Sarah Moss
Farrar Straus and Giroux ($22)

by Greg Chase

A wall can keep people out, but it can also be used to hide something shameful within. In her spare and enthralling new novel, Sarah Moss probes both sides of this age-old human compulsion to erect barriers.

Set in the north of England in the 1990s, Ghost Wall centers on seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents, who have teamed up with an archaeology professor and his students to fulfill her father’s fantasy of re-enacting life in the Iron Age, two thousand years earlier. The novel comments on three different historical moments simultaneously: It alludes to the fall of the Berlin Wall (one of the students has recently visited Berlin), but it also looks back to the brutality of an older world—and forward to the brutality of our own.

Silvie, who narrates the story, makes clear that her father’s interest in ancient history reflects his nativist attraction to “the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere.” In one scene, the professor and her father debate how necessary Hadrian’s Wall was as a means of keeping native Britons at bay:

The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said . . . Well, said the Prof, they weren’t exactly British . . . Celts, we tend to call them these days, though they wouldn’t have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the west. Dad didn’t like this interpretation, didn’t want an Irish lineage, or Welsh or French. . . . He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something.

Many more things are at stake in this conversation than the historical purpose of Hadrian’s Wall, and one of those things is class. Silvie’s father is a bus driver, an amateur historian who resents people like the professor—those who, as Silvie puts it, “were paid to walk the places Dad loved and write the ideas he could have had.” Silvie herself has “never been as far south as Birmingham,” and the trip marks her first extended contact with more privileged young people, those with the resources to travel around Europe for fun.

Whereas her father idealizes a world before industrialization, Silvie understands that Iron Age life demands a great deal of violence. After her mother remarks offhandedly on the possibility of gathering fish for dinner, Silvie reflects on the inaccuracy of this wording: “You don’t . . . gather fish, there has to be murder done.” And she understands that the violent practices they are seeking to recreate have never really left, given that her father is regularly abusive to her and her mother. In one harrowing scene, he beats Silvie with his belt, and she seeks to dissociate from the experience by focusing on “the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made . . . the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end.”

One aspect of the ancient Britons’ culture that especially fascinates Silvie’s father is their practices of ritual sacrifice; in order to ward off evil spirits, he explains, they would single out a person—often a young woman—tie her up, and leave her to die in the bog. “You give what you most want to keep,” he has told his daughter over the years. In chilling detail, Silvie describes how her father and the professor join forces to construct a makeshift wall of their own, and how the re-enactment begins increasingly to feel “like something real.” As Ghost Wall moves ominously toward its climax, Moss shows that sometimes even those who do know history are driven to repeat it.

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Ed Pavlić
Milkweed Editions ($26)
by Julian Anderson

When Ndiya Grayson, the young black professional protagonist in Another Kind of Madness, journeys to see the musician Shame Luther in an unfamiliar Chicago neighborhood, she misjudges her step off the bus and plunges into a puddle. Now, rather than appearing cool and collected at his door, she arrives post-puddle and soaked. But her vulnerability allows for a connection with Shame. For Ed Pavlic’s new novel, which is deeply invested in exploring its characters’ inner worlds, disorientation is part of the point.

Along with Ndiya, Shame too feels off-balanced. Having been on the road for ten years following a friend’s death, he discovers on moving back to Chicago that

without his noticing, all his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. . . . As soon as he returned, he noticed things and, even more, people would approach into magnified focus and bend out of range in a rhythm that changed constantly but didn’t seem to alter in response to anything he could determine or control.

Shame accepts this distorted perspective as a way of coping with the world he cannot control, but as he tries to find a path forward, the city presents its own deadly potholes. While driving, Shame is pulled over by police, designated as Man One and Man Two, who interrogate him bafflingly and then, with vague but serious threats, force him to drive for hours, according to their directions. He can only obey, rendered helpless in an African-American version of Kafkaesque dehumanization.

The present and the past also control people, sometimes metaphorically. Asleep, for instance, Shame is steadily bitten by a spider, which breaches the surface of the skin he has grown over his grief. In a description alert to language, the spider herself is “poise: tangent instant on the inside skin of grief, a stance in the wind of one’s own history, a still shot of experience, a sip of poison.” In this unlikely linking of poise and poison, the spider dances along one of the thousand magical strands, spun of sound and rhythm, which make up the story.

Not only a writer of fiction and essays, Pavlić has a considerable reputation as a poet, and he is attuned to language’s inner music. When a drug dealer is introduced to Ndiya, for instance, he experiences a shock of recognition relating to a horrific childhood crime. His subsequent escape to drugs is rendered in the statement, “And an instant was the time it took a bent mirror of the time it took to take it.” This declaration pushes the boundaries of syntax and grammar into a logic of vertiginous sensation that a reader can understand only by surrendering control.

As they try to cope with a world they feel they cannot properly perceive and trust, the characters’ responses powerfully drive the narrative. Just as Shame lives in his music, naturally and unselfconsciously, the narrative breathes poetry, augmenting descriptions of interior states with riffs of complex musicality. A reader must be prepared to suspend traditional expectations of sidewalks and street signs as they step off a bus into a story that moves with a heart’s deep longing from Chicago’s dangers to a small coastal village in Kenya. Ndiya Grayson’s smooth exterior is a veneer, after all; arriving wet and left-footed at Shame’s house, she is rendered vulnerable and human in her search for connection.

An interview with Ed Pavlić appears in the Summer 2019 Print Edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Purchase this issue here.

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Lindsey A. Freeman
Redwood Press ($18)

by Will Wlizlo

Oak Ridge is a small city like many other small cities and, at the same time, a place with few parallels. Its mazy streets are dotted with anodyne pre-fab homes like so many post-war communities, yet the sleepy town just west of Knoxville, Tennessee, has a humming, volatile core. It was built from the dirt up as a primary component of the Manhattan Project; the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex provided much of the research and fissile material used in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. It’s also where Lindsey Freeman grew up.

In This Atom Bomb in Me, Freeman describes coming of age in and around Oak Ridge, and how she carries her “atomic childhood” within herself. “I felt animated by a kind of power coming from Oak Ridge and my connection to the Atomic City,” she writes. “I often felt like the acorn inside the twirling atom, the city’s totem—something ordinary made extraordinary through a field of power.” Both the mundane and the mysterious irradiate this slim memoir, which builds into something more than just the remembrance of a uniquely situated adolescence in Reagan’s America. In addition to an idiosyncratic consideration of memory and belonging, This Atom Bomb in Me offers a poetic exploration of how culture and identity synthesize each other.

Freeman lived in Oak Ridge for a few months, but her parents moved to the nearby working-class city of Morristown while she was still an infant. She visited often to see her grandparents, who still lived there, and many of Freeman’s sharpest memories come from her summer vacations and car trips between home and Oak Ridge. Her remembrances from that time have a comic uncanniness, a sense of something sinister hidden within the goofy scenes of childhood. Freeman’s memories of playing tricks on the Russian spies who drove around Oak Ridge, finding rickety barns that concealed secret laboratories, and memorizing the lyrics to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” all take on a darker cast when considering the historic context of the end of the Cold War. And, of course, there are memories unambiguously shot through with radioactive material. “All the autumns of my youth,” she writes, “we played soccer by a sweet little creek that was so gentle we never thought to ask if the water was laced with strontium-90 or toxic mercury, by-products of the city’s nuclear industries.”

This Atom Bomb in Me jumps rapidly between valences, and Freeman unpacks how the local manifestations of the nuclear moment and her perception of broader global currents orbit each other. For example, living near Oak Ridge felt more precarious after seeing television footage of Pripyat, a city in the former U.S.S.R. most famous for being downwind of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. “Nearly nine tons of radioactive material was thrown into the air, creating a black plume of radioactive smoke that smothered the city of Pripyat,” she recalls. “The entire city was evacuated. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that a city could be there one day and all its inhabitants gone the next. It was even more frightening because this was a nuclear city full of experts—scientists and engineers—and something had gone horribly wrong.” One gets the impression that, after a lifelong buildup of atomic culture in her bones, the footage of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown was among the most devastating images of Freeman’s adolescence.

Images, both devastating and nostalgic, are a key component of This Atom Bomb in Me. As Freeman flips through her memories, the memoir settles into a scrapbook-like form. The text is broken into eighty-two short sections, and the pages are filled in with visual ephemera, including family photos, historic images of Oak Ridge, snapshots of pop culture artifacts, and artworks. Reading feels like dipping in and out of a precociously curated diary.

In this way, Freeman creates what she might call a “sensorium.” By gathering things she touched, smelled, heard, saw, and ate in youth—there’s a surprisingly introspective tangent about Atomic Fireball candies toward the book’s conclusion—she conveys how a local culture fused to atomic progress can mutate both matter and spirit. “It radiates throughout the city,” she says of the subliminal atomic hum of Oak Ridge, “[it] goes underground, swims and dives through rivers and tributaries, and ignores boundaries and barriers of every stripe. I carry it in my own body. It is both outside and inside, material and immaterial, pulsing and still.”

But after immersing oneself in her sensorium, can we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the world of an atomic child in Oak Ridge? As a researcher and professor of sociology, Freeman is aware of the challenges in understanding cultures and social narratives. To aid her introspective rumination, she treats readers to a primer on some of the thinkers who’ve puzzled over questions of authentic self-understanding. Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs is the most prominent critical reference. Barthes’s primary anecdote in that book is the fable of Little Red Riding Hood, who is famously eaten by a wolf disguised as her grandmother. To fairly judge the place or context in which we reside, Barthes contends, is similar to the predicament of Little Red Riding Hood “trying to destroy the wolf by lodging comfortably in its gullet.” By refashioning the wolf’s gullet from the commercial clutter of mid-century America and exploring the cultural vibrations of the subsequent generation, This Atom Bomb in Me deflects some of our insights into the more essential ways that family, community, and the broader experience of childhood in the Atomic City shaped Freeman. Yet at the same time it also highlights the pervasive leeching of a culture into its citizenry. This tension remains satisfying and provocative throughout the memoir.

We’re left with a model of the author that resembles the structure of an atom. Her revealed core has two parts: a happy-go-lucky kid and a cool, neutral academic. She also presents moving, interrelated flashes of her life—the stories, remembrances, artifacts, trivia, and scholarship—that revolve around her character and keep the whole narrative in balance. These pieces are like the protons, neutrons, and electrons of Lindsay A. Freeman. Eighty-two textual scraps circumnavigate and protect the core; the loops of their meanings create both a boundary and a mechanism to communicate her story. And so, if the comparison may continue, This Atom Bomb in Me is like the chemical element lead, with its eighty-two protons, neutrons, and electrons. Lead, unlike plutonium or uranium, doesn’t have an explosive history. But, depending on how the element is used, its toxic nature can manifest in unexpected places—or its malleable structure can contain the malevolence of radiation.

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Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era
Edited by Jason Baumann
W. W. Norton and Company ($24.95)

The Stonewall Reader
Edited by The New York Public Library
Penguin Classics ($18)

by Greg Baldino

The summer of 2019 marks the 50th year since the events of LGBTQ history known as the Stonewall Riots. Among the many institutions commemorating the anniversary is the New York Public Library, which is showcasing an exhibition open through July 19th, 2019. In addition to his work on the exhibit, curator Jason Baumann has also edited two books, drawing on the resources of the NYPL’s archives and collections: The Stonewall Reader, a collection of writings examining homosexual and transgender life before and after the riots, and the photographic collection Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era.

In the summer of 1969, the Stonewall Inn was a burnt out shell of a restaurant turned mafia-run dive bar. A powder-blue “membership card” issued to circumvent state liquor laws gave its patrons access to watered-down drinks served in filthy glasses. It was not a nice place. But it was one of the few gay bars in New York City with a dance floor, and one of the few that didn’t turn away trans patrons, and hence a popular spot. After midnight on June 28th, the police raided the bar. The gay patrons were ordered to leave, but those in the bar who at the time might have identified as transsexual or transvestites or drag queens were roughly handled and arrested—under a section of the penal code prohibiting loitering which criminalized “being in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration.” That night, though, the patrons of the bar and the residents of the Greenwich Village neighborhood held fast and fought back against the police, leading to a three-day riot.

The riots, sometimes historicized as the Stonewall Uprising, were not the first instance of a police raid being resisted, nor even the first riot led by trans women. They were preceded by the riots in Los Angeles at Cooper’s Do-Nuts in 1959 and in San Francisco at Compton’s Cafeteria seven years later. But owing to a number of factors that no one could have anticipated, the clash at Stonewall became recognized as a catalyzing event, so much so that American LGBTQ history is divided by it. Only the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s is considered as much of an epochal marker. In spite of its importance, though, the actual events and their participants’ roles are hotly debated. A riot is a very poorly organized event, and trying to create an exact historical record of one is, at times, like trying to staple mist to a kite string.

The Stonewall Reader does not attempt to create an objective record of the moment. Instead, the selections try to create instead an assessment of the lives of lesbians, gay men, and transgender men and women in the post-war decades, and how the culture (both queer and straight) was radically transfigured. Notably, the contributors from both the before and the after sections include a number of pieces by transgender contributors. Christine Jorgensen, considered the first successful subject of transitional surgery, writes about how she was exposed in the press while still recovering in the hospital. Transgender activist Mario Martinez documents the dehumanizing attitudes from the very legal counsel that was meant to help him and others. Of the convergence of the different identity groups in action that night, Queers for Economic Justice cofounder Jay London Toole writes: “Those seven or eight people that were arrested did not make that riot, did not make that rebellion, did not make that uproar. It was every fucking person that showed up in the thousands that made it.”

What makes The Stonewall Reader successful is Baumann’s editorial approach. Rather than trying to build a linear definitive take on the events, Baumann instead leaves room for different perspectives from the preludes and aftermaths. “Rather than provide another closed narrative of these tumultuous events,” he writes in the introduction, “my purpose has been to allow the reader to sort these mysteries out for themselves by reading the memoirs and the testimony of the participants and those immediately touched by these historic events.”

This approach carries over, albeit with a tighter focus, to Baumann’s second book, Love and Resistance. Drawing on the NYPL’s archives, the book collects photographs by Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, whose visual records reflect the differences in their cultural backgrounds, and the changes in those communities that Stonewall initiated. Lahusan had come of age during the homophile movement of the 1960s, joining the first American lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, and becoming the art director for their publication The Ladder. Under her direction, the magazine transitioned away from cartooning and illustration work to include actual photographs of lesbian women; a brave and risky move during those days. Born eight years later, Davies grew up in a different culture and became involved with more radical organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries. In addition to her contributions to the publication Come Out!, Davies documented the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Their photographs depict the men and women—gay and bisexual, transgender and cisgender—who took to the streets to rally for change, to advocate that they didn’t have to be just like everyone else to deserve truth and beauty and freedom.

The two come from different backgrounds and ideologies, and their photographs, in both their subject matters and subjects, help to show the shift that happened in LGBT political action during that time. Common to the pre-Stonewall activism of groups like the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society was an approach that could be called assimilationist, but could also be considered destigmatizing. It was the approach of presenting both homosexuals and homosexual desires as being comparable to straight society— “straight” in this sense meaning both sexually heterosexual and performatively normal: tax paying, god fearing, and all-American. Following the riots, activism became more confrontational and transgressive, paving the way for the more direct action of organizations like Queer Nation and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) during the AIDS epidemic. The people street fighting with the police that night had less to lose from capitulation than closeted suburbanites. For the patrons of the Stonewall—predominantly African American and Puerto Rican and no stranger to police brutality—love was literally a battlefield.

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Henrik Pontoppidan
translated by Paul Larkin
Museum Tusculanum Press ($35)

by Poul Houe

This new English translation of a 750-page long Danish novel written more than a century ago is a heavyweight both literally and figuratively. On the volume’s front cover a blurb by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann reads, “the author of A Fortunate Man is a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers,” a claim which another cover reminder about Pontoppidan corroborates: “From the 1917 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.” Add to this that the present translation coincides with two 2018 film adaptations of the book—one for the movie screen, the other for a TV miniseries, both made by Oscar-winning director Bille August—and you are almost compelled to expect a work of art capable of traveling the distance between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first century.

In fact, evidence of the novel’s topicality is not hard to glean. Its eponymous character, Peter Andreas Sidenius, or simply Per, as in its Danish title Lykke-Per (Lucky-Per), is born to rigorously devout Christian parents, the father descending from an endless lineage of Lutheran pastors. But unlike the rest of the vicarage’s large household, Per is driven from an early age by an obstinate zest of life that eventually sparks bold ideas of his own about technical and material matters—much in sync with the modern breakthrough in Nordic culture and society, but completely out of touch with the spiritual norms of the Sidenius home.

Rational and pragmatic, this young disciple of the human god of utilitarian progress is especially intrigued by the energy potential in North Sea waves and Western Winds, and his engineering plans for capturing these otherwise wasted forces of nature for the benefit of the national economy ring like preambles for today’s environmental sustainability agenda. Including his designs for river regulations and a large Jutland freeport, Per’s technological output is precisely as uncompromising as the religious spirituality he was brought up with but now struggles to outmaneuver. Even more than his actual accomplishments, which turn out to be few, this background is what truly throws his striving into relief and makes A Fortunate Man a novel for our time.

More than their prescience, though, it is the failure of Per’s many efforts, and his subsequent life in splendid isolation (as a lowly paid road inspector in his country’s most barren and remote quarters) that deserve the attention of today’s readers. For while the prospects of his ambitions may have stood the test of time, the forces that undercut their currency from the outset, or at least suggested they were premature, remain embedded in our own technology-driven culture and cause today’s humans no less harm than they once caused Per.

Simply put, Lykke-Per, the fortunate man, is also a Skygge-Per, a man of shadows. As Pontoppidan’s lengthy narrative progresses, it reveals in ever so many compelling ways and characteristic details how profoundly indebted to his past this man is, especially when he believes himself to be confronting and resisting his origins most ardently and to be staking out his own path through life. Often others see the link before Per realizes it himself, as when this fellow suitor says to him: “Even if we are not born with chains, we seem to feel an urge to make chains for ourselves as life progresses. We are, and will ever be, a band of slaves. We only ever feel really at home when we are in chains and shackled—what would you say to that now?”

Only gradually, as his forward-moving steps alternate with crushing setbacks, does Per come to acknowledge his susceptibility to the values and attitudes he resents the most. Whether disdaining his provincial father’s religion while seeking the approval of secular urban Jews, or succumbing to feelings of guilt and remorse for his youthful misdeeds, or navigating a spiritual course between religious modes at odds with all of the above, Per increasingly embraces spirituality as a pivotal part of his humanity: not a transcendental spirituality, mind you, but a sense of nature that has affinity to modern technology and science and yet is richer than the outlook of most practitioners of both.

Torn between these opposites at any given time, Per faces shadows of his past while stumbling towards selfhood in the process. When eventually he connects with his father’s faith as an indelible influence upon his own life, it’s the spiritual passion he takes to heart, not the religious doctrine it fueled in his father’s mind. Even Per’s penchant for likeminded characters like Jewish Dr. Nathan is qualified. While admiring Nathan’s intellectual acuity and the eloquence with which he infused the public sphere with modern insights, Per deems his outlook narrowly aesthetic and alien to the natural sciences and modern technology.

Commuting between such diverse sources of inspiration, the fortunate man’s selfhood emerges as a cacophony, a patchwork, and a fluidity: a messy construction of building blocks from near and far but first and foremost a never-ending interaction between the visibly known and the shadows it either casts or represses. It’s Per’s misfortune that such shadows undercut his life, but his fortune that he meets the challenge to come to terms with the predicament. The scene is typically a fairy tale or legend, as when he asks his Jewish girlfriend if she remembers the school book story “of the mountain troll who crawled up through a mole hill so he could live amongst human beings but got terrible fits of sneezing whenever the sun broke through the clouds? Ah, I could tell you a long tale that would explain exactly where that legend comes from!” Per knows! As shadows are both his curse and his blessing, they are what makes him Per, the fortunately unfortunate or unfortunately fortunate man.

Since technology today advances even more rapidly than Per Sidenius’ era of modernity could ever dream of, Pontoppidan’s novelistic lesson about the perilous road to selfhood in a world of our own making could not be more timely. Almost daily we are treated to scary collisions of brazen innovations and the so-called unintended consequences these tend to entail. While progress appears to reign supreme, its shadows are having a ball, and the need to confront the interplay becomes paramount. It’s because fortune and misfortune are often as hard to separate as conjoined twins that a window like Pontoppidan’s on their both vital and deadly nexus is a precious commodity.

Its formal design may seem overly traditional to suit insights into futuristic challenges of this magnitude, but on closer inspection it actually does the challenges justice by bringing their shadowy disruptions to light by way of meticulous disquisitions rather than the style of impulsive tweets. Compositionally, A Fortunate Man, like the standard Bildungsroman, follows its protagonist from the home that shaped him to a world away from there, where his full self can emerge before returning home for confirmation of its independently won identity. For Per, however, the transition never ends, and when, finally, a renewed sense of home does transpire on his own terms, only a version of his homeless experience in no-man’s-land qualifies for the role. The trajectory for his development was traditional, but rather than leading to fulfilment, it led him to drain his life expectations for all that could have compromised his passion to meet them.

Similarly, the novel’s narrative mode and attitude are omniscient and Olympic with movements both between characters and within their minds. Yet while the narrator is the one who knows best, and who tells it best, his puppeteering capacity is not abused to simplify matters unduly, but works to stretch, for better and worse, the human potentials involved to their breaking point. Character depictions and characterizations serve their agents’ most conflicted and contradictory traits, inviting readers to contemplate the ways in which personal centers of gravity are repeatedly split between centripetal and centrifugal forces, or conversely, are stifled in a form of life to be deplored if not avoided.

The disruptions are never far away. Shortly after Per’s personality seems “the first formless template for a coming race of giants, which (as he himself had written) would finally take possession of the world as its rightful rulers and masters—a world which they would then reshape to their own liking and needs,” he goes humbly to bid his father a last farewell. “In ways barely perceptible to him, his decision was linked to other partly diffuse deliberations that had occupied his mind the previous night and, once again, shades of unconquered phantoms had made their disturbing presence felt.”

Again, not only does Pontoppidan’s verbal orchestration deal with authority on the cusp of an existential and national breakthrough that verges on a breakdown; it also offers up an array of painstakingly nuanced individual portrayals and revelations. Alongside this it unfolds, in telling detail, a host of theological and philosophical, political and aesthetic, scientific and technological bones of contention of the kind that defined the cultural and societal scene in Denmark and countries south of its border during the ground-shifting transition from a world of hegemonic national spirituality to one of global innovation and market economic expansion—all turning individual souls more optimistic and more lost than most people realized or had words for.

At book’s end Per Sidenius has died, but only after his tortured search for meaning in life had reached its own dead end. In a journal Per left behind, an admirer learns how he saw this search as “the final aim of our struggle and suffering. Until one day, we are stopped by a voice from deep within us, the voice of a phantom asking: But who are you yourself? From that day forward, no other question matters except this one. From that day, our own self becomes the great Sphinx, whose mystery we must solve.” While space limitations prevent me from quoting most of the journal’s dizzying grappling with the issue, its final words: “I must know! I must know!” suffice to sum up why A Fortunate Man is a demanding read worth the effort.

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