Forrest Gander
Shoemaker & Hoard ($24)

by Elizabeth Robinson

Forrest Gander’s book of essays A Faithful Existence complements the author’s poetry handsomely, opening the heuristic properties of Gander’s work into another genre. Yet “essay” in the normal sense of the word is perhaps an inappropriate word for what occurs in these writings; I prefer “assay,” which “tries or puts to the test” and holds connotations of deep research, a “mining” that is altogether apropos for this poet who has a background in geology. The subtitle of the book frames its exploration provocatively, implying that, for Gander, a faithful existence has something of a religious dimension. However, in a series of appreciations, close readings, and meditations on translation and poetics, the author shapes his discussion to make manifest that he understands poetry-making as intrinsically processual, a practice that “rouses a consciousness that is not sufficiently awake.” Thus, the spirit that inheres in this work is not one that would fit into traditional religious categories, but one that measures transcendence as “a beyond of being” (Gander’s citation of Levinas) that is simultaneously fully embodied and keenly tuned to presences that bear up to no rational account.

It is no coincidence that the title of one of Gander’s poetry collections, Torn Awake, recurs at least twice in this book as a terminology he applies to poetics and to life itself. Gander shows the practice of poetry as an urgently ethical struggle. Through writing–or translation–the author is able to attend to otherness in a way that permits perception to stretch consciousness and create relationality. For instance, in “The Strange Case of Thomas Traherne,” the reader is introduced to the work of a 16th-century British poet whose extant writings were rescued from a rubbish fire in 1967. Gander excavates Traherne’s “COMMENTARIES of heaven” arguing compellingly that their visionary imagination “anticipates contemporary phenomenological urgencies.” Employing the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gander shows that Traherne foresees that “absence and negation presuppose presence and signification” and shows how this in turn leads to an enriched intersubjectivity (“a profound, extensive interpenetration of all beings and things”) that results from a “breakdown in the distinction between subjectivity and world.”

Similarly, Gander agilely reads the work of George Oppen, showing how Oppen both adopted and adapted ideas he had picked up from Heidegger and, likely, Merleau-Ponty. After pointing out the striking consonance between the language of Merleau-Ponty and Oppen, Gander claims that “in sloughing presumptions that circumscribe our thinking, both writers suggest we might step from the ruts of a conditioned perception into the clarity that each prizes.” The struggle is to keep oneself grounded in material experience, in the revelations of perception, and yet to maintain a sense of wonder: “a consciousness that is nothing if not a collaboration with the world.” Clearly, Gander appreciates the phenomenological agency of Traherne’s and Oppen’s work because it is so relates to his own understanding and practice. In essay after essay, the reader sees him striving for an “epistemological nakedness” that will refresh his relationship with language and the world.

I was repeatedly reminded of the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, who insisted that attentiveness has the power of the miraculous; to truly attend to a task or project can be transformative, a means through which the “self” becomes a conduit for a larger agency and consciousness.

There is, in Gander’s sensibility, a willingness to surrender, to be “cored out” in potentially ecstatic ways. In a series of pieces on and about translation, Gander compares language-in-transit (i.e., translation) with “the migration of souls into bodies over time.” If this is transcendence, then it is, equally, a slippery process, for there is no single celestial destination; rather the texts make “manifold journeys toward meaning.” Wary of the English-speaking translator’s propensity for making “colonial raids into other languages,” Gander emphasizes that the translator must try to disappear into translation so that the whole work—not merely individual words—is translated. Thus the text becomes more than a static entity, but a journey in its own right.

That this journey should lead the reader/writer “away from a world familiar by consensus” is another way in which we are awakened, and our revitalized senses are brought to bear on oddities of experience and perception. When I first read the book, I was particularly struck by aspects of its design. Notably, many of the essays are accompanied by photographs: of a nymph stick insect, of two boys fishing in Henry Dumas’s hometown, of a drawing of the fictive Araki Yasusada, of the writers Jaime Saenz and Robert Creeley . . . These photographs de-center the traditional essay’s focus on text and add dimension to Gander’s subjects. The image of Saenz, for example, ensconced in the gothic darkness of his apartment, his somber face echoed in a portrait that hangs just above him, make that poet a more tangible spirit. Further, Gander’s writing “about” Saenz is tantalizingly oblique since he interweaves morsels of biographical material into an account of his own trip to La Paz, Bolivia (where Saenz lived). The details that portray the visit to La Paz are variously mysterious, odd, and funny; their very sharpness brings Gander and Saenz into a living relationship. Likewise, Gander’s sensitive appreciations of Agha Shahid Ali and Robert Creeley movingly animate the two poets, their lives, and their work.

A Faithful Existence conjures a lush, almost erotic attentiveness to language into which all of us who are the co-inhabitants of language are invited. These writings are moving because Gander is passionately engaged with his subjects. Few writers of his formal range and intelligence so openly address the role of emotion in art-making. Gander doesn’t merely open the subject, he plunges in viscerally, making emotional experience a central part of his perceptual repertoire. In the interaction between two of Gander’s assertions—"relationship is consciousness itself” and “emotion [is] the ability to perceive”—arises a poetics of consummate empathy. The emotional and intellectual suppleness of these writings models a vulnerability that, in the end, is the best possible exemplar for faithful existence.

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Walter Benn Michaels
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company ($23)

by Brigitte Frase

On the television “reality” series Survivor, a group of people is dropped into a tropical wilderness and left to fend for itself with minimal supplies. The contestants are sorted into tribes, sometimes randomly, sometimes by age or gender. The tribes compete against each other for rewards. Within each group, therefore, people have to cooperate while at the same time manipulating and lying to each other because only one person can become the million dollar survivor.

This season the tribes were chosen by race, or as we now say, ethnic and cultural diversity. The four tribes are white, African-American, Asian and Latino. It makes me a little queasy to watch the groups adopting, albeit ambivalently, certain stereotypes about themselves. The Asians joke uneasily about how their physical prowess, as “little people” is under-estimated by the other groups. The black guys call the women “sisters” and talk about needing to prove they can swim and handle a boat as well as they play basketball and run track. Every tribe has a vague notion of “representing our people.” They invoke “blood and heritage.”

But what do they mean? In, for example, the artificially created African-American community, what does a nursing student have in common with a jazz musician, a make-up artist, a salesman and an actress? The situation is even odder in the Asian and Latino tribes where people of Korean descent are lumped with a Vietnamese immigrant and the descendants of Filipinos, while contestants descended from Mexicans are supposed to have something essential in common with Dominicans and South Americans.

It is fascinating to watch every one of these very disparate people willing to subscribe to identity politics, in which, no matter what your background, religion, language, core beliefs, education, job or income, you consider yourself, first and foremost, a member of an ethnic community.

It is a strange period in our country’s history, as Walter Benn Michaels points out. Biologists have shown there is no such category as race, and yet we go on behaving as if it exists. The one- drop rule, once used to justify Jim Crow laws, now serves as a badge of pride. You can be “black” even if you look “white,” prefer classical music to rap, don’t know ghetto slang and live in the suburbs. There is no physical basis to racial identification, but there isn’t a cultural one either.

So what’s going on? Why, Michaels asks, do we love to talk about race, a.k.a. cultural diversity?

Americans, guilty about racial prejudice, now bend over backwards to appreciate and celebrate other “cultures.” It has reached the (to me) absurd point that deaf people, or sufferers from other physical impairments, are also now considered to have a distinct and valid “culture,” as though it were more important to respect their disabilities than try to repair them.

The elephant in the room, Michaels argues with wit and style in this vigorous polemic, isn’t race, whether the bad kind, racism, or the good kind, diversity; it’s class. Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to recognize that we have rich people and poor people and that they are growing farther apart.

The trouble with diversity, then, is not just that it won’t solve the problem of economic inequality; it’s that it makes it hard for us even to see the problem. If we’re on the right, of course, it’s not clear that there is a problem. The right tends to regard economic inequality less as a political issue than as something like a fact of nature—maybe temporary (when free markets triumph, it will go away), maybe permanent (if people make the wrong choices, they have to pay for them), and, either way, not that big a deal (today even poor people have TVs; no one had TVs a hundred years ago.) The left [Michaels calls this group “neoliberals”] insists on giving poor people identities; it turns them into black people or Latinos or women and treats them as victims of discrimination, as if in a world without discrimination, inequality would disappear . . . And when people do want . . . to talk about inequality instead of identity, they are criticized by the right as too ideological [class warfare!] and by the left as insufficiently sensitive to the importance of race, sex, gender, et cetera—that is, as too ideological.

The income gap is growing, as is our national delusion that we are a class-less society. More people, mistakenly, identify themselves as middle class than actually qualify, as if belonging were a marker of status rather than income. In fact, the middle class is shrinking. Another delusion we have is the idea that there is equal opportunity—that everyone, by dint of hard work, can move up in class. Anyone, even a female, can grow up to be president! Michaels, relying on government statistics and a host of academic studies, demonstrates the falsity of American dreaming.

The surest way out of poverty is a good education that leads to decent jobs, but the diversity that every college in the nation embraces does not include the poor; they’re handicapped at the start of the climb. Segregated into poor neighborhoods with poor schools, they are the least likely of “communities” to qualify for diversity-based scholarships. The poor—black, white and every other “minority”—cannot compete. “There are very few poor people at Harvard, or… at any of the 146 colleges that count as “selective”: 3 percent of the students . . . come from the lowest socioeconomic quarter of American society; 74 percent come from the highest.”

The new historians of the working class seem to be turning it into just another separate-but- equal culture. They study its racial, sexual, cultural identifications, its taste in food and entertainment, its belief systems—everything except its work. “Where you used to just distract yourself from economic difference by focusing on cultural difference, now you can celebrate economic difference by pretending it is cultural difference.”[201] Labor Day celebrates the art of the barbecue.

Michaels is short on solutions, except for some vague gestures in the direction of socialism. At least he is not alone in his critique. There are signs that other people, from journalists to politicians, are beginning to worry about income inequality. The New York Times Magazine has published stories about the working poor and their lack of bootstraps. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickeled and Dimed, Thomas Frank wondered What’s the Matter with Kansas? The “Wal-Mart movement” decries the company’s wage and benefits structure. There’s even a new moderate evangelical group, Sojourners/Call for Renewal, lead by Jim Wallis, that—having apparently re-read the New Testament—wants to move away from “moral” issues to questions of social justice.

I agree with most of Michaels’ points. His insistence that we take off our multi-colored glasses and face the black-and-white issue of opportunity vis-a-vis wealth and poverty is powerful and rational. Perhaps even too rational. Humans are tribal in the worst and best ways: us against them, yes, but also, we want to belong to a kind of family that takes pride in us.

In his zeal to focus our attention on the growing problem of a class hierarchy, Michaels minimizes the continuing problem of racism. We’re not all respecting and admiring each other’s “culture.” Immigration “reform” and border patrols are in large part coded ways of saying we’re afraid of being engulfed by Them, with their foreign language, their foreign religion, their dark complexions. African-Americans can drink from any public water fountain they want, but they face continuing forms of unequal treatment, from banks to mortgage lenders to real estate agents to landlords to cab drivers. And whether they want to or not, they are always on notice to “represent” their race/culture; whether walking down a sidewalk or moving into a white neighborhood, they face the (usually) unspoken demand to prove themselves as upright and deserving citizens.

Currently Bill Cosby is raising money for a slavery museum, on the model of the Holocaust Museum. It’s about time, but for whites, it’s a cheap way to pay for an ugly past. As Walter Benn Michaels himself points out, also comparing the descendants of slaves to Holocaust survivors and their children, what they deserve—no, require—is justice in the form of financial reparations. That won’t resolve the larger and more intractable problem of the widening fissure between the rich and the poor, but it’s a start, a public dime well spent.

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Jane Gentry
Louisiana State University Press ($17.95)

by Matthew Duffus

Jane Gentry is a poet of formidable strengths, able to delicately intertwine speaker and place with her close attention to detail, and to create a clear connection between the subject and nature. In “A Human House,” the opening poem in her second collection, these strengths are on ample display from the start:

My house
is as real in the world
as water or air,
as the birds’ clear vowels
that rise through fading
light at the day’s end.

Many of Gentry’s poems take her native Kentucky as their setting and her family’s history—1870 to the present—as their subject. Even though such a personal approach could be limiting, Gentry’s awareness of her position in this order enriches her work, as in “The Reading Lamp.” Unable to remember the brand of the lamp, a gift to her grandfather for his 88th birthday, the speaker realizes that “I alone have lived to tell this / little story, and now I approach / the dark to which they’ve gone.” The lamp provides a “last hope” through its association with the departed, and though it “won’t yet yield its name,” the speaker takes consolation in its permanence.

Like the second-hand objects in “My Mother’s Room,” Gentry’s themes show the “polish / from loved hands before her own,” but her voice is so strong, her way of seeing so acute, that she draws in the reader—even in her most personal poems, like “To My Grandson, in the Womb, on Washington Heights,” where the speaker, lying in the Kentucky grass, thinks of her unborn grandson in New York:

I fear for you in that pell-mell
as never for my daughters. Someday
an Agamemnon might summon you to arms;
enemies may fix you in their crosshairs, you
without even bones to speak of!

Such fears are realized in “On the Eve of War with Iraq,” where the speaker juxtaposes her typical, mundane tasks—running errands, preparing to teach—with those of ordinary Iraqis, whose routines are freighted by the specter of war, and concludes, “Perhaps Heaven is earth / without the water of blood, / air without the song of breath.” Through subjects as diverse as Greek goddesses, post-9/11 New York, Iraq on the verge of war, and the details of her own personal history, Gentry confronts “how few of us are lucky enough to live / the life we’re prepared for.”

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Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press ($15)

by Joyelle McSweeney

The critic Jed Rasula offers a seminar on the Kafkaesque, focusing on the appropriation of Kafka as a trope of contemporary literature. The time may now be ripe for a course on the “Benjaminesque.” One can’t trudge three feet through a thick layer of contemporary poetry without tripping over the Angel of History like a cement doorstop. Recent collections have offered us Benjamin-as-costume (cf. Joshua Clover’s author photo on Totality for the Kids) and as puppet-protagonist (“Walter B.” in the work of Sabrina Orah Mark). The ideal literary godfather, he is an always-generous epigrapher.

The title sequence of Ben Lerner’s second volume, Angle of Yaw, inhabits Benjamin from the inside out, adopting sentence structures, themes, and even motifs from his more aphoristic texts such as One Way Street—which, yes, provides an epigraph for this book. Yet Lerner’s second epigraph is from Hart Crane, which points to a competing leaning of Angle of Yaw—away from Benjaminesque parable-izing and into hypertrophic fancy. Repeating characters—Cyrus, the Baron, Hamsun (the junior senator from Wisconsin), and even the happily named Lerner—interrupt the text at its most aphoristic moment and convert it to a kind of prose poetry, or even micro-fiction:

to build the world’s biggest mirror, to outdate the moon, to dream en masse, to sleepmarch, to watch earthrise from the anonymous depths of our diamond helmets, screams Hamsun, and the general will fall to the earth as highly stylized debris. For all that remains of the public are its enemies, whose image will not be returned, so let them eat astronaut ice cream, from which we have abstracted ice, let them read magazine verse in the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons commissioned to implant breasts into their brains. To pave the horizon with silver nitrate, to simulate the nation through reflected light, to watch over ourselves in our sleep, to experience mediacy immediately, screams Hamsun, raising his glass, by waking into a single dream, THE STATE.

What is “screams Hamsun” doing in and to this poem? Both times, grammar breaks down after the insertion of this phrase, obscuring what hypothesis is being proposed. Hamsun draws a fictive frame around the whole, suggesting that we perceive this poem not as a thought-problem but as pastiche, aphoristic tone and diction gone amok and shooting off Edsonesque sparks of absurdity, clause by wordy clause. By the time the parallel structure of the infinitives returns in the final sentence, it too seems like one more bit of style, gleefully rendered by Lerner-cum-Hamsun.

Certain strong flavors are thus mixed with Benjamin in this book—a touch of Edson and Tate here, a helping of Ben Marcus’s flattened tone and estranged allegories of cause and effect there. But the pleasure of this pastiche is distinctive to Lerner, as are certain fruitful motifs such as the astronauts, who in this volume represent not cultural heroes but maimed and voiceless victims of our tautological struggle for vantage. The quirky persistence with which Lerner pursues this theme lends a cumulative resonance to his many pungent images and satisfying turns of phrase, even if his style at times seems designed to disavow the book’s potential philosophical heft.

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Ilan Stavans
Triquarterly ($22.95)
by Katie Harger

Ilan Stavans, a well-known cultural critic and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at Amherst College, offers an uncommon look into the merger of Latin American and Jewish culture in his new collection of fiction, The Disappearance. Describing in the book’s preface his intent to examine “silence—both earthly and divine,” he sketches in two short stories and one novella the struggle of Jewish characters who attempt to find stability in a world where their identity is as unfixed as their diasporic locations.

“The Disappearance” is the first short story in the collection and tells the tale of Belgian-Jewish actor Maarten Soëtendrop, who stages his own kidnapping by the Flemish Facist Youth Front in 1987. Soëtendrop’s acting moves beyond the stage as he takes on the performative role of a person who has never felt at home, “staged in a theater as big as the entire world.” Stavans relates Soëtendrop’s experiment to the power of silence, finally explaining that his disappearance was a wordless escape from the world in which “all Jews are actors.” Maarten Soëtendrop’s true motives, however, are never completely explained; Stavans, who describes himself as “allergic to verbal excess,” clearly believes that silence is as important in literature as in life.

The novella “Morirse está in Hebreo” is framed around the death of Moishe Tartakovsky, a Mexican Jew whose sudden passing leaves his family with a legacy of mysterious silences. His mourners inhabit the microcosm of his weeklong shivah against the noisy backdrop of the 2000 Mexican presidential election, showing the ability of individual circumstance to mute supposedly larger issues. The title of the novella draws on the Spanish phrase estar en chino, which means that something is in Chinese, or figuratively unintelligible. “To die is in Hebrew,” then, denotes both the contrast of death to the life it supplants and the unsuccessful translation of that life into a set of cohesive memories and events. Moishe’s relatives must interpret the secrets of his life and form a picture of the person they have lost—a person about whose life, as president-elect Vicente Fox proclaims in the street outside his family’s window, “the age of innocence is over.”

The final and most thought-provoking short story in Stavans’s collection, “Xerox Man,” recounts the story of an Orthodox man in New York who steals, photocopies, and then burns valuable and historical Judaic texts owned by non-Orthodox institutions. The man, after his arrest, claims the value of his work lies in the fact that “everything is a copy of a copy”—God, he believes, has no plan of order for the world of chaos he has created. Stavans pits the silences of God against those of the realm of authenticity, and concludes that the Xerox man’s mission to fill those silences was “not about replicating but about creating.”

Although Stavans’s attempts to link the content of his stories and novella don’t fully succeed, what his text does not say is as important as what it does. The simple, factual descriptions he offers often lack the speculative analysis that would open them to metaphor but depict a world realistic for its multiplicity of meaning. In this spirit, Stavans unapologetically includes untranslated phrases in his book. “The multilayered nature of speech in a fractured universe like ours,” he believes, requires the same diligence of observation as its unpredictable social context. For his characters, the silences to be found in the world are as telling as the noises, and help to fashion a cultural identity that relies as much on its empty spaces as its filled ones.

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Michael Gardiner
Polygon ($22.50)

by Spencer Dew

“There are more escalators in Tokyo than in any other city in the world.” So begins this debut collection of stories about Japan from Scottish theorist-cum-storyteller Michael Gardiner. Automated staircases and sidewalks eliminate the need for human movement, which Gardiner equates with human decision-making. Japan, too, is a metaphor here, a sleek and smoothly operating machine culture in which authentic human experience or contact has been rendered impossible. What desire exists is restless and sublimated, satisfied with hotel porn—its mosaic of pink cubes “always [hiding] the main action.” Some men masturbate to uniformed schoolgirls on commuter trains, while others pay for online access to a woman who has agreed to live under 24-hour web cam surveillance. She showers in her swim suit and changes clothes without revealing a single pubic hair, yet “things often fall to the floor in this room: she drops them clumsily, bending from the hips when she picks them up. She uses this same movement when looking around in her fridge.”

Every character is trapped on his or her own horrific “escalator,” either as fetish object or foreigner, failed husband, failed employee or dead soul. The best stories are explicitly surreal, even haunting. In his more realistic, slice-of-life moments, horror lurks just under the glossy surface of the “cute” or “utilitarian.” Take, for instance, the device expectant mothers can apply to their abdomens. It recites conversational English phrases so that a fetus can cram for the competitive world of international business while still inside the womb.

Just as Gardiner’s world is one where people feel trapped in transit, it is also a world where translation malfunctions. An Iranian immigrant is relegated to reciting simple phrases to children in an ESL classroom, reduced to a machine, as his fluency in Japanese goes unrecognized and unaccepted. In another nightmare scenario, a now-homeless IT professional keeps track of time with “a watch-face he’d found in the gutter,” which:

kept perfect time, going forward seventeen hours for every twelve of world-time. On the back wall of the shack there was a doubled-up sheet of cardboard shored up against cold, and calculations covered every square centimeter. All involved the numbers twelve and seventeen.

The text itself follows a kind of distortion, its cold and distant san serif script conveying a stilted prose style resembling computerized translation. “Shinkansen—which are still known, to those who fill the world with English words while refusing words entry into English, as ‘bullet trains’—come in three types,” begins one story. Gardiner also cultivates a quality of cliché, of blank description, of deus ex machina narratives: in the final paragraph of a story, the protagonist walks down a street and stumbles “against a male student holding a book on archaeology, a subject his Prestigious University counsellor had advised him to give up for the Law.”

Gardiner wants his readers to be jarred by, alienated from, the very language he uses. This is an interesting idea in the abstract but can make for painful reading, as Gardiner often lacks the skill to employ it effectively, with restraint.

Yet, there are moments, also, where Gardiner the theorist—he is the author of several critical works on Scottish literature—hatches a beautiful idea in the mouth of one of his cardboard characters. A meat pie inspires one such turn:

(It) tasted authentic, as authentic as the British souvenirs in the terminal shops. In airports, things are always authentic. Sometimes you get exhausted by the authentic, and crave the inauthentic again.

This collection would have benefited from more such moments, moments of real connection between text and reader—moments of lyricism, even. One character wonders “when he had allowed the slip from active to passive mood and had stopped thinking out how to spend each day. Once he had spent days; now his days took place.” One hopes that, with time, Gardiner develops a better balance in his fiction, a balance between stylized technique and allowing the words themselves to speak.

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Chris Adrian
McSweeney’s Books ($24)

by Kelly Everding

Humankind’s attraction to end-of-the-world scenarios might indicate some underlying guilty consciousnesses—whatever we’re supposed to be doing here on earth, we’re not doing a very good job of it. Chris Adrian taps into that fear/fascination with his new novel, The Children’s Hospital, where the microcosm of a hospital becomes a focusing lens with which to examine the reactions of a small surviving sample of people lost and afloat in a strange sort of ark. What at first seems so random and odd—a children’s hospital suddenly floating above seven miles of condemnatory, inky-black water—later seems so obvious, such a necessary conceit. What better way to bring together the meek and the proud, the advocates and cynics, the best and worst of humanity, than a children’s hospital, where the patients serve as reminders of how far we’ve fallen—abused, forgotten, stricken by horrible diseases, some loved a little too much for their own good. The innocent have no say in their treatment or mistreatment, most of the time.

As Adrian tells us, “It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and to save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.” By design then, the hospital is infused with and driven by the preserving angel, who provides the ark’s inhabitants with food, clothing, materials for making just about anything, movies that existed and didn’t exist, her own special brand of cherubic song, and insipid encouragement that puts everyone on edge. Adrian builds his story deftly, moving between the voices of these angels who each have their say about their role in this particular apocalypse, and following, in particular, an intern named Jemma Claflin. (Those who have read Adrian’s first novel, Gob’s Grief, may recognize that name, and Jemma may be related to “the notorious Claflins of Homer, Ohio,”—however Gob’s Grief takes place during and after the American Civil War, so Jemma’s destiny may have rained down upon her through generations of these ne’er-do-wells and odd folk.) Although a lowly intern who constantly questions her own abilities, Jemma is the focus of these angels, particularly the recording angel, whose “expiation” and “reward” is “to orbit Jemma Claflin from her birth to her death.” Her lineage and role in this saga is pivotal. Haunted by the ghosts of her dead family, and especially her beloved brother Calvin (who, as we learn from the recording angel, committed suicide in a ghastly, ritualistic manner), Jemma believes herself to be cursed to see everyone she loves die, and she is not far off in her assessment.

As the story progresses, it appears that some of these angels are aspects of her dead brother come back to watch over Jemma—though they are also aspects of the human psyche, the warring facets of a self that at once wants to save and destroy everything it holds dear. This is reflected in Jemma and Calvin’s parents—self involved, raging, loving, over-protective, and ultimately failures. Whether in reflection of his upbringing, or as an innate sensibility, Calvin was always intent on destroying himself, of “going” as he puts it (“Going is scary. Important things are scary. But it has to happen,” Calvin tells Jemma on her fourth birthday), and seemed to foresee the necessity for his death. Jemma, of course, cannot understand the reason for any of these events happening to her and falls back on superstitions, fearing for her boyfriend and fellow intern, Rob Dickens. Her best friend Vivian, another surviving med student, embarks on a list of all the reasons this “Thing” happened to them.

The “Thing” results in endless rounds for the doctors and med students—36-hour shifts that fulfill the nightmares med students must have as they walk zombie-like through rooms and rooms of patients, the feeling that they’ve always been there and always will be there. Adrian makes the nightmare come true in a macabre yet hilarious manner. He populates the hospital with all the likely suspects: vain, self-important doctors, inept med students, eye-rolling nurses, hysterical mothers. They’re all there and they don’t really change their ways after this biblical disaster. Jemma, who becomes pregnant from an early tryst with Rob (actually on the day the flood happened), finally comes into her own when she suddenly develops fiery-green healing powers and zaps the illness out of 698 of the 699 sick children, the only exception being the loveable psych patient Pickie Beecher, a seven-year-old boy who was somehow air-lifted from Gob’s Grief—and if you read Adrian’s first novel (and I highly recommend you do because it is startlingly beautiful), you will find out where Pickie Beecher comes from and why the protecting angel calls him an “abomination.” But once every little illness has been eradicated by Jemma’s scary powers, what is there left to do in the hospital?

Take away the children and nothing would change—she knew that, too. The unfulfilled ambitions of an empty hospital make it even more intensely hospital-like. A hundred nurses with no data to fill the many boxes of their flow sheets, surgeons sharpening their knives in anticipation of a feast never to arrive, radiologists staring forlornly at their empty light boxes; in their lonely boredom they’d manufacture a hospital-feeling so intense Jemma was sure it would be palpable and oppressive. Leave the children and take away the sickness and then…what?

In The Children’s Hospital, the end of the world (as we know it) begins with an inception, the conceiving of a child between Jemma and Rob, and the story develops like the baby within her womb—growing, maturing to the point when it has to either come out or die. This is the story that needs to be told, the reason why the world ends (“It wasn’t global warming!” chimes a hopeful slogan to boost employee morale). Adrian, with great humor, compassion, and lyricism, deftly chronicles the adaptation of the survivors to this new reality, revealing in a microcosm the failures and achievements of flawed people—and particularly flawed Americans. Our struggle to find or make meaning out of the seemingly random and cruel things that happen to us has, in part, resulted in our culture of materialism and corruption and war. It’s hard to see the Bigger Picture from within the Big Picture, and perhaps we need to be out of the picture entirely (i.e. dead) to see it. At its core, The Children’s Hospital is largely about belief and faith and the imagination—an imagination so powerful as to think up a whole new world, or at least a whole new way to get to it.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007

by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Clare Dudman is a remarkable writer of mostly historical fictions who has garnered praise from The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, among others. Her background as a scientist informs her work, but in unexpected ways. In her novel Wegener’s Jigsaw (published in the United States as One Day the Ice Will Reveal All of Its Dead), for example, explorations of science take on a rare poetic grace and cadence. With her unique ability to explore science through fully realized, personal portrayals of real people from the past, she may be one of the most criminally underrated novelists working today.

Dudman was born in North Wales and has worked as an academic and industrial research scientist as well as a teacher of chemistry and a lecturer in creative writing. In 1995 her children’s novel Edge of Danger won the Kathleen Fidler award and in 2001 an excerpt from Wegener’s Jigsaw (Sceptre, UK, and Viking, US) won an Arts Council of England Writers award. This enabled her to travel to northwest Greenland, Denmark, and Germany to research the novel, which is based on the life of Alfred Wegener—the man who developed the idea of continental drift. Her second novel for adults, 98 Reasons for Being (also published by Sceptre and Viking), is also based on the life of a scientific revolutionary; it involves the fictional encounter of an early psychiatrist with a depressed young patient. She has recently completed a novel about the Welsh in Argentina.

We interviewed Dudman via email during the spring and fall of 2006.

Rain Taxi: What past experiences have most shaped you as a writer?

Clare Dudman: I went to night class once a week for several years which was led by a poet. I think that has influenced my writing a great deal, especially the descriptive sections.

Also various novels I've read—the sparseness of Coetzee, the easy inclusion of the fabulous by Salman Rushdie, the way Margaret Atwood suddenly startles and yet completely convinces me on almost every page, the apparent ease with which Toni Morrison incorporates her lyricism, and her liberty of expression, Angela Carter's fearlessness, George Orwell's clarity of expression, the way Graham Swift grabs you so firmly by the hand and takes you with him so assuredly, Vladimir Nabokov's metaphors which somehow seem to claw their way into my soul, and Kazuo Ishiguro's way of seeming to tell nothing and yet saying everything, I especially love that, and, a recent discovery, which I know will influence me in the future, is the work of W. G. Sebald—he intermixes fact and fiction in an exhilaratingly different way. I suppose reading has been my biggest influence. Since I have had little formal teaching in this business of being a writer, I feel that most of the time it is a sort of bungling—there is not much of a plan, and when I try to make one, the book takes another direction entirely.

RT: Your books are literary historical fiction, so many of your characters are real people. How do you approach writing about real people differently than creating your own characters?

CD: For the real people I try to find as much as I can about them and look at their written work and see if I can find a voice. That is the main thing. With Wegener, that was easy—he wrote diaries that were obviously romantic, and in some way, I felt, poetic—so I used that voice throughout the novel. For instance, when he described first seeing the ice, he wasn't at all the clinical scientist; he talked about the amazing colors he could see, the way the setting sun made more colors appear.

RT: And for Hoffman?

CD: For Hoffmann it was more difficult. He wrote memoirs but the only voice that came over from these was, I thought, not terribly interesting. When he visits different asylums in Europe, for instance, he lists what he was given to eat and drink—not very illuminating. I felt the man himself was much more interesting than this—he was rebellious and a revolutionary in his youth and had obviously been a very determined person to revolutionize the care of the mentally ill in Frankfurt—so I searched around for clues elsewhere. I interviewed experts, looked at a biography, read very widely the ideas that were prevalent at the time, to try and get into the mind of a 19th-century alienist. It was incredibly complicated. I also looked at his casebook and examined the symptoms and treatments he recorded.

The other main character in the book, Hannah Meyer, is based on a few lines in Hoffmann's casebook, but apart from that she is fictional. But again I based the character on my reading—there are some wonderful firsthand accounts of life in mental asylums and also of life in the Jewish ghettos in Germany in the 19th-century.

I also explored Frankfurt itself. Although much of the city was flattened during the Second World War, some of the original buildings have been reconstructed and the layout of the streets is the same, so I found the place where the mental asylum used to be and went there. It was strange—it was suddenly quiet after the bustling main street and quite haunting. It made a strong impact on me. I also found the plans and drawings of the exterior of the asylum so I could see exactly how it was, and why Hoffmann felt it needed to be changed. All of this provided me with a strong impression of the setting—so all I had to do was to put my invented characters in there.

RT: Did you find it difficult to write about a real person? Were you concerned that you might not get it right?

CD: Yes, writing about a real person was constricting—especially writing about Alfred Wegener, who has a number of fairly close relatives, including one daughter, who is still alive. I didn't want to hurt them, but I didn't want to make the book too bland either. It was a bit worrying to meet one of Alfred Wegener's grandchildren and for him and his mother to read the book. But to my great relief they liked it—in fact the daughter said that she was glad that a different side of her father's life—the human one—had been investigated. She then went on to say that she felt she had been given both of her parents as a present, because she had only been 11 when he died, which I thought was very touching. I have been contacted by other people who knew the family and have been able to put them back in touch, which seems to have pleased everyone. I was even contacted by the daughter of another character in the book who seemed to be happy with my account—another relief. I have not yet been told about anything that I got wrong, although I am sure that is because everyone is being kind—I expect there are mistakes, although I did try to find out all I could.

RT: And how about with 98 Reasons for Being?

CD: For Hoffmann, it was not such a problem because he lived a couple more generations ago. Also the work was more fictional: his patient Hannah never existed, although there was a girl admitted to his asylum who was treated very much like Hannah was, and he did try out this sort of moral therapy once. I did research the setting, psychiatric ideas of the time, and Hoffmann's history and character very thoroughly. A couple of Hoffmann experts have given their approval—though they thought Hoffmann was more of an optimist than the way I portrayed him. But of course Hoffmann died over a hundred years ago now, so no one really knows.

RT: Much of your work seems to be organic, tied strongly to the physical world. In what ways does your scientific background add or detract from your fiction?

CD: In my scientific work I tend to see things visually—I always like to find a model I can see—and I think I use this way of imagining things in my fiction. So I think, in general, my scientific background adds rather than detracts. As a chemist I guess I am used to thinking of things on a molecular scale; I like to think of what the molecules are doing, where they are going and my characters tend to do this as well. They think about the air they are breathing in—rather too much, sometimes. Perhaps that is how my scientific background detracts—sometimes I get too involved in explaining things that fascinate me, and that might interrupt the flow a little, which slows things down—so a lot tends to go out when I redraft.

RT: Does it get in the way when you are reading someone else’s science-based fiction if they get the science wrong? How important is it in fiction to get the factual details right?

CD: Yes, I have to confess that incorrect detail can get in the way a little. I read a Booker-winning or Booker short-listed book a few years ago which was about a scientist, and that author had got a few details wrong, but since the rest of the writing was wonderful (as usual) I found it more reassuring than anything that even a person like this makes mistakes; I think it allowed me to forgive myself more. A novel is such a complicated thing—the continuity, the plot, the detail, the characters—you have to keep everything in your head at once, and sometimes I think it is impossible to get everything exactly right. I think what irritates me more than incorrect facts is bad grammar—novels that are full of sentences you have to read several times, not because they are overly complicated, but because they are badly written. This irritates me in newspapers too.

RT: In addition to writing, you also teach. What are some of your more memorable moments in teaching creative writing? How is it different from teaching the hard sciences?

CD: I used to teach creative writing to adults in a village hall which we used to share with other groups—there were plenty of comical episodes associated with that!

One thing I found was that I had to be careful. Creative writing affects people very strongly. I have had lots of people moved to tears as I have encouraged them to use memories in their work. It is impossible to know when this will happen—even using the most innocent thing, like using objects from a hand bag or imagining going into a house can cause all sorts of things to be revealed. I used to find that the group tended to become quite close as a result. Sometimes it is therapeutic and cathartic—but I have to admit that it sometimes worried me.

When I taught undergraduates they were quite revealing in a different sort of way—I remember one girl gave a pretty explicit account of the previous night's sexual gymnastics, which was interesting at nine o'clock on a Monday morning.

That sort of thing never happened in chemistry lessons. Chemistry is perceived as a difficult subject and there is a lot of learning and understanding involved, so everything has to be much more disciplined and formal. I did try to liven things up, though, by using drama and writing in my teaching even then—we used to pretend to be molecules interacting, and I used to tell the lower sets stories about Mrs. Proton living with Mr. Neutron and having an affair with Mr. Electron to try and introduce the idea of charges. However when they started writing about the adventures of “Mr. Neutron” in their exam answers I had to stop that.

RT: With the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of blogs, it seems that everyone is a writer these days. How is a face-to-face workshop/class different/better than the instant virtual feedback that writers seek online?

CD: This is such an interesting question—and not something I have thought about much before. I suppose for one thing the feedback online—which I value enormously—is from anyone that happens to come across it, whereas in a class you are usually tutored by someone who either spends a lot of time writing and has some credibility in the field because they have been published themselves, or has an interest and some qualifications in English and therefore has studied enough to be able to give pertinent and useful criticism. Of course some of the people that comment on blogs are in the same category—but they don't have to be. Also I think that some people who write blogs (and I suppose I am one of those people) write them just as a satisfying and public way of recording their lives and practicing their art. I don't think they necessarily want criticism—they just want contact. Whereas in a class people have come in order to improve their craft. Also the class critique is more instantaneous and interactive. Even when I have an email conversation, it is sometimes frustratingly slow and, perhaps more importantly, the various nuances of speech and expressions of voice and face are lost.

RT: Do the benefits of distractions like the Internet outweigh the negatives?

CD: To be honest, I sometimes feel I have a problem with the Internet, and I have noticed I am not alone in this. I am constantly checking my mail—if I am out of contact with it for a few hours I feel a little edgy as if I am missing something, which is totally ridiculous. I also spend far too long writing in emails, and twice have sent off emails by mistake—nothing too serious, just bared my tortured soul rather more than I intended. Once I immediately followed a mistakenly sent email with another email to the bemused recipient ( my editor) saying “Don't read that!”—which of course ensured that it was read even more assiduously than it would have been otherwise.

I also find that I discover too much online. In fact, my agent has advised me not to look—bad reviews can be so destructive if you let them—and I am afraid that I have. Of course I have only discovered these reviews by looking on the Internet—because publishers never send you anything except good reviews. I have found it very hard to give a talk about your book or even teach creative writing with a bad review ringing in my ears. But then what is one man's poison often turns out to be another man's meat—there are few books that have been written that everyone has liked. I have to make more effort to remember that, and people in general do tend to be kind, so I think there are more good things written than bad.

And of course the Internet is an invaluable research tool. It never ceases to amaze me that any detail I require seems to be there, and without it I would not be able to keep in contact with so many people across the planet as I do now. I value that enormously.

On balance, I would find it difficult to live without the Internet now, particularly as a writer—I think it might be a little like losing one of the senses.

RT: You do a lot of traveling in pursuit of your fiction. Do you pick a place specifically to visit in order to address a certain work, or do you get inspired through your travels in general?

CD: For Wegener I sent in my work for an award saying that if I got it I would follow in Wegener's footsteps to a remote part of northwest Greenland—never dreaming that I would get it—so when I did, I had to go. To be honest, I was terrified. Chris, my spouse, doesn't like traveling, so we had never been anywhere much together since we'd been married (about 20 years). But when I went I really loved it. In order to get to the Kamarujuk glacier where Alfred Wegener last went onto the ice, I had to go on two small planes (which had luggage strapped down in the middle of the passenger cabin), and then go on a helicopter to one of the islands off the Greenlandic coast, then find someone to take me in a small boat past icebergs and calving glaciers for 12 hours. It was an amazing trip—with incredibly beautiful scenery—and having seen it and been there I think it really helped my writing.

I wrote all the time—on small airplanes, on helicopters, at terminals, everywhere I could, soaking it in, trying to take it all down, imagining what it would have been like to be Wegener. It was much better than being a tourist. It has been the same when I have gone to more temperate places. I've felt like I'm on a trail, finding the house where Wegener once lived, for instance, and asking people if they knew anything in the street nearby, and finding out where he was born and where he studied.

Since then I've traveled across Patagonia on my own for the book I am writing now which was also exciting—it’s such an incredibly flat place—quite surreal.

I do find seeing places I have never been to before exciting, even if they are places which are quite close to where I live. Anything new makes me want to write. Over the last couple of years I have traveled up and down the U.K. giving talks on my books and my research. I've enjoyed this very much. It's incredibly tiring but exhilarating in a way too. I think travel is essential for some writers, certainly this one—it makes me look outside myself for new stimulation.

RT: Where else would you like to travel to and why?

CD: Tibet, Bhutan, and Lake Baikal (that's your fault, Jeff—I read one of your short stories set there). I love the idea of being somewhere very alien and unusual. I've also read some interesting books set in this part of the world and would like to investigate their philosophies to life.

RT: What is the bravest thing you have ever done?

CD: That's quite a difficult question—things like crossing a desert in a bus full of strangers and only being able to communicate with anyone around me by signs and drawings could be thought of as brave by some, but it isn't really. I didn't think about it much, I just did it without considering at all what might go wrong. I think being brave is doing something that you really are afraid of doing and yet do it anyway—it can be small and totally unspectacular and yet you need to drive yourself forward with gritted teeth. I used to be shy; standing in front of over a hundred people used to bother me so much I had to take beta blockers to stop myself shaking. But I suppose the thing I am most proud of doing is visiting the dying—it is something that most people have to do, but I feel such dread that all I want to do is run the other way; it takes all my determination to keep walking forward.

RT: Who are your heroes and why?

CD: Alfred Wegener because he stood up for what he believed despite derision; all the writers mentioned above, I guess; one of my editors who I actually rarely speak to but who always manages to say exactly the right thing when we do. Actually that is the thing about heroes—it is important not to know them too well, that way you can admire their heroic acts without them being besmirched by human ordinariness. Then there are a couple of my teachers from school with whom I am still in contact, who inspired me enormously to write and keep on writing; and also my aerobics teacher who is always so dependably cheerful and enthusiastic.

Apart from that people who stood up for civil rights—Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Mrs. Pankhurst and her fellow fighters for female emancipation.

I find heroes everyday writing their blogs on the Internet—people fighting dreadful odds with such great cheer that I feel ashamed at my own pathetic grumbles and vow never to take things for granted again—which lasts for five minutes, usually.

RT: What do you think are important qualities and skills for a writer to have?

CD: Dedication, to love the feeling of getting the right word on the page, a compulsion to write and keep going, the deranged idea that someday you will get it right if you just keep going, the ability to shut off the world, a great deal of selfishness and self-belief, a single-minded destructiveness, the ability to see things in a different way and communicate this new way of seeing on the page, sensitivity to the world around you, someone to support you and who thinks everything you do is fabulous, to be thick-skinned and not care what the critics say, dogged determination, the ability to see the good in the most psychopathic megalomaniac, and see the bad in the most saintly priest . . . I realize that a lot of these qualities are contradictory; so maybe you have to be more than a touch schizophrenic too.

RT: Do these qualities conflict with living in the real world?

CD: Yes. All professional writers that I know are dedicated to such an extreme that they will do anything to write and cannot understand that this is not the only thing that is important in the world. They begin to live in the impossible world they have invented; they are sensitive to an extraordinary and destructive degree. When they are not writing they say they feel not quite right, as if they can't get their breath. Of course this is just all other writers—and not me!

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007

Thomas Pynchon
The Penguin Press ($35)

by Scott Esposito

Thomas Pynchon's modern picaresques are best when they dazzle. His masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, remains his most staggering and compelling work because it eschews plot and character in favor of, in the words of Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books, "a tortured cadenza of lurid imaginings and total recall that goes on longer than you can quite believe." Gravity's Rainbow is often called encyclopedic, but this term only works if one imagines the books as an encyclopedia written by one mind, and therefore bent toward all the special obsessions, paranoias, insights, and linkages that make that one mind unique. Pynchon's books compel because of their sheer virtuosity but also because they bring to light Pynchon's horrible, amazing vision of the world.

The new Pynchon novel, Against the Day, contains much that dazzles. A loose count would include a sheep brothel; a man disguised as a jelly donut who's planning a breakout from an insane asylum; multitudes of drugs (from absinthe frappés to small dosages of dynamite to hallucinogenic Mexican cactuses to the more traditional ganja); a frontier outlaw town "like a religious painting of hell used to scare kids"; a minor character who appears as Saint Mark in another character's prophetic vision; invisible chilies that are used in an impossibly hot hot sauce; doomsday odalisques pulled out from under fake polar glaciers; dog-sized, highly evolved ticks that discuss with you the matter of sucking your blood; suits that let you walk beneath sand; communication via gas injected into London's Underground; anarchist plots to make the world's supply of gold explode; a harmonica band; a coffee enema; bilocation; and of course sex—sex with whips and manacles and gloves and leather, regular sex in the middle of a storm in Trieste, tied-up lesbian sex, gay blackmail sex, threesomes at the Four Corners.

But for all the madcap energy, Against the Day also has its share of clunky scenes that do little more than add to its size. These are most concentrated in the book's first 250 pages where the foundations of plots are being poured in, backstories (many of which are unnecessary) are being dumped out, and characters are being defined. Once this book is revved up, however, there are few stalls; I read the last half of it at a sprint, and my feeling on finishing this 1,085-page monster—300 pages longer than anything Pynchon has ever written—was not exhaustion but exhilaration.

Although Against the Day may be Pynchon's last novel, its subject matter has been on his mind since his first. At one point in V., a character reflects, "suppose sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle—blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether—fatal." Encompassing the years between 1887 and 1920, Against the Day can be taken as Pynchon's attempt to describe how the disease—modernity—was contracted.

The symptoms start early. Sixty pages into the book, Pynchon takes us alongside the Michelson-Morely experiment, which disproved the existence of ether and sent physics down the road that would lead to the theory of relativity and bring about a universe without fixed points. The book also travels through the 1893 World's Fair, an epicenter of colonialism and progress. It's here that we meet the Chums of Chance, a globetrotting network of airship pilots that flit around performing mysterious duties. Throughout the book, Pynchon follows the adventures of one airship crew of five (six counting their Henry James–reading dog) as they travel through the hollow Earth via a hole in the south pole, swim under the deserts of Central Asia in search of the lost city of Shambhala, and hang around erupting volcanoes taking measurements for Nikolai Tesla. The reasons for their missions remain obscure to both them and us, and their plotline is further complicated by the fact that they are the stars of a series of dime novels. Many of their adventures, even when they interact with other characters from Against the Day, occur within the context of the books, which are portrayed whimsically and bring the book a feeling of innocence.

Not long after seeing the Chums at the World's Fair, we enter the life of a miner-turned-anarchist named Webb Traverse. Within 100 pages Webb is dispatched by a couple of hired guns under the pay of Scarsdale Vibe, a sort of J. P. Morgan-cum-Goldfinger. Two of Webb's sons, Frank and Reef, go off seeking revenge. Frank ends up part of the Mexican revolution, and Reef ends up in Europe hunting down Vibe. Meanwhile, Webb's daughter Lake marries one of the outlaws, and his last son Kit, a math genius, accepts Vibe's offer of full paid tuition, eventually heading to Germany to study advanced math.

All this is complicated by a rare variant of calcite called Iceland spar. Calcite double-refracts light, producing a doubled image of anything viewed through it, but in Pynchon's book Iceland spar does even more—it lets people see into the fourth dimension, time, thereby showing them the shadow-world that surrounds us all like a colorless, odorless gas. When one character looks at a nugget of silver through this mysterious substance, he finds: "Not only had the entire scene doubled and, even more peculiarly, grown brighter, but as for the two overlapping images of the nugget itself, one was as gold as the other was silver."

This fourth dimension revealed by Iceland spar becomes a common symbol linking many parts of the novel. It is alternately referenced as a sort of heaven, a means of time travel, a hidden world that controls ours, and, significantly, a power that can be harnessed for a superweapon.

Into all this steps Yashmeen Halfcourt, an impossibly gorgeous young woman who seems to be at the center of the impending European war. When we meet her, she is the ward of a society of British neo-Pythagoreans bent on some obscure quest related to Europe's Great Powers rivalry. They are protecting her because her adoptive father is a colonel in Central Asia. "Perhaps because of some rogue psychic gift, perhaps only the secular gravity of whatever her father is up to out in Inner Asia, she's being bedeviled by two or three Powers at once . . . with of course Germany towering in the shadows backstage, whispering cues." Yashmeen is also a math genius and soon meets Kit at school in Germany, dispatching him to Central Asia where he searches for the lost city of Shambhala. She's also the unrequited love of a low-grade British spy whom we follow through the Balkans in the run-up to World War I. Eventually she becomes the dominant in a perverse Anglo-American sadomasochistic triad and even develops into a symbol of the growing anti-Semitism that will fuel many of the 20th century's great conflicts.

We have been here before with Pynchon. Shadow societies that may be running our world. A proliferation of information that comprises nodes in a plot so complex that it can't be written down because language is too blunt an instrument. The entropy that obscures the forces of history. A choice between a mad world or one that follows paranoid logic. These themes that Pynchon has so expertly drawn on in previous books are once again brought into service, and quite well. But has Pynchon done something new with Against the Day?

I think so. Throughout his career, Pynchon has regarded the birth of modernity as an epochal moment (the chapter in V. surrounding the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring comes to mind), but he has never pursued the subject through an entire novel. Against the Day, his effort to address this gap, brings us new metaphors and ideas that have not been taken up in any other of his books.

The book does worst when it's in the old American West. The scenes of Webb Traverse's peregrinations as an anarchist fighting to save his union from corporate oppression are meant to convey the last gasps of a world soon to be extinguished, but they feel hollow. The battles between the die-hard Webb and his homemaking wife lack energy, and even the eventual demise of Webb, and with him his ideology of Socialism at any cost, is merely described. Further, the plotline of Webb's daughter Lake, who elopes with one of the bandits that killed Webb, feels grafted on and is eventually abandoned. It satisfies neither emotionally nor structurally. For instance, here is Pynchon's complete explanation for why Lake fell in love with the man who murdered her father:

And it might turn out, to Lake's own surprise as much as anybody's, that she was one of these passionate young women who believed as the Mexican señoritas like to say that without love one cannot live. That any entrance of it into her life would be like unexpected laughter or finding religion, a gift from the beyond that she must not allow to just exit again and pretend it was gone forever. Unfortunately, “it” had now arrived in the form of Deuce Kindred, for whom her loathing would come to be inseparable from her passion.

Such sloppy writing might be forgiven if Lake was only meant to be a Pynchonian cipher that eventually came to bear interesting symbolic weight, but alas no. After this paragraph we are asked to follow Lake's disintegrating marriage for the better part of 100 pages. Stuck with such sketchy descriptions of Lake and her motivation to marry Deuce, however, we have no reason to care much about her or her marriage, and so these pages read like so much empty plotting, filler we hurry through to get back to the good stuff.

But although the book is flawed, for the most part it's excellent. The characters (aside from the uninspired Lake) are manic Pynchonian creations, equal parts slapstick humor and revelation. Reconstructions of the White City in the throes of the 1893 World's Fair, a convention of aetherists surrounding the famed Michelson-Morely experiment, and the ritzy and scummy sides of New York City are all vintage Pynchon. The author also scores in Europe, especially when describing a math-hungry university in Göttingen and a moonlit Venice (soon to be eradicated by electricity) that is swarming with intrigue. These places, as well as many in Central Asia, are filled with Pynchon's trademark historical details—the kind that sound made-up until you research them and discover that they are actually real.

Certain themes pop up again and again. First among them is the railroads being feverishly built by Europe's powers. It is repeatedly implied that while they lay these train tracks, the Europeans are also laying the landscape of a new reality that will rush them to war as swiftly as trains rush to their destination. At one point a student of the European arms buildup remarks, "The railroads seem to be the key. . . . the rail system grows toward a certain shape, a destiny." More broadly speaking, the tracks also double as representatives of the contortions of time and space being ushered in by the technology of the new era.

There are also many doubles in this book, including a cruise liner with a battleship hidden within its bowels and a palindromous pair of battling professors named Renfrew and Werfner. The latter pair comes to symbolize a Europe that, while ostensibly a group of discrete countries about to erupt in war, is really an organic whole as inseparable as the currents of money that flow so effortlessly between borders. Pynchon seems to be using doubles to explore the hidden connections between superficially different things, and as the doubles pile up, two questions come with them: Which is the original? and Who has control?

Light itself is doubled by the Iceland spar, revealing the existence of another world (in effect a doubling of the Earth), but light also pops up in other guises: a handmaiden to destiny, a means of new communication (wireless transmissions), an impossible riddle for science, the substance that we are really made of. Throughout the book, light is captured by many cameras, again referencing a modern invention that would change our concepts of time and space. At one point a mysterious light illuminates night into dusk for a month, offering a moment of transcendence before Europe takes back up the business of descending into chaos. One of the book's signal events, the horrific explosion that occurred over Siberia's Tunguska region, is described solely thus: "A heavenwide blast of light." Humanity can't live without light, for as Thelonious Monk says in the book's epigraph, "It's always night," but Pynchon seems to be telling us that it is also a force that humans take into their bosom at their own peril.

And lastly, there are many hints of the present. Before bin Laden, the anarchism that is being extinguished in Against the Day was history's most notable use of terrorism against progress. Conjuring up references to today, the corporate scum that rule Pynchon's world are described as people "whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis [i.e. materialism] and nothing beyond it." In a clear nod at yesterday's seeding of today's terrorists, Pynchon writes that the weapons the great powers used to colonize Central Asia fell into the hands of goat herders, falconers, shamans, to be taken out into the emptiness, disassembled, studied, converted to uses religious and practical, and eventually to change the history of the World-Island beyond even the most unsound projections of those Powers who imagined themselves somehow, at this late date, still competing for it.

Against the Day may contain a warning for the denizens of this day, but it is primarily an investigation into how the world, out of all the destinies it might have followed, settled down into the course that defined the 20th century. Thus it complements V. and Gravity's Rainbow, which sought to understand what this century had wrought, as well as Mason & Dixon, which investigated how the process toward modernity first got going. It is a loose and baggy book that is at times frustrating, but it is a frustration that is worth enduring for the chance to experience Pynchon's explanation of this disease that we all now share.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007