Edited by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten
Yale University Press ($27)

by Justin Maxwell

This anthology offers a rare combination of breadth and depth, without becoming a brick-heavy tome of plays. While such a collection seems destined for the hands of undergraduates, it’s a useful text for anyone wanting greater entrée into the world of the theatrically avant-garde. A much-needed amalgam of theatrical theory and practice, it provides works within their aesthetic context and theories reinforced by scripts; more importantly, it takes on the great question of innovative performance: what was that? Anyone who has ever left a theater enjoying that fabulous question will find the beginnings of the answer in this collection. While the anthology is unfortunately typo-ridden, its otherwise strong content is further strengthened by a thorough index and solid bibliography, giving readers the opportunity to move further into the unexpected.

Like much avant-garde work itself, Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten’s anthology assemblage coheres around a collection of loosely structured yet fundamentally valuable concepts. Adhering to a narrative convention that flows chronologically would be a disservice to the collection’s content. The aesthetics being explored do not flow steadily one work to the next, one decade after another, but instead manifest various artistic methodologies, all happening simultaneously after World War II. Consequently, the structure lets Knopf and Listengarten focus on six performative paradigms: “Language and Silence,” “The Ritualistic,” “Disruption,” “Camp,” “Landscape,” and “Terror.” This structure gives the editors expanded room to comment and contextualize—to enliven the unexpected—while simultaneously avoiding the fettering bulk that characterizes many Norton Anthology-like doorstops.

“Language and Silence” explores one of the most arresting and poetic facets of the avant-garde: These plays don’t sound like what we expect. Often, they don’t sound like something we can even understand. The impossibility of non-narrative comprehension is, of course, a falsehood generated by the dominant representational paradigm; after all, our language represents ourselves, and we are acculturated to see ourselves in the representational. This anthology is one path away from that limiting perspective. “Language and Silence” provides three of the most innovative language-users in Western theatre: Beckett’s silent “Act Without Words I,” Richard Foreman’s free-association Rhoda in Potatoland: (Her Fall-Starts), and Mac Wellman’s found-text amalgamation Terminal Hip. Like all the plays in the anthology, these are presented organically within a context that enriches the unexpected. Here, a mainstay interview with Wellman supports the plays with his excellent observation that “most bad language describes a spiritual condition which is not grammatical, but it is real.”

Wellman’s linguistic position that performance is spiritually charged inspires the second section, “The Ritualistic.” The use and role of ritual in modern society manifests in Kenneth H. Brown’sThe Brig, Naomi Iizuka’s Body Beautiful, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Each of these plays takes repetition and the physicality of the stage in powerful, divergent directions. When the plays are contextualized with an excerpt from Sartre’s Saint Genet and an interview with Jerzy Grotowski, then their layers of ritual are illuminated anew, both directly and vicariously.

The unity created by ritualized activity stands in important contrast to the third section, “Disruption.” Here, we get some of the most unsettling (and evocative) manifestations of post-war performance. These are not works designed to disrupt a comfortable convention or idealized abstraction, but to leave an audience member physically shaken. Most notable here is an excerpt from Karen Finley’s We Keep Our Victims Ready, whose work was at the core of the NEA controversy in 1990. Finley uses “the ‘art of offending’ to question sexual politics and disrupt norms of gender subjugation,” and her work is some of the most visceral and powerful in the collection. Given that avant-garde work—on the page at least—can be a cerebral or emotionally cool experience, this section reminds us that on the stage these plays roil with passion.

The fourth section, “Camp,” offers a completely different take on passion and ideology. While the editors acknowledge that “camp has always been on the margins of the avant-garde,” the section is an unexpected and valuable addition to the anthology. The editors summarize their position with the artist Cleto, who defines camp as a “‘crisis of identity, of depth, and of gravity. Not a stable code, but rather a discourse produced by the friction with and among other discourses.’” Such contrarian discourse is at the heart of the avant-garde. In Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr’s Turds in Hell, the instability of code is juggled like a mad circus performer: scary, awful, and amazing. Furthermore, Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” is juxtaposed with Charles Ludlam’s essay “Camp,” which directly argues against her. In their disagreement, the position of Cleto (and the editors by default) is reaffirmed.

The most visual facet of avant-garde performance appears in “Landscape,” the fifth section. Drawing the term “landscape” from one of Gertrude Stein’s lectures, the editors are able to illustrate the plasticity of space, for both the physical and psycho-emotional performance arenas: “allowing audience members to experience the totality of the theatrical event, rather than to follow a plot through time.” Such a broad categorization is, handily, the largest section of the anthology, incorporating long works including Hélène Cixous’s Portrait of Dora, Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class, and Charles L. Mee’s Vienna: Lusthaus. Of the multiple prose documents to re-inform and contextualize these plays, Heiner Müller’s essay “Dove and Samurai” best articulates the poetic heart of the section. Müller says that “Robert Wilson comes from the space Ambrose Bierce disappeared into after he had seen the horrors of civil war.” Suddenly Robert Wilson, the most sculptural of 20th-century theater artists, rises like an obelisk and defines this artistic landscape by standing ninety degrees against it.

The anthology culminates in “Terror,” which showcases innovative artists who understand the darkest facets of Western society and unknowingly presage the cultural fallout of 9/11. Caryl Churchill’s Far Away offers the unexpected experience of encountering individuals in the process of being removed from society, while Griselda Gambaro’s Stripped has an Argentinian sense of disappearance that “emphasizes the conspicuous presence of political and social content in her plays, setting them apart from the works of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett and bringing them closer to the political theater of Brecht.” Such dark waters get contextualized by Charles Marowitz’s essay “Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty” and Anne Boggart’s “Terror, Disorientation, and Difficulty.” Boggart sums up the experience for potential fans of the anthology: “Most of the truly remarkable experiences I’ve had in the theatre have filled me with uncertainty and disorientation.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Helen DeWitt
New Directions ($24.95)

by Brent Cunningham

Given the sundry occupations of the last couple months, the timing of Helen DeWitt’s wicked new satire of corporate America probably could not have been better. As some other reviews of the book have noted, satire has not been a favored form in contemporary American fiction in recent years, but DeWitt illustrates its power, political edge, and intellectual charm in a brisk story that the Wall Street occupiers would do well to keep in stock in their free library.

Lightning Rods is the story of Joe—not Joe Six-Pack exactly, more like Joe Business Class. After spectacular failures as both an encyclopedia salesman and a vacuum salesman, Joe embarks on the path of classic American entrepreneurship. “Classic” in all ways except one: the inspiration for Joe’s particular widget comes from his own perverse and highly fastidious sexual fantasies. After some precursory research and development, he is soon marketing and selling to corporate America a product that is basically a glorified glory hole. For a sizable fee Joe will bring in specially trained women, which he calls Lightning Rods, to work in the company and surreptitiously draw away overabundant male sexual energy. They do this by waiting for a signal to enter the women’s bathroom, undressing from the waist down, and climbing onto a contraption that moves their lower and rearmost portion through a sliding wall into the men’s bathroom. Meanwhile, selected men in the company (high-sellers with libidos so overactive they constantly threaten to entangle their company in sexual harassment lawsuits) enter the men’s disabled stall; the wall slides back; and the high-seller, in a manner the novel repeatedly compares to going to the bathroom, takes care of his special needs.

Satire and comedy traditionally have the advantage of allowing an author to develop ridiculous premises to absurd lengths, and DeWitt follows the logic of her premise all the way. She winks at her reader here and there but mostly adopts a mock earnest tone, which is a shrewd move. Her many cliché-ridden passages justifying the Lightning Rods are argued with such force and conviction, the reader begins to envision certain real-world businesses giving the green light to such a project. The result is a book that manages to be titillating and breezy even as it hides a clusterbomb of social commentary under its glittering, aphoristic surface.

DeWitt’s precise understanding of satirical metaphor accounts for much of the book’s deeper pleasures. In a satire of this sort, too much complexity of character or plot would end up muddling the clarity of the attack, so the ideas need to provide the majority of the depth. Superficially the book’s target is sexism in the workplace, as well as the sexism of the general corporate culture, but the story makes it clear that DeWitt thinks there’s no higher ground in other social circles. The exploitive, amoral logic so omnipresent at the first company to install Lightning Rods turns out to have distinct parallels in the worlds of government, law enforcement, and the legal community. There are also hints that the world of publishing is on the hook, since a number of her clichés about business sound like they could come out of a how-to guide for writing a novel or screenplay: “Making mistakes is how we learn. If you’re not making any mistakes, chances are you’re not taking enough risks.”

But if DeWitt’s satire aims to savage more than corporate culture, broadening out to the rest of society, does that also mean it is watering itself down? To rephrase a debate that is taking place right now among many Wall Street occupiers: if she is attacking everything, is she in essence attacking nothing?

This is where Lightning Rods rewards a closer reading, and where DeWitt reveals her true target. The book intentionally beats a few phrases into the ground, including variations on the phrase “he looked at it this way” or “the way to look at it is like this,” which effectively illustrate the way subjectivity acts as an abdication of responsibility for many people in business and beyond. But the most-repeated notion the characters rely on is summed up thusly: “Any salesman knows that you have to deal with people the way they are. Not how you’d like them to be.”

This is, of course, the favored mantra of all capitalist economies. People are naturally immoral, greedy and self-interested. As much as we might wish that fact were different, sigh, it’s just what is, what always has been, and what always will be. DeWitt’s tale reveals deep and facile tautology in such thinking. Joe has some problems getting Lightning Rods off the ground but it is not for lack of women willing to do the work for financial remuneration; rather, his main challenge is convincing management to install the service and the high-sellers to actually use it. Upper management justifies their acquiescence by using the mantra: high-powered and money-driven men are what they are, sigh. But the high-sellers, although they are indeed oversexed sexist pigs, initially have serious reservations about using the service. What pushes them past their inhibitions is not “how they are” but an array of non-natural factors. Some of them remember that Joe, in his introductory presentation, tossed a few scientific-sounding “facts” their way, and these—all of which speak to supposedly natural urges—allow them to justify themselves. But what really convinces them to try the product is simply that the whole contraption is there, it’s been approved, they’re expected to use it, and so they consider it out of their hands. As one user thinks of it, “There’s no point in needlessly alienating someone who has gotten the go-ahead from higher up.” In short, management has signed off because these men are what they are, but the men enact what they are only because management has signed off.

If this is a remedial concept in many circles, it is still an important one to articulate often and loudly. People, according to most thought systems besides the fantasy of capitalism, find themselves already embedded in a network of specific power relations. Their “nature” is a product of ideological awareness, often specifically the awareness about exactly those power relations. Every human subject makes myriad calculations before they act, but one thing these calculations have no problem doing is incorporating the idea of “naturalness” into their equations. Only a different ideology, and/or different power relations, can hope to condition the subject to act differently.

Sadly, a lot of highly praised contemporary literature continues to offer characters who are motivated by what they supposedly are, not by what relations they are in. There are many deft jokes in DeWitt’s book, from the utter lack of disabled employees in these companies (hence the ease with which everyone repurposes the disabled bathroom stalls) to the Lightning Rod employee who teaches herself to read Proust in the original while “on duty,” but at its core the book is refreshing for a simple but important viewpoint it shares with the Wall Street occupiers: people are the way they are because of capitalism, not the other way around.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Erin Morgenstern
Doubleday ($26.95)

by Greg Baldino

Authors, at their best, are illusionists. They shuffle language like cards, draw plot twists from up their sleeve, and misdirect your attention to the dancing girls while the denouement appears on the page. The last several years have seen a number of books, for adults and children alike, with magic at the forefront, and those that make a mark are talking about more than just the dazzle of spells and the glamor of enchantment.

Spanning the late 19th century into the early 20th and criss-crossing the globe, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus starts when a stage magician named Prospero is delivered an unexpected parcel: the young daughter he never knew, sent to him on her mother's passing. Prospero's stage act plays a double bluff; while other stage magicians pass off their trickeries and gimmicks as supernatural power, his abilities are real, disguised as mere entertainment. His daughter Celia appears to have inherited some of his aptitude, and he sets about training her. It is not an altruistic decision, as the appearance of a longtime acquaintance of similar ability prompts a competition between the two, to set their protégés against one another.

The contest, as it were, takes a different form than expected. Rather than hurling fireballs at one another or summoning deep beasties from the sea to ravage and attack one another, the competition is played out in a circus. It's a game of one-upmanship to see who can craft the more elegant illusions and constructions. The "wizard duel" takes the form of an artistic competition. When Celia crafts a candlelit wishing tree, her opponent, a former street urchin named Marco, responds with a garden sculpted entirely of frosty ice.

What unfolds across years, continents, and lives, is more than just a mysterious fantasy with rich imagery. In a sense, Morgenstern is writing about the creative life. As Celia and Marco's challenge continues over the years they are faced with many of the same anxieties and struggles as artists. Can I do better? Are my ideas still fresh? What am I doing this for? The blowback of the challenge spreads to the lives of those nearby as well. Lives are ruined and lost, but lives are enriched and begun as well.

Like every book of recent years which deals with magic in the modern era, The Night Circus has been compared to the Harry Potter series. On the surface, this doesn't seem to extend beyond the common plot element denominator of characters who use magic. But on reading, the elements which would prompt such a comparison (beyond the fact that it makes for a convenient hand-sell in book shops) becomes apparent. There is the attention to the presentation of wonder, the distinct supporting characters (who at times overtake the narrative, as the ripple effects of Celia and Marco's gambit spreads beyond their contest), and most importantly there is that sense that as you are reading this story about a magic circus and dueling wizards, Things Are Not As They Seem.

In the book, the circus inspires its own fan culture, people who call themselves reveurs and dress in the show's trademark black and white, with a dash of crimson thrown in. It's easy to expect the book's fans to adopt this fashion sense as well; it is much more easily deniable than a Hogwarts cloak, and easily amenable to one's own fashion sensibility. In a sense, The Night Circus is just as amenable to its reader's literary tastes. There are those who will enjoy it for its air of restrained mystery, those who will be enchanted by its imaginative descriptive vocabulary, and those who feel their hearts pull along with the characters as lives and loves are torn when they are not outright broken. In the words of Herr Thiessen, journalist laureate of the reveurculture: "We add our own stories, each visitor, each visit, each night spent at the circus. I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared." So as the barkers of old used to call out from the ticket booth: There's something here for everyone; reserve your seat today!

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Colson Whitehead
Doubleday ($25.95)

by Victoria Blake

By his own admission, Colson Whitehead—MacArthur genius, Whiting winner, PEN/Faulkner finalist—is uncomfortable saying the word “zombie” fifty times a day. He’s “getting used to it,” he told Terry Gross. He’s saying it to the New York Times and he’s saying it to NPR and he’s saying it to audiences across the country on his book tour to promote Zone One, his well-marketed zombie apocalypse novel, published in hardcover to much fanfare in October.

Reviewland consensus is that Zone One is a literary treatment of a popular theme, which is shorthand for “beautiful language, no plot.” True, and true. The novel follows a narrator named Mark Spitz, a man whose dominant trait is his mediocrity. Working on reconstruction, Spitz’s job is to sweep an area of lower Manhattan clear of leftover zombies, work that requires floor-by-floor and room-by-room attention: busting through doors, exterminating anything that moves, and clearing out corpses in body bags. The novel takes place over three dreamy days, most of which passes deep inside the narrator’s rambling head. Whitehead’s strength is not the forward propulsion of narrative; rather, it’s his ability to build a novel out of a slow, obsessive circling, unpacking an idea piece by piece, setting each piece on the bureau, and looking at it with ironic distance. Whether the reader likes the approach is largely a question of taste.

Here’s a more interesting question: Why, after 270-some pages of considered exploration of zombie disaster and its accompanying ennui, is Whitehead just now “getting used to” the word “zombie”? There’s no simple answer. If asked directly to explain the Fresh Air quote, he would probably back-peddle a step or two and reframe the question. He could offer, as he did in a Harper’s Q&A, the aesthetic notion that “The world is a junkyard—take the parts you need to make the machine work the way you want it to.” Or he might reply, as he wrote on his web site, that “I like my zombies like I like my women: slow and implacable.” He might even establish his zombie cred by listing his fan-boy badges—comics devotee, George Romero fan, nightmare dreamer, apocalypse voyeur.

What Colson probably wouldn’t say is what New York Times reviewer Glen Duncan said loud and clear: zombie novels, like all genre writing, is to literature what porn stars are to college professors. (Reviewer Duncan is the author of The Last Werewolf, which suffered from one-star Amazon reviews submitted by genre fans discontented with the author’s literary syntax, characterizations, and plot structure. In the New York Times, he predicts, correctly, the same fate for Zone One.) Why wouldn’t he say this? Because college professors secretly want to be porn stars, and porn stars secretly want to be college professors, and it doesn’t do any good to put either one firmly on their side of the stripper pole. Plus, true art recognizes no boundaries. Plus, Whitehead’s absolutely right: the world is a junkyard.

Here is the battleground, then: On one side, those in the mainstream literary establishment—from reviewers to blurbers to marketers to publishers to fans—are defending their turf and waving their flag on behalf of Literature-with-a-capital-L. On the other side, the genre establishment is either failing to take notice—there are no reviews of Zone One yet on some major science fiction websites—or is lashing out at the novel’s slow and implacable approach. And in the middle stands the novelist himself, with one foot in each camp, saying “I wrote a zombie novel, damn it,” and “Forgive me for writing a zombie novel, please.” It’s an uncomfortable position to be in. Nobody gets tenure—or the MacArthur—by writing zombie novels.

The fact that American letters maintains a genre ghetto points more to the failings of our high-brow/low-brow cultural hierarchy than it does to the readers, writers, and fans of literature, in all its various forms. No serious reader dismisses a work of fiction based solely on its setting or theme, just like no serious writer turns away from the fission of culture, self, and idea at the core of every sustaining novel. Writers make and remake our forms. Examples of this, the highest practice of art, abound, from José Saramago’s Blindness to Justin Cronin’s The Passage, from Victor LaValle’s Big Machine to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We devour the structures and concepts of our influencers, and, if we’re good, we digest and assimilate them, making them our own. As Colson Whitehead knows, there’s a little bit of the zombie in us all.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

João Ubaldo Ribeiro
translated by Clifford E. Landers
Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95)

by Shane Joaquin Jimenez

João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s House of the Fortunate Buddhasrevels in the bygone Olympia Press tradition of literary erotica. Recently translated into English, the novel was originally commissioned by Brazilian publishers Editora Objetiva for a series on the seven daily sins. Ribeiro chose lust, a theme that he weaves into a hyper-sexual satire of the confessional memoir; his book becomes “a socio-historio-literary-pornographic testimony” that asks:what is the nature of lust and why do we repress it?

Our unnamed, uninhibited narrator recounts her life in post-World War II Brazil, where she liberated herself from reactionary society through polyamory, incest, and bestiality. “Life is short,” she says, “to hell with being square.” Out of her effusive anti-narrative rises a unique form of lipstick feminism, in which sex becomes the prime eradicator of traditional, Hester Prynne-ian male dominance:

it’s sad . . . to live in a society where a woman’s honor is located between her legs—my God, how stupid. Isn’t it, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel like holding a rally. How many lives have been lost, how many fates have been ruined, how many tragedies have occurred, how many convents have been inhumanely overcrowded, because of the honor of so many, many unhappy women?

However, Ribeiro raises the question: is this point of view a true denial of male domination or simply one of its polyphonic consequences? For example, many of the narrator’s sexual impulses are linked to childhood trauma, an unfulfilled Electra complex, and a quite fulfilled lust with her brother Adolfo. One of the more compelling issues at the heart of the novel is how our narrator’s sense of lust becomes mixed up with other, darker impulses—manipulation, dominance, violence. Yet this synesthetic dilemma is shown to be infinitely preferable to the gloomier obverse: succumbing to the hold of the “phallocratic society,” which, by refusing to be honest with its own impulses and biology, lives in Glauconian darkness about its true nature. InHouse of the Fortunate Buddhas, freedom is sexual freedom, with pleasure found in its attainment in spite of men and not because of them. Through this doorway lies not only a subversion of the traditional male narrative, but an actual path to spiritual enlightenment. Evoking the Buddhas in the novel’s title—a poetic roomful of gold statuettes—Ribeiro goes to great lengths to show that all religions practice an absurd polytheism, with “saints in place of specialized gods.” Our narrator claims that she is truly the only monothesist, her religion being the call of lust, which in actuality is the voice of God. We have to only listen to this voice to know what we must do to achieve completion.

It is interesting to note that if House of the Fortunate Buddhas had been published in the time period in which it is set, it would have been illegal in many places. Written in a defiantly sexual style reminiscent of Anaïs Nin, the novel only occasionally missteps in its characterization of a sexually free woman in the 1950s, such as when Ribeiro writes that female motivation for group sex is to make a man feel like a “king for the day.” Yet, Ribeiro manages to take a rather simple thesis— “life is fucking”—to the limits of our reckoning, and then beyond, into matters as cosmic as they are personal:

I embodied all the goddesses of love, all the insolent she-devils that people the universe, Lust with its treacherous, wriggling shadows and its immoral banners, its summons to debauchery and dissipation, to complete surrender to the delights of every shade and color that lead to a lascivious death.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Terry Bisson
PM Press ($14.95)

by Jade Bové

Terry Bisson’s latest collection of short stories, TVA Baby, presents thirteen science fiction tales that focus on voyeurism and violence—and sometimes both.

The title story starts the collection with a dose of hyper violence that unfolds with dark humor. The main character, a southerner whose Yankee father came to the south to work for Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, is never named but refers to himself as “TVA Baby.” And he’s got some issues: the story starts out on a plane where TVA Baby punches a guy in the face, driving the bone into the brain and killing him. “You hardly ever see blood on a commercial flight,” he exclaims. When he takes a hostage he misinterprets her fearful stuttering for an actual speech impediment and relates to us the lesson he learned in the Boy Scouts about kids who stutter: “cruelty isn’t a merit badge.” The story progresses with increased violence, and ends with a dramatic shoot-out at a Wal-Mart with “Darth Vader types” (a SWAT team) and a hurried conversation with Ellen Degeneres through a television screen about what to do next.

The voyeurism theme is common throughout the collection, but most prevalent in the story “Private Eye.” In a not too distant future, people are implanted with video cameras in their eyes that stream to pay-per-view websites; the story is told in first person but because of the streaming aspect, the reader becomes a subscribing voyeur to the romantic relationship that develops between the two main characters. Bisson also toys with point of view in “Pirates of the Somali Coast,” an epistolary tale told by a ten-year-old boy via e-mails to his mom and his best friend. An innocent, the boy never fully comprehends the ultra-violence that the pirates are committing; he is overjoyed when he gets to keep a murdered child’s Game-boy but finds disappointment when he discovers “the batteries are all ready dead, just my luck.”

The strongest story here is “Charlie’s Angels,” a stylish piece of noir fiction. Jack Villon is a supernatural investigator hired by a chain-smoking Edith Prang, the director of the New Orleans Museum of Art and Antiquities. His job is to find out who is mysteriously killing people by pinching off their heads, and also where a giant statue keeps disappearing to. The mystery intensifies when clues begin pointing to the statue itself as the culprit, and a mysterious voice starts talking to Villon via cell phone asking him to “Kill me . . . please . . .” Villon’s cynicism toward his job is summed up nicely when he is told about the legend of the giant statue: He reveals he “never figured out why people want to believe in the supernatural. It’s as if they find the existence of the irrational somehow reassuring.”

Here and throughout the book, Bisson maintains a lighthearted tone amidst the darker atmosphere very well, and his playful incorporation of real-world humdrum amidst the science-fiction mayhem offers a lens on contemporary society. Watch your heads!

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Neal Stephenson
William Morrow ($35)

by Alice Dodge

Neal Stephenson is a rare breed of writer. His early novels—most notably Snow Crash—helped found the cyberpunk genre and gave us a dystopian vision of an ultra-capitalist future, one which included a virtual universe not very different from the online multiplayer video games that have become ordinary in the twenty years since. He has set novels in World War II, 17th-century Europe, and in alternate worlds where cloistered academics debate quantum realities. But however surprising his latest choice of setting or subject, his celebration of geekery remains consistent. His astonishing talent is to take subjects that only a geek could love (the birth of the stock market, mine engineering, cryptology, virtual geology) and work them into books you are simply unable to put down.

If you avoid science fiction because you think it’s more about clever ideas and less about a good reading experience, embrace your inner geek and pick up Reamde. Stephenson’s prose is conversational and funny with a clear voice. While some of his novels take breaks from their story to perform an exhaustive exploration of a specific subject or idea, this one focuses entirely on the action at hand. The lack of learning may be noticeable to long-time Stephenson readers—unlike many of his works, this book never feels like it really stretches the brain—but it keeps the pace up, keeps you interested, and keeps you engaged with its world very much like a video game.

Reamde tells the story of Richard, the billionaire founder of a World of Warcraft-style online game, and his adopted niece Zula, an Eritrean-born Iowa farm girl who ends up embroiled with the Russian mob and then jihadists due to poor taste in boyfriends. Along the way we get a British spy, a Russian hit man, a teenaged Chinese videogamer, a Hungarian hacker, and others. The action rarely slows down and yet it never gets boring the way a three-hour action movie inevitably does (for those who read the hefty novels in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and skimmed until you got to the parts with pirates, this book’s for you). As opposed to Snow Crash, in which virtual reality is a large part of the story, Stephenson has tried to write a story that takes place in a video-game-like world.

To outsiders, video games can seem inconsequential. You can kill or be killed, gain and lose money or power, and usually resume playing almost as though nothing has happened. Characters might have a lot of stuff—magic swords, invisibility potions, really big guns—but in an absence of personality, it’s hard to empathize with them. Those of us for whom suspension of disbelief is more of a challenge may feel like video game worlds, at least the fantasy-themed ones, are just too foreign to enter—we need a thread of common experience to hold our attention.

In Reamde, Stephenson turns each of these assumptions on its head. He gives us the high fantasy world of T’Rain, the online game in the story, but it is mostly a background reference for the rest of the novel. The real-world characters that surround it play the roles you’d find in a game like T’Rain. We meet computer programmers who act like wizards, scrying for information in server logs and IP addresses. We search for a band of Chinese game-players who make real money by mining for virtual gold (there is, in fact, a huge economy of young Asians who work in sweatshops where they play games in order to sell virtual items to other players—something Stephenson brings to light with this novel). We see jihadist suicide bombers, whose obsessive devotion to their cause and unquestioning embrace of violence show us what a Warrior class might actually look like.

Stephenson gleefully sprinkles video game touches throughout the novel. There are a lot of guns and ammunition, which present themselves the way they might in a game—characters find them or take them from each other—and we pay great attention to the way they work (Is it a long-range gun? Automatic? Shotgun? Is there enough ammunition remaining? Is it heavy? How does a character’s breathing affect aim?). Most of the characters start with nothing and have to find what they need in their travels—and many of those items might seem useless but come in handy for solving a later problem. As in a video game, there are overarching goals and enemies but also lots of smaller situations that stand in the way and demand resolution before the characters can move on.

Watching these is where a lot of the fun happens. I don’t want to give the impression that this book is formulaic—an obvious danger when writing a game-like novel—because it’s not. Stephenson avoids that pitfall by giving us fully dimensional and generally realistic (if, on occasion, a little too competent) characters who solve problems creatively, but are not superhuman. They have to eat, and go to the bathroom, and do not already know how to use their weapons. They get scared, and their plans backfire, and they make mistakes; they may get in dramatic fights, but they have bruises afterwards. It is easy to imagine yourself as any one of them, which makes the story compelling and entertaining.

If you’re looking for something you’ve truly never seen before, try one of Neal Stephenson’s other novels. If you dream of spending several solid days in front of the Playstation this winter, remember that you don’t need a controller, a screen, or a vacation for Reamde.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

David Bergen
Counterpoint ($15.95)

by Matthew Duffus

Morris Schutt joins the ranks of fictional midlife crisis sufferers—a group varied enough to include both Moses Herzog and Tony Soprano—in David Bergen’s Giller Prize-winning novel The Matter with Morris. Morris suffers from the typical career and personal problems of the genre, but what makes the novel so fascinating are the ways Bergen has adapted these problems to contemporary society. A syndicated columnist in Winnipeg, Morris used to mine his personal life for stories that he could convey, often in fictionalized form, to make points about life in general. But after his son dies in Afghanistan, his columns lose the humorous optimism readers had enjoyed. Even worse, he fabricates the facts about his son’s death, blaming it on the enemy instead of friendly fire. This lie, and his willingness to share Martin’s death with the public, destroys his relationship with his wife, Lucille, and eldest daughter, Meredith.

Finding himself alone, Morris turns to the consolations of philosophy. Here Bergen wisely avoids the road most traveled by fictional midlife crisis characters. Instead of buying a motorcycle and a leather jacket or chasing after women half his age, Morris asks strangers, “Are you free?” in search of a justification for the war that took his son. Still dissatisfied, he isolates himself further by cashing out all of his accounts and canceling his cell phone. In place of these, he relies on a filing cabinet-sized safe and a landline, though he makes regular trips to a nearby Internet café. Free of the trappings of contemporary society, he digs out the notes from a college philosophy course on The Republic: “if he could understand the bigger questions, questions that soared above his own insignificant world, then he might not be so flummoxed by his own littleness.” But the result of this quest is equally dissatisfying: “he had hoped, in the last month, that he was gaining knowledge. But his reading was making him more ignorant, or at least making him more aware of his ignorance.” Unlike Socrates, who might have been pleased by this realization, Morris feels lost when faced with his own ignorance.

Like most midlife-crisis narratives, The Matter with Morris occasionally strays into the comedic. Reflecting on his and Lucille’s courtship, Morris thinks, “they had taken so much for granted, as if she and he and their youthful blazing condition would last forever and ever. This is how one thinks at that age.” Nothing humorous so far, but Bergen adds one more sentence: “Note, Morris thought, read Hobbes.” The juxtaposition of the personal and pseudo-philosophical pokes subtle fun at Morris’s pretensions. Better to delve deeper into his thoughts than to come to the surface and attempt a reconciliation. When the comedic moves from smaller to larger moments, however, it often falls flat. For instance, Morris’s involvement with Leah, a prostitute and classmate of Martin’s, begins with a humorous recognition scene in his hotel room. Inevitably, Morris soon decides to “save” her, a hackneyed plot strand that ends with an unnecessarily dramatic flourish involving a botched break-in.

It is fitting that this novel’s strengths and weaknesses are so closely linked, as Bergen revels in exposing the contradictions in his characters’ lives. The same Morris who cancels his cell phone because it “has become a soother, an umbilical cord, a clattering intrusion” later gets online specifically to Google himself and ends up editing his own Wikipedia entry. Morris does not recognize his hypocrisy, just as he has no qualms about frequenting prostitutes, driving a Jaguar, and using a personal shopper while referring to average Canadians as “the slaves of modern society.” Perhaps this is Bergen’s point. Morris does not solve all of his problems by the end of The Matter with Morris, but he does acknowledge something important about himself: “he was a doer. An actor. And idler.” It is a testament to Bergen’s skills as a novelist that his warts-and-all depiction of Morris Schutt illuminates all three of these qualities and leaves readers contemplating how they fit into our lives as well.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Khairy Shalaby
translated by Adam Talib
American University in Cairo Press ($24.95)

by Brooke Horvath

The Hashish Waiter is the seventieth book by Khairy Shalaby, the 2003 winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature who passed away this past September. The subject this time is a dime bag’s worth of the “eighty percent of the male population” of Cairo who, according to Shalaby’s narrator, smoke hash—or did in the early 1970s, when the novel is set. (Yes, I know my metaphor doesn’t quite work, but that’s because the frothing dragon in the corner is distracting me.) Hashish is, of course, illegal in Egypt, but this proves at most a modest inconvenience to the narrator and his “own little support group,” gathered in Hakeem’s hash den in a rundown neighborhood “at risk of collapse.” Nor are these Cairene stoners the usual suspects. Rather, the group is comprised of young “writers, poets, artists, journalists, and a few university students” who have come to know each other over shared water pipes and mutual interests and concerns. They constitute a salon of sorts, and each member has a story—from Zaki, “the hardworking, up-and-coming actor,” to passionate Marxist femme fatale Hayat al-Barri, from Faruq, political caricaturist for “a famous weekly,” to the disappointing Wagih Farhan, who disappears only to turn up again, to everyone’s disgust, as a reporter for Israeli radio.

As bowls are smoked and tea poured, the group sifts through each other’s latest adventures. Days turn into years as though the only thing the world has more of than hash is time to squander. Careers slowly blossom or abruptly wilt. Strutting fops suddenly don’t give a damn how they look, and talk of the Beatles gives way to gossip about Saddam Hussein. The narrator sells a few stories; someone else lands a job with a magazine. Friends of friends drop by and are eyed with suspicion. Marriages fray; a den regular goes missing; someone scores and someone else gets burned. All the while, over these ambitious (albeit often wasted) careerists hangs the knowledge that “the literary and artistic institutions in the country . . . were all the property of the government.” Indeed, politics is the perennial buzzkill at Hakeem’s. The friends of friends are suspect because “the whole intellectual community—according to firm, reliable rumors—was a nest of spies,” and with Anwar Sadat’s infitah just around the corner, even the momentary high of the 1973 October War soon gives way to cynicism over skyrocketing prices and empty store shelves.

Life may remain “tolerable” for the habitués of Hakeem’s, but the world beyond their “cherished, magical, sleepless” home away from home is growing increasingly “rowdy,” to employ a term straight from the “hash-den dictionary”: “the rowdy Americans” are “planning to invade and occupy Egypt”; the local Marxists all want to “get in on the rowdiness” but might be disappointed “because the rowdy Soviet Union itself had gone from trading in the pains and dreams of the world’s poor and oppressed to trading in human destiny in an insane nuclear arms race that didn’t give a damn about the future of the working class . . .” Families are roiling, each with at least one son in uniform, thanks to Egypt’s Israel-obsessed rowdiness, and the Egyptian pound has staggered and fallen, becoming “the laughing stock of world currencies . . .”

Enter the waiter of Shalaby’s title—Salih Abd al-Birr Mahran—who works cleaning and filling hash bowls for Hakeem. He is known to the den’s clientele as Rowdy Salih because he regularly goes off, acquires some denatured alcohol and a Coca-Cola, and proceeds to get, well, rowdy. “Everything he did and said made us laugh,” the narrator confides, early in the novel, “because we thought it was a slice of utter insanity.” Rowdy, however, soon becomes a folk hero, a beat bodhisattva, for the narrator and his circle. As all acknowledge, there is “something of Rowdy Salih” in each of them. Or so they wish, for Rowdy is less mirror than moral lesson, “damning evidence that a human being was his character, not his clothing, and that people who thought differently were—in his opinion—idiots, duped by the scams of a frivolous society.”

Having trained himself “not to desire anything at all,” Rowdy Salih is an exemplar of dispossession—or, as he puts it, “the king of the run-down ’cause I’m run-down in every which way.” As he negotiates the narrow spaces in which he is permitted to exist, he offers the den’s Rowdy wannabes both a reminder of how paltry their own roistering is and a lesson on what happens when a garden-variety tough crosses the powers-that-be. For the narrator and his friends, Rowdy—like some Middle Eastern Neal Cassady or Herbert Huncke—models a way of holding on to one’s dignity in defeat while refusing to sell out. It is a lesson not limited to Sadat’s Cairo.

The Hashish Waiter is perhaps less a novel than portrait of a generation in crisis. However, if, as Henry James believed, “character in any sense that we can get at it is action, and action is plot,” then The Hashish Waiter has action and plot aplenty. It is also a fascinating visit to a world about which the Michelin Green Guide has been sadly silent.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Diego Marani
translated by Judith Landry
Daedalus ($15.99)

by John Toren

In New Finnish Grammar, Diego Marani has set himself the difficult task of telling the story of a man who has no story. The central character, Sampo Karjalainen, has lost all memory of the past—we don’t know quite how—and also his command of language. To judge from the nametag sewn onto his jacket, Sampo is Finnish, though he’s been brought to a clinic in Treiste and revived under the care of a physician, Doctor Friari, who singles him out for care from among the countless wounded soldiers only because the doctor, too, is Finnish. Doctor Friari arranges for Sampo to return to a hospital in Finland, where he is instructed in the Finnish language by a half-mad priest named Koskela whose beliefs are more deeply rooted in the lore of the Kalevala than the New Testament.

How can it be possible for a man with no access to language to tell us his story? Marani overcomes that hurdle by allowing Doctor Friari to decipher Sampo’s tale after the fact from notes he left behind in various journals while struggling to reacquaint himself with human speech. Friari augments, fleshes out, and clarifies Sampo’s notes as well as he can, but Sampo is a morose, taciturn individual, and the most interesting elements to emerge have less to do with his personal experiences than with the things he learns from Koskela. For example, there are eloquent descriptions of how language “works”: “The forms of a language inevitably have repercussions upon the speaker, it is they which mold his face, his land, his habits. . .” Or: “In the Finnish sentence the words are grouped around the verb like moons around a planet, and whichever one is nearest to the verb becomes the subject. In European languages the sentence is a straight line; in Finnish it is a circle, within which something happens . . .”

Koskela’s lengthy speeches about Finnish mythology and shamanism are similarly intriguing. And from time to time he also tries to clarify for Sampo the difference between the guilt-ridden beliefs of the Finns and the Orthodox religion of the marauding Slavs who have tormented Finland for centuries—and who are even now dropping bombs on Helsinki daily.

One further dimension is added to the plot when Sampo makes an attempt to break out of his solitude by striking up a friendship with one of the nurses in the hospital. He lacks a past, and she spends her days watching dying soldiers lose their future. These differing perspectives make for some interesting conversations as the hapless young couple wanders the streets of Helsinki.

In the end, Marani doesn’t entirely meet the challenge of telling an absorbing tale from the point of view of a man with neither past nor language. The book abounds in intelligence but might have benefitted from a bit more linguistic creativity and confusion a la William Faulkner. Again and again Sampo refers to half-understood words and unintelligible phrases, to fractured articulation and concepts dimly grasped through the mist . . . but the narrative itself is entirely ship-shape and heavily polished after the fact. We can thank Doctor Friari for this—he tells us as much himself. But we might also finish the book wondering what thoughts were actually running amok inside Sampo Karjalainen’s head as he attempted to recreate himself as a Finn.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012