Fame & Folly, by Cynthia Ozick

A review of Fame & Folly, by Cynthia Ozick

Published July 19th, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Faulty Towers

Ozick Exposes Folly of Literature’s Greats

Fame & Folly

By Cynthia Ozick

Knopf, $21 

In her new collection of essays, Fame & Folly, Cynthia Ozick writes that her favorite book by Anthony Trollope is The Way We Live Now, his thirty-third novel out of forty-seven, because it’s his longest—952 pages. About herself she writes that she “has not written enough”—just under 2,000 published pages in thirty years—and that she “is little-known or not known at all, relegated to marginality, absent from the authoritative anthologies that dictate which writers matter.”

Yet despite her “marginality” and the sparseness of her oeuvre, she’s one of the finest writers and critics of our time. She doesn’t need forty-seven novels (although they would certainly be welcome), because in those 2,000 pages she’s written such gem-like masterpieces as Levitation, The Shawl, and The Messiah of Stockholm.

Like her idols Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, Ozick combines traditional Jewish history and mythology with fabulous technical innovation, creating a literature that’s both forward- and backward-looking. Her “Puttermesser” series of short stories rewrites the creation myth, weaving a modern New York sensibility into the ancient “golem” tales, and her chilling story “The Shawl” and its follow-up, “Rosa,” portray the awesome void created by the Holocaust.

Along with her masterful authorial presence, Ozick also brings an astute literary and social consciousness. A champion of “high art” and an espouser of her own self-styled feminism, Ozick writes about literature and history with equal doses of passion, humor, and awe. She balks at nothing—T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, Henry James’ existential dread, her own obscurity—and her erudition allows her an almost omniscient view of whatever subject she chooses.

Her essay “Eliot at 101,” from Fame & Folly, examines Eliot’s phenomenal rise and fall from public favor. Unabashedly stating that Eliot was the center of her literary apprenticeship, Ozick describes him at his height as “pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon.” He filled football stadiums—the University of Minnesota’s football stadium, to be exact: 14,000 seats—with adoring fans of his poetry and of his “New Criticism.”

Eliot’s readers rebelled against Wordsworthian tradition in favor of Modernism, but “the young who gave homage to Eliot,” writes Ozick, “were engaged in a self-contradictory double maneuver: They were willingly authoritarian even as they jubilantly rebelled… they were ready to fall on their knees to a god. A god, moreover, who despised free-thinking, democracy, and secularism; the very conditions of anti-authoritarianism.”

By now the god has fallen: Nobody’s interested in Eliot’s fascist apologetics or his rigid criticism anymore. But his fall seems to have ushered in a loss of popular interest in “high art.” No writer could possibly fill a football stadium now, and Ozick mourns this loss. “What we will probably go on missing forever,” she writes, “is that golden cape of our youth, the power and prestige of high art.”

Other essays in Fame & Folly, notably “What Henry James Knew,” “Mark Twain’s Vienna,” and “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question,” discuss the relationship between what Ozick calls “fame and folly.” James’ ambition and ego were driven by intense insecurities; Twain was momentarily anti-Semitic; Babel rode with the Red Cossacks—yet critics treat these artists as holy. As with Eliot, Ozick reveres the writers but doesn’t agree with their mystification. As Ozick’s essay “Rushdie in the Louvre” argues, mysticism in at the very heart of fanaticism and authoritarianism, and this fascinating and accomplished collection of essays does great service in holding great art up for all to behold while allowing the artists under discussion to remain merely human. Ozick may not be in danger of being idolized by anyone other than me, but this book succeeds brilliantly at rising up as a work of high art while remaining tethered to a very humble and very earth-bound author.

—David Wiley

Cross Channel, by Julian Barnes

A review of Cross Channel, by Julian Barnes

Published July 19th, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Changing Channels

English Novelist Crosses Over with

Short Stories About French

Cross Channel

By Julian Barnes

Knopf, $21

Born in 1946, Julian Barnes was a late bloomer. He published his first novel—the fine, if conventional, Metroland—in 1980, and has been turning out novel after novel, each more brilliant than the last, ever since. His third book, Flaubert’s Parrot—a combination biography, novel, literary critique, and critique of literary critique—was hailed by critics as the greatest novelistic innovation since Nabokov’s Pale Fire. With these accomplishments, Barnes has established himself as one of the masters of the novel. His newest book, however, Cross Channel, is a collection of short stories and finds him far out of his element.

Comprising ten loosely connected stories, Cross Channel addresses Barnes’—and England’s—obsession with France. This obsession colors much of Barnes’ earlier work, and Cross Channel deals directly with the questions of language, culture, and religion at the heart of British and French discourse.

As always, Barnes’ scholarship is formidable. Ranging from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, Cross Channel takes up everything from Catholic missionary soldiers to bridge building to bicycling to winemaking, and as with Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes delved heavily into journals, newspapers, and correspondence to write these stories. The results can be perplexing, especially to monolingual Americans, but at times they can also be deeply gratifying.

The richest of these stories, “Hermitage,” is a moving treatise on love and winemaking in fin-de-siècle France. Two British women, Emily and Florence, are fed up with the turnip farmers of their native village, and to escape they buy a vineyard in northern France, their “hermitage.” Through their interactions with the locals, Emily and Florence open the story to much larger questions than to just the specifics of winemaking. Discussing purity regulations for their vintage, the two women learn about local habits, issues of nationalism, and questions of language. Even the simple task of transporting the wine brings up old economic and social dilemmas.

Not every story in this collection evokes so much so powerfully. Many stories, however beautiful the language, are more technically dazzling than artistically satisfying. The story “Melon” astounds with its knowledge of eighteenth-century culture and history but leaves the reader dry. “Melon” records the various destinies of a group of British noblemen who go to France for a cricket match in September 1789, at the start of the French Revolution—definitely the wrong time to be thinking of sports. With this premise, the story could have been a powerful depiction of personal loyalties, or at the very least an examination of class struggle, but it’s neither. The narrative threads end up getting mangled and fragmented by Barnes’ own virtuosity. Each character’s individuality becomes more and more obscure, and the story ends up being pointless despite its wide range.

Although many of the individual stories in Cross Channel successfully examine the English/French fascination—such as “Interference,” with its cranky exiled composer, and “Dragons,” with its awesome religious clash—the collection is, as a whole, somewhat weak. The interconnecting threads are flimsy, and there’s too much going on in this book for it to be wholly integrated or complete. Maybe the collection is too short—just 211 pages—to make any sense of Barnes’ vast subject material.

Barnes’ worst mistake in Cross Channel is an attempt at closure at the end of all this discontinuity. In the last story, “Tunnel,” the main character, an older version of Barnes himself, travels to France by Eurostar in the year 2017. Letting his mind wander over his lifetime of visits to France, he constructs in his mind a kind of English/French mythology. Despite the story’s eschatological bent, nothing is really culminated. Instead, Barnes relies on the worst narrative trick to pull the story together: The last line of the book reads, “And the elderly Englishman, when he returned home, began to write the stories you have just read.” Hopefully Barnes—the somewhat younger Englishman—will return home to write another novel.

—David Wiley

Talking in Bed, by Antonya Nelson

A review of Talking in Bed, by Antonya Nelson

Published July 12th, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Familiar Talk

Nelson’s First Novel is Mired in Stereotypes

Talking in Bed

By Antonya Nelson

Houghton Mifflin, $22.95

In 1990, Antonya Nelson’s first book, The Expendables, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. Since then she’s published two more collections, and now with Talking in Bed she’s finally published a novel. Unfortunately, like O’Connor—a master of the short story—Nelson proves to be not much of a novelist.

Talking in Bed begins is a hospital where two men, Evan and Paddy, meet after their respective fathers’ deaths. The two are polar opposites—Evan is a psychiatrist, and Paddy is a roofer—but their common experience draws them together into a strange relationship.

Evan’s intellect attracts Paddy, and after a while Paddy becomes something of an innocent ideal for Evan. The two gravitate toward each other, exchanging secrets (among other things) in an attempt to get closer to the truth of their mutual appeal.

After a few weeks of friendship, it’s obvious that they both want to escape their own lives in exchange for the other’s. Evan’s sick of his rational, controlled existence, and Paddy yearns for the larger world that he imagines Evan to inhabit. Although Nelson plays this out thoroughly, delving deeply into each man’s psyche, it’s really nothing more than a drawn-out “grass is greener” scenario.

Add a few alienated wives to this mixture and you’ve got all the makings of a movie of the week. Paddy’s ingenuous charm also works on Rachel, Evan’s wife, and when Evan leaves her, Paddy moves right in to take his place. What follows is a sordid—and somewhat banal—battle of wills and personalities over who Rachel will choose.

Here the novel shifts ostensibly away from Evan and Paddy and onto Rachel. Instead of watching the two men battle it out in the flesh, the reader must now watch it happen within Rachel. As she sleeps with Paddy, she misses her intellectual familiarity with Evan, but it’s precisely that cerebral aspect of love that she’s trying to escape.

The question looms: Which will Rachel choose, the mind or the body? It’s that simple. Or is it? Nelson tries, with some success, to examine every aspect of this dilemma, but ultimately she can’t raise this novel above its essentially one-question premise.

Nelson’s worst sin, though, is not the lame plot, but rather her oversimplification of character. Instead of drawing real characters, she presents the reader with archetypes: the neurotic, overly cerebral Jew, the confused ex-Catholic, the lunk-headed WASP, and the idiotic Mormon. Nelson thinks these facile delineations inherently entail a heightened conflict and that she can simply create stereotypes and watch the ensuing confusion. But these divisions don’t create tension; they simply offend. And who really cares if Rachel chooses one caricature over another?

Talking in Bed isn’t a total waste, though. It presents a broad view of modern social entanglements, leaving little out of the picture. Nelson employs the homeless, the mentally ill, racial minorities, and social deviants to add a more complicated sense of reality to her novel. But like much of her characterization, much of this inclusion is either one dimensional or cursory. It’s ironic; in trying to portray a confused and complicated—and specific—world, Nelson has created little more than platitudes and generalizations.

—David Wiley

An Interview with William T. Vollmann (my first cover story)

A cover-story interview with William T. Vollmann, discussing his book The Atlas

Published June 21st, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Who in the World is William T. Vollmann?

Violence, Carnage, Prostitution, Drugs… Vollmann Documents Decay and Creates Beauty in The Atlas

The Atlas

By William T. Vollmann

Viking, $25.95

Every generation or so, an emerging writer does something new with the English language. These writers re-teach us how to read, confound our sensibilities, and leave critics scrambling for adjectives extravagant enough to describe their work. In this century, there’s been Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon—and now there’s William T. Vollmann.

Like the rest of these artists, Vollmann is unclassifiable, a peculiar and perplexing mystery. Because of his outrageous style, he’s often pigeonholed as “Pynchon-esque” or “Gaddis-esque” by critics, but Vollmann defies categorization.

When I met him for our interview, he was wearing a buttoned-up plaid shirt, high-top tennis shoes, a backpack strapped snugly on both shoulders, and glasses secured with an elastic band. He almost looked like a child dressed for school. Almost overly friendly, he spoke slowly and smiled a lot as we drove to the Seward Cafe for lunch, chatting about himself, books, the weather—whatever came to mind.

Despite his disarming appearance, Vollmann, like Proust or Kafka, is hyper-observant—a meticulous scrutinizer of people and situations; obviously something was going on beneath our pre-interview conversation. He ate his gazpacho, gripping his spoon like a little kid, and seemed to scan the room for material for his next book.

But it was his current book, The Atlas, that was the subject at hand. The series of fifty-three interconnected stories in The Atlas is, as Vollmann writes in his “Compiler’s Note” at the beginning of the book, “arranged palindromically: the motif in the first story is taken up again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and so on.” By Vollmann’s standards, the stories are short—anywhere from a paragraph to twenty pages long. This shorter form, Vollmann says, was inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

“I just thought, ‘Well, I tried writing long things,’” Vollmann said, “‘and I really like these Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Let’s see if I can do some.’ And I really enjoyed the form.” He added his own distinctive spin, of course, writing a collection with a larger coherence, stories that are, as Vollmann says, “interconnected just the way the world is interconnected.”

Blending autobiography, fiction, self-styled myth, and reportage, Vollmann describes these stories as “a piecemeal atlas of the world I think in.” His range of topics is nearly encyclopedic, writing with equal ease about Native Americans, the Bible, prostitutes, war, mosquitoes, crack, and kickboxing. In one particularly harrowing story, “Blood,” the protagonist has unprotected sex with an AIDS-infected prostitute to prove that he loves her, and “The Hill of Gold” retells the story of the Roman conquest of Masada, using Bible-like chapters and verses to create a new kind of mythology.

In the center of the palindrome is a much longer piece called “The Atlas”: a surrealistic account of a man’s (Vollmann’s?) train ride through Canada. The story portrays an entire lifetime over the course of a few days. The man’s memory drifts all over the physical and emotional globe, calling up wars, first loves, and dead friends, fashioning a panoramic and intensely personal view of one man’s history. The Atlas is meant in part to be a culmination of a lot of themes that Vollmann has dealt with in his career, and the title story is an even more condensed version of Vollmann’s fictional world.

Vollmann combines this compression of themes and concerns with a density of prose that’s rarely found in modern fiction. For example, in the story “The Atlas” he writes:

He brought his lips to the ice, which at first was merely a glittering white surface of giant grains and crystals under the blue sky, but as the purple cumuli drew across heaven like the underside of a metal drawer the ice turned bluer and cooler-looking with a yellow line of evil running across its surface, parallel to the horizon—he had a longing to devour the horizons of the world; and he remembered the white line where the wintry noon ended in Nevada, immense and fluffy, shooting cloud-stuff up into the sky like some defense against falling stars, so vast and triumphant and far away across the plains of tan, rust and beige. His lips did not stick to the ice yet.

As the story builds, its seemingly unrelated narrative threads cross and recross until the reader unwittingly attains a grand, transcendent vision of this character’s life.

Loneliness drives many of Vollmann’s characters—and possibly Vollmann himself—into war zones, crack houses, and brothels. In the afterward of 1989’s The Rainbow Stories, Vollmann claims that most of the stories in that book—many of which deal with prostitution—are true. In the Seward Cafe, Vollmann was unabashed.

“Yeah, I’ve smoked crack. I’ve had sex with prostitutes,” he says. “Have you ever read Stephen Crane? When you read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets you get the impression that he [Crane] might have hung out with these people [prostitutes], but the actual descriptions of her being a prostitute are not very full or very convincing. Either he did it and didn’t feel comfortable writing about it, or else he didn’t do enough of it.”

That night at The Hungry Mind bookstore, Vollmann was equally frank before the packed crowd of cultish fans and curious spectators. “When I travel it’s important for me to make connections in the city,” he said, “to find someone who will take care of me—like a big sister—and who better than a prostitute?”

One angry attendee, who admitted to having never read Vollmann’s work, berated him: “You’re just adding to the literature of prostitution, which just perpetuates exploitation.”

“I’ve done more for prostitutes than you have!” Vollmann answered, resolute. “When I was in Thailand, I kidnapped a twelve-year-old slave prostitute and placed her in a convent. Now she’s learning to sew and can lead a normal life.”

Vollmann’s detractors fail to see that his literary treatment of prostitution is not celebratory, nor is it exploitive or degrading. It’s simply honest. Vollmann feels that these marginalized women deserve representation.

“And,” Vollmann added, “you should write about what you know, just like Hemingway said.”

Like Hemingway, Vollmann works as a war correspondent, a job that recently took him to Sarajevo. There he wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times and did a series of broadcasts for the BBC called “The Yugoslav Notes.”

“All that material,” he said, “will end up in this long violence book that I’m writing.” Vollmann has been working on the book—a nonfictional study of violence that is already 1,500 pages long—for several years. “That’s why I’ve been going to so many war zones.”

“All three of the Sarajevo stories [in The Atlas] are literally true,” Vollmann says. One story, “That’s Nice,” describes the main character’s almost surreal struggle with the owner of a rental car that had been destroyed by shelling. As it turns out, Vollmann and two of his friends were in the car when it was hit. Everyone except Vollmann died. “One of them was my high school friend, my translator,” Vollmann says. “The other was another journalist that we met who was traveling with us.”

Vollmann has often been to southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Cambodia, where, he says, “it’s so easy to meet all kinds of insurgents, politicians, to say nothing of prostitutes who like you.” He had planned on meeting Pol Pot, the former dictator of Cambodia whose Khmer Rouge killed more than one million people. He was believed to be hiding out in China, and an interview with him would have been the crowning achievement for the violence book, but Pol Pot died just a few weeks ago (soon after our interview took place).

Ugliness attracts Vollmann; he immerses himself in it; he befriends it. Often his work is a dialogue with violence. While writing one piece for The Rainbow Stories, “The White Knights,” Vollmann hung out with the S.F. Skinz, a group of San Francisco neo-Nazis. Near the end of the story, he let them read the in-progress work to check its accuracy.

“I think that’s just a decent, human thing that anyone could do,” he says, “because if you’re letting somebody into your world, the person’s studying you like a bug or something, then maybe that person’s gonna get something wrong.” The skinheads liked the story, although they told him that it had “too many run-on sentences,” a line that he included in the story.

This openness and lack of prejudice allows for a closeness to the subject that’s almost terrifying, and maybe not for everyone.

“They weren’t bad people, for the most part,” Vollmann says. “Some of them did bad things. If you just say they do bad things, that doesn’t really let you understand them. Every person deserves to be respected and be listened to and understood. I don’t care whether he’s Jesus Christ or Hitler. And chances are, if we could meet both of those guys right here and sit them side by side and talk to them, we might think that maybe Jesus wasn’t as impressive as he was cracked up to be, and maybe Hitler wasn’t one hundred percent evil either, because it’s hard to imagine somebody being one hundred percent one way or another.”

After our interview, I went with Vollmann to the Uptown store Dreamhaven, where he bought two books on bondage. Later I took him for a drive through south Minneapolis, showing him the action on East Lake Street.

“This is where I live,” I said as I drove him through my neighborhood, pointing out crack houses, prostitutes, and gangsters.

“Yeah,” he replied, “it’s pretty nice.”

—David Wiley

An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell (my first author intervew)

An interview with Madison Smartt Bell,

discussing his book All Souls’ Rising

Published January 25th, 1996

in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Rising Star

Madison Smartt Bell Leaves the Pack Behind

All Souls’ Rising

By Madison Smartt Bell

Pantheon, $25.95

Any list of the most important contemporary American authors will undoubtedly include Madison Smartt Bell. The dark vision of Save Me, Joe Louis, the brilliant formalism of The Year of Silence, and the explorations of personal salvation in many of his other novels have assured him a place among today’s brightest young writers. But with his new book, All Souls’ Rising, everything has changed.

No longer simply a great American author, Bell has written a novel of staggering proportions, in one leap joining the ranks of the best novelists of our time.

All Souls’ Rising centers on a single player in history, François-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture, and builds a labyrinthine narrative around his role as the leader of Haiti’s 1791 slave uprising. Bell first became interested in Toussaint-Louverture while doing research on terrorism for his novel Waiting for the End of the World. “Any study of terrorism,” Bell told me in an interview, “inevitably leads back to the Haitian slave rebellion… because of the atrocity level.”

The more he researched, the more fascinated he became with Toussaint-Louverture, first because “the rebellion was the only successful slave revolt in history,” but ultimately “because Toussaint-Louverture’s life fit perfectly the form of classical tragedy.”

Educated, charismatic, and, above all, subtle, Toussaint-Louverture was a natural leader, and the novel chronicles his difficult ascent, focusing on the terrible choices he had to make in order to free his people. Initially chosen by plantation owners as a puppet leader of a bogus revolt, Toussaint-Louverture soon finds his loyalties torn between the slaves and the owners who offer him liberties in exchange for his services. Toussaint-Louverture must choose either to keep the slaves in check, thus helping the owners tighten controls, or to act as the wholehearted leader of the revolution.

As the novel progresses, the choice becomes an easy one, because the revolt soon grows far beyond his or the owners’ control, and Toussaint-Louverture is thrust into power.

As with Bell’s other novels, the range of characterization is impressive. While Toussaint-Louverture is the central character, the novel is built around him rather than solely upon him or his experiences. Bell creates a vast world of characters who circle the scene, at times colliding with each other as they try to make sense of what’s going on. There’s the free-thinking Doctor Hébert and his mulatto paramour, the sinister Monsignor Cigny and his mad wife, Isabel, a host of slave leaders, and, most significantly, a runaway slave named Riau.

The narrative jumps around from third to first person, and much of the novel is told in Riau’s voice, which Bell describes as the novel’s most difficult creation. Riau is so heartbreakingly believable that his astonishing and terrible deeds transcend right and wrong, taking the reader on a journey into the depths of love, hate, and survival.

“All Souls’ Rising,” Bell says, “is the first book in a trilogy focusing on the life of Toussaint-Louverture.” Bell originally projected 4,000 pages of material for the whole cycle, but pared it down considerably, and after writing this first section, cut even more, leaving a modest 530 pages. With this in mind, it’s easier to see how a novel of this length can sustain such acute potency: It’s distilled.

Be warned: This novel is not for the squeamish. As the rebellion and counter-rebellions shift and escalate, so does the carnage. What’s even harder to handle is the intensity of the hatred (both personal and social) that this novel encompasses. At its most physically gruesome, the characters’ underlying motives and psychologies are even more horrifying.

In All Souls’ Rising, Bell’s prose is sharper than ever, and despite—or because of—the awesome terror it portrays, this novel is a beautiful creation. Lyrically, thematically, and structurally diverse, All Souls’ Rising carves itself into the reader.

—David Wiley

Phosphor in Dreamland, by Rikki Ducornet

A Review of Phosphor in Dreamland,

by Rikki Ducornet

Originally published January 25th, 1996,

in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Phosphor in Dreamland

By Rikki Ducornet

Dalkey Archive, $12.95

For those of us who can’t get enough magical realism in our lives comes Rikki Ducornet’s outrageous Phosphor in Dreamland. Truly a renaissance woman, Ducornet has written novels, stories, poetry, children’s books, and has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Coover. With this new volume, Ducornet has drawn equally from her immense reservoirs of talent to craft a new kind of creature.

Set in the mythic Caribbean island Birdland (a not-too-distant cousin to Vonnegut’s San Lorenzo and Nabokov’s Zembla), this epistolary novel chronicles the life of a seventeenth-century poet/inventor/artist named Phosphor. Written by a current inhabitant to his friend in another slightly less mythic land, this series of letters is both a study of the island’s history and an ardent examination of human connection through time. Having the narrator fall in love as he sifts through the island’s evidence is an example of this kind of connectedness, a metaphor for the affinities of history.

Rikki Ducornet

As the narrator examines the remnants of Phosphor’s past, he finds that love was also the main motive for his life—love of art, beauty, knowledge, and, most crucially, for an almost unearthly woman, the beautiful Extravaganza. This is much more than a romantic stroll through the past, though, because Phosphor’s love of beauty puts him in some strange territory. He’s forced to deal with the consequences of his art, such as the exploitation and simplification that can occur when the powerful get their hands on it.

One of his inventions is a mock-up of a camera obscura that can reproduce reality so clearly that Fantasma, the local tyrant, decides to use it to capture the entire island for his personal collection. This leads Phosphor to unwittingly comply with pornographers and, even worse, the ancestors of TV producers.

In addition to his art being exploited, it’s also attacked by the church as heretical. Phosphor’s work is eventually confiscated by Rais Secundo, “Grand Inquisitor, and Ecclesiastical Judge,” in an attempt to eradicate the island’s “pornography.” This confiscation, infuriating as it is, leads to possibly the most hilarious, outrageous, and ironic scene I’ve encountered in fiction. Let’s just say it involves Rais Secundo and the Pope’s hat.

As wonderful as this novel is, it does take some time to really get rolling, so give it a few pages to catch your attention. Phosphor in Dreamland is one of those books that builds until it’s virtually bursting, and with Ducornet’s richly crafted prose and considerable intellectual and techical skills, this novel can barely contain its teeming cargo.

—David Wiley

The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguru

A review of The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguru

Published January 4th, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

The Unconsoled

By Kazuo Ishiguru

Knopf, $25

It’s been six years since Kazuo Ishiguru released the triumphant Remains of the Day to universal acclaim, and now, with the publication of The Unconsoled, his fourth novel, it seems there’s nothing this author can’t do.

The story concerns one Mr. Ryder, an internationally renowned pianist who arrives in an unnamed city for a performance about which he has no information. He’s too embarrassed to ask for a copy of his itinerary, so for more than 500 pages, the reader gets to follow him in his blind descent into the town’s inner machinations.

The style of this novel is virtuosity itself. Ishiguru employs astonishing literary tricks, and his tone is so well sustained that even at its most bizarre, the novel’s progress is seamlessly inevitable.

Although Ishiguru denies it (admitting that he’s never read the whole thing), this novel has a definite affinity to Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Don’t let that sway you either way, though, because The Unconsoled is a truly vital and original work. Its strange beauty left me reeling and extremely satisfied.

—David Wiley

Mapping the Farm, by John Hidebrand

A Review of Mapping the Farm,

by John Hidebrand

Originally published August 18th, 1995,

in The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

Mapping the Farm

By John Hidebrand

Knopf, $23

I must admit that when I started reading John Hildebrand’s new book, I was favorably biased, due to the subject. Chronicling four generations of Minnesota farmers (his wife’s family, the O’Neills) from immigration to the Great Depression to the current battle with expanding agribusiness, Mapping the Farm seemed to have all the elements of a great work of nonfiction. It’s generational, political, and very human, but I found something crucial missing in Hildebrand’s writing.

I was hoping for something along the lines of John Dos Passos or James Agee, and frankly Hildebrand just didn’t deliver it. Although the subject is one of the most important in America today, the book’s power sinks under the weight of the author’s leaden prose. This is a shame, because he’s got great material to work with.

At times I found myself fascinated with his family’s individual members, but the book never let me feel the fabric of their collective past. The episodes were so disjointed and rambling that none of it really fit together, denying the reader a chance to make sense of how the O’Neills came to their current crisis.

In a way, this book’s sense of fragmentation helps to serve a point. Never before has solidarity been so crucial for farmers, yet the O’Neills are breaking apart. Hildebrand describes them at the end of the book as a set of couples—no longer a single family. This dissolution may signify the end of the family farm as an American institution.

Although it galls me to say it, the book just wasn’t very effective. Even when I tried to look past its artistic flaws to find the humanity underneath, I was confronted with a sloppy, uneven mess. This story deserves much better treatment. At least there’s still Wendell Berry.

—David Wiley

The Liberty Campaign, by Jonathan Dee

A review of The Liberty Campaign, by Jonathan Dee

Published August 11th, 1995, in The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

The Liberty Campaign

By Jonathan Dee

Washington Square Press, $10

Newly released in paperback is Jonathan Dee’s 1993 novel, The Liberty Campaign. Like in his first novel, The Lover of History, Dee delves into the meanings, both personal and political, of contemporary history, and with shattering results.

At the tender age of sixty-five, Gene Trowbridge strikes up a bizarre friendship with Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who may or may not be in trouble with the law. Having been confronted by a reporter with questions about Ferdinand, Trowbridge finds himself becoming obsessed with his friend’s past, as well as with his own.

As their friendship becomes more intimate, Trowbridge confronts Ferdinand about the reporter’s questions, and immediately both of their worlds are changed. As he reveals the truth (he was a torturer in the U.S.-supported regime in Brazil), Ferdinand slowly opens up a whole new way of thinking for Trowbridge.

What makes this novel especially poignant is that it dares to confront Americans with their own ignorance and complacency. As Trowbridge was working for “the man” (an ad agency), Ferdinand was torturing leftists, and knowledge of this brings up questions about whether or not there is any real difference between the two. They’ve ended up in the same place, so is it possible that Trowbridge could have become the same thing as Ferdinand?

In the end, this theoretical question is overshadowed by the immediacy of whether or not to help Ferdinand escape his persecutors. Facing his own moral obligations to history, Trowbridge must decide if this monster deserves the rights he denied so many others. Dee gives an answer, but ultimately the question goes unresolved, leaving the reader and a book that will resonate long into the future.

—David Wiley

An Unsentimental Education, edited by Molly McQuade

A review of An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, edited by Molly McQuade

Published August 4th, 1995, in The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago

Edited by Molly McQuade

University of Chicago, $18.95

Edited by former University of Chicago student Molly McQuade, An Unsentimental Education is a collection of reminiscences by her alma mater’s greatest teachers and students. McQuade interviewed twenty-one U of C luminaries from the past and present, and what results is a fascinating portrait of one of our country’s most fertile intellectual centers.

First, both artistically and alphabetically, is Saul Bellow, who studied sociology at Chicago in the 1930s, returning years later to join its Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt, among others. Bellow’s recollection is more nostalgic than revelatory, but the picture of the Nobel Prize winner staying in “gorgeously sleazy” rooms for three dollars a week is priceless.

Kurt Vonnegut describes himself as “a very fringe character” at the U of C, admitting that the school didn’t think much of him. His master’s thesis was rejected twice, so he found himself in 1947, after seven years of school (he had left Cornell as an undergraduate to go to war), with no degree whatsoever. Since he had no qualifications, he was unable to find a teaching job and was forced to try writing. Go figure.

Probably the most interesting entry is by the amazing Susan Sontag, who graduated from the U of C at eighteen. As a student, she married one of her professors, had a child right after graduation, and then attended graduate school at Harvard.

Like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, these interviews were edited and turned into a narrative, but unfortunately only a few of these writers have Malcolm’s gift for oratory, and most pieces end up reading like unfocused essays. Wisely, Saul Bellow and Robert Coover insisted on presenting their interviews in their original form. This lack of focus isn’t really much of a problem, though, because the book is more personal than formal, and its looseness makes its intellectuality much more accessible.

—David Wiley

Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes

A review of the restored version of Nightwood,

by Djuna Barnes (edited by Cheryl J. Plumb)

Published July 28th, 1995, in

The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

Classic Novel Nightwood

Improved in Restored Version

Nightwood
The Original Version and Related Drafts
By Djuna Barnes

Edited by Cheryl J. Plumb

Dalkey Archive, $23.95

Djuna Barnes’s classic 1936 novel Nightwood has influenced everyone from William Gaddis to Jeanette Winterson, but among the general public it remains largely unread. Why? Because like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s an extremely challenging read. For those who have made their way through it, it’s a life-changing experience, and for Barnes scholar Cheryl J. Plumb, editor of this restored version, it was the foundation of an entire academic career.

Begun in 1927, Nightwood went through numerous versions until 1934, when Barnes submitted the finished book to editor T.S. Eliot. Eliot loved it but found much of it “unsuitable” for publication, and he proceeded to hack away considerable chunks of the text. After two years of editing, Barnes finally agreed to some of the cuts. The finished product has become a classic, but Barnes’s reluctance to the changes sparked debate over the artistic integrity of the published version.

Now, after years of studying the original texts, Plumb has restored Nightwood to its pristine version. In addition, Plumb has included twenty pages of annotations explaining Barnes’s literary and historical reference and has documented all the changes made in her own restoration. Plumb has also compiled seventy-five pages of original typed and handwritten drafts to illuminate Barnes’s creative process.

A work of art of the highest order, Nightwood is as groundbreaking in its content as it is in its style. It’s possibly the first lesbian novel to be published in America, and like Zora Neale Hurston’s centralization of African Americans, Barnes deals with homosexuals as normal people rather than as anomalies.

Djuna Barnes

Of course Barnes doesn’t ignore the problems of homosexual life in a straight world, and as in Proust she focuses more on the grotesque and comical and tragic aspects of it than on the joyful and liberating, but her treatment of her queer characters makes them seem universal and as immediate to the outsider as to the insider. This commanding presence gives her the freedom not only to write from a very central point of view, but also to question existing notions of normality and centrality.

At the heart of all this is a love story. In telling Nora and Robin’s tale, Barnes re-examines love and loss in a way that makes the reader think of it as a completely new idea. Her treatment of desire, memory, alienation, and fear all give love a new but frighteningly familiar face, and Nora’s obsession with the transient Robin seems to reflect Barnes’s own battle to understand her past. Throughout Nightwood we see our own misgivings about the nature of love played out in this ill-fated relationship, and Barnes never lets the reader fall back on illusory notions of idealized romance.

Barnes never succumbs to misanthropy or cynicism, either. Her characters are warped and often pathetic, but Barnes actually does care about them. They exhibit a rare humanity that lifts them above their awful crises (although it doesn’t necessarily save them), and even at their most tragicomic, we recognize them as our own.

I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve been able to get the whole way through this novel, so be warned. It’s not easy, but the rewards for your effort are innumerable. If you’re willing to relinquish a large chunk of time (and sanity), this short book just might change the way you read novels.

—David Wiley

Independence Day, by Richard Ford

A review of Independence Day, by Richard Ford

Published July 21st, 1995, in The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

Turning Point

Independence Day Chronicles an American Mid-Life Crisis

Independence Day

By Richard Ford

Knopf, $24

When Richard Ford’s wife asked him why he never wrote about happy people, he responded with Frank Bascombe, the “dreamy” protagonist of the 1986 novel The Sportswriter. Bascombe was proclaimed by critics and readers alike as one of the few truly decent characters in modern fiction, and now he’s back in a new novel, Independence Day, and he’s still happy.

In the first novel, I had difficulty understanding why Bascombe was so satisfied. His marriage had failed, he had a rotten love life, and his occupation as a sportswriter was profoundly ill-suited to his sharply progressive world-view, and still he was optimistic. I attributed this to a kind of early-’80s pragmatism in which real values took a backseat to dreamy contentedness. Like the rest of the nation, he had fooled himself into believing that everything was fine and that his own financial success signified a kind of peace.

In Independence Day, however, Bascombe seems to be coming out of his trance both personally and politically as he confronts the consequences of his successes and failures. After five years (the setting is 1988), he’s still unmarried, his love life still stinks, and he’s become, of all things, a realtor. To top it all off, his ex-wife has remarried, and his son, Paul, shows signs of becoming a delinquent.

In an attempt to deal with some of this, Bascombe takes an Independence Day excursion with Paul in which they “visit as many sports halls of fame as they can in two days.” Along the way, he blunders through the motions of fatherhood, trying to figure out who his son really is and rescue him from his imminent descent into adolescence.

There’s a feeling of impending doom in the background (the escalating battle between Michael Dukakis and the grimly laughable George Bush), as well as in the foreground (Bascombe’s floundering personal life), but Ford never lets his hero give in to nihilism or despair. Instead, Bascombe comes to terms with what he calls his “existence period,” in which he’d largely ignored reality. This is only part of the answer to his problems, though, and the novel portrays his small revelation as more of a turning point than a triumph. There is no evidence that things will get better for Bascombe, his family, or his nation as it opts for a four-year extension of the ’80s, but they’re all learning, slowly.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is how Ford portrays real estate as the philosophy of the Reagan era. Everything can de divided, defined, and sold, including the American Dream, which close scrutiny reveals to be more like a nightmare. As Bascombe reflects on the meaning of the America around him, he finds himself appraising it rather than contemplating it. “Buy low, sell high” has replaced any meaningful kind of American ideology, and Bascombe seems to have become a living battlefield in which profits and humanity collide as he struggles to recognize his clients as something more than commissions.

Ford insists that The Sportswriter and Independence Day are two separate and independent books; that the first is not a prerequisite to enjoy the second—and he’s right. This novel stands wholly on its own. It’s funnier and maybe even a little wiser than its predecessor—which is a feat—and the richness of Ford’s prose evokes the very fabric of an America in search of true independence. This is a great novel.

—David Wiley

Paula, by Isabel Allende

A review of Paula, by Isabel Allende
Published May 25th, 1995, in The Minnesota Daily’s Nightly Magazine

Letters to Paula

Isabel Allende Devotes New Autobiography to Daughter

Paula
By Isabel Allende
Harper Collins, $24

On January 8th, 1981, Isabel Allende began writing a goodbye letter to her dying grandfather, a letter that eventually became her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Exactly eleven years and four books later, faced with her daughter Paula’s crushing bout with porphyria, Allende began another, very different letter. It began, "Listen, Paula. I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost."

Written in a Madrid hospital room and, later, from Allende’s home in northern California, Paula was originally intended as a reminder to her daughter of who she was and how she fit into the world. Paula’s condition deteriorated, though, and the letter started to take on a different identity as Allende slowly realized that her daughter would never read it.

What resulted was a memoir of astonishing power and grace. Allende’s first book-length work of nonfiction, Paula is both a personal history and an examination of mortality, her own as well as her daughter’s. Like her fiction, Allende’s life is peopled by ghosts, mad dictators, revolutionaries, and mysterious relatives, and this book is her attempt to reconcile with the demons as well as with the benevolent spirits of her past.

Born to Chilean diplomats, Isabel Allende’s history is as tempestuous and bizarre as that of her native country. She writes that Chile is a land of immense catastrophes, both political and natural, and that the supernatural takes an active role in daily life. Allende’s childhood was filled with hyperbolic oddities, such as a clairvoyant grandmother and a stern, unforgiving grandfather who was addicted to soap operas and professional wrestling. These unforgettable family members later resurfaced in her novels, as would a myriad of disappearing fathers, exploding uncles, and murdered dogs.

Even the everyday, supposedly ordinary events of Allende’s childhood were extraordinary by any normal standard. For instance, she was made to go to a gymnasium after school where she was hung by her neck by an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys in an ongoing attempt to make her taller. She writes that it didn’t work, that it just made her neck longer.

True to Allende’s style, her first two attempts at love, at the age of eight and again at fifteen, were thwarted respectively by murder and the possibility of incest. When she did eventually get married, to a conservative businessman, she discovered in herself the need to rebel against patriarchal Chile in general and against her own future in particular. She found work as a journalist, playwright, and talk-show host, and spent the next few years amusing, enlightening, and enraging polite Chilean society, gaining many supporters along the way, including the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

Then in 1970, Chile elected Allende’s uncle, Salvador Allende, to the presidency. This was an amazing event, because Allende was the world’s first democratically elected president. For most, though, including Isabel Allende, life went on as before.

While Allende was making gains for the women’s movement in Chile, there was another movement that she, like so many other Chileans, was unaware of. This apathy made the events of September 1973 especially shocking: The U.S.-supported military toppled the democracy and murdered Salvador Allende. Isabel Allende personally witnessed the bombing of the presidential palace, which was a turning point for her and her nation. At this critical point, all Chileans had to make a decision: either comply silently or risk their lives helping refugees find asylum. Allende opted for the latter and was eventually forced to flee the country to save her own life.

With Paula, Allende has reached another critical point, and she deals with it the only way she knows how—through her writing. She says that writing saved her life in the 1980s, and now she draws once again on the spirits of the past to help her make sense of the present.

Although Allende in universally acclaimed as a master novelist, this work of nonfiction may be her masterpiece. Its structure, balance, honesty, and humor work perfectly to guarantee Paula a place among the best literary and historical memoirs. Paula is a great introduction for those new to Allende’s work and is a watershed for her veteran readers.

—David Wiley