel of the 1950s and 1960s packed with an overabundance of Washingtoniana—it would seem to offer another account of just how far the national capital is from "the Game" on the D.C. street.

But if Pelecanos's earlier novels were designed to depict Washington as more human—less politically abstract, less violently caricatured—his new protagonists take the action into hitherto unexplored areas of the city. In fact, the novel humanizes the city by describing how Washingtonians treat their animals. Where the earlier novels expanded readers' image of the city to include ethnic neighborhoods seldom depicted in mainstream D.C. novels, the city revealed by Lorenzo Brown's canine investigations includes the District's most "country" neighborhood, Deanwood, in which second and third-generation migrants continue to raise chicken and goats in their yards and speak with Deep Southern accents.

Brown is typical of Pelecanos's main characters—an African American ex-con who has returned to D.C. with the hope of going straight. His involvement with animal protection gives him a hybrid status in which he is forced to wear a uniform but not allowed to carry a gun, and his bureaucratic authority, coupled with a genuine fondness for dogs, grounds his character in authenticity. Even when he begins to consider lethal revenge against the enemy of a friend, it is his ability to play both sides of "the Game" that illustrates how his Washington is far larger than any single game.

The perspectives on Washington provided by Officer Lopez aren't as startlingly new as those offered by Brown. As a parole officer, the majority of her daytime activities deal with the same "offenders" who populate each of Pelecanos's novels, and her nocturnal drinking binges—in which she transforms from a sexless Jekyll into a sex-kitten Hyde—offer little more than a chance to visit Washington's hotel bars. But her Narcotics Anonymous meetings allow Pelecanos to add success and failure stories from ever more Washingtonians who live and work beyond the gaze of the Capitol dome in their midst.

With this expanded vision of Washington, Drama City also lives up to the fact that it is Pelecanos's first novel whose title refers directly to the D.C. setting—one of the characters offers the name "Drama City" as a contrast to Washington's "Dodge City" reputation. "It was a city of masks, the kind Nigel had said hung in theaters. Smiling faces and sad, and all kinds of faces in between" (283). It is this tragic-comic perspective that transforms Pelecanos' D.C. into the all-too-human city worthy of its title.

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Soren A. Gauger
Twisted Spoon Press ($13.50)

by Kathleen Andersen

In this debut collection, Soren A. Gauger uses the language of an earlier century to create eleven entertaining stories that—in their presentation of a world in which cause and effect have been unlinked, in which narratives loop or spool forth continuously—could only be contemporary.

Taking full advantage of the pulpy pleasures offered by stock characters and situations, Gauger gives us madmen raving against their nemeses in decrepit castles, bumbling academics, psychiatrists undergoing their own breakdowns. Solitary creatures, one might write himself notes to remember his identity, be hospitalized in a ward for "miscellaneous" cases, bet the deed to his property on a single hand of cards, or act blithely on a murderous impulse.

Their lives are described with detachment, in precise, highly mannered sentences, which sound as if composed to a metronome. Each line conveys the ironic distance with which these narrators witness themselves, no matter how visceral their experiences are. On ordering a meal in a foreign language and being served a "very large portion of hot oily tripes," one notes fastidiously: "The very smell was enough to make my sensitive throat go into convulsions." When following a female companion through a crowded fairground, another comments, "I kept up for a few minutes but then from the corner of my eye I saw what looked like a beheading taking place on a stage to my left." Looking back, he finds something apparently almost as disturbing- a carnival game "encircled by young men whose wolfish grins exposed rows and rows of sturdy teeth masticating bread and meat."

Gauger's detached style lends itself to a humorous leveling of events of extremely different magnitudes, as well as to a passion that seems to follow logically: prose driven to probe the nature and limits of narrative, of "story." This questioning, taken up with utmost seriousness and great imagination, leads to a wealth of action and details, yet to few conclusions. Although the reader—having read many pieces about, say, insane gentry, before—may assume certain knowledge of these stories, any expectations are sure to be frustrated. The narrators reveal that, while their experiences can be expressed with perfect clarity, it is impossible to force them to cohere, to pull significant moments out from any others.

This can at times be seen quite literally, as in "Mr. Delfour's Other File," in which asking a man a question, no matter how simple, leads to an endless search for the sources of an answer. Other stories are more conceptually complex. In "The Unusual Narrative of the Odessa Conference," a Canadian professor traveling to Eastern Europe to attend a conference of the International Society for the Promotion of Educated Discourse finds himself again and again on the same flight to Odessa, despite arriving and having a series of increasingly intricate adventures involving repetition and metamorphoses: each narrative line suddenly ends when he hears certain words or falls asleep, returning him to the airplane. This journey, in which he becomes more and more confused about his own identity and even humanity, has apparently lasted for five years, and ends with the speaker finding solace in whatever resolution sleep offers.

The collection's intense self-consciousness can at times be wearing—who is interested in a character who reads a book on Applied Narratology, knowing that he is caught in a convoluted plot? At its best, however, Gauger's concern with form moves beyond cleverness, and illuminates.

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Edited by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, William Justice, and James Quay
Heyday Books ($15.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

In California Uncovered, an array of authors explore one of the most mythic areas of our country. Created by the California Council for the Humanities, which hopes to share the "reality beneath the headlines, statistics, and stereotypes about the state and its people," this collection of stories is a multicultural People's History of the California Dream, an anthology that warns people not to romanticize the Golden State.

According to James Quay, the Council's Executive Director, "No other region in the modern world has undergone the population change California has experienced in recent decades. Only half of the people now living in California were born here. Of the rest, half came here from another state, half from another country. As a result of this immigration, California is the most populous and most ethnically diverse state in the nation." Indeed, one might say there are many Californias—not only Northern and Southern, but also rich and poor, white and non-white, urban and rural and suburban, gay and straight, and Republican and Democrat.

Quay finds a hopeful note amidst this diversity, but the anthology makes one pause about relocating to the Golden State. Included are writings about being poor, working the agricultural fields, life in the inner city, illegal immigrants who are sent home, gang violence, difficult childhood experiences, and alienation. One does not find many Utopian visions, and also not explored in depth is California's diversity of natural environments—the coast, mountains, hills, valleys, forests, and desert shared by residents and tourists alike.

While there are a number of collections of writings about California, California Uncovered seeks to interpret the Golden State in a more postmodern way. Quay, in an excellent section of interviews with a variety of citizens that nicely offsets the stories by professional writers, clarifies the issues when he asks people to respond to a riff on Samuel Huntington's comment about the United States: "Critics say that California is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. California is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope."

Filled with fine and engaging writing, the anthology includes selections by canonical writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, Robert Hass, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Rodriguez, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, in addition to younger and lesser-known voices. "Becoming Californian" is one of the anthology's major themes; Rodriguez writes that leaving home is "almost an imperative for writers and other misfits. The subordinate theme was that impossibility of return—you can't go home again." An excerpt from Steinbeck's Travels with Charley confirms this. Steinbeck had a complicated relationship with California during his life; he resented newcomers to the state, which is especially evident in East of Eden, yet he took their side in The Grapes of Wrath, and was loathed in his hometown of Salinas because he criticized rural California.

If you are thinking of coming to California, one can gather from this book that there are certain things you should not do upon arriving. Think twice about kissing the pavement, it was likely spit upon. Those good jobs, well, there are residents and their children waiting for them. Those beautiful people, there are residents waiting for them too. Not everybody, even in San Francisco, is liberal; there is no longer plenty of room; and you may not like your neighbors. California is beautiful, but as this anthology reminds, it is also perilous. California does not open everyone with open arms.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005