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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Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions ($14.95)

by Daniel Borzutzky

Roberto Bolaño died at the age of 50 in 2003, the year his first book appeared in English translation. Thirty years earlier, just as the Socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown, Bolaño was imprisoned. On being released he moved to Mexico, traveled through Central America and Europe, and ended up in a small town outside of Barcelona, where he wrote about Pinochet's fascists with a directness that perhaps could only come with the distance of exile.

Bolaño was not afraid of realism, though he is certainly not a realist; his work in translation, even at its most bizarre, is rooted in the day-to-day existence of characters whose lives have been turned upside down by politics. We can see the influence of Cortazar in Bolaño's digressive narratives; and Borges's encyclopedic urges are certainly present in Bolaño's untranslated Nazi Literature in America, a novel written in the form of an imaginary catalogue of the many types of Nazi writers (e.g. science fiction writers, poets, prison writers) living in South, Central, and North America. But Bolaño sought to make a conscious break from the magical realist writers who dominated Latin American fiction for so many years. His historical scope, among other things, is much narrower; his language, especially in Distant Star, more commonplace. With his focus on exile and on the lingering effects of fascism, and with his ability to meld several stories into one, Bolaño is reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, whose premature death also occurred just a few years ago. Bolaño's writing is angrier and more violent than Sebald's, his tone less consistent from book to book; nevertheless, like Sebald, Bolaño's approach to history seems new. And like Sebald, whose essays in particular offer a sharp indictment of German writers, Bolaño's fiction is also concerned with the public role of the Chilean literati, who appear in his novels as complicit participants in evil.

Distant Star, we learn in the preface, is an extension of a chapter from Nazi Literature in America. It introduces Carlos Wieder, a fascist poet whose work, we are told, "is going to revolutionize Chilean poetry." Weider writes not with pen on paper but with airplane on sky (as did the avant-garde Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, who in 1982 wrote "The New Life" in the sky over New York City).

Our unnamed narrator is an insignificant poet who first meets Wieder in 1971 at a writing workshop in the Southern Chilean town of Concepciión. At this point the narrator is a college student, and Wieder, who has taken one of his many false names, is writing traditional verses that are bland and unremarkable. The milieu of the narrator and his poet-buddies is one of idealistic Socialism, but within the space of one drab sentence on page 16, "the army seized power, and the government collapsed." Our narrator is then arrested on trumped-up charges, and it is in the prison yard that he sees Wieder's first important poetic act: a string of prophetic Latin words skillfully drawn in the sky. But with the onset of the new regime, Wieder takes up a new artistic practice, murder: he kills the cutest girls in the Concepción writing workshop, the Garmendia twins, the objects of our narrator's desire.

When the narrator is released from prison without charges, he discovers that most of his friends have disappeared and he decides to leave the country. Meanwhile, Wieder is slowly becoming a national hero, known for his patriotic sky-verses, and for the aphorisms he offers to interviewing journalists: "Silence is like leprosy . . . Silence is like communism; silence is like a blank screen that must be filled. If you fill it, nothing bad can happen to you. If you are pure, nothing bad can happen to you."

Of course, bad things are happening all over the country, and thus our narrator relates the stories of poet-friends forced into exile. These chapters, in which Bolaño writes of exile's power to level and destabilize, provide some of the finest moments of the novel. Most compelling is our narrator's portrait of his former mentor in Concepción, Juan Stein, who becomes a full-time revolutionary, fighting with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, with the Cubans in Angola, and with guerillas in Guatemala, Paraguay, Columbia, Mozambique and Namibia. Stein eventually dies in El Salvador, in the end a casualty of all of Latin America's and the third world's failed revolutions.

The narrator, now in Europe, remains informed of Carlos Wieder through letters he receives from his friend Bibiano O'Ryan—who, like Bolaño himself, plans to assemble an anthology of Nazi literature of the Americas. Wieder, in his role as ombudsman between government and culture, "is called upon to undertake something spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds." What he comes up with is a two-pronged tribute to state-sponsored murder: poems in the sky that say ". . . Death is friendship . . . Death is responsibility . . . Death is love . . . growth . . . communion . . . Death is cleansing " along with an exhibition of photographs of mutilated bodies, presumably people he has killed.

By the end of the book, Wieder has faded into obscurity, and our narrator is now in Spain, living a lonely, uneventful life—until he is approached by a private investigator hired to track down Wieder, who has supposedly been living and writing under various pseudonyms in Europe. The novel now becomes a detective story, and soon Wieder turns up amongst the "The Barbaric Writers," who commune with master works "by defecating on the pages of Stendhal, blowing one's nose on the pages of Victor Hugo, masturbating and spreading one's semen over the pages of Gautier or Banville . . . cutting oneself with a razor blade and spattering blood over the pages of Balzac or Maupassant."

Distant Star is an amazing book, not simply for its depiction of Wieder, the outrageous star of this "literary grotesque," but for the subtle way in which our narrator drifts into the anonymity of exile. He is alone on the wrong side of the world, and his story is quietly heartbreaking.

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by Vincent Francone

Achieving recognition early as a writer of wild invention—Gore Vidal once called her "the most interesting young writer I've read in twenty years"—Jeanette Winterson earned the respect of many with her novels Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing the Cherry. Later books divided readers, but her fanatics have become fiercely loyal, especially as she wrapped up her self-proclaimed cycle of unconventional novels with 2001's astonishing The Powerbook. A culmination of the themes (love, gender roles, mutability, longing) that span six previous books, The Powerbook embraced the 21st century without alienating the past, resulting in a creation of rare vision.

Like all visionaries, Winterson continues to evolve. This year's Lighthousekeeping (Harcourt, $23) travels in a new direction, incorporating myth and whimsy, loss and laughter. Using an orphan girl, Silver, and her blind lighthouse-keeping mentor, Pew—a teller of impossible tales—to convey the story, Winterson tones down her usual metaphysical narrative play without compromising her creation. Less of a tinkering with convention than her previous novels are, Lighthousekeeping represents a logical step in Winterson's career as an artist and is perhaps this millennium's first great love letter to the art of storytelling.

Vincent Francone: I hate to start this off politically, but back in November when Bush got reelected, you wrote something on your website (www.jeanettewinterson.com) about America being in a state of civil war. Now that you're here touring the country, do you have any more thoughts on this?

Jeanette Winterson: I haven't seen enough yet. I think by the end of the tour I'll have certainly formed a view, and it'll be on my website next month. But it's the same dividing. The kind of people that I like, that I'm drawn to—of course they're appalled at George Bush, and they didn't vote for him. Then you've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.

VF: A lot of us couldn't believe he won.

JW: I think it's bad for Americans because it makes them paranoid. They start to think, was the election rigged in some sinister fashion? Is it as bad as Zimbabwe? So I think there's a nervousness which is new to the America I know, which is making people feel uncomfortable on both sides. The good guys don't want to appear anti-European and the bad guys just want to say, it's our country and we'll blow up what we like. There's a new attitude, I feel, coming from Europe.

VF: Speaking of the differences between Europe and America, do you notice a difference in readers? Your books seem very European inasmuch as they're somewhat modernist, but a lot of the people I know who are new to your work sometimes have problems with the broken narration and so forth.

JW: I think the Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. We should all read 19th-century novels, but we shouldn't write them. I think that's the important point. People are obsessed with narrative, which has had its day. I used to think that the movies would mop up all of that need for straightforward narrative and allow fiction to find a whole different path, rather in the way that photography freed up portraiture from the necessity of realism. All the bad portrait painters immediately went out of business when photography came along. The really interesting people like Picasso thought, This is fantastic. I don't have to make it look like anybody ever again. I will do something which is much more of a psychological drama.

It seems to me that all those early experiments with novels were really trying to find a way of constructing narrative which is in fact truer to our own experience. There's nobody on this planet, even the stupidest person, who lives in one time anyway. You're walking down the street and at the same time you're thinking of something that happened to you a couple of years ago and you're wondering about something that is going to happen the day after tomorrow, and you hold these realities in your head simultaneously. It's not a problem. So for a fiction writer to try and reproduce that seems to me to be more authentic than somebody who says, No, we all live in this monolithic reality. The same with the idea of progress or of our lives being this straight line. I think most of us have experienced these strange loops and curves and whirls, and we see patterns repeating over and over again in our lives. That's not a straight line. That's about a journey which is much more contoured—the recognition that space-time is curved, not straight, there's nothing in this universe which is straight—which is good if you're gay. [laughs]

VF: Of course.

JW: And why try and impose a straightforward narrative on something when all of our discoveries, scientific and creative, have been showing us that the world simply does not run like that, and our own mental processes do not run like that? We're much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie. The critics say, This is artificial, this isn't good storytelling . . . and I think, Well, let's look at the way people think and the way they live and let's find a narrative which really embraces that. Because life is fragmentary, and the pattern that creativity can offer is not one that is imposed, not something rigid, but rather something which can reveal the intrinsic patterns of that fragmentation. Things are in a perpetual dance, but there is an order. It's not really random at all. When you look into the world of the very small, the microscopic world of how we're made up, it's beautiful, it's strange, and we don't understand it. But it's certainly not rigidly formed.

VF: Never.

JW: Never. I love the idea of a dynamic universe where nothing is static and everything is changing at every moment. You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We're absolutely not. I really believe in the power of art to show us this, to hold up a real mirror to reality and to say, This is how it is: much wilder, much stranger, much more chaotic and exciting than you could ever dream.

As people get older they have these rigid patterns that they impose on themselves, and it kills them. They become dull, they become dead to new experience, they become afraid, biased, and bigoted. It's really simply to do with refusing new experience. I think art is always challenging you out of that refusal, challenging you towards the new, towards confrontations with the self and the world and with other ways of seeing. And that's got to be completely good. I mean, I love going to things that drive me mad. I think, why is this driving me crazy? And then I'm forced to assess my own position because all of us, even the best of us, the most broad-minded, all have assumptions, prejudices, biases which stop us from engaging in the world. When you have a very strong reaction to something and you say, I really hate that, it's a good moment to wonder why. You might be completely right because it's absolute trash and it offends every finer sensibility. But you might be wrong. When the Turner Prize [for visual arts] is given, it's Britain's biggest honor and it's always given to something which is really controversial. It's the polar opposite of the literary world, where prizes tend to be given to things that are quite safe. In the art world in Britain it's really wild.

VF: Really?

JW: Yes! It's fantastic. And they just give this amazing prize and every artist wants to win. And I think these things are very good and I like the heated debates that art offers. It really does force people to rethink every situation. So I just go to everything. I don't have to like it, I don't care. I want to be involved and I want to be exposed to that kind of assault. Sometimes it's fabulous and sometimes it really is hard to take, but at least I'm there engaging in it.

VF: I remember reading reviews of Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before—I don't know if I've ever seen reviews that were that split. People loved it or hated it, and more than anything it really made me want to find out why.

JW: People being encouraged to make up their own minds and think for themselves is so important. This world talks endlessly about freedom of choice, but we've never been more of a nation of robots. Everybody is seduced by corporate culture. They more or less do what the big sinister, faceless companies want them to do: spend money, buy stuff, don't think about anything, don't question anything. It's a crazy way to live. If you're involved in art at any level you're always questioning the status quo because that's what art does. And it's absolutely not a luxury. It's essential. It's one of the things which makes a tolerable life possible. Otherwise it would all be Wal-Mart and shopping malls, wouldn't it? [laughs]

VF: In the "Virginia Woolf Intro" on your website, you talk about critical theory and how convoluted it can be; you also say that art is communication. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

JW: Yes, I believe that absolutely. It's about the connection, not just that one human being makes to another but that we make across time with each other. Science is always updating itself with discoveries. But art doesn't live in that kind of perpetual updating. It lives in a present tense, so we still want to read Shakespeare, we still want to read Dante, and we still even read the Bible, not just because we're fundamental nutcases but because it's interesting to us. It goes on existing and therefore it gives you the most astonishing connection across time. You don't feel that you are isolated in your own moment in history. You can recognize all those other voices, all those other expressions through painting, through music, through books . . . it doesn't matter. They're still absolutely relevant because they tap into those permanent truths about the human condition which go on no matter how society changes around them. And that's why we still go back to great art, whether it's text or pictures or music, because it's still working, it's still speaking to us.

I think that connectedness is really important at a time when people have very little sense of how they've arrived here and what the past is, apart from wars and disputes of what the future might bring. One of the strongest threads connecting the past, present, and future is art—and I think that is a huge achievement. Even if people make the mistake of forcing art into a kind of glorified documentary. But yet, when we think about the works of art that last, we see at once that they go on speaking to us long after any contemporary interest in their subject matter is dead. I mean, nobody goes to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England. You go to Shakespeare to find out about yourself now. When you look at a Caravaggio you don't think that you're in the 1600s in Rome; you go there because there's something compelling about that dark and light and that vision and strangeness that still moves us. That's why there are art galleries, that's why we still listen to classical music, why we still read books. It doesn't matter that they are not of the moment, it matters that they speak to something very deep in us which isn't of the moment either. We talked earlier about the cells in our body being renewed, but the fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe. That's the way that we're made. It's a wonderful thing and I think that's part of the connectedness that art offers.

My godchildren are just starting Dickens—they're eleven and nine—and they don't know anything about Victorian society in England in the 19th century. And they don't care. They just love the characters, they love the stories, and they're excited by the language, and so already we're creating a common ground between us—me in my generation and them in their generation, and we're doing it through the shared space of literature, which is fantastic.

VF: You've written a kid's book and you are working on another . . .

JW: It's finished.

VF: Do you write these with your godchildren in mind?

JW: Yeah, stories is what we do. They're language-based children, they don't have any choice [laughs]. We played word games and learned poetry since they were tiny. We tell each other stories; I'll start off a story and one of them will pick it up. I want to keep their imaginations elastic—that's one of things I can give them. I can give them language and I can keep their minds free so that they love the power of wordplay and they love their own creativity and they take delight in it.

VF: It sounds wonderful. I think a lot of people would kill for a childhood like that.

JW: I didn't grow up with any books at all but I did grow up in an oral tradition, where people were telling stories all the time because they couldn't read. Books for them weren't containers of wisdom, they were closed books, nobody knew what was in there, nobody cared. But what they did do was talk. So I had that and I value it, and I suppose in a way what I am doing now is passing on to the kids the value of the spoken word, because language is in the mouth first and foremost. And then they find the pleasure of that in the written word as well.

VF: Regarding your own creative process, do you keep anything around you when you work? Favorite pictures or anything like that?

JW: No, I always work in a separate space than my domestic space—always have, always will. My studio is completely separate from my house and it has nothing in it at all, except a desk, a lamp, and a wood burning stove, and I take my dinky little Powerbook G4 in there and that's it. The cats come in, the dog comes in, I make coffee; I light the fire when it's cold and look out the window down onto the river and that's it.

VF: It reminds me of how Dylan Thomas had to work in an empty shed in the back of his property with just a desk and his typewriter.

JW: Yeah, and I understand that. I just found that the rest of the stuff doesn't help at the moment of work. I have lovely things in my house, lovely furniture and pictures and books, it's a soothing and a creative place to be in my everyday environment but I don't want to work in it. I have to work with nothing.

VF: It makes sense. I don't want to bring my work home with me.

JW: No. But at the same time, if I'm in an anonymous place I can work anywhere. I'm very good at working on flights, on trains, in tunnels. I don't get distracted by the outside noise. I can switch it out very easily.

VF: We talked earlier about your upbringing. I know you were raised by Pentecostal Evangelical parents, so I would be interested to know what your spiritual beliefs are now, if any?

JW: Well, I'm certainly not interested in organized religion, which I think is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality. You can't tell a woman in Africa who's giving birth to her eighteenth child that it's good for her soul that she doesn't use a condom. The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for. But at the same time I do believe that there are spiritual values, that life has an inside as well as an outside, and the church was one of the few places or institutions that would really recognize that. The problem with rampant capitalism and our loss of religious faith is that the outside now has assumed a grotesque dominance. People have forgotten about the inner life all together. They're almost embarrassed by it because there's nothing there protecting it. Even at their worst, true believers—Muslim, Christian, even Evangelicals—recognize that there is something inside which is not bound by shopping or television. And we need that.

I do think that art is one of the latter-day protectors of life's inside against the endless pressures of the outside, because art itself has very different values. Genuinely alternative values about what matters and what's worthwhile and where you should put your energies. All of those things are very different in the world of art than they are in the world of politics and commercialism. The church used to be good at that. Time to pray is really just withdrawing from the world, which everybody needs to do. Some of us have tried to do it through Eastern religions, through Buddhism, but it doesn't often fit the Western way. People feel slightly uncomfortable that they have a Western outside and an Eastern inside, and there's a tension there. But it's something that we're really going to have to resolve. The 21st century is bringing up a lot of interesting problems and if we don't resolve them in the next fifty years than we won't be around to resolve them in fifty years after that. One of these questions is, How will we nourish our inner life, our spiritual life? You can make brave and strong decisions that say to the rampant outside, We've got to stop; we're not going to buy every blade of grass on the planet; we are going to start feeding the world's poor.

These aren't just political decisions, they come from a place of real compassion, and I think that's part of the inner life not the outer life. Do-gooding is never enough, political will is never enough. You have to feel deep compassion for other people and for the planet, otherwise it's superficial and it doesn't hold. Things happen for a few years and then we go back to the old ways. Whereas if it comes from a deep place and deeply held belief, then we really can change things in the long term. But most people now don't have any deeply held beliefs, which makes them uncertain, fearful, and prey to all kinds of outside forces. It also makes them feel powerless to affect change. You always hear people say, There's nothing I can do. But anybody with a strong inner belief never believes that. Look at Mother Teresa. We may not like her belief system, but she believes in something so strongly that she goes out and does something. And you see that in every remarkable individual; they have a deep inner conviction which the outside world didn't give them and can't take away. So, one of the things I would like to see is more people with that deep inner conviction, but stripped of all its awful religious connotations. We don't want missionaries [laughs], not in the old-fashioned sense. We do want people who will go out there and care passionately.

VF: It's interesting that you speak of conviction. In November of 2004 you put Yeats's "The Second Coming" on your website, asking people, especially in America, to find the conviction . . . I love the website, by the way. I know you had to battle to get the rights to your name back for the domain.

JW: I did, the creep [laughs]. It was that Wild West moment there, wasn't it? When the rest of us were all a bit sleepy, these techno-maniacs thought they could make a fortune.

VF: Selling the rights to your names back to you?

JW: Right. But I spent considerable sums and a lot of time winning the case . . . in fact it's gone down on the law books as a landmark case, which is great. The next day Julia Roberts got hers back, the next day Madonna got hers back, and I thought, Listen girls, you could send a few pounds . . . [laughs].

VF: Julia Alvarez refused to pay someone for the rights to her own name so she named her website her own name backwards...

JW: Well, I was furious. It felt morally wrong, I thought, You can't steal my name. I felt like I was in a fairy tale. Somebody was stealing my name!

VF: Like out of one of your books... someone gambled your heart.

JW: Yeah. I told him at the beginning, I said if you give me my name now back you'll save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run. He took no notice. [laughs] But I love doing the website. It's going to be five years this September since we started it. And it's grown and grown; it's got 250 pages on it with an internal search engine so it's quite easy to find things, and we'll keep adding things. There's really good feedback on it. People seem to like the message board.

VF: It's a useful tool. Reading The Powerbook was interesting in that regard; I love the way so much of it takes place in cyberspace. I was wondering what you thought about technology as either a subject or a tool for art.

JW: Well, we talked about it a bit at the beginning when we discussed photography and how these things have the potential to free up art forms, and then they don't. I don't think technology will alter the way creative artists do business. It might alter some methods or some means or media, but it will never alter the essential spirit of people sitting down and creating something from themselves, no matter how many fancy tools they've got. They still have to have something. It's like those ridiculous screenwriter programs, isn't it? "This is all you need to become a professional—just add the words." But the Internet, I think, is fascinating creatively because it allows people to do what's always been the pursuit of artists, which is to disguise and distort or obscure their identity or invent a completely different role. Orlando is perfect Internet material as someone who pushes time in different genders, different guises. And that's exactly what happens on the Internet. People go into those chat rooms and they feel they can be anybody, which is great. It's sort of virtual transvestitism—all these guys who would never wear knickers going into chat rooms calling themselves "Jennifer." [laughs] It's crazy.

VF: And liberating.

JW: And I like that. I partly think that might free up people's minds to understand a bit more about the freedom and playfulness of art itself, that you don't have to be bound by the facts or any straight narrative. You can be who you like in that virtual world.

VF: You've mentioned in the past that your first seven novels represent a cycle of recurring stories, and that The Powerbook is the culmination of that cycle. If so, how does your new book, Lighthousekeeping, fit in with the rest of your work?

JW: With The Powerbook, I do feel it was the end of a cycle—not as a theory or an intellectual conceit but as something instinctively understood. The Powerbook is an extravaganza; I threw in everything that I could. I wanted it to be as wild and audacious as I could make it, to work with all the things that I'd been thinking of and playing with for the last however many years . . . And I did do that and I was pleased with it, so I knew that whatever happened next would have to be far away from that territory. You have to keep away from the book that you've just written because the thing that was so difficult for you then becomes the thing that is familiar to you. I was reluctant at first to go back to character-based fiction, but as it began to come together as an imaginative idea I realized I should just follow it. It was difficult because I was tempted to just go back to a Powerbook shape. I had to consciously stop yourself.

VF: Well, mission accomplished, because Lighthousekeeping is very different.

JW: It may be that doing the kid's stuff has helped with breaking certain patterns that might have formed. As you get older, you know it's a double-edged sword: you have enormous experience and you know a lot about your own process, but you can fall into the habit of becoming a parody of yourself, which would be awful. I want people to be able to pick out a page of any of my books and know that it's me, to recognize it because of the way the language is used, otherwise all is lost from my point of view. But it also has to be a different book.

VF: I once read that Italo Calvino felt that he never had a singular voice or style that was immediately recognizable. He was more known for his really great concepts, not the language.

JW: But you might know him just from the concepts. [Calvino's] Invisible Cities is a perfect book. He just plowed through and did his own thing in spite of everybody else and he was a great inspiration for me.

VF: Not to change the subject, but how is your new business, Verde?

JW: My shop? Oh, I love my shop. It's a continental deli that's fair on labor, fair on the land. Everything is either organically farmed or well fed farmed—no additives—and it has got to come from either small producers or single producers, no shady corporate deals. Fresh vegetables, organic olives, all of that; our pasta is made fresh every day by a family up the road. We're not going to give Wal-Mart a run for their money, but it's this question of everybody doing whatever they can to make things a bit better. And we can all do something. I had the space in the house that I own and I thought it would be great to have a shop there. I was offered a huge amount of money, 60,000 pounds a year, from an American coffee company [for her retail space] and I was very pleased to say no.

VF: Please tell me that was Starbucks.

JW: I can't tell you who it is. When they made the offer I had to sign a bit of paper saying, if she turns it down, which she won't, she can't tell anyone . . . if I had taken it I wasn't allowed to say for how much, but I reckon as I'm not saying who, I can say how much. Miserable bastards [laughs]. I don't want these people in my life. I don't like their politics, I don't like their coffee, and I don't want to come down the street to my apartment in London every week and see this. So I thought the best thing would be to open a shop myself. I went into partnership with somebody who's a chef and has a lot of experience, and we're making a go of it.

VF: Is it more of a local thing or do you have people coming in from all over?

JW: Oh, people are coming in all the time because it got a lot of publicity when it opened. It looks gorgeous: wooden floorboards, wooden shelves, there's a little fire going in the corner and you can have an espresso while you're choosing things. And we do nice bouquets of flowers as well that you can take to your girlfriend. So you can buy something to cook for her, get her a bouquet of flowers and a nice bottle of Italian wine . . .

VF: Sounds amazing.

JW: Well, it's how you can exercise power. Organic food is expensive, but if you can afford to buy it, buy it. You might not be able to afford to buy it every day, but the day you can, do. That makes a difference. I really believe in cumulative and collected little gestures toward a better world.

Click here to purchase Lighthousekeeping at your local independent bookstore

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