Zander Brietzke
University of Alabama Press ($39.95)

by Justin Maxwell

This strong critical work by Columbia University Professor Zander Brietzke comprehensively and concretely parses out the idiomatic values of drama and film to show the former’s continued relevance in modern culture, while honoring the latter. Brietzke’s prose conveys his complex ideas in an articulate, accessible format; he offers intellectual depth without the linguistic miasma that often clouds academic writing. Starting with a solid premise that “the best theater is theatrical; the best film is cinematic. By that, I simply mean that a theatrical event is suited for the theater and should be seen upon a stage,” Brietzke goes on to build a worthwhile argument about the fundamental differences between the nature of the two mediums. He usefully elucidates the differences between “simultaneity” and “sequence,” noting that events on stage happen simultaneously as the audience sees things all at once, and their eyes are drawn around the stage or left free to roam, whereas film takes place in sequence, literally one frame after another, edited together to create a controlled series of images. Brietzke’s points about simultaneity and sequence lead him to explore a larger idea of spectacle, which he claims fills the whole dramatic space in a way that film can’t. This idea of spectacle replaces, for Brietzke, much of the nebulous language that has been used in an attempt to validate drama and differentiate it from celluloid. As he says, “it is very difficult to know what ‘chemistry,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘special quality’ are, and yet the theater world is filled with such empty medieval rhetoric.”

The fundamental argument of the text is hearty reading, and takes up the first two chapters of the book. Beyond these chapters the emphasis changes from offering a well-reasoned (albeit abstract) thesis to exploring concrete manifestations of the three aforementioned ideas. Each of Brietzke’s subsequent ten chapters takes on a different playwright whose stage work also exists on film. The writing is lively and thorough: each chapter uses different internal structures, sometimes ranging over an author’s oeuvre, such as the chapter on August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, sometimes focusing on a single work, such as the chapter on Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This keeps the book from plodding along or becoming dryly formulaic. Unfortunately, because Brietzke is pointing out different manifestations of the same core concepts, once he’s convinced the reader of their veracity whatever else comes after that point makes the book feel excessive. This tautological approach is perhaps a necessary evil, since the author can’t know where any given reader might be won over. Consequently, American Drama in the Age of Film is a valuable and insightful book but one that some readers may not need to read in its entirety, despite its accessibility.

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Peter Thomson
Oxford University Press ($29.95)

by Eliza Murphy

“Yikes!” is evidently an insufficient response to discovering that the deepest lake in the world, known also to be the purest, is undergoing alarming biochemical shifts in response to human activities. Perhaps “Bloody Hell” will suffice. This is Siberia after all, the nether regions of Russia, and Lake Baikal—home to miniature, pollution filtering shrimp (epischura), the world’s only fresh water seal (the nerpa), and the hardy people who live on its shores—is under siege.

Author Peter Thomson invited his younger brother to join him on a journey half way around the world to see this ecological wonder. As hard as Thomson tries to portray the lake as a miraculous entity capable of healing from a variety of assaults, the verdict is still out on its ability to absorb warming temperatures in a climate so cold that the locals take pride in their skillful adaptation to the frigidity. Some believe that the way to solve any assaults to the lake, the most obvious culprit being the paper mill with its toxic effluents, will be through economic development. Never mind the high concentrations of industrial pollutants stowing away in the blubber of the nerpas, who dine on the epischura that gobble up PCBs, dioxin, and any number of waste products generated by transforming trees into paper products.

Thomson, a veteran environmental journalist, admits that he wants “to believe that this remote place is different,” that “Baikal might somehow manage to elude the corrosive influence of civilization.” Seeking one place on earth imbued with that vanishing essence, hope, he leaves Boston an idealist, attempting to sublimate the “cold-eyed realist” he confesses that he is. Along the way he encounters all sorts of people, iconic architecture, a frustrating bureaucratic machine, some desultory meals, at least one exquisite meal, and dreary landscapes that the realist in him cannot help but describe in detail. Such details might threaten the narrative if Thomson weren’t willing to acknowledge the anxiety this trip provoked in him.

Hope arose for Thomson in the form of his guide, Andrei, who although initially aloof, softens one night and divulges his vision of a trail similar to the Appalachian Trail. Exposed to travelers attempting to leave behind as small a footprint as possible, Andrei absorbs and passes on valuable ways to do so. The exchange takes root in Thomson, who returns on another trip to help build that trail, a gesture significant both for the ground level engagement with an enigmatic location as well as the completion of a personal odyssey for the author.

A skilled science writer, Thomson shares the perplexing and not altogether uplifting news of the lake’s health, presenting an even-handed portrayal of a natural wonder that is as imperiled as every other place on earth. Unafraid to share the tediousness and vexation, beauty and hideousness that travel sometimes entails, he recounts not only the vast physical terrain he traversed, but also intimate personal details that echo the scale of the geography he and his kid brother covered via planes, trains, and a cargo ship across the Pacific. The result is a strong book that is as much about the sacredness we carry with us as it is about a “sacred sea.”

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Robert D. Romanyshyn
Spring Journal Books ($24.95)

by Joel Weishaus

In a 2005 interview with Dolores E. Brien, Robert Romanyshyn said: “As a phenomenologist, I start with the notion that soul reveals and conceals itself in and through the landscapes of experience we build individually and collectively. A person says whom he or she is, for example, in the clothes that are worn, in the books that are read, in the ways in which the house is furnished and made into some kind of home.” He goes on to explain that “the same is true on a collective level… a fourteenth century Gothic church sets in stone the psychological spirit of the age in a way which is radically different from a Renaissance church.”

This phenomenologist is also a post-Jungian, that cabal of therapists and scholars whose work extends C.G. Jung’s psychology into everyday life, facing the Gods with the audacity to address them as symptoms of the psyche’s metabolism, and casting Jung’s insights into this century’s aporia. Romanyshyn’s vision is also philosophical, leading him to where words slip away from their referent. “Green!,” he exclaims, is “a word that is an insult to the richness that surrounds me.” However his is not a deconstructive critique, nor an anthropocentric one. He asserts, rather, that the production of meaning is like an alchemical process that raises one’s awareness to “an internal imperative that is more about the work than it is about me.”

A Core Faculty Member in Clinical Psychology and Depth Psychotherapy at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Romanyshyn has written a pedagogy with much larger applications in The Wounded Researcher. Anyone who reads more than a few pages of this book is by default someone interested in doing “re-search,” as Romanyshyn describes “the unfinished business in the soul of the work, the unsaid weight of history in the work that waits to be said.” Artists, for example, are familiar with the call to create a work “beyond reason,” a call from one’s soul, to contribute to the world something that has never existed before.

The Wounded Researcher is also a book of grieving, a word that made a place for itself in Romanyshyn’s vocabulary after the sudden death of his first wife, to whom he had been married for 25 years. In a dream he had a few days after her death, a longer version of which can be found in his 1999 book, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation, he is at a party at a friend’s house where he sees his wife flowing through a room of guests “as if not weighted down by gravity.” Awake, he writes, “This is her place, and in it I seem to have become invisible, as if I were the one who has died.” Gravity, gravitas, grieving, elegiac mourning, “a sweetly bitter quality that comes from yearning for something that, while never attained, is always with us.”

It is better not to do research methodologically, which Romanyshyn claims has been holding psychology, for one, hostage, but with a poetics; this “does not mean that research is poetry,” but that a researcher is attuned to “the gap between conscious and unconscious, which is bridged by the symbol as the expression of the transcendent function.” This gap, the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal region mapped by the French philosopher and scholar of Sufism and Iranian Shi’ism, Henri Corbin, is “intermediate between sense and intellect and that mediates between them.”

Meaning is born where we are unbalanced. Here the abyss opens, and “to descend into that abyss requires a different way of seeing and knowing.” An imaginal approach to research also includes “former ways of knowing,” such as alchemy, astrology, and I-Ching. It seems to me that the spirit of this work is more European than American, more life-affirming than wealth-gathering, more Eros than Logos; mysterious rather than pragmatic, it dissolves fundamentalism into a Cloud of Unknowing.

Some of the most lyrical moments in The Wounded Researcher are found in Romanyshyn’s generous quotations from and discussion of the problems his students had finding a path into their dissertations. For example, an Iranian student, Kiyanoosh Shamlu, wanted to explore the work of the 12th-century Iranian intellectual Sohrevardi, and how “an ancient Islamic tradition and the modern Western one of Jungian psychology converge and diverge in their understanding and treatment of imagination and its relation to the imaginal world.”

During the initial stages of his work, Kiyanoosh had a series of significant dreams. In the first, “he is in a very dark forest, where he is running away from an old man who is chasing him.” In the second, “he finds himself on the top of a mountain with a book that has no writing in it.” In the third, “he is riding in the sky on the back of an enormous bird while looking down on a green landscape that has no discernable figures or objects.” Kiyanoosh could make no sense of these dreams, until he came across them in Sohrevardi’s “descriptions of the soul’s spiritual journeys of descent from and return to the imaginal world.”

Kiyanoosh went on to explore “an unacknowledged metaphysics,” in which “the imaginal world is not so much an underworld as the epiphany of an other world, which. . . Jung himself was struggling to understand.” Romanyshyn goes on to say that Kiyannoosh’s experience indicates that dreams “may know more about the work than the conscious researcher does.” It is not so much that Romanyshyn opens new territory by suggesting this, but in the context of the book it becomes the long-nosed pliers in the toolbox of the researcher who has soul in mind.

This toolbox also includes elegiac writing, where “a researcher dwells among the ruins because he or she knows that it is in the ruins that the living spirit of the work waits to be remembered.” It is a style of writing that “resurrects the dead and transforms them, as well as our relationship to them.” Also discussed at length is what Romanyshyn calls “alchemical hermeneutics,” a process that “keeps stirring the work so that what would become coagulated dissolves.” There is also “creative repetition,” which is “like falling in love again with the work, coming under its spell, being claimed again by it. Creative repetition is a return to the romance of the beginning.”

Nowhere is the romance of the beginning more lovingly handled than in his discussion of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Romanyshyn suggests that this myth “is the archetypal background for how research becomes psychological,” as it is “about this process of losing and finding, about this work of transformation in which the other becomes a psychological reality, a matter of soul.” The part of the myth that most intrigues him—and that has also cast its spell over many other writers, from Virgil and Ovid to Rainer Maria Rilke—is when Orpheus travels to Hades to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. There he is granted his wish, but only if he doesn’t look back (an echo between Greek and Hebrew mythologies). As in so much mythology, of course, he violates this proviso. “Orpheus had to look back, “ writes Romanyshyn, “because the underworld is Eurydice’s place, and being there, not only is she freed from being Orpheus’s possession, she is also freed into herself.”

In his poem, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” Rilke dwells on this pivotal moment:

She was already loosened like long hair,
given out like fallen rain,
shared out like a hundredfold supply.

She was already root.

This calls to mind Denise Levertov’s poem, “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”:

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

When we love into our roots there is no turning back, though there can a turning away—as when, in Rilke’s poem, Eurydice’s guide, “Hermes says, ‘with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,’ Rilke says, ‘she could not understand, and softly answered / Who?’”

“Who! Just this one word,” Romanyshyn writes, “which the poet italicizes! We are meant to notice something here, some fundamental change not only in Eurydice but also between her and Orpheus.” In other words, this change in direction is possible only when one in the couple lets go, as in Romanyshyn’s dream of his departed wife, to whom he had become invisible. In that dream, if he had tried to speak to her, had said to her, “Don’t you remember me, your husband?” I think she would have replied, “Who?”

Adding the dimension of dreams, along with “metaphoric sensibility,” “creative repetition,” “alchemical hermeneutics,” and many other techniques that are valuable to the process of research in every discipline, this seminal book is also a primer for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

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Alexandra Fuller
Penguin ($23.95)

by Kevin Carollo

“There is a magic place . . . ”
—TV ad for Wyoming tourism

Alexandra Fuller’s third nonfiction work tells the story of a young man who grew up, lived, and suddenly died on the oil patch in western Wyoming. The British-born, Rhodesian/Zimbabwean-raised author of the fine memoirs Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat has outdone herself with The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, a heartbreaking narrative about the American families who give their lives to feed our addiction to oil. There are great high plains winds and the lilt of Rocky Mountain English to go with the great greed, love, and loss in this Wild West tale, and even knowing what’s going to happen in the end cannot keep a cowboy from crying through the final pages. This is both a harsh American Western and a vital work of world literature, and it should win every major award out there.

Written by a self-proclaimed “liberal redneck” (Fuller currently lives in Wyoming), Legend embodies all the contradictions of a frontier narrative. For example, even people from Wyoming do not exactly settle down there, but travel to where the oil is. Oil, on the other hand, remains the one constant, a 24-7 reality in a West that has grown considerably less wild since drilling began: “the endlessness of the plains’ open abundance is an illusion. Nearly all the plains are already swallowed up, paved over, plowed under, flattened, hardened, drilled. You can drive across what’s left of what is wild in an afternoon or less.”

Unlike the recent film There Will Be Blood, which seems rather invested in humanizing the Devil in the shape of an enterprising oil baron (played, of course, by the impossible-to-dislike Daniel Day Lewis), Fuller is interested in telling the humble story of the Bryant family, who have built an honest life around the shady vagaries of oil production for generations. They are soft-spoken, good folk who deserve more than donuts and some cant about the importance of safety on the job.

As a period piece, There Will Be Blood also implies that the precarious nature of drilling belongs to the preceding century, when crude oil was extracted by cruder technology. The reality is much starker: Colton is one of at least eighty-nine people who died in the Interior West between 2000 and 2006 (thirty-five in Montana alone).* The railing that might have saved Colton’s life would have cost the drilling company Patterson-UTI Energy all of two thousand dollars. Instead, they were fined seven thousand dollars for his death in 2006—the same year parent company Ultra Petroleum boasted revenues of $592.7 million. It hurts to do the math, but the bottom line is clear. Safety on the patch means one thing and one thing only: the security of big oil’s profits regardless of the human costs.

The June 2008 issue of National Geographic takes a different approach by equating intensified oil production in Western Siberia with modernity. Environmental and structural problems are glossed over in order to justify the short-term benefits of the region’s explosive “cash crop.” People around the world appear to agree: we cannot not exploit the questionable boon of black gold. Incidentally, Wyoming is the home state of the term “Gillette syndrome,” a term coined by psychologist ElDean Kohrs to explain the consequences of an energy boomtown, which “experiences an increase in crime, drug use, alcoholism, violence, and cost of living, and a decrease in just about everything good except, arguably, money.” The Legend of Colton H. Bryant does not indict the hard laborers who take pride in their work, nor does it exculpate the modern-day robber barons that own the means of production and ultimately care very little about maintaining a high quality of life for their workers.

Fuller clearly wanted to write a different kind of nonfiction work than her first two, and she has succeeded beyond our wildest, most American dreams. Nevertheless, readers will recognize her intense reckoning with the recent past from Don’t Let’s and Scribbling in this book, which doesn’t feature her at all. As with her first two books, Legend does not offer us some kind of impossible reconciliation or absolution, but rather something readers might not expect: a profound identification with the Bryant family, and, yes, a hopeful sort of pride in perhaps one day becoming American like them.

That said, the old saw ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ goes double for The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, which depicts a cowboy, lasso in hand and back to the camera, amidst a blur of horses. Maybe this will sell more books, just as the Wyoming tourist board must evoke a sanitized version of the Wild West to encourage visitors to its magical state. There are some horses in Legend, to be sure, as well as rodeos and Mountain Dew, but without an oil rig looming in the background, one wonders what the book designers were thinking. Inside, however, one finds a gut-wrenchingly beautiful narrative that will make both Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck turn over in their graves—this time with immense pride.

*Drilling has not become safer the last couple of years in the Interior West. On May 15, 2008, a Montana man fell to his death working on the western North Dakota oil patch, the eleventh such death in ten years. Owned by Cyclone Drilling of Gillette, Wyoming, this particular rig pumps out the crude for the Houston-based Murex. This most recent tragedy highlights the national scope of oil interests in the region, as well as intimates the national response necessary to force oil companies to move beyond what Fuller describes as “safety, safety, safety, have a doughnut. Safety, safety, safety, now go out there and get as much gas out of the ground as quickly as you can.”

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Richard Bruce Nugent
Da Capo Press ($18)

by Douglas Messerli

If you prefer the pious potboilers of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the irreverent interrogations of Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed, better skip Richard Bruce Nugent’s Gentlemen Jigger, a fiction—written in the 1930s, but published here for the first time—which even in its title hints at its “incorrect” attitudes (the title, Thomas Wirth notes in his Introduction, “is a sardonic riff on an old racist ditty: ‘Looky, looky, Gentleman Jigger—half white and half nigger.’”) And Nugent, through his witty alter ego Stuartt Brennan, uses the “N” word enough, as did Whoopi Goldberg recently on the television show “The View,” to draw tears of frustration not only from Elizabeth Hasselbeck (a fellow panelist on that show who, after hearing Goldberg’s outburst, began to cry) but from any well-meaning correctionist.¹

Nugent, the bad boy provocateur of the Harlem Renaissance, dared to speak out in the late 1920s not only about racist attitudes against darker-skinned blacks within the African American community, but also about that community’s prejudices against homosexuality. Along with younger black figures Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston (Nugent, Thurman, Hughes, and Cullen all being gay or bisexual), Nugent challenged readers through the publication of the journal FIRE!! to consider their brothers and sisters less as part of an essentialist community and more as often eccentric and contradictory individuals. Meant to shock, Nugent’s contribution was a drug-induced dream story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade!” about an encounter with the narrator and a male Hispanic pickup who he calls Beauty.

A son of a noted Washington, D.C. family (his mother was a Bruce), Nugent was so light-skinned that when he first arrived in New York he lived for a few days in a whites-only hotel, and apparently, when he was first introduced to the dark complexioned Thurman, he excused himself, confused over his own racist feelings, an event presented in this passage in Gentlemen Jigger:

It was just as Stuartt was succumbing to the invitation of the food that Tony pointed to the table and said, “There is Raymond Pelman.”
It was a distinctly unpleasant shock—so unpleasant that Stuartt lost all desire for food. Silent and empty-handed, he followed Tony to Pelman’s table. So this was the brilliant Raymond Pelman—the Negro from whom he had expected so much. This little black man with the charming smile and sneering nose, with sparkling, shifting eyes and an unpleasant laugh.
Stuartt decided that Pelman was not to be trusted. He was too black. Stuartt had been taught by precept not to trust black people—that they were evil. And Stuartt was the totality of his chauvinistic upbringing.
. . . Stuartt felt decidedly uncomfortable in his presence. So, after a polite ten minutes of torture, he took his leave.

Returning to Thurman later, Nugent apologized for his behavior, and soon after the two became close friends, sharing a room in what they proclaimed Niggeratti Manor, a rooming house owned by businesswoman Iolanthe Sydney, who charged many of the Harlem writers and artists little or no rent.

From the beginning Nugent, like his character Stuartt in this roman à clef fiction, was an absolute charmer—he had previously worked for Buster Keaton and Rudolf Valentino—and was blessed with an intelligence and wit that, when combined with Thurman’s own brilliant patter, thoroughly entertained and educated their frequent visitors. Indeed, the first half of Gentlemen Jigger consists of many of their witty conversations and descriptions of their frequent and sometimes outrageous parties, replete with pretty boys, beautiful women, and plenty of gin. The characters Nugent presents—most of them fairly recognizable to anyone acquainted with the artists, dancers, and writers of the day, the central ones of whom are Rusty (Wallace Thurman) and his boyfriend, a white Canadian nicknamed Bum; the beautiful Myra (presumably Zora Neale Hurston); her lover the Jesus-look-alike Aeon (represented as Stuartt’s brother, but in actuality probably a mix of Claude McKay and Jean Toomer); the noted white writer, photographer, and sponsor of Black writers and artists Serge Von Vertner (Carl Van Vechten); and Tony (Langston Hughes)—attend to the conversations of the duo, intelligently responding and debating with them. Some of these discussions are just witty riffs on sexuality and drinking. On their way to a picnic, Myra and Aeon are unexpectedly met by Stuartt and Rusty:

“We are cupids—thoughtfully, one of each color, one in each of your honors. Every young and beautiful love should have its quota of obstacles and chaperones. Consider us the more evil of these.”
“Did you bring the gin?” Rusty asked. “I see Myra brought our lunch.”
“I brought ‘green dawns’ after seeing what you were bringing to read aloud.” Stuartt turned toward Aeon and Myra. “Firbank and Proust,” he explained. “Dawns are wonderful,” he continued without pause. “One part absinthe, one part alcohol, tinted with crème de menthe and sparkled with lime and fizzy water—cool as lemonade and potent as—”
“Let’s leave sex out of it,” breathed Rusty, “particularly such gutter and dialect as is mouthed by juveniles.”
“Oh, what you said!” Stuartt chattered as he poured several cups of the incredible pastel drink from a mammoth Thermos. After handing one to each of them, he took another and started to the forward part of the bus, saying over his shoulder, “Oats for the uniformed horse—he looks unhappy.” A few moments later he could be seen offering it to the bus driver.

But in the majority of these intellectualized Bouvard and Pecuchet-like interchanges, they are painfully self-aware in their conversations of the political and racial issues surrounding their lives. In their first conversation with Bum, for example, when Thurman’s Canadian friend admits that he has no knowledge at all about the Harlem Renaissance, he is “lectured” by the two:

“First of all, Bum, I suppose you have never known a Negro before. That’s the usual defense. And you expected to find us more or less uncivilized denizens of some great jungle city, believing in witch doctors and black magic and all that. Well, you’re right. Or maybe you’ve read Harriet Beecher Stowe and feel sorry for us. Do. Or Octavius Roy Cohen and are amused, or Seabrook and are afraid. You know, Rusty, it really is too bad we aren’t more different. What a disappointment we must be.”
Rusty synchronized into the routine. “Well what can you expect. A group of people surrounded for a hundred years or so by a culture foreign to them. How long can you expect it to remain foreign?”

Later in the book, among several long comic dialogues, Stuartt takes issue with the group’s praise of fellow artist Howard (likely Aaron Douglas), dismissing their comments that Howard’s work is “essentially African” by noting the absurdity of describing anything as “African” and brilliantly expounding on the vital differences between a “Gabun full figure,” and art from Sudan, Congo, or by a Benin native. Like a true didact Stuartt explores the complexity of this issue, remarking to Rusty, “Remember these things. . . if ever The Bookman wants an article on Negro art.” In this sense, Nugent’s fiction is less a recounting of the lives of him and his friends, and more a complex discussion of various issues involving art, race, and sex.

Accordingly, for some readers Nugent’s dialogic writing will seem like a bumpy, baggy affair, with what critic Northrup Frye has described in his Anatomy of Fiction as “violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative.” Indeed, the editor of the Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader characterized Wallace Thurman’s fiction, Infants of the Spring—a work written at the same time as Nugent’s which often incorporates scenes similar to Gentleman Jigger (in a biopic about Nugent, Brother to Brother, friends even accuse Thurman of copying from Nugent’s manuscript)—in terms that might equally apply to Nugent’s writing: “The novel was melodramatic and much too didactic, its talkative characters caricatures.”

As Frye warns, however, in works such as Nugent’s (and Thurman’s) “the appearance of carelessness reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” For both of these fictions are anatomies, not novels, a satiric form of fiction that “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.” The major figures in such works are represented as “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts”—all of which might describe Stuartt and Rusty (or Paul and Raymond in Thurman’s work)—who suffer the disease of the intellect. Here the country weekends of Thomas Love Peacock, Aldous Huxley, and Wyndham Lewis, where the pedant captures the attention of his guests over drinks and long dinners, is replaced by the raucous celebrations at Niggerati manor and dinner at Devores.

Another structural aspect of anatomies is the tendency, as in Petronius’s Satyricon, to gather together individuals representing all social classes and/or to represent the pedant-hero undergoing a voyage that includes both the upper echelons of society and the underworld. It should come as no surprise, accordingly, that after Stuartt’s encounter with the Harlem underworld—ending, as it does in Thurman’s book, with dispersal and disillusionment—the second half of Gentleman Jigger takes us through another kind of underworld, the Mafia, in which low-class figures live aside the wealthiest classes of U.S. society.

The Stuartt we encounter in part two, now living in Greenwich Village, is almost a new being; he has grown his hair long, and, as Bum describes him, “the kid sparkles.” Whereas in the first half of the fiction Stuartt presented himself as a knowing wit, here we see him admitting to Ray, a young handsome Italian vaguely connected with the mob, that he has never had a gay sexual experience before. His clumsy attempts at love are met with a feeling from Ray that he needs to protect and educate the innocent neophyte. This new Stuartt, moreover, although still very much a philosophus gloriosus, is far more modest and honest in expressing his ideas. In Niggerati manor he lived without a job in utter poverty; now he is selling his art, and his apartment has become a meeting place for Village artists, young hoodlums, and visiting art patrons—the perfect location, of course, for his further musings on various subjects, sacred and profane.

So fabulous are the characters in this section that it becomes hard to tell whether or not Nugent is still writing a roman à clef or has abandoned it for pure fantasy. If the events are accurate, as Wirth suggests, we must rewrite the annals of gay history to include noted Mafia members. But in another sense, it makes no difference, since the overriding structure of the book continues to be the form of the anatomy.

After his affair with Ray, Stuartt moves up the Mafia social ladder by taking up with “the biggest shot known to Ray,” Frank Andrenopolis, the so-called “Artichoke King,” (a character likely based on mobster Ciro Terranova, who controlled much of New York before “Lucky” Luciano). Although generally heterosexual, Frank, who has been turned into the police by his moll, casually begins a sexual relationship with Stuartt that only enhances the young artist’s reputation. On a trip to Chicago, the two encounter the big mob leader, Orini (based on Luciano), to whom Stuartt takes an immediate disliking; offended, Orini drives Stuartt to his lakeside mansion, undetermined whether to beat him or make love. Playing dangerously with Orini’s notions of manhood, Stuartt escapes the beating, and woos the mobster into bed. Stuartt also attracts the attention of Bebe, Orini’s mistress, and threatens to sign her and himself as dance performers at a local club, unless Orini is willing to buy her out of the contract.

Next door to Orini’s mansion Stuartt encounters the socialite Wayne Traveller (probably based on Grace Marr, with whom Nugent formed a platonic relationship and later married); she further promotes Stuartt’s career. More success follows, as Stuartt, presumed to be white, does the costumes for a musical (in real life, Nugent had a non-speaking role in Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy) and dances in a film with Bebe. In the midst of these joyous activities, however, a young boy enters the theater asking for donations for the Scottsboro Boys, and Stuartt, requesting his weekly payment, hands over the check for $3,000. Later, queried by a gossip columnist who finds his gesture a strange one, Stuartt answers: “I can’t see why it’s so funny, though. No one seems to think it strange if a Jew helps a Jew. But it’s news if a Negro helps a Negro, I suppose—.”

With that, Stuartt’s career comes shattering down upon him, as racism wins the day. Unlike Thurman’s novel, however, in which the Nugent character Paul Arabian commits suicide, Nugent turns the tables, so to speak, in his own fiction. To buy him out of his contracts, he is paid $100,000—the amount he has previously told Orini he would need to survive for the rest of his life!

So too did Nugent prevail, outliving most of the figures of the Harlem Renaissance. And while the character Nugent in the biopic Brother to Brother is presented as being homeless, in reality the artist lived out his life modestly in Hoboken, continuing to meet with the board of the Harlem Cultural Council, an organization he helped found years before. Yet there is still something terribly sad about this satiric masterpiece and Nugent’s own life, for in the end his is a story about intelligent, loving, and beautifully youthful individuals trying to survive in a world of general stupidity and hate.

¹The discussion on “The View” about the “N” word is far more relevant to the issues above than one might imagine. This discussion, brought about by Jesse Jackson’s use of the word over what he thought was a closed mike, led Goldberg to argue that white people’s use of that word meant something far different that its use in the black community, where its hateful meanings had been transformed into something that was used in different contexts—perhaps akin to the gay community’s reclamation of the word “queer.” At the time of Nugent’s novel, the white author (and long time friend to many Harlem Renaissance writers) Carl Van Vechten had just published his view of Harlem in Nigger Heaven; upon publication of the novel many of Van Vechten’s friends, black and white, were outraged and hurt. Nugent’s use of the word in Gentlemen Jigger also makes his friends quite uncomfortable, although they recognize that he is being a provocateur.

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Philip K. Dick
Tor ($25.95 )

by Ryder W. Miller

Before Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) became a successful science fiction writer, he wrote realistic fiction, penning titles such as Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and Voices from the Street. Now, as these books appear in the wake of his literary and cinematic rebirth, one can see what he was originally trying to do. In Dick's realistic novels, characters long for the American Dream. One can find the influence of Henry Miller (The Air Conditioned Nightmare) and Arthur Miller ("Death of a Salesman") in these early works, as they feature circumscribed salesman who do not fit in at work and are struggling to make a better life.

In Milton Lumky Territory, written in 1958 and first published (posthumously) in 1985, is a case in point. Aspiring businessman Bruce Stevens seeks to work in the territory of the older salesman Milton Lumky; being a friend of Bruce’s new wife Susan, Milton tries to help Bruce along in a scheme to buy Japanese typewriters that they can sell for a higher price in America. Milton fronts the money for Bruce to make the initial investments, but things go downhill from there, leading the characters to grapple with a semi-existential crisis.

Dick here writes plainly about life in California, the vagaries of love, and the struggle, sometimes spiritual, to survive. He depicts Milton as a fault-ridden character who, although helpful, often wisecracks and has strange opinions. Milton has problems with Bruce for not believing in god and finds it strange that Bruce’s desire “to make a store run is a permanent value.” When his younger rival realizes that he wants to leave “Milton Lumky Territory,” we know it’s not merely the sales area he’s talking about.

Like many of Dick’s main characters in his realistic novels, Bruce and Susan decide they need to move to start again—but missing from most of these novels is what happens to the characters after they have moved. Similarly, the tone of In Milton Lumky Territory is not very adroit; as in his science fiction novels, the story can feel sparse and padded with unneeded adjectives. There is little of the wild conjecture that one finds in Dick’s more popular books; rather than oppressive and violent governments of the future, there are toxic personalities to avoid. The only memorable reference to science fiction in Dick’s currently available realistic fiction is a character in Humpty Dumpty in Oakland who comments that the genre should be “easy” to write.

It was in fact easier for Dick, who in the 1960s became a favorite speculative writer for many readers, eventually developing a cult following. Yet though not as fun as his fantastic works, In Milton Lumky Territory and Dick’s other realistic books cut straight to the heart of the American Dream. These are real people Dick is writing about, the kind of morally complicated people you might find in any nearby store, and they each have their own dramas.

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Olivier Rolin
translated by Jane Kuntz
Dalkey Archive ($12.95)

by Levi Teal

One enters Olivier Rolin’s Hotel Crystal through a narrow door with a brass knob, which rests loosely in its housing and will not turn until jiggled. Once inside, readers will find thick green shag underfoot that swallows the sound of their passing. The plot is the overstuffed, four post bed abutting the east wall. The characters are the myriad wallpapers, overlapping in places, repeating in others. The story is the small writing desk facing the window, served by a crooked chair. The voices are the layered smells that seep from inside the armoire—oak, varnish, mildew, starch.

Each chapter of Hotel Crystal begins with a meticulous description of the main character’s current hotel room, followed by a pertinent anecdote. The protagonist presents himself in these first-person anecdotes as—among other things—a prominent figure in international intrigue and espionage, and as a lecturer on Proust who’s greeted at brimming lecture halls by crowds of swooning, short-skirted schoolgirls. It’s readily apparent that he is inventing his autobiography. The only room our narrator can neither remember nor describe—unless he’s perpetrating a cover-up—is the epicentral room #211 at the Hotel Crystal.

All these flights of fancy are written on whatever materials the author has at hand: pages torn from books such as Under the Volcano, Alice in Wonderland, Leaves of Grass, and Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, as well as postcards, travel guides, notebooks, etc. That he is composing his work on unsent postcards and stationary suggests he seeks correspondence, but has no one to whom he can write. Instead, he stores his writing in a briefcase, which he abandons in a taxicab immediately before his disappearance. The briefcase is found by a friend and turned over to a group of editors, who guess and second-guess at authorial intent and arrange content as they see fit.

Sorting out this mess of unreliability is part of the fun; Rolin’s biting satire of the thriller genre, academic world, and “high” culture is another. Most enjoyable, though, are the protagonist’s fictitious bits of autobiography. He writes both the hotel room depictions—Perec-esque in their menacing commitment to precision—and the fraudulent autobiographies because he is bored. The real reason behind his globetrotting is never revealed, but the unexceptional rooms he occupies suggest his life outside his writing is mundane. These hotel room vignettes seem like the character’s primary coping mechanism.

That these descriptions never lead to anything may frustrate some readers, but this is part of Rolin’s gambit. In the end, Hotel Crystal uncovers and questions our boredom and frustration—with this novel, literature, reality itself. We are left facing the void, our own personal room #211, which can (and must!) be filled only by our own imaginations.

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Leon de Winter
Translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans
Toby Press ($14.95)

by Kevin Carollo

“Now what do you want to know?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.”
—Franz Kafka, The Trial

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. To judge whether life is or is not worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
—Ben Okri, The Famished Road

In recent world literature, there is a widespread hunger to reckon with the legacy of the 20th century. The epic task of translating its weight on human consciousness means a spate of authors from around the globe are compelled to revisit History writ large, alternately focusing on the buildup to World War II, the Holocaust, the ensuing Cold War, the era of decolonization and neocolonialism, the breakup of the Soviet Union—and the consequences of such radical shifts in the world’s geopolitical and cultural imaginary. In Leon de Winter’s splendid novel Hoffman’s Hunger, protagonist Felix Hoffman happens to be thinking about all of these things as he deals with myriad physical ailments and searches vainly for happiness by reading Spinoza and gorging himself on food and drink.

Death-driven and self-loathing, in Hoffman we see a convincing archetype of the insatiable century he’s ashamed to be surviving. Currently the Dutch ambassador to Czechoslovakia and living in Prague, Hoffman is also a Holocaust survivor, and has lost his twin daughters—one to a strange, heartbreaking illness in the 1960s, the other to drugs in the 1980s. Astonishingly, de Winter seems to have written this work during or extremely close to the novel’s narrative present, the second half of 1989. Originally published in 1990, and a bestseller in Holland and Germany, this is apparently the first of Leon de Winter’s works to appear in English (in a deft translation by Arnold and Erica Pomerans), meaning that it took the post-Cold War era of globalization to bring this ambitious and engaging novel into our language.

One cannot help but wonder why this is. Towards the end of the novel, Hoffman thinks: “The destruction of the [Berlin] Wall marked the beginning of the end. It seemed out of the question that a lasting peace would descend upon Europe. Peace had always been based on fear in the continent.” It is a curious kind of rumination, typical of Hoffman’s skepticism and more than a tad ironic coming from a purported promoter of Western diplomacy and development. The novel’s frequent conjectures eerily anticipate the turn of the century’s transition from Iron Curtain to European Union, a transition defined by numerous balkanizations, intense immigration fluxes, national identity crises, and incredible bloodshed. What have we learned exactly? Felix, our insatiable antiheroic hero, desperately wants to know.

In addition to the eerie sense of prescience one feels when reading Prague’s most celebrated chronicler of alienation, Hoffman’s Hunger shares with Kafka an obsession with the body, unforgettably inscribed in stories like “A Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony.” Where Kafka’s hunger artist cannot find anything he likes to eat, de Winter’s Hoffman—as well as an obese American character named Freddy Mancini—cannot find any way to stop eating. The awkward cocktail parties and cloak and dagger politics of the novel come replete with profound ruminations on the nature of happiness, guilt, death and greed.

It is hard not to see the allegorical potential of such hunger: we consume and consume but are never satisfied; our desires are destined to be our undoing. Food serves as both a sublimate for something deeper and more frightening within us, and as a site in which all of these hungers, fears, and Cold War cultural identities are contested. De Winter reminds us that beneath the cliché “you are what you eat” lurks a global politics of cultural consumption.

Though Hoffman’s Hunger is as heady as it is heavy, it is paradoxically a fast, intense read, and somehow more moving than depressing. Perhaps this comes from the yearning de Winter adds to the debauchery and pathos of the unsatisfied existences and failing bodies of his primary characters—the all-too-human desire for knowledge, for happiness, for love, for survival, for meaning. This novel is indeed a lot to chew on, but to the translators of Leon de Winter, it must be asked: can I please have some more?

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Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton ($25.95)

by T. K. Dalton

Jerome Charyn's new novel, Johnny One-Eye, is a picaresque set in Manhattan during the American Revolution. The eponymous hero was born in a brothel run by his mother, Gertrude. His patrilineage is unclear, but may include the taciturn, red-headed giant, George Washington. For the duration of the Revolution, Manhattan teems with prostitutes and spies, and Johnny's allegiances, as well as those of the supporting cast, often waver. Johnny One-Eye's great success lies in creating a world steeped in “the hurly-burly of a war without real perimeters or rigid lines.” Its downfall is in the ease with which its hero rides the flux.

Mercenary though he may be, Johnny is loyal to a handful of characters. He ties his fate to the traitorous Benedict Arnold, in whose service as a “scribble boy” he lost an eye; to a British officer who employs Johnny as a spy; to another redcoat who prosecutes Johnny as a double agent; and to Washington, whose soup he (mildly) poisons for the chance at an audience with the rebel leader. This tangle of alliances creates an intriguing situation only heightened by Johnny's hopeless attraction to Clara, the stunning “octoroon” prostitute adopted by Gertrude, the brothel's madam, when both she and her biological son was young. Gertrude's devotion to the “farmer-in-chief”—affection recklessly returned by the general—leads Johnny to conclude that Washington is his father. These flimsy bonds push the boy's sympathy over to the shoeless, rag-tag rebels.

Still, Johnny's access to the major players of the day seems too convenient. The crown's secret service is stymied when looking for Washington, but this teenager who begins the tale under suspicion for attempted assassination has a sixth sense on the subject. Johnny's easy access to the general is only topped by the general's access to regular escape. Washington and his British counterpart square off in a dramatic game of blackjack set in the brothel: “We'll announce a colossal game, a tournament of champions at the Queen's Yard,” says William “Billy” Howe, the British general defending Manhattan. “My spies tell me he won't be able to resist.”

The execution of the scene, however mawkishly set-up, shows Charyn's gift for period drama. Here, the general asks to borrow a ribbon, the significance of which is known to he and the madam alone. “Washington bowed to Gert with a sweep of his arm that was like the motion of a duelist or a dancer of the minuet. For a moment he was outside Billy's realm—Billy's headquarters and house of cards—and was only with Madame. He committed the edge of her ribbon to his lips, said, ‘Now I have the luck I will need,’ and ducked inside the closet.” For Charyn, Washington's ability to hold it together is mythic, and here, the magic holds.

Johnny takes the myth one step further, putting an equally monumental woman behind the farmer in chief: “Gert was his [Washington's] America—not the America of Martha and Mount Vernon—but of a certain bawdiness that seemed to elude him, of imagination he seemed to fear. He could not have conducted a war without such imagination, conjuring up a people and an army with the force of his mind.” Charyn captures that bawdiness, the rough rancor of thirteen intransigent colonies formed by dissidents and debtors, in a remarkable way. He demonstrates a nearly effortless use of archaic lexicon. Despite a few stumbles (“I espied a pair of bodkins,” or “Verily her face was aglow”), the story earns its yellowed parchment feel with this sort of subtlety: “I wrote love letters for the keepers of the pit dogs,” Johnny says of his time on the prison ship. Of the other “nuns” in the brothel, he writes, “They were fine Christian women who went to the mariners' church, the only one that would have them, and indebted themselves to the tobacco dealers who took advantage of their passion.” The Revolutionary age was singular, a nation simultaneously learning to talk and hitting puberty. It's an oddly relevant one, too, as Charyn makes clear with this sentence: “They expected the entire town to greet them as liberators.” His “they” is the British and his “town” is Philadelphia, but anyone can make the contemporary substitutions.

What keeps Johnny One-Eye from being a great book is Johnny One-Eye himself. At a time when nearly everyone was almost always risking practically everything for abstractions like liberty, our hero takes almost no initiative for even something as worthwhile as romantic love. Two women, spy-prostitutes, both tell him they wished he had kidnapped them, taken them from the battlefield. Don Quixote wouldn't have hesitated. Our picaro, though, is meek. He moves too passively between epic figures, never understanding them, rarely exercising even a healthy amount of free will. Johnny even recognizes this some eighty pages from the end: “Damn my own reticence, my own inclination toward folly—I was always at the edge of things.” It's anachronistic, and hard to believe someone who reads Aeschylus and Aristotle might believe it, but maybe Johnny thinks the world is flat. Charyn, unfortunately, lets him think so.

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Dorothea Dieckmann
translated by Tim Mohr
Soft Skull Press ($14)

by Spencer Dew

Guantanamo chronicles the transformation of Rashid, a German who, while vacationing in South Asia, is arrested and shipped to America’s most famous detention facility. In this alien world of outdoor cages and grueling, imposed rhythms, subjected to the excruciating pain of torture and the agony of monotonous, exposed captivity, Rashid loses his old sense of self and becomes someone new.

This surrender begins on the biological level, as hunger turns to “generic desire for generic slop,” “a dull feeling in his brain and on his tongue” that prompts him to wait for and savor tasteless meals. Later, confusion and fear give way to Rashid telling his captors what they want to hear, even feeling guilty that he can’t offer more details on his jihad, a word he’d never used before being brought to this place. Likewise, from originally thinking of the Koran as a collection of “fairy tales” Rashid finds that, when locked up in a prison camp with nothing else to read, the words of the scripture take on mystical resonance, inflecting his experience and worming their way into his dreams.

By the end of the novel, however, the hallucinatory dislocation is gone, and Rashid is surreally at home in his constriction, living now in a walled cell, anticipating small favors and treats—a twinkie, a Kit Kat bar. Acculturated to his hellish existence, Rashid dreams of paradise as “Security level four. A shower every day. Videogames.” The longing for distraction and comfort replaces the idea of freedom. Plans for suicide are dismissed with the arrival of a Happy Meal and the “feeling of reassurance and familiarity” it brings. Rashid may vomit after gorging himself, but the “unmistakable sensation of having been uncomfortably full” offers something like satisfaction.

Dorothea Dieckmann is a master of description and the psychology of confusion, and as the panicked dependency of the abused on his abusers takes root and grows, she shows herself to be an heiress to Robbe-Grillet and Kafka. With the disquieting, warped ending of her book she surpasses these teachers and gives us something more contemporary and indicting: in the next cell over, Jamal, who has extracted a miniature Barbie doll from his Happy Meal and named it after his wife back in Manchester, sings saccharine snippets of pop song lyrics, crooning “This is where I long to be… la isla bonita.”

There is a second, more subtle narrative of transformation within Dieckmann’s book—the story of America’s decline, of the risk of the nation and culture collapsing from within due to the complacency of citizens who fail to protest (or even pay attention) to the lawlessness and immorality of their government. For a German, the grave weight of such responsibility bears special resonance, but for all readers, this disturbing tale functions as an urgent parable for our times.

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