Michael Downing
Shoemaker & Hoard ($23)

by Carrie Mercer

Described by one Native American as “the white man cutting an inch off the bottom of his blanket and sewing it to the top to make it longer,” the idea of Daylight Saving has been mocked and championed in equal measure for more than two hundred years. In Spring Forward, Michael Downing chronicles a surprisingly checkered and bizarre history, including arguments between federal, state and local governments. Lobbying efforts came from such diverse groups as farmers, railroads, retailers, Broadway, the beef industry, and even church clergy.

The general public has the impression that Daylight Saving was invented for farmers, but as Downing makes abundantly clear, farmers were vehemently against it from the start. Among many non-farmers who contended the benefits of Daylight Saving was A. Lincoln Filene, chairman of Boston’s largest department store. “Most farm products are better when gathered with dew on,” he claimed. In fact, many crops could not be harvested until the sun had dried the dew off. Ironically, Daylight Saving actually had the effect of lengthening the farmer’s workday, since his schedule was determined by two different clocks—the natural one and the one controlled by his local government.

Who started this nonsense in the first place? And why? The blame (or credit, depending on your viewpoint) can be spread among many characters, as Downing notes. Although Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion may be the first on record, no one is really sure anymore if he meant it as a joke. In the early 20th century, English architect William Willett lobbied parliament after having a revelation that the early morning summer sun was being wasted on sleeping townsfolk, that they should be out enjoying the extra light. Claims of energy savings and workplace efficiency resulting from Daylight Saving are still popular. Such claims have never been substantiated, despite the fact that the U.S. government has been using such reasoning to implement, and even extend, Daylight Saving since World War I.

In general, having more late afternoon/evening hours of light has made the most difference in people’s leisure time, increasing how much they spend (in time and money) on activities such as barbeque and “pleasure driving,” making the beef and barbeque industries as well as auto and fuel manufacturers heavy lobbyers for Daylight Saving. Of course, entertainment industries that depend on people going indoors for the evening—including Broadway shows and movie theatres across the nation—lobby just as hard against Daylight Saving. One worldwide change that Daylight Saving can be credited with is a huge increase in the number of people playing golf, due to later hours of daylight. And while there are less than five million farmers left in the U.S.—about 2 percent of the labor force—there are now over 30 million golfers.

Who knew an hour could make so much difference? If only it were that simple. As Downing details, even when communities have agreed to participate in Daylight Saving, there is still no consensus on how long it should last—anywhere from three to six months. This lack of agreement has created some ridiculous arrangements, such as the 1966 case of one office building in St. Paul, Minnesota, in which half the floors—those working for the city—observed Daylight Saving, and the other half—those working for the county—did not.

As entertaining as Downing makes the madness over Daylight Saving, he does an even better job of putting this one bone of contention into the larger context of worldwide timekeeping. His discussions of Greenwich Mean Time, Stalin’s failed five-day week in the 1920s, and the aggressive race between countries to be the first—by way of an altered clock—to arrive in the new millennium, give the reader an idea of how powerful a tool timekeeping is, and what huge economic and cultural forces depend on it.

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Eileen Chang
Translated by Andrew F. Jones
Columbia University Press ($27.50)

by Lucas Klein

By now, Chinese Communist Correctness has long since receded, changing Eileen Chang’s writing from being a guilty pleasure to simply a pleasure. The trend began in the West, as Chinese literature scholars in American universities during the ’60s promoted her vision and style as supreme in 20th-century Chinese literature. Readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan then discovered, or re-discovered, an individual talent, opening the mainland floodgates by the end of the ’80s. And yet, while the resurgence of her popularity can be traced to the American academy, her essays have, until now, been inaccessible to English readers.

Chang’s deft and sympathetic translator, Andrew Jones, an accomplished academic who has also translated the fiction of Yu Hua, has given Chang an English that suggests her own fluency and comfort in the language. Indeed, some of her essays were originally written in English, then expanded in Chinese, from which Jones translated—or “triangulated”—for this volume.

The context of Chang’s writing in English suggests the nature of her danger for a Communist reading public: her essays describe her upper-class background, and are forthright about fleeing war-ravished China in favor of English-style university education in Hong Kong, but Jones’s footnotes reveal an even more sinister truth. Much of her English journalism was printed in a pro-Axis periodical published in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Chinese writers, especially those still read and studied today, matched their opposition to Japanese imperialism with an increasingly vehement leftism. Chang’s resilience against social pressure from the rest of the Chinese intellectual community displays an impressive strength, and despite writing from an occupied zone for collaborationist magazines, she would have called herself apolitical. Daily life, human interactions, and even fashion concerned her too much, it seems, to have been bothered by politics.

Daily life, human interactions, and fashion are—particularly for 1940s China—considered female topics, and if Eileen Chang has any political dreams, they are for a space in which women’s problems can be accepted and considered. “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” in which she presents the preceding several hundred years of Chinese history as a tale of its fashions, even allows for an intersection of politics and panache: “In times of political turmoil and social unrest—the Renaissance in Europe, for instance—there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement . . . During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams.” She even portrays fashion as a response to oppression: “In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes.”

Advocating for a women’s view of history, though, does quite not make Eileen Chang a feminist. Her essay “Speaking of Women” spends pages cataloguing sexist statements in an English pamphlet called Cats (along the lines of “Time is money, which is why the more time women spend in front of their mirrors, the more money they must spend in a boutique,” or “Two women can never make friends as quickly as two men, because there are more secrets between them”), but she follows it with no piquant rebuttal. Rather, her response is measured, mild, even meek. While she begins with a fine attack against generalizations—“The price of such so-called wisdom is a cheapening of the truth, for how could it be possible to sum up all women in a single phrase?”—she later depicts women in particularly unflattering terms: “In a democratic system … the problem is that most women are even less able to govern themselves capably than men.” While her topic is ostensibly egalitarian, her tone is aloof, whether writing about women in government or moralizing that, “when poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

The Chinese word for essay includes the character for “scattered,” and the general style of Chinese prose allows for much more meandering than the English version of the genre. Not surprisingly, some of Chang’s best moments are when she strays from the assigned topic, talking about Japanese children in an essay “On Dance,” or Chinese attitudes to the law while ostensibly writing about “Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes.” The entire essay “Seeing with the Streets” is a grand digression, demonstrating the refined vision of an exacting author as she free associates through an urban neighborhood.

But despite the roaming elegance of her longer pieces, the freshest pieces are the most clipped, those mini-essays where Chang gives herself no room to meander. One, “On Carrots,” plops into a meta-nonfiction; recording a quick dialogue about carrots, Chang elaborates only with:

I secretly jotted down this little speech, without changing even a single word and then couldn’t help laughing to myself, because all I needed to do was add a title—“On Carrots”—and a stylish little essay appeared on the page before me. . . And its wonder lies in brevity: by the time you start reading, it’s already over, which only makes you ponder its meaning all the more.

When she died in 1995, Chang—whose Chinese name Zhang Ailing is a transliteration of her English name—had been living in the United States for forty years. She had stopped writing years earlier, and her reputation had fluctuated, but she had remained a highpoint of Shanghai culture at the low point of the city. This new translation of her essays, providing in English what was composed under its influence, fulfills her charge by allowing us into that zone between two poles.

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Nadeem Aslam
Alfred A. Knopf ($25)

by Scott Esposito

In Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam develops a set of relationships that reveals the ways in which love—often abetted by religion and nationalism—can divide people instead of bring them together. Dasht-e-Tanhaii, Aslam’s stylized community of Pakistani immigrants to England, is "a place of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds."

Within this community, the lovers Jugnu and Chanda appear to have been murdered for living together without marrying, and Chanda’s two brothers are the suspected killers. As he tries to get on with his life, Jugnu's brother Shamas must endure the silent scorn of Kaukab, his fundamentalist wife, because he was permissive of Jugnu's lifestyle. Soon, however, Shamas meets a beautiful Muslim woman named Suraya and falls in love. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is being used: she must marry Shamas in order to remarry the husband who drunkenly divorced her one night since, under Islamic law, a divorced couple can only remarry after the wife has married another man.

This plot may appear busy, but over the course of almost 400 pages it proves sparse indeed. Instead, what fills the cavernous pages of Aslam’s book are deep, lyric studies of Shamas and Kaukab and their relationships to Jugnu, the other residents of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and their three estranged children. Aslam's talent for rendering the complexities of many difficult relationships is substantial, and the more we read, the better we understand each character as he or she develops throughout the novel. It is this that makes Maps for Lost Lovers mesmerizing.

In the book’s first section, Aslam writes that as a young immigrant to England, Shamas's wife Kaukab was so excited at the prospect of learning English that she filled a notebook with “jumbled up” proverbs she had overheard. Aslam presents a list of these, the last of which is “Heaven is other people.” As Aslam explains, “The last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?”

Kaukab’s misappropriation of Sartre’s aphorism is emblematic of the greater paradox that Aslam relentlessly drives at throughout Maps for Lost Lovers. Kaukab is a sweet, caring person who would never truly believe that that other people make the world into a hell. For her, relationships are rewarding and fundamental. Yet, unwillingly, Kaukab’s prejudices often create a hellish setting for her friends, her family, and herself. Her rigid fundamentalism and her continual disapproval of the ones she loves send her husband into the arms of another woman and prevent her three children from ever coming home. Although this paradox may be most easily seen in Kaukab, it is no less present for Shamus, Suraya, or many other characters. Tragically, instead of coming together in a time of despair, they make things even more difficult for one another. The question Aslam ponders in presenting this paradox is whether his characters are tragically flawed, simply incapable of doing better, or if they are coerced into such things by their memory of Pakistan and their interpretation of Islam.

Such subject matter may make Maps for Lost Lovers, at times, a depressing read, but it is nonetheless a very worthwhile one. Throughout, the book is buoyed by Aslam’s lovely prose, which is saturated with imagery to the point that virtually no object or feeling is presented without a striking image to accompany it. A slow book that casts a very deep gaze, Maps for Lost Lovers is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on powerful forces con drive us apart: nationalism, religion, and, most of all, love.

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Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday ($24.95)

by Kevin Dole

From the references to The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in the jacket copy, one might expect Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted to establish mainstream literary credibility for its author. It doesn’t: Haunted is no more or less literary than any other book by Palahniuk. Similarly, early reference in the text to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the Villa Diodati—the country house where Mary Shelley and friends created, among other tales, the story of Frankenstein and the modern vampire archetype—might make one expect the book to be a horror novel. It isn’t: Haunted, while often disturbing and occasionally disgusting, it is not a very scary book.

Haunted is, despite all indicators otherwise, a black satire, like most of Palahniuk’s work. What differentiates Haunted from his other fiction is that it is a collection of short tales told by disparate, desperate characters, much like the classical works of literature that it so conspicuously mentions. The storytellers are all participants in an unconventional writers' retreat, held by the extremely wealthy and aged eccentric Mr. Whittier—who, in the grand tradition of wealthy eccentrics given to odd experiments, is not who he seems (his secret being, in the tradition of Palahniuk, bizarre enough to make one simultaneously laugh aloud and squirm)—in an abandoned theater. There the novel’s 18 narrators spend three months in isolation in hopes of creating their magnum opus.

The stories that they produce, masterpiece or no, comprise the text. This structure is not without its flaws. It allows Palahniuk to explore his major themes from multiple angles, but despite this freedom Haunted feels almost mathematically rote. Each chapter is a self-contained story. Each story is prefaced by an unremarkable prose poem that introduces the character and establishes the circumstance of the story. In between stories we learn how the group is coping with confinement in the face of ever increasing privations (this connective tissue is told in collective third person, the same “we” that presumably narrates the poems). But while predictable, the real reason that this structure proves problematic is that it places total reliance on the individual stories, which are a decidedly mixed bag.

Most of them, thankfully, are at least worth reading, and some are even great. Included is the notorious “Guts”—which, along with “Exodus” and “Speaking Bitterness,” shows Palahniuk at his provocative best. The final story, “Obsolete,” is an allegorical tale of speculative fiction that would have been at home in the best of the ’70s sci-fi pulps, and “Hot Potting” would make the high point in any horror anthology. But too many others are merely mediocre. Readers quickly learn that each story will contain a Shocking Twist, and while always inventive, the twists are sometimes desperate in their outrageousness. Stories like “Punch Drunk” and “The Nightmare Box” just try too hard and are the worse for it.

The relationship between the stories is also confusing. A collection of short fiction needn’t necessarily be cohesive, but much like the characters that tell them, these stories just don’t get along with each other. “Dissertation” and “Post-Production” don’t even seem to occupy the same reality. And Haunted takes a bewildering turn toward the paranormal in its second half; it’s difficult to reconcile later explorations of werewolves and psychic powers with earlier stories of personal failure and devastating irony. Most of the stories succeed on their individual merits but fail when taken collectively, especially since the subtitle tells us that Haunted is supposed to be a novel.

The overarching narrative shows Palahniuk at his worst. As befits a group of people so damaged, the characters quickly move from self-pity to self-destruction. Unfortunately, they all have suggestive names like The Reverend Godless and Miss Sneezy. These pseudonyms and the structure of the theater itself are probably meant to recall “The Masque of the Red Death” but instead the action takes on pastiche, like the end solution to a session of the board game Clue— "Comrade Snarky in the Blue Velvet Lobby with the Chef's Knife!" The mayhem wears out quickly, becoming profoundly ineffective and at times incoherent. Palahniuk wants to talk about self-sabotage and our "culture of blame"; he wants to address the connections between storytelling, victimhood, and voyeurism. He does this with some success inside the characters’ stories, but in the collective narrative he feels it necessary to tell us explicitly, and this weakens the work.

Haunted starts to come together as a book at the end, despite the supernaturalism; it nearly closes with a tone that's almost hopeful (in a Samuel Beckett sort of way), but its grace is quickly dashed by pointless, mean-spirited irony. This is a book that can be admired for its complexity and ambition, but will likely be remembered for its failure.

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Siddhartha Deb
The Ecco Press ($24.95)

by Niranjana Iyer

The Republic of India is often imagined in the shape of a diamond, with Kashmir and Kerala marking the north and south, and Bombay and Calcutta defining the western and eastern regions respectively. Such a map, however, would be incomplete; north of Calcutta lies a fragile strip of land (no more than twenty miles wide) that connects the Indian ‘mainland’ to the seven hill states of the north-east. Bounded by Burma, China, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, these states form one of the least-explored regions of the world, and are the setting and subject of Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic.

Amrit Singh is a Delhi-educated journalist who works for a sleepy Calcutta newspaper named (inappropriately enough) the Sentinel. Going through the newspaper files, he chances upon a photograph of a young woman being held at gunpoint by two masked men. A note states that the woman is a porn actress killed by a north-eastern rebel group named MORLS, as a warning to those engaging in “corrupt activities.” Posted to the region on a routine assignment for the Sentinel, Amrit decides to privately investigate the photograph, partly out of curiosity and partly because a German acquaintance hints that his magazine in Tubingen will pay well for an article on the picture. The story, Amrit is instructed, must portray “the mystery and sorrow of India through the story of the woman in the photograph.”

North-eastern India, the reader learns, is rich in oil; the locals, however, have not benefited from the oil wells constructed by the Delhi government. Rebel groups are hence numerous, and have long been fomenting minor trouble, so as to convey their frustration and resentment to the central government. Deb introduces into this real-life scenario the rebel group MORLS (Movement Organized to Resuscitate the Liberation Struggle), which casts itself as a guardian of morality. MORLS’s activities include ordering women to dress modestly, forcing prostitutes to give up their trade, and threatening drug users with violence unless they kick the habit.

An isolated event in a remote location is thus revealed to be no less than a microcosm of the global conflicts of our age. Boundaries and borders—both physical and imagined—are fragile; nothing is one-sided in this novel. The German magazine is guilty of desiring to reduce India to a snappy sound bite, but Amrit Singh, in search of an easy-to-market story that might grant him financial freedom, is no less culpable. The Delhi government may have suffered under the rule of imperial Britain not long ago, but it is now quite content to take advantage of a far-away people in a faraway place.

As Amrit travels to the state of Manipur, and then across the border to Burma in search of his story, reality and illusion begin to blur. The woman in the photograph might not have been a porn actress. She might not be dead. The photograph might have been staged, either by the Indian government to discredit the rebels, or by the rebels themselves, as a warning to the local population. As Amrit goes deep into the region, the difference between the center and the periphery too becomes shadowy—Delhi is no longer the locus, but an unreal and increasingly irrelevant place.

Shades of Heart of Darkness indeed; in fact, An Outline of the Republic is prefaced by a quotation from Conrad “Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” Amrit is always searching for an objective truth, the real story under the layers of narrative, and the novel never veers from the viewpoint of a dispassionate observer.

This self-consciously journalistic tone, however, sometimes leads to the prose taking on an “explaining” note. Manipur is described as having “the highest rate of educated unemployment in the region, rampant drug use, promiscuity, AIDS, and regular violence with government forces as well as ethnic clashes.” Describing the diversity of passengers on a bus, Deb writes that it “felt like a microcosm of the region, indeed of the nation.” At its best, however, the novel is a clear-eyed declaration that nothing less than the truth should do—however complicated and elusive that truth might be. A subtle exploration of identity and conflict, without a whiff of exoticism, An Outline of the Republic is a timely addition not just to writings on India, but to the literature of the peripheries of the world, making the reader question whether ‘far-away’ is perhaps closer than previously imagined.

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Lance Olsen
Chiasmus Press ($12)

by Scott Esposito

Early in 10:01, the accomplished new experimental novel from Lance Olsen, we're told that movie directors employ a technique called a zip pan, in which "the camera moves so quickly the image in between the original subject and its successor is blurred." This is far from trivial information; 10:01 is constructed of about 100 two-page vignettes connected by the literary equivalent of a zip pan. Each vignette briefly descends into the consciousness of one of roughly 50 characters, all of whom are connected by the fact that they are watching a movie in AMC Theater #10 at the Mall of America, the Bloomington, Minnesota, monstrosity that, with 520 stores, an indoor amusement park, and a walk-through aquarium, is purported to be the largest mall in the country.

It's an apt setting for a book that attempts to understand how Americans today process the ever more information-rich world around them. Rather than organizing his book around a discernible plot, Olsen makes an exploration of this idea the book's main attraction, including tiny clues in each vignette. Although some the vignettes are linked and some of the characters are visited more than once, most often we're left to develop our own connections between "shots."

By structuring 10:01 like a movie and setting the book during a movie screening, Olsen suggests that we make sense of the daily onslaught of mediated, superficial interactions by perceiving consciousness as little movies that run inside our heads. He reminds us that the typical movie consists of roughly 500-1,000 shots, paralleled in our own lives by the hundreds of advertisements and seemingly endless barrage of information we are subjected to each day. Olsen's book trades heavily in cinematic metaphors (e. g. comparing the rapid eye motions that make up perception to the flicker of frames during a screening), and throughout the book film techniques are adapted into literary equivalents, such as heading each vignette with the minute, second, and hundredth of a second at which it takes place.

The vignettes themselves range from surreal, to bizarre, to comical, to stream of consciousness, to poignant, perhaps duplicating our daily range of sensory input. Like the many pieces of information leveled at our precious senses, some of the vignettes are more enjoyable than others, but part of the pleasure in reading Olsen's book is that—good or bad—we know that we'll soon move on to the next hit. In a longer book with longer sections, Olsen's style might have become tiresome, but at a brisk 190 pages, 10:01, like a chaotic, quick trip through a busy mall, never has the chance to drag.

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René Steinke
William Morrow ($24.95)

by Garin Cycholl

It’s not sure whether the end of the century will be noted by the striking of typewriter keys or the blast of a horn, but many artists in these days of disposable apocalypse are standing in line for their chance to chronicle the last shovel full of dirt onto the past century. The strange thing is that those notes may have already been compiled by the Baroness's Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, poet, artist, and subject of Holy Skirts, René Steinke’s novelistic exploration of the Baroness’ life, its scraps and fashions. Steinke’s novel chronicles this woman who carves her artistic identity in an age that still believes in the self. Born in Germany, the Baroness ends up in World War I New York and crafts her poems from a common American language—the popular music, conversations, and advertisements that she hears in the streets. Yet, Steinke’s novel is not another example of historical fiction, an imagined life of a living poet. Instead, the novel plays within the linguistic abrasions of the city, the language that Elsa picks up on the streets and within commercial culture. Steinke explores how a world is strung along these gathered bits of language, the poetic and psychological scraps that become the framework in which her artistic life is explored.

Steinke’s fiction measures a life lived out of time, cataloguing Elsa’s seemingly irrational, vacuous poems and how easily she disappears amidst the early century’s passing materiality. In Germany, Elsa hides herself in a man’s second-hand suit and a monocle as easily as men around her hide behind their Kaiser-like mustaches. Among a collection of Berlin chorus girls, Elsa disguises herself with a pair of cardboard breasts that hilariously slide down to the front of her pelvis during a show. Following a lover to New York, she vanishes among the flags hung in the shop windows of a pre-Weimar America. Here, she hones her craft—piecing herself together in language and collecting her wardrobe from things tossed into the trash. Chewing gum wrappers for jewelry. A blinking light positioned above her behind, a cincture that draws the eye of Marcel Duchamp. Her poetry develops as fragments, appearing piecemeal in The Little Review, and modernity breaks like a wave around her, a future strung from the past. She becomes a muse of sorts for the cold but stricken Marcel.

The novel’s central moment opens around a rumored short film in which Man Ray captures Marcel shaving Elsa’s pubic hair. Excited by the prospect of this promised work, another man later asks, “Is (the film) Cubist? Is it Futurist?” Marcel gives his measured explanation, “The Baroness is not a Futurist. She is the future.” Elsa lives and works in anticipation of the film’s release, but when the film is destroyed in processing, Marcel just as coldly explains, “Our friend said the strips stuck together in the chemicals. . . It was an experiment. The technology isn’t ready for us apparently.” The film, and art itself, is the rumor left behind as its material gets swallowed by the enticing, but failed, technology.

Despite Elsa’s verse and outrageous wardrobe, Steinke’s writing depicts the Baroness just as much a rumor, a life overheard. As a girl, Elsa hurls a batch of early poems into the fire when her mother responds to them with nonchalance. In the cities, she throws herself easily from one sexual encounter to another. Others’ charges of “purposelessness” in her life sting her. She breaks into The Little Review’s New York offices in a ferocious attempt to steal negative letters written to the magazine about her poetry. Returning to Paris after World War I, her “aloneness” remains “huge”; she lives in a one-franc apartment with rented furniture.

The easy summation here would be to point to the artist’s fragmentation in the face of modernity, to mumble something about postmodernity “not coming in non-refundable bottles.” Yet in the novel’s narration, Elsa adeptly plays herself as a rumor. The odd thing that Steinke develops here is how Elsa inhabits her own body, while the century seems to disappear around her. Perhaps, this is the artist’s test. Just as a painter-friend reads the wartime daily newspaper with one eye covered, Elsa reads the past. In a moment of defiance, she enters the wing of an Italian museum populated by ancient male nudes and is escorted out by angry guards who fold their hands across her eyes. As an artist, Elsa similarly reads the city, wanting to “write a poem that resembled walking in a crowd across Forty-Second Street.” Amid the shining, chewing gum wrappers and bits of accumulated language, her poems become “happy accidents,” the residue of a life in the city, itself “already a poem” in Elsa’s covered eyes.

Holy Skirts upholds this fragmenting vision of the artist, but not with what Elsa herself would brand “fake melancholy.” As she poses for painters and plays herself on New York’s streets, her art passes as a rumor against the relief of artistic posers and boys going off to war. The ironies are that this rumored art is just as striking and certain as the details of how the poet leaves her own body to find it. And against the poems, the century passes, “gray and loose and unnoticed.”

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Andrea Levy
Picador ($14)

by Christopher J. Lee

Small Island is the recipient of last year’s Orange Prize as well as the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, two of Great Britain’s highest literary honors—a first time occasion for a work of fiction. I mention this at the start insofar as these distinctions reflect the original achievement found in Andrea Levy’s new novel, as well as its recognizable elements of theme and character. In short, this is a work that succeeds through its balance of a classic British lineage—Jane Austen forward—transformed by the contingent cultural crossings of Britain’s imperial past, a fashionable combination feted by critics and popular readers alike as witnessed by the exuberant reception of recent novels by Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. By seeking to recast the British novel for a multicultural present, Levy consequently shares a common audience and sense of purpose with these two writers, posing the fundamental question of what it means to be British today in a context irreversibly changed by colonialism overseas and its blowback of immigration found arriving on Britain’s shores.

But Small Island is also much more than this. Levy’s novel takes place in the years before, during, and shortly after World War II, with her three main characters—Gilbert Joseph, Hortense Joseph, and Queenie Bligh—addressing such questions of belonging in this setting of global conflict and social upheaval. The fate of her principals can, of course, be situated and read in this distant historical context. However, as with Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Great Fire (2003), which takes place in the aftermath of the Pacific theater of the same war, there is also a sense of inescapable comparison with our contemporary predicaments of war overseas, the after-effects of violence, and coping with world events on an individual, human level. The questions of identity grappled with by Levy’s characters consequently gather a particular poignancy and an unexpected resonance with our post-9/11 present, without the self-conscious theatrics and sentimentality of recent fiction that has tried to address this event directly.

“There was no doubt about it, I was looking forward to this war,” Queenie stridently declares just prior to the London Blitz, her naïve confidence based on her perception of the oncoming war as a solution to her stagnant, unhappy marriage. Her mood quickly changes once bombs start falling, though her statement also encompasses the sentiments held by Gilbert and Hortense Joseph. Gilbert, a Jamaican volunteer in the Royal Air Force, joins the war effort with a clear sense of patriotism, but he finds his loyalty tested by the racism he meets in the service, begging the troubled question of what values he is fighting for. Trained as a schoolteacher, Hortense similarly arrives in postwar London with storybook expectations of the city, only to encounter everyday discrimination amidst its cool, grey atmosphere. The lives of these three intersect in a boarding house run by Queenie, where they all manage to find a sense of safety through each other. This comfort changes climactically near the novel’s end when Bernard, Queenie’s husband, unexpectedly returns from his commission in India, filled with derogatory bile despite his humbling experiences in Britain’s far colony. Though Levy brings her characters to conclusion, her finish is a surprise, with enough unresolved plot elements to suggest a possible sequel.

Levy cleverly handles this expansiveness of time, geography, and character by employing a sequence of chapters that cut back and forth across time, with each consisting of the individual perspective of one person. Part of Levy’s accomplishment is her remarkable ventriloquism; she fully inhabits the separate voices of these characters. Furthermore, the world she conjures forth—from the island idylls of Jamaica, to the military fields of northern England, to the downcast streets of London after the Second World War—is entirely her own. Given its parameters, Small Island will undoubtedly show up on the reading lists of students and scholars engaged in cultural and postcolonial studies. But as proposed earlier, there is a separate context and greater poignancy at work here, likely unintended or expected by the author herself, that deserves a second reading. Levy’s fictional evocation of the wide panoramas and local atmospheres of World War II—with their moments of tension, uncertainty, and, at times, release towards greater self-awareness—reminds us how the past, when skillfully interpreted, can hold lessons for the present.

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

Neil Gaiman
William Morrow ($26.95)

by Kelly Everding

Neil Gaiman is a human repository of stories. Or is he? Human, I mean. He seems to know an awful lot about gods throughout time and cultures. And he knows all their stories. But what sets Gaiman apart from any run-of-the-mill deity is his distinct understanding of human foibles and strengths as well as those of the gods. We are all made of the same stuff, after all.

Gaiman crafts his newest novel, Anansi Boys, with the deftness of a spider weaving a web, luring the reader deeper and deeper into the story until she is simply stuck and helpless against its masterful humor and fun. The story follows the hapless Fat Charlie Nancy whose life, it seems, consisted of one embarrassment after another due to the shenanigans of his dapper old dad. But after distancing himself from his father and his Florida backwater upbringing, Fat Charlie looks forward to a future life without incident or embarrassment, accompanied by his lovely fiancé Rose. Unfortunately, this is not to be, for Fat Charlie’s father isn’t done with him yet—he has the audacity to die, starting a series of misadventures resulting in Fat Charlie learning two very important facts: one, he has a brother he never knew about and two, his father is a god.

The narrator of Anansi Boys intertwines this story with the ancient legends of Anansi, the titular Spider God of African legend, who is also Fat Charlie’s father. Falling into an easy Caribbean story-telling dialect, the narrator follows the crazy antics of Anansi as he pursues the pleasures of food, wine, women, and song. Anansi is as greedy as he is clever, and as funny as he is handsome. His pleasures may be sacrificed for the fun of the story, but he always gets his way. Gaiman often plumbs the rich archives of creation myths and folktales for his own stories, but his profound grasp of the human element brings these stories into the modern age, adding sophistication, wit, and irony to the mix. Gaiman takes the bare bones of these myths and applies them to rounded characters who change and hopefully grow a little from their experiences.

Although Fat Charlie discovers he is the son of Anansi, he has no powers, or so he thinks—not even the basic human ones of self-confidence. He is powerless with his own name: he hated being called Fat Charlie, but the name “clung to him, like chewing gum to the sole of a tennis shoe.” It was a name his father bestowed upon him, and the name dogged him no matter how often he moved or tried to re-invent himself. As Anansi says, “People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.” When Fat Charlie meets his brother, Spider, he finds out where all the talent in the family had gone. Spider has all the power. He’s handsome and charming, and Fat Charlie pales in comparison. But this kind of power breeds a dangerous detachment:

A god’s relationship to the world, even a world in which he was walking, was about as emotionally connected as that of a computer gamer playing with knowledge of the overall shape of the game and armed with a complete set of cheat codes.

Spider just uses people and moves on. With trademark wit, Gaiman puts it this way: “It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.” Soon, Spider takes over Fat Charlie’s life, impersonating him at work and, worse, with his fiancé, to disastrous results. This seemingly small power struggle soon takes on god-like proportions. Without any confidence or sense of his own power, Fat Charlie relies on the gods to sort things out and unknowingly taps into an age-old struggle between Anansi and Tiger, a battle between gods that goes back to the beginnings of time. But despite the twists and turns of this twisty turny plot, Fat Charlie begins to discover his own strengths and how he fits into the story:

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.

Poet Muriel Rukeyser put it another way: “The world is made up of stories, not atoms.” A quantum physicist might well agree, as narrative is needed to describe the strange occurrences that go on at the subatomic level. Stories on our day-to-day level of existence are just as necessary too, as they help describe how we interact with each other and with this diverse and complicated world. And stories about the gods and magical happenings become more and more necessary as we become more and more estranged from ourselves. While fantasies such as Gaiman’s may deal with otherworldly matters that seem to have no bearing on hurricanes or wars, we may find that, in fact, they do have everything to do with them. How we tell stories about ourselves says volumes about how we impose our beliefs onto the world, often with very dire ramifications. This itself is one of Gaiman’s recurrent themes, from his Sandman comics to his previous bestselling novel American Gods—and it is richly explored in Anansi Boys.

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

by Justin Taylor

“The book died because that's what good books do without huge accidents of publicity.”-Padgett Powell

In October 2004, I picked up the pre-election issue of The Believer. In that issue, in an article entitled “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” Chris Bachelder waxed philosophical on political and satiric writing, on the admirable zeal and regrettable prose of Upton Sinclair, and on the prescience of E. L. Doctorow. He also offered some unflinching self-critique of Bear V Shark, his first novel.

The book follows the Normans, archetypal American family extraordinaire, on a road trip to the sovereign nation of Las Vegas to witness Bear V Shark II, a bigger-than-1000-superbowls sort of event. The first time around the shark won, but rather than providing a conclusive answer to the age-old question (given a level playing field, who would win in a fight . . . ), bear-backers have vowed revenge and once again it will all go down at The Darwin Dome. The Normans won free tickets when their son, Curtis, won an essay contest with an entry titled "Bear V Shark: A Reason to Live." Of this novel, Bachelder wrote “a satire first published late in 2001, [it] has faded quietly out of print after a pretty modest circulation run and disappointing sales here in the USA.”  Toward the article’s end he wrote that the book seemed to him now “in fact, as disposable and ephemeral as the popular culture it derides.”

Of course, at this point it had been nearly two years since I’d even held the book, but it had never occurred to me that the novel might have been anything less than an unqualified success. Chris Bachelder had been an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Florida while I was an undergraduate there. Though I didn't know him personally, the combination of school pride and proximity had been enough to multiply the already considerable pleasure of reading what I’d taken to be an aggressively paced, wildly original satire. But putting the hometown hero thing aside, the book’s vitriol had come as a welcome relief from the endless stream of hyper-patriotic pap that had taken over the airwaves and bookstore-shelves beginning September 12, 2001. I had loved BvS and pushed it on everyone I knew. In fact, my copy was so well-loved that I never got it back. It lives on an anarchist compound in Waldo, Florida, now, the yellow bear-and-shark-emblazoned spine doubtless a standout amidst more volumes of Bakunin and Marx than are advisable for a household.

In a nutshell: I remembered reading a much better novel than its author was describing having written.

INTERNET TENDENCIES

If you Google “Bachelder” this is what you get: (1) The law offices of J. E. Bachelder, (2) the Wee Otter Restaurant at Maine’s historic Bachelder Inn (since 1808!), (3) a professor of the trumpet in Vermont, (4) Nahum J. Bachelder’s Guide to Likenesses of New Hampshire Officials, (5) a Bookslut interview with Chris Bachelder from January 2004, (6) Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography, (7) etc.

Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography purports to be a guidebook. Organized by “lesson,” it includes illustrations, important notes in bold-face, useful quotes and tips in the wide left margin, and the occasional recap or pop quiz. The genial but removed narrator is constantly indicating to “you” what the next step is and how things should look, as if you were assembling a workbench. “Drive along the dark interstate and feel almost immediately exhausted,” you are instructed in Lesson 1 (“Getting Started: How to Drive to a Large Market that is not New York”). “It is crucial that you imagine your life as a movie.”

As the lessons progress, “you” are dragged through the daily grind of virtual tour photography (a neo-archaic process involving turning in a circle to take overlapping digital pictures that are saved on floppy disks and then sent to a group of Russians in California who “sew” the images into 360-degree “virtual tours” of apartments and building grounds), “you” fall back into old habits with an estranged ex-girlfriend but keep your feelings guarded and stay ambivalent about commitment, “you” make friends with the guy across the hall, “you” wonder (idly) about the brutality of the world and watch (numbly) as the neighborhood around you decays further still.

This book is a structural marvel. In less skilled hands the how-to format would have soon become stale, forcing either an evasive tonal shift or else driving the reader to bored tears. Bachelder, however, manages to keep the jokes fresh and the turns sharp, meanwhile laying groundwork for the ultimate subversive move. High and low cultural references mingle and sometimes crossbreed as the Houston summer gets hotter, the apartment complex names start to swim together, the Russians keep calling, and the story of “you” and “the Estranged Girlfriend” develops in the most unexpected direction—into a tale of flawed, genuine humanity and honest-to-God pathos.

“We liked it a ton,” McSweeney’s managing editor Eli Horowitz told me, “but in a way it was too directly up our alley. So we didn't know what to do.  But Chris seemed game for anything, and I remembered reading in the late 90s that e-books were the wave of the future, and here we were, in the future, and so it seemed like a good fit.” John Warner, the McSweeney’s web editor, estimated that the file has been downloaded 75,000 times, though he qualified that guess by saying “that could be on the low side. [It] far exceeded any expectations I might have had.”

Though it’s shorter than BvS, Bachelder spent a lot longer on Virtual Tour. “I was committed to the material and just couldn't let it go,” Bachelder told me. “I wrote it as a first person novel, then started over and wrote it in third person, then started over and wrote it in second person.” After the decision to go e-book, the format was changed yet again (from an “Employee” adding his own “appendices” to an employee manual to the “guide”/“lessons” form it now assumes), and Horowitz brought in a “designer, editor, picture-finder, caption-writer, and computer-whiz.” Bachelder, Horowitz, and the team spent about six months working out the format and look of Virtual Tour. It was published on the McSweeney’s website in November 2004 as a free Adobe PDF file.

I wondered whether there was a political dimension to that decision, but Bachelder said it wasn’t intended as a statement. “When we were working on it, there was this great feeling of cooperation and collaboration and good will, and my feeling was that I wanted to extend this good will outward to readers. I thought that even charging a couple dollars would just look grubby and ugly…Also, at this point, I was just so happy that this book was going to be made available in some form.”

YOU WERE WRONG TO DOUBT YOURSELF

“[W]e are actually living in an age when satire is increasingly untenable,” Bachelder wrote in The Believer, “because satire relies on clear distinctions between real and absurd, and between core and surface, and those are not distinctions we can easily make anymore.” Essentially, he is updating the sentiment expressed by Philip Roth in 1960, that the culture’s absurdity was outstripping the writer’s ability to invent (Bachelder himself quotes Roth in full in the article). Of course, the fact that Bachelder got a book like BvS published forty-one years after Roth’s proclamation should signal to him that perhaps both he and Roth are coming off unnecessarily defeatist, if still pithily quotable.

“The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose;” said Upton Sinclair, “he thinks no more of ‘art for art’s sake’ than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin . . . ” Wrote Bachelder apropos Sinclair’s statement: “I admit I’m stirred by this kind of overblown, radical rhetoric, but I know it’s misleading…Beauty without Conviction is a beer commercial; Conviction without Beauty is a pamphlet.” This last is perhaps the most concise articulation of Bachelder’s philosophy, especially to the extent that a well-executed joke can be considered Beautiful in some analogous way to that in which Marilynne Robinson’s luminous clarity or Dennis Cooper’s austere brutality can be considered Beautiful. Yet it’s not the little beauties in Bear V Shark—outlandish commercials for inane products masquerading as chapters or the author writing himself in as a color commentator on a live news feed in Part 2—that make it a work of residual interest and, yes, redeeming social value. It is, as with Virtual Tour, the utterly unexpected and disarming infusion of humanity (read here as “Conviction”) into the whirlwind of comedy, fantasy, and bile. In a culture where earnestness is derided and satire a form largely bereft of any goal beyond self-reference and/or -preservation, the most original and irreverent thing you can do is to actually care about something.

Bachelder knows that satire isn’t dead or impossible, only in need of some Conviction to give it shape, or else he wouldn’t bother trying. His point, then, seems to be about just how much harder satire becomes, as hyperculture eclipses more and more of the sane world that satirists such as himself take (and provide) such pleasure in undermining.

But this is the thing: concerning his own first novel (which I've just re-read), Chris Bachelder is wrong. And I'm not alone in this assessment. “It’s humor that I admire,” Padgett Powell told me, adding “I would not mind having written Bear V Shark.” I wouldn’t mind having written it either, for whatever that’s worth, but coming from the author of Edisto and Aliens of Affection (among others) that’s really saying something. Indeed, Powell—who teaches at University of Florida—was instrumental in getting Bear v Shark published while Bachelder was still an M.F.A. candidate. “I suggested an agent,” Padgett said, “and the book was sold two weeks later.”

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES, AND EACH OTHER (OR, THE FINAL THOUGHT)

It’s too early to guess whether BvS will or won’t turn out to be “a foundational work in the construction of an American poetics of engagement,” as  Bachelder put it, or “embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life,” as he quoted Milton as putting it. But it’s funny and it’s revealing and it’s as sharp as it was four years ago, neither Freedom Fries nor the rise of reality TV withstanding. Rather than accept Bachelder’s own assessment of his first novel, I’m more inclined to go with the theory posited by Kevin Leahy in his introduction to the Bookslut interview: that BvS “hit the market at a time when America wasn’t in the mood for self-critical reflection and metafictional fun and games.” That’s undoubtedly true. What’s more, if the rest of the country needed more time to recover from 9/11 than a bunch of North Florida radicals, I suppose that’s fair enough as well. But at this point, anybody who stands by the ridiculous 9/12 declaration of irony’s death is a poseur; one with an agenda to be sure. There should be more books like this.

Oh sure, there are some flaws in BvS. Some are probably symptomatic of it being a first novel, and others are doubtless specific to the story, but since I’m not here today as a reviewer I don’t have to point them out or dwell on them. I’m here strictly in my role as advocate. In general, I advocate the politics of giving a damn, and anyone who is willing to envision the art-child of a beer commercial and a socialist broadside. In specific, I advocate the re-publication of Bear V Shark. Finally, I suggest readers everywhere keep their eyes peeled for his new novel U.S.!, being published by Bloomsbury in February 2006. The story follows Upton Sinclair as he is repeatedly (and quite literally) resurrected from the grave, only to be repeatedly assassinated for his trouble. I haven’t seen a preview copy, but suffice to say that hopes are running high.

Click here to purchase Bear v. Shark at your local independent bookstore

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