M. T. Anderson
Beach Lane Books ($16.99)

by William Alexander

M. T. Anderson has written another Pals in Peril Tale. If you have children, or know any children, or have ever in your life seen or heard of children, use that as an excuse to find and read this book immediately.

Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger! follows the further adventures of Lilly—a wonderfully ordinary protagonist who mistakes herself for a sidekick—and her two conventionally heroic friends, Katie and Jasper. Katie is a young teen accustomed to battling vampires and werewolves, and there is series of books about her within this series of books—writers follow her around and take notes. Jasper is an all-American youth of pluck and verve who swears by the moons of Jupiter and regularly rivets together magnificent devices of retro-futurism. These inventions rarely work out as intended. In an earlier Pals in Peril Tale, the brilliantly titled Whales on Stilts!, he planted a covert surveillance device in a mad scientist's HQ; the device was powered by mule on treadmill, making it a bit less covert than it should be. Jasper also has a series of books about him, but his books all seem to be out of print. Some extant copies might be collecting dust in the sorts of restaurants that nail bits of Americana to their walls and rafters. Writers no longer follow him around to take notes.

Such metafictional cleverness is no barrier to empathy. What Terry Pratchett did for fantasy, and Douglas Adams for science fiction, M. T. Anderson accomplishes for those endless series of books, all written by the "same" author over several decades, about various children who solve mysteries. Pals in Peril is satire, and—as with the very best satire—it is also a successful example of the very thing it pokes fun at. The pals in question always know what kind of story they are in, but their postmodern self-awareness never impedes the momentum of that story. In other words, this book is laughing with you, and never at you.

Agent Q finds our heroes still forging across mythic Delaware, a land "cut off form the world for generations by its prohibitive interstate tolls." Anderson is, of course, deeply concerned about historical and geographical accuracy:

I would hate it if my portraits of people from Delaware were in any way mistaken or misleading. If you are actually from Delaware, and you feel that there are inaccuracies in my portrayal of your state, I hope that you will write a note explaining the error, hop on your ostrich, ride through the jungle to the nearest mail rocket, have the Censor from the Ministry of Silence read your letter and cross out the illegal parts, clap it into the belly of the missile, and send it winging on its way into the civilized world.

Delaware "is ruled by a tyrant known only as His Terrifying Majesty, the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro." In Delaware any stick of furniture may be a Ministry spy in disguise, and the fate of the Resistance depends on the courage and loyalty of lobsters. It is that kind of book. Anderson explains:

Dear reader. Dear, dear reader. Here we find ourselves, you and me, engaged in a book in which someone has just exclaimed, in all seriousness, "The sentient lobsters!"
How did we end up here? Did we make some mistake along the way? Aren't there books on geology, or ancient Greek theater, or the art of Japanese flower arranging, to study?
I ask you, Isn't there something else we should be reading?
And I tell you: No.
Because you and me, we understand that important things don't always seem important. We understand that looks can be deceptive. We understand that Katie's question was in fact a very important one. Why? Because it's important to think about the fact that the Ministry of Silence might seize upon the tank of sentient lobsters who guard the safe house for the Resistance—and it's important to consider that if Katie didn't yell "THE SENTIENT LOBSTERS!" the lobsters might have found themselves abandoned and forgotten, sad eyed with drooping claws—while the restaurant burned—and their briny water heated up—and the littlest lobsters wept for help—as the flames rose. . . .
AND THAT CANNOT HAPPEN, MY FRIENDS!

Agent Q is a book that loves being a book. Every page delights in language itself. The story will make you fondly remember those series of books you devoured as a kid and know better than to ever revisit, for fear of the crushing and inevitable revelation that they were actually terrible. Read Pals in Peril books instead. Read them to children—any children you can find. They must understand the importance of sentient lobsters.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Gina Frangello
Emergency Press ($15)

by Spencer Dew

The need for a hole—as one character in this collection describes sexual desire—is not about lack, but fit. It’s a hunger for resistance, for such close envelopment that any metaphorical “hole” or space between two people might, as they merge together, seem temporarily erased. Yet the phrasing, in stripped down and brutal slang, already exemplifies part of the problem, reducing a human to an object and an absence, and suggests the clutter of metaphors, myths, ideals, and cynicisms that swirl around our articulations about sex. In Slut Lullabies, Gina Frangello proves herself an observant student both of need and of lack, and has crafted a collection of stories that examine the tangled nuances of each condition.

These tales skirt pain and terror, abandonment and independence, offering slices from the center of life, oozing fruit. A teenage girl plots to seduce her English teacher, or fantasizes about it, then performs it, threatening to extort him—but power dynamics shift swiftly enough to cause motion sickness. “I don’t want to hurt you,” the man says, pressing above her, preparing to take her virginity. The girl reassures: “I’ve been hurt before.” Another young girl, as a romantic gesture, mails her travelling boyfriend “a bottle of Chicago rain, and later, my dishwater-brown ponytail wrapped in a blue ribbon when I got my hair bobbed.” Such gestures fall short, or come across as macabre and creepy. In Slut Lullabies, couples try to communicate, or they do things that look like communicate, or they simply exist in the proximity of each other, sometimes speaking. One lover “listens, rapt,” as Miguel “regales” him with fragmentary anecdotes of his own childhood, full of suffering. Misunderstandings solidify, like cement, and “the looming mountain of truths he does not know can only be called Miguel’s fault.”

Indeed, like the severed chunk of hair, things can signify in so many ways, spun by random interpretation. In the story of Chad and Miguel, the banality of wedding planning becomes an allegory of the couple’s dissonance. Early on, the two men are told they should consider simply shaking hands at the ceremony’s conclusion, out of sensitivity to those guests who might not want to witness a kiss. Phrased in terms of contracts, a legal biting of thumbs, “pandering to homophobes who might vomit paella from witnessing two men kissing has been translated into a subversive act against the anti-gay policies of the State of Illinois.” Chad’s family serves Mexican food for Miguel, in a confusion of countries and cultures, and the men ride together across Chicago’s south side, Chad admiring old buildings he owns or wants to own, “crooning” over the turrets and facades while Miguel sees vacant lots and liquor stores, weeds “just tall enough to rape a woman amid and not be seen.”

Confinement breeds interior distance, as in the tale of two couples on an Aegean cruise, the masterful “What You See.” While it reads at times like a field guide to sex lives, in dream and application, this story becomes much more than a chronicle of the warps in what people want. Quick with a well-turned phrase about medical conditions and circumstances of abuse—about how, in this particular case, “both women have TMJ and dentists who pretend not to understand why their jaws never improve”—Frangello is a compassionate chronicler of her characters and their lives. The book has its flashes of titillation and some partly declawed cattiness to its humor, but the author has no interest in celebrating gloss or indulgence in the crass. Here are humans, striving and enduring—as when a woman on her birthday watches the Navy Pier Ferris wheel over the shoulder of her lover, composing a to-do list in her mind as he thrusts inside her. Nothing in such a scene is simple in Frangello’s telling. She traces out the knottiest of conditions with sympathy and care.

Consider also the title story, featuring the familiar teenage manipulations of girls, friends—one of whom has a knack for digging under the skin. “I did not understand people,” the narrator says, “I believed what I wanted to believe,” whereas “Sera believed in turning human need to her advantage. And need would always win out.” Yet what is more multivalent than need? Even the rapist’s need, in Frangello’s treatment, is various, awkward—violent and timid, brutal and foolish, wounded even as it wounds. And the narrator comes to a lyric appreciation of a whole different register of human connection, tentative and stumbling and somehow pure. “One summer afternoon when we were eleven, on the hottest day of the year, I chose to accompany Mom on the bus to pick out linoleum rather than go with Sera’s family to the beach,” she says, a moment that will wrench tears out of the most calloused reader. As meanings are transformed, polished down by the covetous caress, our heroine comes into a new revelation, a new relation with the past and present:

The clarity of that fury drained from me, and I couldn’t remember what was so bad—so inexcusably shameful—about being the neighborhood slut, anyway. With an intensity so rough it doubled me over, I missed the long-past squeaking of my mother’s bed, the muffled, complicit adult laughter that excluded me, that rhythmic pounding on the wall our bedrooms shared—the lullaby of my youth.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Dawn Paul
Marick Press ($16.95)

by Ellen Orleans

How do you understand a taciturn and truculent father who died when you were twenty? Lacking family recollections, Dawn Paul has interwoven real and imagined narratives of her father, Philip, to create this novel inspired by real-life events.

Understated, The Country of Loneliness mimics living with an alcoholic: it’s filled with fear, detachment, and smashed hopes. Paul alternates between her childhood and her father’s, shaping a likable, lonely boy who also grew up with an alcoholic father, Philip Sr. Of her own girlhood, she writes:

My family is not poor . . . We have money, but my father owns it, decides how it is spent. If I need a winter jacket . . . my mother braids my hair so I look nice and signals when he is in a good mood. . . . It is understood that I can get away with asking, he will not yell at me or hit. But I am afraid every time.

While The Country of Loneliness is grim, moments of life emerge. With ambitions to run a big company, Philip’s sister Ruby “wore frayed dresses lightly, the line of the old let-down hem showing, as though she would not be wearing such clothes for long.” Yet by chapter’s end, Ruby is pregnant. “Inevitable, a future planted in Ruby’s young body before she’d even started her own.”

Crushing chapter endings frequent the book’s first half. Philip’s father shames him publicly; Philip’s mother chastises him for speaking condescendingly to an adult. Individually, these heartbreaks are powerful; as a group, though, they become repetitive and even predictable.

Fortunately, the author shifts away from this pattern. When Philip and Ruby discover their father’s illiteracy, Paul avoids the anticipated blow-up, instead sending Philip Sr. out of the house, imbuing Philip Jr. with power, then shame. “His father’s failings . . . did not bolster him, they weighed on his wide, bony shoulders.” The elegant contrast of wide and bony drives home Philip’s complex feelings and hints at the conflicted man he will become.

Memoirs often progress from strong to middling, but this fictional adaptation moves from strong to stunning, from immobilized to initiator. As World War II approaches, Philip defies his parents and joins the Navy. In the parallel story, Paul defies her parents and drops out of college.

Near the book’s end, Paul tackles that essential question: Why did her father become who he was? Asked “What was the war like, Dad?” Philip offers rare honesty. “War is being on a boat watching ships get blown out of the water and knowing your buddies are on them.” Paul’s subsequent description of her father on his ship’s bridge—the smell of oil, the heat of flames, the grime on his cuffs—astounds.

Despite this revelatory shift, Philip’s death is not mawkish, but instead reveals the complexity of emotions among daughter, doctor, and the dying. As author and daughter, Paul reaches a fittingly jumbled peace between her and her father—both the man she knew and the man she was forced to invent.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Louis de Bernières
Vintage U.K.

by John Cox

In two of the most touching scenes in this collection of connected stories, women cavort fantastically with their long-dead lovers in a hopeful reminder of the power of memory amidst inevitable change. These two scenes bookend Louis de Bernières’s Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village, and capture something of the relationship of the author to the life he seeks to portray: not completely gone, but in need of significant acts of imagination to be lovingly reconstructed and memorialized. The first of the scenes, near the beginning of the book, features Mrs. Mac, who is mysteriously accompanied by her deceased husband Joseph to the cemetery to tend his grave. This vignette has some overlapping characters and places with that of the elderly Miss Amanda Feakes, who, close to death, dances to big band tunes with the suave Lieutenant Alec Montrose who had not, alas, survived the Second World War. This is sorrow more potent somehow than that in the rest of the book, but nonetheless one of the chief sensations throughout is that time is winding down, inexplicably, unseen, as the various characters age. But de Bernières carefully balances the woes and the pensiveness of his characters with the joys of good music, companionship, loyal pets and love.

From a historian's perspective, the book is above all the swan song of a rural place faced with ineluctable change. The change does not have so much to do with the structural changes facing Britain as a whole—immigration, financial and industrial globalization, the atrophy of political parties, relations with the rest of Europe—as it does with the disappearance of native youth into the cities and the growing presence of newly settled urbanites, leaving the older stratum of the village population to enjoy retirement, sell things to one another, throw dinner parties, commute to work, preach old sermons, clip the hedges, remembers joys and tribulations past, and maintain the golf greens. In another, smaller way, the book's characters, in the rich silt of both their memories and their possessions, allow us a look into the century's experiences of empire and war; there is a lot of memorabilia and a lot of patriotism, though not as much residue from the defining traits of Englishness (tea, anyone?) or of capitalism (ads and jingles and boxes) as one might expect. Still, the emotional impact of the book is greater than its historicity. De Bernières transports us into a world of the muted and familiar, where there are limits both to pain and to color.

Among the characters we get to know a bit in various stories are a naked general, a communion-obsessed baronet; fussy, naïve priests; lots and lots of pets; whacked-out spinsters with “stupefying halitosis” who own lots and lots of pets and houses; the “malodorous” last peasant of the district, good old Obadiah Oak; people who confide in spiders instead of their friends; and smart university-bound teenagers. We learn of a Maltese turtle dove holocaust, the cruelty of human-spread myxomatosis, the romantic and the brutal sides of war, a mysterious case of food poisoning, the silliness of socialism, and deaths lyrical and tragic—an elderly gentleman dies laughing in a circle of friends but a beautiful generous women dies suddenly of cancer before she's forty. That so many women in the book are in the grips of “the menopause” can only be emblematic of the stage of evolution of the village as a whole. A number of the stories are memorable because of their poignancy, and several are quite funny; perhaps most illuminating are the three “Auspicious Meeting” tales in which an unlikely band of merry musicians finds each other and connects to something bigger than the village.

De Bernières, one of the great novelists working in English today, has delivered a volume that is altogether more satisfying than his last effort, The Partisan’s Daughter. Still, this is very different literature from his Latin American trilogy or his Balkan-Turkish works. This substantial volume of interrelated pieces, over half of which had been published elsewhere but which have been competently fleshed out and fused together with new tales, consists of, if you will, miniatures. Reading this book is like listening to Schumann—it’s a good thing, it’s a great thing, but it’s not the Shostakovich or Beethoven we were listening to a decade ago. We too can learn to love this sprawling English village and its rambunctious cast of characters, although we will also come away with the feeling that this old England, like its Church, "was not an extemporising institution." And, ultimately, if we know what to look and listen for, we may agree that “it looks so magical, like something out of a Salvador Dali picture, all those branches growing into each other" in this crazy country and countryside, where so many people knew each other's names.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Company ($25)

by Ben Woodard

Though initially intended as a warning, the phrase “in these uncertain times” has developed into a parody of itself, a safety net for the rat-a-tat lingo of reporters and politicians discussing the troubles of America. Yet, the phrase itself seems to be little more than the admission of a constant reality, for when are times certain? At what point isn’t life a mystery?

Paul Auster has made a career out of pondering such questions, and in his latest offering, Sunset Park, he continues to thread them without falter into a pinball narrative set against the gloom-and-doom backdrop of the 2008 financial collapse. A tale of loss—both physical and emotional—the novel deftly chronicles the exploits of Miles Heller, a young drifter with an impressive pedigree (of which he feels ashamed), a secret tragedy (of which he does not speak), and an underage love called Pilar (the one person, as her name suggests, propping him up), as he finds himself marching both forward and back in life, stumbling into loss and redemption.

After a threat from Pilar’s older sister forces him to flee his southern Florida life as a “trash out” man of foreclosed homes (“the things, the innumerable cast-off things left behind”), Miles heads to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, where he squats in an abandoned house and counts the days until Pilar’s eighteenth birthday, a day he can safely—and legally—return to her, a stretch he considers nothing less than a prison sentence. Here we are introduced to his supporting cast. There are his roommates: Bing, the gregarious ringleader, a drummer who owns a repair shop specializing in obsolete technology; Ellen, a confused real estate agent who wants to be an artist but is afraid of failure and her sexual past; and Alice, a Ph.D. candidate completing a dissertation on male/female relationships in post-World War II cinema, specifically William Wyler’s 1946 “servicemen come home” drama The Best Years of Our Lives. Then we have Miles’s parents: Morris, a Manhattan publisher trying to keep his company afloat while saving his second marriage, and his estranged wife Mary-Lee Swan, an actress past her prime, performing as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. And finally there’s Bobby, Miles’s dead stepbrother—the reason for his loner persona and a constant memory that haunts him to no end.

Mary-Lee’s presence in the city at the same time as her son is coincidence, as is Morris’ happening to visit Florida on the day that Pilar and Miles first meet. It’s these moments of kismet that make Sunset Park an intricate pleasure to read. Add in the vast amount of seemingly innocuous tangents-turned-metaphors that pepper the text, and each page becomes a kind of map, offering directions to the core of both events and character. It isn’t long, for example, before similarities between our modern cast and the lost veterans of the Wyler film begin to emerge (“What war did Miles Heller march off to,” Alice wonders at one point, “what action has he seen, how long has he been away?”), nor is it merely happenstance that Miles is sleeping in a room once held by a woman with a similar name, Millie, Bing’s ex-lover.

As interesting as they are, these tangents threaten to become tangles, snares that keep the reader at arm’s length in Sunset Park’s closing pages. As Miles finally takes the steps necessary to face his troubles, and as his fellow squatters fear the day they will be caught and scattered from their makeshift home, we are ping-ponged between characters, often left to learn of major events in afterthoughts and conversations. In reading these passages an inevitable question arises: Instead of explaining the purpose of, say, the PEN American Center (as a human rights organization, it fits comfortably into Auster’s “artist without home” theme), wouldn’t the author have been better off closing some narrative gaps in the lives of Mary-Lee, Bing, or Alice? As it stands, they unfortunately become lost in Sunset Park’s shattering conclusion.

Of course, this distribution of information—or lack thereof—could be Auster’s ultimate intention. Following in line with his last novel, the brilliant Invisible, these characters aren’t meant to be simple. They’re the product of our “uncertain times,” residents of a place where people come and go, where luck is temporary, and where stories often conclude without ending at all.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

P. G. Wodehouse
W. W. Norton & Company ($18.95)

by Brian Conn

For those not already familiar with P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves material, a sketch: these are funny books about rich British people, set more or less in the first half of the twentieth century. Bertie Wooster, the narrator, is a genial young upper-class twit who regularly finds himself embroiled in troubles of a sort alien to you and me but inimical to Bertie’s lifestyle, troubles falling almost universally under a small number of types: 1) Bertie accidentally becomes engaged to a girl to whom he does not want to be engaged, but cannot break the engagement because he is a gentleman; 2) a friend of Bertie’s is in love with a girl and it falls to Bertie to promote the course of their love (sub-type: the girl is of the wrong sort and it falls to Bertie to obstruct); or 3) Bertie is enlisted by one of his aunts (or, sub-type, by a love-object of the wrong sort) in some objectionable and basically frivolous scheme. Out of these troubles, several of which may occur in conjunction and all of which may be complicated by the presence of blustering uncles, sneaking cousins, touchy French chefs, and other flotsam of British upper-class-twit life, Bertie will inevitably be rescued by Jeeves, his valet, who knows everything.

Wodehouse wrote a lot, and much of it is good, but the Jeeves books are his most popular works and pretty clearly the best. This new omnibus, Just Enough Jeeves, offers three Jeeves books bound in one volume: two novels, namely Joy in the Morning (1946, sometimes published in the U.S. as Jeeves in the Morning) and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934, sometimes published in the U.S. as Brinkley Manor), plus one collection of short stories, Very Good, Jeeves (1930). There’s also a short introduction by Robert McCrum, author of P. G. Wodehouse: A Life (Norton, 2004).

It isn’t clear to me why new editions and collections and repackagings of Wodehouse appear so frequently. He’s still popular, but it’s not as though he’s in danger of going out of print; last week I walked into a bookstore and found perfectly good editions of two of the three books in Just Enough Jeeves on the remainder table. If you’re new to Wodehouse and want to test the waters, however, the selection in this volume is quite good: Joy in the Morning is arguably the most perfect Jeeves novel;Right Ho, Jeeves peaks in certain highly prized scenes and includes a notable diatribe by Anatole the chef (“This is a bedroom, what-what, not a house for some apes? Then for what do blighters sit on my window so cool as a few cucumbers, making some faces?”); and Very Good, Jeeves represents the cream of the Jeeves short stories. The book design is unproblematic, the type is entirely readable, and the McCrum introduction provides some basic context. The only drawback here is the size of the volume: at just over 700 pages, it’s not unmanageable, but also not what you want to slip in the backpack for a weekend retreat, which is something you should be able to do with Wodehouse.

It’s difficult to get at the silk-smooth yet weirdly complex nature of the humor here. Although an accurate description of the plots of these stories, the outline above—bumbling gentleman looked after by sophisticated valet—in no sense represents what is good about them. That would be the language, and Bertie’s interior world as represented by the language; the plots are just scaffolding on which to hang the language. Its characteristic feature is a radical mixing of lexical registers: although Bertie is an Eton- and Oxford-educated gentleman who once won a prize for scripture knowledge, what’s really on his mind is the murder mystery he’s reading, the latest London show, and what to order for lunch at the Drones Club, where young gentlemen gather to tell racy anecdotes and throw rolls at each other; he’s swimming in divergent strains of English, but seems incapable of distinguishing among them, and thus winds up juxtaposing them in unexpected ways in his narration. You get things like “it had naturally seemed that the end of the world had come and Judgement Day set in with unusual severity.” You get words such as “mulct” and “meed” coexisting with “oojah-cum-spiff.” You get dialogue like:

“Cleopatra wouldn’t have liked him.”
“Possibly not, sir.”
“And I doubt if he would go any too well with Tallulah Bankhead.”

Such things occur in basically every sentence, dramatizing the fatuous events in the life of this rich and boring man in an absurd melange of terms from the Bible and the racetrack, the drawing room and the London tabloids, Shakespeare and The Poisoned Pin—all cast in a flawless, classically-inflected syntax. Sometimes Jeeves speaks up, and then you get a similar gag, but Jeeves speaks exclusively in a polished valet language, rendering the fatuous events formally:

one day the bird chanced to be lethargic, and his lordship, with the kindly intention of restoring it to its customary animation, offered it a portion of seed cake steeped in the ’84 port. The bird accepted the morsel gratefully and consumed it with every indication of satisfaction. Almost immediately afterwards, however, its manner became markedly feverish. Having bitten his lordship in the thumb and sung part of a sea-chanty, it fell to the bottom of the cage and remained there for a considerable period of time with its legs in the air, unable to move.

One effect of all this is that the stories are funny, and the more you like language the funnier they are. Beyond the humor, these shifts in register often come so thick as to yield a unique pleasure as you have the sense that what you’re reading is, in a way, complete gibberish, but that you understand it perfectly well nonetheless.

But there’s something else in Wodehouse, something more subtle—a comfort. When I’m overcome by dread, I find Wodehouse even more useful than liquor; it is impossible to read a Jeeves story and fail to entertain the possibility that all is right with the world. This effect stems in part from the conventional plots and the small stable of character types, which work together to put the reader in a secure and predictable environment; it stems in part, too, from the ridiculous nature of the problems the characters face, and the way the narrative muffles the emotional reality of even those problems. But it also arises from the way all this language comes together so well. Wanton juxtaposition of different strains of English seems almost like an experimentalist or postmodernist trick, something designed to undermine, to draw attention to gaps and inconsistencies, to highlight difference. In Wodehouse, though, all these languages fuse together into a single language that, although absurd, is positive and distinct and unmistakable. One has the impression that all the differences in the world, rather than signifying a terrible disintegration, are actually superficial and sort of delightful. Perhaps it’s the universal role of comedy to make one feel this way; in Wodehouse, that role gets executed in the language of every line. And if you believe that language structures your experience of reality, then Wodehouse’s comedy goes as deep as comedy can go.

People who write jacket copy tend to say, or at least imply, that Bertie Wooster is stupid. This is an error, for Bertie inhabits his world very successfully. He knows what is good (tea in the morning, hot Scotch-and-water after a difficult experience in the country), what is to be avoided (the ire of Aunt Agatha, the departure of Anatole), and how to maximize the former and minimize the latter (trust in Jeeves). It’s true that he’s ignorant of the problems his social position implies, and so maybe he’s naive and incurious and a waste of a classical education—I won’t claim he’s actually bright—but to take a world of confusion, transform it into a world where everything fits together, and then live in that blithe world as though it were the only one that ever existed—that takes a certain genius. Wodehouse nailed that genius, which perhaps becomes even more remarkable when one considers that the exterior world in which Joy in the Morning was written was one in which the Nazis were occupying France. Even when things were most imminently falling apart, he was able to put a few scraps of civilization together into something safe and whole.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Leïla Marouane
translated by Alison Anderson
Europa Editions ($14)

by Spencer Dew

In Leïla Marouane’s intriguing new novel, the main character is a bundle of contradictions. Mohamed used to be, as he says, “the good Muslim, the kind of Islamist—nowadays we would say ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘terrorist’—who was respected and solicited for advice by the entire neighborhood. To such an extent that I was called on to lead prayers, or recite a sermon, or give my opinion on questions from simple to complicated.” A veteran of “whitening creams and hair straightening sessions” with a self-chosen “Gallicized name,” Mohamed embraces association in another “we” from that in which, as the son of Algerian immigrants to France, he was born and raised, but while he has amassed enough of a fortune that he can finally move on up to a better (read: whiter) neighborhood of Paris, renting an apartment he intends to use as a place in which to “roll about with creatures to tempt angels and demons alike,” he has yet to move beyond his Algerian Islamic upbringing.

That culture, and its intricate mesh of religious ideas and laws—the very questions that, as “the good Muslim,” Mohamed helped his neighbors wrestle with, questions hinging on interpretation of divine statement or prophetic precedent and the myriad prohibitions and prescriptions of the faith—can still tangle up a forty-year-old virgin desperate to live out fantasies of being a modern Parisian playboy. Even in these erotic fantasies, however, his religious background rears its head. Contemplation of Adam and Eve segues straight to sticky sheets, and Mohamed has a special obsession with that famous Quranic vision of paradise so often glossed by later commentators. After one would-be conquest wipes away his over-eagerness with a tissue, he recites a passage from a theologian with which he has something of a fetishistic relationship: “Every time one sleeps with a houri, she is a virgin. The rod of the Chosen One does not decline. The erection is everlasting. To each coitus corresponds a pleasure, a delicious sensation so unusual for this base world that if a man were to feel it on earth, he would fall down in a faint.” “That’s hot,” says the woman, but for Mohamed, unfortunately, this otherworldly ideal is more of a trap.

Mohamed may know what tradition teaches about the houris awaiting the faithful in Paradise, but he has little clue how to woo an actual woman and is utterly unprepared for their shocking frankness, their comfort in their bodies, and their social location. The women in this book—like Mohamed’s sister, for instance—can be at once Muslim, immigrant, and French. Some might be a little nutty—one collects underpants from male visitors, another emerges from a string of “suicide attempts, psychoanalysts from the Primo Levi Association, or something like that, without whom, she whispered, she would not be here calmly having dinner with me”—but they seem open, at least, to their own peculiarities, whereas Mohamed, hiding behind his “white name” and terrified that his new neighbors will take him for a terrorist, lives like a covert agent, deceitful and desperate.

The main woman in his life remains his mother, even as, like his Algerian past, he vehemently attempts to ignore her. She leaves messages on his phone; he erases them. She enters his dreams, dying her hair blonde and donning a short red skirt and talking about toleration and assimilation—it is a nightmare for Mohamed, but an obvious reflection of how easy life seems for the women around him and how impossible it all feels for him. His life, in the end, has been shaped too much by literary visions and not nearly enough by reality, a state that comes to a surreal head when he finds that, indeed, his life is being manipulated by the authorial voice of this book, a female novelist who Mohamed fears is reducing him to a puppet and pulling his strings. This, too, is an obvious expression of the fear Mohamed has that he simply cannot abandon his past. He can give up on prayer, pop pills with his whiskey, miss the start of Ramadan, and chase a fantasy of life very different from his upbringing, but the conditions of his birth haunt him nonetheless.

The Muslim identity described in these pages is not so much a matter of submission to theological claims or adherence to practice, but rather “unconscious obedience” to a mindset Mohamed can’t escape precisely because he’s put so much effort into highlighting it in his consciousness through his attempts to isolate and erase it from his life. While his sister fits in to Parisian society without undo exertion, Mohamed’s inherited identity becomes more rigid for being so rigorously concealed, and the world of the assimilated—the “white” world he seeks both to be accepted in and to bed—remains bafflingly foreign to him. At the same time, he realizes, with some discomfort, that the Islamic identity imposed upon him by society likewise isn’t the same as commitment to Islam: “What if,” he asks himself, “I had never possessed the faith. What if it had been nothing more than the product of a long, assiduous education, merely glancing off my soul without ever burning into its fiber?”

So he dreams of returning to the straight path, embracing religion, and in one such dream the pious pilgrims who come to his apartment for a couscous dinner show up clean-shaved, in firefighter uniforms, presumably so as not to attract suspicion that they might be terrorists. This throbbing paranoia about being labeled as a terrorist ultimately defines Mohamed more than anything else—more, even, than his tangled lust and horror in regard to women. It is repeatedly emphasized in this book that the religion of Islam is predicated on the notion that God is infinitely merciful and forgiving, but Marouane presents a situation in which being identified as a Muslim male in contemporary Paris—whether by self or other, whether religiously, culturally, or ethnically—generates a kind of guilt. Mohamed knows that according to Islam all his sins can be wiped away (and, like young Augustine, he makes this eventual redemption part of his agenda as a sinner), but precisely because he obsesses over it—and because he lives in a society that obsesses over it—his heritage, his Muslim identity, can’t be so easily erased.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Gary Shteyngart
Random House ($26)

by Mark Budman

“By reading this sign you have denied existence of the object [the tank] and implied consent.” This sign welcomes the protagonist of Super Sad True Love Story, a Jewish-Russian-American with Ashkenazi eyes and a penchant for Asian girls, back to the U.S. of the American Restoration Authority. In this phrase, Gary Shteyngart distills the essence of our potential, frightening and manically laughable future.

As is evident from this and his previous books, Shteyngart, who was born in the old Soviet Union, is a master stylist and master satirist—a mixture of Juvenal, Gogol, and Babel updated for the 21st century. Add Orwell to the mix and you can get an idea of this new book’s appeal.

Though satirical and dystopian, however, this novel is not quite like 1984—it’s funnier, it’s ethnic, and it’s way over the top. Straight lines are bravely extended from yesterday into the day after tomorrow. Everything is blown up to absurd proportions. From corporate mergers to LandO’LakesGMFordCredit. From smart phones to apparat. From all-too-familiar humiliation at airports to body cavity searches everywhere (only foreigners who buy triplexes for 20 million Northern Euros are exempt). From Iraq to Venezuela. From Rumsfeld to Rubinstein. The dollar is Yuan-pegged. The apparat projects your credit ranking and your fuckability for the world to see. Ads call for the Chinese to spend and for Latinos to save.

As the title promises, Super Sad True Love Story is soaked in super-duper, in your face, overstated sadness. Its sadness transcends the pervasive melancholy of its protagonist, a self-admitted, certified loser if ever there was one. This sadness has a palpable quality; a reader is ready either to punch the protagonist or to cry for him. His love interest does both.

Everyone and everything is sad in this novel, not only the protagonist. His Korean girlfriend, whose unglorious handle is Euni-Tard, who minors in Assertiveness, who comes from a dysfunctional family, who is super angry, who dresses in JuicyPussy clothes, who speaks in texting abbreviations (e.g., TIMATOV, ROFLAARP, PRGV), and who spends her time shopping online at AssLuxury via herapparat. The protagonist’s boss, a rejuvenated septuagenarian, who competes with him for said sad girlfriend. The protagonist’s friends, who are only concerned about their ranking. His aging neighbors, dying a slow death. The entire United States, run by corporations like the above-mentioned LandO’LakesGMFordCredit, and by the above-mentioned American Restoration Authority, which operates under the logo “deny and imply” and where everyone suspicious is sent to the “secure screening facilities” upstate.

To the author’s credit, this universal sadness is contagiously hilarious and framed in truly gorgeous language. “I turned away from Ms. Abriella’s beautiful seagull-shaped lips as if slapped, and let death wash over me, the corned-beef smell of my damp neck giving way to an old man’s odor rising from my thighs and armpits like steam.”

But when the author gets into the lyrical instead of satirical, his prose sometimes runs out of juice or becomes too juicy. Take this passage when the protagonist—incidentally nicknamed Rhesus Monkey—is about to make love to his, ahem, true love, the Korean girl whom he has just met: “I . . . cupped the twin, tiny globes of her ass with my palms.” Sadly, this super sad cliché about the human butt permeates romance literature.

Likewise, when the protagonist fails to develop an erection (it doesn’t help that his love refuses to take off her bra because her chest is too flat) and he spends the rest of the night between his beloved’s legs, he declaims: “I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human.” Human? What did he expect?

But often even his lyrical order is gorgeous: “How to contain the natural reflex to stand up on one’s hind legs and sniff poignantly for the warmth of the sun? How to keep one’s mouth from funding Eunice’s and burrowing inside?”

Meanwhile, the world falls apart around the true lovers. After a decidedly non-Christian Rapture, the American Restoration Authority is replaced by the rule of a private company, Nassau warlords are fighting Queens warlords, and the entire country is divided between foreign sovereign funds. Worse yet, the lovers part and no amount of kneeling and pleading (that’s how Rhesus Monkey kept his hold on his love) helps. Sad news for America, sad news for the protagonist. Even his girlfriend is mildly sad.

We can only hope that this uniquely portrayed dystopia is not going to become the American truth. And as for love in this story, IMHO, it can be characterized as bizarre. Nothing is wrong with bizarre though. Gary Shteyngart makes bizarre funny, thoughtful, energetic, and even page-turning. Despite its charming faults, Super Sad True Love Story is one of the best—and scariest, despite its humor and inept protagonist—books I’ve read in the long time.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Robert Steiner
Counterpoint ($12.95)

by John Madera

The power of Robert Steiner’s novella Negative Space comes not from its subject matter but from its prose, which offers a kind of lyrical philosophy of loss, memory, and pain; a taxonomy, or rather a “postmortem,” as the unnamed narrator calls it, of his marriage’s dissolution, the failure itself a corpse to exhume. The plot, mundane as it is, may be reduced to the following: a man’s wife of twenty years confesses to an affair, then leaves the terrace—the site of her admission of infidelity—to pack her things, whereupon the cuckold, waiting for her to return to the terrace, reflects on her confession, her betrayal, and the general course of their marriage. But, while it’s certainly true to say that pain, even emotional pain spiked by betrayal and abandonment, is commonplace, the knowledge of its mundanity does not make the actual pain any less painful—cold comfort, as we all know, is an oxymoron, and does little to alleviate any icy knifing of the heart. As the narrator explains:

Everything that happens in the ordeal will have already happened, and nothing that happens has not already happened, hundreds of thousands of times before, not to me, but to others. The ordeal has happened elsewhere, to someone else, hundreds of millions of times, but it is no less mortifying to me than if it were happening for the first time in human history.

The narrator’s attempt to see, from as many directions as possible, the sorry state that he’s in, and the imagined state toward which he thinks he will soon plummet, doesn’t bring any kind of resolution, and the repetitions he employs, (as in the passage above, where he runs the word “happen” through a few of its conjugations), reveal his desire for connectivity but also for the insistence, and therefore permanence, of his pain.

James Joyce might have been describing Steiner’s narrator when he wrote: “How you would be thinking in your thoughts how the deepings did it all begin and how you would be scrimmaging through your scruples to collar a hold of an imperfection being committled.” Steiner’s narrator is also often found “thinking of the thinking,” rummaging through the wreckage to find the imperfections of his life and marriage; he is troubled, too, by scruples—those uneasy thoughts and feelings, those hesitating doubts, those uncertainties about principles and duty. And just like Finnegans Wake, from which the above sentence was derived, Negative Space explores, as Joyce in a letter explained, a “state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.” The state that Steiner makes sensible is not the dream state, but the waking life of a man quaking with loss—a profound state of anxiety, resulting from betrayal and “the dystopia betrayal makes of love,” and abandonment, articulated in sweeping, sensuous sentences marked by orbicular observations, acute analysis, evocative detail, and languid lyricism:

Before ash, rubble, rubble subjected to thought in order to believe that there could be a moment of perfect understanding to explain my wife’s exit. Whether or not, however, afterward comes nothing but ash, not a subject, not the woman I love, only residue. In twenty years of marriage, I have neverinterpreted my wife because I did not need to, or thought I did not. Suddenly, because she was leaving, she would be known to me as variations on the theme of the woman I love, of the woman I cannot help but love, as angles of complexity that rest side by side, explaining to me why or how I cannot help but love her, bringing thought to bear on the love I have felt and continue to feel, introducing anguish into my house. Smoldering ruins can occupy a panorama the way from our terrace I witness the olive grove, and the sea beyond it, and beyond the sea the horizon that cuts it, and beyond the horizon the bleeding sun, but eventually even ruin is nothing but gravity.

The narrator employs a kind of cubist prism to anticipate the “ordeal,” the black hole of suffering through which he thinks he’ll be sucked once his wife has finally left him. These “angles of complexity” enable him to chart the disintegration of his thought to rubble and then to ash, and also the way in which his own pain, the ruins of his marriage, is layered like the perception of objects in the fore-, middle-, and background—if at the same time obscuring the fact that his repetitions, which serve, perhaps, as a mantra, will not enact the spell of return that he desires.

Steiner is an artist of the sentence, allowing syntactic threads of consciousness to spool out and form a tapestry; it is the way in which these sentences flow and sweep that will compel readers to follow this manic albeit measured monologue, a monologue centered on word choices, on silence and darkness, on the universe, on his wife’s nudity, on jealousy, on how memory subsumes desire, on ideas about truth, and relentlessly about the self and the other, the end of the world, the differences between dread and misery, and most of all, nothing, the nothing that threatens to swallow everything up. Take for instance, this characteristic passage:

The postmortem ought to be cathartic, I thought on my terrace in the dark, but it would not be, the way most things that ought to be something are something else. Before the ordeal began, I knew it would not serve a human purpose, even though it would bring human thought to bear on unspeakable emotions, as if thinking could comprehend catastrophe, or as if my catastrophe were natural, an earthquake, a monsoon, instead of betrayal. The ordeal would prolong the dissolution of our marriage, tracing the fatal movements of my relations with my wife, forming and re-forming, and revising, over and over, the reality of twenty years, or what I assumed to be reality. The postmortem would be interminable, but no less destructive, as time passed. As time passed, within the eternity of thinking through the collapse of our marriage, there might be moments of nobility, of mercy, even an authentic poignancy that could redeem the destruction, turning it into destiny, or the delusion of destiny. Since my wife’s absence would become the object of my obsessive thinking because she loved someone other than me, the ordeal would keep our marriage alive, even when I did not realize she was in my thoughts, even if I believed I had finished thinking of her and that the ordeal was finished.

Negative Space is a portrait of paralysis, a study of stasis, an analysis of the anguish felt by the abandoned. Though the prose is, like the narrator’s postmortem, interminable, it’s still pleasurable, forcing us to follow its twists and turns toward some kind of understanding about what may ultimately be incomprehensible and irresolvable. Taking its title from a term in the artist’s lexicon, which defines the space around and between an image’s subject, the novella explores the space surrounding betrayal, that space moving in and out of focus, often becoming the primary focus, as if it were a version of Rubin’s vase, that famous optical illusion where the vase is supplanted by two faces staring at each other. In fact, this book might have been subtitled “Toward a Syntax of Figure-Ground Reversal,” to be placed on the shelf alongside Steiner’s critical work, Toward a Grammar of Abstraction.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011

Tom McCarthy
Knopf ($25.95)

by Will Fertman

An ambitious bildungsroman that made it to the Man Booker Prize shortlist, Tom McCarthy’s C follows our hero Serge Carrefax from his birth in late 19th-century England to his occult shipboard death in the 1920s. The saga in between gives the author an opportunity to sing some very familiar songs about modern science, art, and the souls of our own 21st-century folk.

Serge is born to an eccentric country family, one dominated by his overbearing, brilliant scientist sister and his unbrilliant but still overbearing inventor father. The latter is director of a school for the deaf, an oralist who insists not just on teaching speech to his students, but on stifling sign language: “Speech . . . must be wrung from him, wrenched out.” He applies this principle to his own wife, a deaf woman who discreetly signs with the gardener. In his off hours, he’s obsessed with telegraphy and the shopworn possibility of electronic communication with the dead.

Serge’s sister is a wild child with a microscope, first seen tormenting her baby brother by using his penis as a telegraph key, cementing his incestuous loyalty. Her interests fall more to natural science and chemistry: she has a lab, draws cross-sections, and generally fits into the Arcadia mold of budding young genius.

All this eccentricity crowds Serge mostly out of the picture. He is a slight presence who finds refuge in late-night listening sessions on his wireless set, chatting with and eavesdropping on radio bugs, ocean liners, and transmissions from the far corners of the Empire. McCarthy’s evocation of the Marconi-era radio world is compelling: a pre-verbal soup of Morse code, where a young boy with a spark set can find himself on equal footing with the Royal Navy.

The opening section allows McCarthy to expound on the contradictions and erosions of modern science—how certainty can breed cruelty, how the drive to communicate can be a flight from intimacy, how enlightenment can devolve into forbidden lore. This comes to a head when his sister commits suicide after an insectile premonition of the Great War:

“I’ve got a lover.” . . .
“He’s secret; it’s all secret. But he’s made me sensitive. He’s done stuff to me. I can see things that . . .”
“That what?”
“See things. What’s coming. When the bodies meet and separate, and more bodies come out, the parts all lie around in segments.”

The next section finds Serge in a Continental spa, trying to purge his mela chole with healing water and the pursuit of a hunchbacked masseuse. Stripped of his family and his spark-set, Serge himself turns out to have little in the way of personality, carrying only a dark, bloody, fecal sorrow that’s transmuted in each successive phase of his life: it manifests as a love of drugs and the impersonal lethality of air combat, a fondness for memorial architecture, visits to Spiritualist seances. He finally completes his circuit in Egypt as an archeologist-spy, rummaging through the trash-filled tombs of the Old Kingdom.

Throughout the book, Serge remains blank, a cipher to follow through instructive adventures to his final fate. McCarthy is more interested in communicating his own notions about modernity than he is in satisfying either traditional novelistic goals of plot and character or formal ambitions in prose or structure. Instead, he depends on recognition and repetition to drive the book forward.

The effect is a lot like fan fiction, where fans of Harry Potter or Star Trek write their favorite characters into new storylines. McCarthy’s source material comes from Pynchon, Byatt, Stoppard, Durell, Heller, and others: A baby’s penis is conditioned to detect invisible forces. A perfidious godfather drops in from the Foreign Service to teach the children cryptography. The compassionate tutor happens to be an articulate Marxist. Instead of allowing the novelty and terror of flying combat to create their own reality, McCarthy drags an artist in to explain how the aerial view disrupts the picture plane and spawns abstraction:

“It doesn’t work,” he moans as Serge pours him a glass. “It’s just not possible once you’re in flight.”
“What’s not?” Serge asks.
“Art! Tell me, Counterfax: what’s the first rule of landscape painting? . . . Horizon!” Carlisile slaps the table. “Got to have a damn horizon if you’re going to paint a landscape! And what’s the first thing to disappear when some madman at your back is loopy-looping?”

McCarthy is a skillful enough writer to knit these ideas into a fluent narrative, but not searching enough to let the process lead him somewhere new. By remaining doggedly committed to the conceptual elements of the book, he allows the form to become a kind of pun, only there to convey an idea and without any sort of generative power of its own. All those punch-card looms and postmodern Egyptian ruins end up feeling anachronistic, too heavy with foreshadowing.

Compelling novels sustain their tensions, closing one story while leaving subtexts unfulfilled. As Catullus said, it’s a poet’s job to incite an itch, and give erections to impotent old men. Fan fiction allows a reader to scratch those itches, making subtext explicit. But in finishing what others have started, McCarthy leaves one feeling a bit deflated.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2010/2011 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2010/2011