Tina May Hall
University of Pittsburgh Press ($16.95)

by Tessa Mellas

As a physical object, Tina May Hall's story collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects is a tiny, perfect thing. But then, so are the stories contained therein. Hall’s collection amounts to a mere 150 pages; one senses that when she writes, she spurns computers and stands at a letterpress instead, choosing letters one by one, testing thousands of words in each sentence, arranging and rearranging each possible configuration until she gets it exactly right. That is not to say that the book is “careful,” for that would imply convention, blandness, and a lack of imagination. Hall’s carefulness takes marvelous risks. For all its linguistic precision, the collection is also whimsical, brutal, and structurally experimental, with beats of subtle humor woven in. Though a minimalist, Hall’s sparseness is artful and bold.

At twelve pages, the first story, “Visitations” is the longest in the collection. With her lover out of town, the narrator, a pregnant woodcut artist, copes with the thickening smell of decay as trapped squirrels rot behind her kitchen wall. Though the smell is nauseating to her, it attracts wildlife from the woods— spiders, birds, deer, wasps. The wilding of the domestic sphere calls attention to something amiss in the couple’s relationship, their growing estrangement fueled by the narrator’s propensity toward solitude. She seems a half-wild creature herself, gnawing endlessly at meat, shirking domestication, pushing away the lover who carries yellow squash to her on a two-mile trek through the woods. The brutality of her eating contrasts with the delicate life growing inside her, a bodily change she finds bewildering: “I felt bones slipping where there should have been no bones.” Hall pairs the disorienting psychology of pregnancy with the reciprocal feelings of strangulation and wonder that accompany love, painting a complex narrative with delicate brushstrokes.

Another story, “Skinny Girls’ Constitution and Bylaws,” takes on a different tone, more comical than the first, more fragmented in form, but still with Hall’s stunning prose. The story starts with this one-sentence paragraph: “We will know each other by the way our watches slip from our wrists, the bruises on our knees, our winged shoulder blades tenting silk dresses.” Hall’s descriptions transform a clique of petite schoolgirls into a gaggle of supernatural witches, transparent underwater and invulnerable to nooses. The utter beauty of each line mocks our cultural awe over pre-pubescent thinness. Take this sampling of lines: “When we lift our arms to the moon, there is a sound like branches scraping”; “We will gestate plump happy babies in the bone cages of our pelvises”; “We will donate cells drawn from the doorknobs of our spines, the needle a key turning us”; “We wash in teacups. We chart the stars on our scapulae, make telescopes of thumbs and forefingers.” It is remarkable the number of brilliant lines that Hall fits in these five pages.

The prose in “For Dear Pearl, Who Drowned” is beautiful in a completely different way. Take the story’s second paragraph: “Her knees glow in the shower. She scrubs them hard. They are red and wistful. She has given up on soap. Soap is for sisters taking baths together. Soap tastes like Sunday nights. Now, everything is scrubbing. She scrubs too hard to be clean. It is hard to scrub oneself clean. It is hard to be clean. It is hard to be”. As the protagonist tries to make sense of a drowning, the narrator tries to make sense of language. The sentences are simple, childish. They combine and recombine images. They test different combinations of words to see if a new arrangement will make the plot turn out differently. Paragraphs trail off with no end punctuation, as though the protagonist seeks to avoid pain by leaving sentences unfinished; if one doesn’t verbalize an event in language, perhaps it didn’t happen. The images in the story— of rivers and eggs, wrinkles and teeth, teacups and pills— take on a surreal quality when they are spun through a linguistic game of repetition and reappropriation. The final effect is gut wrenching, making the wordplay a miraculous narrative feat.

While Hall can do tragedy remarkably well, the book hardly performs in just a mournful key. In “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Meteorologist and Stopped the Rain,” for example, Hall takes us on a light, metafictional romp. She writes, “This is not a love story. If it were, there would be a certain pathos in a woman conjuring a lover out of storm watches and tornado warnings.” The story “How to Remember a Bird,” about a town that births a hole which swallows things— the bakery, reporters, armchairs, staplers, shoes— has dark undertones, but there is a playfulness in Hall’s existentialist spinning of metaphors, that somehow makes that darkness comforting rather than grim. And the six-page “Faith is Three Parts Formaldehyde, One Part Ethyl Alcohol” is surprisingly poignant, narrating a sweet exchange between Rosa, who cut off her pinkie finger to forge a divine link with God, and a man who’s had a tracheotomy and carries in his pocket both a silver voice box and a cassette tape on which his childhood voice sings a song about a spider and a rainstorm.

Hall ends the book in the place where it began: with pregnancy. However, while in the first story the narrator finds herself ill-suited for being a wife and mother, in “All the Day’s Sad Stories,” the series of prose poems that closes the book, a couple cannot get pregnant. While disasters are happening elsewhere, piped in on the evening news, the couple’s mundane routine, filled with all the strategies of those trying to conceive, is marked by futility. Hall infuses even the items they touch at the grocery store— “the paper skins of garlic,” the cantaloupe lifted to the nose to sniff— with sadness. She writes:

It is autumn and late at night and the moon is shriveling like a mum. Mercy buys olives, soda water, bright red pistachios. She has cravings; sometimes she licks salt off her index finger if there is nothing else in the house. The store is air-conditioned and fluorescent. There is a frost warning for tonight. Mercy and Jake wrapped their shrubs with burlap, and now it looks like a row of decapitated heads rings their house. The sliding doors at the front of the store whisper. Mercy has a hard time triggering automatic things— doors, faucets, towel dispensers. She spends a good portion of her time in public waving her hands at electronic eyes.

Domesticity takes on a certain quiet beauty in this final piece. There is beauty in each hiccup and child-sized yogurt cup, in “a bouquet of icicles pilfered from the bus shelter’s overhang, sharp as knives, already melting,” and in “the miniature trees [that] have outgrown their shapes.” It seems that Mercy and Jake’s inability to birth what they crave, to turn something as vulnerable and potentially imaginary as love into a child, is what makes them notice these small beautiful things. While their longings are left unfulfilled, ours as readers are quenched, for Hall has birthed her tiny perfect things over and over by magically reconfiguring the simplest words.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Orson Scott Card
Subterranean ($35)

by William Alexander

Orson Scott Card has rewritten Hamlet. The back of this slim novella boasts that once we have read this "revelatory version of the Hamlet story, Shakespeare's play will be much more fun to watch—because now you'll know what's really going on." The author has previously updated other Shakespearean plays, rendering them more intelligible to modern audiences while supposedly retaining the “flavor” of the originals.

Thomas and Harriet Bowdler did similar editorial work in 1818—mostly by removing any and all references to sex. (They had to avoid Measure for Measure entirely.) From them we get the word bowdlerize: "to remove material that is considered improper or offensive from a text or account, esp. with the result that it becomes weaker or less effective." Card himself makes the comparison in an introduction to his "translation" of The Taming of the Shrew, and answers the implicit accusation that he is producing Diet Shakespeare through prurient censorship:

It seems to me that we might rather lose our contempt for Bowdler’s attempt to make Shakespeare watchable to the audience of his time, and realize that the standards of taste and decorum change from age to age, and it is not at all unreasonable to make such temporary changes in the script as will allow a play to continue to find an audience—as long as the original remains available, so it can be restored to public view when tastes change again. See intro here

Fair enough. Every new performance of the Bard is also an act of interpretation, sometimes a drastic and transformative one. We still have authoritative versions of the scripts afterwards, to be reedited and reinterpreted. However, Card's essay concludes with the following:

The purpose is to present Taming of the Shrew in a way that recovers, not the original text of Shakespeare’s play, but the original experience of it—a fast-moving, instantly comprehensible, pun- and bawdy-filled, ironic, self-parodying comedy with a legitimate moral lesson about the relationship between man and woman in marriage.

Note that he considers it a virtue for a text to be "instantly comprehensible," as though it were a very bad thing to confront an audience with something they don't already know, understand, and believe. Also note the troubling idea that The Taming of the Shrew carries a "legitimate moral lesson" about gender roles.

Such troubling undercurrents become gale force winds in Hamlet’s Father. In this adaptation, Hamlet was never close to his father. The prince is unfazed and emotionally indifferent to the old king's death, feels no sense of betrayal when his mother speedily remarries, and thinks that Claudius will make a perfectly good monarch. Hamlet is also secure in his religious faith, with absolute and unshakable beliefs about the nature of death and the afterlife. He isn't particularly hung up on Ophelia, either. Throughout the novella, Prince Hamlet displays the emotional depth of a blank sheet of paper.

Card has completely removed the dramatic stakes and haunting questions posed by the play, and the threadbare result is a failure of narrative craft on every level. Only one question remains: Is the ghost of Hamlet's father really a ghost, or is it instead a demonic liar? (Both, as it turns out.) But most of the novella is filled with pedantic moralizing, made all the more bland by Hamlet's smug and uncomplicated certainty. "Some acts are always right," he insists. "And some are always wrong."

This much is sure: The spirits of the righteous do not walk the earth. They are caught up into heaven, and look no more upon this poor land of shadows, having beheld the light that can be seen only by the pure in heart. My father is here because he was a wicked man. Now he is an angry spirit, and mine are the hands that he has chosen to act out his rage. And yet by justice and ancient law, my hands do belong to him, until his murder be avenged.

This Hamlet will never refer to death as an undiscovered country or wonder what dreams may come in death's sleep. He will never suggest that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. He is "instantly comprehensible," and instantly forgettable.

Neither does Card’s prose retain the flavor of Elizabethan English—or any other kind of flavor. These words taste like saltines without salt:

Horatio brought him his sword. "Laertes is looking for you," he said.
"I don't have time for Laertes. He must know I didn't mean to kill his father," Hamlet said.
"It's not his father," said Horatio. "It's his sister."
"Ophelia? I didn't touch her."
"She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead."
"And for that he wants to kill me?"

In case you missed it, this is the moment when Hamlet first learns about Ophelia's death, and this is the extent of his emotional shock. Card's prince won't be jumping in Ophelia's open grave or daring Laertes to trump his grief.

The extent of the novella's failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his "revelatory new version" turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.

Here's the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now "as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house."

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: "Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be."

All of this is as horrifying as it is ridiculous. It is not, however, surprising that Orson Scott Card's primary purpose is to slander ten percent of the human race. He recently joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an institution which exists solely to crush gay civil rights wherever they emerge. Card has publicly stated that homosexuals will destroy America:

There is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it . . . The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.” See speech here

The neurologist Simon LeVay did, in fact, demonstrate that homosexuals are "born that way" in 1991. Ivanka Savic proved it conclusively in 2008. These are rigorous scientific investigations of human neurobiology. Card's fantasy of abuse, stated outright in his editorial and dramatized—badly—inHamlet's Father, has no factual basis. This should make the slander easy to dismiss, but it is painfully difficult to prove the absence of anything—or to refute someone who presumes to speak for your own unconscious wish.

This kind of psychological violence is easy to inflict. Let's play the same game with Card's portrayal of the Danish prince, and suppose the Hamlet of Hamlet's Father is gay. After all, the prince shows tenderness for Horatio, and only for Horatio. He is physically shocked when, at one point, Ophelia tries to kiss him. Afterwards, he only notices her beauty in the abstract: "She had been a sweet girl, when he knew her years ago; she was a pretty woman now, and though he had no particular desire for any of her tribe, he knew it was wrong to trifle with her." Tribe meaning women here, it’s clear that women delight not Hamlet. Only Horatio delights Hamlet. What's more, the prince was born this way; the book assures us that Gertrude was able to protect her son's innocence from the old king's appetites, and the boy turned out to be gay regardless.

Unable to live happily ever after with Horatio, Hamlet goes half-mad. He hallucinates the ghost of his dead father just to have someone to blame for what he perceives as a hell-bound condition. The tragedy here is that no one gave him an "It's okay to be Takei" button or insisted that he watch Hal Duncan's "It Gets Better" video when he first started thinking about suicide. Shakespeare himself was probably queer. (Go read sonnet #20 if you doubt me.) Hamlet, as re-imagined by Orson Scott Card, is certainly queer. Unfortunately, the prince's literary stepfather is both a bigot and a bowdlerizer. If aught of wonder you would see, look elsewhere.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

Christopher R. Howard
Seven Stories Press ($14.95)

by Natalie Storey

Christopher Howard’s debut novel, Tea in Ulaanbaatar, begins with a Peace Corps volunteer who, in a drug-induced stupor in an apartment in Ulaanbaatar, finally remembers the lines to a Mongolian poem he has forgotten. “The words appear like the faintest light,” Howard writes. “Like a flash of knives in a cave. The words come to Warren in this high-altitude winter that has deadened the skin of his face and is now creeping inward, eating at his sinuses and teeth.” The poem verifies what Howard’s main character has known all along: his life means nothing in Mongolia. “We sit together / the mountain and I / Until only the mountain remains,” the poem concludes.

The novel’s lyricism accompanies a dark storyline; from the first stunning page, Howard plunges readers into a nightmarish landscape. He describes water so cold it hurts, silverfish and horseflies invading houses, beds, and body cavities, and garbage-littered streets. Of the Gobi desert Howard writes, “Later he heard infant camels screaming in the void and they sounded like human babies.” Warren works as an English teacher, but eventually hooks up with a beautiful, young Mongolian girl who helps him acquire blood tea, a rare hallucinogen. During the drug deals that occupy the latter half of the novel, Warren and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer drug their medical officer. When they accidently kill her, they feed her fingers to a buzzard. Such plot twists, rendered in stark prose, will keep many readers guessing.

Howard casts his main character in the role of the “post tourist” — a traveler who sees with two critical eyes, one turned on himself and the other on the society to which he travels. Although he faces hardships in Mongolia, Warren still prefers it to home, thinking:

In America there is no morning, only the lie of morning, when you scramble to the office lacking the morale to face another day, to dive into work that collected in your cubicle while you had the gall to be sleeping, to earn the funds to allow you to drone through a life consuming, consuming. Even a frigid wasteland is better than that existence.

Warren’s motivations for leaving the United States surface quickly— he seeks only escape from his dissatisfaction—and the book’s major contribution to travel literature lies in this portrait. Rarely do authors strip bare the motivations of Americans traveling and working overseas, often preferring more romanticized versions. However, in Tea of Ulaanbaatar, the moral imperative to help Mongolians gets nullified by the volunteers’ selfish motivations. The Peace Corps bureaucracy hampers the volunteers at each turn. The locals prove hostile. “That’s what Amerik founding fathers could never have understood,” one Mongolian lecturers Warren. “That you would use your freedom for nothing. You Ameriks, fat, and with all your petty dramas, you have enough food, enough housing, and what do you do? Do you make the world a better place? No, you corrupt each other.” Howard holds nothing back in this critique.

In describing Mongolians, however, Howard’s descriptions sometimes read harshly. “The Mongols don’t farm,” Howard writes. “I’ve seen the reports. They literally do not farm. That would take time away from drinking and beating each other senseless.” Howard’s characters frequently refer to the alcoholism of Mongolians. Such observations ring true to the characters but will surely leave a negative impression of Mongolia, a country rarely written about in the United States. Discerning the difference between fact and imaginatively created fiction becomes difficult for any reader unfamiliar with Mongolia. For example, no “blood tea” exists in Mongolia. However, camps of traditional Mongolian tents, called gers, do dot cities and towns. Ultimately, the novel resembles neither Flaubert’s sexualized Arabia nor Conrad’s hopelessly dark and ignorant Africa. Howard’s Mongolia appears bleak, but the harshest treatment of all he reserves for his naïve American characters.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011

David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown and Company ($28)

by Rich Gangelhoff

Although the center of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel,The Pale King, does not hold, the writing itself still fascinates. Certainly there were challenges in bringing this final Wallace doorstop to print. Michael Pietsch writes in his Editor’s Note that before his suicide Wallace left “a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages,” and also material from “hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks [that] contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more.” Pietsch describes arranging all this diverse material, much of it written in freestanding sections, as “the most difficult part of editing The Pale King,” and the strain frequently shows. For example, Chapter 1 is a prose poem of Midwestern landscape— it’s great writing, but it feels like it could have been pasted anywhere in the text. Chapter 3, on the other hand, which consists of a two-page conversation between unidentified speakers on masturbation, seems to fit nowhere in the text, and feels more like an outtake from Infinite Jest than anything new from Wallace. Amidst such chaos, the reader cannot be sure which of the resulting inconsistencies and lacunae are editorial gaffes and which are Wallace’s own self-conscious, postmodern narrative disruptions.

The novel really starts in Chapter 2 with Claude Sylvanshine’s airplaning toward Peoria, Illinois, for his promotion at Internal Revenue Service Post 047, the Midwest Regional Examination Center, circa 1985. Sylvanshine is a “fact psychic,” and this vignette is the most hilarious section in the book; while Sylvanshine is at a training session on rental property deductions, he experiences “data incursions of the annual rainfall in Zambia for even-numbered years since 1974.” In another chapter, we meet Leonard Stecyk, an obnoxious boy genius (the picked-on-in-shop-class type), only to read later of his gradual stultification in the IRS, where he does not shine. Also not shining at the IRS is the David Wallace character, “age forty SS no. 975-04-2012,” and Lane Dean, Jr., who impregnates his girl on a picnic table, dutifully marries her, and supports her with his government job. We meet Toni Ware and Mother Tia, trailer trash mother daughter prostitutes, but how they tie in with the main IRS plot never comes clear. Then we skip to “the boy,” not identified until later in the book, when we connect that the “wiggler” (or tax form examiner) who sweats a lot and has anxiety attacks is David Cusk, who we first encountered as an anxiety-ridden high school student. And at the top of the ziggurat sits Mr. DeWitt Glendenning, Jr., arguably the Pale King himself.

You get the idea? It’s a collage, a pastiche of vignettes, and it’s one character after another, albeit backstoried in substantial depth and living color. It’s just that they don’t connect. Even on page 444, we are meeting newly introduced IRS examiners at an after work happy hour, Shane Drinion listening to Meredith Rand for sixty-five pages about her problems—self mutilation and the psychological effects of being beautiful and disturbed by it. The book, at this pace, would probably have ended up with a word count in the Clarissa zone had Wallace been able to finish it, and it might have achieved the grace of something like John Dos Passos’s USA, the characters like spokes in a wheel radiating outward from the IRS center in Peoria.

Still, there is much to recommend the vignettes as they are. The novel smartly addresses the issue of the average hockey mom not knowing how many senators her state has, tracing the history of civics: a 1950s requirement, a ’60s elective, a ’70s pipedream, an ’80s irrelevancy, eroding into today’s incorporated corporate if-I-want-to-rebel-I-can-buy-it attitude. The narrator muses with nostalgia on his own adolescence amidst these times, and this section is highly amusing, as if breathing out bong hits from a rancid couch with the Wallace character. His college days consist of even more wasting away watching soaps, but an accounting class provides the way for the waste case to drift into the IRS recruiting station in “Chicagoland.”

Although the David Wallace character speculates on the nature of dullness and attention, the book is not about boredom or self-help, nor is it the author’s veiled suicide note (sure he mentions suicide, but he also mentions picnics). It is, rather, a deconstruction of the word boredom, which results in the conclusion that the word invented itself, offering the splendid takeaway: “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” Despite being unfinished, The Pale King demonstrates that Wallace took this credo to heart.

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Barry Hannah
Grove Press ($27.50)

by John Madera

Notwithstanding its Evil Knievel-style dust jacket—meant perhaps to evoke the titillating, slash-and-burn early lifestyle of its author—the real daredevil pyrotechnics, the true daring and attack, of Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories, are its heavily-machined sentences, prose that may be indebted as much to Hemingway’s brevity, clarity, and macho bravado as they are to O’Connor’s grotesqueries, but still sentences that only Hannah could produce. As he said in a speech delivered at Bennington College in 2002, “I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of the living.”

Reading through Long, Last, Happy, you can’t help but be struck by Hannah’s attentiveness to life as it’s lived by largely unlikeable characters, lively and unlovely—or perhaps lovely because of their liveliness. His fictional world offers readers a panoply of the grotesque, picturesque, and burlesque, a true variety show of shysters, wastrels, ne’er-do-wells, hacks, and failures; hideous schemers and beautiful dreamers; also musicians, soldiers, writers, and academics, not to mention racists and homophobes, each of whose fabulous foibles are incisively rendered in sentences which, without mincing words, make mincemeat of our hypocrisy, dishonesty, malice, violence, and other assorted failings, what Hannah, in “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb,” describes as that “bog and labyrinth” where we are all “overbrained and overemotioned.” It’s the kind of language, rendered as much with and for the eye as with and for the ear, that struck Hannah “as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores,” a musical language: an “orchestra of the living” accompanying “memory, the whole lying opera of it.”

Speaking of lies, there is no small number of liars in this collection: the “old liars” of “Water Liars,” who trade tall tales like the one about fishermen reeling in “fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins,” having used “nuthin” for bait, or the “chronic prevaricator” in “High Water Railers,” whose “lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened.” The narrator of “Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?” is a natural-born liar: “There was always a great lie in supposing any life was significant at all, really. And one anointed that lie with a further arrangement into prevarication—that the life had a form and a point.”

Speaking of violence, Long, Last, Happy contains quite the high body count. In “Testimony of Pilot,” a saxophone prodigy’s bandleader is killed in a car wreck; later, when he is well into adulthood, his ex-girlfriend dies in an airplane crash, she and her fellow passengers “all splattered like flesh sparklers over the water just over Cuba.” The story ends with the narrator himself dying on a surgeon’s table. “Coming Close to Donna” ends with a girl getting brained with a tombstone. “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb” opens with the narrator taking “a bullet through the throat” then “overmurder[ing]” a fellow soldier by shooting him four times in the face. The narrator of “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” one of Hannah’s many stories set during the Civil War, confesses that although he hates “this murdering business,” he does love the “burning and the looting.” “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony” ends with the ultraviolence of a woman being dynamited: “The thing was still alive. It was staggering in the doorway. Its limbs were naked and blackened. Its breasts were scorched black. It was a woman, hair burned away.” Amid all the violence, death, and carnage, Hannah might be describing himself in “Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other”: “He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in his thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions.” Actually, the protagonist of that story turns out to be a thinly veiled William Burroughs. With all the bullets whizzing past, knives slicing skin, muscle, and tendon, and explosives blasting things to Kingdom Come in Long, Last, Happy, it’s an unlikely weapon, namely “a bowl of Lysol” thrown at a moment of rage, that wreaks the most havoc in the book.

Speaking of sentences, Hannah’s stories are full of stunners that are crafted to conjure a distinct persona, often a crackpot whose scattershot observations shift between the hare-brained and deceptively brainy, at the end of which you can almost hear the requisite rim shot. Some blogorrhea-sufferers, with their swelled heads pricked by all things priapic, will fawn over sentences like “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out” (“Love Too Long”); and “She wore a sundress with a drastic cleavage up front; looked like something that hung around New Orleans and kneaded your heart to death with her feet” (“Testimony of Pilot”); and “She’d sunbathed herself so her limbs were brown, and her stomach, and the instinct was to rip off the white underwear and lick, suck, say something terrific into the flesh that you discovered” (“Testimony of Pilot”). They will likely get off on the mythologizing of drunkenness: “The drunkard lifts sobriety into a great public virtue in the smug and snakelike heart. It may be his major service. Thus it seemed when I was drunk, raving with bad attitudes” (“Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter”). As funny as these sentences often are, each one carefully attuned to voice and character, these aren’t the ones that shine most. Hannah’s character descriptions are often wonderfully odd and wittily acerbic. These comic observations whittle down the characters that fall prey to Hannah’s blade. But it’s his eccentric lyricism that consistently satisfies, and which, at times, reaches toward an as-thorough-as-Thoreau perspective, one that may be less enlightened, but is by no means less attentive.

Though the largely amoral characters of Hannah’s early work provoke or even celebrate violence and mayhem, later stories like “Scandale d’Estime” begin to soften that stance. This story also attests to his ability to craft quiet lines, such as “Her eyes blinked pink at the rims when she lifted up, and I was gone for her, out of my depth,” or “This charity and long-suffering had never even nearly come near me before.” The assonantal lilt of those short i-sounds in the former sentence and the latter’s alliterative rush of n’s (“never,” “nearly,” and “near”), not to mention its clever interpolations of “near,” the way “never even” suggests a palindrome, attest to Hannah’s command of the full resources of language. And “Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other” is a story replete with idyllic reminiscences characterized by their Faulknerian flow:

The rain smelled sweet, rich. Thinking of the golden wheat lapping it up, breadbasket of the world, amber fields of, sun-browned boy with a string of bullheads, home-dried cut cane pole with black cotton line, drilled piece of corncob for a bobber, Prince Albert tin with nightcrawlers in wet leaves for bait.

Here, Hannah uses b-words (“breadbasket,” “-browned, “boy,” “bullheads,” “black,” “bobber,” and “bait”) to serve as anchors in a lyrical passage that might, because of the glissando effect of its inventory, very well slip off the page. And his eliding of “waves of grain” —allowing the reader to fill in the blanks, as it were—is a masterstroke, as it eliminates the cliché while still enjoying all of its resonance.

The final section of Long, Last, Happy, features four new stories that find Hannah in top form. It opens with “Fire Water,” another of his fishing tales; this one features a group of octogenarian women whose idyllic fishing trip is ruined by an arsonist’s act of conflagration. The story exemplifies many of the hallmarks of Hannah’s style: an unhurried, almost gentle rhythm, evocative imagery, and a sultry lyricism evinced in his descriptions of the fire as “running, almost speaking in snaps of twigs mad orange all suddenly” and a steeple “falling into a heart of black and purple as the whole structure went down, wracking, gnashing what teeth were left.”

Following the collection’s final story, “Rangoon Green,” Hannah posits that “writing train[s] our people for logic, grace, and precision of thought,” and these are the very qualities Hannah’s best writing offers. Story after story reveals compact (if usually skewed) patterns of thinking and speaking that are manifested in sentences that dance, that are elegant even when their subjects are inelegant, that are, yes, graceful even as they stab us. Their precise imagery, description, and characterization; their sharp dialogue, biting humor, and malice; their delight in bizarre human behavior; and their rage against human weakness all confirm not only Hannah’s strange predilections, but also his acute perception and insight. In the 2002 talk he gave at Bennington, Hannah opined:

It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be sleepier than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise.

Without question these stories, home to a carnival of misfits and miscreants, are evidence that even in death Barry Hannah’s work still rises above that of many of his still-living peers—and most especially above the work of his many imitators, the pretenders who, in contrast with Hannah’s ideal writer, seem more dead than alive. As Hannah might have put it, these eyes-wide-open stories “sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

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Simon Winchester
HarperCollins ($27.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Simon Winchester, author of more than a dozen books and frequent traveler on the Atlantic, takes on the difficult task of trying to explain that ocean’s history and wonder. Unlike Hugh Ambrose’s recent The Pacific, which chronicles the personal experiences of soldiers during and after World War II, Atlantic is a multifaceted exploratory journey which seeks to answer wide-ranging questions about this unique ocean.

A variety of historical players are described in a barrage of tales that includes four continents and their exotic sounding, and sometimes remote, ports; all manner of ocean lore is presented; and various interpretations of the Atlantic are provided. Winchester takes so many approaches because, as he posits: "It is a tricky tale to tell. Simple chronology might suit very well the story of the making of the physical sea itself—but the details of the human experience are scarcely so amenable."

To describe his growing understanding of the Atlantic Winchester starts each chapter with a quotation about one of the seven stages of life from the famous "All the world's a stage" monologue in As You Like It: "Infant; School-boy; Lover; Soldier; Justice; Slipper'd Pantaloon; and second Childishness." For example, he opens Chapter 6:

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloons,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side.
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice.
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

While somewhat anthropomorphic, this leads to a well-told chapter about the failures of marine conservation, especially the demise of the cod fisheries of the American Northeast. There is also good coverage of global warming’s impact on the Atlantic.

Winchester’s presentation encapsulates past and future—when all the continents were, and will be again, a single, large landmass—but it also reveals the present gray waters humans have always known. All sorts and stripes have sought their fortune on it, including explorers, fishers, travelers, artists, writers, soldiers, merchants, scientists, and defenders. And many, like the author, have left their mark; Atlantic is a wondrously quotable book (e.g., "From here onward the sea yawned open wide and featureless, and soon took on the character that is generally true of all great oceans—being unmarked, unclaimed, largely unknowable, and in very large measure unknown").

The Atlantic is the most overused and traveled ocean in the world. In reading about its history, its majesty, and its vastness, in Winchester’s powerfully human terms, we are left to contemplate how the ocean appears to be fighting back with rising waters and severe storms.

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Marianne Tatom Letts
Indiana University Press ($19.95)

by Jeremy Wade Morris

On Feb 18, 2011, Radiohead launched their newest album, The King Of Limbs, on their website. The digital download cost $9, though fans could also pre-order (for $50) what the band described as the world’s first “newspaper” album: a deluxe audio-visual package consisting of 2 vinyl records, a CD, a digital download and hundreds of pieces of artwork. The launch followed Radiohead’s much-hyped 2007 release of In Rainbows, where the band let users pay what they wanted for a download of the album.

Talented musicians and master anti-marketers, Radiohead have spent their careers pushing the boundaries of musical creativity and mass production. Marianne Tatom Letts’s excellent new book returns to the origins of the band’s subversive marketing strategies: the making and selling of two of Radiohead’s most interesting, dense and disputed albums, Kid A and Amnesiac. Letts’s smart, in-depth account reveals as much about Radiohead’s ambivalent and conflicted relationship with popular culture and contemporary capitalism as it does about their musical appeal.

Some might argue Letts’s biggest contribution is her theorization of what, conceptually speaking, makes a concept album. Her introduction discusses academic and journalistic work on the topic (with nods to undisputed concept albums like Tommy and The Wall) in order to position the concept album within art rock and progressive rock traditions. Letts presents a concept album taxonomy that will be highly useful for popular music scholars. While some song cycles hold together based on a linear narrative with a plot or characters, others cohere thematically and rely on repeating musical or lyrical motifs. Letts assigns Kid A and Amnesiac to a category called the Resistant Concept Album: one that is “unified but resists interpretation,” on account of its non-explicit plot, musical discontinuity, and unclear lyrics/concept. Kid A and Amnesiac aren’t the first resistant concept albums, but they are illustrative of a tradition that simultaneously subverts and fulfills the expectations of the recorded music commodity.

After a well-researched survey of Radiohead’s career before Kid A, Letts proceeds with song-by-song readings of the musical, lyrical, and paratextual elements (i.e. packaging, websites, and other marketing materials) of the albums under consideration. She claims it is “helpful but not absolutely necessary” to know how to read music, but music scholars will surely take more away than general audiences in other fields (i.e. media studies, cultural studies, etc.). Still, Letts makes a sincere effort to keep her interpretations accessible for non-experts and to link her readings back to the wider themes her book explores.

Kid A and Amnesiac are resistant concept albums because they feature loosely unified mediations on the death of the subject in modern life. Letts convincingly traces how the first four songs of Kid A follow a subject whose only means of coping with the alienation brought by modern technology, politics, and capitalism is to disappear completely. She then argues the second half of Kid A and most of Amnesiac can be read as persistent but futile attempts to reconstruct the subject. Letts skillfully addresses lyrics, groove, notation, and other song elements where appropriate. She also uses inventive techniques like grouping lyrical snippets from across songs to form an “image trail,” a method that seems particularly suited for analyzing a fragment-spewing poet like Thom Yorke.

Despite her attention to the music, Letts never forgets it is not just sound that conditions our reception of albums, but also the way albums come to us. Kid A was marketed atypically without true radio singles or proper music videos, whereas Amnesiac had a more traditional launch. Despite the fact the band and its label (and subsequently, the press) trumpeted Amnesiac as a return to the “classic” Radiohead sound, Letts pours water on the idea that it is somehow easier to digest. Although some readers might quibble with her insistence on following the status of the modern subject across both albums, Letts likely never intended her reading as the only one. For Letts, it is clear that a “concept album is in the eye/ear of the beholder”—a statement that in some ways trumps her conceptual taxonomy but remains entirely inarguable.

Letts’s bigger achievement here is her nuanced approach to Radiohead as commodity, as cog in a larger system the band both reviles and requires. Radiohead embody the irony of trying to make an “artistic statement that exists above . . . the corporate culture that will ultimately receive and promote it, then packaging that statement to sell back to the consumer.” Radiohead hide from this contradiction within layers of fragmented lyrics, abstract artwork, and labyrinthine websites (I remember the Kid A website reading “www.radiohead.com—as useful as a chocolate fireguard™”). The band has spent years reconciling its public image with its ethical and political commitments by masking both. Radiohead may present a scathing critique of commodity culture but they are reflexive enough to know the role they play in their own commodification.

In this sense, the resistant concept album becomes a metonym for Radiohead’s entire career. By resisting the form of the concept album while still adhering to it, Kid A and Amnesiac show “there is no escape within the modern human condition, just as there is no escape for Radiohead itself trapped inside the capitalist machine.” Letts, via her readings, sees only one way out: “In the end, music as a commodity must become self-critical, must confess its commodity character without surrendering its utopian content: that the world could be otherwise.”

This is what was so exciting about In Rainbows. By asking users to set their own price, Radiohead suggested that the world of mass music production could be otherwise. Many in the industry worried the band was devaluing music, giving it away for free. Instead, the possibility of free forced a questioning of the relationships between listeners and the music commodity, which was ultimately freeing. Sadly, Radiohead’s experiment also made the perfect rock music marketing campaign. Skeptically, In Rainbowsshowed how far the music commodity could be pushed (i.e. selling it once as a download, once as a CD, once as vinyl and once again as individual songs and tracks). Like the vanishing subject Letts tracks onKid A and Amnesiac, the utopian potential Radiohead sparked disappears completely, lying dormant and waiting until the band’s next album launch. Or as Radiohead sings, and Letts quotes: “I will see you, in the next life . . .”

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Robert Morrison
Pegasus Books ($35)

by Spencer Dew

There may have been a Malay, one day, who dropped by unexpectedly at Dove Cottage, and he may have hit up England’s most famous addict for some opium. Thomas De Quincey, to whose dubious recollection we owe this tale, tried, lacking any “Asiatic” language, to communicate by reciting a few verses of the Iliad. Or, to read this odd anecdote another way, in the face of exotic horror, De Quincey announced his own classical education, his status as cultured. Insistence on this dichotomy between the savage and the civilized runs throughout his oeuvre. Carried away in writing, describing the heights of a laudanum high, De Quincey indulges in Orientalist imagery, but as a political reactionary, a xenophobe, he is quick to differentiate fantasy from reality: “I honour the Barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.”

A gentleman addict, getting a kick from wandering the working class streets or taking likewise forgettable release in the beds of prostitutes, De Quincey fancied himself a man of refined, if particular, taste—“a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum . . . and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood”—but he was never quite sufficiently a man of wealth. Indeed, as Robert Morrison’s comprehensive account of a life makes clear, debt was a constant problem. De Quincey acquired “new London debt . . . in the very act of extinguishing the old Westmorland debt,” for instance, and, as with drug use, this is a recurring cycle, despite his being repeatedly “put to the horn” and publically humiliated.

One gets the sense from this biography, though, that De Quincey was a hard man to humiliate. Something of a hack journalist (Thomas Carlyle said he wrote “for bread in the paltriest of all newspapers”) who nonetheless created works approaching genius, a man who kept coded entries chronicling his masturbatory activity, and a sycophant in courting the friendship of the famous Wordsworth, De Quincey does not lack for eccentricities, for weirdness. Some of that freaky edge is dulled here by Morrison’s dry narration, but, drawing on publications and letters previously unavailable, this book gives us more of the life of De Quincey than we’ve seen before. If Morrison’s writing tends toward the flat, De Quincey, when he’s quoted at length, more than makes up for it. Consider these “Asiatic scenes,” De Quincey’s recounting of a dream in which “I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.”

I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

One almost needs a pith helmet to read such prose, as it offers both a world tour and a psychedelic trip through the trappings of comparative religion. And it is here, among the tropes of De Quincey’s visions—both those he presumably experienced and those he carefully composed for his reading audience—that Morrison’s biography tantalizes with what it reports but, for the most part, does not presume to interpret. Take the crocodile, for instance: this creature haunts De Quincey. As Morrison says, “No single image tortured De Quincey like the crocodile. It brought out his worst fears of self-division and otherness.” But that is pretty much all that Morrison says about it. The biography, by necessity, must move on to other things, the accrual of more debt, the services of more prostitutes. While Morrison has some theories of his own, particularly about “the bifurcation of the self” as an experience that plagued De Quincey, his gestures toward such theories seem designed merely to raise more questions, to inspire future readers—and students, and scholars—of De Quincey to launch their own quests into the strange jungles of his texts.

The author who famously described opium as “the secret of happiness,” wasn’t exactly overflowing with mirth; rather, as Morrison notes, De Quincey was obsessed with death and alterity, consumed by visions of infinite shafts opening in the sky that found intellectual reflection in the “frightful magnitude” of the universe as revealed by new work in astronomy. For De Quincey, too, the Christian theological narrative of the fall from grace was something reiterated individually in every human psyche—through dreams, through trauma, through confrontation and recognition of the “the vile, the bestial, the unthinkable” within us all. Morrison, hiking swiftly onward through the years of De Quincey’s life, drops these intriguing themes like crumbs, one implication being that future books on De Quincey need to focus on precisely these themes, exploring any or all of them in detail through the voluminous De Quincey oeuvre—not just the Confessions, but also his criticism, his explicitly political writing, and that masterwork,Suspiria de Profundis.

Suspiria, indeed, raises yet another question: what are we to make of these dreams, these visions, not just in terms of content—the racism and imperialism of the imagery, the cosmological and theological speculations, the wild psychological theories—but in terms of phenomenon? There’s that Malay again: is he a real person, an opium hallucination, or a conscious literary creation? It may have been in De Quincey’s commercial interests to confuse these categories, as with his encounters with Levana, the Roman goddess of childhood education—not, De Quincey tells us, via “the poor machinery” of “spelling books-and grammars,” but rather by “that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life”—as well as those three dreadful Mothers that flank her in Suspiria.

Morrison makes clear De Quincey’s investment in fashioning himself as a product. “What shall be my character,” writes a young De Quincey. “I have been thinking this afternoon—wild—impetuous—splendidly sublime? dignified—melancholy—gloomily sublime? or shrouded in mystery—supernatural—like the ‘ancient mariner’—awfully sublime.” The desire to become such a “character”—and, in turn, to turn “character” into a commodity, to invent himself as a celebrity author via his own weird experiences, either lived or claimed—remains the central and most intriguing aspect of De Quincey and his work. Morrison sometimes relays this without much spark, as when he writes, “Laudanum dragged De Quincey through hell . . . Yet like many addicts, in the nineteenth century and far beyond, the severity of his addiction did not prevent him from functioning at very high levels for decades.” Opium, however, was far more than merely “a prison, not a death sentence,” as Morrison puts it; the embrace of the exotic, the harrowing, the supernatural, and the sublime was also all part of a project to produce literature by living a literary life. It is for this conceptualization of art through experience, as much as for the glimpses of historical context revealed by his life, that De Quincey is of interest to the contemporary world.

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edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski
Zone Books ($24.95)

by W. C. Bamberger

The access to knowledge movement, which often goes by the acronym A2K, is like an iceberg: only a small part of it rises to the top of the media stream where nonactivists get a glimpse of it. The most visible struggle for most of us is probably that of music and film companies vs. those who download media without paying, either for private use or for sampling purposes. The blocking or restricting of Internet access in China and Egypt, and the successful struggle to bend pharmaceutical companies’ patent rights to bring affordable HIV drugs to the people of Africa (a success now being actively undermined), are other high profile instances. But there are many more facets, many quandaries and contradictions inherent in the wider effort.

The fact that A2K concerns are so varied is one of the problems its activists face: “Can file sharers, software programmers, subsistence farmers, and HIV-positive people find useful common cause in their joint opposition to existing regimes of intellectual property?” This 600-plus page collection of essays is intended to offer a sampling of such efforts, as well as a history of the movement and help for the reader trying to understand all these questions within a larger context. The essays range widely, into some very unexpected areas, from the matter of how indigenous knowledge can be protected (including something called “paid public domain”) and even John Locke’s views on what we mean when we say we “own” ourselves.

Each of the editors contributes an introductory essay surveying parts of this newly-emerging, fragmented, and unstable field. Amy Kapczynski provides a “conceptual genealogy” of the movement, while Gaëlle Krikorian addresses the activist and political aspects, with an accent on struggles between the third world and the developed countries.

One of the central points of debate is one most of us would understand, at least economically: If a creator—be it an artist or a pharmaceutical company—has invested time, energy, and money in the creation of something, shouldn’t that person or entity have the right to control its dissemination and reap financial benefits?

This assertion is, as the essays here remind us, a conceptual approach or narrative that supports the expansion of intellectual property rights. But there are other narratives, as well. Agreements such as the Doha Declaration maintain that some things—public health, for example—trump intellectual property rights. There is no consensus about the point at which the sheer importance of some concerns—from access to medicine to text books to sampled music—outweigh those rights.

Not surprisingly, there is a great divide between the attitudes of the developed nations and those that are still rising. As with energy consumption and pollution, developing nations feel they should have the freedoms that the U.S. and the European Union had when they were younger. Some of the arguments the underdogs offer are very intriguing. In “Undermining Abundance” Philippine social activist and engineer Roberto Verzola offers this observation:

Furthermore, the countries that complained most loudly about the piracy of their intellectual property were themselves most guilty of pirating intellectuals such as doctors, nurses, and engineers from the Third World. The latter was deemed a more malignant case of piracy because it took away the original and left no copy behind.

The U.S. and its business interests often come off as the bad guy in these essays. Very early in 2001, for example, the new Bush administration tried to strike down policies, authorized by international treaty, that allowed Brazil to have some leverage over international pharmaceutical companies and so get AIDS drugs to more its population; the uproar was so great that the Bush administration quickly retreated. Bill Gates once flew to the Philippines to make a deal with the government whereby their pirated software was declared legal in exchange for which previously ignored copyright laws were to be enforced for the general populace.

As would be expected, several writers discuss ideas such as that of an “intellectual commons,” of open source software, of open-access publishing, of collective research, and similar efforts that would be crippled by enforcement of copyright laws. (True to its own spirit, this entire text is available as a free download at www.zonebooks.org/pdf/ZoneBooks_A2K_.pdf.) Among the more interesting points made is how different a physical commons is from an information commons, the first of which is said to suffer under common ownership while the second thrives. Even on these points there is disagreement, some even worrying “that more information could in some cases not improve, but rather threaten access to knowledge.”

Some of the arguments sound radical, such as Krikorian’s point that increasing copyright laws creates conditions favorable to the “production of pirates,” and that “they easily fit into a political environment that is predominant in many Western countries in which security and repression ha[ve] become routine.” Others sound a little foolish: Cory Doctorow’s contention, for example, that, “If copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow . . . YouTube would vanish . . . Flickr would dry up and blow away,” hardly seems a weighty argument for liberalizing intellectual copyright laws.

But then, others might believe that it is. Like so much within the A2K debates, this comes down to a matter of opinion, political stance, economic position, and more; in short, how one views the present social reality, and what one holds as a social ideal. This collection is vitally important, then, in that there is much here to help us make our opinions more informed ones, even while it illustrates how there are no easy answers to the relevant questions.

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Douglas Coupland
Atlas & Co. ($24)

by Mark Gustafson

To call Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) a media prophet, albeit a reluctant one, is not news. The works by which he is known, includingThe Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage, are not much read anymore; on a superficial level, they have left two time-worn bytes: “the medium is the message,” and “the global village.” That he was also an ambitious scholar, a devout Catholic convert, and someone apparently much further along the autism spectrum than most of us may be fresher information. So also McLuhan’s modernist credentials (he was an ardent fan of the linguistic shenanigans of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an acquaintance of Pound’s, and a friend of Wyndham Lewis’s), his flirtation with New Criticism, and his study with the literary critics F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards. This short biography, by a writer known especially for his novel Generation X, is keen on linking Marshall (as Coupland usually calls him) with today’s digital world.

The occasional interposition of other material—entries from an internet name generator, a test for autistic tendencies, descriptions from used-book databases, MapQuest directions, Gmail’s automatic suggestions, YouTube comments, a few typographical flourishes, etc.—helps this biography meet its hipness quota. At the same time, Coupland adheres to standard biographical procedure, with the conventional structure of a lifeline (birth to death and the stages in between), various subplots (the mama’s boy, career intrigues), the roughly sketched social and political background, and even some overt autobiography.

About Coupland’s writing, there is good and bad. It is rich in idiosyncratic and refreshing formulations like “fame curve,” “prude loop,” “Technicolor pimpings,” “Muppet Kremlin,” and “academic Smurfpolitics”; it postulates the brain as “an enigmatic beige pudding” and McLuhan as “an information leaf blower.” On the other hand, while cliché can be effective when used in moderation, Coupland pours it on, veering dangerously toward the trite and even maudlin. For example: “Marshall . . . You were in the right place at the right time, and it wasn’t random. How do any of us end up being fascinated by some things and not by others? And why do so few of us do the things we like doing? It was an adventure, Marshall, and wasn’t it grand?” The overuse of cliché tends to weaken assertions like “had Marshall not been born, there would have been a hole in the world. . . . We are only better for his having been alive.”

Furthermore, Coupland exhibits relative cluelessness about the life of the mind. After describing McLuhan, the young instructor, as “a skinny guy who seemed prematurely old, who talked only about religion and literature, who had no listening skills,” he asks: “This was the guru whose ideas would revolutionize the way we see the universe?” And: “That Marshall ended up becoming what he became as the result of studying a sixteenth-century English satirist, rhetorician, and critic is as freaky as if he’d studied Easter rituals in medieval France and emerged at the end as a rocket scientist.” But several pages later the steps are logical and clear. While the ivory tower with its blinkered academics often deserves dressing-down, Coupland too readily (is it defensively?) descends to caricature and poor generalizations. The academy was where McLuhan spent most of his life, and where he belonged.

No doubt, keeping the biography of a major figure and formidable intellect brief is difficult. But even though Coupland suggests the reader fill in some blanks with Wikipedia, this does not relieve him of the burden of appropriate selection and omission. He still needs to engage at some depth with the key ideas and thinkers that shaped McLuhan; unfortunately, he shows little evidence of having done so (with, for example, Alfred North Whitehead or G. K. Chesterton, though Dagwood Bumstead gets more than his due). “Heady stuff!” he exclaims.

Surely there is a connection between McLuhan’s work and ways to think about today’s world of instantaneous communication and information. But mere reassurances that he is important, “more so now than ever, because he saw this coming a long way off, and he saw the reasons for it,” are not enough, nor are mentions of Baudrillard, Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault. Little or no substantive explanation is marshaled for support. Coupland writes, on the one hand: “Dear God, he would have enjoyed using the internet.” On the other hand: “Society was absorbing too much technology too quickly, and he knew it. Did he like this? No! He hated, loathed, abhorred it. . . . How the man ever came to be perceived as technology’s cheerleader is a mystery.” Yet he too is complicit, as though he wants it both ways.

Coupland’s sympathy with his subject is plain—in their medical history, their nationality, and even in their unbidden (and maybe inappropriate) elevation to spokesmen for a generation. Unlike the hapless, snooty professor in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall—whom McLuhan, in a brief cameo, famously rebukes with the subtitle of this book—Coupland surely knows something of his work. But is it enough?

As the book has keyboard commands as a structural device, using “return,” “command . . . shift,” and “escape . . . control” as headings for its three major sections, I have pondered using those other commands, “enter,” “delete,” and “option/alt,” for my criticism. But even while Coupland’s book leaves many questions frustratingly unaddressed, it has its merits, and effectively conveys some of McLuhan’s complex fascination. It has led me to dust off books long dormant on my shelf (especially The Gutenberg Galaxy, “one of the most brilliant books on books and the effects of print and reading ever written”), and to read them with new awareness. Maybe, after all, that is enough.

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