An Interview with Cynthia Ozick

A cover-story interview with Cynthia Ozick,

discussing her book The Puttermesser Papers,

with a full transcript of the interview

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine, July 2nd, 1997

The Wizard, Ozick

Literary Magician Cynthia Ozick

Completes a Four-Decade Spell

The Puttermesser Papers

By Cynthia Ozick

Knopf, $23

Imagine a novel that took thirty-five years to write. In an age when writers become instant superstars and publish five books before reaching thirty, it’s almost inconceivable. But for Cynthia Ozick, age sixty-nine, half a lifetime on a book is just the right speed.

In the early 1960s, the young Cynthia Ozick (pronounced with the same vowel sounds as “Moses”) wrote a story called “Puttermesser: Her Work, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife.” The story introduced lawyer and feminist Ruth Puttermesser, a character who would stay with Ozick for the rest of her life. Since publishing the story in The New Yorker, Ozick has revisited Ruth about once a decade, adding another chapter to what would eventually become The Puttermesser Papers.

“This was always conceived as a novel,” Ozick says, speaking from her home in New York, “but the labor of giving birth to the novel was extraordinarily gradual. I began it at age thirty-four. And how do I remember that very accurately? Because of the weird program I had for the novel, I smuggled my age into every chapter. … I conceived these chapters as a high point of each decade of her life, and the idea was to write the slowest novel in the world.”

Ozick included the first two chapters of the Puttermesser saga in her brilliant 1982 collection Levitation, which is where many readers got their first taste of Ruth. The first chapter finds Ruth working as a cog in the New York Department of Receipts and Disbursements. Although a dedicated city worker, she yearns for a more meaningful connection to history—a connection she ultimately invents for herself in her head.

It’s an amazing story, so complete and self-contained that almost any short story writer would be satisfied to leave Ruth where she was. But the second chapter, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” goes to an entirely new level of literature. A decade or so older, Ruth finds herself fired from her job by sinister politicos, so she retaliates by taking over the city. She achieves this by unwittingly fashioning the soil from her houseplants into a golem, a legendary Frankensteinish creature from Jewish folklore, that helps her fulfill her “Plan for the Resuscitation, Reformation, Reinvigoration & Redemption of the City of New York.” The golem helps Ruth run for mayor under the auspices of the “Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism” party. And Ruth wins.

By creating the golem to help bring order to New York, Ruth mimics God sitting back in the celestial easy chair, declaring it all to be good.

“It goes way, way back to Genesis,” Ozick says, “where God creates man out of earth and blows a wind into his nostril. And Adam is made out of earth. In fact his name, Adam, means ‘clay,’ means ‘earth.’ So it really goes way, way back to the primordial infrastructure of the human mind—the idea that you can in a sense compete with the creator of the universe and create life. … This idea of creating human life out of nothing is just endemic in us.”

What’s even more fascinating about the story is that while Ruth creates, she is also created, which carries tremendous writerly implications. Ruth imitates God the creator, certainly, but she also imitates Ozick the writer.

“Puttermesser has made the golem,” Ozick says, “but the golem has made Puttermesser mayor, so who created whom? Writers write books, and it’s the fact that they’ve made books that makes them writers. It is a cycle. Your characters make you. You also learn from your characters. And you don’t know where they come from. You don’t know where they’re going. You don’t know even their voices when you start. And when you’re finished you feel very much added to—some new grains of being have augmented your own being because this stuff has come out of you. And then you’re different afterwards.”

At their zenith, Ruth and her creation, Xanthippe, turn New York into a kind of neo-Garden of Eden. But after a certain point, things begin to crumble. Like Milton in reverse, Ozick charts the rise and fall of humanity—as personified by a rapacious, oversexed golem—and even at its zaniest, the story resounds with deep pathos for our doomed race.

And if that weren’t enough, Ozick brings back the postlapsarian Ruth three more times. The third and middle chapter, “Puttermesser Paired,” finds Ruth in love with painter Rupert Rabeeno, whom she meets at the Met as he paints an imitation of The Death of Socrates. Rabeeno calls his works reenactments rather than imitations, but any way you look at it, he’s an imposter.

“I am really, really interested in impersonation—fakes and imposters,” Ozick says. “I’ve always been interested in the word ‘imposter.’ In fact, I remember my excitement as a child when I first came upon that word in a fairy tale. And I decided that my own father might be an imposter. And I tested him. Because my real father was the only one who knew the combination to the safe. ... The idea of impersonation is absolutely fascinating. And because, after all, it’s what every fiction writer does. You impersonate other people.”

But Rupert’s impersonation leads Ruth down a dangerous path. In lieu of sex, the two read to each other from George Eliot’s novels, and then from various Eliot biographies, and along the way Ruth slowly tries to mold her relationship with Rupert into George Eliot’s relationship with George Lewes. Their love for each other then becomes little more than a paper chase, an imitation of real life.

The tension between paper and life has been a central concern of much of Ozick’s work. Her 1987 novel The Messiah of Stockholm features a predicament similar to Ruth’s and Rupert’s, when a book reviewer falls into an all-consuming obsession with finding Bruno Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah. Ozick describes this fascination with paper as one of the controlling factors of her life:

“I think I once wrote a little tiny thing that might have been in a collection called Metaphor & Memory in which I said, ‘I do not like life. It interrupts.’ … Paper comes before life for me. And life does interrupt, and it torments me.”

So “Puttermesser Paired” can either be read as a cautionary tale—because Ruth gets burned in a big way—or as a triumph, because Ozick herself has created such a masterful work of imitation. Life becomes secondary, true, but who needs life when the story is so good?

The fourth chapter, “Puttermesser and the Muscovite Cousin,” has been chosen for next year’s Best American Short Stories under a different title and in a shortened form. Which may be ironic, because it’s the least Ozicky of all the chapters in The Puttermesser Papers. There are no golems, assumed identities, or imagined histories here, just the tale of Ruth’s Russian cousin coming to America. It’s a great story, but it’s telling that the least fantastic chapter in the book would be the one chosen for mass consumption.

The final, chapter, however, is where the action is. In “Puttermesser in Paradise” Ozick finally knocks Ruth off and sends her to Heaven—at just shy of the Biblical age of threescore and ten. Lying in bed, reading Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Ruth gets attacked, killed, and raped—in that order—by a ski-masked intruder.

“I always knew I would kill her off when she got to my present age,” Ozick says. “But I did not know that it was going to be this vicious, this horrifying.”

Even more horrifying is the Paradise Ruth finds. She’d always imagined it as a place of eternal reading and eating, but what’s waiting for her is endless ambiguity. Paradise for Ruth ends up being all things at all times—and all being as meaningless and self-canceling as the Solomonic vision of the world laid out in Ecclesiastes.

“All her life has consisted of almost hitting climax and then withdrawal or detumescence before truly hitting climax,” Ozick says. “Or let’s put it this way—climax and anti-climax. So though I did not know what her Paradise was going to be, it had to be consistent with the nature of her DNA. Her DNA is to dream, to imagine, to utopianize, and then to be struck on the head by reality.”

Ozick begins the chapter with a poem that purports to be “translated from the Akkadian” but which Ozick admits to having made up herself:

“Knit and unravel,

Commands the Gavel.

Do and undo,

Till nothing’s true.”

And that’s exactly what Ozick does with Ruth. Negating much of what we learned about Ruth in earlier chapters, Ozick writes her away “till nothing’s true.”

“I think this book as a whole is a mediation on mortality, on evanescence, on the ephemeral,” Ozick says. “It’s a little book about—not what Shakespeare means when he says ‘Ripeness is all,’ but just the moment after. … Because ripeness is all, but then the next step after ripeness is decay. Unless you devour at the moment of ripeness. But we don’t always get to devour at the peak of ripeness. … And therefore it may not be true that ripeness is all—it may be true that decay is all. And when you begin to think that decay is all, then you’re thinking about the human condition and mortality, which is the heart and soul of everything in our lives. It makes ambition. It makes tragedy. It makes comedy. Being the creature that is conscious, the only creature that knows our end… what is going to happen to us—no other creature knows it—that is why mortality dominates our lives and also makes us write. Because we’re writing against that doom.”

What makes this book remarkable—aside from Ozick’s outrageous imagination and astonishing prose—is that it actually incorporates the doom as it rages against the dying of the light. For Ruth there is a time to be born and a time to die, and Ozick funnels it all together into the same time and place. And even if nothing’s true, as Ozick writes, at least we have this amazing book as a testament to our struggle against  the meaningless doom.

—David Wiley

An Interview with Cynthia Ozick

by David Wiley

for The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine

Conducted June 19, 1997

Published July 2nd, 1997

How did The Puttermesser Papers come to be a novel?

CO: This was always conceived as a novel, but the labor of giving birth to this novel was extraordinarily gradual. I began it at age thirty-four. And how do I remember that very accurately? Because I smuggled my age—because of the weird program I had for this novel I smuggled my age into each chapter. So Puttermesser is thirty-four, and in the next one she’s forty-two or forty-six, I forget. And the next one I got a little cagey and called her fifty-plus. And the next one I got a little Biblical. As you see, I conceived these chapters as a high point of each decade of her life, and the idea was to write the slowest novel in the world. And I always knew I would kill her off when she got to my present age.

You were planning on this age?

Yes. I was going to kill her off before she hit threescore and ten, the Biblical age—just before that.

Could you talk about the chapters’ publishing history?

The first chapter was in The New Yorker. The second chapter was in Salmagundi. The third chapter was in The New Yorker. The fourth chapter was in The New Yorker, shortened and under another title. And under that title, it was chosen for the Best American Short Stories. And, I’m missing a chapter, I think. Anyway, the last one, “Puttermesser in Paradise,” was in the May Atlantic. “The Muscovite Cousin” was in The New Yorker—I’m going backwards now—under the title “Save My Child!”

“Save My Child” was in The Best American Short Stories?

It isn’t out yet. It’s next year—it’s basically an excerpt from the chapter called “The Muscovite Cousin.” That is going into I guess the 1998 Best American Short Stories, which includes the stories published in 1997.

Wasn’t some of that story taken from an essay in Fame & Folly?

I wrote a piece on Isaac Babel—I think it was called “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” And in there I wrote about the visit of a Russian cousin, a Muscovite cousin to me. And yes, I have to confess there is a relationship. But I also have to insist that fiction is fiction, and once this actual visit entered the world of imagination it was no longer fact. It’s very important to me that a separation be made from essays and fiction and that the essays never be used as a measuring stick against the fiction. I think this is really a kind of lethal thing to do to a writer of fiction.

How much of this did you have planned from the beginning?

The details I didn’t know, but I knew it was going to be a very slowly rising idea and that I was going to wait till I had the right formulation that would apply to Puttermesser, as opposed to some other fictions. And when some idea came to me—some fictive idea that I recognized immediately as “this belongs to Puttermesser,” and I waited for those moments. And I don’t think I really planned it to be one a decade, but it did more or less come out like that.

In “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” you focus on the relationship between the creator and the created.

It is a very intriguing idea, as I clearly don’t have to tell you. It’s the kind of thing that makes—we have to think about Mary Shelley, naturally. And it goes way, way back to Genesis, where God creates man out of earth and blows a wind into his nostril. And Adam is made out of earth. In fact his name, Adam, means “clay,” means “earth.” So it really goes way, way back into the primordial infrastructure of the human mind—the idea that you can in a sense compete with the creator of the universe and create life. The idea of cloning, and particularly as applied to human cloning—it takes people’s breath away. I mean so much that Clinton said that we’re not allowed to do it in this country. He placed a moratorium on human cloning. This idea of creating human life out of nothing is just endemic in us. A lot of nature religions, like Native American—you’re in Minnesota, so you’re really close to this—Native American religions have the God himself or herself, the God or the Goddess, made out of earth. I guess it’s also related to the fact that things grow out of the ground, which, when you think about it like a visitor from another galaxy, is quite amazing. That you stick a seed in the ground and a tree comes up. And I think it’s all related to the sense of human wonder at the procreation that’s endemic in the planet.

What’s fascinating is that Ruth Puttermesser is also created as she creates. And that seems to have a lot of writerly aspects to it.

Yes. I see what you mean. Yes, that Puttermesser has made the golem, but the golem has made Puttermesser mayor, so who has created whom? Right—I think that’s quite true. Writers write books, and it’s the fact that they’ve made books that makes them writers. It is a cycle. Your characters make you. You also learn from your characters. And you don’t know where they come from. And you don’t know where they’re going. You don’t even know their voices when you start. And when you’re finished you feel very much added to—some new grains of being have augmented your own being because this stuff has come out of you. And then you’re different afterwards.

From reading The Cannibal Galaxy and other things, it seems like you’re fascinated with the tension between Hellenism and Hebraism.

Yes.

Could you talk about how this tension plays out in Ruth?

I’m not sure it is in Ruth Puttermesser. I’m not aware that she necessarily thinks that way. Do you see that?

Well, you give the golem she creates the name Xanthippe.

Well, actually you’re right about that. Yes, of course. Because it’s quite true that in Jewish folklore the golem is, as I expressed in that story, a sort of savior. And not an erotic creature at all. And it’s true that Xanthippe does turn into a Greek goddess of Eros or lust. You’re right, I simply overlooked that—a big thing to overlook. But, yes, she does turn Greek, because she does turn into Eros rather voraciously. And in that sense she’s Dionysian. And you know the split in the human mentality between Apollo, the mind, the rational, and the Dionysian, the, what shall I call it, the orgasmic—it’s really in all societies, in all religions. Puttermesser’s really on the side of Apollo and the rational. I mean it’s very clear. When she goes through the history of golem-making she’s quite interested that the chief rationalist of all, the Vilna Gaon, who was an excoriator of mystical movements that were rising up in European Jewish society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this super-rationalist was said by folklore—merely a legend—but that a legend should rise up that the greatest rationalist of all should have created a mystical creature, this in a way comforts her. But she’s definitely Apollo. She’s on the side of rationalism, which means to be on the side of Hebraism, and not sympathetic to mysticism, and yet her creation turns Hellenistic, just as you said.

The third story, “Puttermesser Paired,” features an imposter, Rupert Rabeeno. It seems you’re really interested in fakes.

I am really, really interested in impersonation—fakes and imposters. You’re absolutely right. I mean you really have kind of hit a deep germ. I’ve always been interested in the word imposter. In fact, I remember my excitement as a child when I first came upon that word in a fairy tale. And I decided that my father—this is very glamorous, I thought—my father, my own father might be an imposter. And I tested him. Because my real father was the only one who knew the combination of the safe. So I tested my father, made him open the safe, and then I knew he wasn’t an imposter. And I knew I was, you know, acting out at the time. But you’re right, the idea of impersonation is absolutely fascinating. And because, after all, it’s what every fiction writer does. You impersonate other people. It’s also what actors do, but actors don’t make up from scratch what they impersonate, and writers do. I love the idea of impersonation. But I also have another theory about it, which has to do with the character of writers. I think if writers impersonate in life, then that is going in some way to contaminate them as writers. And I think impersonation belongs in fiction and that you shouldn’t do it in life.

Is there a little bit of Wyatt Gwyon [from William Gaddis’ novel The Recognitions] in Rupert Rabeeno?

What an interesting idea! I never thought of that. No, no. Maybe subliminally, because that’s one of my all-time favorite books. Yes, Gaddis is remarkable. He’s one of our most extraordinary contemporary writers. And The Recognitions is a great, great book, and I read it when it was new. I kept it with me and read in it and in it and in it. But not consciously here, and it’s quite interesting that you bring that up, because I have been tremendously interested in that book. But a long, long time ago, you know, when it first came out, and I haven’t read it since.

Rupert Rabeeno also seems to me like a kind of Gaddisy name.

Well, Rabeeno is really a kind of garden-variety Jewish name, you know. It’s a version of Rabinowitz without the witz.

Speaking of writers of massive novels…

Infinite Jest—is that what you were going to say?

David Foster Wallace and William Vollmann both cite you as an influence, especially Wallace. He says he has a painting of you in his house. This is kind of interesting, because you seem to revel in your obscurity.

Well, reveling in never going out of the house, for sure. If that’s what you mean by obscurity, having rather reclusive impulses, I do. I mean I do go out and sort of live a normal life, because—you remember Flaubert’s dictum, “Live like a bourgeois so that you can write like a God.” And that’s sort of related to what I said before about not impersonating in life—so that you don’t have to be a character or bohemian or weirdo in life because then it dribbles out and you waste it. But if you hoard it for the writing, and that’s exactly what Flaubert means in that remark. About influential—I have no inkling of this.

There’s a third-person essay in Fame & Folly about how you haven’t written enough and how you’re not important in any way—or I assume it’s about you.

“The Break.” Yes, that’s quite true. That is deep, deep autobiography, yes.

I think the two most interesting new writers working now are Vollmann and Wallace, and they love you. I just think maybe someone should tell you.

Well, thank you. It’s a little bit inconceivable and interesting. I’ve written—I don’t think it’s in Fame & Folly, it’s in an earlier collection—something about Cyril Connolly, and the beginning of that has a little autobiographical patch about the early years and a certain imprinting that happens to a writer who can’t get published in early years. And listening to you, I can see that you’re not only out in the stewpot, even in Minnesota, but you seem to be creating your own stewpot. And that is the most valuable thing a young writer can do. So you can have me as a horrible example of what not to do. And I’ve written about that—it’s called “Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success.”

Did you want to say something about Infinite Jest?

No, I just had an instinct that you were going to mention David Foster Wallace.

Did you read it?

Actually, I have it on order. And there’s a big, big article about him—where did I read this—oh, in the New Republic. There’s a wonderful, long article about David Foster Wallace.

Infinite Jest is really wonderful.

Now I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that I only have it on order and haven’t read it. But you know when you’re trying to write fiction, there are periods where you don’t want to read fiction, particularly by powerful voices. Because, for me anyway, I can get to be a kind of ventriloquist.

Yes, it’s so hard to keep from channeling Kafka and Proust—and you. And Bruno Schulz. Thank you for Bruno Schulz, by the way.

Channeling—what a funny way to put it. It’s true. I think it’s the truest way to put it. Yes.

When I read The Messiah of Stockholm I thought either that Bruno Schulz was the greatest writer of the century, or else you were for inventing him. Because I’d never heard of him.

But that’s quite typical, and we really owe our knowledge of Bruno Schulz to Philip Roth, who in the Writers of the Other Europe series brought him to American, and really Western, attention. And so he is really the hero of these Eastern European writers. Particularly Bruno Schulz.

Did you read David Grossman’s book on Bruno Schulz  [See Under: Love]? It happened at almost the same time as your book.

Yes. It’s so interesting. An israeli critic from a Hebrew University called me, and he said “Do you know that there’s another book?” It hadn’t yet been translated, and it was still in Hebrew, and he said “There’s another book written at exactly the same time about Bruno Schulz.” So that was interesting.

From reading The Messiah of Stockholm and some of your other works, it seems like you’re really interested in cabalistic paper chases. Are you more interested in paper than in life?

I’m afraid so. I think I once wrote a little, tiny thing that might have been in a collection called Metaphor & Memory in which I said, “I do not like life. It interrupts.”

In another interview you told the story about how you were checking the page proofs for Trust in one hand and rocking your baby with the other. And you said you were a little shocked by the feeling that the page proofs felt more important than the life in the crib.

You know, that baby is now thirty-one, and she’s a professor of Near Eastern archeology, and she has a baby of her own. And I do see the difference, because she writes papers, she goes to conferences, and she’s, you know, your standard academic with a very heavy program at Penn State. She and her husband both are in this together, and they also took a four-month-old baby to a horrendous dig last summer. I tell you all this because you can hear from this that there’s enormous intellectual commitment, but I see in her a normality that I never had, which is that, with all this configuration of commitment, that baby is all. And paper is secondary. But you’re quite right. Paper comes before life for me. And life does interrupt, and it torments me. Very often. Most of the time it interrupts.

I’m deeply shocked by the novel’s last chapter, “Puttermesser in Paradise.” You knew she was going to die, but did you know it was going to be like this?

I always knew it was going to be a mugging, and of course that was in place in the very first chapter, with the kind of standard New York fear of muggers. I always knew it was going to be a mugging. I did not know that it was going to be this vicious, this horrifying. And that, really, is where the whole question of impersonation comes in, because in order to write a passage like that you really have to become that guy in the sneakers. You have to change your sex, for one thing. And you have to become deeply cruel and callous about life. And this is where Flaubert’s “bourgeois” comes in and my “anti-impersonation in life” comes in, because I would never murder or rape in life. But to do it in writing, I have to be candid, there is a kind of relish in making that happen and shocking oneself with how far one can go.

Are you glad she’s dead?

Yes.

Why?

Because it’s right. She culminated. She had her consummation, and she was always heading for Paradise. And all her life has consisted of almost hitting climax and then withdrawal or detumescence before truly hitting climax. Or let’s put it this way—climax and anti-climax. So though I did not know what her Paradise was going to be, it had to be consistent with the nature of her DNA. Her DNA is to dream, to imagine, to utopianize, and then to be struck on the head by reality. Because I think this book as a whole is a mediation on mortality, on evanescence, on the ephemeral. In that sense, it’s a little book about—not what Shakespeare means when he says “Ripeness is all,” but just the moment after Shakespeare gets to say that. Because ripeness is all, but then the next step after ripeness is decay. Unless you devour at the moment of ripeness. But we don’t always get to devour at the peak of ripeness, and we’re always just a little too late, so we come into the decay that follows ripeness. And therefore it may not be true that ripeness is all—it may be true that decay is all. And when you begin to think that decay is all, then you’re thinking about the human condition and mortality, which is the heart and soul of everything in our lives. It makes ambition. It makes tragedy. It makes comedy. Being the creature that is conscious, the only creature that knows our end, our goal, our aim, what is going to happen to us—no other creature knows it—that is why mortality dominates our lives and also makes us write. Because we’re writing against that doom.

That story seems to be deeply influenced by Ecclesiastes.

Well, I think everything I’ve said in the last few seconds is Ecclesiastes. I believe the human condition is tragic, because it is governed by mortality. There’s a famous piece of dialogue between two schools of thought, two first-century figures. One is the school of Hillel, and one is the school of Shammai. Shammai is a literalist, and he wants people to toe the line. And Hillel is tolerant, more easygoing, and much more understanding of human failings, and they’ve never agreed about anything in jurisprudence. You can divide them this way—mercy and justice—Hillel more on the side of mercy and Shammai more on the side of justice. They’ve never agreed on any matter that has come up before them. However—they did agree once on a subject. Shammai said, thinking over the whole trajectory of human life, “It is better not to have been born at all.” And it’s a very Buddhist point of view, actually, you know—getting off the wheel of life. Hillel thought real hard about this, and he saw the wisdom in it, and he did agree. But he added, “Yes, it is better not to have been born at all, but since we have been born, let us perform the commandments.” Namely, acts of conscience, mercy, and compassion. And unless we’re very attracted by Eastern religions, I think in the West our conscience is dominated by “but since we have been born, let us do acts of compassion.”

That story seems more nihilistic than most of what you’ve written.

Well, you know the little proverb, the little Song of Paradise at the beginning that says “translated from the Akkadian”? I made that up. That doesn’t really exist.

In the first chapter, Ruth imagines/invents her uncle. And later we find that she’s invented even more about herself that we’d taken as truth. Is she her own author?

That’s interesting. I think that’s a fascinating conceit, but I think that conceit belongs to a critical interpretation, not to the author.

I mean, it’s like you’re playing games with her existence, like there’s nothing definite that we can believe about her.

Yes—do and undo.

So what’s next?

Well, I’ve committed myself to a couple of essays. And the ceiling fell in, and it took six months of reconstruction, and before that I had begun a short story which I hope to finish very soon. It’s called “Actors,” and it’s based on my seven years in the theater. Somebody asked me, “What were you doing in fiction between The Messiah of Stockholm and The Puttermesser Papers?” And I had total amnesia, and it was very frightening to me, and then I remembered, “Oh, my God! Yes—seven years of two productions of a play.” And that taught me something about the nature of the theater and how evanescent it is and that it’s all ephemera, because it’s all on the side of experience. It’s on the side of life. It isn’t paper. So I really am committed to paper, and I did spend seven years of my rapidly diminishing span on life, which was the theater. But I wish it had been paper. Then I would have had another novel.

It was a play version of “The Shawl”?

There was a lot of confusion about that, because the producers insisted on giving it that name. It was not an adaptation, it was a sequel, and it was a political play. And in the out-of-town production it had a different name. It was Blue Light. And in the New York production it was called The Shawl. As I say, at the insistence of the director and the producers, and the director was Sidney Lumet, who came back to the theater after thirty-five years of being in movies and out of the theater. And that was kind of wonderful to work with such a distinguished and revered movie name. And Dianne Wiest played Rosa. And Mercedes Ruehl played Stella in the out-of-town version. And it was a marvel to be in that world for so long. But the play was, as I say, a political play. It was about Holocaust denial on one level, and on a more metaphorical level it was about the seductiveness of the devil—that the devil always comes with sweet talk. Also an ancient idea.

How different was it from “The Shawl”?

It used some of the same characters. It uses Rosa. Stella became the main character. But it was a sequel. It was not at all an adaptation. I wrote twenty-five versions of this play. And that took seven years—almost a decade of my life given away to something that isn’t here anymore, unlike a book.

There’s no printed version?

No. I haven’t been able to decide which of the twenty-five versions, and so I’ve kept it out of print. It’s so much a director’s medium, and the writer so much becomes an amanuensis of the director, at least of this particular director, that I don’t know if I ever do want it in print. I’m not decided.

For some reason, I’m having visions of Henry James being booed off the stage.

Well, in a sense it happened. Because the reviews in New York were very bad. They mostly concentrated on the director, not on the writer. But the play was sold out, both out of town and in New York and could have gone on and on for months, except that Dianne Wiest had another obligation. And the producers didn’t want to go on without her, because she was a very great draw, and so was Sidney Lumet. So I don’t know if it was the play, you know, or the glamour of these two Hollywood figures. Probably more the glamour of the Hollywood names. But there was enormous audience enthusiasm—standing ovations every night. It had its excitements. But the answer to the question “are you a paper person?”—the answer that I learned over seven years is yes.

Did the applause affect you?

It’s very exhilarating. It’s exciting. It’s extraordinary. I understood what Henry James was after. I had a little bit of it. Yes, it’s very heady. It’s champagne. There’s no question.

Can you tell me a little bit about your literary past, like what happened between OSU and Trust?

It’s all written about in the Cyril Connelly essay. Briefly, I can tell you that I read and read and read and read and read. And I was also writing another novel. I was writing a novel, which was going to be a vast philosophical novel. I wrote about 300,000 words of it. It was called Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love—M.P.P.L. And my husband started calling it “Nipple” for short. And then I was making a joke that this is the nipple on which I sucked for seven years. It was like the Biblical wooing of Rachel and Leah, because seven years on Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love—that’s a line from Blake, as you probably recognize. And then I abandoned that, and then another seven years on Trust.

Do you still have a reward for someone who can finish Trust?

Yes. Actually, I met someone just yesterday, but in order to have this gold medal struck I really need evidence. And this person told me she had written a review and promised to give me evidence. So we’ll see. We’ll see whether this is just an avaricious person wanting gold. But I haven’t yet had to give anybody this gold medal. So I haven’t had one struck yet.

I love long, complicated novels, so maybe I’ll give it a try.

This one will daunt you, I think. Although in my secret self I know that I’ve never written that well since. I’m convinced of it.

I had always understood that you were unhappy with that novel.

I like it better than anything I’ve ever written. And I have to keep quiet about that, because it’s a deeply minority opinion.

Do you want me to print that? Because I won’t if you want to keep this to yourself.

No, no. You can say it. Of course you can.

—David Wiley

An Interview with A.B. Yehoshua

An interview with A.B. Yehoshua, with a discussion of his books Mr. Mani and Open Heart

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

June 5th, 1997

Talking About His Generation

Israeli Writer A.B. Yehoshua on the

Waning Art of the Democratic Novel

The name A.B. Yehoshua may not ring too many bells here in the States, but on the international scene he ranks alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and Salman Rushdie as one of the great contemporary novelists. He is to Israel what García Márquez is to Columbia, Grass is to Germany, and Rushdie is to India—a kind of literary spokesman and symbol for the entire country.

This might seem incomprehensible to an American reading public obsessed with keeping art and politics separate, because even though we have Toni Morrison, who comes close, we generally don’t have much interest in writers who are engaged in the national culture the way Yehoshua and company are. So when Yehoshua came to Minneapolis a few weeks ago, he meant to shake things up a bit, giving two electrifying lectures and talking serious politics in an interview arranged by the University of Minnesota’s chair of Hebrew Studies, Yehudit Shendar.

A Francophile from birth, Yehoshua speaks English with a curious French accent, and his wild hair and ecstatic bearing give him a Nutty Professor type of aura. Lying beneath his disordered manner, however, is a mind as focused and organized as any in literature. He speaks frankly about the Palestinian question (he advocates full peace at any cost), and he stresses the importance of moral and political involvement on the part of writers. But the moral duty of the Israeli novelist, Yehoshua says, has a specific dimension that may seem foreign to other writers:

“The artist in Israel, and in Zionism in general,” Yehoshua says, “was very much involved in what you will call the national activity, the national spirit. They were involved not only because there was a great problem that is happening to a people, generally writers are very much involved as social critics, as prophets or whatever they are doing as patriots. But in the Jewish Zionist movement it was especially important because the renaissance of the Jewish people of the Zionist movement, of the national Zionist movement, was done also through the renaissance of Hebrew. So they were not only participating in the big event as partners, but also it was very important because they were very active in the recreating of the Jewish language. Because in order to do a national movement, it was a necessity to bring back, to revive the Jewish language.”

But Yehoshua is finding himself to be one of the last of the Israeli writers engaged in this larger arena. It seems that Yehoshua and fellow novelist Amos Oz, who are both part of a leftist section of the Israeli Labor Party called the “Sane Left,” form the last of the old guard. Only novelist David Grossman, who is even farther left (and whose book See Under: Love is one of the best novels of the last ten years in any language) is as engaged.

“My feeling is that we are the last one,” Yehoshua says, “my generation—and perhaps David Grossman, who is younger, and perhaps he is the last one—who are very much involved in public affairs, that are still writing from time to time in articles, that are shouting, that are giving interviews and things like that. The younger generation doesn’t want to do it anymore. The younger writers are writing their Postmodern literature—they are doing it with great joy, with all the jokes, like your [American] writers. There is a fine writer, a young writer, who is doing a very smart kind of short story pieces, and he was asked by a television station to have a dialogue with one of the former writers, with the more older writer. So he chose me as a partner, and when he was calling me and saying to me, ‘I’m going to come to your house with the crew of television,’ there was some kind of terrorist attack, and I was saying to him, ‘Prepare yourself. We will have to talk about—we will be asked by the television about this and that,’ and he said, ‘Why? We have to talk about politics? No, no. I am not coming here. I don’t want it at all.’”

Writers want to write personal literature, which is important, but Yehoshua says that there has to be a balance between the inner and outer worlds in literature:

“A writer has his duty first of all to do a fine literature that will touch the individual,” Yehoshua says, “that will speak on the behalf of the individual. And so it’s very difficult how to find your way in between your duty as a writer to speak about the big issues—and especially about moral issues—and to do all your private literature with all the subtleties of psychological description, of human situations.”

Yehoshua’s history as a writer is a testament to how artists can integrate the needs of the individual with then needs of society. Starting out at age twenty-one—after his military service—Yehoshua worked as a short story writer, feeling out how to create a prose style, and then moved on much later to larger forms—and issues.

“I was starting writing abstract short stories in the mood of Kafka and some of the abstract writing of Agnon. And then, little by little, I was descending from the abstract writing to reality, and I was very much influenced in a certain time of my literary career by Faulkner. In my mind Faulkner is the best writer of the century in any language. … He was important in the way in which he was doing the multi-voices novel. This for me was important in the ’70s, when I felt that Israel was cracking, dismantling to many voices, and the way to recreate a novel that will express rightly the mood of Israel—the model was given to me by Faulkner.”

Yehoshua has been called “a kind of Israeli Faulkner” by critic Harold Bloom, and Yehoshua explained part of his fascination with Faulkner in his lecture “Modern Democracy and the Novel.” Arguing that all the greatest works of literature from this century were written in its first fifty years, he says that he would take the works of “Thomas Mann, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, the less famous Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bruno Schulz, Musil, Doblin, Agnon and Céline” over any of the great works written in the last fifty years.

It’s not just the mysticism of time that makes these writers seem better than contemporary ones, Yehoshua says, but that the current political scene isn’t conducive to great writing. He points to modern democracy—democracy as practiced in countries like the United States, that is—as one of the key factors in literature’s decline. Many of the great novels of the past—from Cervantes’ Don Quixote to Faulkner’s As I lay Dying—strove toward a democratic aesthetic, Yehoshua says, but with today’s capitalism-disguised-as-democracy, writers somehow think there’s no more work to be done.

Don Quixote was radical because it placed more emphasis on the voices of the poor than of the aristocracy, and writers as late as William Faulkner were still expanding this vocabulary. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying took the democratic mode in literature to its highest point, Yehoshua says, with each chapter narrated by a different character—none of which having any supremacy over any other. With this barrage of voices eliminating any kind of ersatz objectivity on the part of the narrator, Faulkner was able to create a world as seen by its inhabitants, not just by its creator.

It’s this kind of democratic agitation that Yehoshua sees as missing from modern novels. But he, at least, is still interested in progress. Taking his cue from Faulkner, Yehoshua uses the multi-voice technique in ways even more radical than his Mississippi master’s. His 1976 novel The Lover was his first foray into this style, but his 1989 novel Mr. Mani rivals even the astonishing See Under: Love as the great novel of modern Israel.

Mr. Mani tells the story of the Mani family through five long conversations held over the course of 150 years. In each conversation the reader hears only the voice of one of the speakers, which makes the whole thing both wildly disjointed and almost infinitely suggestive. Each speaker is somehow connected with the Mani family, so the reader gets to see its progress through Israeli/Palestinian history not only from the outside, but through several unrelated and openly biased eyes. Each speaker has his or her own story, and watching all the threads—of the Mani family and the speakers—come together is one of the most thrilling experiences of modern literature.

Yehoshua’s last book, Open Heart, is a bit of a retreat from this style, however. Following one narrator, Doctor Benjamin Rubin, on his impossible love affair with his boss’ wife, the book finds Yehoshua writing a more personal kind of fiction for a change. Although it’s amazingly rich, with uncanny characterization and an almost unfathomable spiritual depth, it’s just not as compelling as his other work. Part of this has to do with the translation. Yehoshua’s old translator, the brilliant Hillel Halkin, just recently retired, and Open Heart is clumsily translated into English by the South African Dalya Bilu.

But Yehoshua is returning to the larger arena with his next novel, A Journey to the End of the Millennium, which he just released in Hebrew. Exploring the relationship between the Sephardic Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews at the end of the first millennium, the book looks to be a vast parable extending its reach into modern Israeli questions—in short another Yehoshua masterpiece. But we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out Mr. Mani.

—David Wiley

A cover story on Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

A cover story on Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

May 29th, 1997

Pynchon’s Progress

The Author of Gravity’s Rainbow Resurveys the

Mason-Dixon Line and Rediscovers America

Mason & Dixon

By Thomas Pynchon

Henry Holt, $27.50

Even though he’s never been on Oprah or Conan, Thomas Pynchon in arguably the most culturally significant American writer of our time. Almost as famous for his reclusiveness as for his literary output, Pynchon has never given a public appearance, never been interviewed, and hasn’t had his picture taken since he was a teenager. Yet his influence ranges across nearly all American media, even—especially—in areas that have never heard of him.

Pynchon emerged in 1963 when his first novel, V., revolutionized America’s literary landscape. Taking the Modernism of James Joyce and William Faulkner on its last steps into Postmodernism, Pynchon became a kind of icon for the 1960s, and his outrageous style simply changed everything. In addition to being one of the most staggeringly erudite humans beings on the planet, he was one of the first American writers to take the subversive cultures cropping up around him seriously, writing about conspiracies, alternative histories, and creepy cabalistic systems. He also wrote about jazz, rock ’n’ roll, drugs, and sex, but what distinguished him from the pedestrian decadence of the Beats (and today’s Gen-Xers) is that he contrasted these depictions with advanced theories of entropy and information. He didn’t glorify the emerging popular culture; he chronicled it as a kind of increasing degeneration—a wild party that ultimately robs us of our identity and replaces it with consumerism and conformity.

The ironic and troubling thing about Pynchon—and America—is that the party is so damn appealing. We love to buy into the latest rock band, pretending that we’re rebelling as we keep our eyes glued to the tube. And it’s tempting to approach Pynchon’s dissonant style as a kind of retreat from meaning, a sarcastic feast of words and images that protects us from moving forward (the working title for his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, is said to have been Mindless Pleasures). Unfortunately, it’s this misreading of Pynchon that has probably had the largest cultural impact. Pynchon gave us an alternative to meaninglessness in his fiction, if only in glimpses, and now television has appropriated his ironic, subversive style and used it to sell to us. If only we buy a Subaru or Nike shoes, TV tells us, we’ll be able to stave off the empty, decadent mob of faceless consumers and take our nonconformist stand.

So where does this leave Pynchon? After changing the world with the novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, he didn’t produce anything new until seventeen years later, in the waning years of the Reagan era, when he released the 1990 novel Vineland. Rumors abounded during his sabbatical: He was burnt out; he was recovering from a bad acid trip; he had resumed writing under his pseudonyms J.D. Salinger and William Gaddis. But the most prevalent rumor was that he was working on a novel about the Mason-Dixon line.

The first peep of the Mason-Dixon theory came out eighteen years ago, and so when Pynchon released Vineland, critics unanimously cried, “What the hell is this?” In Pynchon’s’ absence, such writers as William T. Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and Carol DeChellis Hill had extended his legacy to new lengths, and Vineland didn’t fare well in comparison to the work they were producing. It was simply more of the same critiques of modern culture—critiques that even television commercials had picked up on—and even though most of it was right on the money, almost everybody wrote Pynchon off as old and unhip.

So when word started resurfacing again about the Mason-Dixon novel, some critics saw it as a retreat from Pynchon’s stance as the oracle of modern culture. Was he protecting himself from accusations of irrelevance by hiding behind a historical novel? Or was this going to be an epic re-imagining of American history the way Gravity’s Rainbow was? Now the wait—and the debate—is over, because Pynchon has finally returned to release the awesome Mason & Dixon.

Probably twenty to twenty-five years in the writing, Mason & Dixon is unequivocally worth the wait—and the weight (it’s almost 800 pages long). It spans just twenty-five seminal years of American history (1761–1786), but it’s one of the most powerfully modern visions of this country’s state of mind since—well, since Gravity’s Rainbow. And Pynchon definitely has not lost his contemporary edge: In surveying the story of Mason and Dixon, he incorporates sly references to everything from the Three Stooges to Popeye to Bill Clinton to Tammy Wynette.

The story begins at its end—the Christmastide of 1786, when the exiled Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke sits down to tell his Philadelphia family the story of Charles Mason (1723–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779). Briefly starting with third-person descriptions of the Reverend and his family, the novel then swings into Cherrycoke’s weird, quasi-first-person account. He describes Mason and Dixon’s first encounters with each other in England, their meeting with the Reverend himself, and their mutual voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, where the pair is sent to observe the Transit of Venus. The book soon shifts to an impossible third-person narrative, however, with Cherrycoke recounting events he could never have seen. His family calls him on it, and he laughs it off and quickly changes the subject, so the reader is left with a constantly shifting—and possibly unreliable—series of frames around the story.

So who is the narrator—Pynchon or Cherrycoke? And what is our frame of reference—1761, 1786, or 1997? Despite all these shifts, Mason & Dixon is by far Pynchon’s most accessible and linear novel to date. It follows just two characters in a straight line as they survey their way across America. The simplified structure might disappoint some Pynchon fans, but he makes up for it with a richness and complexity of characterization that he could never have achieved in his earlier years. And of course he gives readers a shitload of intertextual games to play, referring at turns to such anachronistic authors as Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Julio Cortázar, and himself. Notice that the Reverend Cherrycoke is probably an ancestor of Gravity’s Grainbow’s Ronald Cherrycoke, and there’s also “Fender-Belly” Bodine, who’s presumably the progenitor of Pynchon’s recurring character Pig Bodine.

After their trip to the Cape of Good Hope, Mason and Dixon are separated briefly and then sent together on a mission to America to survey the disputed border between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Once in America, they descend into the darkest, most Conradian reaches of the ostensible Age of Reason. But first they have fun partying with George Washington, who really likes his hemp. The novel’s most outrageous scene takes place when the future president gets Mason and Dixon high and engages them in a spirited discussion with his slave Gershom. The scene reaches a comic zenith when the faithful Martha Washington comes running in with a tray of pastries for the party: “Smell’d that Smoak, figured you’d be needing something to nibble on.”

As the two men then set out to carve up the new world, they slowly realize they are simply the tools of huge systems way beyond their comprehension. The narrative also introduces more and more inexplicable phenomena—which Europe’s rationalism is trying to eradicate—and the two astronomer/surveyors are forced to work as unwitting missionaries against the nonrational. Along the line, they meet a group of Presbyterian settlers who are “in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris” and who apparently live near an enormous Golem. The Golem was created, so say the Presbyterians, by a tribe of Native Americans believed to be one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The pair also comes up against a talking dog, an amorous mechanical duck (both curiously the product of European Enlightenment—the sleep of reason does produce monsters), and a field of cathedral-sized vegetables.

Moving steadily west, with numerous side trips and detours, Mason and Dixon begin to question their mission, and strange memories surface to counter what science tells them is reality: Dixon admits to knowing magical secrets passed down from texts “rescued from the Library at Alexandria, circa 390 AD., before Christians could quite destroy it all.” And Mason, in one of the novel’s most visionary sections, remembers the mysterious eleven days between September 2nd and September 14th, 1752, which Parliament had struck from the calendar to correct astronomers’ mistakes. While everyone else went straight from the 2nd to the 14th, Mason lived the eleven days, roaming the streets in search of other lost souls.

As we do today, the people in the 18th century spent most of their free time entertaining themselves with crappy art, and this is where Pynchon makes some of his most pointed comments about America. Mason and Dixon get drawn into reading a trashy serial called The Ghastly Fop, a serial that’s still running when Cherrycoke tells his tale. At one point, Cherrycoke’s listeners take time off and read to each other a section of The Ghastly Fop that deals with a woman abducted by Jesuits and her escape from them with the help of a Chinese feng shui master. As Cherrycoke resumes his narrative, Pynchon makes his boldest move—bringing these two characters into the story of Mason and Dixon. It’s an amazing comment on how history gets told, with Cherrycoke working not only as Mason and Dixon’s Boswell, but as their Kinbote too.

With the two new characters playing crucial roles in Mason & Dixon’s progression,  the book shifts from being Pynchon’s most traditional, old-fashioned novel to his most unabashedly Postmodern. And it’s a complete success. Combining the best of all the resources available to the modern novelist, Mason & Dixon is both totally wacky and absolutely moving, proving not only that Pynchon has progressed to new levels of maturity, but that he’s still as radical as ever.

—David Wiley

The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison

A review of The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

May 8th, 1997

Father Figure

The Kiss

By Kathryn Harrison

Random House, $20

Books about incest can be a troublesome lot. Seen by some critics as gratuitous attempts at selling to the talk-show constituency, books that expose the sins of the father are often attacked as sensationalist. Novelist and short story writer Charles Baxter complained that Jane Smiley’s use of incest in A Thousand Acres cheapened the novel, but he was probably just mad at her for criticizing Shadow Play, his novel from the same year. And with Smiley’s novel beating out Baxter’s for the Pulitzer Prize (and a wider audience), his accusations—along with those of the more conservative critical echelon—seem a bit suspect.

The truth is that incest is far more common—and complicated—than many critics like to believe. It’s not just some device writers use to sell books; it’s a hard fact, and like any other disturbing aspect of modern life, it needs to be openly dealt with in the literary world. But it’s still tricky. And trickier still is when the book is non-fiction. Smiley uses incest to explicate the relationships between her novel’s characters, but when it’s real, and is the focus of the book, how are writers—and reader—to approach it?

Novelist Kathryn Harrison tackles this enormous task with her new memoir The Kiss. Roughly dividing the book into two parts, Harrison writes her life story leading up to and then following the decisive moment of her young life, when her father first kisses her. The division recalls how Vladimir Nabokov contrasted Lolita’s psychotically beautiful before-half with its psychotically ugly after-half. But this time we get the girl’s—or rather the woman’s—point of view: Harrison is twenty years old when her father initiates their affair.

Harrison keeps the narrative tight, with enough family background to give the book texture but not so much that it loses its focus. She grows up with her maternal grandparents after her parents’ brief marriage and divorce. Her mother lives with them sometimes, but she’s a fleeting, maddening figure. Her father, a minister, relocates after the divorce, remarries, and raises another family in another part of the country. Harrison is vague with names and places, never mentioning her father’s—and hence her own—last name. She writes on the book’s copyright page that Harrison is her married name (she’s married to novelist Colin Harrison) and that she “has not used her maiden name in a number of years.”

Despite its anonymity, The Kiss is razor sharp in its depiction of her family’s dysfunctionality. Harrison only meets her father twice in childhood—at age five and age ten—and with her mother floating in and out, Harrison never gets the affection of a real parent. Even worse, she gets teased by her mother’s proximity without ever getting to connect with her.

So when the twenty-year-old Harrison, a brainy, insecure college student, finally gets to spend time with her father, she finds in him a father figure she never had. The two are nearly mirror images of each other, and they bond instantly. But her father cannot separate their newfound filial love from the carnal passion he feels for the beautiful woman his daughter has become. Using all the power he has—a creepy combination of the intellectual, the theological, and the fatherly—he breaks down all her defenses, beginning an affair that virtually shatters Harrison’s young personality.

But The Kiss is far from a sob story. It describes a terrifying event, but ultimately the books is about redemption. It’s about a woman rebuilding herself, reclaiming herself from the past she won’t allow herself to forget. Not so much a book charting a recovery as it is a reclamation of memory, The Kiss asserts itself as one of the most powerful memoirs in years.

—David Wiley

Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

A review of Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

 April 24th, 1997

Picking Up the Pieces

Fugitive Pieces

By Anne Michaels

Knopf, $23

Canadian poets must be under some kind of curse—or maybe call it a blessing—that condemns them to be known for their novels. Margaret Atwood, who’s written more books of poetry than of any other genre, is mainly famous for her novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye, and poet Michael Ondaatje is known almost solely for The English Patient. Maybe this disparity signals a loss of prestige for poetry, but then again all these novels are deserving of the attention they’ve received. And now, with her debut novel, Fugitive Pieces, add Anne Michaels, author of the award-winning collections The Weight of Oranges and Miner’s Pond, to this group.

It’s hard not to call this novel poetry, though. Mostly narrated by Michaels’ invented poet Jakob Beer, Fugitive Pieces is an exploration of both the surface and the substance—the meanings and the words to describe them—of twentieth-century history. Lost in the absurdities of postwar Europe—and then in the academic world of Canada—Beer is a survivor in every sense of the word. He survives World War II; he survives the guilt of survival; and, most of all, he survives—mainly through poetry—the nearly overwhelming sense of meaninglessness this bloody century gives him as his birthright.

Beer surfaces (literally) in the buried Polish city Biskupin:

“So hungry. I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew.”

His entire family killed by the Nazis, Jakob travels the wilderness by night, like the unnamed boy in Jerzy Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird. But unlike in Kosinsky’s horrific masterpiece, where all humanity is completely lost, Jakob finds a single human figure in the darkness of Hitler’s Europe: a Greek geologist named Athos. Finding himself with no alternative—it’s either save the boy or let him be killed—Athos smuggles Jakob to his native island Zakynthos, where they wait out the war, reading and starving.

The novel then follows them to Canada, where Athos gets a teaching job and Jakob grows into manhood—and into poetry. Jakob also eventually becomes a professor; he marries, divorces, despairs at Athos’ eventual death, and then finds a kind of soul-mate/savior in the almost too luminous Michaela.

Although probably the novel’s coolest character, Michaela is way too good to be true. Jakob desperately needs to connect—both physically and emotionally—because his faith in humanity is repeatedly shattered by reality, but introducing Michaela is a bit of a cop-out on Michaels’ part. She’s young (twenty-five years Jakob’s junior), brilliant, gorgeous, and amazing in bed, and she mostly spends her time dazzling the reader rather than rehabilitating Jakob. There’s not a part of their courtship and marriage that’s less than brilliantly written, but Michaels seems to be avoiding some key issues by making their relationship so physically idealized. Still, despite Michaela’s resembling a mid-life crisis affair, the connection of the flesh is a vital part of how Jakob finds himself among the world of the living.

But the reader knows, from the first page, when and where Jakob will die, and this point occurs only about two-thirds into the novel. The latter third of the book, narrated by the younger scholar Ben, is the search for the Jakob not known in the literary or scholarly world—the personal Jakob hidden behind the page.

The second section, although Michaels imagines it ingeniously, seems a bit disjointed from the rest. The novel is fragmented, almost irreconcilably so. But this is undoubtedly Michaels’ plan, and there’s a kind of gestalt to the various fugitive pieces of Jakob’s life that makes for a powerful vision of the elusive poet. The reader imagines the whole from his parts, and despite Fugitive Pieces’ few flaws, it’s a pretty amazing whole.

—David Wiley

Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis

A review of Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

April 10th, 1997

A Dog’s Life

Lives of the Monster Dogs

By Kirsten Bakis

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $23

“But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlast him.”

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

In Franz Kafka’s world the lives of humans and animals are intimately connected—and usually in creepy ways: Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant beetle in “The Metamorphosis”; in “Investigations of a Dog” the narrator is a reasoning canine that finds itself alienated from its essential dogginess; in “The Burrow” a giant mole-like animal finds itself in a horrifyingly human existential terror. These stories can be read as human parables played out in animal shapes, but they are also pointed comments on the interrelatedness of the biological world. And now, with modern science negating many of the meaningful differences between humans and animals (if any biological being can be cloned, do we have individual human souls?), the relationship is all the more dramatic.

In her debut novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs, Kirsten Bakis revisits and updates some of the ground Kafka laid, creating a terrifying vision of biology for the new millennium. The book mostly takes place between 2009 and 2011, when a group of 150 monster dogs moves to New York City. At first nobody knows anything about them except that they walk upright, wear nineteenth-century clothes, have mechanically human hands, and can talk. They’re reclusive and extremely wealthy, and because of their shyness they almost disappear into myth during their first year in New York.

Through a strange coincidence the narrator, Cleo Pira, happens to form a friendship with Ludwig von Sacher, a German Shepherd who functions as the dogs’ historian. Through Ludwig, Cleo meets Klaue, the dogs’ self-appointed leader, and she unwittingly becomes the dogs’ human liaison and chronicler.

As she becomes closer friends with Ludwig, she learns about the dogs’ history. Ludwig has the only surviving written documents from the dogs’ past, and he is putting together a history he plans to call “Lives of the Monster Dogs.” It seems the dogs were the brainchild of a mad Frankenstein-esque biologist from nineteenth-century Prussia named Augustus Rank. Rank imagined an army of perfectly obedient soldiers—dog soldiers—that would help him conquer Europe. Befriending Wilhelm II, the future ruler of the German empire, Rank gets funding to work on his invention. But he’s eventually forced to flee—to Canada—when he doesn’t succeed.

Setting up a remote town called Rankstadt with embezzled money, Rank spends the rest of his life working on his dogs. He never lives to see the final creation, but his followers carry on his dream and eventually perfect the dogs. In his absence, the followers—and then the dogs—set up a complex mythology around Rank, expecting him to return and lead them all to world domination.

Cleo learns all this by reading Ludwig’s papers, and eventually she finds out that the dogs rose and slaughtered the humans in Rankstadt, deciding to go out into the world by themselves. But what happens in the present is just as shocking. The dogs, while they are as genteel and refined as Prussian aristocrats, are still dogs, and try as they might, they will never be human. As Bakis writes, “It is a terrible thing to be a dog and know it.”

Lives of the Monster Dogs is a virtuoso pastiche of literary styles—part history, part memoir, part correspondence, part diary; it even includes a twenty-page libretto for an opera written and performed by dogs. Bakis is an ingenious mimic, but what’s even more impressive is her understanding of how to put together a compelling narrative. She’s slyly old fashioned, working the bizarre, postmodern mishmash into an absolutely thrilling series of progressions. What results is a kind of Calvino-meets-Dickens novel that simply explodes with meaning and style.

The word “explodes” might also be just the right way to describe how this book ends. In trying to deal with their increasing alienation from the canine and human worlds, the dogs throw a bash even more saturnalian than the one at the end of P.D. Eastman’s classic kids’ book Go Dog Go. Without giving away any of the ending’s substance, lets’ just say that Lives of the Monster Dogs is the dog party to end all dog parties.

—David Wiley

Naked, by David Sedaris

A review of Naked, by David Sedaris

Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,

March 13th, 1997

Diary of a Madman

Naked

By David Sedaris

Little, Brown, $21.95

Ever since reading David Sedaris’ first book, Barrel Fever, I’ve been searching for the perfect way to describe him. First I was saying he was like a What’s Up, Tiger Lily?-era Woody Allen, but gay and even funnier. But that doesn’t begin to capture the full-bore insanity that is Sedaris. So lately I’ve settled on the only description that even comes close: fucking hilarious.

Sedaris gained national attention by reading his essays on NPR, astonishing listeners with stories of an epically comic and embarrassingly familiar America. His “SantaLand Diaries,” which chronicle his job working as a Macy’s Christmas elf, make the Santa scene from A Christmas Story seem as warm and fuzzy as Miracle on 34th Street. And his essay “Giantess” tells the story of his brief flirtation with writing erotic fiction. For those of us living under a rock, Giantess magazine traffics in stories and pictorials about normal women who somehow grow to more than fifty or sixty feet tall. Hearing Giantess’ editor explain the magazine’s style guide is priceless:

“Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”

Barrel Fever collected four of Sedaris’ essays and twelve of his short stories (which are all—every last one of them—shit-your-pants funny), but his new book, Naked, is strictly nonfiction—and God help us if it’s all true. Although each chapter is written in a compact essay format, Naked is pretty much Sedaris’ life story, and like so many of the best contemporary memoirs (Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life or Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club), the key word is dysfunction.

The already classic second chapter, “A Plague of Tics” (which Sedaris read on NPR last month), tells the story of the author’s childhood compulsions: counting everything, ritually pressing his nose and elbows to objects, obsessively shaking his head, licking light switches, cars, and lawn ornaments—the kid is just plain weird. But he can’t help it; a voice in his head demands that he obsess:

“What about that television antenna? Is it still set into that perfect V, or has one of your sisters destroyed its integrity? You know, I was just wondering how tightly the lid is screwed onto that mayonnaise jar. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Sedaris becomes more functional as he gets older, but he doesn’t become any more normal. And what’s amazing is that the crowds he finds himself in make him look like Beaver Cleaver in comparison. The chapter “Dix Hill” finds Sedaris volunteering at the local insane asylum, and in “The Drama Bug” he gets a part in a local production of Hamlet and discovers who the real lunatics are.

Then things begin to get strange. He begins hitchhiking as a teenager, and the chapter “Planet of the Apes” recounts some of the most outrageous road adventures ever recorded. Sedaris has an uncanny ability to recreate people’s speech, and when he (wisely) gives up hitchhiking, he starts taking the bus cross-country—and the linguistic fireworks begin. Anyone who’s ever been on a long bus trip knows how the conversations alternate between amazing and mind-numbing, and Sedaris gets it all down. In “C.O.G.” (which stands for Child of God), he faithfully recreates a one-way conversation with a raving maniac who can only be described as ingeniously obscene:

“I said, ‘motherfucker, you haven’t got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church mouse. You crawled out of your mama’s tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her milk-stained titties, and you ain’t never looked back, motherfucker.’ I said, ‘If you don’t want this baby, then I’ll find some son of a bitch who does, someone who don’t look at the world through the slit of his shit-blistered, faggoty-assed, worm-sized dick.’ I said, ‘This baby might be a bastard, but I guaran-fucking-tee you it won’t be half the bastard its daddy is, you fucking bastard, you! You can suck the cream out of my granddaddy’s withered old cum-stained cock before I’ll ever, and I mean ever, let you look into this baby’s wrinkly-assed face, you stupid fucking shithead.’”

The book’s not all this outrageous, of course. Sedaris’ family is insane, but endearingly so, and the parts about his mother’s death are intense and moving. Never lapsing into sentimentality (his mother would laugh at him), Sedaris recounts both the tragedy (in “Ashes”) and the comedy (in “The Women’s Open”) of such an important passing. The latter essay, especially, brings out the utter strangeness of the idea of memorial when Sedaris’ sister watches a special video their mother left her, only to find that their father had recorded a golf tournament over it.

The book ends with the title chapter, a completely incongruous (and, by Sedaris’ standards, appropriate) essay on his week-long stay at a nudist colony. Just imagine: David Sedaris surrounded by a bunch of really weird naked people. The mind reels with possibilities, and Sedaris eclipses them all.

—David Wiley