Author: Leonard Gill

The Last Summer of Reason

By Tahar Djaout

Ruminator Books, 147 pp., $19

As of 1:37 p.m. on Sunday, September 23rd, “The Amazon.com 100,” as good an indicator as any of what’s on the mind of Americans, ranked number one in sales a book that Americans cannot even read — yet: Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War. Number three on the list, and unavailable too because it’s on back order: Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center. Number five, again on back order: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Number six, and, you guessed it, on order (and unreadable in another sense?): Tim Lahaye’s latest apocalyptic frightfest: Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne (Left Behind #9). Moving down a few notches, from number 9 last week to number 17, foolishness and more on back order: Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies; further down, down from number 21 to number 32 (because it’s “incomplete”?): Nostradamus and His Prophecies. So, what book is shipping these days? Count on number 45, which moved a good 30 points (down) in the wake of September 11th: Who Moved My Cheese?

Now, scroll away, way down, all the way to an indicator of what’s not up with Americans: Amazon.com’s number 2,143,231. There you’ll find a small but important book, and by the time you read this it may be you can read it because, as of Sunday, September 23rd, it’s still on order: Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason. The indication, according to the base ranking: first and for your information, the publishing house, Ruminator Books — small, independent, out of St. Paul, Minnesota, and, according to its mission statement, “dedicated to the publication of … literary works that represent diverse voices, both new and forgotten … books [that] explore and enhance the concept of community on regional and global levels.” Already you can guess this much: Ruminator must be liberal-minded, internationally minded, and with that epithet “literary” and that dedication to forgotten “voices,” practically un-American, which makes it these days probably barely breaking even.

Another indication: that author, Tahar Djaout. With a name like that you just gotta know he’s not only not European, not Asian, not African, he’s gotta be vaguely Middle Eastern, one of “them,” maybe trouble. But he is African: North African, by way of postcolonial Algeria, new and/or forgotten maybe to you and me, by you and me but not unknown back in the spring of 1993, when, as an outspoken journalist, novelist, and poet, Islamic fundamentalists (or was it government henchmen?) gunned him down in his hometown of Bainem. Among Djaout’s papers: a manuscript titled to fit today’s headlines, The Last Summer of Reason, and a title to fit the author’s very surname, “August.” And among Djaout’s champions, now as then: Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who wrote the Foreword to this posthumous novel.

In the opening sentence of that Foreword and by way of introducing the author to new readers, we read: “This voice from the grave urges itself on our hearing. For let no one be in any doubt — the life and death discourse of the twenty-first century is unambiguously the discourse of fanaticism and intolerance.” And in conclusion: “The most ambitious enemies of humanity are the absolutist interpreters of the Divine Will, be they Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Christians, Moslems, Born Agains of every religious calling.”

How’s that for prophecy, Nostradamus? And how’s that for characterizing today’s world-terrorism? “I am right, you are dead, and while we’re at it, praise the Lord.”

And the book itself? Call it a novel but a novel that’s plotless, more a meditation — the story of a bookstore owner named Yekker, whose wife, son, and daughter are lost to him, converts to a cause that cancels out the past, which, as with the present and so too with the future, operates under strict orders from God, man to do the necessary and murderous dirty work.

Yekker, then, alone as he travels the dangerous, familiar streets of a once-free city, comforted by flights of the imagination and by a life lived among books but dreaming, in his waning days, in this terrible, new age, dreams that are all but disallowed. Books disallowed too, except for the pre-approved and the One Book, with its call for action and violent action, if need be, against those who do not heed the Word. Children who pelt him with rocks. The tires on his car, which get slashed. Strangers who interrogate him. Yekker’s store, empty, until notice comes the store will be closed. He thinks back: to wondrous days on the beach with his family, to birds in the air, to horizons of sea and air, to books (“dreaming and intelligence brought together!”) that made those horizons limitless. He knows: His days are numbered. Unreal city.

“It is terrible to be watching spaces in which you have been moving around for forty years,” Yekker sadly observes near the close of The Last Summer of Reason. “Only these spaces possess a reality that survives by expunging every human existence that may have stopped or settled there.”

Of Yekker’s unnamed city so too the ghost town unreason makes of society, of individuals — including individuals inside two towers, built close to 40 years ago, across the sea.

Make the most of your mind. Go global. Learn from Soyinka. Do something about Djaout’s rank. Be, in the space of The Last Summer of Reason, un-American. Do without the cheese.

The Corrections, By Jonathan Franzen

Farrar Straus Giroux, 568 pp., $26

Fury, By Salman Rushdie

Random House, 259 pp., $24.95

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel The Corrections weighs in at more
than twice the size of Salman Rushdie’s new novel Fury, and, if ever
size counted, it counts here. Both books have to do with up-to-the-headlines
life as it is lived in these post-millenial, post-dot-com United States, and
both books have as their subject what’s making us tick but still sick at
heart. The prime suspects? The usual list: The media. The market. The
Internet. Advertising. Temporal forces — as in, too much, too little time on
our hands. Or is it still a matter of the old standbys: our families,
ourselves? But what of ourselves when every drop in serotonin means another
half-increase in our pharmaceutical of choice, when “self” itself
becomes a guessing game of who’s who and what’s what?

Salman Rushdie’s Fury is, true to its title, fast and, well,
furious — the better to plant a finger on the pulse of a half-crazed nation
and the better for Rushdie to rant over it (when he isn’t riffing on it).
The Corrections isn’t exactly slow-going either, but it does take its
own good time across a multitude of characters and intersecting plots, side
characters and secondary plots, over hundreds of pages and orders of
importance, the better to count as a novel that is positively great: smart,
smart-alecky, silly, wise, and, while we’re on the subject, heartfelt and
heartbreaking.

One measure of greatness in fictional works of Franzen’s and Rushdie’s
kind, the “social” as opposed to the “literary” novel:
kindly reminders of the recognizably day-to-day that stick and stay stuck in
the reader’s brain, as in Franzen’s Lambert family of five: father Alfred,
suffering the onset of Parkinson’s but true to himself to the bitter end,
losing out on the big bucks he stood to make from his retirement and losing
out on the chemical patent he holds on a discovery that could one day cure his
very illness, thus driving nuts … wife Enid, suffering from a lifetime of
cluelessness and seriously standing in the way of the moral determination
shown by her husband, but whose one wish, that her family gather for one last
Christmas in the fine, upstanding, fictional city of St. Jude, somewhere in
the Midwest, USA, is seriously jeopardized by … son Chip, former fancy (and
sex-starved) academic, former screenplay writer on the skids, newly a member
of a highly questionable Internet operation in the dangerous business of
selling post-Communist Lithuania (the world’s first nation-state-for-profit)
to the highest bidders, which leaves … Chip’s responsible brother, Gary, a
highly bankable Philadelphia banker, to try to capitalize, handsomely, on his
own father’s suffering even as he stews inside the Chestnut Hill life he’s
made for himself along with a fed-up wife and a trio of next-to-fed-up sons,
who together insist that Gary is suffering from depression, that he needs
“help,” when what his true problem is is a version of cluelessness
to match his mother’s, which … sister Denise, a hard-bitten but basically
soft-shell cook in one of Philadelphia’s chicest restaurants, barely has time
for, since she’s tied up herself at the moment having an affair with her
millionaire bankroller’s wife at the same time as she’s trying her best to …
take care of, long-distance, her ailing father Alfred (mother Enid she’s never
much seen eye-to-eye with).

Complicated, confusing? You bet, but Franzen gives himself the space to
make it all-too believable, in additon to funny, frustrating, humane, and
within the realm of possibility of every reader he’s got, and with this book,
every new reader he deserves.

Consider, now, Rushdie’s protagonist in Fury, Malik Solanka, age
55, mastermind of a thinking-man’s TV puppet show but with a marriage on the
rocks and currently on the verge of losing his mind on the Upper West Side.
Solanka’s problems as an ex-academic (what’s with these unhappy teachers?)
turned media powerhouse are no less humiliating and no less outlandish than
what Franzen’s characters go through but with this major difference: lack of
space, breathing space, so that when the climax clue to Solanka’s hang-ups
comes to light, it comes round to the reader as imposed by Rushdie rather than
by the free play of his protagonist.

Still, Fury delivers on what it so plainly sets itself to do:
concoct a really smart, take-no-prisoners lampooning of English Lit. hogwash,
big-business skulduggery, high-level Web foolishness, murderous high-society
sexual shenaningans, the cult of celebrity, and every other thing Solanka
encounters (Rushdie too) under a New York City sun. The cure, as explicitly
called for by Rushdie? You gotta have heart. Fury makes the case.
The Corrections, at length, makes it more memorably.

Savage Beauty

The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

By Nancy Milford

Random House, 527 pp., $29.95

Her being the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923? Her standing-room-only readings before rapt audiences in towns such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco, Dayton, Durham, and Des Moines? Her high critical reception one decade, mixed reception the next, then what? And why did talk of her poems invariably turn to talk of her?

Kenneth Tynan, a critic not known for foaming at the mouth, called Millay “a ravaged observer of the human plight,” not a “pretty non-combatant [or] delicate fashioner of pathetic parlor verse.”

Edmund (“Bunny”) Wilson, one of many lovers and no slouch in the critic department, believed her to be “one of the sole surviving masters of English verse” — though, by the mid-1930s, even Wilson had to concede that, along with Auden and Eliot, she “seems to be going to pieces.”

Arthur Ficke, poet and friend, also saw her go to pieces (and may himself be doing likewise) when he wrote: “[Millay] appeared at a moment when American youth had need of her … [for] the lesson of beauty that she taught them: for the revolt she expressed was not merely away from a stuffy prison [but] also toward an open meadow … there was an unmistakable wind of pure dawning in what she did.”

Robert Frost, who confessed to admiring her “less flippant verse,” was rather less keen on her “lesson of beauty” and “unmistakable wind” but had to give her credit: “Miss Millay is a great audience killer. … She loses nothing of course by her reputation for dainty promiscuity.”

But it was a critic named Rolfe Humphries who may have got it right in the end (and who gets us back inside that parlor) when he wrote in The Nation in 1941: “[T]he fact that the direction of her progress has been from legend to success somewhat confuses discussion of her merit as an artist. If [Millay] is not taken quite seriously in this role today, it may be that she was taken too seriously twenty years ago … placing her out of her class, over her head, instead of keeping her where she really belonged … as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s naughty younger sister in the parlor, the last of the female Victorians, and in that sense only, the herald of the Coming Woman.”

On the subject of Nancy Milford’s big, new biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, however, it’s the poet herself who got it right — by sidestepping talk of open meadows and pure dawnings and by cutting right to the chase if your object is national attention. When the idea of a “mellow Foreword in retrospect” was suggested to Millay for a collection of poems in 1948, she responded: “People who never in all their lives, except when in school and under compulsion, have held a book of poems in their hands might well be attracted by the erotic autobiography of a fairly conspicuous woman, even if she did write poetry.”

Well, Millay did write poetry, recited it, sold it at unheard-of rates, but if it’s crude erotics you want that’s not what you get in Milford’s book. It is, though, comprehensive, if by “comprehensive” you do not mean a critical appraisal of Millay’s work but do mean whom Millay was bedding and what Millay was writing, drinking, downing, or just plain surviving. On contemporary currents in poetry or poets she influenced or was influenced by, you’ll read next to nothing here. (Is Daniel Mark Epstein’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, also new this September, better on this sort-of important topic?)

Milford, however, does have her advantage. Right off her bestselling bio of Zelda Fitzgerald in the ’70s she got hold of Millay’s surviving sister Norma and with her the trust to go ahead and dig into: Millay the homemaker for two younger sisters while mother Cora was out of the house, off nursing, off cutting hair (after getting rid of Millay’s father, and he, her); Millay the Vassar woman winning the hearts of Vassar women; Millay the Greenwich Village bohemian winning the hearts of male leftists and male literary types; Millay the poet writing poems with one foot in the 19th century, another in the 20th (footing left in the 21st?); Millay burning a candle at both ends; Millay apparently not much affected by World War I; Millay apparently not much affected by the Depression; Millay writing brave words in response to Hitler’s rise; Millay in and out of love, in and out of the country, crisscrossing the country on tours, then winding up married to a Dutch importer named Eugen, who cared for her in adulthood as she was not cared for as a child. Then, by the ’40s: gin, poems, Dilaudid, another affair, poems, morphine, the death of Eugen in 1949, and a year later, a fall down a flight of stairs and the death of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Coming Woman gone and went.

Read Savage Beauty, learn from it. But see if this month’s Modern Library selection of poems by Millay rounds out the story, confirms her talent or raises some doubts. Editor and introducer: Nancy Milford.

Mosquito

A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe

By Andrew Spielman and

Michael D’Antonio

Hyperion, 226 pp., $22.95

ay it’s August, you’re outdoors, it’s dusk. You think you’re minding your own business, when chances are good something with a body the size and weight of a grape seed is minding your business too. That something is a mosquito, probably female and probably Culex pipiens. Here’s how you help her suck the blood right out from under you.

While you’ve been absentmindedly swatting the air, swatting your ankles, spilling your drink, you’ve also been exhaling carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Bad move. Sensors on the antennae of a mosquito really go for both, and your “scent plume,” which is heavier than air and circling your feet, is only making matters worse. Plus, all that arm action — you might as well be directing a dive bomber in for a pinpoint attack. The swatting is keeping you the target and the mosquito right on target thanks to her compound eyes, eyes that don’t miss a beat. (Nor do her wings, which are going at it between 250 and 500 times per second.)

Now it’s feeding time. Her “proboscis” has already probably probed you a good 20 times, but when her “stylets” go to work (like “a pair of electric carving knives”), get ready to lose a few micrograms of blood. And what you’ve lost the mosquito has gained in two to three times her weight. Now she’s struggling to get airborne and out of your way. If she makes it to safety, her digestive system will work for about 45 minutes drawing water from your blood and expelling it. That’s 45 minutes you have to strike back. Just be patient and on the lookout for any mosquito that’s sitting still and has pink droplets coming out of her anus, sure sign she, having gone from larva to pupa to bloodsucking adult, is now a sitting duck. Same for you. That saliva of hers, the stuff she just pumped into one of your venules or arterioles, could be the death of you, or have you never heard of yellow fever, malaria, dengue, or encephalitis?

Don’t know when I learned of those first three but do know I learned of encephalitis firsthand when it sent me, dizzy, to bed, age 7, for three weeks. A mosquito (“vector”) to blame? Who knows? New Yorkers heard about encephalitis a lot in 1999 when it killed birds, horses, and people and sent the whole city into a panic, a virus to blame for certain: the “West Nile” type and mosquito-borne.

The source for this and all the above information is the team of Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio in the pages of Mosquito, the latest in what is getting to be a long line of popular books on what one would think unpopular subjects aimed at an unscientifically trained audience. This new book is as interesting as any, perhaps of special interest to Memphians. For it was yellow fever in 1878 that cost the lives of more than 5,000 of its citizens (out of a population of 33,000). And it was in 1983 in a Memphis graveyard that the “tiger” mosquito, Aedes albopictus, was first identified in North America.

How did the tiger get here? Good question. What was it doing here? Having a great time. As Spielman, a senior investigator in tropical diseases at Harvard, and D’Antonio, past Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, explain, mosquitoes are just crazy about Memphis because the place is made-to-order: mild winters, hot summers, humid, filthy in the 19th century, worldwide importer and exporter of goods in the 20th, all that plus a wide river and standing water everywhere. (Ever tried getting water out of a tire that’s doing double-duty as a lawn ornament?) So what better breeding ground or distribution point could there be for these disease-carrying bloodsuckers? Well, New Orleans or Houston may have it worse, and plenty of poorer places across the globe have it much worse than New Orleans or Houston, which makes the continued incidence of yellow fever, malaria, dengue, and encephalitis, despite every effort, no joking matter.

Spielman and D’Antonio don’t joke either, but it must be Spielman who can write so admiringly of an insect whose sole purpose is self-preservation and D’Antonio who can write so admiringly of the work to rid the world of the diseases mosquitoes carry.

But FYI, in this summer of Jurassic Park III: Michael Crichton, in his novel Jurassic Park, suggested that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from a blood-filled, dinosaur-chewing mosquito trapped in amber. But Steven Spielberg, in the original film, showed us Toxorynchites, which the authors of Mosquito point out was one mosquito that did not depend on blood. “Its mouthparts are not up to the job.” No word from these authors on other blockbusting nuisances this August. But unlike Toxorynchites, Hollywood’s up to the job. In fact, it’s made it its job. It sucks.

Often I’m asked what’s new and worth reading. What I know never to answer is this: any book, read or unread by me, that is also: 1) award-winning, 2) American, and 3) fiction. Why is this? What is it that tells me that whoever’s putting the question does not want to hear about a contemporary American novel (a collection of contemporary short stories? c’mon), even if reviewers are all over themselves getting their two cents in (and earning about that much), even if the author is not exactly an unproven nobody, and even if the friends I’ve got are going on about it? Maybe the thinking goes this way, and maybe the thinking’s got something going for it:

“Award-winning”: must mean “literary,” which means “difficult.” Sounds, hell, is pretentious. I’m outta here.

“American”: must mean the book is: 1) disguised autobiography (ugh), 2) undisguised poetry (triple-ugh), or 3) a “meditation” on: A) loss (of what?) and B) redemption (from what? who knows? nevermind). Any which way, it’s bound to be a savage indictment of the way we live now. Real obvious stuff, depressing. You’re telling me?

“Fiction”: must mean storytelling from a storyteller who cannot, will not tell a good story because 1) the storyteller is too busy hogging all the attention, 2) the characters are too busy behaving unlike any human being anyone but a writer ever met, and 3) the story isn’t only not good, it’s preposterous.

Why do I think others think this? Well, I don’t first of all think all that much, nor do most readers who look to fiction to be first and foremost a source of pleasure, who want the pleasure of acknowledging that, you, dear storyteller, that sentence, phrase, word you wrote, there’s truth in it, you got it right. And I’ll remember you did a good job because the job you did, it was worth remembering, you got something across, something I recognize, but in no way I could’ve imagined.

And maybe this is what’s got B.R. Myers (who is this guy?) in a real rant in a lengthy essay (“A Reader’s Manifesto”) in the July/August Atlantic Monthly about authors (plus reviewers) I have never read (I am not proud to say) but for every one of the reasons I’ve just mentioned. Myers’ complaint: storytellers who cannot, will not tell a good story and a public hoodwinked into thinking they can and do. Literature, in other words, with a capital L. “Self-conscious, writerly prose.” Literary versus genre fiction. In short: writing, in too much of what is taken to be exemplary American fiction, that is, on closer inspection, “gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks” by writers who either “don’t make sense, or bore us to tears.” Case studies and choice comments:

On the reigning member of the American school of “Evocative” Prose (aka pseudo-poetry), here’s Myers on Annie Proulx (The Shipping News): “routinely incomprehensible,” “demands to be read quickly,” mistress of the mixed metaphor and the “standout” sentence. A writer incapable of butting out of the story she thinks she’s telling.

On the American school of “Muscular” Prose and its chief exponent, Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses etc.): “pseudo-archaic formulations,” “hit-and-miss verbiage,” writing in which it is “a rare passage that can make you look up … and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank.” Horse-sense? Nonsense!

On Don DeLillo (White Noise etc.) and the “Edgy” school: “patronizing,” “flat,” “tiresome,” “disjointed strings of elliptical statements,” portentous in his depiction of Consumerland America and flat-out wrong on the important subject of Americans and their supermarkets. Get real. Get out!

On Paul Auster (City of Glass etc.) and the abundant market for “Spare” (aka minimalist, aka lean) prose: “laborious wordiness [that] signals that this is avant-garde stuff,” whole chapters that “can be skimmed with impunity,” but a crafty writer when it comes to “the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.” But hey, anyone on the definition of “nominalism”?

And finally, “Generic ‘Literary’ Prose,” David Guterson and his Snow Falling on Cedars, a “verbal rubble”: an author who thinks it “more important to sound literary than to make sense,” an anti-genre genre writer whose “determinedly slow tempo” and “accumulation of pedestrian phrases” hope to fool the reader into thinking he’s achieved some “lyrical effect.” The academy’s verdict? Required reading in some sorry college classrooms. The verdict of “almost every fourth amateur reviewer on Amazon.com”? Repetitive. You say inmates are running the asylum?

Look here. Harold Bloom last year wrote a useful book called How to Read and Why and in it he told me to reread As I Lay Dying. I couldn’t do it. I mean, reread it, because I’d never read it in the first place. But I read it. And out of roughly 50 books this past year, it’s the one I think about still because it was great and I felt it was great from the moment I finished it, from the moment, in fact, I finished the opening sentence. Felt it, not thought it. Faulkner wrote it but Faulkner stayed out of it. How? Because it was a good story. It pleased me.

The Broken Places

By Susan Perabo

Simon & Schuster, 254 pp., $23

Susan Perabo has the unique distinction of being the author of a well-received book of short stories called Who I Was Supposed To Be and, as the first woman to play men’s NCAA baseball, being a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. What the one may or may not have to do with the other I have no idea, but a degree of calculated risk comes to mind. A too-calculated frame of mind can, however, put a freeze on writer and athlete both, and Perabo’s new novel, The Broken Places, is a case in point.

In the small town of Casey, Pennsylvania, a 12-year-old boy named Paul Tucker watches as his fireman father, Sonny, rescues a 16-year-old named Ian Finch from the basement rubble of an abandoned house. It was Ian, with his snarly attitude and swastika tattoo (a “goner” according to Paul’s schoolteacher mother, Laura), who caused the place to collapse when his homemade bomb brought the house down. Ian comes out saved, minus a foot, and Sonny comes out a national hero, minus a personality — or at least a personality Paul recognizes. In its place, Sonny, son of a legendary town fireman himself and the very emblem of an upstanding all-American, takes enthusiastically to the attention showered on him, bows to Ian’s every antisocial comment, and, by the time he gets to Hollywood to supervise a bogus made-for-TV version of the rescue, takes to alcohol, cigarettes, orneriness, crying jags, general obnoxiousness, and a level of inattention to Paul unbefitting a human being, much less a father. Now it’s Sonny who comes close to bringing his own house down. Laura, perpetual worry-wart and as tightly coiled as they come, for her part, back in Casey, pulls her own switcheroo by making a racket on Paul’s drums and wandering the house at all hours. Paul, a nice kid, doesn’t know what the hell is going on, tries valiantly to stick up for his father while sticking by his mother, then takes up with Ian to begin a good lesson in the time-honored tradition of family secrets. (For his part, Ian does some changing too: He starts off positively dangerous and graduates into mere loathsomeness.)

There is no arguing Perabo’s descriptive talent when it comes to setting and speech in The Broken Places. No use denying, either, the underlying, universal family dynamic she’s got going here: that most of us live most of our lives living up to or living down whatever or whoever came before us, each to his own to make his own separate peace. Or no separate peace if you’re Sonny Tucker, who enlists his wife into a kind of disappearing act in the space of months and to the bewilderment of his son. Do people in real life change this drastically this quickly and into their diametrical opposite this thoroughly? Do characters in fiction? Possibly, even in a strong novel with an even stronger design, as Perabo writes it. In a great novel, never.

The Catsitters

By James Wolcott

HarperCollins, 314 pp., $25

Wonders never cease. Or is it no wonder whenever a critic, in this case Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott, gets it into his head to write a comic novel and a fine eye for the asinine goes suddenly cloudy with sentimentality, predictability, and, when those two won’t do, impossibility — this in a book purporting to be a sophisticated take on the wild and wacky world of a single man of a certain age out of his league but on the make?

The man in question is Johnny Downs, a bartender-slash-actor in New York City and nice-enough guy but, all told, a little too nice for his own good and way too clueless to be a bartender-slash-actor in New York City. When his girlfriend two-times him, his friend Darlene, a calculating motormouth down in Georgia but no dummy in the romance department, enters the picture to telephonically pull Downs out of the dumps and wipe Downs’ heart off his sleeve. Darlene’s object: to turn him from doormat material into marriage material. Downs’ objects: a string of highly self-absorbed and equally high-driven New Yorky women Downs may find to his liking but you should find, with the exception of one, intolerable. Darlene’s winning way with object and objects both: witty and wise counsel when it isn’t cruel and unusual punishment, and Wolcott does right by keeping the details fresh, the tone brittle, the action furious, and Downs in keeping with Darlene’s every command.

Would that Wolcott had kept at it, too, rather than softening midway into The Catsitters. Better yet, would that Wolcott had given Downs something of a spine. Hard to do, though, when your protagonist at heart is a real softie and you don’t dare make him not too good to be true.

Water From a Bucket

By Charles Henri Ford

Turtle Point Press, 272 pp., $16.95 (paper)

It’s time Charles Henri (né Henry) Ford got some regional recognition to go with his international reputation, a reputation that rests on his long career as poet, painter, printmaker, photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and now, with Water From a Bucket, diarist. But first, know this:

Ford was born in 1908 in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, son of a hotel-owning father and artist mother and brother to future stage and screen actress Ruth Ford. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school, got his poetry into a number of small magazines, then took the ambitious step in 1929 of founding his own literary magazine out of Columbus, Mississippi: Blues: The Magazine of New Rhythms. William Carlos Williams served as a contributing editor, and together they sought and published the work of Ezra Pound, H.D., Kenneth Rexroth, Erskine Caldwell, and an unheard of newcomer by the name of Paul Bowles. Blues ran for only nine issues but its influence was felt. Ford’s name was on its way to being made.

He went to New York long enough to collaborate with film critic Parker Tyler on one novel, the groundbreakingly open and unapologetically gay (and banned) The Young and Evil, then left for Paris in 1931 to become guest of Gertrude Stein and roommate of Djuna Barnes, whose manuscript, Nightwood, he prepared for publication. He also fell into friendships with anyone who was artistically anybody — from expatriates Man Ray and Peggy Guggenheim to Edith Sitwell and Jean Cocteau. It was also in Paris in 1933 that Ford met and fell for surrealist painter Pavlik Tchelitchev, who was 35. Ford, a mere 24, stayed with him, in and out of love, for the next 25 years.

The two returned to New York, and in 1940 Ford founded another influential magazine, View, and for the next seven years he ran the work of the reigning European modernists and the work of stateside friends such as Joseph Cornell, in addition to publishing the first English translations of André Breton’s poems and the first monograph on Marcel Duchamp.

The late 1940s and ’50s, the period covered in Water From a Bucket, saw Ford and Tchelitchev hopscotching to and from Paris, Italy, New York, and Connecticut, and Ford making it down to Jasper, Tennessee, for his father’s dying illness. But when Tchelitchev died in 1958, Ford moved permanently to New York, where he still lives and where he made fresh starts in filmmaking (his underground classic Johnny Minotaur featured Allen Ginsberg) and in a new form, the “poem poster.” It’s an extraordinary career even without the fact of Ford’s own poetry, which stretches from the surrealistic to the “cut up” (a technique he was one of the first to explore) to his favored form today, haiku.

This background to Ford’s life is necessarily sketchy, but was it necessary that Lynne Tillman’s introductory remarks to the diary — a diary she had to coax Ford into publishing — be almost equally so? If, as the publisher states, the Ford family once lived in Memphis, for example, mention isn’t made here. Still, it’s the diary itself that counts, and Tillman is right to characterize Ford’s “epic poem about the dailiness of art and life” as an “itinerary of lived attitudes” delivered “in bits and pieces, a collage, or like [Ford’s] poems, a cut up.”

And like a cut up the bits come to us every which way: from the critical (Peggy Guggenheim’s “art collection is hard to look at, especially the messes signed Jackson Pollock”); to the chatty and/or catty (“‘Her characters are unreal,’ I say to Pavlik, talking about Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. ‘She’s unreal herself,’ he replies”); to the catty and/or chatty (“Osbert Sitwell used to call America the garbage can of Europe, but now he’s eating out of it”); to the ornery (“‘Rhymes, too, come from the unconscious,’ [Auden] told me. ‘They should stay there,’ I said”); to the reportorial (“I look at P.’s hemorrhoid [burst but healing] every night with the flashlight”); to the puzzling (“To walk like an Egyptian is to carry a ladder across Paris”); to the startling (“On how many shoulder-blades have you wanted to cut your throat?”); to the haunting (“A trembling duck being weighed in hand-scales: part of the trembling world, part of me”); to the self-incriminating (“‘You’re just a whore, that’s what you are,’ Pavlik tells me”); to the quotidian (“‘I’m not going to Canada with you unless you learn to suck — this jerking off business is boring'”); to the reassuring (“Anything that brings two people closer is, theoretically, good — even to eating each other’s excrements”); to the all-out icky (“Having read about the ‘insertions in the urethra’ in the Kinsey book I’m about to make an experiment …”).

“I loved the Blues before I loved the Poem,” Ford writes in May 1954 in Paris in a rare reference to his Southern roots. “Somehow the two loves were from the same source. So it was natural that I called my poetry review Blues. … Years of work, a burst of glory, and it’s all over.”

No, Mr. Ford, not all over quite yet. In Water From a Bucket, you come in still loud and clear.

The Naughty Bits:

The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes From the World’s Greatest Books

By Jack Murnighan

Three Rivers Press, 231 pp.,

$14 (paper)

PHOTO BY PHILLIP PARKER

Jack Murnighan, the man behind Nerve.com’s and Nerve magazine’s “Jack’s Naughty Bits,” has a new book out and guess what. It’s called The Naughty Bits ! And to start off we’ll head straight down, to the bottom, to the Old Testament, because in Murnighan’s closing pages and “for sheer quantity of nudge nudge,” the Bible, he declares, is “up there.” Getting “there,” though, is not half the fun. In fact, it’s more “like trying to distinguish body parts in scrambled adult channels on TV. If your attention wavers for even an instant, you risk missing the enchilada.”

What he means is you risk missing out not on Abraham and Sarah (too complicated), not on Sodom and Gomorrah (too obvious), not on the Song of Solomon (too poetic, yet its beautiful verses Murnighan recognizes) but on Deuteronomy 23:1, in which it is written: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” Why the testicularly challenged and unaccountably memberless should be denied Paradise Murninghan, who is not a theologian but the next best thing (a Ph.D. in medieval literature from Duke), chooses not to explain but merely to bring to your sweaty little hands and undivided attention. But if it’s the enchilada you want, that’s what he’s here to serve.

Take it or leave it that he happens also to be conducting you on a crash course in world literature. You know, the books you either once had half a mind to get to or, full-minded, dreaded ever seeing the sight of. But rest assured. Of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, even Dr. Jack, he of the “bourbon-addled memory,” admits that it’s read “in its entirety only by the real triathletes of literary studies.” What we get of Spenser is a scant 40 lines out of his unread thousands. The good Elizabethan topic? The fine art of flirting. This, though, is nothing.

The topic when it comes to the usual suspect, the man behind Ulysses: the fine art of rimming. But with this critical aside from the enlightening Murnighan, who, in his prefaces to these selections, is always and everywhere eye- if not mind-expanding: “Joyce opts for cadence and mellifluence instead of hard adjectives … and it’s a shame, for nothing would have given me more pleasure than to see the consummate wordsmith butt up against the aggressively corporeal — in all its ineffability.”

Praise be then, and more pleasure in the eyes of Murnighan, for his exciting excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — a scene of bowel-emptying love-making that could easily empty your stomach and send you, if not to the closest sink, to the closest dictionary to double-check your understanding of the word “ineffable.” (The “butt up” part we get but not nearly often enough.)

No dictionary required and no instance among “the world’s greatest books” in the case of Larry Flynt, who, as an “Unseemly Man,” had his way with, then wrung the neck of his beloved, a chicken. Poor chicken. Have you gotten a good look at the face on Larry Flynt? Or, for that matter, Jean Genet? Even so, Genet gets his too — no chicken, just a guy — and this unaccustomed bit of armchair psychoanalyzing from Murnighan so out “there” it may be true (but what of it?): “Genet seeks out these ‘queers who hate themselves,’ finding, perhaps, in their pained concessions to desire a Dantesque punishment for his own inescapable self-hatred.”

Well, at least Genet, damnation, was in good company. Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno, in what Murnighan calls “the most archetypal of all naughty bits in the history of literature,” gets pride of place, before and above the low-down we get from Lawrence, Roth, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, Donne, Hemingway, M.F.K. Fisher (!), Hesiod, Boccaccio, Erica Jong, Plato, Rabelais, George Eliot (!!), Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Sappho, Petronius, Ovid, Anonymous (?), Sade, Ariosto, Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, and for those who really know their international best-sellers, Thibaut de Champagne, John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester), the Pearl Poet, Johannes Secundus, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume IX. Plus, and get this, of all nonentities, Kenneth Starr, whose report, we’re informed, “was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story.” And I thought it was meant to be read as an attempted coup d’état.

But I, a sucker for the truth be told, even be it in a dead language, am sticking with the 2,000-year-old poems in Latin of Catullus, whose “bawdy and satiric lyrics,” Murnighan argues, “are some of history’s wittiest barbs.” He’s right. In poem LXIX, a certain Rufus is made not to wonder why “no woman/Wants to place her soft thigh under you …” The problem? This Rufus has got a “a mean goat in the armpit’s valley.” But that doesn’t compare to the double-trouble of a playboy named Amelius in XCVII. Jack Murnighan has done the work digging up this guy’s dirt. Your job’s to get wind of it.

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.'” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain — but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.