FINAL SILENCE
Ronald Flores
translated by Gavin O’Toole
Aflame Books ($15.95)

SENSELESSNESS
Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Katherine Silver
New Directions ($15.95)

by Aaron Shulman

How does one write about terror in fiction? Until September 11th, 2001, this wasn’t a pressing question for writers exploring contemporary life in the United States; now it is unavoidable. The last seven years have seen numerous fictions grappling with 9/11, to varying degrees of success. The consensus has been that the experience is still too close and the nerves still too jangled to process it. While Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland turned many a head last year, and Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II was chillingly prescient, it is undeniable that writers in the U.S. are just starting to experiment at refashioning terror into illuminating products of the imagination. It seems only natural, then, to look for guidance and inspiration in the literature of regions long acquainted with the daily intimacies of fear and violence. Guatemala is a devastatingly fertile place to begin.

Guatemala’s civil war—the longest in Latin American history, a brutal conflict that took the lives of over 200,000 people—lasted from 1960 to 1996. Terrorism against civilians was the modus operandi of successive military regimes in Guatemala, and heinous human rights violations were part and parcel of the government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Extrajudicial “death squads” became an inextricable component of the violence (thanks to a helping hand from the U.S.); the use of the word desaparecer (disappear) as a transitive verb originated in Guatemala. It should come as no surprise, then, that the milieu of the civil war has defined contemporary Guatemalan literature. Though much of this writing has yet to be translated into English, a few important titles are now available, including Guatemalan novelist Ronald Flores’s absorbing first novel, Final Silence, published in Spanish in 2001 but released in English just last year.

Winner of the Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, Final Silence takes place during the time leading up to the signing of the 1996 peace accords. The plot concerns a Guatemalan psychotherapist, Ernesto Sandoval, who fled his mother country many years earlier to live in the U.S., where he has established himself professionally and founded a center dedicated to treating torture victims. Haunted by memories of his homeland and the deaths of his father and brother, Sandoval returns to Guatemala to rediscover himself and his native country. Once there, he begins treating a powerful general and war criminal, Jorge Camacho, who longs to be set free from the darkness of his misdeeds during the civil war. The two men embark on a psychological battle toward redemption or disaster, each repulsed by, yet also drawn to, the other.

Drawing on an intriguingly diverse repertoire of narrative techniques—viewpoints constantly shift, for example, and first-, second-, and third-person narrations can all be found interacting in the space of a few pages—Flores shows that formal innovation is an effective, perhaps even necessary strategy for taking on content whose horror can’t be conveyed in words. His decision to center Final Silence’s exploration of the aftereffects of terror around the pain of the victimizer is a daring move, one which demonstrates Flores’s courage and imagination. While one could securely argue that Final Silence explores the poetics of terror, one might also frame it as an unsentimental gambit into the complicated poetics of healing. For Flores, healing is not a process of rosy restoration; rather, the afterglow of fear and violence persists as victim and victimizer must grapple with the past, much like Sandoval and Camacho do in their tumultuous sessions (this approach could be projected in any number of ways onto the U.S. reaction to 9/11). The ongoing story of Guatemala is one still plagued by terror, yet it is bracing to know that the tormented isthmian gem has found an able chronicler.

Another recently translated novel bringing the plight of Guatemala to English-speaking readers is Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Born in Honduras, Castellanos Moya grew up in El Salvador and came of age during that nation’s very own terror-filled civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. In 1997 he published El Asco, a novel which garnered both praise and death threats, sending him into exile and eventually landing him in Guatemala (he is now the exiled writer-in-residence at the nonprofit organization City of Asylum in Pittsburgh). Out of this sojourn in Guatemala emerged Senselessness, a slim, compulsively readable novel which is as harrowing as it is hilarious.

The unnamed narrator of Senselessness is a paranoid, misanthropic litterateur who has been hired by the archbishop of Guatemala to copyedit a 1,100-word truth report chronicling atrocities committed by the military during the civil war (Castellanos Moya never makes it explicit that the story takes place in Guatemala, but various hints in the text put it beyond question). The impending publication of the report has brought tensions between the church and the military to a head, and the narrator fears for his safety. As a drinking buddy says to him one day at a cantina near the archbishop’s palace: “May you come out of this shit alive.’”

While the novel confronts the unthinkable atrocities committed against indigenous communities and, much like Final Silence, the legacy of this violence, Senselessness still manages to be uproariously funny. This is no meager feat, and its success hinges on the acerbically comic, darkly spitting voice of the narrator. Castellanos Moya’s style here might best be described as a breathlessly looping rant, which leads the reader into winding, page-long sentences and multipage paragraphs. The narrator’s voice is equally entertaining whether it’s following a thread of his unraveling paranoia or, as in this passage, recounting the unglamorous details of a sexual conquest: “thoroughly excited by my member in her mouth, [she] finished taking off the garments she was still wearing, including a pair of military boots and thick socks that seemed to me vulgar and unattractive garments to wear under a summer skirt . . . when an odor issued forth from those military boots that tore my nasal passages to pieces and made me feel the strongest possible revulsion, an odor that undoubtedly permeated her feet, perhaps beautiful and appetizing from afar, but which I didn’t even dare to look at because I had thrown my head back against the couch, my eyes closed, my face wearing the enthralled expression of a man overwhelmed by pleasure.” Translator Katherine Silver must be commended for her artful fortitude in sustaining the rhythmic energy of the prose.

Parallel to the narrator’s screwy misadventures and mounting fear is his fascination with the testimonies of the massacre survivors and torture victims recorded in the report he is editing. Phrases like “I am not complete in the mind,” describing the psychological trauma of violence, echo over and over in the narrator’s mind. As the novel veers toward its conclusion, the gap between violence in testimony and impending violence against the narrator seeming to close, these phrases take on an even greater power, fusing into the language of the narrative itself. It is in fusions like this one where Senselessness is most boldly triumphant, forging together comedy and tragedy, laughter and despair, history and the present.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Phillip Lopate
Other Press ($24.95)

by Joseph Jon Lanthier

It’s typically a sign of desperation when writers, even critics, begin littering their work with deferential references to their influences. Susan Sontag dismissed this tendency—an occasional indulgence in her early pieces—as inflated didacticism. “My pedagogical impulse got in the way of my prose. All those lists, recommendations!” Nevertheless, the essayist’s relationship to the reader has a far more instructive flavor than, say, that of the novelist. Indeed, to assume this posture in fiction is to risk lecturing a story rather than telling it.

Phillip Lopate, a master of the contemporary essay, may be one exception. In his two novels, and now two subsequent novellas, the most genuine moments often involve some deft name-dropping: a tenuous lover’s rendezvous over Kenji Mizoguchi’s films, or a devastating dispute over the classical conductor Zubin Mehta and composer Pierre Boulez. The effect is calmly centrifugal; Lopate is the rickety but charming interborough bus leading us from the seed of his idea to the fruits of his cultural exploration, rather than vice versa.

One is tempted to link this distinctive style not only to Lopate’s day job as an editor and writing professor, but to his long bachelorhood. Alienated admiration, of women just as often as of film or literature, is his most fecund subject; he finds eloquence between passion and detachment. Since marrying in the ’90s, however, he has been on his best behavior, mostly publishing anthologies that emphasize his curiosity for cultural bridges rather than sexual ones. But the novellas in Two Marriages show that the “inescapable ego” of the essayist makes eternal islands (bachelors) of us all. There’s a dashing intellectual promiscuity in Lopate’s best work that he has not surrendered entirely to matrimony.

It is fitting, then, that both novellas in Two Marriages concern a spontaneous overflow of betrayal, recollected—and confessed—in tranquility. Lopate uses perfidy as an excuse to explore the “universal hetero-male problem”: viewing our lovers from across the sex crevasse, we become infatuated with the distance rather than the destination. This central theme is also readily understood as a surreptitious conversation about criticism. Just as we create, and become obsessed with, methods and systems for organizing film genres or schools of poetics, we impose upon unthinkable events and deeds the same ultimately futile theoretical structures. And why not? Human behavior can be just as prone to dusty archetype as a Dreyer film.

Of course, it’s one thing to comment on a movie as a spectator (a role we have no option but to assume) and quite another to withdraw analytically from one’s own romantic meltdown. And, granted, the “Woman as Other” theme is no innovative twist. To exacerbate matters, both of the couples in Two Marriages teeter on the precipice of stereotype: jaundiced, domineering husbands with wives who furtively exercise the seductive, cognitive strength of puissance that by now seems the birthright of fictional femininity. But Lopate eschews the pedestrian by setting his stories after the heat of the moment, in the flaccid rationalizations that follow cuckolding and in the slow return to the drudgery of household discourse.

These scenarios are spun for humor in “The Stoic’s Marriage,” the first of the two novellas. This work is a bolder mirror image of Lopate’s first novel, Confessions of Summer: both are sustained first-person monologues of disaster, both are moody and esoteric, and both deteriorate in a fugue of an anticlimax. Gordon, the narrator and titular stoic, is nearly a hyperbolic version of Lopate’s on-page persona: a wealthy, bookish, middle-aged sesquipedalian lacking modern social skills. He catalogs via Moleskin diary the story of his hasty marriage to a seemingly nubile Filipino woman named Rita, whom he meets as she cares for his dear mother on her deathbed. This is domestic mismatch as Rabelaisian satire; it’s not enough that man can never “know” woman, but Lopate presents us with characters that quite literally do not know each other (a third-world trophy bride and an overgrown, under-sexed, perpetual graduate student). The narrator attempts to justify his rashness in love with poetic sophisms, hilariously dissecting his wife’s body, or at least attempting to, in page after page. “She lifts her head like a doe, and as you approach her, you see one eye, not both. I am speaking metaphorically, of course . . . . I don’t know how to explain it any better, forgive me.”

Gordon’s determination to follow the philosopher Epictetus’s example molds him into a sublime foil for the bubble of activity he is thrust into. Rita’s betrayal, which is a convoluted series of unfortunate circumstances rather than a single cataclysmic event, forms a stoic fantasy; the more ludicrously brutal the situation becomes, the more opportunities the protagonist has to react calmly and recite Seneca. When faced with the annoyance of celibacy, the desire for sex is marginalized with logical subterfuge: “It is not that sex is overrated, but that its pleasures are inherently the same thing over and over . . . . It is not even necessary to masturbate.” This is a funnier interpretation of the thinking man’s sexual sour grapes than even White and Thurber’s.

Through Gordon we also see Lopate in rare form, participating in clear Jewish comic traditions. Although Gordon himself is not Jewish (he makes vague boasts of his Spanish heritage), his situation recalls the story of Job—a story that, when viewed aerially, is one of the most hilariously acerbic Jewish satires ever written, and quite possibly the prototype for all humor of the pathetic. Gordon is an even better clown than Job because he phrases all of his lamentations as failed stoic aphorisms laced with melodramatic pathos (a choice example: “I realize that Rita probably doesn’t love me as much as I love her, but it doesn’t matter . . . The fact that I love her more than she does me is justified, because I’m not as lovable as she is.”). And because Gordon is the victim of Woman rather than God, we find his plight both identifiable and deserved (the nimble gift of the best clowns). Gordon, like Job, admits defeat before a higher authority—performing a graceful vaudevillian tumble while he’s at it.

The second marriage/novella, “Eleanor,” changes pace to the free-indirect discourse style of The Rug Merchant (the two marriages are thus neatly “buddied” with Lopate’s prior fictive output). A single weekend in the upper-class lives of middle-aged Frank and his second wife, Eleanor, is recounted through multiple and occasionally colorful points of view. We’re fed a series of lively if somewhat perfunctory vignettes around the household: people answer phones, visit zoos, become jealous, escape to bedrooms to make sexual advances, chide one another, make love, and seem pleasantly ignorant of their decadent insularity. The highlight of this slight farce is a dinner party featuring a locally famous actor and several old friends; Lopate keeps his omniscient narration at a Renoirian wide angle throughout while various voices and scenes bleed through it. But perhaps because of the broadening of vocal diversity and the simultaneous whittling of temporal scope (not to mention the sharp departure from the “Stoic’s” clownishness), the second marriage feels less successful.

Lopate also grapples here with the universal male problem he means to hunt down: standing on the divide’s other end, he fails to penetrate (or perhaps penetrates too much) the minds of his female characters in a manner that transcends typical gender projections. But then again, it’s this same bias that makes the confused-male-fantasia aspect of the marriage so credible. We delve headfirst into Frank’s (mis)understanding of his wife’s body: “he felt that peculiar secretion of hers, like an acid bath, gripping him gently, which always excited him.” Gender confusion is rooted in the genitals; the mystery of the female otherness, the yonic symbol, becomes corrosive. We eavesdrop on these fumbling interactions as Frank’s id pitifully misinterprets his lover’s signals: “It was hard to tell at this stage in their marriage where her appetites left off and his began.” It’s too soon after courtship for Eleanor to risk bruising Frank’s ego, so she allows herself to become a mirror for her husband’s lust.

This leads to the inevitable set piece of Eleanor’s admission of betrayal, and the loudest female cliché in Lopate’s oeuvre. “Sometimes I would sleep with a man and get the feeling that underneath he loathed me. Loathed my body, because it was a woman’s body.” Must all sexual misconceptions be rooted in misogyny, equated with male assault? We suspect in such passages that, underneath it all, our essayist is hopelessly glib; the problems of these husbands can be clumsily tagged as love vs. lust, selfishness vs. compassion, tribalism vs. modernity.

But with Lopate the accomplishment is not always in the structures he builds; it’s on the bridges that depart from them. Through allusive girders and beams in the text we glimpse the overspilling blueprints and roadmaps of the author’s own cultural-sexual obsessions. Roughly two-thirds into “Eleanor,” Frank plays his guests a 16 mm copy of City Lights through an old projector, and we’re treated to a laconic narration of the film’s final reel, climaxing with “the most heartbreaking close-up in film history.” As the scene fades, Frank mistily observes that the ending “gets” everyone who watches it, quite unaware of what he might learn from Chaplin. This recalls an anecdotal tangent in one of Lopate’s personal/film essays in which he describes watching Dreyer’s Ordet with a Catholic girlfriend; she scolds him for the double standard of refusing religion but allowing himself to be moved to tears by Judeo-Christian imagery on the screen. “You can take it in art, but you can’t take it in life!” she reprimands.

Lopate’s characters are like us; they want—they need—to solve problems by talking them out. But City Lights presents a perplexing alternative: when the female lead “sees” the chivalric Tramp for the first time, and he peers back into her, their interlocking visual epiphanies leap the chasm of gender confusion. This humanistic recognition from island to island is delectably ironic in Two Marriages, but it nearly sinks Lopate’s entire city at the same time. It’s never an endless intellectual exchange that soothes sexual alienation: it’s always the hackneyed melodrama of romantic tenderness. Which might be, in the end, the real problem. We can take it in art, but we can’t take it in life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Geoff Ryman
Small Beer Press ($16)

by Margaret Shaklee

“The words will come again, when your people need them most. When they cry out, tormented and disrespected, this book will flourish to shade them from the sun.”
—Leaf 155, Kraing Meas

In The King’s Last Song, noted speculative fiction author Geoff Ryman weaves together ancient legend with a gritty view of modern Cambodian life, and the pattern that emerges is surprising. The novel conveys not merely a story, but the light and darkness, despair and hope, tradition and Westernization that is Cambodia itself.

Jayavarman VII, the beloved legendary Buddhist king of Cambodia, has never been needed more. The government is in corrupt shambles, no one knows who can be trusted, and continuity from day to day cannot be taken for granted. When archeologist Luc Andrade’s team unearths the Kraing Meas, the golden book written by Jayavarman himself, it is not particularly a comfort but a worry. A target for art thieves and any number of factions with questionable motives, the book is a historical treasure that endangers anyone near it. When Luc, along with the book, is kidnapped, two of his employees are forced to team up if they want a chance at finding him. William is a peaceful “motoboy” who wants nothing more than to support his family. Tan Map, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier whose family has long since been killed, doesn’t know how to live without war.

As Luc tries to keep himself and his fellow prisoner alive, he begins to translate the Kraing Meas for his captor, who turns out to be an official in the Pol Pot regime. Interspersed with the present-day action, the tale of Jayavarman unfolds: In his childhood he was called Prince Nia, or Prince Hereditary Slave. He continually tried to break down the barriers between nobles and the slaves and workers. He spent his adult life caught between worlds and trying to unite them. In one world, he was a slave captured in war, surviving only by the love he had for Fishing Cat, his childhood slave-friend. In the other, he was a king, married to a compassionate noblewoman, but with a slave consort. As a ruler he used love, not fear, to lead, but he also arranged for a troublesome son to be killed in battle. He was love and war, devotion and brutality.

While peaceful William, war-consumed Map, and Cambodia-loving Luc could easily be flat, typecast characters, Ryman steers clear of such simplifications. Their interwoven histories are at times noble and at times horrifying, laced with profound emotions and punctuated with atrocities. The King’s Last Song leaves one questioning preconceptions of good and evil, and conflicted between hope for and discouragement with the human race.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Linda Lappin
Wordcraft of Oregon ($15)

by Joyce J. Townsend

Many literati recognize Katherine Mansfield’s name but are fuzzy about her context and accomplishments. A New Zealand native, Mansfield is lauded as one of our language’s great writers of short fiction. She had ties to the famed Bloomsbury Group active in London in the early 1900s, a collection of artists, writers, and other English intellectuals who demonstrated a bisexual freedom ahead of their time.

After twenty years of fascination with Mansfield, and fifteen years of active research, Linda Lappin confidently expands our knowledge in her latest novel, Katherine’s Wish. While the relationships, events, and inner musings of the characters are fictionalized, Lappin has built on textual evidence from journals, letters, and diary entries in order to adhere to “an overall sense of truth” which she renders as her own mosaic. Her writing style, with its rhythm, flow, and sensual detail, richly evokes the significant social scene of a vanished era.

Katherine Mansfield was deeply committed to achieving excellence at her craft. In one section, propped on pillows in bed, she scribbles a ditty about her absent husband—“Who’s the man as cold as stone / to leave a wife like you alone?”—and concludes that her only solution to loneliness and disappointment is to write:

She must not hold back out of false modesty or propriety. She must tell all; she must deposit her few grains, her residue of truth. She must not fear that friends or acquaintances might recognize themselves in unflattering portraits . . . . It was not their personalities . . . she wanted to describe now, but rather types, situations, conditions of existence in which anyone . . . might recognize themselves, if only for an instant. There was nothing personal about it.

Despite loneliness, growing illness, and physical disability, Katherine perseveres. “The valve would open to release a rush of words like water from a long-trapped spring.”

Set against the backdrop of war-torn 1920’s Europe, the three main characters are fully realized: Mansfield, the consummate artist, willful, critical, and obsessed; her self-satisfied, priggish, and adoring husband, British literary critic John Middleton Murry; and Ida Constance Baker, Katie’s plodding devotee and handmaiden since they were schoolgirls together. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, and other notables appear as social intimates.

Like any writer worth her salt, Linda Lappin never gets in the way of her characters fulfilling their destinies. The book probably could have included more about Mansfield’s background to help bridge the unsettling disparity between her father’s wealth and her own financial situation, which often leads her to despair and degradation. But Katherine’s Wish is first and foremost the compelling story of an artist fighting against time. Long after the last page, thoughts of her linger like an exotic scent, as if, anticipating other guests, she simply stepped from the room to display a vase of flowers or a platter’s mounded figs.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Hanif Kureishi
Scribner ($26)

by Charlotte Kelly

In Something to Tell You, Hanif Kureishi sets up interesting cultural and structural tensions that unfortunately fail to deliver, resulting in an estranging narrative. Initially, the book holds great promise, as Jamal Khan—a successful middle-aged psychotherapist living and working in London—narrates the most intimate details of his life and intrigues the reader with an unexpected revelation: “I live every day with a murder. A real one. Killer, me. There; I’ve told you. It’s out.” Jamal is a man with a marked interest in secrets—both his patients’ and his own—and he reveals plenty of them as the novel progresses, yet it becomes increasingly difficult to remain invested in him and the other characters. Ultimately, the novel flounders in a world of stilted expression and blurry morality.

As in other Kureishi novels, the characters here engage in transgressive relationships and revel in cultural counterpoints. Jamal is half British and half Pakistani; his lover Ajita has immigrated from India with a tyrannical father and gay brother; his upper-class British mother lives with her female lover; his Muslim sister Miriam frequents fetish parties and adopts a myriad of unconventional lifestyles. These dynamics provide the groundwork for interesting character development and relevant social critique, but the novel veers away from the central (and most interesting) conflict of Jamal and Ajita’s lost love into self-absorbed descriptions of the psychological and behavioral quirks of the characters. As Jamal travels from London to the English countryside to Pakistan and back, he offers pithy and even insightful observations about the cultural idiosyncrasies of each place, but an interjection toward the end about the terrorist bombings that took place in London in July of 2005 feels forced rather than relevant.

One of the novel’s strengths is Kureishi’s unapologetic character development; he does not make his characters “pay” for their poor behavior, rendering them as flawed human beings rather than stereotypes. Still, as Something to Tell You enters into an indulgent world of prostitution, bondage clubs, strippers, and drug use, Kureishi seems to go out of his way to make each one uncomfortably unfamiliar. Sexuality is an alienating element in the novel; the frequently meaningless (and occasionally disturbing) sexual encounters serve to further distance us from the narrator. Kureishi’s pseudo-Freudian comment seems to be that people are inherently selfish, powerless to their instincts, and persistently motivated by sexual desire.

As a narrator, Jamal emphasizes his educational background and goes on multiple diatribes about the history of psychoanalysis, frequently name-dropping. On the other hand, the novel includes many pop-culture references, some of which feel particularly awkward: when Jamal attends a Rolling Stones concert, his references to hanging out with an advice-spouting Sir Mick at an after-party are nearly cringe inducing. The book thus exists at an uncomfortable borderline between literary and popular fiction, making it difficult to locate a consistent tone; the vacillation between an intellectual and a colloquial style is frustrating rather than entertaining. While Kureishi’s point may be to offer Jamal Khan up for critique, the novel’s tone is too ambiguous to make this clear.

Although the title and the confessional first-person narrative imply a gesture of intimacy between author and reader, the empty speech bubble featured on the cover better summarizes its stance. Something to Tell You might be an enjoyable read for those who are particularly fond of Hanif Kureishi’s edgy style, but as an introduction to his work, I would suggest looking to stronger titles such as The Black Album and The Buddha of Suburbia.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Louis de Bernières
Alfred A. Knopf ($23.95)

by John K. Cox

Publishing must be tough for Louis de Bernières—in the same way that releasing a new album must be tough for Alanis Morissette. How would you like to try to follow up on the success of Jagged Little Pill, or in our writer’s case, Corelli’s Mandolin? Works that meet with both dizzying commercial success and nearly universal critical acclaim are rare; they can also break an artist because of the way they unrealistically raise expectations. Fortunately de Bernières has written excellent works both before and since his great Balkan saga of World War II, and A Partisan’s Daughter is another solid, albeit not outstanding, achievement.

This particular book could serve as a useful introduction to de Bernières’s corpus of writings because it underscores his tendency to write black comedy with sunny spots; the author injects only the necessary dose of malevolence and balances it with a formidable erudition. Who could argue with de Bernières’s profound and up-to-date representations of movements such as fascism and nationalism and personalities such as Mussolini and Atatürk in his works over the past decade? It is a rare thing to read big books of fiction packing the emotional punch of Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings and to be enthralled and even heartened by the intellectual qualities evident in the historical setting.

A Partisan’s Daughter begins and ends with an old man musing about love. As he nears the end of his life, he speculates, a bit anemically, on the relationships between love, lust, adventure, and obsession. Discovering at the outset that this is yet another treatment of men’s supposed fascination with prostitutes, a reader may be forgiven for having the temptation to drop this work and wait for the next novel from this hard-hitting but quirky author. But the book soon gets better; a writer as ebullient as de Bernières is hard to discount or ignore for very long.

Christian is a representative for a pharmaceutical and medical equipment company in London. It is the turbulent winter of 1978 when the story opens, but the times are not trying for Chris in any political way; rather he is at wits’ end regarding his lifeless marriage and has half-heartedly decided to look for a prostitute one day on the way home from work. He spots an attractive woman, suitably dressed for her supposed trade, standing by the road but “pretending to wait for someone”—and on that note of indeterminacy, we are off to the races in terms of the novel’s intellectual structure, as the woman’s recollections in the next chapter confirm.

The woman’s name is Roza, and from this sinister—or infantile, but lacking the comic thrust that was likely intended—initial encounter, a close relationship sprouts. Chris often drops by Roza’s dilapidated squatters’ building for tea or coffee or wine, and Roza spends most of the book telling him stories about her life. Their friendship is tender, but one cannot help but notice that various clocks are ticking within the story, and the relationship, like Roza’s persona and even her country, is not destined to last.

Roza is from Serbia and she is a Partisan’s daughter, meaning her father took part in World War II on the side of the communist-led Partisans of Josip Broz Tito. After the Nazis were defeated, Tito established a maverick socialist system in Yugoslavia, and her father became a low-ranking official of the secret police—albeit one of a more Stalinist ilk than that of most Partisans or successive generations of communists. Roza’s colorful father looms large in her memories, a Serbian-inflected incarnation of the new order in Yugoslavia. (He is, appropriately, the old order by the 1980s, and one increasingly fragile after Tito’s death in 1980.)

As a girl Roza was steeped in the folklore and earthy village life of her native land, and we learn about her exploratory sexual encounters with her Slovene friend Tasha and her first great love with a Croatian student named Alex. Roza made a successful start to her studies in Zagreb but didn’t finish; she wants to go to England as a tourist and then stay there illegally to work, but in order to make enough money for the trip she must first work in a timber yard in rural Bosnia. She hates it there and eventually leaves Yugoslavia via the Slovenian border to Trieste, where she finagles a spot on the yacht of an Englishman named Francis. The sea journey is fittingly breathtaking in its sex and general adventure. Then, in the English Channel, when it becomes obvious that Roza has no visa for the U.K., Francis grudgingly sneaks her up the Thames. They live together in his village for two years, until Roza gets bored and moves to London by herself.

Roza ends up working at the improbably named Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise Club, where she falls into the prostitution the owner touted as “optional” after she is brutally kidnapped and raped by two clients. She ends up having two abortions and feeling very much adrift in an unreal subterranean life; finally, with her big trunk full of the money thrown her way by men frustrated with their wives and marriages, she calls it quits. Her healing process begins when she becomes housemates with an awkward young actor dubbed The Bob Dylan Upstairs, with whom she shares poetry and (not surprisingly if you know de Bernières’s oeuvre) a heartwarming friendship with a dog. Roza is living off her proceeds, and only sometimes bored, when she gets to know Chris.

For his part, her English visitor enjoys his visits to Roza’s house, platonic as they are. His affection for her grows, accompanied by shock at her stories, but he nonetheless continues to save up money in case he eventually wants to buy her affections. He also enjoys chatting with Roza’s bohemian housemate. Ultimately, these encounters with the domestic and international Other represented by Roza and the BDU change Chris but little; he does, though, note that his childhood seemed bland compared to Roza’s and lament that he knows little about foreign lands. Chris thus takes to reading a lot about the Balkans and eventually travels there several times.

Finally, Chris has saved up the five hundred pounds that he believes was Roza’s asking price. She claims to have something big to tell him at a future meeting, but whatever alliance of the hearts might have been in store for them and us is wrecked when Chris uncharacteristically gets drunk one night and shows up at her door in a rage compounded of self-pity and sexual frustration. He insults her royally; she in turn leaves him a simple note in Serbo-Croatian and moves away, but he continues to think about her for years as his life winds down.

A Partisan’s Daughter is mildly experimental in terms of narration and its use of memory, and after we have figured out the sequencing in the plot, we are confronted with an interesting question pertaining to one of the structural elements: to what extent are the stories of Roza, who functions here as a kind of Scheherazade, actually true? Is it sinister, or at least uncharitable of us, to blame the genius behind a frame-tale, especially when she might be the victim of a kind of cruel human trafficking? But there is a lot of evidence, delivered by the BDU and by Roza herself and gradually unearthed by Chris, that Roza is taking enormous liberties with the truth and pursuing her own agenda in these late-night sessions with the suitor. What that agenda might be, we do not know, but it does remain likely that Roza has a great deal of fear and pain in her past.

On the thematic front, historians such as this reviewer have come to expect great things from this particular author. If de Bernières said lots of things that were spot-on about European and Turkish and Latin American history in earlier works, how well does he manage his facts and demonstrate the modernity of his reading list here? For what it’s worth, the representation of Yugoslavia in this particular book receives only mixed marks. Certain comments on Balkan culture—crowded, convivial bus trips, harsh cigarettes, a widespread obsession with heroism and historical grievances—are dropped in a lapidary, almost loving way into the story. But where political conclusions and, worse, depictions of ethnic conflict are included, both Chris and Roza make plenty of questionable and uncorrected generalizations. Albanians and Bosnians are not the same people, despite the fact that many are Muslim and that some Serbs call them all “Turks,” and the demise of Yugoslavia did not get underway in the late 1980s with Albanians killing Serbs. One has to trust that the author, like his characters, probably does believe, when push comes to shove, that hate can only be justified when a broad sample of behavior is observed and logged.

Ultimately, this book is not really an interrogation of the art of storytelling or a commentary on Balkan history; it is a meditation on the difficulty of saying anything coherent or original about love. The men in the book think of marriage as a desert, of wives as loaves of pasty sandwich bread, and of other women as bodies with holes; these men are pretty much all ignorant, misogynistic, or frustrated. There is no serious consideration of why the marriages actually fail or any balanced presentation of how the various women really think. The title character, the charming and intelligent Roza, could possibly make a difference to one man and succeed in her own quest for happiness, but the drunken confrontation at the end of the book is not the real cause of the bleak breakdown. An unavoidable litany of current events leads us past Tito’s death and up to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the end of all cultural points of reference for a Partisan’s daughter; we also witness the slow accumulation of money in Chris’s sex fund that parallels Roza’s stash in the trunk under her bed and augurs a radical change of lifestyle. It would seem, then, that the scarred emotional landscape of marriage and sex is international and, alas, incapable of repair. De Bernières shows us that love, lust, and obsession are all real but not necessarily fruitful.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990
Charles Bukowski
City Lights Books ($16.95)

by Christopher Luna

Most readers either love or detest Charles Bukowski, the poet and novelist infamous for his prodigious, worldly appetites. Many often confuse him with the persona he presented in his work: hard-drinking, violent, cruel. There is also the issue of class; certain readers seem unable to forgive Bukowski for achieving fame and fortune from his realistic portraits of fast women, alcoholics, and the unemployed. He has been accused of being a misogynist and a bad writer. Yet Bukowski’s work contains a verisimilitude, humor, and courage missing from most writing. It hums with a life that much poetry and prose lacks. So much Bukowski material has been released since he died in 1994 that his posthumous output rivals that of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur. Portions of a Wine-Stained Notebook is the latest of these posthumous collections, dredging up miscellaneous stories and essays which appeared in publications as varied as Cream, High Times, Hustler, and the Los Angeles Free Press. The entries contain many of Bukowski’s signature elements, including sex, booze, gambling, and domestic violence. But they also reveal a sophisticated side of the author: his love for classical music and his impressive knowledge of literature, for example.

As editor David Calonne points out in his introduction to Portions, “Part of the failure of the American critics to properly take Bukowski’s measure is their ignorance of his essentially European cultural sensibility.” Calonne reminds us that Bukowski is a “literary rebel” like Artaud and Celine: “Bukowski’s breaking of taboos has a certain ferocious (and ironic/humorous) intentionality about it. He is violent and sexually manic in ways that his two American masters—William Saroyan and John Fante—are not, although his aggressive prose should be understood as the tough carapace he adopts to protect himself from violation.” In “I Meet the Master,” Bukowski’s account of his efforts to track down Fante, Fante asks Bukowski’s companion, “Is he really as tough as he writes?” She replies that Bukowski is “220 pounds of melting butter.” This is not news to those who have actually read his writing. Despite his brash exterior, Bukowski had heart.

Bukowski, of course, was aware of his reputation, but did not allow it to get him down:

What fame I had was mostly in Europe, through translation. In the U.S. stories went about that I beat my women, hated homosexuals, and was a vicious and terrible person. The university dandies had it in for me. A student came by one night and over some beers he told me: “My prof says you’re a Nazi and you’d sell your own mother out for a nickel.”
“That’s not true,” I told him. “My mother is dead.”

In the title essay, as close to a manifesto or an ars poetica as Bukowski ever wrote, the author poses a series of questions such as “Does pain make a writer?” He also shares his personal philosophy: “I believe in the God of Myself: the one who finds as much color in a brick as in a rose, superable yet adamant.”

Some of Bukowski’s best material is his criticism of other writers. He sometimes dispatches with long lists of sacred literary heroes in a single paragraph, as when he explains how the changes in men’s lives diminish the strength of their writing:

Céline became a crank and forgot how to laugh . . . . Mailer became an intelligent journalist, as did Capote. Pound just got darker and darker and pissed out. Spender quit, Auden quit, Olson begged to the crowd. Creeley got angry and tightened. Abraham Lincoln hated blacks and Faulkner wore a corset. Ginsberg sucked to the sound of himself and was overcome. And old Henry Miller long done, fucking beautiful Japanese girls under the shower.

Bukowski hilariously describes a fistfight with a Marine who “had a good mind” but an unfortunate admiration for Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser:

One night after the gamblers left, we sat down with the whiskey and tried to talk it out. I also told him that Faulkner was playing children’s games. Chekhov, no—a playpiece of the comfortable masses. Steinbeck, a technician. Hemingway, only halfway. He liked them all. He was a damn fool. Then I said that Sherwood Anderson could outwrite the whole bloody gang. That started something.

It was a good fight. Finally, every mirror and bit of furniture in the room was flattened out.

Portions contains material that diehard fans will love, including ruminations on politics, literature, academia, gambling, and drunk driving. One story features a case of coitus interruptus involving a silver statue of Jesus Christ; another features a three-way encounter with two women that is a marvelous example of over-the-top pulp erotica. There are descriptions of a 1975 Rolling Stones concert, a brief encounter with Allen Ginsberg, and a riot. While this book may not win Bukowski any new fans, those who love his acid wit and unflinching look at the lives of real people will not be disappointed.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

LEARNING BY HEART
Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit
Corita Kent & Jan Steward
Allworth Press ($21.95)

COME ALIVE!
The Spirited Art of Sister Corita
Julie Ault
Four Corners Books ($29.95)

CORITA: ON TEACHING AND CELEBRATION
Two Short Films
Baylis Glascock
Corita Art Center gift shop ($25)

by Greg Bachar

Certain individuals and their work, when discovered for the first time, appear to be familiar, as in I think I’ve seen this before. One has this feeling looking at a lot of art and writing that came out of the 1960s, and Sister Corita Kent’s work is no exception: it features bright, psychedelic colors, images of war, messages of protest, and cut-and-pasted texts mixed with advertising slogans to form statements about social issues.

We ascribe this sense of familiarity with a dismissive hand wave, without realizing that just because something appears to be familiar to us doesn’t mean that it wasn’t new, strange, and even revolutionary at some other point in time, and that it still might be so now if we are just able to look at it without preconceived ideas. It’s in this way that the past becomes a great teacher, but only to the student who really wants to study, learn, and see.

Sister Corita Kent, like all true visionaries, was certainly about seeing. In Baylis Glascock’s 1967 documentary We Have No Art, there is a scene in which Sister Corita tells her students that while watching films it is a good idea not to blink—that if one blinks one will miss something important. Later in the film, she leads an audience through a “happening” of her own design: people in the audience are asked to turn around and place crepe paper hats on the people sitting behind them. They are then asked to inflate a clear plastic glove and hold it to the other person’s ear like they are telling them a secret while simultaneously reading an E. E. Cummings poem to their new neighbor and setting off poppers with confetti streams shooting out over the heads of the audience.

It is kind of a cliché 1960s moment, but then Sister Corita explains that each person in the scene is part of a larger whole; she was using the room and its occupants to paint a canvas whose totality only she was able to see from her vantage point at the podium. She describes the happenings that were part of the culture of the time as the breakdown between visual arts and theatre.

In a similar fashion, Sister Corita invokes a phrase from the Balinese, who don’t have a noun for the word “art” in their language: “We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.” She then explains that there is no distinction between art and “not art”; that the purpose of art is to give one an intense experience so that one might experience everything that is “not art” (life) more intensely; and that “a work of art is a small piece that you can digest which gives you a kind of idea of the richness that is in the whole.”

Sister Corita Kent is a small piece of the 1960s, whose life and work sheds light on the richness of the whole. Her book of teachings, Learning by Heart: Teaching to Free the Creative Spirit (cocreated with Jan Steward), and the overview of her life and work, Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita by Julie Ault, are refreshing reminders that “our best times are when working and playing are the same” and that creativity is “the art of connection making.”

Sister Corita said Learning by Heart was “meant to be a workbook.” Divided into sections that explore the terms each chapter is named after and providing the reader with lessons and exercises to put those terms into action, Corita lays the groundwork for the reader to explore a variety of aspects of looking, sources, structure, making connections, tools and techniques, work and play, and what might have been Corita’s most important theme: celebration.

This is a great book for artists, writers, teachers, and anyone who might be in search of a creative spark. Sister Corita states the obvious in ways one can apply to complex creative projects with an accumulation of phrases of wisdom supported by examples and exercises: “the goal is to get the greatest number of ideas”; “sources are starting points”; “the more tools and techniques you have, the broader will be your making vocabulary.” She playfully encourages one to “PLAY AT WORK: Take a few minutes during your lunch break to play with your office copy machine. You will immediately be able to see things in permutations that would otherwise take hours to imagine or achieve.”

Julie Ault’s book Come Alive! is a nuanced context for Sister Corita’s life, work, legacy, and a colorful oversize journey through the images she created in her lifetime. “With enthusiasm and a celebratory position on life, through her teaching and through her art,” Ault writes, “Corita opened the way for various forms of liberation in the many individuals and institutions she affected over time. Heightened awareness, analytic consciousness, aesthetic innovation, political activism, collaborative spirit, collective experience, visual pleasure, intellectual empowerment, and serious fun are just a few of those forms.”

Sister Corita said that the function of art is “to alert people to things they might have missed.” Her work, and these two books that capture the spirit and intent of her work, alert the reader to the existence of someone they might have missed until now, but whose lessons and words evoke a familiar and necessary presence.

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Click here to purchase Learning by Heart at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

by Tim Jacobs

I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love.
—David Foster Wallace, Interview with Larry McCaffery
(Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

I’m not going to talk about his life, depression, or end. Neither will I catalog references to suicide in his fiction. I will not, as he remarked about Joseph Frank, commit the Intentional Fallacy all over the place (“although we know these fair words, we cannot know the dead,” says Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy). I’ll also avoid unhelpful superlatives like “genius.” But I will contend that David Foster Wallace was the most important American writer since William Gaddis, and Infinite Jest the greatest novel since The Recognitions. And so I want to talk about the fight—his, mine, yours—his fight to write, of course, but also our collective fight to live better, more generously, beyond ourselves.

David Foster Wallace’s primary concern was for the reader. While he knew every literary technique and stratagem, had a mind that computers might envy, had read everything, and was a linguistic and philosophical titan—“obscenely well-educated,” he said of himself—his greatest strength as a writer was simply that he loved. He was feverish about whether you would feel pleasure from what you read. He fretted over whether his work had rewarding enough payoffs for the commitment and linguistic effort you had to put into reading him—dropping down to those six-point footnotes, flipping through Infinite Jest’s bulk to those nearly annoying and frequently intrusive endnotes (like note 110’s 18-plus pages with its own set of footnotes), hopping around in the OED to find definitions for abstruse/archaic words, and even puzzling out the etymology of familiar words like yen (see “Adult World (I)” for an amazing lexicological ride in which a story about a currency trader and his young wife turns out to be so much more). This was a vital relationship he did not want to dicker with: “all the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.” He was a reader’s writer—not an avant-gardist, theorist, or hipster show-off—probably because he was himself a lonely reader, abundantly self-conscious and inwardly bent. He fought to write, as former roomie Mark Costello wrote in his gorgeous reminiscence of Wallace. And his fight, the fight to get it right, was for you.

Love was his prime mover. A generosity of spirit—what he called, in his essay, “Tense Present,” the Democratic Spirit, a sedulous respect for the views of others no matter how absurd—governed his writing. Most of his work tangentially hints that truly radiant fiction seduces the reader without selfishly screwing up that fragile relationship predicated on trust—trust that the writer will not have contempt for the reader, will honor the reader throughout, and will not forsake the reader for the writer’s own glory. In what is arguably the most comprehensive articulation of his aesthetic, the 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery in which Wallace makes aesthetics cool and literary theory come alive, he wistfully suggests that great writing—the kind that makes you feel less alone inside, that penetrates your consciousness and breaks into your solitary inner kingdom—emerges from the more generous side of the writer, the side that loves instead of the side that selfishly craves love. It maybe has to do with “having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved,” he said. Maybe it’s that simple.

Subtle touches signify much in Wallace’s discourse of love. In “Tense Present” he led with a Latin epigraph from Augustine, Dilige et quod vis fac—“Love, and do what you will”—echoing Gaddis’s The Recognitions, in which Wyatt Gwyon’s transformative recognition is Augustine’s precept. It’s a bit pretentious, sure, but it’s also the key to all of Wallace’s work. “Tense Present” is variously smug, hilarious, politically charged, and bang on in its dissection of the American culture wars via language usage. If you’re a good descriptivist and you find Wallace’s work showy and tedious, the notes and textual manipulations off-putting, it’s still worth looking at why he appended this Latin quotation to his essay. The implication of Augustine’s precept is that all actions are good if they’re first motivated by love: “Love, and do what you will . . . Let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.” Thus Wallace can provide stern medicine on usage and the culture wars only if he first loves, if he is concerned with doing right at the outset, if all that he says is motivated by a love, a concern, for doing the right thing and not simply by the desire to win an argument or look smart. If the motive is to look sharp and erudite, then the entire exercise fails: the focus reverts to him, the author, instead of the reader, and the whole enterprise becomes solipsistic, masturbatory, onanistic. (It is no accident that Wallace’s conception of the newly formed North American nations in Infinite Jest uses the acronym ONAN, after that first biblical seed-spiller.)

Wallace made a similar rhetorical move in a vituperative review of The Best of the Prose Poem for this very publication, as it happens, in 2001. He eviscerated much of the quote-unquote best of that anthology, but still discovered certain poets that rang his cherries, as he liked to say. As a gesture of good will, he personally paid for an ad in Rain Taxi promoting one of these poets, Jon Davis. Love, and do what you will. This isn’t some insipid buy-the-world-a-Coke philosophy or Hallmark proverb: it’s about real people putting others before themselves in all spheres of human activity. And it applies to everything we do. If you are a fiction writer, then it will be absurdly hard to write out of the side of you that loves, because let’s face it: we want to be adored for what we make. But that motive spoils the broth. Just as observing a phenomenon changes that phenomenon (Heisenberg), so too does your spirit (geist) alter/inform/seep into the artifact, transforming it. Try it sometime: it’s hard work. But so what? Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight, sings Bruce Cockburn.

Wallace knew that human life is largely about pain and suffering. He knew that you and I suffer daily from trivial and tragic events. He also knew that we run like hell from any kind of pain, discomfort, difficult thoughts (like this one: you’re gonna die someday and the world will steam merrily along without you in all its glorious banality—lather, rinse, repeat), and he saw a profound link between our desire for pleasure, eschewing of any pain, and the commercial arts’ easy pandering to our desire to be free of difficulty. He further saw contemporary writers emulating the easy rhythms of commercial art—and that’s why he made stuff that would aggravate you to a degree, but in a way that was still pleasurable. He knew that our suffering, merged with our post-industrial loneliness, had metastasized into full-scale solipsism, and that some contemporary fiction was simply not doing its job of making us feel less alone through “imaginative access to other selves,” which he felt to be healthy, nourishing, redemptive. Therefore, he worked extra hard to put a recognizably mediating voice in your head (television, by contrast, disingenuously disguises its mediation). He made his stuff smart and tricky and complex but also vastly entertaining, so that you would enjoy your share of the linguistic work in this figurative conversation. And he made it all formally sharp and meta, because he knew that these techniques are fashionable with the literati and perennially seen as clever, and that you therefore basically approve of them. He saw the move to metafiction’s involution as having some value, the value of opening up the fourth wall to undisguised mediation: someone—some presence—is talking to you.

He wasn’t Gandhi and he didn’t die for your sins, but the concepts of service and personal sacrifice, especially in a writerly context, he clearly took seriously. One thing that Wallace did incredibly well was to co-opt metafiction’s recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader. He likened metafiction to a literary Armageddon (“art’s reflection on itself is terminal”) and called it a “permanent migraine”: you’re writing a novel about a novelist who sits down to write a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist who paralyzingly suspects that s/he’s nothing but a character in some novelist’s novel, and so on—sigh—you get the idea. Wallace called this kind of writing cleveritis, and he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer. For me, metafiction is always performative. Its entire agenda is a brash display of writerly ingenuity in the service of making the writer look good/smart/clever. We all know that this kind of showy pose is hollow, and we tire quickly of people who try to be clever. As Wittgenstein famously put it:

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing . . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

Ouch. Aside from a stern proclamation about insincere writing leading to false expression and, ultimately, self-deceit, what Wittgenstein is implying here is that writing is spiritual, and that our motives either infect or inspire the writing. You know what it’s like to write something that’s good, your best stuff: it just feels right. You’re alive and humming and doing what you feel you were put on earth for, but while you’re at the center of this stopped-time moment, you also strangely don’t seem to matter all that much, either. You exist in a more natural way, without having to push your desires/interests/feelings all over people. You’re not selling anything, you’re giving. Or you can think that writing’s just writing, and wolfing a hot dog over the kitchen sink is the same as sharing a meal with someone you cherish. Choose to see it the way you want to. But Wallace saw something inherently priceless about selfless writing. So while nuclear weapons didn’t invent aggression, to borrow Wallace’s analogy, neither did metafiction invent solipsism. It just happens to be how the thing is deployed, and for whom: it’s about the “agenda of the consciousness behind the text.”

So metafiction in Wallace’s hands turned out to be gloriously inventive and complexly nourishing. Wallace saw that “the move to involution had value,” as he said, and so he used it in much of his work. “Good Old Neon” is ostensibly about a suicide that DFW knew in high school, when it really materializes that the subject is “David Wallace,” his hyperself-consciousness and insecurities, and how he managed, after “years of literally indescribable war against himself,” to put a lid on all those voices, “that inbent spiral that keeps you from getting anywhere.” It’s a commonplace for writers to put themselves into their fiction as characters, but here Wallace does it not to be clever but to dramatize the intense struggle that we hip, educated North Americans have to live meaningfully, authentically, abundantly. “Octet” risks readerly fatigue with its series of convoluted pop quizzes, narrative fragmentation, footnotes, and tricky philosophy, but it succeeds in diagnosing metafiction’s problems while using the medium of metafictional techniques. (See Pop Quiz 9, the real focus of the story, which leads, “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” and where the narrator analyzes the entire cycle of very short belletristic pieces that actually comprises “Octet” for their strengths and failures only to conclude that the whole cycle fails—when really it intentionally fails, fails for you—and gets the reader thinking hard about what it means to take meaningful risks that resonate with someone besides the scribe). “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” reads as a windy essay-rant that dismantles the toxicity of metafiction by using all of its celebrated hallmarks to underscore how this type of writing buttresses solipsism—how we’re all marooned in our own skulls, as Wallace put it. His formal ingenuity of foot/endnotes and strategic interpolations using square editor’s brackets calls attention to the artificiality of the text, of course, but more importantly these [ ]s draw attention to the fact that the text, the story, is mediated by a real human being who is pretty much the same as the reader—to suggest that the reader isn’t alone with her thoughts, fears, desires, and that a similar human being has pretty much the same thoughts, fears, desires. (See the medial portion of “Adult World (I)” where a simple comma is rendered “[,],” and then contemplate the implications of such a subtle rhetorical move—who editorialized, and why?). Wallace’s metafiction drew attention to the fact that someone cared, regardless of how sappy that sounds, and that the feel of such a thing while reading is moving and transformative.

I want to finish up by talking about “Everything Is Green” from Girl with Curious Hair. Wallace says in “Tense Present” that “every sentence blends and balances at least two communicative functions—one the transmission of raw info, the other the transmission of certain stuff about the speaker.” And so it is here. One of the best aspects of Wallace’s work is how complexly layered it is, while remaining intensely engaging and entertaining at the surface. “Everything Is Green” is a supertight story about two rural Americans, Mitch and Mayfly, living (we presume) in a trailer park, and discussing (we infer) Mayfly’s supposed unnamed infidelity or indiscretion. The story is thickly mediated, rendered in Mitch’s free indirect discourse, first-person point of view, but still with a pretty much invisible mediator looming (but not really intruding). The control of the language in this two-pager is amazing for its purity. That Wallace could emulate a discourse community like this one with such authenticity and generosity, without judgment or contempt, rendering their emotions with sincerity, human beings like you and me—because fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being, as he says in the McCaffery interview—this, well, this is a truly profound ability, and love. Here’s the opening of the story:

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I feel like I know. She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette in light through the wet window, and I can not feel what to say. I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more.

Here we are right inside Mitch’s unselfconscious head; he’s not performing, he’s just trying to figure things out. I especially love that “can not” is rendered as two words (three times throughout) and “every thing” as well later; this subtle move is loaded, but it’s done without interrupting the narrative flow. It does draw attention to the fact that Mitch and Mayfly’s dialogue is heavily mediated—distilled through someone else’s consciousness. It’s like a slight writerly nod of recognition, full of deference, to the reader, in linguistic passing. It silently suggests that the mediator is in here, in the text with you, as you silently, solitarily pass your eyes over the inky glyphs: you are not alone. The implication is that this is how Mitch conceives of the word cannot. And it happens visually although we hear it in our heads, though as spoken utterance we have no logical way of knowing that Mitch conceives of the standard spelling of the word “cannot” as “can not” except by seeing it as such. (This recalls Hal Incandenza’s musing late in Infinite Jest where he recalls a sign he saw as a kid that said,

L I F E I S L I K E T E N N I S
T H O S E W H O S E R V E
B E S T U S U A L L Y W I N

“with the letters all spaced far out like that”—another moment of highlighted mediation that quietly acknowledges that the character self-consciously understands that the reader sees the text). It’s remarkably subtle writing that gently nudges you out of your solipsistic cocoon. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart both. That later in the piece there is a subtle undercurrent allegory about solipsism and how Mitch and Mayfly use English clumsily, in their own dialect, to get into each others’ heads and attempt to understand each other fully as human beings, is also wonderful and ties back into the can not, into language, because language is our only way out of the mess we’re in, or it’s the method of further imprisonment. It’s our choice. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you.

Everything is green. Every thing. See it? They look out the trailer windows during the silent interludes at the green grass, the green trees, the green bushes, all fecund and dripping with rain, and everything is green. And both of them see it that way; they see the same green. There is no solipsistic color fallacy operating for these two, and although it takes linguistic unpacking and enormous emotional risk, they gradually move forward to understanding each other through their slow, ponderous, careful, unselfconscious speech, because all we have is language, and language is always a function of relationships, as Wallace said—yes it’s tough work and takes forever to put our lightning-flash thoughts into the prison-house of words for each other, but it’s also goddamned worth it, because “language and linguistic intercourse is, in and of itself, redeeming, remedy-ing.” David Foster Wallace certainly thought so. It’s all we’ve got. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do.

So then, this is water. This right here: your environment. So decide. Live deliberately. Believe in something bigger than yourself. Love, then do what you think’s best. Don’t just go merrily along. Lose the black misanthropic spiritual outlook. Maybe the cloak of irony too. The sky is blue: it isn’t a flat square coldly Euclidian grid. Forget the hot narrow imperatives of the self. Be an anti-rebel. You have considerably more firepower now, you know. Think about what black miracle you’re giving yourself to. Maybe serve someone who doesn’t deserve service. Life is like tennis: those who serve best usually win. Ask why write instead of what to write. Don’t write for yourself. Writing is a gift. So give already. Write for the achingly lonely pleasure of the other. Quit scanning for any garde of which to be avant. Only bullshit artists move in packs. Talent’s just a pen that works, anyway. Don’t abandon the field. Abide. You are loved. End of story. Are you immensely pleased? I am (in here).¹

[For David Foster Wallace, Ave atque vale]

¹ Mainly DFW here. Q.v., respectively, “Kenyon College Commencement Address, 2005” (uncollected, but forthcoming as This Is Water); “Octet,” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; “1458 Words,” Speak Magazine; “Tense Present,” Harper’s Magazine; “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” Review of Contemporary Fiction; Infinite Jest; “Good Old Neon,” Oblivion; Infinite Jest; “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” Girl with Curious Hair; RCF interview; “Feodor’s Guide,” The Village Voice; Infinite Jest; “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”; “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; Infinite Jest.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

James Baldwin
Vintage International ($11.95)

by Alex Starace

In the afterglow of Barack Obama’s historic victory, it may be instructive to look back on James Baldwin’s slim volume The Fire Next Time, which collects two early 1960s works evaluating race relations in Harlem at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Hard as it may be to believe, Obama is of a completely different generation from Baldwin. He’d scarcely been born when Baldwin wrote the first piece in the collection, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”

The impetus of the 1962 letter, at least on the face of it, is simple. Baldwin’s nephew, also named James, is hitting puberty and the elder Baldwin has a message: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.” In his characteristically evocative, compassionate prose, Baldwin limns the contours of his father’s dreadful life and his brother’s transformation from an enthusiastic young boy into an ineffectual, violent, and bitter man: “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.” He tells his nephew that he was born “to be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. . . . You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.” Despite his rage at seeing his family grow up in a ghetto, Baldwin concludes the letter with a message of perseverance and love. The problem, as he sees it, is that whites are afraid—not of blacks, but of losing their own identity and admitting their own inhumanity and lack of action toward blacks (“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”) And so Baldwin urges “that we [blacks], with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

This final theme is the thread that runs through the second, much longer letter, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The essay, which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1963, is a meandering, remarkable story of Baldwin’s religious upbringing and his (much later) meeting with Elijah Muhammad. As Baldwin tells it, when he hit puberty, he knew he was doomed: “But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace.” He was growing up in the ghetto; he had to do something to avoid the Avenue. That something was the church. He became a child-preacher and gave several sermons a week. It was his “gimmick,” as he says, a way to keep him focused, to give him status, and allow him to gain space from his violent, overbearing father (who, not coincidentally, was a long-standing preacher at a different church). And, most important, it was how he avoided the fate of many of his friends, who fell into drugs and crime as a result of hopelessness and desperation.

Zoom forward nearly twenty years, to the early 1960s. Baldwin is now a literary giant, famous enough that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, wants to have an audience with him. Baldwin is curious: Why has a doctrine of black supremacy and independence become viable? What distinguishes Muhammad from the scores of soapbox preachers standing on the corners of Harlem during Baldwin’s youth? The visit takes place on the South Side of Chicago; the scene is like that of a gangster movie, or a Kafka novel. Baldwin enters a house and there’s a sitting room with eight men and six women. The women sit on one side and the men on the other. There’s small talk, discussion of “white devils,” a wait for the leader. When Muhammad shows up, he’s mesmerizing in a quiet way: “I knew what he made me feel, how I was drawn toward his peculiar authority, how his smile promised to take the burden of my life off my shoulders.” The group sits down for dinner and it becomes clear Muhammad’s followers are sycophants. A ceaseless chorus of “Yes, that’s right” ensues, along with non-stop talk of the imminent destruction of “the white devils” and the innate glory of “the black race.”

Baldwin can sympathize with Muhammad and his follower’s sentiments:

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down—that has cut down so many in the past and cuts down so many every day—it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish a real from a fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so. All doormen, for example, and all policemen have by now, for me, become exactly the same, and my style with them is designed simply to intimidate them before they can intimidate me. No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color.

Regardless of Baldwin’s empathy, it turns out to be a dispiriting visit. He declines to make a religious conversion and is then given a car and driver to escort him to his next destination. His evening with the leader of the Nation of Islam is over.

At the end of the essay, Baldwin explicitly rejects Muhammad’s doctrine of hatred. Instead, he asks that sane people, both black and white, band together in an attempt to staunch the cycle of vengeance and hatred he sees forming: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” It is a sentiment not unfitting of Barack Obama—although on the campaign trail Obama would speak of the divisiveness of partisanship rather than race. And here is where the question arises: How far have we come? How far do we need to go? The Fire Next Time speaks eloquently of America’s systematic and structural failure to address its racial injustices in the 1960s. Baldwin understands how it breeds bitterness, ruins lives, and makes people—both white and black—small, petty, and hateful.

Certainly, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s; Barack Obama’s election as president is an astounding achievement. But can we say we’ve now transcended our “racial nightmare”? Clearly, all our nation’s racial problems didn’t vanish overnight. But maybe—just maybe—it’s now merely a matter of how soon various barriers will fall. Meanwhile, it’s important to note that the type of injustice Baldwin brings to light exists on more than a racial plane; he documents the seeds and emotions behind jingoism, classism, xenophobia, and demagoguery, as well as racism, and he makes clear the deep resentments they breed within both perpetrators and victims. Throughout it all, his compassion is boundless—even as he condemns most, he preaches a doctrine of love and resistance. His care, his insight, and his ability to empathize with all sides of the issue are unequivocally relevant today. He is a timeless writer. For that he should be honored and read—in any era.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009