Keith Tuma
Salt Publishing ($14.95)
by Stephen Burt

What a bad title for such a good—and, paradoxically, ambitious—book: though it presents itself as a low-pressure journal, the inconsequential deeds and recollections of a senior professor in a sabbatical year, On Leave unfolds to reveal a meditation on the anecdote as a form; an elegant sketch of grief, and of partial recovery; a calm revolt against the conventions of one-point-in-front-of-another, stiffly ineffective, argument about modern poetry; and (best of all) an amenable introduction to the sometimes prickly, too often unapproachable “avant-garde” (or, if you prefer, “post-avant”) poets in Britain, Ireland, and America, among whom Tuma has made his lit-crit career. If you are not already reading Trevor Joyce, Tom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, or Rae Armantrout with pleasure, or if you have tried and failed, Tuma’s offhand admiration for the poets and for their poems might let you try again.

Before we get to the parts about the poets, we have to get used to the journal as journal, whose disconnected paragraphs record disjoined parts from a year in Tuma’s life. We read about international travels, headline news (it’s 2007-08, and Obama runs hard), sports (the Cubs, up and down), and sadder life-changing events: Tuma’s mother grows ill and dies in the course of the year. We meet the critic as father and husband, as grieving son, as owner of an aged dog, taking walks by a river in southwest Ohio (Tuma teaches at Miami University Ohio), leading just the sort of “real life” that realist fiction emulates, the sort of life that some people think avant-garde poetry, with its opposition to transparency, to the picturesque, to the taken-for-granted, cannot present.

Those people, Tuma’s work implies, are wrong. “Avant-garde poets claim to hate anecdotes or the anecdotal style,” Tuma complains, “though what they really hate are the way those anecdotes are framed”: wrapped up with a moral like a gaudy bow, or slotted into a story of transformation, growth and epiphany. Framed in weirder ways, or just hung on the wall, the same anecdotes can provoke thought, lead us to read on, as they do (Tuma shows) in the disconnected, open-ended collections of anecdotes about artists and writers, from Drummond of Hawthornden onwards through Hazlitt and Elbert (not L. Ron) Hubbard, that Tuma intermittently emulates here. Avant-garde poets, this form says, are people too: even J. H. Prynne, the famously difficult, forbiddingly intellectual, Cambridge writer, is a person, and in his own person attracts the kind of storytelling that his poems repel.

“Only those who have personality and emotions,” says T. S. Eliot, “know what it means to want to escape from those things,” and to read a difficult modern poem—whether it’s Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922, or Armantrout’s Money Shot today—you could do worse than make educated guesses about what the poets have tried to escape. Tuma can help us guess: his stories about his favorite recent poets reflect on their work, and also thank them for their collaboration, their involvement with a literary community that is more than the sum of its poems: “that’s the spirit I associate with the world of small press poetry, the world I have been remembering here.”

Tuma can also gloss individual poems; he quotes them, appropriately and sparely, sets down his reactions and moves on, to the Cubs, or the dog, or back to Samuel Johnson, and to the next day. You won’t find high-energy interpretive arguments here, but rather a journal that shows how it feels to admire these poets, these poems: Tuma convinced me, as it were, by his presence, to try again with several rebarbative British and Irish writers (Trevor Joyce in particular) whose powers have not come across, or not to me, in Tuma’s earlier, more academic, attempts to select the best of their work.

Anecdotes seem to deny history—they stand on their own, they get traded like shells, or like coins—but they have a history, as do all forms: Tuma begins and ends with some self-consciousness about what “anecdote” means, a self-consciousness that works against the informality of his tone. There are other books about poets and poems that work this way, but unless you count The Grand Piano, the recent “collective autobiography” of the West Coast language writers, they are not books about the (cough) post-avant; they are books on the lives of the so-called confessional poets, prized for their anecdotes whatever else they contain (Eileen Simpson’s memoir Poets In Their Youth, for example), and nineteenth-century books about the Romantics (Hazlitt’s My First Acquaintance with Poets), and earlier collections of disconnected remarks and events, such as those around Dr. Johnson. It’s an exalted, as well as a casual, company; Tuma’s short, welcome book belongs there too.

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That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion
Rachel Herz
W. W. Norton & Co. ($26.95)

Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust
Daniel Kelly
A Bradford Book / MIT Press ($30)

The Meaning of Disgust
Colin McGinn
Oxford University Press ($35)

by Jeremy Biles

The cover of each of the three books under review here includes a photograph of someone making what is known as the “gape” or “yuck” face: upper lip curled, brow wrinkled, and nose scrunched in an expression of recoil, the universal signal for disgust. According to the authors, the very sight of the human countenance thus marred will function empathically in those who view it; beholding the signal of disgust engenders the emotion of disgust. If this is true, then emblazoning book covers with the gape face might seem an unwise marketing strategy; potential readers would be repelled by the images. But as Rachel Herz, Daniel Kelly, and Colin McGinn make clear, disgust is a highly complex emotion, a matter of both repulsion and attraction; there is something fascinating, even seductive, about disgust. Putting faces of disgust on the book covers is thus a means of intriguing an audience.

The authors themselves are clearly fascinated with disgust, each painting a distinctive portrait of the emotion—his or her own gape face. Though these portraits differ in important and sometimes irreconcilable ways, they are united in their participation in a wider current of intellectual investigation. As Kelly points out, disgust “has become relevant to discussions across the humanities, especially those engaging the cognitive sciences and those in the midst of the ‘affective turn.’” In fact, these three books are only among the most recent entries in a spate of publications evidencing the academic “turn” to affects and the bodies in which they’re grounded; numerous books on corporeality, emotions, and specifically disgust have appeared over the past three decades, with writers seeking to suture close a Cartesian wound long in healing.

Herz, Kelly, and McGinn are convinced that disgust is a distinctly human emotion; it therefore speaks intimately, if often troublingly, to our species-condition. Though each writer takes a different approach to the subject matter—Herz is a psychologist building on her expertise in olfaction and emotion; Kelly is a philosopher steeped in the cognitive sciences and dedicated to empirical study; and McGinn is professor of philosophy interested in metaphysical questions—all three find disgust to be crucial to understanding the human condition. Herz concludes her book by claiming that “disgust holds a mirror up to us. This is why, by unraveling disgust, we can more fully understand what it means to be human.” McGinn echoes the sentiment in his parting comment: “To a considerable extent, disgust makes us what we are.” And Kelly, though rather more circumspect, affirms that disgust is integral to “the cognitive economy of modern humans.” But what exactly does disgust reveal about us?

In responding to this question, Rachel Herz proposes to unravel the “mysteries of repulsion,” as the subtitle ofThat’s Disgusting indicates. Herz’s study is a fine work of popular science—informative, synthetic, insightful, and written in clear, light-handed, lively prose. (If, like me, you’ll be taking an overseas plane ride this summer, consider picking up Herz’s book for the trip.) It also brims with illustrative (and titillating) anecdotes and examples involving everything from mephitic feet, mutilated bodies, and competitive eating to creeping insects, nose-picking, and political ideologies—not to mention unavoidable discussions of bodily excreta: “urine, vomit, phlegm, saliva, sweat, blood, pus, feces.”

But That’s Disgusting is by no means a mere gross-out fest. Drawing upon a breadth of scientific research (including her own work on the psychology of smell and emotion), Herz pursues large claims concerning disgust: disgust “teaches us about the inner workings of our brains and personality”; it is “uniquely complex among human emotions”; and it “reveals the fundamental concerns that underlie our existence.” Universal but not innate, disgust is based in biology and “influenced by learning, context, and complex thought.” The overarching aim of the book is to demonstrate the intimate association of disgust with death. Indeed, Herz claims that they are “fundamentally linked”: “disgust is fundamentally about our awareness of our own death and our terror of it.”

What precisely does death have to do with disgust? According to Herz, disgust has evolved as a form of fear, specifically the fear of our primary predator: pathogens. The emotion is an avoidance mechanism, the most “elemental purpose” of which is to “engender an avoidance of rotted and toxic food.” Of course, disgust may be elicited by a vast range and variety of things, far beyond food gone bad. Herz explains that the emotion has evolved from its “basic form” to include all manner of repulsions, from noxious fumes to immorality. Though its elicitors are many, what disgusting elements have in common is that they remind us of our vulnerable and imminently mortal bodies—our “animality.” In other words, the emotion arises when confronting things that make us aware of our fragile animal natures. Disgust is an avoidance response, and what it wants us to avoid is death. Unlike simple fear, however, disgust is a learned emotion, shaped by culture and context.

Daniel Kelly also trains attention on the interaction of evolutionary biology and culture in Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Potential readers should not be deceived by the goofy title of this book, which is distinctly at odds with the tone, subtlety, and sophistication of the book’s content. Kelly offers a highly nuanced philosophical account of disgust, in which readers will find themselves negotiating terms like “mood congruency,” “affect program,” “inferential signature,” and “antecedent functional overlap.” Despite (or perhaps because of) its highly technical nature, the discussion is lucid and the argument cogent, with the aims of each chapter stated clearly at the outset and rehearsed in each conclusion.

Kelly’s ambitious task in this concise but dense book is twofold. Surveying the rather disorganized state of research on disgust, one “primary goal . . . is to consolidate and organize the research on disgust.” This goal serves the larger ambition of constructing an integrated functional theory of disgust that would “bring order to the chaos.” With his first chapter, Kelly begins his procedure by delineating the “behavioral profile” of disgust, building upon and organizing data from a wide range of cognitive-science studies. He lays out three elements that must be accounted for in order to achieve a complete theory of disgust: unity of response (the characteristic features of disgust response occur as a unified cluster); variation of the elicitors (“a large amount of variation exists in what is found disgusting, and so in what types of elicitors activate individual disgust systems”); and diversity of the elicitors (a “surprisingly diverse range of elicitors . . . trigger disgust . . . from the brutely physical and inert to the highly social and interpersonal”).

The next three chapters proceed methodically in responding to these theoretical criteria. Chapter Two formulates Kelly’s “Entanglement thesis,” which explains how “different components of disgust . . . form a homeostatic cluster that we recognize as a single response type.” The hypothesis pursued here is that “two distinguishable cognitive mechanisms that were once distinct . . . in the cognitive architecture” of humans underlie disgust. These distinct but “entangled” mechanisms have to do with food regulation and the avoidance of pathogens and parasites. The successful defense of this hypothesis satisfies the requirement to explain the unity of response. Chapter Three describes disgust’s “sentimental signaling system,” and in doing so accounts for the “flexibility of disgust’s acquisition system and the variation . . . that it allows” —the second requirement. And Chapter Four outlines the “Co-opt thesis,” which explains how disgust works in conjunction with different cognitive systems,” and is “redeployedmultiple times, in multiple domains, and in combination with several other systems.” Explaining how a variety of things elicit disgust satisfies the final constraint on the theory. Conjoining the Entanglement and Co-opt theses in light of the behavioral profile allows Kelly to conclude his “construction of an integrated theory of disgust.”

In short, then, disgust is a complex but unified emotion whose joint basis is food regulation and pathogen aversion; but it evolves over time to respond to a variety of things, including moral matters. In his final chapter, Kelly addresses the role of disgust in normative ethics, asking what role disgust “should play in moral reflection, deliberation, justification, and beyond.” What follows is an incisive critique of “disgust advocates” like bioethicist and public intellectual Leon Kass, proponent of what Kelly terms the “Deep Wisdom theory,” which sees disgust as a reliable moral indicator. Kass has famously claimed that “in crucial cases . . . repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it . . . Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” Kelly decisively refutes this position, demonstrating that “the fact that something is disgusting is not even remotely a reliable indicator of moral foul play. Disgust is not wise about or acutely attuned to ethical considerations . . . rather, repugnance is simply irrelevant to moral justification.” In fact, disgust often presents ethical dangers, underwriting xenophobia, racism, and religious intolerance.

Kelly’s resounding conclusion concerning disgust and normative ethics nicely supplements Colin McGinn’s The Meaning of Disgust. McGinn dismisses the question of moral disgust as beyond the real purview of his study. Early in the book he notes (in terms that agree with Kelly’s account) that disgust has “become recruited by the moral faculty,” before remarking that he “shall not be much concerned with moral disgust from now on.” Instead, McGinn asks, “What does disgust mean? What is its pith and point?” In contrast to Kelly’s empirically grounded account, McGinn is not afraid to speculate about the nature—the very essence—of the emotion; he seeks to formulate a metaphysics of disgust. And whereas Herz draws upon colorful anecdotes to move her argument forward, McGinn is more inclined toward thought experiments and introspection. Of the three volumes considered here, McGinn’s is surely the most writerly. The author clearly delights in well-turned phrases; his eloquent language, though serving much speculation, is also evocative—at times even earthy—and, though hardly ribald, eschews euphemism. For instance, he is happy to correct Freud by insisting that snakes are less phallic than fecal symbols.

The pleasures of McGinn’s text are many, and they go beyond the elegant prose. Though there is a tendency at times to proceed by way of unsupported assumptions, subjective impressions, and generalizations (the margins of my copy are littered with question marks), there is nonetheless a deep persuasive force to McGinn’s account. The author opens by characterizing his text as a work of “impure philosophy” that blends philosophy, psychology, biology, and literature. In doing so, he “aims to uncover disagreeable truths about what we are, as self-conscious emotional beings with organic bodies.” But these truths are not just disagreeable; they are positively tragic, and thus what McGinn writes is an “essay in species self-criticism, and self-pity. It is a sort of lamentation.”

What turns a philosophical treatment of disgust into a lamentation? In short, McGinn believes that disgust is part of the tragedy of our human condition. We are a species whose self-consciousness is both a boon and a curse. Capable of reflection, we are also confronted inevitably by the mortality that haunts our incarnated selves. Formulating a set of characteristics common to all things disgusting, and revealing what he takes to be the shortcomings of previous theories of disgust, McGinn observes that disgust is not merely an emotional reflex, but rather “rests upon certain thoughts about the world, specifically in relation to life and death.” As McGinn claims in a stirring passage, disgust is linked to a profound ambivalence:

What is disgusting is death as presented in the form of living tissue. It is death in the context of life that disgusts—the death or dying of the living. Not death tout court, but death in the midst of life, surrounded by it. Or again, it is the living becoming dead, making that dreadful transition . . . Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are present in some form: it is not life per se or death per se that disgusts, but their uneasy juxtaposition . . . What disgusts is theinterpenetration of life and death.

The elaboration of McGinn’s “Death-in-Life” theory includes a critique of the theory that disgust arises with the recognition of animality and thus mortality (Herz’s basic position). It is rather the coincidence or “interpenetration” of the living and the dead that engenders the emotion. And if Kelly’s theory provides a rigorous account of the evolutionary function of disgust, McGinn provides a theory that illuminates the existential import of disgust: disgust involves the “tragic nature” of the “biological incarnation of consciousness.”

William James once remarked that rational proofs for the existence of God fail to move humans’ hearts, even if they produce notional assent. If McGinn’s account lacks the scientific rigor of Kelly’s theory, it nonetheless has the merit of speaking a truth with emotional resonance. Where it is least effective is not in its speculative but rather its more dogmatic moments. McGinn’s construal of the essence of art, for example, seems unaware of certain developments in contemporary art, and remains overly constrained by its weddedness to notions of classical beauty; it fails to take into account the history and possibilities of disgust within aesthetic production. “Art is intended to draw our attention away from our gross nature,” he writes, “to provide an alternative to that disturbing vision.”

A disturbing—and fascinating—vision emerges when these recent works by Herz, Kelly, and McGinn are read as a triad. What culminates in juxtaposing these accounts is a collective portrait of disgust more lively and nuanced than any single one. In this way, these three books, taken together, are like the obverse of Sir Francis Galton’s famous study in which photographed faces are superimposed, resolving in a symmetrical composite, the “golden mean” of beauty. Here it is rather the varying emphases, approaches, and conclusions—the unresolved bumps and warts—that really make salient what is interesting about the complex and ambivalent emotion each book scrutinizes. Such a lumpy, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory portrait seems entirely appropriate for beauty’s repellent yet seductive cousin, the disgusting.

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The Wildwood Chronicles, Book I
Colin Meloy
illustrated by Carson Ellis
Balzer + Bray ($17.99)

by Steve Bramucci

Wildwood tells the story of Prue McKeel, a fiercely independent twelve-year-old living in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Early in the book, Prue’s younger brother, Mac, is abducted by a murder of crows and carried into the Impassable Wilderness—a land filled with anthropomorphized animals, a bitter, exiled Governess, a band of outlaw woodsmen, and a nation of talking birds. Before she can save her brother, Prue and her quasi-friend Curtis must first help unknot a massive political stalemate that consumes all of The Wood (the insider-name for the Impassable Wilderness). Along the way, the reader is dropped into a world that Meloy (best known as the front man for the band The Decemberists) and his wife/illustrator Carson Ellis have crafted with considerable care. The narrator’s affection for The Wood is obvious and Ellis’s illustrations always feel tenderly drawn.

Though Meloy often focuses on quaint, Wes Anderson-esque set-design, the book’s true strength lies in its characters. Prue fits into the mold of a classic storybook heroine—she is always ready to take a stand, whether in the complex political dealings of talking birds or against her own parents’ recklessness. Sidekick Curtis is a walking contradiction—like so many boys his age—he’s a self-titled pacifist in one moment and a war hero in the next. The antagonists are similarly vivid and often refreshingly complex: the exiled queen vacillates wildly between charming and ruthless and the various politicos are maddeningly aloof. The leader of a gang of woodsmen named the Bandit King is as vivid and morally ambiguous as his literary antecedent, Robin Hood, and does a nice job ratcheting up the energy whenever he enters the proceedings. As the book hurtles toward the finish line, armies converge, new alliances are drawn, secrets are revealed, and mysteries unfold. Almost all of this hurtling is saved for the last 150 pages of the 541-page book, but dedicated readers who have done a good job retaining information will be gratified by the resolutions and will close the book excited to read Prue’s next adventure in The Wood.

At its best, Wildwood manages to be many things at once: it's a love story for Portland's Forest Park, the immense swath of protected greenery that gives the book its setting; it’s an ode to classic children’s books of the past, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Piers Anthony's Xanth series; and it’s a complex parable full of big ideas (the limits of government, the un-winnable nature of war, etc.) and even bigger words. Wildwood is even a beautiful piece of art, with illustrations, maps, and color plates by Ellis. As love story, ode, parable, and art piece, the book works beautifully. But read as a book for kids, the novel occasionally falters. Meloy’s twee details and focus on politics in Wildwood’s middle section create a pace that might prove frustrating for even precocious child readers. In this same vein, at times the author seems to choose difficult words when simple ones might have done the trick. Unlike M. T. Anderson (Octavian Nothing, The Game of Sunken Places), who uses big words in books for kids but also offers context clues so that young readers can decipher them, Meloy sometimes creates thickets of syllables that are tough to beat through and make the narrator feel a touch pedantic.

Meloy’s language and plotting force the question of Wildwood’s audience—it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the book will be more rabidly devoured by thirty-year-old fans of The Decemberists than by those in Prue’s age group. Yet whether its audience is still in school or looking back on it through a nostalgic lens, The Wildwood Chronicles are bound to gain a following—indeed, the movie rights have been sold and the next two books are on the way. One only hopes that they will show Meloy writing with the same sense of urgency that can be heard in his best songs.

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A Tragedy
Forrest Hylton
City Works Press ($12.95)

by Kristin Thiel

People often read to escape, but Forrest Hylton’s first book-length fiction reminds us how grounded we usually remain. Most books are written in one language, regardless of how many languages the characters speak, how far around the universe they themselves travel.Vanishing Acts is written in at least as much Spanish as it is English. Readers who don’t read Spanish may feel as the book’s clumsy minor character does when he visits a dance club: “Alejandro stuffs his ears with bits of napkins, takes another shot of rum, and, looking bewildered, fills his mouth with popcorn.” (If you prefer all English, just flip the book over—a monolingual version begins from the other side.)

The novel’s main character, Richard Melville, feels scared, awkward, and excited as he conducts fieldwork for his anthropology dissertation on urban warfare in Medellín, Colombia. “He’s not Colombian, didn’t grow up in mean streets, and acquired what little experience he has in Berkeley and New York City,” and it’s a disagreement between subject and verb in an overheard bombast that raises his ire. But he is also fluent in Spanish, including being able to hold his own with rebel and drug informants, and he cannot resist his hotel bellhop’s offer to get him “¿una señorita? ¿Cocaína?, ¿marihuana?” He is “pleased” to be in Colombia’s second-largest city, “where vices would be indulged and fantasies realized on the cheap.” Richard acts like a deep-undercover cop on a TV procedural; from the get-go, he tries (often unsuccessfully) to balance his background, work, and pleasure, and there are moments of magical realism (he is in South America, after all) when Richard feels he’s flying. “It isn’t really flying, though, more like some suspended animation catapult . . . floating but not free, cursed with the knowledge that he’ll have to land, and, from the ground, wind himself up again.”

Hylton writes the narration in English; most of the dialogue is in Spanish, although there is a tiny amount of play with Spanglish, Colombian slang, and Cajun-English. There is never direct translation, though a patient reader will find contextual clues to some of what characters say in Spanish paragraphs or pages later in the English narration.

Vanishing Acts is worth the read for its unapologetic bilingualism alone, but its compelling story and characters can stand on their own. Richard is such a mess—an aware mess, but a mess nonetheless—and the book is an interesting sociopolitical thriller with a startling and unresolved conclusion, yet it also recounts what is everyday life for many people in Medellín. Though he’s talking about an experience much, much different from reading, Richard’s description could fit what it’s like to read this novel: “overrun by a pleasure that hurt. The best kind.”

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Andrei Gelasimov
translated by Marian Schwartz
AmazonCrossing ($14.95)

by Amy Henry

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” she said. “My Nikita’s acting up. Please help me out this once. I can’t cope with him by myself.” . . .
The little guy shuddered and stared at me as if I were a ghost. He actually dropped his blocks.

A maimed and disfigured veteran from the war with Chechnya, Konstantin might as well be a ghost, given his frightening appearance; even the police suggest he stay indoors and hide himself away lest he frighten the neighborhood. Yet he performs the scare-tactic cited above as a favor to his neighbor Olga, and the child immediately heads to bed without a word. Konstantin acts as if the ability to incite terror doesn’t bother him. Only later, when alone, does he attempt to bury himself in vodka, the only escape from his lonely life in Moscow.

Despite the vodka, however, Konstantin is still conscious of the fact that he volunteered for the war just to avoid his controlling stepfather. That decision left him with the horrific wounds and scarring, but also created a new family for him among his fellow young soldiers. Their bond, created the moment a grenade landed in their tank, erased most of his past life as an artist and abandoned son. So he gives away his mirrors, tries to forget that he was the last one pulled from the wreckage of their tank, and drinks.

Things change when one of his comrades goes missing, and the former company reunites to search for him. In between their forays around Moscow, the men recollect their war days as well as their efforts to normalize their lives in a changing Russia. In a twisted version of Robin Hood, they check on old contacts and make sure everyone has food, medicine, and most of all, vodka. Konstantin also reconnects with his biological father and his new family, finding himself determined to dislike them but unable to do so:

I looked at them and thought, Why have things worked out for me this way? Why do some burn up and others get carried out? Why did other children end up getting the father I had? . . .
Actually, all this was probably too much for a single “why.” One question mark was obviously not going to cover it.

Complicating the search is the mysterious disappearance of a large sum of money, money that might be linked to events during the war. So while the men generously play good Samaritans, tension builds as their suspicions about each other are revealed in fragments loosened by the ever-present vodka. Konstantin is forced to accept that all his past memories may not be accurate, which requires him to reassess his future. This prompts him to return to his artistic roots, and in doing so, he comes to a new realization about the war and his friends.

Andrei Gelasimov writes lean prose, and the pace never slows. The plot of Thirst is fairly simple, essentially a Moscow road trip, but the complicated and secretive characters are cunningly revealed in each step of their quest. Never asking for pity, Konstantin makes it clear that not all scars are visible and that his identity is not found merely in his reflection.

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Lysley Tenorio
Ecco ($13.99)

by Robert Martin

The debate has been long, and inconclusive, and in many ways irrelevant: are MFA programs good for writing, or are they ruining American fiction? One thing is certain: regardless of whether the quality of letters suffers under the current academic model, it hasn’t kept writers away from graduate programs; it hasn’t kept writing programs from proliferating; and it hasn’t stopped agents and publishers from mining programs for fresh, young, marketable talent.

Mark McGurl’s 2009 book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, brought this debate to the attention of many creative writing programs, adding a new wrinkle to the equation: the “MFA-machine” itself is now firmly and eagerly cognizant of its own questionable worth. Writers come to MFA programs with full knowledge of—and participation in—the critiques against their own endeavors. McGurl hyperbolically summarizes these criticisms in a 2011 response to a review of his book:

A set of otherwise fair questions about creative writing are not so much asked as always-already answered: No, writing cannot be taught. Yes, writing programs are a scam—a kind of Ponzi scheme. Yes, writing programs make all writers sound alike. Yes, they turn writers away from the “real world,” where the real stories are, fastening their gazes to their navels. No, MFA students do not learn anything truly valuable.

McGurl’s overstatement of these observations proves a point: this extreme view is unreasonable, and has furthermore been disproved by many astounding and provocative products of MFA’d authors. The culprit for the debate’s persistence is the vast amount of mediocre work turned out by writing programs. The similarity of these mediocre works—the uniform conventions, the recycled situations and diminishing narrative devices—points the work, and writing programs as a whole, toward the disparagement of their detractors.

On its surface, there is a great amount of mediocrity in Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection of stories, Monstress. His prose seems safe, sometimes dull. His stories cycle through the same themes and plots repeatedly. While peculiar, semi-historical situations flavor his character studies (a fist-fight with the Beatles, a witch-doctor turned entrepreneur, an AWOL American soldier reaching celebrity status in a leper colony), they carry a whiff of formula, as though derived from exercises designed to help “make it new.” In short, this collection exudes all the attributes of an “MFA-machine” product. But oddly, it is this collection’s predictability, its strict coherence to a chosen convention, that enables Monstress to succeed where so many collections fall short.

The book’s homophonous title nicely exemplifies Tenorio’s achievement. Phonetically identical to “monstrous,” the invented word infuses familiar sounds with a softer connotation, a separate narrative. This double-meaning also informs our interpretation of the stories: every character, every story in Monstress, is an exploration of a marginalized, identity-torn individual. In sacrificing their native culture, these characters suffer as outsiders, foreign to the culture they find themselves in and unfit to return to the one they left behind. This is a plight shared by the migrant and the monstrous alike.

The idea of a homophone also provides a metaphor for the stories’ similarities: the characters in every story are Filipino. They either live in or are headed to California. The plots unanimously hinge on a betrayal. And this betrayal is borne of the isolation and dislocation. Like homophones, these stories hold disparate narratives in similar containers—eight versions of the same story, it would seem. This plays directly into the foremost criticism of MFA programs: they homogenize writers and styles, so that every story reads like every other story. Yet Tenorio’s examination and reexamination of these motifs and consequences extends the effect of each story beyond its respective arc: because of their similarities, these tales collude with each other across the table of contents. In this way, Monstress transcends its eight individual stories and reveals a larger guiding narrative at work. With this overarching agenda in mind, Tenorio’s style and language takes on a deeper significance.

Tenorio largely avoids idiom, especially compared to other lauded multicultural writers such as Junot Diaz or Zadie Smith. Rather, Tenorio’s prose is intentionally indistinct: straightforward, measured, simple, though careful and crafted with obvious skill. At times the lyrical elements are so spare they are hardly noticed, as when one character observes, “A slant of light stretches from the half-closed door, grazing the edge of my arm.” This prose seems designed not to distract the reader. More often than not, the transparency and ease of the language does its job: you can’t help but notice the similarities in theme and plot and character and setting, and you allow these similarities to expose inter-story connections. You read between the lines, because the lines aren’t designed to be the focus. Crossing the lines is the focus—a theme Tenorio explores both narratively and linguistically.

Another side effect of Tenorio’s largely homogenous prose is that any appearance of a culturally specific term tends to indicate the characters’ otherness, rather than their character. Witness how the protagonist of “Superassassin” (a character culled from Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in that he is a lonely, comics-obsessed immigrant dealing with an obstinate single mother) describes his mother’s romantic failings:

Her strategy was faulty: she had been making domestic offerings—a home-cooked meal of lumpia and pinakbet, Filipino delicacies she calls her love potions. But they lack any magical properties. Her men always see the food as alien and weird, a little too far from home.

These indigenous recipes are among the handful of non-English words employed in the collection’s 224 pages. The reason this character fails in maintaining a relationship, the narrator claims, is her reluctance to forego her Filipina identity: she resists crossing the culture line and fully assimilating, and this is why she remains alone. This is a consequence present in each ofMonstress’s offerings.

Tenorio’s characters never question whether they ought to desire America: the desire for America is simply a fact of their setting. In “Help,” an impressionable Filipino youth beseeches his uncle, an airport employee, to explain how the world is connected by air travel: “‘Where do they go?’ I asked. I was seven, maybe eight years old. ‘That way,’ he pointed skyward, then moved his hand to the side. ‘Then that way.’ I always assumed he meant to the States.” The result of this constant desire to incorporate an ideal of America into their identities (and to incorporate their identities into a new culture) is unfailingly betrayal. The characters betray each other to get to America, they betray each other to stay in America, they betray their countrymen by abandoning the Phillipines.

The lasting impact of Monstress is different for its readers and characters. The unfortunate men and women in Tenorio’s tales do not belong anywhere; there is no community they can access. Readers, however, achieve precisely that state the characters seek: they hold multiple narratives in mind simultaneously. As you read through this collection, each previous story remains in your memory and participates in your understanding. The characters try and fail to access this multiplicity, and as such Tenorio creates a coherent, subtle, and thorough portrait of what it means to be isolated, otherized, monstrous.

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José Maria de Eça de Queirós
translated by Gregory Rabassa
Tagus Press / UMass Dartmouth ($19.95)

by Douglas Messerli

Fradique Mendes, originally conceived as a Pessoa-like heteronym, was created by the great Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queirós and two friends in 1869 as a way to poke fun at their fellow countrymen. The invented poet wrote in a kind of satanic Baudelaire manner, an affectation of many younger Portuguese poets that Eça felt needed to be satirized. The persona so engaged him, however, that he continued to write through the pseudonym from 1888 onward, revising the work into a comical biography and collection of letters published in 1900, the year of Eça's death.

In many respects this work cannot be separated from his great fiction, The City and the Mountains, published in 1901. Both works swing between two extremes, between a kind of dandyish figure living in the center of Portuguese culture and a more retiring version of the same figure, returning to the quiet isolation and nostalgic innocence of a previous time. In the later book, Jacinto begins as a believer in change, embracing the most progressive developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a man who, when that world falls apart, retreats to his home in the mountains, where he rediscovers the quietude and order of an agricultural tradition.

So too does Fradique Mendes begin by being a man of the world, living in France and traveling to exciting exotic locales such as Arab countries and Brazil. Yet, like Jacinto, Fradique Mendes, whose great love fails him, gradually reverts to more conservative-based realities, often scolding his correspondents for their desire to become involved in urban life and their lack of religious values. Fradique Mendes finally disappears while traveling “on a very long and distant journey”—which, he declares, is no longer out of curiosity, “for there are no longer curiosities left, but to put an end in a most worthy and beautiful way to a relationship like ours.”

The letters of this fiction are fascinating for their swings between worldly knowledge and peasant pleasures, between a cultivated artistic sensibility and a craving for the simplicities of the past. In the end, because of this oscillation of values, Fradique Mendes is a grand failure, a made-up man who fails in life primarily because of his vicissitudes. Yet in The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, Eça forces us to compare this failed dreamer with an academic critic, so slavishly attracted to the “ecstasy” of Fradique Mendes' earlier poetic dabblings that he cannot see the failures of the man. Presenting his subject in metaphors even more Romantically inspired than the poet's later life, the critic of the fiction ridiculously drops names—from Ponce de León to Mozart and Beethoven, from Voltaire to Klopstock and Immanuel Kant—that reveal even-more confused notions of reality. Here's a sample:

Here I fell back, wide-eyed. Victor Hugo (everyone still remembers), exiled at the time on Guernsey, held for us idealists and democrats of 1867 the sublime and legendary proportions of a Saint John on Patmos. And I drew back in protest, eyes inflamed, so much it seemed to me beyond the realm of possibilities that a Portuguese, a Mendes, could have held in his the august hand that had written The Legend of the Centuries! Corresponding with Mazzini, camaraderie with Garibaldi, that was all very well! But a sojourn on the sacred isle, to the sound of the waves from the Channel, strolling, chatting, pondering with the sage of Les Misérables, looked to me like the impudent exaggerations of the Azorean islander who was trying to put one over on me . . .

If there were ever an example of literary hero-worship, this critic exemplifies it. Fradique Mendes is great because he associates with the great!

At times, this comic lavishing of metaphors and comparisons wears on the reader—as it is meant to. And The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes is, overall, not quite the masterwork that is The City and the Mountains. But the fiction remains a wonderful send-up of Portuguese cultural pretentions, and perhaps, to a certain degree, a revelation of the cultural tensions in Eça's own life. Given the depths of his literary contributions, it is well worth reading this satiric work.

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Michael Schiavone
The Permanent Press ($28)

by Soo Young Lee

At the heart of Michael Schiavone’s debut novel Call Me When You Land is a fractured family pulsating with quiet desperation. Single mother Katie Olmstead receives the news that her estranged ex-husband Craig, father to her teenage son C.J., has died of a heart attack and left behind for them a Harley-Davidson Road King. Katie sees the motorcycle for what it may mean to C.J.—escape from her. Personal demons of failure swim to the surface as she struggles to hold onto a son grappling with the death of a father he never knew, a son that readily disregards and spurns her affections. While C.J. vents his anger on the hockey rink, Katie numbs her sorrows with Grand Marnier.

Schiavone writes skillfully and with purpose. There is as much (if not more) meaning in what he doesn’t say as in what he does. The brusque exchanges between mother and son underscore the painfully vast distance between them. The author also often sets up a scene then immediately enriches it with flashbacks, the constant shifts in time is reflecting the pasts that pervasively haunt the characters’ presents. Schiavone’s attention to details in portraying ordinary events (a hockey match, a night of bartending) may seem merely practical, but such details serve to convey the searing realities—C.J.’s repressed rage, Katie’s agonizing self-hatred—that underlie these events.

While plot lines about dysfunctional families have been done to the point of exhaustion, Schiavone masterfully develops his characters with human depth and complexity. Craig is not merely ‘the deadbeat dad’ who abandons the family, nor Caroline ‘the uptight sister,’ C.J. ‘the angsty teenager,’ and Katie ‘the alcoholic mother.’ Harsh one moment and tender the next, each of these well-drawn figures surprise us with their humanity and depth. Schiavone compels us to care about them, their wounds and triumphs reflecting many of our own.

Ultimately, Call Me When You Land paints a poignant and gripping story of a fractured psyche, of a mother terrified of losing the one defense against herself—her son: “Often she’s romanticized the future freedom, her parental parole, but in her bones she knows a sudden privacy will cut deep. With him, C.J. will take her understanding of consequence. Without him, there will no longer be a reason to hide.” Powerful in its subtleties, moving in its understatedness, the novel expresses the painful realities of a family and the quiet desperations that threaten to break it.

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César Aira
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions ($12.95)

by Douglas Messerli

An insignificant Panamanian government employee named Varamo is paid his monthly salary, one day in 1923, in counterfeit money—money he recognizes as being false the moment it is placed into his hands. This law-abiding and fearful citizen of Colón, accordingly, is faced with an intense crisis for the first time in his life. Trying to spend the money will result in imprisonment, but how can he care for his ailing, slightly mad, Chinese mother, let alone himself, with no money?

In Varamo, his latest book to be translated into English and perhaps his most hilarious work to date, César Aira takes us through this first day and night of Varamo’s horrifying situation, wherein he is accosted by a local madman and a shady underground figure, witnesses the country’s Minister of the Interior suffer a car crash, and sits down to dine on a fish he was planning to embalm, already painted with chemicals, that his mother had cooked up for lack of better ingredients. He is also confronted with what he refers to as “the voices,” which speak meaningless sentences to him on a daily basis.

These voices slowly become untangled as the dizzyingly confused Varamo gets tangled up in a plot of codes and smuggling. Eventually, he runs into publishers at the local bar, men who are interested in having him write a book about his embalming experiences, promising him an advance precisely the amount of his counterfeited salary. Having never written a word before in his life, Varamo is skeptical, but has little choice: it is a perfect solution to his dilemma. So, after a mind-liberating walk through late-night Colón,

He sat down, and he wrote the poem. It is true that the verb "to write" covers a wide range of practices. In this case the author simply copied out all the papers he had put in his pocket since leaving the Ministry that afternoon. He did this in a cumulative fashion, without punctuation or divisions, without rearrangement, in lines of irregular length (the idea of prose, a late refinement in old civilizations, was utterly foreign to him). The order was determined by chance. The code book provided a basic structure, and he alternated the keys with literal transcriptions of the other notes. He had the advantage of having received contradictory instructions, which he followed with providential diligence of a beginner: Caricias had told him to change the keys to make them unrecognizable, and the publishers had advised him to leave the raw materials as they were.

Aira tells us at the beginning of the book that the result of this undertaking, which Varamo titles The Song of the Virgin Child, became the “celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry,” a work “drilled into the minds of schoolchildren or regularly chosen for recitation in poetry competitions.” On top of his hilarious spoof of how great experimental work is created, the author also plays with notions of genre, arguing that his own narrative, since it is “true,” is not a fiction but a use of the third person to tell the “truth,” as a journalist might.

Of course, Aira’s work is not at all truthful, but an absurd series of “postmodern” lies pretending to represent reality. The joy of Varamo lies in the fact that as the fictional poet’s world collapses about him, forcing him to build up a new reality, the reader gets to tag along, to play with the character and author in the creation of a new universe made up of the accidental and coincidental elements of an imagined life. And isn’t that what the creative act is really all about?

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Peter Markus
Dzanc Books ($16)

by Nick Ripatrazone

Recursivity in prose was a favorite trick of American postmodernists, with Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William Gass all spinning particular variations. While interviewing Gass in 1998 for Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt claimed Gass’s proclivities toward heightened and mannered language were ultimately grounded by a focus on place: the Midwest. We Make Mud, the newest collection of fiction from Peter Markus, is a descendent of Gass’s oeuvre, particularly On Being Blue, but results in a unique book focused on a paradoxically clear setting.

We Make Mud consists of brothers fishing, a father working, a mother resting, men crossing rivers: curiously vague characters performing even more curious actions. Those actions sometimes become violent, as the unnamed brothers drive nails into each other’s hands. We Make Mud does not exist in a realistic world, though: Markus deconstructs, and then methodically reconstructs, the reader’s comprehension of setting and character through his recursive language. Gass and his contemporaries might have had more of a cultural goal, whereas Markus endeavors to make us believe through disbelief.

His accomplishment of this feat is a true reward for the reader—at least the reader willing to remain in his exaggerated, elongated prose-poetic moments. The book arrives in blocks of texts without indentation and paragraph, and sentences such as this are common: “Maybe we do what our mother says for us brothers not to do—this no, this don’t, this mud—because we like it when our mother and our father say to us these words too: words that make the sound that a hammer sometimes makes when it hammers rusted nails into wood.”

The only section not containing blocked paragraphs is titled “Good, Mother.“ “Our father is not with us” is one of many clever plays with prayer and Biblical language in the book, but the real reason Markus uses this language is to focus our attention on the mother. The characters first act with care, holding her hand to the back of the house, where “we lay our mother down into this bed.” The care does not last, as the brothers build a resentment for the mother: it was she who “made us brothers wash the mud from our hands,” who said “that she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere . . . west of here.” Her punishment is implied in the final lines of the section, when the brothers “raise back the hammer” while they “line up these rusted nails.” It’s a jarring section, but it shows Markus’s control over the narrative as a whole.

Markus’s lexicon hinges on the juxtaposition of concrete words (fish, tree, mud) with more abstract titles (mother, father, brothers). The result is fascinating: supposedly concrete objects become malleable upon closer inspection, and the reader discovers that letters fall away upon repetition. This isn’t a literary parlor trick: the experimentation affects the content, creating a dizzying world where violence begets rebirth. We Make Mud is not for everyone—some readers will conclude that this massage of language stings the muscles, and the prior publication of many of the smaller chapters causes them to have the feel of standalones—but for those who love the possibilities of fictive language, the whole of We Make Mud is a treat.

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